Devils, for a change Read online

  ‘Now, just lie still a moment, and concentrate on all those bones I’ve mentioned – try to own them with your mind, make them a reality.’

  That wasn’t difficult. Never before had she felt so grounded in her self, so conscious of her body’s power and structure. They were her, those bones, as much her as her conscience, or her will; more solid and more central than her faith. Yet, for thirty-nine years she’d been completely unaware of them, lived as if without them, put all her concentration on her soul.

  Ivan’s hands were creeping lower now. She tensed in sudden fear again, heard her stomach rumble; flushed at the loud noise it made, as if it were expressing her unease. She was so open to him, vulnerable. Although fully clothed, she felt naked and exposed, her whole body in his power, like a specimen on a dissection table; its skin split open, its rumblings magnified.

  ‘Don’t worry about the gurgles,’ Ivan smiled. ‘That often happens when you’re learning to relax. Let it rumble all it likes. We’re so embarrassed by our bodies, so terrified they’ll belch, or fart, or otherwise disgrace us. But none of those things matter. A fart’s no worse or better than a cough.’

  Her face was crimson now. No one said such things, used such words in polite society. A nun would no more fart or belch than run naked through the chapel. Yet she was intrigued by Ivan’s view. Okay to be confused, he’d said; okay to do the things which others labelled vulgar or disgusting. She had spent so many years condemning everything she did as wrong, or at least as less than perfect, it was a relief to feel she was all right as she was; all right gurgling, nervous, muddled.

  Ivan was still talking, working through her bones. She felt humbled yet inspired by his attention, the way he seemed to make her so important, as if her bones, her body, were the only things which mattered in the world – the first time she’d ever felt that in her life.

  ‘Feel the wide wings of the pelvis, the big hollow space inside. I want you to rock your pelvis gently to and fro, so you can feel it working, be more aware of it.’

  She didn’t move. Her other bones were fine, but not her pelvis. She knew little of anatomy, but morality alone put the pelvis out of bounds. She felt so flustered and self-conscious now, she had missed what he was saying, tried to pick it up. His voice was slow and serious, a teacher’s voice, lecturing to his pupil.

  ‘The pelvic girdle is rather like the shoulder girdle, in some ways, anyway. They diverged in evolution, but they’re patterned on the same basic plan. Or you can see the pelvis as another sort of head – two very heavy weights, one at each end of the spine. In fact, that’s quite a good analogy, because the skull protects the brain, while the pelvis surrounds all those vital bits and pieces, like the bladder and intestines – and the ovaries, of course, in Rose’s case, and yours.’

  She tried to concentrate. Did she really have to worry, if the pelvis were just another head, another heavy weight, not private or embarrassing at all; just a bone, an amazing bone which supported the spine, provided attachments to the legs? Yet still she hesitated. Rocking seemed so blatant, and completely inappropriate for someone who’d been taught so long to live like a statue, rigid and restrained.

  ‘What’s the matter, Hilary? Have you nodded off or something?’

  The teacher – sounding sharp now. She dared not disobey him. She screwed her eyes up tight, as if disowning her own body, tried to escape into her head, keep her real self separate and apart. Then, nervously, reluctantly, she started rocking; not daring to let go, at first, just moving very stiffly, as if her joints had rusted up. Yet the rocking itself began to calm her and relax her; became gradually more confident, built into a rhythm, a lulling gentle rhythm, fusing mind with body, breaking down the boundaries she’d erected in her mind.

  ‘That’s fantastic, Hilary! You’re doing really well.’

