"Solitude: Karoo after rain" (c) Dan Wylie. Acrylic/oil on canvas. |
A LOCKDOWN STORY
“Are you moving in?” He gestured at the suitcase.
She
didn’t seem to know what to say or do, other than look imploring. She was
soaked through, her quasi-Victorian, or pseudo-Mayflower white shirt plastered
over nipples visibly rigid with cold, her long hair slicked into rat-tails.
He
wasn’t quite sure what to say, either, so surprised he was to see her there,
and he was thinking uncharitably about whether she might after all be an unwitting coronavirus carrier, when she said miserably, “I just didn’t know where else to
go.”
He
looked around into the scything rain. “You’re alone? Where is that delightful
husband of yours?”
“I
left him. I – ran away.”
He
stared, disbelieving. Her body gave a long involuntary shiver and he suddenly
made up his mind. “Come in. Go through to the bathroom.” He fetched a towel.
“Do you have dry clothes in there?”
“I
hope so.”
“This
feels like the first blast of winter, doesn’t it,” he filled in unnecessarily.
“I
wouldn’t know. It’s cold, right enough. For the tropics.”
“I
forgot, you’re Irish, you’re used to being cold and wet.” He grinned
ostentatiously but she did not smile back.
While
she dried off and changed he made up the bed in the little spare room, and put
on the kettle. Unhappily, he had to assume she would need to stay for a while,
breaching his habitual semi-hermetic state, filling his meagre, guarded,
prickly space. Knowing he should not be unhappy, doing this, the obvious right
thing.
She
emerged barefoot, wearing a simple if old-fashioned pleated dress and clutching
a beige cardigan about her narrow body. He almost quipped that at least,
fashion-wise, she’d made it into the nineteen-fifties, but thought better of
mocking her at this unsettling moment. She was looking all at once nervous,
grateful and wary, as well she might.
“I’m
astounded you ran to me, not to one of your churchy chums,” he said. “I thought
you must have condemned me as your Number One Satanic Enemy.”
"Satan is the Number One Satanic Enemy.” She didn’t seem to intend it as a joke.
"Satan is the Number One Satanic Enemy.” She didn’t seem to intend it as a joke.
“Well,”
he said, feeling obliquely accused of something, “I was pretty rough on you the
other day.”
*
That he had been.
This
couple had knocked at his door a few days previously. He had looked at them
through the bars of his security gate and felt his heart sink. They had that over-scrubbed look, the unctuous too-friendly smile, tragically sensible shoes
just right for tramping from one house to another, and clothes that hovered
somewhere between the Amish and the law firm of Blatherforth and Sharx.
Not to
mention the young man’s opening line, sliding from a left-slanting mouth in a
face clean-shaven but marred by old acne scars and a blond excuse for a pencil
moustache: “Morning sir, have you been saved?”
“Have
you opened your heart to the Lord?” the slender, dark-haired woman slipped in.
They had accents, Irish probably.
“Jesus
H Christ,” he breathed. “Haven’t you idiots heard about the coronavirus
lockdown? Go home and stay there, for fuck’s sake.”
The
man bridled a little at his language, the woman tucked her chin defensively
into her neck. But they had evidently been trained to weather all manner of
abuse: they beamed simultaneously – he had rather yellow, crowded teeth, she
rather lovely white prominent incisors – and the man said smoothly: “The Lord
protects the pure of heart.”
“Well,
that sure as hell won’t include me,” he retorted. “Step back, will you. Two
metres.” Which they obediently did; they had to move out of the shade of the
porch into hot sunlight. The woman tugged a floppy hat out of a woven shoulder
bag and put it on; it had, he thought, hibiscus flowers printed on it, and it
made her look oddly more vulnerable, pixie-like.
The
young man said, eyes aglint it seemed, as if he sensed an opening, “We’d like
to talk to you about the spiritual bounties of the Good Lord, especially in
these difficult times – “
“Oh,
come on! You sound like an undertaker. Maybe you are. Is coronavirus the
beginning of the Apocalypse then? Are you actually looking forward to the
mayhem and slaughter, before you’re swept up in the final rapture?”
There
was nothing like a botched plumbing repair, for which he could blame no one but
himself, to put him into a seriously bad mood. Even more cantankerous than
usual, then, he could feel himself rising to the bait of the young man’s
smugness.
The
woman cut in, “If you really knew your Bible you’d know we would never
take pleasure in others’ suffering.” And added slyly: “And we bring Easter cheer.”
He looked at her a little
more closely, then: pretty in a slightly angular way, as if a woodcarver had
accidentally planed just a little too much off the cheeks. Her almost black
eyes were direct, prepared for the long haul, fervent. Their challenge was
almost a relief: it was a very long time since he’d had a decent theological
argument.
