Jago (36 page)

Mr Keough’s house was quiet, no lights on yet, shut up tight against invaders. Teddy wondered if the old man had mined his garden path. He hated the festival more than anyone. Teddy wondered whether Mr Keough mightn’t have been right. His front door was graffiti-struck. Someone had carved a Jewish star into it, and squiggled in Arabic or Hebrew or one of those languages with sloppy alphabets.

The sign was near now, barely ten yards away. Beyond, it wasn’t Alder any more. It was the Achelzoy road. He wondered how his mum and dad would get on. Five yards. He didn’t think Terry would hurt their parents, no matter how much he changed. Dad could still take a belt to him. Closer. A yard? They probably wouldn’t notice Teddy was gone.

He drew level with the sign, reached out, touched it. The metal was warm from a day of direct sunlight. A thrill coursed up Teddy’s arm, through his entire body. The pain lessened. He gripped the sign, pulled himself past, and turned to look at the lettering,
ALDER
. He was out of the village. He looked back and saw the road running towards the tree outside the Valiant Soldier, splitting there. He saw the Agapemone.

Jenny. Jenny Steyning had barely spoken to him in five years. He should walk on, get to Achelzoy before it was too late for a bus. Jenny in her white dress, seeming to float, golden hair a halo, lips a whisper apart. He should walk. Jenny. Walk.

He stepped past the sign, back into Alder, and it was as if he had stepped off a cliff.

F
or Wendy, the Agapemone was a safe haven of order. She knew what she had to do, when it had to be done, how long it was supposed to take. Services and meals were scheduled. Duties came around on a roster. The little unstructured time she had was filled with supplementary committee meetings, organized readings or simple prayer. She recognized that, for some of the Brethren, the Agapemone was a God-given excuse never to think for themselves. Marie-Laure, with her convent experience, probably hadn’t made a decision since joining the community. And Derek, whose entire life involved going along with things, thrived on imposed routine.

It was simple to live by the rules, but today Wendy had failed. Having missed the breakfast ceremony, her whole day was out of whack. She had a nervous spurt of sinfulness at the neglect of her duties. At the festival, her special province was the crafts stream; jewellers, silk printers, wood-turners. This morning, she was supposed to have visited the field where the stalls were to be set up, checking that each was in its place according to the prearranged pattern. She hadn’t gone.

With all the Brethren about their particular tasks, regimented by Mick or James, Wendy was alone, at a loose end. It was as if she had used an excuse to get out of a PE lesson. Unsupervised, she was free to do whatever she wanted. But she had never known, not as a schoolgirl and certainly not now, what she wanted. She wandered through the third-storey gallery, an empty and rarely used space that ran the length of the Manor House, and let herself out on the balcony.

She was facing away from the festival site, in the shade, looking further up the hill towards the woodland. The festival had spilled around the house, and she could see people exploring the woods. There were marked areas off-limits to the crowds, but the boundaries would become blurred over the next couple of days. A couple of bikers were pissing against a tree. The shade became colder. They saw her and roared drunkenly, shaking cocks at her with feeble pelvic thrusts. They had beards, proper faces. Laughing, they zipped up and went away. Badmouth Ben was out there somewhere, but Wendy felt safe in the Agapemone itself, as if Beloved radiated a protective shield.

Wendy explored her own feelings, mingling guilt with excitement at her bewildering freedom. Derek would be organizing the traffic patrols, shepherding cars and vans. Karen and Susan would be in the printshop, cranking out programmes. James would be bossing the stage crews, supervising roadies assembling the cliff-face of amplifiers. Away from the festival, Sister Jenny would be with the postulant, Hazel, seeing her through her anointment.

Only she had broken the pattern. Wendy wondered whether, without her, the crafts fair was a free-for-all, stallholders smashing each other’s merchandise, getting into fist fights. More likely though things had gone smoothly, suggesting all her work really did not do much. Once people signed up for their stalls and plots, all they had to do was arrive with their goods and set up. They shouldn’t need a traffic cop.

