Requiem (15 page)

'You're
gonna
have to stop sleeping with men just because you
feel sorry for '
em
,' she announced to herself. Then
she snapped on the car radio to blot out her own censure.

And he was a wreckage,
old Tom. Tight as a drum and, as far as she could tell, hallucinating and
suffering more delusions than some of the alcoholics and junkies she was paid
to help. But they had a long friendship, she and he, a rare friendship of the
type that common wisdom said couldn't exist between a man and a woman. Plus she
felt she owed something to the memory of Katie; and Katie would have in the end
approved of what happened last night.

Sharon
knew, from her counselling experience, that she could help Tom. She wasn't
entirely sure whether his problem was an inability to come to terms with
Katie's death, or if it was some incident at school, or a combination of the
two. Whatever it was, she could help him. She had two options, both effective
in limited ways. Either she could spend hours and hours of careful, sensitive
counselling, helping him face his difficulties, rebuilding his confidence,
relighting the lamp for him, comforting him and showing life in a positive
light. Or she could achieve the same results, short-circuiting all the talk, by
fucking him.

So what if she'd chosen the latter? Life
is short, hey?

That's what
Katie always used to say:
This fleeting life. I love this fleeting life.
It
was her motto, her slogan. And her epitaph. Almost as if she'd known.

Had she
known? Or was Katie just guessing that night?

Before
Sharon had left England for Israel, she'd been passing through town, so she
paid Tom and Katie a surprise visit. She'd arrived at the door bearing a bottle
of
Frascati
. At the exact moment she'd touched a
finger to the doorbell, Tom had opened the door. He was carrying a long, slim
leather case.

'What's that?'

'It's
a snooker cue. Tuesday is snooker night,' said Tom, 'with the boys.'

'He can
cancel,' Katie had said, coming up behind him, kissing Sharon and relieving her
of the bottle.

'That's right. I can cancel.'

'No,
you boys go and stroke your green baize. I'll stay in with Katie. All right if
I stay the night? See you later, Tom.'

The two women had spent
the night gossiping and cackling. Katie always made Sharon laugh. When they'd
emptied the wine, they went out to get another bottle from an Asian corner shop
and decided to choose a video on offer at the same store.

Katie had
pointed at the soft-porn section. 'Tom's taken to renting these,' she said
sadly. 'Just occasionally. He thinks I don't know.'

Sharon
pulled out one called
Inexhaustible.
'We'll rent it. See what turns him
on.'

So
they'd gone back, drunk some more wine and smoked some grass Sharon produced
from a little plastic sachet. Tom generally frowned on but tolerated the dope,
so Katie had only these rare opportunities to indulge an old student habit.
After a while they'd set up the video and spent the next hour howling at the
Martian script and Wendy-house acting. Eventually Sharon switched off.’

'Perhaps
that's what he needs,' Katie had said. 'Three in a bed.'

'Are you
inviting?' Sharon was joking, but she sensed a strange mood in Katie.

'No,'
said Katie. 'I couldn't ever share him. Not even with you, lovely Sharon, not
even with you.'

'Will you think that when he's old and
grey?'

'I won't be around.'

'What do you mean, you won't be around?'

'I'll never
make forty. It's just something I've always known. I'll never make it past
forty.'

'Come
off it!’ Sharon had said. But she looked at Katie sucking on the remnants of a
joint and saw that her friend was serious.

'I've been told.'

'Told? You mean a doctor told you?'

'No. Not a doctor. There
was a man. He just stepped out from behind a car and tried to hold my hand.
Then he was gone. Then I saw him again. Have you ever realized that some of the
ordinary people you encounter on the streets are not people at all - that
they're some kind of spirits?'

'You're spooking me, Katie.'

'I'm sorry.
Forget I said it. Please don't say anything to Tom.'

Katie
wouldn't be drawn any further on the matter, tried to laugh it off. 
Something, though, must have happened to make them laugh again, because when
Tom arrived home, he walked in to find them cackling and incomprehensible. They
were both high as astronauts, and, unable to get any sense out of them, he
went off to bed, leaving them to it.

It was the last time she saw Katie.

Now she had shared Tom,
in a way it hadn't then been possible to predict. And she felt certain that if
Katie had seen Tom, and the condition he was in, she would have forgiven Sharon
and even approved.

Sharon
glanced up at the city wall as she drove up the
Hativat
from Mount Zion, seeing three soldiers silhouetted against the blue sky, Uzis
slung low. Sometimes it seemed you were driving round the rim of a bubbling
volcano, always expecting it to spit fire or spout molten rock. Vast boulders
were blasted out of its deepest core until, cooling, they changed and smoked
and hardened into religions; or they cracked and burst open prematurely,
expressing themselves as random acts of violence. It was a heat. She
experienced this nucleus of cities as a kind of heat. Jerusalem. I've been
living in this city too long.

As
she turned up
Yafo
Street under the elaborate
Jaffa
Gate, the cool jazz music playing on her car radio
experienced some interference, the frequency drifting in and out. A charge of
noisy static obliterated the channel. She reached for the dial to retune,
finding nothing on the wavelength. As she glanced up through the windscreen, the
sky before her suddenly buckled as if under terrifying weight. The sky
collapsed in on itself. She gasped and stepped on her brakes, the car's wheels
locking, squealing on the hot, dry road. The car juddered to a halt at an angle
to the causeway. The static on the radio discharged itself, and a clear female
voice filled the airwaves;
I
can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't
breathe, I can't breathe . ..

The
voice faded out, to be replaced by a static burst again, and then the cool
saxophone came back. Sharon looked up. The sky had straightened out again.
Angry car horns sounded behind her.

