After Purple (48 page)

I hardly dared look up. When I did, the crowd was motionless. Not a single skipping spastic or whooping stretcher-case, not one triumphant crutch waving in the air. Only bent heads, stiff legs, dead and palsied limbs. I almost jeered. Of
course
Bernadette had never seen Our Lady. What other proof was needed? How could a Mother of Mercy look upon these wretches and simply shrug?

“Lord, your word is life,” the priest was saying,
insisting
almost. Yet some of these cripples would be dead within the year.

“Lord, your word gives joy,” he chanted. But there was no scrap or shred of joy in the whole of Lourdes — only suffering, shabbiness and profiteering.

“Lord, your word is food.” I almost spat. What had I eaten other than a sham and scratchy host and a dish of over-priced gruel, followed by a stolen, tepid breakfast which I'd wrested from the clutches of a gross and oafish priest? What had
any
of them eaten in their poky, smelly, grease-bespattered dining-rooms — coarse bread, cheap chips, brackish holy water instead of sparkling wine. They weren't there for the frills. They scraped and pinched all year not for golden beaches or gourmet's fare, but for non-existent miracles and double pneumonia. They belonged to a church which kept them poor and sick and starving, and then went on to call pain noble and suffering blessed. The church got all its definitions wrong. Greed was wicked, joy was dangerous. Only poverty and penance won gold stars. I glanced around the square. Sex was life and joy itself, yet here was only crawling celibacy, mean and scared like Ray's, blushing behind its fig-leaf. Nuns and priests who cut the body off at the neck with their wimples or their dog-collars; convent girls taught that sex was sin and cunts were hell-holes; the sick and handicapped who were either too deformed to do it, or caged up in institutions which only admitted people above the waist; withered peasant women who had swapped their young-girl guilt for disgust and apathy. Swarms of people for whom sex was shame, and joy was something strictly confined to a heaven which would probably be confiscated before they ever got there.

“Hosanna, hosanna!” they were singing, which should have been translated “misery and pain”.

I gazed up at the sky. If only I could see a
different
God — Adonis crossed with Leo, or a Father who was still young and strong and potent, a Priest-Son with an erection.

Rain fell in my eyes.

There was a sudden peal from the organ. The crowds rose to their feet, as if they were lifted up on the clouds of incense now swirling up to heaven. Everyone joined hands and then stood with arms outstretched at shoulder level. I was included in the human chain. A woman on either side of me had grasped my hands and held them high.

“Pater noster,” roared out the whole massed congregation. They were reciting the Lord's Prayer in Latin, the universal language, so that everyone could understand. A vast united nursery of children crying for their Father. I remembered the night of my confession — God was present then. He had snuggled up beside me, offered me His arms. Now He was as deaf, blind and crippled as His children.

“
Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie
…” beseeched the throng.

I yanked my hands away, broke the chain, plunged and butted through the crowds. I didn't want a Father who soaked and drenched His children, who sent them hailstones when they begged for bread; a swarthy foreigner who spoke only a dead language, or who was deaf and dumb like Lionel; a trickster and a conman who allowed poor simple peasants to muddle up His Mother with a ghost, a fraud, a sham.

I fought my way through the ranks, the only moving creature in that great rigid, worshipping mass, the only seeing person who knew the niche was empty and the Grotto false. People frowned and muttered as I elbowed past them, the
brancardiers
tried to stop me, but now I was almost out, darting towards the huge stone ramparts and safely underneath them to the river. I raced across the bridge, pounded along the path which crossed the meadows, then on to the grass itself, feeling it damp and spongy underneath my feet. I passed the second bridge, back to the path again. On I went, beside the dark, rain-tossed water of the Gave. The ground became rough and stony. I tripped and almost fell. I could hear the prayers rising up behind me, fainter now, but chasing me, accusing me.

I threw myself down on the grass, stuffed my fingers in my ears. I could smell wet earth, rich mud, the gamey throbbing scent of spring. Golden celandines were tangled in the grass, tiny purple vetches almost hidden amongst the taller plantains. An insect struggled up a stalk, a pebble shone. The rain was faltering now. I rolled on my back and peered up at the sky. One brave bird was spiralling through the clouds — a hawk perhaps. The only birds I could recognise were sparrows, but this was something classier. Its wide raggedy wings were plunging and soaring high, high above the river. Could God be a bird? Not a Father, but a disembodied spirit, a high free happy thing, a phoenix? I almost craved a God like that. Religion should be light and fire and freedom, not a frowning headmaster with a ruler and a cane.

