Jago (40 page)

Outside were as many people as on a tourist beach at the peak of the holidays. Emotion roiled off them in waves, breaking against the house. The crowd was mainly happy in a sunny late afternoon that had cooled enough to be tolerable. People looked forward to the festival, not too many drunk or stoned, everyone mingling and meeting. Life was fine. Susan gulped whole another aspirin, swallowing phlegm to keep it down. After a day of tightly shielding herself, she was drained. Whatever happened, she was nearly at the end of her rope. She’d have to open up or crack up, and take whatever Jago could unleash. Being near him so long had worn her reserves down. Susan Anonymous was coming apart like a jigsaw. Witch Susan would have to step up and protect herself.

All those years of drifting, of damping her Talent, of trying on and throwing away jobs and relationships as if shopping for a cardigan, of hoping it would all just go away. And two years here, with Jago. That had all been preparation. She knew she wasn’t imagining, projecting. This was the crux of her life. She’d be judged by how she measured up to the immediate future. Precognition. That was one of the things she didn’t have. David thought it was philosophically, physically and psychically impossible. She couldn’t know the future. But she knew that just beyond her sight, enormities waited.

For a while, hiding had been easy. She had found out about aspirin, and how it could quiet her down. At Lancaster University, her doctor put her on the pill to regulate her still-troublesome periods, and that helped too. Her Talent didn’t go away, but she learned how to suppress it, how to control it. Graduating in 1977 with a frankly mediocre 2.2, she moved to a succession of provincial towns—Poole, Eastbourne, Harpenden—and short-lived under-achieving jobs. Assistant librarian, typist for a medical publisher, receptionist at a local radio station. Filing, photocopying, making tea. She amused herself imagining ways to use the Talent to make a fortune. She could become a professional gambler and read her opponents’ cards from their minds or pop the roulette ball into the right hole. Or she could become a star conjurer, or dowse for gold and oil, or investigate large-scale insurance fraud. Or work as an invisible assassin, pulling triggers without leaving fingerprints. When David found her, she was in local government, processing social-security payments in Loughborough.

IPSIT
had just been founded, and David, with ten years of committees and lab-rat tests behind him, was searching for Talents. He’d followed her career, even tracked her off and on through her Susan Anonymous phase. He approached her as she was getting fed up with pretending to be living a real life. She’d drifted away from her latest boyfriend. Men told her she was afraid of letting them get too close. Jobs were boring her and, the headaches becoming crippling, she had a reputation for malingering. David offered her a chance to be a star again, but not to go public. Unable to conceal his astonishment at the extent of her Talent, he called in sceptical colleagues—some from America and France—to assess her. She juggled objects and made plates spin, although her telekinesis had peaked in late adolescence and she was capable of far less spectacular trickery than she had been as a teenager.

Now, her Talent was intuitive rather than effective. She was a psychometrist, she could
see
things. After years of anonymity, the burst of activity was liberating, exciting. She had one or two almost satisfactory love affairs. She kept herself apart from the other Talents. She knew the names—Poulton, Kermode, Tunney—but didn’t want to get close. Bringing Talents together was like putting magnets on the desk: either they clanged tight and were hard to separate, or they found a soft, tough repulsion field between them.

In the early 1980s, she was taken to a Sheffield police station and given a pile of women’s clothing to sort through. Skirts, blouses, shoes. Some were new, some were old and worn. Some were ripped, some had bloodstains. She was able to sort the pile into three smaller piles. The new-bought garments that had no resonances whatsoever. Clothes donated as control specimens by policewomen. And the victims’ leftovers. She didn’t see the murders like a movie flashback, but found the impressions—of violence, pain and hatred—overwhelming, and was suddenly able to give details, mostly trivial, about the dead women. David and the fatherly inspector encouraged her to think beyond the women and build an image of the man who killed them. He was a shadow, distorted by his victims’ pain, but there were things she could tell them. He was not ‘Jack’, the man who’d sent a tape to the police confessing in a Geordie accent. His name, she intuited, was Peter, and he’d already been ruled out as a suspect. The inspector, who obviously didn’t think that was much help, thanked her and she was taken away. Not long afterwards, by a fluke, they caught the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe.

Her bottle was empty. She had a finger in, scrabbling for a last pill she had already taken. She’d been eating them like Polo mints. Unbending out of the window seat and standing up, she felt woozy. How many had she taken? She had a huge tolerance, but, even so, there were dangers.

