Mercy Seat (21 page)

You can't love anyone, can you? she murmurs.

I start to reply, but stop myself before making a sound.

She reaches down to find my hand where it rests on her hip and guides it between her thighs, opening them enough to let me in before closing them again and trapping me there.

Without moving my head I can see a top corner of the window and the grey wastes of sky beyond. Every time the wind gusts a few drops of rain tap at the glass and the old
sash window rattles in its wooden frame.

Put your fingers inside me.

She eases her legs apart again, just enough, and I do what she says, surprised at her wetness. I feel myself growing hard, despite myself.

Deeper.

Alex thumps down the stairs to his room again. The music dies and in its place comes the sound of his television. Voices fencing back and forth.

You're like me, she says finally, whispering. We should have been born with gills. She shivers and I rest my forehead against the back of her skull, breathe in the fragrance from the salty oils of her scalp.

Jennifer won't want to live like this for much longer. She won't stay with you. You know that, don't you? Michael is all that matters to her now.

I close my eyes and remember again swimming after her into the bay at night. Turning my cold, bare body to look back at the world, floating clear of it, unable to fall.

I was like a wife and a mother to my father, she says. I was everything to him, in the end. She presses her body harder against mine, as if for warmth, and shivers again. Jennifer was pregnant by that man, Bill Kerrigan, she says then, and he talked her into an abortion, not long before she met you. She'll go back to him, I think, now she's got Michael and feels like she can forgive him. Or someone like him. Someone from the real world.

I don't ask her how she knows. Some confession in a cafe, maybe, or some drunken heart-to-heart on one of the nights when I left them in the living room and tried to sleep through their low, muddled babble with Michael in the cot at my side. Yes – a night like that, I think, and I
remember Jenny, the evening after Christine left, crying so bitterly, recalling those afternoons with Kerrigan, the father of her first child. It's not about us, she'd said. You don't have to worry.

I lift my head clear of Christine's dark, sleek hair and look down along the length of her body. Her limbs, stiff and blueish, seem shadowless and flattened, more like engravings than flesh in the iron light.

It's night when Jenny finally twists her key in the lock and pushes open the door to the apartment. She stands a little while on the threshold, in the dark, maybe sensing all the heartbreak and trouble that will flood in on all of us, unstoppably, with the simple lighting of the room.

Luke? she calls. Luke? Then silence while her hand finds the switch, and silence while she stands confused in the bulb's glare, noticing the photographs first, maybe, and Michael, still sleeping, his deep, deep sleep, lying motionless amongst them.

Twelve

The years make Russian dolls of our lives, nesting one self inside the other, a neat, coffined family of near identical forms – habits, needs, errors – that get heavier with the decades, more full of rattling ghosts. Inside we go, one self after the other, and each one forever; and if we could make out anything in there, where no light gets through, it would be the contours of our own head in front of our face.

I like to think it was by accident that Christine stepped in front of a rush-hour bus, just weeks after returning to the house her father left her. But I did discover, much later, that she'd tried to commit suicide, three days after her father's funeral, with the same sleeping pills she would use to make Michael sleep so deeply – almost too deep to ever come back, and maybe he never came back the same child – that long, grey August afternoon. But if she tried to die a second time, she failed, and lingered on for years, trapped in God knows what kind of limbo. Jenny and her mother refused to the bitter end to let the hospital turn off the machinery around her hospital bed. It was the only way they had to punish her, perhaps. Five years of that, before she managed to let go, sinking down to whatever currents carry us off into the dark.

While Christine drifted alone inside her head, or more probably far beyond it, I made my way to France, Spain and Morocco, scratching a living on farms, vineyards and
camp-sites as I went. By my second year of wandering I'd made enough contacts in the loose, almost casual small-time underworld of drifting pickpockets, petty dealers and tobacco smugglers to get better paid work – and as much solitude as I needed – tramping across the border with rucksacks full of contraband cigarettes, sometimes bricks of Moroccan hash. Occasionally I'd come across British newspapers left lying on benches or on the breakfast tables of cheap hostels, and it amused me vaguely to realise that my life had become some small flaking off of that long Thatcherite dream: self-sufficient, entrepreneurial, a busy little insect in the service of free trade. I used the network of pilgrim trails around the Baztan valley in the Basque country, wore a scallop shell in my cap, and was robbed occasionally, nearly murdered once on the banks of a small stream, but never caught.

