Mo Hayder: Pig Island

I stand there stunned, looking from the bog seat to her then back again. 'I can't just-'

'I think you'll find it easier than you expect.'

I stare at her for a long time. I'd like to slap someone right now, but even at eighteen I'm clear enough to see a story when it comes my way. My hands hover on my belt. 'What about you? Where are you going to be?'

'I've seen it several times before.'

'You're going to watch? You have to be-' I break off. She's looking at me with one of those faces that doesn't need any words — eyebrows slightly raised, chin tilted down, arms crossed. An SS guard, may as well be. Her mouth is closed in a firm line: Argue all you want, it says. I'm not budging. I sigh. 'OK, OK. Just stand back a bit, for Christ's sake.' I unbutton my trousers, pull down my shorts and sit on the toilet, elbows on my bare knees, hands dangling, looking up at her. 'Well,' I say, after a while. 'I told you, nothing's going to happen-'

Before I know it, Asuncion's conjured a wad of toilet paper out of thin air and is thrusting it down under my arse, forcing it up against me. There's a moment of uncomfortable slithering as I struggle, 'What the fuck do you think you're — get your hand out of -' and an unfamiliar wet, cold sensation around my arsehole. Then she steps away, pushing her hair triumphantly out of her eyes, the tissue bunched in her fingers.

'You fucking lunatic!' I go. 'What was that about?'

'The tumour,' she says, holding the paper under my nose, making me recoil at the fucking awful smell. A wad of something black and slimy sits in the petal-white tissue, something that smells of putrefaction and death. 'You passed it.'

'Here,' I say, making a grab for it. But Asuncion is too quick. She whips it out of reach and spins on her heel, throws open the cubicle door and stalks out. 'Hey — stop.' I follow, hopping, skipping and almost tripping over my unbuttoned trousers, trying to do up my belt and flies at the same time as push open the doors she's slamming her way through. In the hall as I catch up with her she's making a triumphant entrance, hand held high, titanic smile like a boxing-match ring girl, me stumbling after her as she marches up the aisle. Up ahead the pastor's staging a shocked pause in the proceedings, his eyes widening dramatically at the procession approaching him. 'Asuncion,' he calls. 'Why the interruption?'

She mounts the stage. Dove uses his hand dramatically to cover his lapel mic and leans over so she can whisper in his ear — his eyebrows lifting almost to his blond hairline as he pretends to be amazed, delighted by what she's saying. He lifts his eyes to mine with a smile and he's half got his hand out ready to pull me victoriously on to the stage when he sees the expression in my eyes. His face falls.

'What're you fuckers up to?' I mount the steps two at a time. Under my feet the stage shakes a little. 'Give me that fucking thing.'

'Joe?' he says. 'What's the problem? What's the-'

'Give me that.' I make a grab for the tissue. 'Show me what you wankers are doing.' Asuncion gasps and tries to wrench her hand away. A feedback scream shoots through the microphones, but I hold on tight to her wrist. The congregation jump to their feet, faces frozen and shocked. I dig my fingernails hard into Asuncion's skin — don't stop just because she's a woman — and get her to release the tissue.

'Joe!' Malachi rips his microphone off his lapel. 'Joe!' He puts a hand on my arm, so close I can smell his face powder. He tries to turn us away so our backs are to the audience and he can talk confidentially. He's sweating now. Looking at what's in my fist and sweating. 'Leave the stage now, Joe,' he goes, licking his lips and putting his fingers out, itching to grab the tissue off me. 'Give me the tumour and leave the stage. Whatever your problem I'll speak to you off stage. Just give me the-'

He makes a move for my hand but I shake him off. 'Listen, you little shit,' I hiss. I turn and put my face close to his. 'I'd like to kill you. If I could get away with it, I'd kill you. Remember that.'

And that's it. I'm off, striding out of the hall with my prize, joined by Finn in the aisle. Outraged little black women hit us with their navy blue handbags as we go.

The tumour turns out to be a putrefying chicken liver. 'Probably been left to rot for a coupla days,' says the Environment Department in Santa Fe. 'Where the hell did you boys get this little beauty?' It's such a great story I'm over the fucking moon. We've got him. Pastor Dove is ours.

But funny how life goes, isn't it? because Finn, the one who started the Albuquerque crusade, the one who was going to be a journalist, suddenly goes cold on it. He loses his heart to some girl he's met in a tequila bar, follows her home to Sausalito, California, and spends the next couple of years as a surfer dude. He gets himself sun damage and a phoney West Coast accent. When he comes back to the UK he publishes a surf mag for a while and ends up a literary agent in London. Turns out I'm the only one with a hard-on for getting Pastor Malachi Dove knobbed.

I take up my university place in London, and start casting around for a mag to take the chicken-liver article. But before I can place it, a rumble comes out of the New Mexico desert. The Psychogenic Healing Ministry is in crisis. The IRS are reviewing its tax-exemption status; Malachi Dove is admitted to hospital, suffering from manic depression. And then the proverbial shit hits the fan. The dominoes really start to fall: he's under suspicion of torching the house of a state trooper who's given him a speeding ticket; some of his female disciples go to the press — he banned them, they say, from bringing sanitary towels into ministry headquarters. He says feminine hygiene products are medical intervention; they say he does it to humiliate them, that he's a misogynist.

'I asked myself difficult questions when I was at my lowest,' Dove tells a journalist on the Albuquerque Tribune, when he gets out of hospital. 'I asked the Lord if He would, in His grace, take me to be by His side. The answer was no, but what was revealed to me was that I will control my death. My death will be significant to the human race.'

'We're talking about suicide,' goes the journalist. 'The Bible says it's a sin.'

'No. It says, "Thou shalt not kill." The translation is faulty. The Hebrew says, "Thou shalt not murder."'

'I didn't know that.'

'Well, now you do. Every Sunday I will pray. I will ask if my time is here.'

'And when the time comes, how will you do it? Hanging?'

'Not hanging, and not jumping. As a Christian those methods have connotations of guilt for me. Relating to the death of Judas Iscariot.'

'Pills?'

'I don't take medication of any sort.'

Probably at this point he's sussed that whatever method of suicide he comes up with, it's going to put his manifesto under the glass, because after that he changes the subject. Ends the interview. There's a photo of him attached to the article and he looks fucking appalling. He's piled on weight and it's gone round his shoulders, neck and chest. His thatch of hair is yellow against his skin, which is red from either blood pressure or the New Mexico sun, and the only thing I can think when I see the photo is: Christ — looks like someone's peeled the bastard's face.

In London I work all the depression-suicide stuff into the article and sell it, at last, to Fortean Times. Maybe I have a premonition, who knows? because I publish under a pseudonym: Joe Finn. Two weeks after it comes out the Fortean Times gets a solicitor's letter. We're all in the shit. Pastor Malachi Dove is going to sue us all: the Fortean Times and, most of all, the heretic who dares to call himself a journalist, Joe Finn.