“Oh, so you take no secret
pleasure in Christ’s writhing on the cross, then? The necessary prelude to the
resurrection? Your theology wouldn’t exist without suffering to feed off.
Another fairy-tale as improbable as the Four Horsemen, by the way. You
Jehovah’s people have some seriously screwy ideas, from any perspective.”
“Oh, we’re not Jehovah’s
Witnesses,” the man said. “We’re the Church of the Golden Ascension.”
“Oh, great, another
deluded cult, then.”
He could tell the young evangelist
was feeling needled, from the excessive calm and diplomacy with which he
intoned, “It is those who have not seen the light who are deluded, but they
know not that it is so. Opening the heart to the voice of the Lord allows all
those scales to fall away. It is a liberation from all that anger and
cynicism.”
“Amen,” breathed the
woman.
“An abdication of will and
responsibility, you mean. So whose blindness and self-delusion is to prevail,
yours or mine? Why choose one faith over another? Why would one church have all the truth? Rationality versus faith, yadda-yadda, the old circular argument, endlessly
pursuing the unprovable.” He felt abruptly weary. “Listen, I have my own faith,
and it isn’t yours. Go home and obey the fucking lockdown law, okay.”
“We are called by God to
preach his Word, and not succumb to fear, however great. The Lord protects us.”
The woman murmured, “Amen”
again, twisting her bag’s straps in her hands, then adding, “We were quarantined
when we arrived in the country. We’re from Ireland. And we’ve been tested,
we’re okay.” This earning a noticeably irritated glance from her companion.
“Yeah, but am I? Jesus, don’t
you people read anything, or know no history? There have been dozens of
pandemics, and no sign in any of them that God protected a single soul. In
fact, the bloody God-botherers have repeatedly been half the problem. They
insist on meeting, then end up infecting and killing more innocent people than
anyone. You’d think you’d all have learnt something from the Black Death; back
then even the Pope saw what was cutting and banned religious parades. And
you’re trying to tell me that God’s paying any attention to who gets cut down
and who doesn’t? Please.”
“God takes to himself those
he loves, for his own purpose, ours not to question why.”
“Ah, there’s the same
tired old cliché, the hidden Plan. So he’s killing off all those doctors and
nurses in Italy and everywhere, the kindest and bravest of
anyone, because he loves them? Fuck that. What a cop-out. That is one
nasty unpredictable bastard of a god. Not someone I’m going to worship, like
some blind mole in a tunnel.”
He was, in a way, relishing
cutting loose, while at the same time disliking himself for being so scathing,
and rather wanting this winsome and ridiculous pair just to disappear now. The
young man was looking into the distance and chewing his lip, having a hard time
controlling his response. The woman plucked at his elbow, “Let’s just go,
Paul.” For the first time he noticed their wedding rings. Paul shrugged her off
brusquely.
“This – man, needs to hear
the truth. The Truth! Satan, sir, has his claws in you. That Devil has poisoned
your mind, and you don’t even know it. He is subtle as a serpent. You, sir – I
grieve for your soul –“
In reply he burst out with
an involuntary laugh. “Serpents now! Christ! Actually, I rather like snakes,
they’re beautiful, innocent creatures. And I seriously don’t need you grieving
over me before I’m dead, thanks very much.”
“Those who insult and
blaspheme will burn in Hell forever…” Paul the evangelist looked infuriatingly
satisfied, sure of himself.
“More fairy-tales,” he
scoffed back. “If you credit that you’re even more of a dunce than you look.”
Which was unfair, and he knew it, and regretted it instantly. The man’s face
twisted, he was about to lose it; the woman said smoothly, “We’re going now.
May we leave you some pamphlets?” Glossy colourful brochures had magically
appeared in her hand.
“Cool, they’ll make good
fire-lighters.” The pamphlets went hastily back in the bag, and her mouth
turned pinched and small in the shadow of the hat. The man was incensed now,
his wife had been spurned, he was pointing a shaking finger.
It was clearly time to
bail. “Go home!” he told them, “Avoid viruses.” And he closed the inner door in
their faces. But he still heard their voices, first hissed, then raised as they
moved away, and then a little squeal from her. Maybe they were disagreeing
about how they’d handled this recalcitrant old codger. He opened the door
again, to see them walking up the sloping driveway. The man Paul gripped the
woman by the upper arm, she was struggling to free herself, until he shoved
her; she fell awkwardly, and yelped in pain, but Paul, the husband, lunged
after her and slapped her heavily across the head, so that her hat flew and
rolled away, and the evangelist grated, “You damned well do as you’re told,
woman.”
“Oy!” he yelled, and they
both turned to look at him; Paul seemed about to snarl something, but now it
was his wife latching onto his elbow and tugging him away. But when the
evangelist looked back again, with every appearance of wanting to tear him limb
from limb, he couldn’t help himself: he made that two-finger gangsta sign at
Paul, I'm watching you, and calling after him, “I see you for what you
are, you hypocritical piece of shit.”
