Requiem (31 page)

Katie drove.
'You're very quiet,' she said as she changed gear.

'I'm still thinking.'

'I know,’
she said soothingly. 'You're trying to put it
right.'

'I'm sorry. I really am sorry.'

'Don't. At least you're here.'

When
they reached the church the sky was swollen, coloured like a bruise. The
sandstone church tower leaned into the wind like a rigged ship tacking against
formidable racing clouds. They got out of the car. The lych-gate bobbed
slightly in the wind. The great yew tree in the churchyard creaked and waved,
and even the effaced headstones seemed insecure, each like a tiny boat moored
in a dangerously swelling harbour.

'We'd
better get inside, out of this wind,' Katie said, locking the car.

They
approached the sanctuary of the church. A lofty, aluminium double-ladder was
drawn alongside the porch, leaning against the tower and reaching up to the
trefoil niche sheltering the effigy of Mary Magdalene, as if someone had been
trying to save or steal the statue. The fierce wind rattled the ladder against
the sandstone wall of the tower. A claw hammer was hooked around one of the
lower rungs, swinging slightly. Tom had a bad feeling. His sense of dread
redoubled as Katie reached for the iron ring of the church door. She opened the
door a fraction before turning to him. 'Come on,' she whispered. 'Don't wait
out there.'

Tom hovered
outside the porch, the wind snatching fistfuls of his hair, rattling the
aluminium ladder against the tower. 'I can't,' he said. 'I can't.'

'Don't
be silly, Tom. Come on.' She slipped inside the door, leaving him alone outside
the porch.

The freezing wind
shrieked round the sandstone church like a predatory spirit. The sky darkened
further. It was not yet noon, though it could have been night. Something moved
at the periphery of his vision. He looked up. There was nothing but for half a
dozen stone gargoyles grinning down at him, eyes popping, tongues drooling.
Rain water dripped like saliva from the tongue of one of the carvings. He
turned away, running a nervous hand through his hair, unable to move backwards
or forwards. When he looked back up at the Magdalene effigy, what he saw made
him step back. The Magdalene had shifted position. The eyes were lowered at him;
her arm, once holding a vase of ointment, now seemed aligned at a new angle,
pointing at
him.'I
can't do it, Katie! I can't come
in!'

As he shouted, he heard
a low growl from the throats of the gargoyle creatures, and in a second all six
heads were yammering and barking at him like rabid dogs.

'Katie!'

Above the
sound of the barking gargoyles he heard his wife calling to him from behind the
great oak church door. 'You know what to do, Tom! You know what to do!'

Tom
looked at the ladder and hammer. Grabbing the hammer, he proceeded to climb.
The ladder creaked and shifted slightly. The wind snatched at him as he drew
abreast of the lowest row of gargoyles. The first gargoyle slavered and spat as
he aimed a hammer blow directly at its face. The hammer punched into the soft
sandstone, and the figure exploded in a small cloud of dust. The second and
third gargoyles went the same way.

Panting
and weeping, he continued to ascend the ladder to a second row of heads. But as
he climbed the gargoyle heads had changed. Tom was paralysed as he gripped the
rungs. The first was the face of David Feldberg, begging him to take the
proffered scrolls. The other gargoyles had also been transformed. They were the
heads of the scholar Ahmed, and of
Tobie
from the
rehabilitation clinic.

'Please, Tom,' they cried. 'Please!'

'Don't be
fooled, Tom!' came Katie's voice from within the church. 'Don't be fooled!'

Still weeping, Tom
launched the hammer at the first face, pulverizing it. Then he dealt two swift
blows to the last of the faces. The wind snatched at the exploding dust.
Chippings of stone spiralled to the ground, falling at the foot of the ladder.

'Come inside!' shouted Katie.

A mighty gust
of wind roared around the angle of the tower, heaving the ladder on to a single
leg, pushing it away from the wall. The ladder swayed momentarily in dark space
before it clattered on to the sandstone. Tom recovered. He was but a few rungs
from the Magdalene. The wind blasted him full in the face, hurricane-strength
as he struggled up the remaining rungs, squinting into the full force of the
gale. His breath coming in short gasps, he reached out to touch the effigy. The
moment his fingers contacted the cold stone, the wind lashed like a giant paw,
smashing the ladder from beneath him and flinging it into the darkness of the
churchyard. Tom felt himself falling, spiralling endlessly down into blackness.

He landed on
his feet, inside the church. He was standing just inside the oak door.

A small
congregation, perhaps a dozen or so people, was gathered near the altar. Only
Katie, who stood with them, seemed to notice him. She smiled.

'What are you doing here, Katie?'

She shook
her head, finding the question ridiculous. 'The morning, Tom. We're watching
for the morning.'

Katie
turned away. Surveying the walls of the church, Tom saw the desecration. In
three places the ochre-coloured walls had been paint-sprayed with spiralling
words. In each case the word LIAR was sprayed in letters of diminishing size.
As he looked closer he saw the words LIAR
LIAR
LIAR
repeated in the scrawled spirals, until the letters
became obliterated in an ugly paint blotch at the spiral centres.

Tom approached the
altar. A low murmuring was coming from the congregation. A stone spiral
stairway had appeared in front of the altar, and, led by the vicar, the
congregation was descending to a shadowy crypt. Each step was engraved with
mysterious runes and Hebrew letters. Tom caught a whispered chant as he stood
behind Katie. She shuffled towards the stairway, falling in behind the others.
'Liar, liar, liar.'

He joined in the chant. 'Liar, liar,
liar.'

48

'And so in this dream,' said
Tobie
, 'did you take any pleasure in punching out all these
faces?'

'Yours,' Tom
said emphatically. 'I remember being particularly satisfied when I got to you.'

