Requiem (13 page)

She stepped
from under the tree, walking deeper into the garden. Tom went after her.

He followed her
through the ancient olives, the air tingling with the scent of opal balsam.
There was a sudden quickening in the leaves, a shimmering as she stepped
between the trees. Balsam streamed across the garden, rising from cracks in the
arid soil. The woman unexpectedly turned and waited for him, and he experienced
a folding sensation; the universe creased and spilled itself. The woman moved
towards him, hands outstretched, and her perfume, her balsam, was overwhelming.
She lifted her veil, but her face was in shadow as she kissed Tom fully on the
mouth. Her felt her tongue probe his lips, and in an instant there was no
woman, only the brief awareness of a large bee as it entered his open mouth and
the pain of the sting as it penetrated the soft tissue inside his lower lip.

A
moment of panic followed in which he felt himself falling and he knew he'd
swallowed the insect. Hacking, coughing, he stumbled blindly back through the
olive trees, towards the cave and the Franciscan monk.

22

'Ice is what we need now. Ice
for you to suck.' Sharon, in charge, conjuring the Jewish mother from deep
within herself. She'd applied a weak solution of soda to the inside of Tom's
hugely swollen lip and was now clattering a tray of ice-cubes into a glass. She
became worried when Tom complained that his throat was swelling. 'Suck the ice
on the other side of your mouth
so's
not to wash away
the soda.'

'The
shoda
ish
awful,' Tom said. He
was finding it difficult to pronounce certain words. His face, still inflating,
was beginning to take the shape of a Halloween pumpkin.

'Just leave
it there!' Sharon threw up her hands. 'A bee sting in the mouth, imagine!' Any
minute, Tom thought, and she's going to say
oy
vey
.

The moment Tom had
returned from the Garden of Gethsemane Sharon had swung into action. She
pressed another large ice-cube into his mouth. 'Imagine if that monk hadn't
been there! How did the thing get into your mouth? I mean, did you encourage
it? I don't mean that: I mean I never heard of it before. You say the monk
hooked the sting out of your mouth? With his fingernail? God, I hope his hands
were clean! Think of the infections! What kind of monk was he?'

'
Franshishcan
.'

'Franciscan?
Are they hygienic people? Here, suck another piece of ice.'

Tom
had sought help from the monk immediately after the bee stung. The monk had
tugged at Tom's lip, looking for the sting remnant, a sensible policy, to try
to remove the poison sac before it released more acid. But he had difficulty
finding the thing. When he finally claimed to have removed it, Tom was certain
he was only exercising a little psychology.

Because Tom
knew that what had stung him was a bee, and yet it was not a bee.

'What
happened to the creature?' Sharon wanted to know, feeling his brow for a high
temperature.

'I think I
shwallowed
it.'

'Swallowed
it! You mean it's inside you? Oh, God, I hope it's dead.'

'Of course
it'sh
dead. Anyway I'm not sure.'

On trying to
spit it out, he'd felt himself swallow the bee. He'd felt a vibration in his
throat. It seemed absurd, yet there it was.

'Do you want to lie down?'

'No. I
jusht
want to shit here and feel
misherable
.'

He couldn't
tell Sharon what had really happened. How could he? How could he tell her he'd
encountered his phantom again in the Garden of Gethsemane, and that she'd
kissed him before metamorphosing into a bee?

Tom spent the night in
extreme discomfort. He dozed fitfully, dreaming feverishly. His dreams swung wildly
from school to Jerusalem. He heard the voices of schoolchildren and his former
head teacher saying,
If it's the mere matter;
and he heard the voice of
the phantom woman talking in dead languages and snatches of English, drifting
in and out like a frequency signal on a short-wave radio. The voice went on
relentlessly, just out of range, urgent, trying to recount to him some
fantastic story, confused and broken. The name of Jesus was invoked and muddled
details of a bungled crucifixion; the name Magdalene was repeated over and
over, the tongue trilling and ululating on exotic verbs and phrases which
themselves fluttered from her vibrating tongue like insects and chimeras and
mutant birds which didn't want to die . . .

In the dead
of night, as he lay awake and staring into the dark, an unknown hand knocked on
the door of the apartment. His blood froze. His mouth dried. His tongue stuck
to the roof of his mouth. There was a ringing in his ears.

So you're back. You followed me here.
As I knew you would.

He strained
to hear if Sharon in the next room was disturbed by the knocking, but she slept
on. His clock told him that it was 3 a.m. For over an hour he lay like a
corpse, waiting for the soft, intermittent knock on the door. He repeated the
words of the psalm the monk had told him:
My soul
waiteth
for the Lord more than they that
watch for
the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the
morning.

When his
clock indicated 4.15, he knew he would be left alone. His eyes were sore,
stinging with repressed tears. Finally he fell asleep.

By morning
the swelling of his mouth was beginning to subside, but the voices in his head
carried over from his dreams. The dream voices somehow persisted, but they were
muffled, as if trying to communicate from behind steel doors.

Sharon fixed him a fruit
breakfast through a liquidizer. He drank with a straw. Breakfast was conducted
in silence. Sharon hadn't resurrected the issue of Katie, of his resignation,
but the matter was always there between them, like unwanted concert tickets
pinned to a wall.

She
fed bananas into the liquidizer and flicked a switch. 'I had an affair,' Tom
said suddenly, above the gargle of the liquidizer. 'Before Katie died. That's
all, really.'

Sharon
switched the machine off and sat down. Her eyes were like new coins. She waited
for more, but when nothing came she got up and switched the liquidizer on
again.

'That's all,' said Tom. 'There's nothing
more to it.'

Sharon
switched the appliance off. 'Shall we have this on or off?' she asked
pointedly.

