The Story of My Face (25 page)

He runs his hands lightly up and down Belinda's sides, pulls her back into him. In the field, they start to sing again.

‘No shortage of kids down there,' Harris points out. ‘But that girl, the one I brought back, she isn't theirs. And the boy's in a bad way, doesn't talk –'

‘Crazy –' Belinda says again, stepping up backwards, so that she's standing on his feet, with her buttocks in his groin. ‘They give me the shivers.'

‘I like them,' Harris says.

‘You just think you can make them pay,' says Belinda, as Harris slips his hands around to the front, one down into her jeans, one up under her shirt: no bra. ‘I know you –'

27

It is nearly six o'clock when we arrive back at the site, the sun yellow-gold rather than white, but still fierce. The meeting-field is still half-full but the frailer adults and almost all the teenagers and children and their mothers, hungry and hot, have left and are sitting or playing in the squares of shade around the caravans. We go straight to the Hern caravan, noticing little except for Leverson's car. Mark points it out to me: a deep-blue Humber, just a couple of years old, and gleaming clean, parked close to the gate.

We have cheese-and-tomato sandwiches, sticking them together with mayonnaise from the night before and using almost all the loaf. We eat quickly. My head spins; I think I'm going to be sick. Mark helps me into my bunk. I cover myself, despite the heat, with crocheted blankets and an eiderdown, pulling at the edges to ensure a perfect seal, then I fall asleep as if someone had turned off a switch.

What has happened? Mark wonders. Is his mother all right? He should let her know that they are back. . . . But a huge weariness presses down on him. Instead of going out into the field he sits for a while on the steps of the caravan, in his father's place, listening blankly to the tap of hawthorn twigs on the roof. Then he goes inside again, pulls the curtains closed, climbs into his own bunk and lies there in the dim greenish light.

Later, he's aware, very distantly, as from the bottom of some infinitely deep well, of his parents returning, of his mother's soft laughter and the shushing sound she makes to his father. When he wakes properly there is a lamp on the table with a note beside it saying that everyone will be by the river, and ‘both of you' are welcome to come; the ‘both' is underlined. He finds his torch and goes first to the tap, washes from the bucket without bothering to warm the water. In the distance he can hear the congregation singing Envall's arrangement of the 150th Psalm. Their voices push towards the high notes, gratefully plummet at the ends of each phrase. Softened by its journey across the fields, it sounds almost as it's supposed to, and he hums along to it. It's just as he is tipping the suds into the hedge by the gate that Mark realises someone is coming up the lane, and then a beam of light seeks him out, so that he has to do the same or be blinded; the four eyes of the Anderton twins gaze back at him, blinking just as he is.

‘Oh, hello,' he says. ‘What happened then, this afternoon?'

‘Well, we should be asking that,' says Peter.

‘Where are you off to?' Mark asks.

‘Nowhere. You can come if you want,' Peter says. Mark hesitates, then lowers his torch and, leaving the bucket, he falls in with them. They take a stile to the left and are soon in a position where they can see the lights, some moving, some still, down by the river.

Tim says it will do; they all sit down.

‘Well,' Peter said, ‘Leverson arrived. Shook hands, patted bums and promised great things for the morning. . . .'

‘Do you smoke?' Tim asks suddenly.

‘No,' Mark tells him, ‘of course I don't.'

‘Shame.' Timothy lights the cigarette he has been rolling since they sat down and draws deeply upon it. ‘In any case,' he adds, after a few moments, ‘welcome.' He passes the cigarette to his brother.

‘What do you mean?' Mark asks, shortly, blinking against the smoke.

‘We were on the hill. We saw you and your redhead coming back. Clear enough what you'd been doing.'

‘So welcome –' Pete cuts in, ‘to the Republic of Sin. You've left the Kingdom of God behind, and come to a better place.'

‘Is that drugs?' Mark asks.

‘Sara gets it, at the university,' Tim says. ‘All things are possible. For example, Pete and I are going to live in London, as soon as we are sixteen. We'll get a flat. How was it with Natalie, then?'

‘It doesn't mean what you think,' Mark says. The twins laugh, choking on their own smoke and trying to push it away with their hands. Below, the singing has stopped and lights separate from the group in twos and threes, proceeding erratically in a variety of directions. The night is very warm. The moon, which Mark had noticed earlier, shining out from behind thin afternoon cloud, has gone.

‘What I mean,' Mark persists, ‘is that I've got to think everything through, and ask myself questions, and pray, and decide what to do. Everything's upside down and I don't know exactly what it means.'

‘Don't know was made to know,' Pete says, slowly exhaling.

‘Or maybe it means nothing at all,' says Tim. The smoke, just visible, spreads around them in the dark. Mark has the feeling of visiting a life someone else had told him was his, finding it half-mistaken, half-familiar.

He leaves them there, and cuts back to the van. His parents have still not returned. The van is dark and stuffy. He sees that I've pushed off the blankets and I'm lying there fully clothed, even down to the borrowed socks. I'm breathing with my mouth half open, I lie there like someone cast into a sudden trance, rather than naturally asleep. It is a kind of experiment for Mark to stay there, watching, to see what happens; which is that very slowly, so that he has ample chance to prevent it, but no real sense of urgency until it is too late, the feeling of wanting grows, to the point where, if it felt safe, he would climb into my bunk. But it's not safe. There are voices in the field. Doors open and close, occasional lights jog past the thinly curtained windows. All he does is to reach over, and put the tip of his forefinger in my mouth, rubbing it along the slack wetness behind my lower lip.