Tobie
laughed girlishly.
'How did I know,
darlink
^.’
How
did I know you'd say that?'

'Do
we really have to have the
Undead
listening in on
this?' Tom flicked his head towards Christina, who'd been in on the session
from the beginning. She sat with her chair reversed, her hands folded under her
chin. Since the start of the session she hadn't once taken her eyes from Tom,
and she hadn't said a word.

'I don't
allow clients to abuse each other,'
Tobie
said
evenly. 'You can be as candid as you like with each other, but no abuse.'

Someone
put a head round the door and asked
Tobie
to take an
urgent phone call. 'Talk to each other, children, I'll be back in a moment.
Talk.'

After
three minutes of enduring both Christina's silence and her unblinking gaze, Tom
said, 'At least we're all agreed you're actually
here
this time. I was
beginning to think you were another phantom. That was quite a stunt you
pulled.'

Christina said nothing.
She blinked once, very slowly. Tom shook his head. Under the lank curtain of
hair, and behind that pale, ravaged face, Tom thought Christina must have been
an attractive woman, once. Her punishing anorexia had left her with a
teenager's figure.

'I know you want to fuck me,' she said
sullenly. 'I know it.'

'I'd rather fuck a corpse.'

'You've been doing that already.'

Tom
glowered. Christina didn't even flicker. They sat in silence for a few more
minutes, until
Tobie
returned.

'Have you
two made the most of each other? Have you been talking?'

'No,' said Tom.

'Yes,' said Christina.

'Good,'
Tobie
said. 'Good.'

'Ask him about
school kids,' Christina said, getting up off her chair. 'He fucks schoolgirls.'

Tom's
eyes incinerated her as she left the "room. Christina tossed a backward
glance at him over her shoulder.

'Well,' said
Tobie
.

Tom was still glaring at the closed door.

'Don't be
alarmed, Tom. I warned you, Christina picks things up. She doesn't know any
more, take my word for it. She picks up fragments, and that's all she knows. I
have an idea it's related to her sickness.'

'Sickness? What sort of a place are you
running here?'

'Let's say
I'm no longer surprised. Was that who you had to meet that day? A schoolgirl?'

Tom nodded.

'You'd been having an affair?'

'She was one of my pupils. I
met with her that day to end it. We mostly met on Sundays, when Katie was at
church.   It was only  a few occasions.  I knew it was
madness, but I had a kind of fever for her.'

'Why were you going to end it?'

'I
was meeting her to tell her it had to stop. I'd come to my senses. I realized
what I was doing, to her, to Katie, to myself. I was going to leave her alone.
In my own mind I'd resolved it.'

'And
Katie was killed that day.'

Tom wiped
away a single, hot tear. 'I went through all that with Kelly. I felt sick.
Hollow. Then I came home and I went to bed. I was awoken by the telephone. It
was the police. A tree had fallen on Katie's car on her way back home. A tree.
Blown down in the gale.'

'And it's hard not to personalize a thing
like that.'

'I know what
you're thinking of me. I know how you must see it. Well, maybe everything you
think of me right now is correct -'

'Stop it,'
Tobie
interrupted. 'Stop it right there.' She leaned out of
her seat to place her two hands on his forearm. For the first time it occurred
to Tom how young were
Tobie's
eyes. Where so many
people of
Tobie's
age had eyes like dried beads,
shrunken by the loss of life's novelty, hers blazed with sympathetic light.
'First thing, Tom, I don't judge. I'm not here to do that. I got too much in my
life I've done wrong to judge anybody. Understand that, for my sake. I see you
suffering and I want to say, hey, I suffer too. You see, talking about it is
the only way I think I get you to stop judging yourself. Because that one is
the worst judge of all.'

It
didn't stop there. She'd known about it. You see, some kid at school, a
boyfriend of Kelly, he got jealous. He knew, or guessed. He started writing
things about me on the blackboard at school. I caught him, and I dealt with it,
so I thought. But then someone else - I don't think it was him, maybe it was
Kelly - started sending letters to Katie, spelling it out. Katie confronted me
one day, and I admitted it. Of course, she was terribly hurt. But I promised
that I wouldn't see the girl any longer.

'Then
after…after Katie was killed, the writing on the blackboard started up again. I
would turn up in the classroom at the beginning of the day to find the board
covered with filth and abuse, sometimes words I'd never even heard of. Shocking
things. Then weeks would go by and it would happen again. It couldn't have been
the original boy because he'd moved to a different school.

'And it was
always on a Friday morning. One time I had a hunch it was about to happen
again, and I contrived to stay in my classroom overnight to see if I could
catch someone. It was easy to dodge the cleaning staff. There's a stockroom ...
a store cupboard at the back of the classroom, and anyway I had my own keys. I
locked the classroom door and I settled down on a chair in the stockroom with
the door slightly ajar. I stayed awake all night. Perhaps I dozed before the
first staff and kids arrived, but when I went out of the stockroom, there it
was, the usual litany of filth, chalked in huge letters on the blackboard. And
the classroom door was still locked.

'But now I
knew who was doing it. I should have known it was her all along. The
handwriting, when I came to examine it, was hers, but in printed form. It was
Katie's. She was doing it.'

Tobie
blinked impassively.

'I couldn't
take it anymore. I gave in my notice. I needed to get away. The only person I
could think of running to was Sharon, here in Jerusalem. But Katie followed me.
She tracked me down. She's here. She won't let me go,
Tobie
.
She won't let me go.'

They sat
quietly for a while, Tom with his eyes averted. At last
Tobie
said, 'I think we came a long way today. I think it's enough for now. I'm going
to make you some tea before you leave, but I want you to promise me something.
Promise me you'll repeat this to Sharon. She's very worried about you, and you
don't talk to her. Will you do it?'