After Purple (55 page)

He was just a stripling, thin and shy and jumpy, who dribbled when he kissed. He had long greasy hair which dangled in my eyes and a little nervous cough. He sweated so much, he made all my body wet. After three minutes, he was hauled off by the Irishman who came before he'd even entered me and then said, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph” and spat contemptuously on the ground. I watched the little gobbett of spittle froth and shiver by my hand. Red-cap was the best. He kept his woolly hat on and almost all his clothes, but he knew how to move against me and he bit my breasts so hard, I almost fainted.

After that, they came in twos and threes. I soon stopped watching — just shut my eyes and let all the wild sensations trample over me. Things were so distorted now, I hardly knew if I was real or not. I reached out my hands and tried to touch the sharp, consoling edges of the world, but a workman must have shifted them. There was nothing left but fear and noise and grab. A Band-Aid scratched across my stomach, a sneeze exploded in my ear. Stubble chafed and pricked my breasts, calloused hands criss-crossed up and down me. Other men were leaving their machines and running over, wiping their hands on their overalls, tearing off their belts. I had long lost count of all the pricks. Some hacked and bucked and bull-dozed, others merely dabbed. Somewhere in the background, I could hear crashings and groanings from the wounded hospital as bits of its limbs fell off, angry splutterings from the fire, sudden shouts from the men who worked the cranes.

I squinted through my eyelids. The world was so bruised and bleeding, someone must have mugged it and flung it in the gutter. I was lying there beside it, with six or seven men fighting for a cock-hold on my body. Their skin glowed red and livid in the fire, their limbs were charred black branches, their eyes hot and spitting coals. The sky was even darker now, soggy with clouds which were only bloody swabs and pus-stained bandages. I could feel it pressing down on me — soiled, polluted, stinking — like the workmen's bodies.

“Bernadette,” I shouted. “Bernadette.”

She couldn't hear me. I had lost her in all the thrust, the heat, the roar; the sweaty vests flapping against my stomach, the heavy boots trampling on my hair. I could see furious messages scrawled across the air, smell smoke and sin and darkness. Ordinary things like spades and pickaxes were grinning horribly, my own body split and cracked across its surface like a broken vase. I had no idea if I was vase or flesh or dream. Perhaps I was crushed against the galloping flanks of a nightmare, or tossed into another (bloodier) life like Louis de Gonzague. All I knew was I wanted to wake up.

I opened my eyes and crawled on my hands and knees towards the fire. Someone had restoked it, so the flames leapt even higher now, licking at the floorboards of the sky. I was torn, exhausted, filthy. I needed fire to purify me, burn me down to ashes. Things were always burnt in winter, to make way for the spring. New buildings built on the charred cinders of the old ones. Even here, a new, shining hospital would rise from all this scum, soaring like a phoenix out of flame. Scanners out of scrap-iron, transplants out of nuns.

“Lord,” I cried. “Look upon the flame that lights our darkness, the fiery pillar that sweeps away the murk of sin.”

The words of the Easter Vigil were jumbling, leaping in my head. The Christians had begged their God to bless the Fire, so it would cleanse their bodies, cauterise their souls. The pagans before them had flung sin and death and darkness on their funeral pyres, until the whole sky roared and sung with light. Only fire could heal me, purge me, light me; burn away my sin like a blow-lamp, melt the workmen's pawmarks off my cunt. I must blaze and kindle with the hospital, be cremated with it, until our cold, fused ashes lay white and ghostly on the ground. I didn't replace my clothes — just walked naked, trusting, praying, towards the fire.

“Watch out!” shrieked the man with the tattoo. I knew his voice because it sounded shrill and powerful like the eagle's.

I didn't stop. The whole horizon was blazing like a beckoning red carpet which God had laid out in my honour.

“Come away!” yelled Red-cap. “You're crazy! You'll kill yourself.”

I fought and shook him off. Already the flames were licking down my thighs, stretching out their fingers to my breasts. The open wound of the hospital streamed and wept with blood. My mouth was full of lava, my eyes were scarlet holes. The yellow crane was towering over me, its sharp teeth splashed with blood.