The Agapemone wasn’t like Rivendell. Ben’s whispered words could hurt but not wreck. Rivendell had been weak before Ben turned up. The Agapemone was strong. Rivendell had no Beloved. Suddenly, Wendy felt an overpowering kinship with Beloved. She felt closer to Him than she had since the Great Manifestation that had brought her into the Agapemone, since the days—before Kate, Marie-Laure, Janet, Jenny, Hazel—when she was the most favoured, the Sister-Love.

Her duties had been a distraction, absorbing too much attention, preventing her from concentrating on the true purpose of the Agapemone. Liberated, she felt herself back in the centre. Beloved was in His rooms, she knew. She was closer to Him than anyone else, perhaps twenty feet away. Wendy had been His first Sister-Love, the first of the Inner Circle. She’d been among the first in the Agapemone. She took off her band and shook her hair free. Ben might find her. Today she might die, but she would have been first.

* * *

When Badmouth Ben died, Rivendell broke up and the remaining members scattered. Wendy held on longer than most, not wanting to disappear immediately after the ‘accident’. She and Derek stayed for a few weeks, while her hair grew out. The police came round, more concerned with discovering exactly who Ben was, so they could notify his next of kin, than in finding out how he’d died. They thought he’d taken a turn badly and his petrol tank had exploded. Now he was dead, everyone realized how little they knew about Ben. No one even knew his surname or where he’d come from.

With Ben dead, Rivendell fell apart, but not before the repercussions and reprisals. Gareth Madoc and Christopher Pringle, Ben’s lieutenants, unable to keep up the reign of terror, fell from power. Christopher left and never came back, but Gareth was local and had to stay around. Two weeks after Ben’s death, a couple of boys kicked some of Gareth’s ribs in and dumped him on his parents’ doorstep. Wendy and Derek left after that, hitching for Liverpool.

While they were on the road, the summer finished, a spectacular thunderstorm putting an end to the drought. Stranded out in the open between lifts, Wendy and Derek were soaked. Wendy thought of it as a cleansing of her sins. She’d thought it would be the end of Ben, the end of her fears and guilts.

* * *

She looked up at the sky, china blue above the chimneys of the house, and wondered how long they’d have to wait this summer. Eventually, the weather must break. It must rain.

* * *

In her memory, the thunderstorm lasted for days, weeks. They travelled the length of the country, clothes plastered to their bodies, emptying and discarding vodka bottles, and ended up on the south coast, in Brighton, where a river was running down the road to the seafront. Washed along in that stream, they reached the beach and stopped running. The only people in sight, where a week earlier there’d been thousands of sunbathers, Wendy and Derek sat down beyond the tarpaulined playground, watching the rain making orange puddles, constantly speckling the sands. They finished their last bottle and rolled it into the waves. Derek gave up eventually and huddled under the West Pier, smoking soggy cigarettes. But Wendy stayed, lying face up like a sun worshipper, rain slapping her face, getting in her eyes, filling her mouth. She felt empty.

* * *

High in the sky, she saw a vapour trail. It was a small aeroplane, passing over the Agapemone. She sat down on the balcony, putting the building between her and the plane’s sightline. She remembered the emptiness.

* * *

Her entire life had been a matter of trying to fill the emptiness. She’d been aware of it since school. She tried to fight. First, she went against parents, teachers, friends. She tried to fill the void with disobedience, thick lipstick, eyeshadow, short skirts, undone blouse buttons, loud music, notes to boys. Her body started getting heavier, her arms and legs chunkier. For a few months, she stood out because she had breasts and wore a bra, but then all the other girls did too. Empty again. She tried working, expending bursts of energy on essays, exams, revision, projects. Her parents and teachers approved, and her reports said she’d settled down. This phase carried her through O and A levels and got her into Essex University, reading geography.

After her first term, as she came to realize what a swot and a virgin she was, she felt empty again. She found Derek in the next room at her hall of residence, surrounded by a haze of dope, listening to his Strawberry Alarm Clock and Jefferson Airplane albums, reading Castaneda and William Burroughs. She tried filling her life with Derek. Then with protests, occupations, campaigns, marijuana, vodka. Her studies became at once difficult and irrelevant. Some of her friends had already dropped out. After a long, serious, mainly one-sided talk with Derek, they followed suit, handing back their documentation to their course tutors. She asked for a notice, explaining their reasons for withdrawing from the university, to be put up in the common room. While children were being bombed in Cambodia, she couldn’t see the value of geography.