I slept more soundly in the hills, barns and pilgrim shelters along the Camino than in any of the other places I've known since leaving Bethesda, though even after long, exhausting days of hiking I often woke before daylight with Christine's white face floating in my mind, or Michael's.

I came back once before she died, for my grandfather's Baptist funeral under a daylong veil of soft valleys rain, and took the chance to visit her in the sterile little hospital cell that Jenny and her mother had condemned her to. I was surprised to learn from one of the nurses that she was visited every other day by her sister, who would speak to her at length, in private, as soon as she was left alone. I sat with her for a little time, the nurse in attendance, as she was obliged to be for a stranger, but couldn't find anything to say. As I left, I explained that I didn't want Jenny knowing
about my visit. I won't be back, I said, so she doesn't need to know. It would just upset her. The nurse looked at me quizzically, but shrugged and said, all right then, if you think so. But if she ever checks the visitors' log she'll be able to see for herself. I can't change that for you.

No, I said. I understand, and smiled to reassure her, though if I could have paid every penny I owned to cover my traces, I would have. And I've often wondered since whether she kept her word, or if my saying goodbye to Christine became one last hurt I inflicted on Jenny before slipping like an assassin out of her life completely.

By the time of my grandmother's funeral, soon after, in bright March sunshine, Christine was gone too. Her ashes, I discovered later, were scattered by Jenny and her mother in the Irish Sea she'd so often swum in. So maybe there was some forgiveness, some kind of peace made, in the end.

I was in my thirties before I came back to Britain. I had money in the bank from a thousand illicit border-crossings, and I rented a tiny flat in the great anonymity of London. I went back to studying and was amazed to find that the work I'd completed so many years before still counted for something, though I didn't have the heart to go back to any of the subjects I'd thought about and written on in that small box-room at Bethesda. In fact, I changed my name and studied theology, and after graduation applied for a part-time doctorate in early Church doctrine and history, back in Wales, at a college whose windows faced the sea again. My thesis, along with my research, wanders on its way as obscurely as I once did; I have no intention of ever finishing it.

I've no faith of any kind in God, and I know that my compulsion to devote so much of my thinking to religion must be, at bottom, a simple longing for the father I lost, and expiation for the missing father I so quickly became in my turn, though I feel no embarrassment about that need. And I wonder, too, if all my tracking down of God through his big, empty lair is a means of finding some way back to Jenny and Christine; a sense that there might be a thread left behind in the labyrinth where their father lurked, some human trace, lying all these years in the dark. Am I really like him, that half-mad, controlling, hypocrite believer, as Jenny claimed all those years ago? It's possible she was right, I suppose: who else ever knew me? Is that why Christine – lost in her own private maze – tried to break through its walls?

But it's hopeless, I know, to think in these kinds of ways. It's like trying to read the shapes of shadows in a cave by flooding it with light. It comes from being too much alone, for much too long.

Now, if I believe anything that can be put into words, it's that there's a kind of solidarity in the enormous, continuous effort the mind must make to see meaning in the world – to go on living, to keep the spirit alive in its shell – and the vast, impersonal energies that bind the atoms at their nuclear hearts. I imagine the universe, which is nothing if it isn't one great idea, the one great archetype of thought, working hard to believe in itself, in the face of entropy and all its billion cooling stars. I think it's tired, and can't rest.