  His praise was like a blanket, warm and cosseting – the first praise she’d ever had – and for something so ridiculously simple. Now she’d got the knack of it, she couldn’t stop her rocking. It felt soothing, strangely comforting, as if her body were in tune with some larger, cosmic rhythm, expressed also by the music, which seemed to spiral on and on, never came to rest in a climax or a cadence, but worked through endless new and lilting harmonies. The square of window had darkened into black, no daylight left, no dull and cold grey clouds; only the bright flames of the candles sending nervous shadows nickering up the walls, the smell of wax and musk. She was excited by the fact she owned a pelvis, a moving working pelvis of her own. She rocked harder, faster, feeling her whole spine press against the floor, vertebra by vertebra. The movement seemed quite natural now, helped express her triumph that she had bones – not just that awesome pelvis, but two hundred and fifty other bones – all hers, all indestructible.

  Ivan was still praising her. ‘You’re so much more relaxed now. You’ve really opened up. It’s important to be open. Think of all the “open” words – open-handed, open-minded, open house – all good words, aren’t they? To be open means you’re vulnerable, okay, but that’s better than being closed through fear. People waste so much time on fear: fear about the future, or a constant nagging dread that the things which happened in their past will poison them for ever, or recur again to trip them up. You’ve got to let that go, trust life to be good.’

  She stared at him. If only it were possible … She felt she had stumbled on some new religion, with Ivan as its priest – a priest in purple tracksuit bottoms and a tee shirt with the logo ‘Bulmers Devon Cider’. She had been so self-absorbed, so nervous, she’d hardly noticed that he’d changed his clothes, at least his top and shoes. He was wearing soft suede boots now, fringed around the calves. She glanced up at his body – the strong but narrow shoulders, mobile hands, flat stomach – let her eyes go lower, quickly looked away again. She had seen the bulge between his legs, outlined by the clingy purple fabric. He was man, as well as priest, and the fact frightened and disturbed her. How could she have rocked like that, so blatantly, so eagerly; lain down on the ground, with that … that bulge so close to her, maybe almost touching her as he reached down to guide her movements? She had tried to kid herself that she was just a tiny baby, but the truth was far more shameful. She was a mature and adult woman, who had allowed a man to stir up dangerous feelings. She scrambled to her feet, appalled. She had totally forgotten that she was still bound by her vows – a vow of chastity, which included not just deeds, but thoughts; which enjoined her to avoid even occasions of impurity.

  ‘Don’t get up so quickly or you may feel dizzy. What’s the matter, anyway? We haven’t finished yet.’

  ‘No, really, Ivan, that’s enough. It’s so … new for me, all this.’ She forced a nervous laugh. ‘I need to take it slowly, like the gin.’

  ‘Well, I hope you enjoyed it. It’s meant to be a pleasure, not a penance.’

  ‘Oh, I did.’ She tried to sound more gracious. There were sins against charity, as well as against continence. It would be wrong to bolt away, let Ivan think she had derived nothing from the lesson, when he had given up his time. ‘I mean, just to realise that I’ve got a body … It’s funny, really, we use the word so often, yet as far as I’m concerned, bodies never have much weight or substance. I mean, “Body and blood of Christ” – you know, in Communion. I’m always saying that, but I must confess I’ve never realised all its implications. It was a kind of … spiritual formula, something miraculous and precious, but still rather formal and remote. But when you think just what it means. Real blood, real body.’ She broke off, startled, could suddenly see Christ Himself with bones, a rocking pelvis; struggled to suppress the image, which must be blasphemy.

  ‘Well, blood’s as much a miracle as bones, of course. Have you ever seen blood under a microscope? No? Hold on a sec, don’t go.’

  He disappeared himself, returned in just two minutes with a stout mahogany box, which opened up to reveal an antique microscope, its dark-grain wood and shining brass cradled in a handsome case.

  She touched th
e highly polished grain. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it? It was a present from my father when I was studying Biology.’

  She felt almost surprised to hear he had a father. He seemed so self-sufficient; living on his own, working from this basement flat, without colleagues or an office, that she couldn’t quite imagine him with parents or a family, with fixed or formal ties.