Outside, they were together but still empty. Between university and Rivendell, there were five or six years of emptiness, wandering, drinking, doping. They tried drugs, politics, mysticism; Derek always following her lead. Rivendell had been a good idea, but it was an Eden that advertised for a snake. Rivendell under Badmouth Ben was a nightmare that had shown just how easy Wendy’s previous sufferings had been. The first time he hit her, she wasn’t able to believe it. After the fourth or fifth, it became routine. After Ben raped her, she didn’t let Derek near her in bed. Only after Beloved’s healing touch would she let her boyfriend back into her body. The ghastly thing was that with Ben, she didn’t feel empty. While he was alive, she had hatred, fear, the need for revenge, the need to right injustice. Oppression gives the revolutionary a purpose. Watching the bastard burn, she lost her purpose.

On the beach, immediate purpose fulfilled, rain in her face, vodka fug in her head, Wendy felt—as she’d never done when Ben was fucking or battering her—that she might as well die. If she kept her mouth open, she’d drown. The rainwater would fill her lungs. Literally, she would not be empty any more.

* * *

There was someone in the gallery, standing quietly in the doorway. Wendy twisted her head around to look.

Beloved.

* * *

Beloved found them on the beach. He loomed into her field of vision, rainwater streaming from a wide-brimmed black hat, dog collar white in the gloom, and lifted her, wiping her face with a scarf, kissing her. At once, Beloved was father, teacher, purpose. He was her Saviour. Derek joined them. They were unable to speak. The rain was roaring too loudly, surf thrashing the sand. Beloved radiated His own warmth. Empty, Wendy knew Beloved would fill her.

She realized why she’d been emptied, why Ben had been sent to destroy her old life. She had to begin anew with Beloved, start from nothing, grow from a baby again.

Apparently, Beloved had a Vision, and ventured out into the storm knowing He must find someone, someone who’d be the heart of the community that was already beginning to form. He wore a long coat and elastic-sided boots, shiny with rain. Immediately, Wendy recognized Him for an Angel.

Later, Wendy learned about Beloved. By then, He had broken with the Church. He was living in a tiny deconsecrated chapel, with Mick Barlowe and a few others. He had renamed the place the Adullam, after the Biblical cave in which the unfortunate, the outcast and the desperate took shelter at David’s summons. The rain drumbeat the roof, streaming in and running down the walls. The pews had been taken out and most of the windows were broken and boarded over, but there were mismatched cots and chairs for furniture. It was even more primitive than Rivendell, but the feeling of community was unmistakable. Mick, not yet the composed second-in-command, was totally devoted to Beloved. Beloved fed Wendy and Derek, gave them shelter. After a meal of hot soup and bread, He preached.

‘I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse; I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk.’ He added footnotes, whose meaning would only become clear with time, ‘Thus has the Son of Man manifested Himself among us with eyes like a flame of fire.’ She was captivated. At last, she felt this was it, that her emptiness was cured, gone, forgotten. In His eyes, Wendy saw the Spirit of the Lord. She found her faith and vocation. Then, in that damp and old-smelling chapel, while lightning struck the sea outside and thunder rattled the walls to the foundations, there came the Great Manifestation. Taken to the altar, Wendy held Beloved fiercely as the Spirit moved within her. He prayed for her. ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow.’ He
knew,
she realized, and felt Love washing over her like rain, cleansing the blood. He forgave her with a kiss. Apparently, she spoke in tongues and had to be restrained. She only remembered a white heat of revelation. When the night was over, she was the first Sister of the Agapemone, the first Sister-Love.

The Agapemone existed before Beloved bought the Manor House. It was a community, not stone walls and a roof. And she was in at its birth. Derek followed her.

And others. The unfortunate, the outcast, the desperate. The Adullam became crowded, a joyous place even when it was so cold you had to wear gloves to bed. Beloved found more Brethren. The owners of the site called them squatters and kept trying to shift them. The Adullam was condemned, a mini-market due to be built where it stood. Beloved claimed faith kept a roof over their heads even if it did tend to drop off in bits. Eventually they were scattered in flats and houses all around town, a skeleton complement left in the Adullam to keep occupancy.