Skin Job
by Catherine Eisner
A Self-Narrative Assignment
A high risk of re-offending,’ an incisive voice was heard to quote from my case file.
The finality of these words was thought to prepare me for the inquisition to come.
‘She’s had two conditional discharges with an out-of-court dispensation following her latest caution for shoplifting. Sentence suspended for twelve months with a recommendation she accept rehabilitative mental health support to seek a resolution to her underlying psychosocial problems.’
Not every wind blows you from your safe mooring. But that day, as I approached the Grünewald Institute, the wind was blowing so hard I saw one ear of a terrier bitch blown inside out to expose a secret inner depth that was blush pink.
I vowed then that any consultant clinical psychologist appointed to dredge the depths of my ‘maladaptive behaviour’ would very soon learn to his chagrin that the mind of his subject is wholly untroubled by a neurosis so primitive as ancestral shame.
❧
‘Her?’ I overheard someone whisper. ‘A bucket load of vipers.’
When I entered the demonstration room an attendant technician was erecting an interview-camera tripod. At Dr Studhart’s insistence, each session of his forensic psychology course is recorded, a practice essential in his view for self-critical examination by his trainees to test their cognitive skills in clinical interviews.
The mood is grim. I make sure of that. They know I scoff at their one-way mirrored observation window that screens the new intake of novice psychotherapists. I’m unfazed by their callow eagerness to pick my case history apart.
‘Overture and beginners, please!’ I want to shout.
Behind his reptilian smile, only Dr Studhart knows my rare capacity for isolating my manias into meticulously separated boxes.
He leads me to the hot seat. I’m his warm up act. The first combatant appears at the door and seats herself to confront me. The camera rolls.
‘So, what brings you here?’
A classic opening gambit. Sweet, earnest, Little Miss Clean. She’s young; more a prim head girl straight out of high school than a neophyte shrink.
I stand up abruptly and step aside to avoid eye contact. It’s a blocking manoeuvre that never fails.
Meanwhile, a perverse obduracy causes my mind to chant: ‘Baa baa black sheep have you any wool? Yes sir yes sir three bags full!’ (In truth, it’s the rhythm-and-rhyme method I once learned to regulate the compression rate in cardiopulmonary resuscitation. A kind of mental metronome.)
I find the repetition of Baa Baa Black Sheep is a calming displacement activity to maintain composure and restore normal respiration whenever I’m in a tight spot.
Yes, a black sheep. It is a sign of madness that’s mine to own. But to unlock the mad creature’s numberless dark secrets will require a master key.
❧
‘Tell me. What do you remember of your early years?’
(Keep asking, Little Miss Clean, and maybe you’ll learn how to play dirty.)
I feign a defiant glare then my eyes glitter with tears.
Hers seems a nonjudgmental question, but she might just as well have asked: ‘What precisely is the delusional disorder that brings you to our Grünewald snake pit?’
She’s frowning now. Impatience always earns demerits. She hesitates. Then:
‘Perhaps you could try to give me a picture of yourself as a child . . . ?’
❧
Alright. Then picture this. A curious little girl. You may see her, if you wish, in La petite fille curieuse by Corot. Like me, the child stands in the shadow of a wall.
It’s a painted likeness! And it’s an image that reminds me most tellingly of the narrow confines of my own childhood because, on the other side of the high blank wall, which enclosed our Clergy House like a huge monkey-cage, my father’s sign warned:
NO BALL GAMES NO TRESPASSING
PROHIBITED
The wall Father built around my mother and myself resembled the forbidding wall that enclosed the garden of the Selfish Giant.
‘We are citizens of no earthly State,’ my father would claim with upturned gaze.
Yes, maybe in my father’s edicts I saw a kind of intimation of my First Disobedience. For, in my warped view, the double negative of the No Trespassing Prohibited notice seemed positively to endorse an invitation to transgress since it suggested that in any act of sinning abided the promise of foreordained redemption.
‘The clear light from the candle of the Lord shines on our souls,’ my father so often reminded me with all the cloistered virtue of an Elder of the Elect.
I cannot explain to Dr Studhart’s trainee headshrinkers the singular fact that, though my parents regarded their only child as an object of general censure, they also regarded our family as having been elected by God to know the privileges of saving grace. These canting pieties were shared by the Redemptorian League whose precepts consumed our daily lives, directed by Father, the League’s Minister-General.
For had not my own father told me that no past transgressions, nor any future acts of my own, could ever alter the decree that I was numbered by the Redeemer among Salvation’s predestinarian Few.