What happened in the afternoon did not feel like a sin, and now this doesn't either. That's all he has to weigh against everything he has ever been led to believe, by everyone important in his life. But all the same, weighing it seems worth doing. He stands there,
burning
, as St Paul would have put it, and then when he hears his parents' voices outside, slips into his bed underneath.

The car door opens, closes.

‘Tomorrow is a new day, my love,' his father says.

‘I can't say I'm looking forward to it,' she replies. ‘And I really don't know what the poor child will make of it.' Water from their tooth-brushing splatters on the ground as they speak. They are sharing the mug, handing it from one to the other.

‘You can't have it both ways,' his father says good-naturedly. ‘You must hand it to the Andertons for backing down.'

‘It was because they had their way on the more important thing,' she says. Then it goes quiet, while they undress, put their clothes in the car.

She climbs straight into bed. He pushes the snib on the lock of the door. ‘God bless,' they tell each other. Mark's father's breathing shifts gears, then slips into the easy, shallow rhythm of solid sleep.

‘Are you awake?' his mother whispers some time later. He can see the dim, pale shape of her, sitting up.

‘Where did you go? Was Natalie all right?'

She was worried about being thrown out, Mark tells her, leaning half out of his bunk. I am lying just eighteen inches above his head. He and his mother are only feet apart, but in the dark the distance grows and it is rather like having a telephone conversation. Suddenly, he remembers ringing her when he had gone over on his ankle in football practice, and had to be taken to the hospital after school for an X-ray. He must have it, she told him. It would be all right so long as he didn't look at it.

‘It was terrible this morning,' she says.

‘Yes,' he agrees.

‘But good may come of it. You're not to worry. I like Tony Thwaite. Jean too. She's very brave. Are you all right?'

‘Yes,' he tells her, ‘fine.'

Then he too drifts off, leaving Barbara the only one awake, lying wide-eyed next to her husband in the locked caravan, waiting for the small gusts of breeze that push through the windows, the rustle of leaves outside.

28

A cool morning, slightly overcast. Blouses, face-cloths, underpants, a tea-towel, flutter on the line strung between the caravan and the hedge. John is on the steps again, Mark and Barbara on chairs by the hedge. I have spread a rug on the grass. On my lap, I hold a small leather-bound copy of Envall's sermon
The Forgotten Commandment
– Finnish to one side, English of sorts on the other. I move my finger steadily along the lines as I read, slowly, trying to make some sense of it. My hair is freshly plaited. I'm wearing a blue-checked dress and a yellow cardigan, and thoroughly enjoying being an Envallist child, and the way that everything has come together all at once.

‘We should make a move,' John says. People are beginning to drift towards the meeting-field, each person or group carrying their own chairs and equipment.

‘I need a word with you first, John,' I hear Barbara say.

‘I'll carry your chair?' Mark asks me as I shut the book carefully, a blade of grass slipped in to mark my place. He's been annoying me since we got back and I pretend not to have heard. I go inside to put the book away, then linger a moment at the border between our spot and the site in general, looking back. Barbara has one hand on her husband's arm, the other buried in the pocket of her slacks. She gives me a brief but dazzling smile, then waves us children on.

‘You go ahead –' ‘Are you all right?' Mark asks as we set out together for the other field.

Of course, I tell him. Everyone is being very nice to me now, it's all fine. I look steadily ahead and give no sign of remembering anything about yesterday at all. I'm offering him the opportunity to forget what happened, which is what I want to do, so that I can get on with the new situation. But Mark doesn't want the same thing. He bunches his eyebrows, reaches for my hand, which I snatch away and thrust in the pocket of my dress. He'd very much like to go for a walk with me again. After this meeting is finished, perhaps. There's a lot to talk about. Before tea-time, perhaps? What do I think?

‘I don't know,' I say, finally glancing at him.

‘Maybe?'

‘I said,
I don't know
,' I repeat, holding out my hands, not to him, but for the chair to sit on.

There's a buzz of excitement in the air as the congregation settles itself in concentric circles around an arrangement of two oil drums with a piece of rough-sawn timber spanning them like a bridge. This is Paul Leverson's doing. The timber is to be a kind of gangplank, along which, one by one, blindfolded, the entire congregation, or as many as can be persuaded, will walk. Each person will carry a rucksack of stones to symbolise their unconfessed sins. At the far end, they will tip the stones out on the ground, naming them for all to hear. Mark says he remembers reading about this in the newsletter, how, on his visit to one of the Canadian congregations, Leverson himself had carried stones in a far more extreme situation: walking along a pine log over a real ravine with a sheer drop beneath; how afterwards, ‘the spirit filled him'.

‘But of course, you don't have to do it,' he tells me.

‘I might,' I say, although anyone can see that the plank is not thick enough and will wobble a lot. ‘I might want to.'

‘Not about yesterday –' ‘Why not?' I ask. ‘I'll do what I want. I'll say what I want, and I will, I really will, if you don't leave me alone.'

Elsbeth Anderton has asked if she can be the first.