There are two small Methodist chapels within walking distance of the cottage I rent – Hebron and Salem, one originally Calvinist, the other Wesleyan – perched on
either side of the southernmost tip of Pembrokeshire, and they're subject to entropy too, of course, lapsing into ruin one loose slate and one burst water pipe at a time. I like to attend one or other of their services most Sundays, watching and listening from a seat just inside the door, enjoying the faintly sung hymns, the mild, encouraging sermons, the bowed backs of the old people's heads at prayer, the whisper and smell of rain from the sea, crossing the wet fields outside. The chapels have to share a minister between them, now – the Reverend Carys Bethell – a young, humorous, intelligent woman more likely to quote poetry, Karl Barth and philosophy than the Old Testament. The congregations are a pitiful contrast to her energies, of course: three or four of the faithful in each, fading away almost symbiotically with the rotting buildings they come to worship in. I don't know what the elders in such a time-bound, traditional place made of being preached to by a young woman when she first arrived. But that atmosphere of timelessness operates both ways I suppose, and sometimes I wonder if they've even noticed yet. Is she slowly winning them round to some notion of a gentler, much more human God than the builders of these chapels would ever have recognised or even wanted? Or is she simply outlasting their frowns and gossip for a while, like the tallest candle in a power-cut?

She's curious about me, it's clear, and often meets my eye in the midst of a service, though I make sure to slip away before she can keep me in conversation. I did stay a little longer once, to thank her after a sermon had both puzzled and moved me. She'd taken a poem as her text – one of the lyrics in the voice of God in Rilke's
Book of Hours
. ‘Nearby is the country they call life,' she read,
leaning forward eagerly, as she often does, as if she might one day launch herself from the tall oak pulpit. ‘You will know it by its seriousness.'

The words reminded me, though I couldn't say exactly why, of a scene in a film I'd watched once – something French – in a small art-house cinema during my time in London. I used to go there for the weekday matinees, knowing it would be almost deserted then, and would sometimes drift into sleep or lose myself in memories amongst the rows of empty seats. In the film there was a trial scene where the judge shouted out his charges and questions at a line of cowed prisoners. Then, because the prisoners' belts had been confiscated in their cells, one of the men finds his trousers falling down, and is terrified. For an awful moment there's nothing but silence. Then the judge begins to laugh. And soon the entire court – and the humiliated prisoner – is laughing helplessly too.

Helpless – that was the thing. I remember standing and groping my way out of the cinema without watching the rest of the film. The day was bright and hot outside; dusty and roaring with mid-day traffic. It must have been deep into summer. I walked to a nearby park and sat on a bench until my heart stopped racing.

I waited for her when the service ended, outside the porch, smoking a cigarette in the watery sun, nodding at the few old widows and widowers as they left. They each seemed a little startled to see me loitering in the brightness there.

Oh. Hello, she said, when she finally appeared. I see you at the back there most Sundays, don't I? But you never stay for introductions. She turned away briefly to lock the door, then faced me again with steady, pale green eyes
and a bright, frank smile that seemed, in the friendliest of ways, to demand I explain myself.

I quoted the lines of poetry to her. You spoke so well about most of the poem, I told her, smiling. But I was sitting there hoping you'd explain what those particular lines meant, and you didn't. I can't get them out of my head, and I've no idea why.

Explain! she said, laughing. I'm a woman of the cloth. It wouldn't be right for me to do anything as wicked as that to a poem.

I laughed with her, and we shook hands and introduced ourselves a little shyly.

I'm sorry, but I'm always here under false pretences, I told her. I'm not a believer. Not even agnostic. I just find it restful to listen to it all.

She nodded decisively. I think that's as good a reason as any for being here, she said. To be honest, you always look so gloomy in the shadows, I was thinking you must be some disapproving old diehard building up evidence for a quarrel. I get my fair share.

Maybe you'll convert me and I'll become one.

She laughed again, and I longed suddenly to find an excuse to keep her talking, but couldn't think of anything beyond some clumsy, rushed invitation that would surely unnerve her, and the impulse passed as quickly as it had come. Well, listen, she said. I'm so glad we've spoken at last, but I must get going.