The Woman who Loved an Octopus and other Saint's Tales (10 page)

I settled in. I'd always known that this would be my life. The world at bay, I safe in the faith; six prayers a day from midnight to midnight. Life rolled by. The seasons were the only thing that changed. Every day brought us closer to the death of the flesh, life eternal of the soul. Every time a sister died, we celebrated the beginning of her life in the Lord.

It was a wandering preacher who brought me the news from home. He was one of the men who travelled spreading the faith, just like the ones who had met my mother on the bit of sandy beach.

My mother was dead, had died with the name of the Lord on her lips. It was my father who had killed her when he'd heard that she had taken me away and would not tell him where I was.

The sisters came fluttering all around me, eager and envious.

‘She is with the Lord!'

‘How proud you must be.'

‘She died a martyr for the faith.'

I got away in the end and went to kneel in the chapel, my lips moving automatically. They would have liked to talk more, but they could not interrupt my prayers.

What a waste, I thought. I wanted to cry but my eyes burned, dry as tinder. What a waste. Why should she die for believing in a different god? Why should she not tell my father where I was, and live? Buried in a convent or buried in a marriage, it was all the same to me. No one had asked me what I wanted.

It was as if the heavy shutters on the chapel windows had banged open and let fresh air and sunlight into the dark.

I had never known that I didn't like life in the convent. It would have been futile to think about what I did or did not want, because my thoughts counted for nothing.

But already it was too late. I knew now that I did not want to be where I was. I did not want to be a nun. I did not want to be a wife. I did not want my father's gods nor my mother's Lord. I wanted the freedom of fishermen: to come and go and work with my hands and my body, proud of my knowledge of the weather and the currents. I wanted the freedom of the convent's maids whom I'd seen at night, more than once, in the orchard; skirts hiked high and bodices undone, hands or mouths busy between each other's thighs. They didn't have to keep themselves pure for a husband or for the Lord. They weren't required to pray all day. The holy sisters had long given up their souls as lost, and anyway, they were only servants.

I tried to close the shutters in my mind that had so suddenly opened on thoughts I hadn't known were mine. I fastened them and turned my back on them and I began to pray in earnest, begging the Lord for forgiveness, praying for my mother's soul.

I ought not to grieve for her. She was in heaven, she was a holy martyr whom the Lord prized above all, she would sit at His right hand. I bowed my head, prayed six times a day for the salvation of my soul. I believed in the Lord.

Father Hugh had died. He had been old and frail, and for months had been unable to journey out to the far-away convent to take our confession and absolve us. We had been unshriven for a long time.

Father Diarmuid came instead. He was young and strong, and his beauty blazed like a bonfire. He moved as gracefully as a cat. His habit flowed loosely around him, but when a gust of wind moulded it against his body, I could see him as clearly as though he was wearing nothing at all. I knew that I wanted to do with him what the maids did in the orchard with each other.

I knew that it was wrong and impure. I would lose my maidenhead and my salvation. I was afraid of losing my eternal soul to damnation, but the wanting in my body was stronger. I was tired of being a virgin for the Lord.

I went to confession twice in two days, and when he heard my voice the second time, he opened the grille to look at me. I lifted my head and looked back at him, and said, ‘Meet me in the orchard tonight'.

He was there. His beauty shone in the moonlight, he drew me like a magnet. The long grasses caressed my thighs as I walked towards him. And when my hand touched his naked skin, the shutters in my mind flew wide open and a gust of wind blew through me, so strong that it lifted me up and spun me around and made me fly.

Of course, they found us out in the end. We were caught one night in autumn when the cold rain had driven us indoors.

They beat him with birch rods until he bled and begged forgiveness. They made me watch. After they had birched me too, they held a council and decided that as I had come from across the sea to them – a stranger; not one of them as had become abundantly clear – I was to be put in a rudderless boat and sent where it pleased the Lord to take me.

When day broke, all I saw around me was water. Waves smacked against the sides of the boat. A wind rose and slapped me with raindrops, hard and cold.

The boat drifted on and on. I was going to drown or starve, and I did not care which it was going to be. Clouds moved across the sky all grey day long, until night fell again.

When the second day broke, I saw a dark line on the horizon. I was drifting towards it. Suddenly, I was certain that the land was my island, the place I came from, the place where my father lived and my mother had died. I was going to be washed up on the same piece of sandy beach where the Fathers had met my mother; I was being carried by the same current. I imagined my father's face as I arrived, and I had to laugh and laugh and couldn't stop.

The land came nearer. I could see the outline of a rocky coast, steep cliffs. The laughing stopped, and instead I was afraid, terribly afraid. I was on my way back to my father's lands. He was going to kill me as he had killed my mother. I was a disobedient daughter and not a virgin any more.

I began to pray, gabbling with fear. I promised the Lord that I was going to be a faithful daughter; that I was going to keep myself chaste. I promised Him that I was going to beat the bad urges out of my body. The holy sisters had shown me how when they had beaten Father Diarmuid and me in the chapel after they caught us sinning. I suddenly understood that what we had done was a sin against the faith and the Lord, because it went against the laws that He had laid down. I understood that I was nothing and that the Lord was everything. I had been given to Him, I was His and no longer mine.

The land came nearer. There were jagged mountains on the horizon, blue as clouds. I was washed ashore at the foot of a steep cliff. This was not my island.

I was saved.

I fell on my knees in prayer to thank the Lord. Then I set about doing His work. I had to subdue my will and my unruly body. So I carried large stones up the steep cliff path, one after the other. I would build a church. Soon my hands were rough and bleeding, my back bent and aching. Every time I slipped and the stone rolled back down to the bottom and I had to start again, I fasted for penance. The winter storms lashed me with rain and hail. Some days I was so weak, I could not even lift a stone, let alone carry it up the cliff.