  ‘Are you scared of blood, Hilary?’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Would you like to see your own? It means I’ll have to prick your finger, but I’ll only need a drop. And since you’ve got a good nine pints …’

  She tried to picture nine pints, like bottles on a doorstep. It seemed excessive, though she’d never really thought about amounts. Blood was simply there – like bones, like pelvises.

  ‘We’d better go into the kitchen, so I can sterilise the needle.’

  She blinked in the strong light. Her eyes had got so used to the soft flicker of the candles that the kitchen seemed as harshly lit as an operating theatre, though far smaller and more cluttered. A bust of a Greek god sat between the toaster and the kettle, its nose chipped off, a dog’s lead round its neck. A poster of French cheeses had been tacked up on the wall, beside one of human muscles. At least fifty different herbs and spices were lined up on the shelves, including things she’d never heard of, like cassia and fenugreek. She also noticed baby food, several different cereals with chubby naked infants smiling from the packets. Ivan with a baby seemed even more unlikely than Ivan with a father.

  He was clearing the table, setting up the microscope. He had also put the kettle on. ‘Cup of tea?’ he asked. ‘They always give you tea when you’ve donated blood.’

  She didn’t laugh, suddenly felt scared again. It was too intimate, this ritual. She remembered her and Katy both pricking their fingers when they were just thirteen, mingling their bloods, to make themselves officially best friends. Later, she had confessed it in Confession, felt disloyal to Katy. Yet if she hadn’t done, she would have felt disloyal to God.

  As Ivan stood above her with the needle, she kept recalling fairy tales – sleeping for a hundred years, waking up to princes, or bad fairies. Her blood looked far too red, a vibrant pulsing shameless red, which seemed to spurt too willingly. He placed one drop on the slide, adjusted lens and eyepiece, then motioned her to look.

  At first, she could see nothing, only greyish blur. She tried another angle, suddenly saw a cosmos on the slide, a whole new world of what looked like tiny planets: hundreds, thousands of them, packed close against each other, yet gently floating in some mysterious aether. She watched, astonished, as they slowly drifted, some somersaulting, spiralling, others motionless. It was as if she had stumbled on a secret universe, closed to her before; awe-inspiring, infinitely complex. She looked up, dazzled. ‘That can’t be just one drop of blood.’ She grinned. ‘You’ve tricked me, Ivan, haven’t you, put something else on the slide?’

  ‘Oh, no. That’s your blood all right – a few odd million cells of it. The body always seems so reckless in its numbers. We’re all made up of at least a thousand billion cells apiece, with some twenty thousand genes in just one chromosome, two hundred thousand hairs on the average head, and about two hundred and fifty million red cells in one small drop of blood.’

  ‘Red cells? But these ones are all white.’ She stared down at the slide again, where her brilliant scarlet blood looked colourless, transparent – what she might call bloodless, if the word weren’t so inappropriate.

  ‘No, they’re not. The magnification just dilutes the colour. There are probably only a few thousand white cells on that slide, and all the rest are red. It’s amazing, really, that something quite so tiny should be so vitally important. I mean, those red cells must be five or ten times smaller than a pinprick, yet if they ever stop whizzing round the body, you’re dead. And the whole system’s so elaborate. You could spend fifty separate lifetimes studying just the blood cells, and still not know it all.’

  She continued peering down. If just one drop of her blood was so astonishing, so complex, then she was a miracle in toto. Nine more pints of blood were flowing through her veins – universe on universe. She ran her fingers through her hair, no longer short and butchered, but a dense and tangled forest with two hundred thousand separate trees springing from her skull. She had always seen her body as a puny paltry thing; sought to punish it, downgrade it. But now Ivan had transformed it, made it huge and powerful.

  She took her tea almost in a daze, burnt her mouth drinking it too fast. She didn’t want to talk, only reflect on how incredible she was. She had blood, a body, bones; a dozen pairs of ribs, two dozen vertebrae; a hundred thousand genes. She refused a second cup of tea, said she’d better leave now, help Liz with the meal, though it was hard to have to plummet down to roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, when she’d soared to such great heights. They walked back through the living room. The candles had burnt out, left only their sweet scent. She stopped by the rocking horse, stroked its coarse black mane.