Her head didn’t ache. Then again, she could feel hardly anything. She couldn’t think how much, if any, time had passed.

The light changed. It had been getting dim in the unlit room, shadows expanding as the sun passed to the other side of the house. Now it was as if someone had drawn the curtains and turned on the lights. Not electric light, but the wavering glow of gas or fire. It was warm, but a different warmth, not the heat of the outside seeping through, but heat from a fire keeping out a cold beyond. There was a fire, and Edwin Winthrop hung over it. The furnishings were polished wood and new upholstery rather than jumble-sale acquisitions. There were ghosts, memories of people Susan recognized. Edwin, leaning against the mantel, fire cupped in his brandy glass. And others. The young Catriona Kaye, shorter than she’d imagined, in a pink dress with fringes. Irena Dubrovna, the medium, spilling out of a black evening gown, lifting a heavy veil with a dramatic gesture. This was quite common, although Susan had never experienced it at the Agapemone. A random snippet of the room’s past was being replayed. It would pass. Edwin and Catriona began to dance together. Someone played a piano that occupied the space where the television set would be. Susan was more comfortable with these ghosts than with the current occupants of their space. Long dead, or at least long gone, they couldn’t affect her, any more than a film on video cassette could touch her or a painting talk back. She was a spectator. The scene began to fade, and the present flooded back. Edwin and Catriona whirled together, coming apart. Susan saw Catriona’s face freeze, staring directly at her. Rather, at the place where she was. Knowing it impossible, she imagined Catriona Kaye, briefly and shockingly, could see her. Then the ghosts were gone.

Susan found herself on her knees, head whirling, and put out hands to push away the carpeted floor. Her head, weighted like an anchor, dragged her down. The empty aspirin bottle rolled away. She fought heavy eyelids. Someone stood over her. She recalled Catriona’s eyes as she saw what couldn’t be there. And she imagined Jago staring, caught, as he was sometimes during her sermons, by a vision of the beyond which he misunderstood as proof of his own divinity. Her eyes popped open even as she sank, and Beloved was there. He raised a foot, and she saw the sole of his shoe. She flinched mentally, her body lagging way behind her mind, expecting the tread on her face, but he simply touched his toe to her chest, a hunter posing with a shot lioness. A thrill leaped from him and electrified her. She jolted, then slumped, shocked asleep.

‘H
mmmm,’ Hazel said, ‘that was nice.’

Cindy, a trainee hairdresser before coming to Beloved, fussed with Hazel’s hair and face, as if prettying a doll. They had all felt it. Jenny recalled the transport of her own Great Manifestation, and a deep warmth spread from her heart.

‘Just a taste, my Sister, my Love,’ she told Hazel.

‘It’s like hot ice cream, isn’t it?’ Cindy said.

Hazel snorted a laugh, and her hair shook. ‘Not at all, it was…’

She had no words. That was all right. Beloved was beyond words.

‘It was the Beloved Presence, Hazel. You’ll get used to it.’

‘I’m not sure about that.’

Ever since her own Great Manifestation, Jenny had known the cycle was drawing to a close. When Beloved found perfection, He would end all things. Looking at Hazel’s face, with the slight Chinese turn to her eyes, Jenny wondered if she was perfection. Maybe it had to do with purity of intent, an ability to forget self, to become totally the empty vessel for Beloved’s benison. Certainly, Jenny’s own thoughts had been too much with herself. Beloved had forgiven, but she remembered the sharp edge of her own disappointment. That had been soothed away in the white-hot intensity of the Great Manifestation.

‘There now,’ Cindy cooed, arranging Hazel’s shining hair around her shoulders. ‘That’s comely.’

* * *

In her dream, Susan was a teenager again, struggling with a difficult lover. It might have been David, as he’d been when she first saw him. It might have been Roger, sucking back spit as he tried to get himself into her. It might have been one of the boys from Lancaster, the slightly younger-than-her feebs she attracted. It might even have been James, unfamiliarly young and uncontrolled. Her lover’s face was shadowed. Bedclothes tangled between them. He wasn’t hurting her, but, despite a great deal of effort, he wasn’t doing anything right either. She wished he’d slow down or stop. His lips were on her neck and face constantly. She took his head in her hands and eased it up so she could see his face. Instantly it faded to transparency and coalesced with the darkness. But the eyes had been unmistakable. Anthony William Jago.