But every evening, no matter how tired and worn out I was, I used a birch rod to beat my body into submission. I had to keep my promise.

Every night, my lover visited me in my dreams. His hands stroked my wounds and scars and caressed my body until I swam in pleasure.

Every morning when I woke up, the wounds of the day before had closed and healed. Weeks passed, but nothing changed. The Lord would be displeased with me.

The birch was not enough.

I walked inland until I found a thorny shrub and tore off several of its branches. They would take care of the dreams.

But when the rods landed on my skin, their touch was as tender as a lover's fingers. They had grown white flowers whose sweet scent rose into my nostrils and made my head swim. The thorns had disappeared as though they had never been there.

I was going to burn in hell.

I ran down the cliff path and threw myself into the sea. There were sharp rocks just under the surface, impossible to evade. I braced myself for the shock of the cold, but the water was warm. It held me as though in a huge hand, blue and sparkling in the sunlight that had broken through the clouds. The currents moved over my skin until my body uncurled all of its own accord.

I spent the next day collecting tufts of wool from the grazing sheep. I felt as though all the nuns in the convent were watching me, as well as the Lord; and I had to do something.

When I had enough, I twisted the wool into thread. I knotted stones and broken shells with sharp edges into them until I had a formidable lash. I tried it out on the back of my hand. The threads wound round my fingers, curled and moved and hissed at my other hand when I tried to prise them loose.

The lash had turned into live snakes.

‘Saint Patrick cast all snakes out of Ireland,' the voice of the Mother Superior said in my head. ‘Snakes are the Serpent's foul brood. Saint Patrick was so pure that they could not abide him.'

Warm, dry bodies moved slowly over my skin, coiling and uncoiling, entwining themselves with my fingers. Tongues flickered as heads moved here and there.

They were beautiful.

Their beauty was like that of Father Diarmuid's body in the moonlight, like white blossoms against black wood, like air and sunshine through open windows.

I sat and looked at them and stroked their lovely, scaly bodies until, one by one, they unwound themselves from my hand and slipped away.

Then I got up and threw the birch rod off the cliff. It turned into a cormorant.

Collen

Sixth or seventh century

collen
[f] – (n) hazel

Sometimes called
Collen Filwr
, Collen the Warrior. A champion for Christianity, he fought and killed a pagan warrior. Later on, Collen became a wandering preacher and missionary, settling down to live in what is called today the valley of Llangollen. At this time – according to the legends – there was a cattle-stealing and man-eating giantess living in the area:
Cawres y Bwlch
, the Giantess of the Pass. Collen decided to go and see her. As he approached her cave and asked who she was and what she was doing, the giantess answered:
Myfi fy hun, yn fy lladd fy hun.
(It is I myself, killing myself.) He challenged her and they fought. He sliced off her arm. She picked up the bleeding limb and hit him with it. He cut off her other arm as well and eventually killed her.

According to a local version of this legend, Collen was a woman.

I was The Muscular Christian. My stage name, you see.
Wrestling for GOD
. For years and years of my life, I fought for God on a stage, not only for a living, but for a life.

‘You've heard of Jacob wrestling the Angel! Who wants to wrestle with this angel here?'
That always brought a roar of laughter from the crowds. I w
a
s fighting on the side of the angels, but I'm not exactly your fragile blonde. I'm six-foot-four in my socks and about three foot across and, as I say, I have a fair amount of muscle.

Now my mother was one of those fragile blondes. Me, I've got thick black hair that doesn't even curl. ‘God only knows how you gave birth to that,' my stepfather used to say, and even when I was small I could tell that he didn't think I was a gift from heaven.

In the beginning she'd laugh and say, ‘Well, her father was quite tall, I expect that's where she gets it from,' but after a while we both learned that he didn't like us mentioning my real Dad. He liked it even less when I said it that way.
My real Dad.

‘You're not my real Dad!' I'd scream at him when I was older, and then I'd run away and stay at a friend's for a night or two, until he'd simmered down. Two times out of three he'd have forgotten by the time I showed up again. Sometimes he didn't, and I got it with his belt. So I started the weight training. I'd pay him back one day, when I was stronger.

I expect that was why he hit me more, not less, as I got older and bigger. He wanted me to know that he was stronger.

‘You're a freak!' he'd jeer. ‘You'll never find a man!'

My mother had long given up saying anything by that stage.

I just went on training every day, until every muscle in my body hurt. They did that often enough, anyway, so it didn't make much of a difference.

It was a sort of travelling circus that rescued me; Billy Graham meets Billy Smart, if you can imagine that.
Roll up, roll up and find the Lord!
Sounds daft, doesn't it, but it worked. I know, because that's how I found the Lord.

I was about sixteen when they came to our town, though I looked older.

Posters for GOD's Circus were plastered all over the place. It was a big spectacle in a place where nothing ever happened. Everybody was dying to go, although nobody admitted it. It was so tacky. But they all went, anyway. There was the tent with its flashing lights. Large banners announced the likes of
Samson, the Strongest Man on Earth, Lazarus Whom GOD Miraculously Raised From His Sickbed
(not from the dead, though) and
Mary Magdalen, The Sinner Who Repented And Found Life In GOD.

Now I didn't much care for the repentant sinner, a miserable, wailing female – though I did notice that heads went up when she talked about her Life of Sin with a lot of unnecessary detail. After that, the preacher came on. His voice would have filled the big tent even without a microphone. Words flowed out of him like a river. He carried us all along in his current. Drops of sweat flew and glistened in the light. It was marvellous.