*
"I was unnecessarily - robust," he confessed as they sat
at his dining-room table.
“You
were – actually enjoying yourself,” she accused. She was cupping her coffee mug
as if it were someone’s living heart. He raised his palms in mute apology. “But
you were also the only person who has ever called Paul out for what he is.”
“You
could surely have gone to some of your – what was it, Church of the Holy
Abduction, those people?”
“Ascension.
Exactly not. We’d only just arrived, I don’t know them. They’re just a handful
in this country, all in Joburg. Anyway, they would just send me back to him. It’s
our place as women to submit, as the Bible instructs.”
“And
yet you left him. To walk all this way to me. That’s a huge risk.”
She
shrugged. “I have no phone to call anyone.
I can’t go home because of the travel ban. I thought you would at least be honest. And
it’s the last place he’ll look.”
“The
church is based in Ireland somewhere? You met Paul there? Sorry, I don’t know your name yet.”
She
almost smiled. “Maeve. O’Shea. From Sligo. And I suppose 'met' is the
word, for an arranged marriage.”
“Maeve?
I thought they’d buried you on top of Knocknarea! I’m Doug Bracewell, by the
way. And I won’t shake your hand, I might infect you with my evil.”
The
two of them looked at each other mutely, as if measuring the distance between
them, or calculating whether a third guest, Mister Covid-19, might not be also
invisibly present. And, it seemed, mutually deciding that there was nothing
much they could do about it now.
“You
know the Sligo area, then,” she said conversationally. “Queen Maeve’s grave-mound on Knocknarea and all.”
“I
went there once on a bit of a Yeats pilgrimage,” he said. “Thoor Ballylee,
etcetera.”
She
made a little nasal sound, of amusement, or disappointment. “I heard of that.
We never went to such places, though. We are taught to abhor the outside world,
it is full of evil and distractions from the Path.”
“Well, full of evil it is,
no question. And viruses. Yet they send you off into it, as missionaries, to
sort it all out? You two seem as naïve as newborns!”
“Perhaps. Perhaps also we
can bring a freshness, make a change. But, yes, from the age of ten it was all
prayer, devotion, the Lord’s work. It was very safe, very comforting. Betrothed
at fourteen, married at sixteen to a man I hardly knew. Accepted him. Loved
him. I did love him,” she insisted. “I do."
“Except
that he beats you up.”
“Mm.
And like all the women I’ve accepted it for years. It’s Eve’s inheritance, our
due for being sinful. I sinned all the time, I’m afraid.” She giggled, almost
naughtily, endearingly.
“You
murdered Irish peasants, you ate their gall bladders?” But that just made her
frown bleakly, puzzled. He lurched on: “Most cultish churches have some kind of
Chief Bullshitter?”
Her
brows pinched again. “We have a Founder. McRorty, dead now, but we have some of
his writings. It’s mostly the Bible, though, the Lord’s Word is enough for us.
No one really leads, we’re a small group, it’s sort of communal.”
“A
self-perpetuating crucible of prejudices, then. So when did the doubts set in?”
“There
are always doubts. Doubts are the Devil’s work; they are sent to test our
faith. The Faith is stronger for them.”
He
leaned back in his chair and sipped his coffee. “I’m not even going to start
trying to unpack all the inner contradictions of that. And yet here you are, in
the house of a total non-believer, evil incarnate. Drinking his evil coffee.”
She
did smile then, those forward-leaning incisors. “It tastes good. And you are
kind, really. I think you are on the Path without realising it. If you opened
your heart to God’s gladness you might stop being so angry at things.”
"Things, what things? I only get angry at bothersome evangelists who think they have the
One Answer and try to inflict their neuroses on everybody else, and punt a book
about this obscure, usually vengeful deity – a book which was, by the way,
cobbled together over centuries by multiple dunderheads with all sorts of
agendas and squabbles and mistranslations. God’s word, my ass. I mean, the
naivety, the selective delusions, combine that with this smug arrogance – it’s
breath-taking really.”
Maeve
put her coffee mug down sharply. “You sound like an evangelist for the
anti-evangelists. So you have all the answers, I suppose. Being just as
arrogant, as you call it.”
“Hah,
not just a pretty face, you’ve a handy streak of sophistry as well. Cute. No, I
do not have The Answers. Well, it depends on the question, doesn’t it. I’m just
like the Christians, I know what I believe. How do I know it? I just do. I love
that word ‘just’, don’t you? The ultimate escape hatch. I 'just know' what
God’s plan is. End of useful conversation.” He thumped his own mug down,
suspecting that he had somehow frustrated his own coherence.
She
said primly, “I think you are angry at everything because you don’t have
anything to base your morality on. You are a lost soul, flailing about in the
darkness.”