So, to me, my falsehoods actually appeared to be a sign of good faith in something.
As to sinning, if only I could have told my misguided father that in heaven all the truly interesting people are self-condemned absentees.
❧
I rehearse my thousand-yard stare and Little Miss Clean contrives a semblance of a shrewd smile. Consults her notes. The camera whirrs. She’s leaving no stone unturned; I’ll concede her that.
‘I know it is a difficult time for you right now, but can you try to tell me what it’s like for you to be here?’
The room momentarily darkens, and a beastly chill rain shakes itself behind the windowpane. I preserve my cunning, like a cat, for the late afternoon and dusk.
A stone remains unturned, and Miss Clean will never know what lurks beneath it.
So how do I feel? I know I am quite prepared to sit out this session in silence. There are two tracks in my brain, but my dual nature is under double lock and key.
In our Clergy House, on the kitchen wall, hung a coloured oleograph of The Broad and the Narrow Ways that lead to Heaven or Hell. The welcoming broad path to Perdition, alive with allurements and snares, actually appealed to me mightily; I yearned to take a Sunday excursion along its course, heading for Gehenna.
And this was the picture I first saw when, aged seven, a violent thunderclap and lowering skies drove me one Sunday from our dismal walled garden into the house.
Like any other Sunday, it was a day of painfully constrained behaviour.
After the thunder, the house was ominously silent and I became frightened.
I was oppressed by some vague sense of dread.
There was no hint of life apart from silverfishes fleeing from a hole in the centre of a loaf of bread, a hole I knew to be a sign of bad luck.
Somebody will die soon, I thought.
There seemed only one explanation. By some odd chance I could not apprehend, the very elements that ruled the clouds had conspired to leave me behind, while ‘the Lord had returned with His Angels’ and He – with a thunderclap – had gathered up my parents in His arms to be with Him in Everlasting Glory, as the Elect had prophesied.
At that moment of stark abandonment, I felt my soul shrivel into ashes.
(It had been only a day earlier that Father had raised his head from his devotions to confide: ‘The ways of Providence are strange, child.’ He’d then turned aside and fixed his gaze on a celestial distance.
‘The End of Days!’ My father’s words had rung out with rare good humour. ‘Who knows? Today? Tomorrow? We may next meet when we rise with the Saints to greet the Lord in the air!’
The old clock on the mantelpiece had struck three and he’d started.
‘Of one thing you may be certain.’ He had snapped shut his pocket Bible with an air of dismissal. ‘We shall not taste death.’)
Imagine then the pain of heartless betrayal I endured when, on that Götterdämmerung-Sunday, far from passing through a storybook door into a world of light to join my parents in a place where all things would be radiant and blissful, all I heard from the parlour below was my father playing Jesus Loves Me on the harmonium, while my mother jangled to the melody on a toy tambourine.
I must have been staring wide eyed by the parlour door because suddenly their music broke off.
‘I thought you were t-t-taken . . .’ I stammered.
‘Thought, my girl?’ my father roared, hastily covering with a napkin the remains of a ginger parkin on his plate. ‘You thought no Greater Powers had eyes to see you take your ball into the garden? Thought lies in bed and dodges knee-duty!’
(Knee-drill was morning and evening at six. The house was a regular prayer-shop.)
I continued to stare, repulsed by their po-faced religiose certainties.
‘You must pray,’ my mother urged. Her voice was sharp and peremptory. ‘Pray,’ she went on, ‘what a dreadful thing it would be if, at the Last Day, the Lord said, “Come, ye blessed”, and He did not choose you.’ The thunder again echoed far off.
‘Anyhow, whatever happens,’ I consoled myself, ‘sinning is the best part of repentance.’ (Needless to relate, I had not taken my ball to the garden.)
As it was, the absurd episode caused me, uncontrite, to doubt only more vehemently the all-seeing God of my parent’s hymnal who . . .
From His shining throne on high
Comes to watch me where I lie.
‘Just watch me,’ I repeated savagely to myself, ‘just watch me where I lie!’
To what purpose I would dissemble my habitual lying I did not wholly know then, but I could see the wisdom of seeming zealous in the religion I affected to serve.
❧
Miss Clean flushes an agitated pink and betrays an involuntary grimace as she attempts to bait another trap.
She looks as suited to this psychoclinical set-up as a cow in church.
