Mo Hayder: Pig Island

'You're going through my pockets now?'

'Yes. My husband lies to me about smoking so I go through his pockets.' She dropped her chin then and met my eyes and I saw she'd flushed a deep purplish colour — like her cheeks were bruised. 'My husband thinks I'm stupid. So I have to fight back.'

The most important thing about me and my marriage was I didn't fancy my wife any more. I'd known it for months and done nothing about it — it's one of those things you can stick in the back of your mind and ignore if you're clever enough. But, and this is true, I cared about her. Weird fuck I was, I did still care for her. And I cared, in some rusty old-fashioned way, about fidelity. Back in London half my friends were already blasting their way through first, second divorces: I was the sanctimonious one, believed in thick and thin, wasn't going to end up in a frigid, three-minute-egg of a marriage. Touche, Joe Oakes, you pious arse. This'll teach you.

I stood slowly and went to stand in the kitchen doorway, looking at her. 'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I am.'

She didn't move for a moment. Then her shoulders slumped and she let out a sigh. 'That's OK,' she said, shaking her head and holding out the rucksack to me. 'It can't be easy, giving up.'

'No, but I'm working on it.' I pulled on the rucksack. 'Believe me.'

She forced a smile. 'I've put some water-bottles in, at the bottom, and some factor ten.' She smoothed down the rucksack straps across my chest and, finding an imaginary stain on my T-shirt, wet her finger and rubbed at it. A compulsive neatnik, Lex, this grooming, this shrimping, was her way of showing I was forgiven. 'Now,' she said. 'I know it's your turn to cook tonight, but you'll be exhausted, so I'll do a pasta salad. Avocado, bacon, olives. It'll save if you're late.'

'Lexie,' I said, 'I told you. Didn't I? I said I didn't know if I'd be back tonight. I told you this. Remember? I said I could be out there a few days.'

She bit her lip. 'A few days?'

'We talked about it. Don't you remember? I said I'd probably have to stay over and you said you'd be all right on your own.'

'Did I? Did I say that?'

'Yes.'

She shrugged. 'Well, don't worry about it. I mean I'd've loved some time with my husband on our holidays, and obviously I'd rather not be in this place on my own.' She opened her hands to indicate the bungalow. She'd hated it at first sight. She'd booked it but turns out to be my fault it was so shitty. 'But, don't worry, it's all right, I'll be all right.'

'Lex. I said it was work, remember?' Remember how I said it was-'

'Please!' She cut me off, holding up her hand in the air. 'Please don't. Please just go. I'll be fine.'

'I'll call you. If there's a signal out on the island I'll call you. I'll tell you how it's going — when I'll be back.'

'No,' she said. 'Don't. Really — don't. Just… just go. Do your thing.' She drummed her fingers on the table, not looking up at me. 'Go on,' she repeated, when I didn't turn to go. 'Just go.'

I sighed and touched her shoulder, opened my mouth to say something, then thought better of it. I tightened the rucksack and left, not bending to kiss her goodbye, quietly closing the kitchen door behind me. That was how it went, these days. Outside I stopped. At the end of the bungalow's long, rhododendron-crowded driveway the land opened into a funnel. There, basking in the glittering sea, was Pig Island.

'Rage against the Philistines of science. Do not allow the arrogance of the medical community to rape and subdue your natural self-healing powers. Wrest control over your life.'

The Psychogenic Healing Ministries, volume 14,

chapter 5, verse 1

The Psychogenic Healing Ministries would say my problems with Lexie were all about my godlessness. They'd say that if I only opened my heart to the Lord, that if I'd only grow towards his cosmic love, in no time I'd find myself growing back towards Lexie. And she'd grow towards me too. I'd never been to the Positive Living Centre on Pig Island, but I knew more than I needed about what the PHM would say about me and Lex. I knew their philosophies like I wrote them myself.

What happened between me and their founder, Pastor Malachi Dove, all starts back in Liverpool twenty years ago. It's the mid-eighties. Liverpool's the unemployment capital of Europe, and my cousin Finn is the closest thing to a God I know. He's a charm bird, totally does not look like my cousin with his blond, mosh-pit hair and ratty nose. The Kurt Cobain of Toxteth. He's the first in our family to get into university and he comes home summer holidays to Self-pity City talking like a Londoner. He tells us all about university and the birds he's shagged. He's going to be a journalist, travel the world. Everyone hates him. Me — I think I can see the sun shine when he bends over.

It's probably the girls that do it for me, because by the next year I've got a place at UCL and I'm ready to follow him down south. Me and Finn together, I'm thinking, the copping potential is unlimited. Then something happens. Something that changes the course of our lives. Finn's ma gets cancer.

Now, I've always really liked his ma, always thought she was totally sound. Actually, what I've always thought is, she's clever. But what does she do, good Catholic girl, when she's told she's dying? She refuses chemo. She scoffs down shark cartilage and flower remedies by the lorryload. She visits Lourdes. She ends up selling the house and trailing some faith-healer around the United States. His name is Pastor Malachi Dove. He believes in NO MEDICAL INTERVENTION. He believes in the power of prayer and positive thinking. Two months later she comes back to Toxteth and dies in agony in a hospice in Ormskirk. So it goes, as Vonnegut would say.

For me and Finn, religion's what you get twatted for. Aled up on a Saturday night it'll be Everton and Liverpool, or Papes and Prods that starts the fight. And seeing Finn's ma die like that gives us a rage for Pastor Malachi Dove that won't go away. We get copies of Charisma magazine and find he's in the south-west US. With the money Finn's ma leaves we get on the next flight to New Mexico. We think we're gonzos. Bad Boys doing the Right Thing.

Oral Roberts has just told the world God will kill him if the congregation doesn't stump up eight million and Peter Popoff's just been outed on The Johnny Carson Show. We spend about a week on the breakaway-church circuit, trailing all these characters around the south-west, getting to know how it works: we meet rapture partisans, pretri-bulationists, preterists, post-wrathers and the midtribbers. We go to deliverance ministries and take part in prayer chains. Slowly we're narrowing it down to our target. And in July it happens. We meet Pastor Malachi Dove. Chief minister and founder of the Psychogenic Healing Ministries Foundation.

It's in a convention centre in Albuquerque. Air-con because it's hot as hell outside. Finn and me, we're about as out of place as you can get: there's me in my beanie and striker's donkey jacket, Finn in his Big Kahuna T-shirt and a mincy little Italian-style zip-up bag that would get him a good twatting in Seaforth; here it contains a loaded tape recorder and mic. We sit in row T, thinking everyone's staring at us. Thinking everyone knows for sure why we're there.

The first surprise is the stage. It's kind of empty and clinical. Feels like a hospital theatre, not a church. The helpers, all women, are a cross between angels and theatre technicians: eighth Dan judo pants and gleaming white plimsolls on bare feet. On stage a stretcher is wheeled up to a screen with a blue sky projected on it. Me and Finn sit there muttering between us, all ready to start snickering. Then Malachi Dove comes on stage and we get surprise number two.

First off, he's not American, he's English. (From Croydon, we find out later, son of a paperclip salesman.) And he's dead normal, not dressed in some huckster's suit: he's wearing a corduroy jacket and he looks more like a young teacher at a public school, with his soft, boyish good looks and thatch of blond hair flopping down over his forehead. Rimless specs on a tip-tilted nose and you can see his tendency is to get fat, not mean. Years later, when Leo DiCaprio is famous, me and Finn turn to each other and go, 'Malachi Dove. Malachi Dove and Leo. Separated at birth.''