Peter James - Perfect People

‘Phoebe!’ She was staggered by the knowledge that came from her daughter’s mouth. And horrified by the swearing. ‘Don’t say that word, it’s horrible.’

Phoebe shrugged like an antsy teenager.

‘Would one of you do something for me, please?’ Naomi asked. ‘I have a really bad headache. Would you run upstairs and bring me some paracetamol – there’s a box in my bathroom cabinet – the one with the mirror on it?’

Luke turned to her. ‘What kind of a headache do you have, Mummy?’

‘A bad one, that’s what kind.’

‘Is it from trauma or from mental stress?’ Phoebe asked.

‘Or from intracranial disorder?’ Luke added.

‘Or migraine?’ said Phoebe. ‘That’s really quite important to know.’

Naomi looked at her children for some moments, barely able to believe her ears. She gave them an answer she hoped Sheila Michaelides would have approved of. ‘It’s a two-paracetamol

kind of a headache, OK?’

There was a moment of silence, then Luke said, ‘Then I don’t understand.’

‘Nor do I,’ said Phoebe. ‘Not exactly.’

‘You don’t understand what?’ Naomi responded.

Luke puckered his mouth, clearly deep in thought. ‘Well, it’s like this, I suppose. You want one of us to go upstairs to get you two paracetamol because you have a headache, if we are understanding you correctly?’

‘You are understanding me correctly, Luke, yes.’

Again his whole mouth puckered in thought. Then he turned again to his sister and whispered to her. Phoebe shot a glance at Naomi, frowned, then whispered back.

Luke again addressed his mother. ‘We’re really quite confused about this, Mummy.’

Naomi swallowed her exasperation. ‘What are you confused about, darling? Exactly? It’s quite simple.’ She screwed up her eyes as the pain worsened, lowered her head and pressed her fingers into her temples. ‘Mummy has a really bad headache. She would really be grateful if one of you would run upstairs and get two paracetamols for her. That’s all.’

‘Let me explain what we don’t understand,’ Luke said. ‘You have a headache. Headaches don’t affect your legs, Mummy. So you are quite capable of going up to the bathroom yourself.’

She saw a cheeky, teasing grin on his face for a fleeting instant, so fleeting she almost thought she had imagined it. Then he got up, shrugged, went upstairs and came down with two capsules.

*

Some while later, Naomi woke, with a start, on the sofa. A rock band she did not recognize was playing on the television, but the sound was muted. She could smell a tantalizing aroma of cooking meat. Was John cooking dinner?

She hauled herself off the sofa and walked through into the kitchen. And stopped in her tracks, in amazement.

Phoebe was perched on a stool, minding a large frying pan on the hob. Luke, on another stool, was dicing peeled potatoes, a cookbook open beside him.

As if sensing her coming into the room, Phoebe turned, with a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth smile. ‘Hi, Mummy!’ she said cheerily.

‘What – what’s going on?’ Naomi said, smiling back.

‘Daddy’s busy working. Because you’re not feeling well, Luke and I decided to cook dinner for us tonight. We’re making Swedish meatballs and Janssen’s Temptation – potatoes with cream and anchovies, which you have every Christmas Eve, and we know you love!’

For some moments, Naomi was speechless.

Lara was cold. Cold and wide awake in her bed in the dormitory building at the foot of the cliff, directly beneath the monastery. A storm was blowing. The Aegean Sea, crashing on the rocks less than a hundred metres away, sounded like it was about to swallow the building, maybe even the entire atoll. Massive explosions of water sounding like thunder.

God loves me, and Jesus loves me, and the Virgin Mary loves me.

And my Disciple loves me.

And I belong.

Those were the things that mattered to Lara. As a child, she had always felt herself belonging on a higher plane than others around her. She felt an outsider, disconnected from her family, unable to fit in at school and to relate to the others there. She was a loner, yet she hated being a loner. All she had wanted was to belong. To be a part of something, to be wanted, needed.

She loved these people she was with now, and the vision they shared. She agreed with every view they held. She loved the fact that they understood you couldn’t just lock yourself away from the world, but sometimes you had to go out into it, tread along its sewers, carry out the Lord’s fight against Satan for Him.

She could hear, suddenly, above the din of the waves, the faint drumming of the wooden gong that summoned the monks to matins, echoing around the monastery walls high above her. It was half past two in the morning.

This was her third January here, and each of them had been equally harsh. Despite the window in her room being shut, she felt the blast of the icy squall outside on her face, and pulled the bedclothes tighter around her.

Then she pulled her hands together.

Praying.

Praying for the man in the photograph on her wooden dresser. Praying with a warm heart and with cold hands that were red and coarse from manual work. That sweet, sweet Disciple, with his gentle voice and his soft touch, and all the dreamy promises they had made to each other.

Timon.

The memories of that week of praying side by side with him in the chapel, and that one night she had been permitted to spend alone with him, still sustained her over three years on. They were preserved in her heart by the love the Virgin Mary had for her, for all three of them, for herself, for beautiful Timon, and for beautiful Saul, asleep in his crib just beyond the end of his bed, who would be two and a half soon.

He had not yet met his father.

She smiled. Imagining Timon’s expression when he saw his child, his son, his boy, his baby, this beautiful baby whom God and the Virgin Mary had given them. The same Virgin Mary who had spared her from having to kill the Infidel Cardelli family in Como. God had sent her to a convent there, while she was pregnant with Saul, to wait for His command to strike against the family and their twin boy and girl spawned from Satan.

But then the Virgin Mary had sent an avalanche of snow down on to the Cardellis’ car as they negotiated a pass in the Dolomites, sweeping them off the road and down into a deep ravine, burying the wreckage beneath a quilt of pure, white flakes.

Come let us reason together, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet they shall be as white as snow. Isaiah 1.

Now, every day and night her prayers were the same. Please God, Sweet Lord Jesus and Blessed Mother Mary, bring Timon home to my arms.

So I may feel his seed entering inside me and grow more babies who will become strong here, away from the sewers of the world. Babies that Timon and I can nurture, who will grow up alongside all the other babies here to be fine, strong people, to become, one day, soldiers in your army, who will go out into the world and destroy evil.

Please bring him home to me soon.

The rain beat down relentlessly on the Disciple’s car. This was weather he had prayed for. On a night like this, no nosey villager would be out walking their dog, wondering what a strange vehicle was doing in the car park behind the schoolhouse.

Inside the little rental Ford it sounded like a never-ending sack of pebbles was being emptied onto the roof. The car smelled of plastic and velour and damp clothes. His body itched all over; he had broken out in a rash.

Nerves.

He felt terribly alone, suddenly, as if God was putting him through this final test, here on this vile night, in this foreign land, with rain spiking the tar-black puddles all around him. But he would do it. For God and for his Master and for the love of Lara, he would do it.