Pig Island (4 page)

“You fucking lunatic!” I go. “What was
that
about?”

“The tumour,” she says, holding the paper under my nose, making me recoil at the fucking awful smell. A wad of something black and slimy sits in the petal-white tissue, something that smells of putrefaction and death. “You passed it.”

“Here,” I say, making a grab for it. But Asunción is too quick. She whips it out of reach and spins on her heel, throws open the cubicle door and stalks out. “Hey—stop.” I follow, hopping, skipping and almost tripping over my unbuttoned trousers, trying to do up my belt and flies at the same time as push open the doors she’s slamming her way through. In the hall as I catch up with her she’s making a triumphant entrance, hand held high, titanic smile like a boxing-match ring girl, me stumbling after her as she marches up the aisle. Up ahead the pastor’s staging a shocked pause in the proceedings, his eyes widening dramatically at the procession approaching him. “Asunción,” he calls. “Why the interruption?”

She mounts the stage. Dove uses his hand dramatically to cover his lapel mic and leans over so she can whisper in his ear—his eyebrows lifting almost to his blond hairline as he pretends to be amazed, delighted by what she’s saying. He lifts his eyes to mine with a smile and he’s half got his hand out ready to pull me victoriously on to the stage when he sees the expression in my eyes. His face falls.

“What’re you fuckers up to?” I mount the steps two at a time. Under my feet the stage shakes a little. “Give me that fucking thing.”

“Joe?” he says. “What’s the problem? What’s the—‘

“Give me that.” I make a grab for the tissue. “Show me what you wankers are doing.” Asunción gasps and tries to wrench her hand away. A feedback scream shoots through the microphones, but I hold on tight to her wrist. The congregation jump to their feet, faces frozen and shocked. I dig my fingernails hard into Asunción’s skin—
don’t stop just because she’s a woman –
and get her to release the tissue.

“Joe!” Malachi rips his microphone off his lapel. “Joe!” He puts a hand on my arm, so close I can smell his face powder. He tries to turn us away so our backs are to the audience and he can talk confidentially. He’s sweating now. Looking at what’s in my fist and sweating. “Leave the stage now, Joe,” he goes, licking his lips and putting his fingers out, itching to grab the tissue off me. “Give me the tumour and leave the stage. Whatever your problem I’ll speak to you off stage. Just give me the—‘

He makes a move for my hand but I shake him off. ‘
Listen, you little shit
,“ I hiss. I turn and put my face close to his. ”I’d like to kill you. If I could get away with it, I’d kill you. Remember that.“

And that’s it. I’m off, striding out of the hall with my prize, joined by Finn in the aisle. Outraged little black women hit us with their navy blue handbags as we go.

The tumour turns out to be a putrefying chicken liver. “Probably been left to rot for a coupla days,” says the Environment Department in Santa Fe. “Where the hell did you boys get this little beauty?” It’s such a great story I’m over the fucking moon. We’ve got him. Pastor Dove is ours.

But funny how life goes, isn’t it? because Finn, the one who started the Albuquerque crusade, the one who was going to be a journalist, suddenly goes cold on it. He loses his heart to some girl he’s met in a tequila bar, follows her home to Sausalito, California, and spends the next couple of years as a surfer dude. He gets himself sun damage and a phoney West Coast accent. When he comes back to the UK he publishes a surf mag for a while and ends up a literary agent in London. Turns out I’m the only one with a hard-on for getting Pastor Malachi Dove knobbed.

I take up my university place in London, and start casting around for a mag to take the chicken-liver article. But before I can place it, a rumble comes out of the New Mexico desert. The Psychogenic Healing Ministry is in crisis. The IRS are reviewing its tax-exemption status; Malachi Dove is admitted to hospital, suffering from manic depression. And then the proverbial shit hits the fan. The dominoes really start to fall: he’s under suspicion of torching the house of a state trooper who’s given him a speeding ticket; some of his female disciples go to the press—he banned them, they say, from bringing sanitary towels into ministry headquarters. He says feminine hygiene products are medical intervention; they say he does it to humiliate them, that he’s a misogynist.

“I asked myself difficult questions when I was at my lowest,” Dove tells a journalist on the
Albuquerque Tribune
, when he gets out of hospital. “I asked the Lord if He would, in His grace, take me to be by His side. The answer was no, but what was revealed to me was that I
will
control my death. My death will be significant to the human race.”