No, not blood. The iron ball had turned into a paperweight and the red was only peonies gleaming on the glass. I stretched out my hands towards it, and as we touched — fingers, bodies, mouths — the whole blundering, dazzling, loving universe burst flaming into flower.

“Please,” I murmured. “Could I have white curtains? The blue ones hurt my eyes.”

“That's right, dear,” said the nurse. She was also dressed in blue. There's very little white on the National Health. I was in a side-room off a ward which had cornflower curtains and a grey and yellow speckled floor. I had burns on my face and body and bruises where I'd struggled with the workmen when they'd dragged me from the fire. They didn't hurt — not now. Nothing hurt except the blue.

They seemed to know who I was. They called me Mrs Morton and even had all my notes and X-rays from St Maur's. It seemed odd that my notes should be saved when so much else had gone. I didn't eat — there was no more need to, really. They gave me pills which they said would make me sleepy. My body dozed — heavy and lumpy like a fat white bolster, but my mind was laser-sharp. It was as if the fire had burnt off all the dross and left me fierce and light and pure.

I thought mainly about Bernadette — not just her message, but the fact of seeing her at all. It was only now I realised what it meant. Somehow, I had missed the most important thing about it — that since she had appeared to me as a living breathing person, then there couldn't be any death. According to the books, Bernadette had died in 1879 — more than a hundred years ago — and yet I had seen her as young, as fresh, as childlike as in her photographs — not aged, not ghostly, not marked by time at all. That hundred years had been nothing but a sneeze, a flick of the fingers, a puff of smoke. Bernadette had dropped into the present as if the towering granite walls between the centuries were merely matchstick fences you could topple with a finger. Adrian kept centuries very stiff and separate in his leather-bound textbooks —
England in the Thirteenth Century, The Hundred Years War, The Twelfth-Century Renaissance
. But clearly he was wrong.

I lay in my three-foot bed in my eight-foot cubicle with the blue curtains drawn around me and a pale blue ceiling blinking down, and all time spread out before me like a smooth white counterpane thrown across my bed — past, present, future, all sewn together like little squares of patchwork. I'd always seen time as a book before, heavy and serious like one of Adrian's tomes, divided into chapters (centuries), with a beginning and an ending, and page numbers plodding steadily and logically from one to six or seven hundred. Now I realised it was just an enormous piece of parchment which you could roll up or spread flat, covered not with footnotes or boring complex arguments, but with huge leaping pictures, splashed one on top of the other, and where all the footprints of all the different peoples were jumbled up and criss-crossed, so that the Blessed Virgin or John of Gaunt or Josie Rutherford were all racing and tumbling on one shining stretch of sand.

It was as if all the leaves of all the world's books had floated out of their covers, wriggled free of their indexes, and fused into an endless sheet. Ancient Chinese Emperors sat dicing with Adrian's medieval kings (Henrys and Edwards without their numbers now, and medieval meaning nothing) and with towering American presidents not yet born. Louis de Gonzague took tea with Bertrand Russell. Ming and Ch'ing were sold in Habitat, sharing the shelves with 1980s mugs. There was no time, no death. And if there was no death, then I couldn't be a murderer. Janet's baby was still kicking and crowing in its cradle, my own child kicking in my womb. Lucian four months or forty months — it didn't matter any more. If he had once been living, then he was
always
living, and I was still pregnant with him, glowing and plump and blest like Janet was.

The nurse was fussing with my hair. They'd had to cut off most of it. I didn't mind. I didn't bother with mirrors any more — there was too much else to look at. I'd discovered that small, secret things like safety-pins or sticking plasters had whole worlds rolling through them.

The nurse put my brush and comb back in the drawer. “It's growing jolly fast,” she said. “I'll be plaiting it next week!” When she smiled, I felt whole mountains crack. I'd stared at her apron once for half an hour and watched the Alps form in its snowy folds and creases. Another time, she brought me a small green pot-plant (from Adrian, I suppose). It grew into a tree with great tangled roots and towering branches, which blocked out so much light, I had to ask her to remove it.