‘You know you are here so we can assess your needs, so we can try to help you find ways to work out your problems. Perhaps you can think of an important life-changing event that might explain your recent actions?’
I notice the gawkers from the alienation panel have been joined at their observation window by a newcomer who is no stranger to me.
Yet I remain uncertain whether the attendance by Detective Inspector Vine at this session is purely professional. There maybe some who are charmed by his looks. I know he is not wholly indifferent to me. Perhaps he’s one of those unfortunates who call me their friend.
Blue-black hair, close-cropped high at the sides of his head, this virile man has a voice like a hog-caller’s. His pronounced five-o’clock shadow suggests his jaw has been dipped in blue fountain pen ink.
He once told me he lives in Bromley. I believe him. A surprisingly high number of police officers reside in Bromley.
In the recent past we have even exchanged notes on the techniques of shoplifting.
He is perfectly aware of the ease with which you can defeat surveillance alarms if you simply wrap a scrap of aluminium catering-foil around the plunder’s security tags.
I’ve even discussed a refinement of mine: a double-lined shopping bag for supermarket-kleptos in which are sewn sheets of baking foil to fool the store detective.
Of course, as I tell myself – never mind foil-lined – a person of my exclusive wickedness, like the Undead, is destined for a lead-lined coffin. Because I’m worth it.
❧
I award an alpha plus to Little Miss Clean for her attempts to blow the lid off my unspeakable past. My scorn is so rabid I’m tempted to screech: ‘If I were to bite your hand now you’d go mad!’
Nonetheless, her insistence on my recall of an ‘important life-changing event’ resonates with a certain high-water mark in my adulthood I cannot deny . . . it is that never-to-be-forgotten moment of my father’s astonishing – if unwitting – deathbed confidences and of his true ‘End of Days’.
I was alone at his bedside. His long yellow fingers, outstretched from a dark heap of bedclothes, clutched my wrist. His blood-shot eyes, I noticed, never strayed from contemplating in a strange torpor the vast parental double wardrobe at the foot of the bed.
‘Your mother’ll have no need of it,’ he rambled. ‘It is the received truth of our Ordinance. For He shall clothe her in raiment incorruptible.’
The thickness of speech was due to the absence of dentures,
The air smelt of age and mouldering memories.
In the adjoining music room, Mother lay convalescent on a studio couch wedged beside an ancient harmonium whose wooden casing was riddled with worm holes.
Before I was born, my parents had both seen service as missionaries. I had a vision of a damp mission hall stranded in the rainy season. Somewhere remote like Sarawak.
My father was breathing very slowly. He glanced dully at me for a moment and then returned to his absorption in the wardrobe. Quite suddenly his breath caught. There was a long pause and then he winced and ceased to breathe.
In the darkened room I exchanged puzzled glances with my reflection in the wardrobe mirror and tried to figure out the sudden turn my father had intended his mysterious words to take.
‘Mother will have no need of it.’ What could he have meant by ‘it’?
I abruptly wrenched open the door to Father’s side of the wardrobe.
His vestments gave off a mildewy, sickening body smell. There was a familiar odour of camphor and beeswax candles
‘If the Devil is vicar then you are his stooge!’ My lips could not forbear to blurt these words from the heart.
I rummaged shelves above the clothes-rail where little hutches were consecrated to his collar studs and cuff links. And there under his handkerchiefs I found ‘it’.
It . . . a phial of ribbed yellow glass labelled Morphine Oral Solution, 10mg/5ml.
Packed in a vintage WWI army-issue canvas pouch overprinted with a salvatory cross in faded red, the long-sealed gloopy liquid was further marked Liquor Morphinae and underlined Poison, evidently a souvenir from my father’s earliest years of contrarian principles as a stretcher-bearing Conscientious Objector in the Royal Army Medical Corps.
Looking down into the gaping mouth of the Lord’s Anointed, I saw his teeth were worn down smooth to a yellowish murk from decades of grinding fulminations.
The clock chimed. ‘All hours pierce us,’ I recited, ‘the last one kills.’
I went to the window to let in fresh air. Then, as I held up the phial to examine it, I felt the room around me grow brighter and brighter like the brightest sunlight and all I could see was myself bathed in a new enlightenment, no longer mindful of the yellow face in the dark corner where the bed was now buried in deepest shadow.
My father had claimed my mother would ‘have no need of it.’
He was wrong.
Mother, I assured him, would not be denied this all-merciful painkiller and its miraculous return, unscathed, to perform its duty on another front line.
I’d make sure of that.