He
laughed. “You people practically invented the darkness. The terrors of Hell, Let
there be Light. It’s all a myth. A mighty effective one, to be sure, but a myth
for all that, no more true than the fairy-tales of the Bushmen, or the Pawnees,
or Buddha’s mother being bonked by an elephant.” He leaned forward. “So what is
God’s plan for you, can you tell me that, O wanderer in the rain?”
She
looked down. The rain in fact was still beating at the window behind her, and
she seemed to listen to it for a moment. Eventually she said gloomily, “I do
not. Maybe I haven’t known for a while. Perhaps I need to pray harder on it.
And even then sometimes we must accept that we will never know, it is too deep
for us to fathom. That’s what faith is.”
“Fantastic,
it makes sense because it doesn’t make sense. We don’t know what’s going on;
therefore there must be a god. Please. But look, I mean ultimately we think
alike, in a way. You don’t really know what the fuck God wants, or why he
kills the doctor but spares Donald bonehead Trump. No one can tell you. And I don’t know what the universe is going to throw at me next, either. A global
virus, wham! A weird Irish evangelist, poof, on my doorstep! Who could have
predicted? I see no sense in interposing a capricious god between me and a capricious
universe. Life is complicated and unpredictable, end of story. Deal with it.
Day by day, moment by moment.”
This
appeared to give her pause; he took the opportunity to say, “Let me fix us a
bite to eat, you can park your stuff in the study so long. Hang your wet things
in the porch.” She did that, while he made some sandwiches. She took a curious
turn around his living-room, bending to look at framed photos – “Is that your
mother?” – touching the surface of a painting as if to confirm its reality. She
came up short in front of a white alabaster statue squatting in a corner.
"What is that?”
"What is that?”
“Oh,
my Buddha?”
“You
worship that?" More a statement of sudden understanding than a question.
He
laughed. “My graven image? My personal carving of Baal? Nah, I bought that from
the friend who made it just to keep him from starving that month. I mean, I’m
sympathetic, but in any case one doesn’t 'worship' Buddha, not in Zen
anyway. You know the saying, ‘If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him!’?”
“That
sounds horrible! All other religions are the spawn of Satan. So we are
taught,” she added almost apologetically.
“It’s
a kind of joke, really. Zen people can be very jokey. The point is, the Buddha’s
teaching is like a finger pointing toward the truth; once you see the truth,
you can forget about the finger. It’s not about rigidly adhering to one icon,
or even an unbending set of rules, like old Moses’ commandments. More about
responding clearly and appropriately as circumstances dictate. You have water
in your hand and you see a fire, you don’t drink, you put out the fire. A wet
woman arrives needing help, you take her in. If I could see you were dying of
Covid-19, I might have responded differently, or at least with a different
strategy to help. If you were obviously about to try to kill me, I might kill
you, no problem.”
“It
seems terrifyingly – ad hoc.”
“I prefer ‘dynamic and
exciting’.”
“But – where’s the
foundation? It’s so - hand-to-mouth, like.”
“Exactly!
You see the truth. You are enlightened! You can now discard me.”
She
gave a tiny smile. “Now who’s being the evangelist?”
“Ha!
You found me out. No, I think of it as more a way of being. A practice, not a religion. It
might even be compatible with Christianity in some ways. Look, I know I’ve been taking
a hard line, winding you up a bit. A lot! Sorry. I’m not insensible to all the
good many Christians do. Jesus, and Paul - Saint Paul, that is – had
some beautiful and valid teachings. I went through a whole churchy phase until
I decided it made no sense of the world I saw in front of me, but I still enjoy
reading some Christian writers: Kung, Thomas Merton, Pascal. Mostly mavericks,
to be sure.”
“I
don’t know these people,” she said bashfully. “We never read anything except
the Bible, really. Not – really.”
“Oh,
except the things you snuck a look at under the bedcovers, right?” She blushed.
“Ha, you sinful little minx, you! It’s okay. A little contradictory knowledge
is a bit like suffering, isn’t it. It could make your faith stronger.”
“Sophistry!”
she burst out, pointing at him, but she had her chin tucked down and she was
actually suppressing laughter. Then suddenly neither of them could keep it in
any longer, and they folded up in irrepressible giggles.
“Well,”
he finally gasped, “I think we’re going to get on just fine. At least until the
Irish Embassy extracts you, if they can. Meanwhile – “he glanced through the
window, where a bar of weak sun was shimmering – “it looks like the rain has
stopped. I have a large property which we can walk around and eat our sandwiches
without violating the lockdown. Would you like that, Maeve O’Shea?”
Maeve
O’Shea nodded. “I would, Doug Brushwell.”
***
An entertaining story and beautiful painting for an Easter Monday lockdown. Thanks, Dan.
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