* * *

They were ten feet from each other, doing different things. Syreeta was sorting through a box of cassettes looking for Dolar’s demo tape, and Jessica was pretending to ignore him while she watched him. Ferg was uncomfortable, but didn’t want to move for fear of exciting interest. He was sure Syreeta was really looking at him, too.

Suddenly, as one, the pair of them looked up and gave an identical gasp, as if taken by surprise. They looked into the air at nothing, then at each other. Jessica was blushing and Syreeta shaking her head. Something had passed between them, a secret message. He knew it, and boiled inside. Then, together, they began giggling.

* * *

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘Girl fainted.’

Gary Chilcot was kneeling over a small body, fanning with a paper plate. Lytton’s neck prickled and he imagined the worst. It was Pam, the doll-like redhead.

‘Should I loosen her clothing?’ Gary said, tongue scraping the grass.

Lytton got close. The girl was breathing, didn’t smell of drink, wasn’t obviously wounded and didn’t have a syringe stuck in her arm. He touched her eyelid with a thumb, planning to check her pupil for dilation. At his touch, her eyes flicked open.

‘She’s fine,’ Lytton said, not yet sure if she was.

Pam sat up, and put her fingers through her short hair. She didn’t seem to have had anything apart from a nice sleep and pleasant dreams. The girl looked at him directly, and gave an unmistakable smile.

‘Fuck,’ she said with wonder, shaking her shoulders and head.

‘She’s all right.’

Lytton stood. Pam propped herself up on her elbows and stretched her entire body, cream-pale midriff drum-tight.

‘I couldn’t half do with a cigarette,’ she said.

* * *

The family were together again, Maskell joined with Sue-Clare, Hannah and Jethro in the big bedroom, producing fruit. His flesh extended, joining with his wife and daughter, heavy with his seed. Sue-Clare whispered in his ear, occasionally nibbling the lobe, occasionally flicking the inside with her tongue. She was coaxing his seed free. Hannah, wrapped in her ball of moss, sang ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. Maskell’s hand was under his wife’s breast, fingers snug against the grooves of her ribs.

‘Ssssuki,’ he hissed, loving her.

He pulled back to watch her face change. Bangs of tiny ivy shoots around her cheeks shook as she received his seed. Her eyes shut, she caught her breath, held it and, as the blush settled, slowly sighed air out of her lungs.

* * *

His vision blurry, Teddy groped his way, using the low walls as a guide. The burning in his head was worse than the worst hangover he’d ever had. Fighting, he stood up and got his eyes open. After a heroic effort, he managed to stand straight. He stared and his eyesight came back. He was not the only one staring. Sharon Coram and the black boy Teddy had seen her with earlier were on the grass verge, wound together like the strands of a rope. They were clothed, but their mouths were fastened as if Sharon were swallowing the boy’s tongue, a fakir taking a snake into her stomach. They wriggled against one another, buttons coming free as if the couple were so hot to get down to it they couldn’t even wait to take off their clothes. The crowd laughed and made comments, but the performers didn’t mind. Stan Budge, who worked and drank with Teddy’s father, opened his throat and began, in a boozy bass, to sing one of his annoying folk songs, ‘The Village Pump’. Sharon wrenched the boy’s head to one side, her hand gripping his dreads, and screamed. Not with pain.

* * *

Jeremy couldn’t understand it. Beth Yatman, who’d been standing at the gate checking customers’ badges, was laughing like a hyena, a deep, full and dangerous laugh that disturbed him. He wasn’t sure what to do. Beth was staggering, and the line of festival people were getting impatient.

‘Another loony woman,’ someone said.

Beth found this hilarious and almost choked. She fell against the gate and slid to the ground. Her long dress caught on a nail and, as she slid down, was pulled up. Jeremy watched as inch after inch of Beth’s dress rucked up, showing more of her thin legs. Someone in the queue cheered. Beth covered her laughing face with both hands. Her dress tore and she plopped on to the dry earth, kicking like a baby. Her dress up around her waist, Jeremy saw she was wearing knickers covered with yellow flowers. Jeremy knew he shouldn’t be looking, but couldn’t pull his eyes away. He felt slightly sick inside, but also excited. Beth pulled her dress together over her knickers and legs.