Distantly, as if spoken far off by a stranger, I heard my parting words at the threshold of the tawdry death scene:
‘The man’s a mollusc! Sanctimonious plankton!’
❧
Despite my assumed poise, I was conscious that an altogether stranger twist to this strange encounter was the knowledge that, some four hours earlier, a disturbing ‘stressor event’ of comparable significance had foreshadowed my father’s last rites.
Within minutes of my eleven o’clock appointment with my mother’s surgeon at his consulting rooms, he’d delivered his verdict on an intra-abdominal exploratory operation that had further enfeebled a woman observably consumed by an advanced state of valetudinarianism.
‘Investigations have revealed that your mother has been host to an ultra-rare entity,’ he began in a tone that did not impart even perfunctory regret. ‘I hesitate to particularise; the sight is one that no sheltered offspring should be permitted to see.’
He spoke with the cruellest doctrinairism and took my hand.
His hand was as cold as the mortuary slab. Ice trickled down my spine.
‘It appears that, over many decades,’ he went on, with solemn emphasis, ‘a calcification of a non-viable extra-uterine foetus, conceived by your mother as a very young woman, has been compressing – undetected – the posterior bladder wall and right lower ureteral duct. In other words, a “lithopedion” or “stone baby” resulting from an untreated ectopic pregnancy.’
I was hard put to it to give a satisfactory answer.
He smiled exactly as I’d expected; the hard inscrutable professional smile, which never betrays an emotion. I did not, however, trust myself so far as to speak.
I looked at the surgeon and thought: ‘You have started the chase, and I will have to be in at the death now you’ve obliged me to join the field.’
Instead I said with Satanic fluency, ‘Certainly it is a very odd reward for a blameless life. My mother was an Angel, you see, and my father was a Man Without Sin.’
‘As it is, we believe to minimise possible associated complications the safest outcome is NOT to proceed with any additional surgical interventions to excise this half-grown calciferous foetal mass. You understand me? The skeletal remains.’
(‘Burying bones! It’s a dog’s trade! I howled in my head.)
‘Remember, you’ve to keep this business dark,’ he insisted, ‘it’s kindest to a patient of your mother’s as yet undiagnosed infirmities. We rely on you? Yes?’
‘I think it’s – just immense!’ I answered with a half-hesitating glance. I suddenly felt as helpless as a child abandoned. ‘That is just my difficulty. A long-lost twin, turned to stone, still implanted in my mother! Well, at least you appear to have foreseen a resistance to accepting your incredible report and your bizarre speculations. You don't suppose I’ve enjoyed the last quarter of an hour, do you?’
I had not realised until that moment that bad is never good until worse happens.
It was too dreadful. Too, too dreadful to think of, let alone believe.
❧
‘Cheeseless rice!’ I shuddered. ‘Whatever else, the day’s gone belly up.’
There was a sharp, acid taste in my throat. A hatred had taken root in my heart.
Beyond the windscreen the world I saw was half the Devil’s and half my own.
Be warned! I cannot overstate it. Intense emotional stress such as grief and anger can blind any thought to drive with care.
I never saw the darkening shadow until upon me and it struck the nearside mirror.
The roe deer lay there by the roadside. Its hide rippled with little momentary shiverings.
The wind struck sparks from the trees and glowing leaves showered the woodland verge.
There was a burst of sunlight, and the shadows seemed to retreat. Only then did I learn how one state can supplant the other with swift and amazingly facile ease.
Of course! The surgeon’s verdict on the young missionary mother hardly demanded a tiresome scriptural exegesis.
In a subtropical hinterland, peopled by unbelievers, it was easy to see how her swelling girth had been dismissed as a phantom pregnancy, a belief upheld when all hopes shrank some time before the end of her second trimester.
My Holy Mother, the Most Favoured! Did she believe then that her sainted first-unborn had been predestined: an annunciatory angel to herald the Second Advent?
I can readily accept this seraphic legend because it’s evident to me now that, upon my own birth, I’d been groomed from the first to be my misbegotten sibling’s understudy.
No prizes for guessing why they named me Evangeline.
The indignity of my predicament was now clear . . . she, the Unbaptised One, the Heaven-sent mummified Holy Innocent, still yet dwelt there within my mother, embodied there to share my familial blood, while I the Bad Seed, bred by the Arch-Fiend to reign as her evil twin, was constrained by circumstance to call her kin!
In the interstices between good and evil, for the space of a second you may act and, in that second, two things are made very clear at once.