'You look like shit,'
said
Tobie
as Sharon swung into the Bet Ha-
Kerem
reception.
Tobie
had a pad
of cleaning cloth in one hand and a plastic bottle with spray-nozzle in the
other. Even though
Tobie
ran the rehabilitation
centre, she cleaned the windows, changed the light bulbs and carried a set of
screwdrivers in her handbag. She was the seventy-year-old founder of the
centre, a Freudian psychologist and a friend when she wasn't being either
manager or janitor. 'And you should have been here half an hour ago.'

'Had a crisis,' Sharon said, logging in.

Tobie
lifted her bottle of
detergent in the air. 'It's not for me, darling. Have your crisis. Have your
half-hour. Only there was your old friend Christina came back in this morning,
and she's on a White Cloud and calling your name, so it never stops. Can I
speak with her? Some chance.'

When
Tobie
said White Cloud, she meant seriously fucked up.
Christina was a former client - patients were referred to as clients at the Bet
Ha-
Kerem
centre - who had formed a particular
attachment to Sharon. 'What time did she come in? How was she?'

'How was
she? She just walked up to the door when the sun was rising, and she was naked,
darling, naked.'
Tobie
pronounced the word
nekked
.

'I'll go straight through.'

'Go easy:
White Cloud. Don't forget staff council in an hour.'

Sharon
stepped into what they called the White Cloud Room. You had to take your shoes off
at the door. It was a room reserved for serious' counselling, carpeted, soundproofed,
all furniture padded. It was a room for shouting, screaming and weeping. They
didn't need to use it very often, since rehabilitation for most of the
alcoholic and addicted women was a long,
undramatic
slog in the exercise of ordinary living. But occasionally one of the clients
went White Cloud.

Christina
was on the floor, huddled in a white bathrobe supplied by the centre. Her
long, dark hair fell across her face. Sharon could see the swollen pink pouches
around her eyes through the strands of her hair. She crossed the room and
quietly sat down next to her.

'Hi, sister,' she said softly.

No answer.
She stroked the woman's hair from her eyes.

'What
are you doing, coming here naked?' she said evenly. 'What's the idea of that?'

'I'm not
your fucking sister,' said Christina, looking away.

'Please yourself.'

'Where were
you? Where were you when I came here?'

'I don't
live here, Christina. I'm not here all the time. I have a life of my own, you
know.'

Christina had first come
to the centre after a drugs conviction. A one-time heroin addict, she'd been
weaned on to methadone but hadn't been able to make progress from the methadone.
At the centre she'd become fond of Sharon, and a breakthrough was made, only
for her to return to the centre hooked on barbiturates. Another breakthrough
after careful nurturing from Sharon only saw her return, this time with an
alcohol problem. Each 'cure' was only a displacement from one dependency to
another. There was a hole in Christina raging to be filled. Finally, after
scrupulous counselling and painstaking attention to routines and a disciplined
timetable, Christina had declared herself clean, whole and fulfilled. She'd
found religion.

On the day
Christina had told them all the good news, Sharon remembered looking at
Tobie
, whose face reflected her own sense of dismay
contorted by the need to seem positive.

'That's wonderful, darling. What kind of
religion?'

'Adventist,' Christina had said.

Sharon had bit her lip.
Tobie
, wiser and more resilient, had summoned a kiss for
her. They had helped her pack and watched her leave the centre after a small
party for staff and the other resident women.

'Three
months,' Sharon had whispered as Christina lugged her bag through the door.

'Less,'
Tobie
had added. 'Less.'

And
Tobie
had been right, by two weeks. Here they were, ready
to start all over again. 'Christina, are you going to tell me what made you
come back here?'

'
Sha-na-na-na-na
,
sha-na-na-na
.'
It
was Christina's trick, to hum pop tunes. A lightweight shield, often impossible
to penetrate. Sharon sighed. She'd been here before more than once, right back
at the beginning.

‘I haven't
got time for this. Sorry. It's boring me these days.'

'
Sha-na-na-na
, SHA-NA-NA,
na-na-na
.'

'Get stuffed, Christina.'

'
Sha-na-na-na
.
Wanna
know how they
did it? How they did it? Did it?
Didit-didit
.
Dit-dit-dit-didit
.'

'Did what? Who
did what? Look, I've got to go to a meeting.'

Christina smiled, eyes
closed, shaking her head to her own tune. '
Didit-didit
.
Did it. Did-did-did-
didit
.' Her expression changed
suddenly to a snarl. 'Broke his fucking legs! They BROKE HIS FUCKING LEGS!' Then
she was smiling again, humming her
beaty
tune. '
Didit
, did-did-did-did-
didit
.'

'Who broke whose legs?'

'That's how
they did it. Where were you? I came here and you weren't here. I was looking
for you, Sharon. You let me fall. You said jump and I'll catch you. But you let
me fall.'

Sharon
vented an enormous sigh. She'd experienced this many times before, and not just
with Christina, but each time the knot seemed just impossible to unpick.
Sometimes she was exhausted with it. Sometimes she wanted to say to the
Christinas
Hey, go and rot. I do my
best for you and every time back you come,
sometimes worse than
before. There
are some I can help and some like you I can't help;
why should I waste my time on the hopeless cases?

Then she
softened and stroked Christina's hair from her eyes again. 'I don't know where
you are, baby. But you're a long way away.'

Then Christina blew her
nose and shuffled closer to Sharon, laying her head on her shoulder. Sharon put
a protective arm around the woman, as Christina began to weep softly.