“We’re talking about suicide,” goes the journalist. “The Bible says it’s a sin.”

“No. It
says
, ”Thou shalt not kill.“ The translation is faulty. The Hebrew says, ”Thou shalt not
murder.“‘

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, now you do. Every Sunday I will pray. I will ask if my time is here.”

“And when the time comes, how will you do it? Hanging?”

“Not hanging, and not jumping. As a Christian those methods have connotations of guilt for me. Relating to the death of Judas Iscariot.”

“Pills?”

“I don’t take medication of any sort.”

Probably at this point he’s sussed that whatever method of suicide he comes up with, it’s going to put his manifesto under the glass, because after that he changes the subject. Ends the interview. There’s a photo of him attached to the article and he looks fucking appalling. He’s piled on weight and it’s gone round his shoulders, neck and chest. His thatch of hair is yellow against his skin, which is red from either blood pressure or the New Mexico sun, and the only thing I can think when I see the photo is: Christ—looks like someone’s
peeled
the bastard’s face.

In London I work all the depression-suicide stuff into the article and sell it, at last, to
Fortean Times
. Maybe I have a premonition, who knows? because I publish under a pseudonym: Joe Finn. Two weeks after it comes out the
Fortean Times
gets a solicitor’s letter. We’re all in the shit. Pastor Malachi Dove is going to sue us all: the
Fortean Times
and, most of all,
the heretic who dares to call himself a journalist, Joe Finn
.

Chapter 5

I was meeting my contact from the Psychogenic Healing Ministries at the convenience store in Croabh Haven where he came weekly to collect supplies for the community. As I walked I tried to imagine what sort of ritual would have a community discarding pig offal into the sea. No wonder they’ve got you down as Satanists, I thought, turning my eyes to the island. What are you getting up to out there then, you bunch of nutsos? What’re you messing with?

Suddenly and brilliantly, the trees opened on to the vista of Croabh Haven. I stood for a moment, blinking in the brightness, thinking how different it all looked from last night, how difficult it was to square this picture-pretty marina, its glittering yachts and SUVs, with the swill of rotten meat next to the sewage pipe only half a mile up the shore.

The heart of the marina was the convenience store on the green, surrounded by vehicles gleaming in the sun, a dairy truck and tourists to-ing and fro-ing, lazy in their flip-flops, clutching carrier-bags full of fresh tomatoes and lettuce and
Hello
! magazine, seabirds pecking at ice-lolly wrappers on the grass. A guy in a striped butcher’s apron was stacking boxes at the rear of the shop and inside, in the cool, a dimpled, smiling girl in a yellow halterneck served holidaymakers at the cash desk, loading their purchases into bags.

I’d never seen Blake Frandenburg before. He was one of the original settlers on Pig Island twenty years ago and I knew his name, but not his face. When none of the men in striped polo shirts and canvas hats approached me, I wandered the shop for a while, picking up odd extras I might need for the next few days: no Newkie Brown so a bottle of Stolichnaya in case I was on Pig Island for a long time, a few sticks of menthol chewing-gum (thinking of the smell last night again) and some Kendal mint cake, because you never knew what they’d feed you in those places. These are people who can get by on green tea and glasses of their own urine, don’t forget.

I was at the cash desk, half-way through paying, when the shop girl paused. She lifted her chin and looked over my shoulder out of the window and, with a muttered ‘’Scuse me,“ slipped silently out from behind the desk. I turned to see what had got her attention. There was nothing outside, just the neatly clipped green and beyond that bright pennants fluttering on the masts. At that moment a large woman in shorts and a bikini top came barrelling across the grass towards the shop, sweating and ushering in front of her a young boy, both of them casting anxious glances over their shoulders in the direction of the jetty. The shop girl stepped to the door and held it open for the woman to come inside, holding the child firmly, her hands covering both his ears. ”That’s it, good boy. Inside. Good lad.“

The shop girl closed the door and raised the blind slightly, so that she could stand with her nose to the door and stare out. The large woman stood next to me, peering out of the window, mopping her neck, the child pressed into her hip. Outside, next to the green, a couple had parked their car. They had both opened their doors and the woman had one sandalled foot resting on the Tarmac when something made them change their minds. First the foot disappeared back inside, then the doors closed. You could hear the distinctive double clunk of a central-locking system engaging. Behind me, other shoppers had slowly turned to see what was happening and now a long silence descended on the shop. I was about to say something when, from nowhere it seemed, a face appeared on the other side of the glass.