There was a burst of sunlight. A membrane of radiance stretched over my sight.
‘Look how white the daylight is,’ I said to the roe.
I examined the car’s crumpled front wing. Foaming screenwash flowed in a runnel beneath the chassis and, as I turned, my feet slipped from beneath me so I fell, brought to slither in a channel to where the deer half-knelt.
It was as though her strange, composed, sidelong glance examined a fellow creature reborn into an inexorable new dispensation. A New Covenant.
Driving home to the Clergy House, I clenched the wheel, searching my childhood for some sort of messianic sign, such as the birth of Jacob who came into the world gripping the heel of his older twin, but according to the surgeon that manoeuvre, in my own case, would have been a bit of a stretch, obstetrically or even eschatologically.
In my rearview mirror I saw the roe deer glide upright on three slender legs like a collapsible tripod smoothly unfolding.
As I have shown, since the age of seven I have known the path I would choose to take. So at that instant I knew what I should do.
Early, I’d seen my chosen path: to bathe in the darkness of Uncreated Light.
❧
I see the cameraman is dismantling his tripod, which means this initial diagnostic interview in these semi-structured sessions – devised to conform to Dr Studhart’s criteria for preparing a psychiatric treatment plan – is now concluded.
My thwarted interrogator, silent in bowed submission, clutches a damp facial tissue, evidence that Little Miss Kleenex has failed to wring a confession of crime from me! It would be indecorous for her to see me gloat as she retires hors de combat from the martial field, but it’s true my serene Teflon mask remains unscathed, for she is not the first opponent in my life who’s played a losing game.
(‘I won’t let you delay me,’ I mutter. ‘The loss is entirely yours.’ I have cultivated a forbidding narrowing of the eyes sufficient to repel vulgar curiosity.)
The mid-afternoon recess bell rings. Dr Studhart has known me long enough to permit himself to nod and say nothing and depart with his students in the rush to the cafeteria, where notebooks will be compared for rivalrous diagnostic impressions.
One figure walks towards me, shouldering a path through the crush.
Detective Inspector Vine.
Laurence Vine.
I suspect Laurence in his workaday life is the raw material meant for Other Ranks. More than that I won’t believe! He once clumsily hinted he was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Valour. Let me tell you. Laurence is no more a decorated police officer than I am one of those maniacs who’d take an axe to give her mother forty whacks.
❧
A harsh wind was gusting when we left the Institute and a wind-torn branch lay in our path like a pathetic thrown gauntlet. It was a bad hair day.
The campus had been washed clean by the recent shower.
I was bundled up in a fawn duffel coat and my old school scarf. I do not attend much to fashion, nor invite gratified vanity. I shun the looking glass. Prettiness dies quickly and ages with sin.
The cafeteria is found behind the accommodation block for non-psychiatric visitors. When we approached the buffet bar, I sensed a hostile reception.
Noticing my discomfiture, Laurence laughed harshly and said in a loud voice:
‘That you’ve bothered to show up at all today is the best way of protecting the public! The Courts will not give you another chance.’
Detective Inspector Vine seemed determined to brand me an unwelcome interloper.
‘Yes, but you must see how eagerly they’ve bought my story,’ I reasoned. ‘Even the lady magistrate’s convinced it’s starting to dawn on me that should I continue to offend I’ll be back before the Court. Don’t you believe me?’
‘Thousands wouldn’t.’
Laurence isn’t quite quite, if you see what I mean. He looked me straight in the eye but I’m certain he saw not me, but his own nature written there, and that more bad than good.
‘May I?’ he asked deadpan, indicating a bar-stool beside me.
‘Squattez-vous.’
The stool creaked under his weight. He sat there on the swivel barstool with wide-spread thighs. His complexion had briskened in the wind.
‘Come on! I’m no Sunday School boy,’ he gibed, ‘and you’re no saint.’
Even so, Laurence Vine can still look like a boy with a stolen postal order in his pocket who’s just won the Good Conduct prize.
His switchblade smile can change in an instant. It can still unnerve me.
By way of filling up an awkward silence I stared at a cutlery dispenser on the counter marked SPOONS.
In the mirror of my mind, I read SNOOPS. I’ve mentioned there are two tracks in my brain to map my dual nature. How could I tell my inspector that I feel perfectly capable of being in a state of grace and consumed by murderous zeal at the same time.
‘Not hungry?’ He reached for his official-looking notebook and jotted a secret entry.