  ‘Have a ride, go on.’

  ‘Oh, no, Ivan, I can’t. It’s a child’s horse and I’ll break it.’

  ‘No, you won’t. It’s really strong, that thing, built to last. It’s already survived a hundred years, and with all sorts of people riding it, far heftier than you. You look pretty light to me.’

  She was light – buoyant with elation, light-headed from the wine again, which seemed to have returned in its effects, made her feel floaty, as if she might take off and fly away. She climbed into the saddle, with its real stirrups, leather straps, gathered up the reins. She began to rock, cautiously at first, as if nervous of the horse, fearing it might bolt or rear, then gradually relaxing, as it responded to her movements, obeyed her as its mistress. Never before had she been so exaltedly aware of her body moving, working – all the bones which Ivan had created just by naming them, were now gloriously in action, proving their existence. The humerus, connected to the radius and ulna at the elbow by a hinge-joint, flexing as she pulled the reins; the femur, longest bone in all the body, pressed against the smooth flank of the horse; the fibula and tibia hanging free; the tiny tailbone coccyx snug against the saddle.

  She galloped faster, faster, back across the centuries, until she was a mighty brontosaurus, a powerful creature with no brain, no soul, nor will, nor conscience, to keep plaguing her, oppressing her; just a huge impressive body, with bones the size of columns; a proudly crested tail, and some forty billion blood cells coursing through her veins.

  SPRING

  Chapter Eleven

  Hilary ran along the path, skirt swirling out around her, face up to the sun. It was still a strange – and glorious – sensation to feel the sun fingering her bare arms, a brisk west wind blowing through her hair. Liz had warned her not to wear short sleeves, said it was too cold, still March, still really winter. She glanced up at the sky, the offcuts of deep blue between the clouds. It didn’t feel like winter, and anyway, Liz didn’t understand that she was trying to make up for twenty years of being swaddled in a veil and long-sleeved robe. She kept going out without her coat, even in the rain, to feel the wind and weather on her skin; to revel in that heady sense of lightness – no longer insubstantial-light without the shield and anchor of her habit, but a new and soaring freedom.

  She stopped to admire a blaze of daffodils, gawky long-stemmed trumpets, some bent and trampled down. She picked one of the casualties, secured it in the V-neck of her dress, let her hand linger there a moment, touching the bare skin. No secular could ever know the sense of almost wicked liberation in a V-neck – to have one’s throat on show, display all that naked flesh, even draw attention to it by wearing a gold chain. She had bought the chain herself, bought her yellow slip-ons, the first shoes she’d purchased since the age of seventeen. Yellow shoes! Crazy and extravagant, yet somehow right for spring. There was so much yellow in this tiny children’s park – crocuses the colour of an egg yolk, riotous forsythia sunshining the fenc
e, at least three different yellows in the frilly daffodils, even a yellow metal slide. She had found the place a week ago, much preferred it to the waste of Wandsworth Common, with its constant roar of traffic, its sweaty pounding joggers, its fierce and threatening dogs. The park was quiet and fenced; dogs on leads, children with their mothers; lovers holding hands.

  She didn’t feel alone. Ivan was beside, around, within her, stopping when she stopped, admiring birds and flowers with her, seeing through her eyes. He was always with her – always – even when he was working in his flat, or had gone to see his mother in East Grinstead, or was lying fast asleep at night, three floors down from her. His physical presence wasn’t really necessary. He had seeped into her mind now, transformed her whole perception, so that she saw the world quite differently, as less menacing, less dark. Liz had noticed how she’d changed, attributed it to the lessons, which she now had twice a week. Yes, of course those helped – had made her more relaxed, taught her how to own and use her body, but it was the Alexander teacher, not the Alexander method, which had made the crucial difference.