“Holy Christ!” blurted the fat woman. “He’s insane.” At the back of the shop a small girl squealed with fear and hid behind her mother’s legs.

The face pressed itself into the glass, its nose distorted, the eyes pulled open to show the pink inner rims, the lips pressed away from gums like a skull.

‘
Booh
!“ it said. ’
Booh
! Run! Run from the bogeyman!”

And that was how I met Blake Frandenburg, the first of the thirty or so members of the Psychogenic Healing Ministries I’d encounter over the next few days.

He turned out to be even weirder-looking without his face pushed against a glass pane: he was miniature and suntanned with a very tight, thin skull that looked like it had been squashed sideways in a vice. His skin was rough and scarred, like a shark’s, and he was dressed like he belonged halfway between a Florida hotel and a golf course: a yellow shirt and tie, white shorts, his feet in shin-high socks and pale laced-up golf shoes. When he first shook my hand outside the convenience store it was like holding the skeleton of a very dried-up fish.

“Sorry about the bogeyman thing.” He gave me a nervous grin. “But I really want to impress this on you, Joe, they push you to it. They really do. It’s been like this from scratch—they ain’t done nothing but be antagonistic.” He was from the States, and when he spoke he smiled constantly with one side of his mouth—like the other side was paralysed—showing those white teeth you only ever get on a Yank. “The things they say about us. If you want my opinion, it’s just plain
antagonistic.”‘

“They say you’re Satanists. That’s what they say about you.”

His fixed smile didn’t waver. He continued shaking my hand, nodding up and down, up and down, nervously searching my face, like he wasn’t sure if there was a sly joke going on or not. His palms were sticky with sweat. Just when it seemed it was going to go on for ever, he took a sudden step back, releasing my hand like it was hot. “Sure,” he said. “Sure. We’ll get to that later.” He ran his palms down the front of his shirt—to smooth it or clean them, I wasn’t sure—and shot me another quick flash of teeth. “All in God’s good time, all in God’s good time.”

That edgy, noncommittal cheerfulness turned out to be Blake’s thing. He kept it up all the way across the firth to the island, giving me cheery facts and figures about PHM: how many people it reached through its website, how they’d built generators and cared for the land, and worshipped daily. “We live in Paradise, Joe. Thirty of us, living in Paradise. Only five people have left in twenty years and you’ll see why. You, Joe, even
you
won’t want to leave.”

I sat in the bows, facing the island, the cuffs on my shorts rolled up a bit to get some sun on my white, city-boy knees, watching the settlement on Pig Island gradually reveal itself to me: a vague pale line on the north shoreline, slowly blooming into a spit of sand: indeterminate patches of colour above it, which wavered and crystallized into twenty or more cottages huddling together, their windows reflecting back the morning sea like mirrors. Apart from the cliff that rose above the community, crowned with trees, the settlement didn’t look very sinister now I could see it close up—not the place of devil-worshippers. Each cottage had once been painted a different ice-cream colour, like the seafront at Tobermory, but they had faded now and stood, like dying flowers, facing a central green. The only God-squad thing was a towering stone cross in the centre of the grass—Celtic, medieval, pagan-looking, and as we got closer I saw just how fuck-off enormous it was. At least forty feet tall. Taller than our house back in Kilburn.

The dory was quick. Even loaded down with a week’s supplies it was a little sea rocket—the water slipped quickly away under us, oily engine fumes lacing the air. Blake nosed it into a small gap between the rocks and a jetty. Overhead was a trot-line with a pulley that he pulled down and clipped on to the bowline. He worked quickly, killing the motor and moving the fenders around so the boat didn’t jostle against the rock. On the jetty I helped him unload the boat, stacking everything—the tinned stuff and the fresh milk, crates of vegetables and (oh, sweet relief) a healthy stash of Guinness tinnies and gin—into a large handcart. I pushed it for him because that was only fair, big hairy old me and tiny-guy him, and I followed him in silence up the narrow path that led away from the jetty, looking at the way the knotty veins in his calves pulsed black with the effort of climbing.