‘A glass of tap water and no tip,’ I shrugged, ‘my father’s boast when leaving a temperance hotel. He had never set foot inside a cinema or public house in his life.’
‘Your self-denial does you great credit. The lady magistrate is certain to not disagree.’ His snidery was relentless. ‘Have you ever been in jail?’
‘No,’ I shot back, ‘but it’s not for want of trying.’
‘Tell me your dearest wish.’
‘I wish some unknown star would destroy the planet.’
As jaded lovers, at least it can be said our hollow words share a certain sardonic operatic sonority in their mood of lost illusions.
‘How do you manage to be such a mean bitch?’
‘It’s a gift.’
‘It’s a mystery why you tolerate me.’
‘It’s because you always say exactly what I wish to hear.’
‘Well try this.’ He nodded pensively and examined the point of his pen. ‘When you’re next in trouble, Never say die till you’re dead is my motto!’
‘That won’t be necessary. When one employs so-called female talents such as low cunning and lovable dimness,’ I simpered, ‘one can produce simply amazing results.’
He turned on me his switchblade smile, swivelling the stool until our knees touched.
I felt little drops of sweat beading at the roots of my hair, and an almost imperceptible shiver ran through Laurence and made him look away.
❧
It was an old lady’s bedroom, with a scattering of talcum powder on the carpet and its dusting defined the intricate mouldings on her dressing table, looking glass and drawers. Her discarded mittens smelled of wintergreen.
Again, I examined myself in the mirror. ‘I can’t make you out,’ I thought. It was true. It was as though I was viewing myself from a great distance and would have to screw up my eyes to begin to discern the barest details.
I gazed at the fallacious pathos of her nightdress case and the brush-and-comb bag I’d fetched from the hospital.
The demon in me waited.
A residual sense of compunction moved me to approach her bed; it was an impulse of despairing appeal. No one should wish to hear the complete low-down on the dissolution of one’s mother.
‘God’s eyelids are closed,’ she’d told me that morning when she’d informed me I was past praying for.
My relations with my mother, Inspector? Two remembered reproofs will suffice:
‘You might think you’re clever, but you can’t plait treacle!’ She had formed the idea that I was still her ten-year-old scullion. ‘And make sure you do a good job of sweeping the front doorstep – more people pass by than come in.’
The shabbiness of her furnishings appalled me. The windows were over-spun with cobwebs, which also hung above her bed in orderly swags. The general effect was of extraordinary thrift.
A crack in the plaster grinned above her bed.
My mother’s very goodness had begun to look like the malice of a pious fraud.
That quibbling mouth snapped at error. In my childhood there had been no choice: Either brought to repentance or harassed to death by earnest pietism.
‘I know the truth,’ I announced. ‘Here I am, Mother. You can’t miss at that range.’
Her eyes darted back and forth in an agitation in which was mingled fear and distrust. She was quivering like one of those Pentecostal convulsionaries I’d been taught to scorn.
‘The truth? Remember all your father taught you! We, the Elect, are founded on our separation from evil and we reject the blandishments of those who preach to the Many. It cannot be the truth, or so many would not go to hear it.’
(Her complacence, her pinched mouth, only served to goad me further. It compelled me to remember my father’s pulpit-hems at bedtime.
‘Without faith, the world will end in spiritual . . . ahem . . . ’ My father had paused.
‘Mayhem?’ I’d suggested under my breath.)
The rain rattled against the window.
I merely said, ‘It’s time for your afternoon nap.’ It was a reminder that her medicines were due. Since her return from hospital, I’d been measuring out her life with apostle teaspoons. Her sharp grey face twitched with restlessness and her eyes wandered over the room in search of something to again find fault with.
I poured a goodish droplet of the thick opioid linctus.
I heard an owl last night. It was a sign I would succeed in my self-sought task.
I clenched my fists to avoid crying out.
‘Do as you will,’ I thought. ‘Has Father not absolved me of any sins, be they as heinous and atrocious as they may? For all is pre-ordained and (Lady Magistrates be advised) none of our sins will be laid to our charge.’
❧
Two hours and a quarter after death I bent her head forcibly in an attitude of prayer as appearing more seemly for the authorities to find. When finally our family GP arrived there was a silence of some minutes, then he removed his jacket.
‘Evangeline, my dear, it’s hotter in here than the hinges of hell.’
It was cool in the room for I’d opened the windows, yet I felt like a child who was still growing; that clammy hot feeling, fresh in my memory, of my clothes as forever too tight. Sectarianism kept me apart from other girls, so I’d developed rapidly but late.