'Off. It was someone from school.'

'Another
teacher? A colleague? And you feel guilty about it. You feel bad because Katie
died while you were being unfaithful.'

'Worse than
that. I feel bad because I didn't feel guilty. Because with this other person
it felt so good.'

'You feel bad because it felt so good?'

'The sex. I
went crazy for a while. I got hooked on the illicitness of it. I mean the sin.'

'That, eh?
I'm afraid you're out of my domain when you talk about sin. I've never been
able to associate sex with sin.'

'Sin has a special taste and smell.'

'How does it taste and smell?'

'Honey and fire while you're fucking.'

'Careful,
Tom. Make sex precious and you make it dangerous.'

'Isn't that how it should be?'

'No, I don't think so.'

'I know how all of this must sound to
you.'

'No, you don't.'

'Yes, I do. You see it
all cynically. You think:
Stupid Tom, lost his head over an ordinary affair,
then his wife died and he couldn't deal with it.
But how can I tell you
anything about how much it hurt? And how stupid and ugly it made me feel.. .?
And, oh, God, my mouth still hurts!'

'Want some more ice?'

'No.
My teeth are tingling from the fucking ice-cubes. It's women, Sharon. They're
different from men.'

'You
finally figured that out.'

Tom wasn't in a mood to
be mocked. The candour of Sharon's sexuality confused his notions of where
exactly that difference lay. Concerning male sexuality, he knew it to be only
poorly hidden and permanently breaking the surface. Female sexuality was more
recessed, in the shadows, better camouflaged, even if the difference was only
slight, and even if women like Sharon occasionally contradicted that
perception. But he knew from his own somewhat limited experience that women,
once their ardour had been awoken, were the more demanding of the sexes. Men,
accustomed to living just under the surface of the lake, broke water only to
dip back happily under the waves until the next time. Women, however, brought
to the mouth of the sea cave, stood there and roared.

Tom sucked
air through his straw, making bubbling noises at the bottom of his empty glass.
'You wouldn't understand,' he said.

Sharon gave him a look as old as time.

23

The sun settled on the
pavilion in the park, dropping slowly, already half-obscured, like a burnished
dome in some fabled and exotic city. Shadows of late summer spilled across lush
grass. The smell of autumn was already in the air, a whiff of damp, green
leaves hankering after gold. Katie and Michael Anthony strolled through the
avenue of ornamental trees. They stopped at some rose bushes by the children's
playground.

'Blown
roses,' said Michael. 'Omar
Khayyam
. You see it
everywhere when your time is up.'

'Can I link
arms with you?' asked Katie. She did, and they moved on.

'Now that's a thing I
didn't dare ask. Linking arms. My God. You know, I don't want to bungee jump,
or drive a fast car round a race track, or parachute from an aeroplane. It's
not those things. It's the small things. I want to sit with the sun on my face;
take a beer with a friend; link arms with a woman on a beautiful afternoon in
the park. I'm grateful. And I thank your husband.’

'He's a good man.'

'Where is he now?'

'He had to meet someone.'

'Who?'

'He
didn't say who or where. We've not been communicating well lately.'

'Oh, you must! I should
have married. I made a terrible mistake becoming a priest. I feel like all this
time I've worked against my preference, and maybe that's what caused these
cells to riot inside me. Who knows? But I know I should have married.'

'It's not all beer and
skittles, Michael. Shall we sit here?' They sat on a bench, with the sun on
their faces, Katie's arm still linked in his. 'Is that why you left the
priesthood? To give marriage a late try?'

'No,
no. It's too late for me. I've blown it. It was the fairy tales I couldn't
stand any more. Fucking virgin births - excuse me, I've just learned to enjoy
swearing -and other
sodding
fucking children's
stories.'

'You don't believe those things then?'

'Believe?
Look, Jesus was married. He was a rabbi, and they married. But the early
Churchmen cut it all out when they edited the Bible. Jesus loved women, but
we're not allowed to.'

'What?'

'Oh, he
loved women! In the Apocrypha there are accounts of him angering his followers
by kissing his wife in public.
Snogging
, yes - they
don't want that, do they? Not with that Magdalene tart, God love her. And why
do you think he waited until his disciples were away before approaching the
Samaritan prostitute at the well? See for yourself. Every time there's a woman
at a well in the Bible, it means procreation. Fertility. Sex. It's a pattern.
But it's all denied.'

'Radical ideas,' said Katie.

'Radical?'
He laughed bitterly. 'It's old hat. But as a priest you have to work hard to
keep scholarship from coming into it.'

'So whom did he marry? Jesus, I mean.'

'Are you humouring me?'

'No.'

'Mary
Magdalene is my best guess. She was a temple-priestess out of the Canaanite tradition,
regarded as a prostitute by the Jews. Jesus converted her, and he married her.
It's in John, chapter 2, but you've got to fill in the edited bits. Mary
Magdalene was with him all the time. Remember the scene where she's outside the
tomb, after he's resurrected, and she fails to recognize him? That's because it
wasn't him. The Church wanted her to "recognize" his brother James in
order that he could lead the Church, and she refused. Puzzled? It gets better.
Jesus' Church was hijacked by that psychopath Paul. But you'd be best to ignore
it. Stick with the fairy tales.'

 'No
wonder you stopped believing in God.

 'Oh,
no!' He touched her arm. ‘I never lost my belief. Never for a second, in Jesus
or in God. I just stopped believing in all the fucking silly stories that go
with it. Did I tell you how I love swearing?'

2

Sharon had promised to drive
Tom to the archaeological sites of Qumran and
Masada
by the Dead Sea. Six bottles of mineral water lay on the back seat of the car.
'Hot up there,' she said.