I couldn't do what Bernadette had asked me. I knew that, now I'd seen the sick — the babies who were simply swaddled corpses, the boys who had never kicked a ball or kissed a girl, the dying old ladies who had been dying for a hundred years, I couldn't wrest their only hope from them. They
needed
that Lady to be the Blessed Virgin. Bernadette was wrong to give them cruel fact instead of faith and fantasy.

I'd fly away. Take the first plane or train or coach I could arrange and return to England. I'd burn all my books on Bernadette, disown her as my sister, return to Leo, get a job. I'd forget the whole cruel Catholic sham, turn my back even on Ray himself, live for my body, not for my soul, further my name through Leo's kids, not through dead and dusty scientific books.

The hawk had disappeared. There was only a hole in the clouds now, a shining halo touched with gold. In my mind, I saw Bernadette's dark pleading eyes staring from the centre of it, heard her cry “I trust you”. I sprang up from the grass. Any moment now, she might appear to me again, try and change my mind. Not likely!

I started running across the fields, away from Lourdes, towards the lowlands and the sane non-Catholic North, towards cakes and steaks and pricks and wombs and sheer crazy easy happiness. Bernadette's voice kept tripping me up, unravelling all the joy.

“It wasn't the Blessed Virgin,” she was saying. “Tell the people, tell the priests.”

I stopped my ears, fell on my knees. “Lord that I may not hear,” I cried. “That I may not hear.”

Rush hour at Victoria. Crowds of grey-complexioned commuters churning their way across the station. People bumping into me or my suitcase because I was dawdling at a time when all the rules said “Rush!” Everyone else obeying — seething and surging past me with dreary gaberdines and set, sullen faces. Out-of-work pigeons chuntering high up in the roof, the odd frail feather drifting down on all the bobbing heads. Trains panting at the buffers and red raucous buses glimpsed through the exits, while a still-early morning shook and stretched itself outside. The
smell
of morning — coffee, and cold, and sudden wafts of after-shave. A porter swilling tea while all the world rushed by him.

It had taken me twenty-three hours, twenty-seven minutes to exchange Lourdes for London. (The last train had been late.) I'd tried to go by plane, fly away like the hawk that very same Monday afternoon, while the Procession of the Sick was still shambling and sobbing through my soul. But Pax Pilgrims only flew on Saturdays and were most unhelpful when I told them my grandmother was dangerously ill, and (later) that all my favourite relatives had died in a multiple car crash on the motorway. All I could do, they said, was take the ordinary scheduled airline from Toulouse or Biarritz. The only problem was, it cost a little matter of a hundred odd pounds, when I'd already paid my all-in fare with Pax. I spent so long arguing with them, I missed the last decent evening train. I packed my things (leaving the books on Bernadette as a present for Madame) and went to catch the midnight one, which was slower and stopped at all the boring little stations in between. It was only then, I discovered that even the train fare cost more than I had in the world. I was so discouraged, I trailed back to my lodgings and went to sleep in my clothes with my case still packed beside me.

First thing in the morning, I trekked up to the hostel and asked Doc for a loan. (Ray wasn't there — thank God. He was saying Mass in the hospital where Mike was dying, more or less.) At least Doc was up and semi-dressed this time. He even laughed and said, “Why not ask St Bernadette for a handout next time she appears to you?” When he realised I was serious, he got quite piqued and uppity, and went on about things like collateral and guarantees. I was forced to resort to tears and the grandmother saga again, and even then, he only forked out a mingy half of what I'd asked. I still had Leo's spending money which I'd hardly touched at all, and a tenner I'd earmarked for emergencies, so in the end I scraped together just enough for the basic ticket, so long as I avoided frills like meals or sleepers. Doc drove me to the station, which was just as well, since the porter was waving flags and slamming doors as we stampeded on to the platform. I made it with a second to spare, like one of those dramatic sequences in films where they build the tension by playing “she'll-never-make-it-music” and superimposing pictures of the breathless heroine with the almost departing train. I stuck my head out of the window and waved to Doc who was still wearing his pyjama top above a pair of tartan golfing trews. The train from Amiens was in, and my last view of Lourdes was of hundreds more handicapped being lifted down like parcels in their wheelchairs, the whole sombre station blooming with blue and white nurses' caps and a new instalment of holy hope and fraud.