I was a late child.
Conversely, my parents had prematurely entered a twilight of confused elderliness. Now both had finally toppled from their self-erected pedestals.
Before my mother died she’d pulled her head from under the quilt and asked, ‘What is all this?’ She withdrew with a half-smothered sigh.
I’d felt her pulse. There was none. I’d rubbed her wrists where they were reddened. Her tongue was protruding. There’d been tiny blood spots in the whites of her eyes.
As for my long-preserved sibling (ha-ha), I had no doubt that upon my mother’s death she was at once destined for that godforsaken crèche-in-the-sky for unbaptised unborn orphans, the limbus infantium of the unremembered.
My mother’s doctor could have had no conception that he was in the presence of an ultra-rare entity who’d been spared by the Infernal Serpent to be a bade angel, earthbound and commanded to herald a new Age of Misrule.
I was wearing my mother’s housecoat. I wanted to laugh behind my hand.
As the Serpent’s Apprentice I am fully qualified to speak with forked tongue.
The doctor sat at the dressing table to write the death certificate then patted his pockets.
‘Evangeline, be an angel, would you fetch my spectacles for me.’
‘Serpently,’ I mumbled behind my hand.
❧
It’s Autumn in the garden I remember, so today I heaped a bonfire of dead leaves to be lit with my Redemptorian Certificate of Baptism together with Father’s Testimonial to his Rekabite Temperance Pledge. I was not humbled by the immensity of the sky and its clouds, nor by the profaned smoke rising to meet them.
(I should remark here, for the titillation of amateur shrinks, that female modesty obliges la baptisée in our congregation to sew anglers’ lead weights into the hems of her white slip to prevent garments ballooning in the water during baptism. An apt metaphor, agreed, that prepared us for the weight of repression we would owe to the dour Redemptorian Fishers of Men led by my father.)
Another thing. Please consider the curious recurrence of archetypes so beloved by psycho-mystagogues . . . Brother, Sister, Father, Mother, all of whom play their part in our Redemptorian mythos (certainly our followers were our brothers and sisters in Christ and my mother, well, was our Mother Superior in nomine diaboli).
But what of those more intriguing archetypes? The Husband, the Wife, the Lover, and the Mistress?
The least said in fewest words would be my inclination.
My late husband? What quality of marriage did we have? He wooed with empty hands – his only gift, a girdle. I bought my own wedding ring by default. More than that, I never considered his first wife’s jewels truly mine.
Even when we first met all those years ago I considered Laurence a cheap imitation. It is true that the Lover, the Mistress, the Wife, and the Husband were, at that time, sharing a double bed. It was borne on a carnival float through our village high street to proclaim a full-dress rehearsal that day for one of our am-dram productions, a bedroom farce: French Doors, I think, or was it Don’t Dress for Dinner, Darling? Whichever: we were all immodestly costumed in nightwear; a pyjama party motorcade. I was cast as the ingénue.
Plot? Star-crossed honeymooners and cheesy goings-on in a seaside boarding house. I can remember only one line from the play, the rumpled bride’s tearful curtain line, ‘Egg on face, darling, as if you cared.’
Sometimes when I see the rings with which Laurence’s fingers are laden, I reflect on how we first met and admit I must have been powerfully drawn to his given name.
Laurence. The archetypal lover.
Laurent was, I don’t need to remind you, the murderous lover of Thérèse Raquin,
Zola’s anti-heroine, incriminated as murderess in her own husband’s slaughter. The muscular embrace of Laurence, his huge fists, evoked the moment in the novel when the lovers first recognise their supreme passion: a desire to tear the flesh off their backs that was greater than had they torn from each other their clothes.
In those days, confusing as it was for Laurence to enjoy my company, it was yet more difficult for me not to enjoy his.
True. For the ‘Vacancy’ sign at the threshold of the broad path leading to our hotbed hotel seemed to shout out the hollowness of our passion and, true, I always knew Laurence regarded me a kind of side dish along with his many flings. I could see, even then, that to wholly love him would be like trusting a great weight to a slender thread.
❧
At home, nowadays, as soon as the telephone senses my body heat it starts to ring. Or so it seems.
‘How are you?’ asked that oh-so-familiar incisive voice.
‘I’m having a wizard time,’ I said.