When she'd gone, I pulled my nightdress up and laid my hand lightly on my stomach. I felt Lucian stir and flutter underneath it. And not just Lucian. All the babies who had ever lived (or died) were there inside me. We were all one, all fused, all sharing the same father.

A second nurse came in with a cup of tea and a miniature swiss roll wrapped in silver foil. I didn't touch it, didn't need crawling comforts any more. There was so much white and light and growth inside me, food would only muddy it. I was trying to clear away everything which weighed me down or soiled me, all the distractions which kept me bound, gross, caged. I had one last job to do — that's all — to pass on Bernadette's message to the world. Even that was easier now, because I knew who had appeared to her. It wasn't the Blessed Virgin, it was Janet.

I had been so stuck in time, so obsessed with birth and death and dates and normal life-spans, it hadn't occurred to me before. But now I saw there
wasn't
any time, the whole thing clicked. Bernadette's Lady could have come from
any
century, even ours. She could just as well have been a modern person, living in what we (wrongly) term the present. The only limitation was that she called herself the Immaculate Conception. No problem there — I realised now that Janet herself was almost certainly conceived immaculate. She hated sin and sex and imperfection and would never have stood for someone like the Blessed Virgin being freed from sin, while she herself was stuck with dirt and squalor, messing up her soul like dirty fingermarks. It fitted with her whole blameless upbringing, her Devon Cream childhood, her goody-goody father, the badges she had won for Good Behaviour.

Another point was, Janet had blue eyes — the same deep flower-blue which Bernadette described. The Blessed Virgin couldn't have — coming as she did from Galilee where everyone was dark. It was obvious, really, Janet would be special, one of those exclusive one-percenters who had keener, sharper eyesight than the blurred and groping ninety-nine per cent of us, who had to put up with dark eyes.

The words she spoke were utterly in character. She asked for penance — Janet
would
. It was part of her whole policy of rationing people and confiscating toffees and her everlasting economies and rules. At the eighth apparition, she had forced Bernadette to kiss the ground for sinners. That was the sort of thing she made
me
do — not literally, perhaps, but through a score of small humiliations. She was also hot on sinners, which meant anyone who had different opinions from herself, or who wore dungarees or boob tubes, or didn't use a napkin. She requested processions in her honour and a chapel to be built. That was also typical. Janet expected homage all the time, not only from Adrian, who was forced to trot round Sainsbury's with her every Saturday morning, totting up the prices on her pocket calculator, but also from all the tradesmen who had to deliver meat and vegetables and know their place and call her Madam. Even at work, people bowed and scraped to her and a special girl came in from Contract-Bloom and put fresh flowers on her desk each day, as if it were an altar.

What finally convinced me, though, was the ninth apparition when the Lady commanded Bernadette to wash herself in a spring. Hadn't Janet asked much the same of me? Well, not in a
spring
, perhaps, though even that would have saved her precious water. Janet was obsessed with washing. She put a full load in her Hotpoint Liberator every single morning, and made Adrian shower before and after anything connected with food or sex or Sunday. The Mother of God would hardly come down all the way from heaven and waste her apparitions nagging people about their washing habits. Only Janet could be that finicky. In fact, the whole of Lourdes is fixated on the Baths. There's no other place in the world where people queue for three or four hours just to immerse themselves in freezing water and where even the sick and dying are carried to the wash-house.

The statue in the Grotto even
looked
like Janet — the marble-smooth complexion, the sanctimonious expression in the eyes, the gaze fixed heavenwards to avoid the squalor (and the prices) down below. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that Janet had not only been conceived immaculate, but had probably experienced a Virgin Birth as well. That meant she'd produced her baby (
both
her babies) without a man involved. It was obvious she'd approve of Virgin Births — no fuss, no mess, no man, no sperm. And
I
approved. A Virgin Birth meant Adrian had never screwed her, never
known
her, as the Bible puts it. Which allowed me to discount her, to even try and like her. She wasn't a rival any more, she wasn't even Adrian's wife. The Holy Ghost had fathered both her children and Adrian was mine.

“Aren't you going to eat that nice cake?” tutted Nurse. She had bustled in to take my tray away.