I knew, then, I was right to get away. Wasting fifty pounds on a train fare when I'd already paid via Pax was hardly economical, yet the thought of five more days in that weeping, bleeding, hollow, swindling town filled me with such gloom and almost panic, I think I'd have shelled out double to escape it. I realised, too, I was escaping Bernadette. I was terrified she'd appear to me again, saddle me with some new impossible instructions. I couldn't carry them out. The Blessed Virgin was more valuable to those hopeless hoping sick than all the drugs, doctors and priests put together.

I stopped for a moment in the swarming, fuggy station, leaning against the window of Victoria's Pantry, one of the British Rail buffets which was crowded with commuters and reeling with the scent of bacon. I'd travelled so long, my legs felt strange and choppy, as if there was still a jolting train or a lurching channel ferry underneath them. I'd spent the entire journey trying to undo the last three months. I'd booted Ray's religion out of the train window and flung it overboard into the seething Dover Straits. As we'd chugged through Bordeaux and Angoulême, Poitiers and Blois, past fields and cows and vineyards and the first shining splinters of spring wheat, I'd gulped down great mouthfuls of nature and fertility, prayed to a pagan god, embraced Leo and Adonis. Every time Bernadette's sad eyes flicked into my mind, or Ray's limp prick or stricken face, I replaced it with an instant snapshot of Leo erect and radiant.
He
would be my new religion. I'd been vowing that, the very night that Bernadette appeared to me — she'd simply messed things up. True I hadn't brought his miracle, but he wouldn't need it now. It was only my religious hocus-pocus which had turned him off. All that Latin and jargon and asceticism and mugging up Masses in his bedroom must have been a put-down. Once I returned without a soul, he'd rush back to my body and respond the way he always had. Ray and the church had somehow cast a spell on him, but now I'd run away from them. I heard the train wheels singing “Free free free”, saw Leo's strong dark body soaring past in all the tree-trunks, felt his power throbbing through the rails.

I'd practised my new religion for twenty-three and a half hours. I'd sung, slept, sworn, indulged, rubbed myself sore in smelly train toilets, flirted with railway men and passengers — even managed to stuff myself, despite being skint. It was almost a holy principle now to feast instead of fast. A nun with a cheese and salami roll and a bag of macaroons had shared them with me on the first lap of the journey. When I'd changed at Paris, I'd found a half-eaten sandwich in a litter bin, and had then toured all the station bars and cafés, picking things off plates and raiding sugar bowls. On the boat, I was feeling peckish again, so I changed into my skimpiest sweater and my tightest jeans and sat around looking hungry. That always works. A sales rep from Châtillon brought me a sausage and a double gin, and was so intent on trying out his English, he left his change on the bar top. I pinched it when he wasn't looking and used it later to buy a synthetic cream
mille-feuille
.

I was almost relieved to be nicking things again. It cut me off from Bernadette, proved I couldn't be a saint. I was secretly scared that seeing Bernadette had branded me for ever, made me a seer, a guru, a visionary, someone special and elect. Supposing I had other apparitions, further messages, which flung me into chaos, tore my soul apart? Life with Leo was hardly silk and roses; it was rarely even predictable, but at least it didn't smash up natural laws. Leo didn't die and then turn up again, speak in riddles, vanish into thin air. I must return to him and cling to simple, solid things — sex and pricks and bodies, jobs and dogs and food.

I pressed my nose against the steamy window of the Victoria cafeteria. There everything was simple — tycoons snatching breakfast, typists swilling tea. A bank clerk in a bowler hat had just attacked a doughnut. I watched the sugar sparkle on his fingers, waited for the jam to drool triumphant down his chin. I had less than a pound left in the world. I stood there dithering, trying to decide whether to splurge it on two and a quarter doughnuts or the tube fare back to Notting Hill. The tube fare won. I was far too tired to walk three miles with a suitcase, and anyway, the thought of Leo was growing more and more insistent. If there was any miracle at all, it would be the one of our reunion.