‘It’s in the paper!’ Laurence began in an affected tone. ‘Page eight under the Law Reports. “An exhumation order has been issued for the purposes of post-mortem examinations of the remains of a pastor of a Denomination of Evangelicals and of his wife in response to findings from an investigation into the circumstances surrounding their deaths.” It’s reported a suspect is in significant danger of arrest and of being taken into police custody.’
It should be explained that ever since Laurence played the sinister Detective Inspector Vine in our most recent quick-fire whodunnit, Stealth Night, his role has held a peculiar fascination for him. In fact, his identification with the character has been well nigh absolute.
DI Vine! Divine! The Dispensationalist dimension of an intercession hallowed by this name has not escaped me.
There has surfaced a malevolence in Laurence that now eats him up, animated by sheer diabolical cruelty, as he seeks frightful new techniques to inflict torture on me.
Throughout our on-off amours and lovers’ tiffs our mutual antagonism had been more aphrodisiacal than threat. But his words on the ’phone now sounded truly malign.
So, I said, coolly:
‘Laurence, thank you, you always say exactly what I wish to hear.’
‘The mere fact that a defendant tells a lie is not in itself evidence of guilt, you know.’
Laurence was at his most sententious.
Incidentally, I haven’t mentioned our membership of an elite little group recruited for SRP – Simulated Role-Play. It’s a sort of Pathology Re-enactment Society. We’re trained in the immersive Meisner Technique that instructs an actor to respond as instinctively as a cat to the actions and emotions of the surrounding drama.
The introduction to Dr Studhart, and my Grünewald Institute performances as a distressed analysand, I owed to Lawrence, who’d read about the Casting Call for SRP actors in The Stage. I had particularly impressed Dr Studhart with my virtuosic command of gear-change manias, switching from accelerando to ritardando in seconds.
Events have shown I can turn on the tears with minimal effort.
‘We’re a motley crew,’ Lawrence used to say. ‘And you’re the motley-est!’
The calls for our talents are not restricted to psychotherapy. The Counter-Terrorism Police, the British Army, even Church seminaries require the services of actors for simulated role-play to submit convincingly as guinea pigs to those tyros training as State practitioners in the black arts of ideological Inquisition and the intérrogatoire prolongée with the red gloves on.
In effect, we’re ‘replicants’, inhabiting the skin of our host subject. Or, as we’re known in our arcane trade: ‘Skin Jobs’.
The thrill of working with Laurence, the two-timer, has definitely palled.
‘I once knew the inside of the Vine Street nick in Westminster,’ he’s now telling me cheerfully in a coarse voice. ‘Ain’t no stranger to the Horseferry Road Magistrates Court neiver.'
Then he tells me they’re scripting a completely new strand of simulated crime suspects for forensic interviews.
‘They’re to be held in the old regimental Drill Hall in the Horseferry Road,’ he crowed. I heard the throb of treachery in his words. ‘Police cadets! It’s surprising how often a baton charge can beat the truth out of you!’
I imagined my bullet-headed whilom lover as his eyes shone with the dangerous enthusiasm of a convert. In my mind’s eye I could see him removing his wristwatch. It was a gesture that was always a preamble to violence.
‘We don’t wear kid gloves. We always remove them first.’
I am consoled by the thought that were I denied Legal Aid then I could always apply for charitable support from the Actors’ Benevolent Fund.
One has nothing to fear when one’s on the side of the angels.
❧
More I won’t say. But I will do such things! What they are yet I do not know, but they shall be the terrors of the earth.
Note:
Dr Studhart writes: Our case notes, arising from subsequent diagnostic questionnaires, report the possible source of other related neurotica. The subject states, ‘You can forget my father, the god wallah, and his jumping jesus congregation. It’s my mother, the Mem [Mem Sahib], who should have been sectioned along with my Ayah. This nursemaid was no more than a child herself and taught my mother to paint morphine under the fingernails of her bawling newborn infant to pacify the little beast. It was the custom of the country.’ Although it remains unknown whether changes in pain response induced by opioid sedation, when applied to the immature and vulnerable nervous systems of neonatal infants, persist into later age, it has been documented that – following the discontinuance of morphine ingestion in early infancy – withdrawal phenomena undoubtedly include intense agitation due to visual and auditory hallucinations, leading to indeterminate long-term impairments to baseline social, cognitive and moral development.
Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Eisner has ‘mastered the twist in the tale and her stories cascade vividly into derangement’ affirms a national review crisply, an insight endorsed by a reviewer stimulated by ‘startlingly inventive and genre-busting tales.’
