D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

He said his name was Rod. She told him her name was Sarah — the American stepmother’s name had been Sarah, Saree. Surnames among their sort were obviously never used. Neither was the past. He admired her clothes, calling them klutzy, but without the scorn of the young woman in the container depot. She wished she knew more of the mores of the people she had joined. His group wasn’t quite her group -perhaps under different circumstances, with his really quite respectable jeans and sweater, they would have been sworn enemies. She was glad he accepted her. He was young and strong and confident, all the things she wasn’t. Tomorrow frightened her. He’d said he was leaving town. If he’d still have her, she’d tag along, just till they were out of Vincent’s watchful city.

At lights-out a single lamp was left burning yellowly high up under the vaulting. For late-comers, the vicar said, and she was grateful for it. Her day of doing-not-brooding was nearly over. She knew she would not sleep for a long time and she feared the darkness. In darkness brooding would be all that was left.

She lay and stared at the sagging mesh of the bunk above. She thought of the woman lying on it. Would she piss her pit, this woman for whom she should have had some fellow feeling but who was blankets tied with string, old beyond guessing, with poor swollen hands and a way of drinking her tea as if it were in that moment everything? Katherine could not begin to imagine the connections that made her move and stop moving, eat and stop eating.

She thought instead of Vicar Pemberton, made real in the walls about her. His hostel had been an obvious staging point. He had let her in without question, had accepted her just as he had accepted her unhappiness, that other woman’s unhappiness, over the telephone. Perhaps indeed he needed worries not his own. Though now that she had seen him, awkward, forcing himself, unprotected by the distancing device of the telephone, she thought not. He was driven by a larger need. In his vestry, above his table, a card: Come to me all ye that are heavily laden. At some time he had found out, or been found out. Now he was working to make it true.

She understood his connections very well. And felt sad for him. And slept.

Her very early morning rigor was becoming something of a habit. She woke, saw night and was irritated. After breakfast she had a long way to go, and she needed every bit of sleep she could get. She found she was sweating also. That was new. She glanced along the beds and was relieved to see that Rod too was sleepless, sitting propped up against the wall behind his bed. Then suddenly her eyes seemed to diverge, and there were two of him, and then a steady movement of the two of him from left to right that she couldn’t check. Dr Mason’s words rang in her ears: rigor, paralysis, sweating, coordination loss, double vision, incontinence, hallucination, progressive autonomic breakdown bringing on… Rather that than Lord of Upper Egypt.

She closed her eyes, hoping that the incontinence would at least wait until she was out of the hostel.

Then Rod was sitting on the bed beside her. She wondered why. ‘Did I make a noise?’ she said.

‘Not a sound. But I don’t sleep much. I saw you were awake, so—’

‘It’s not drugs.’ She wanted him to know that. ‘Just a thing I’ve got. A… sort of malaria.’ Malaria was an Aimee Paladine disease. It was tidy: you lay and shook, and then got bravely better.

‘Don’t talk,’ he said. ‘You’ll wake up the others.’

She got her hand out from under the bedclothes and reached for his. With her eyes shut it was easier, less of an admission. After a tiny hesitation he let her take his hand. She didn’t mind the hesitation — she was hardly appetizing — but she was glad he overcame it.

She held his hand for a long time. A picture of Harry came into her head, of his hand in hers as she sat beside him on a bed and he slept. Situations recurred, permutated, expressed endlessly the same few pathetic human needs. She wondered, without guilt, what hand if any Harry would now be holding. And, tired out, the figure three hundred thousand circling in her dreams, slept again.

In fact the hand Harry was holding had cost him rather less. It was stout and motherly, and Harry had sought it in anger. Anger that Katherine could make him the husband of a liar and a cheat, could make him ridiculous before a shopful of girls and then unworthy before the all-seeing Vincent. He had sought a pair of breasts not hers, and legs not hers between which he could exercise the skill that had been her special delight. When the skill had failed him he had been folded in such care and professional tenderness that his purpose had faded, and he had sighed, and found in the dark a hand, stout and motherly, that asked nothing he could not afford, and gave, in the dark, everything that he needed.

When Katherine woke sunlight was streaming, crimson and blue, through the windows high above her bed. She instantly remembered the circumstances of her disturbed night and, squirming, was cheered to find that she hadn’t — such a charming phrase — pissed her pit. Next she looked for Rod. He was nowhere to be seen. She didn’t blame him for leaving early, for going on wherever it was without her — now that it was morning she didn’t even mind. She could manage perfectly well on her own.

The noise that had wakened her was the voice of Vicar Pemberton, rising and falling in muddled echoes between the pillars and white marble monuments. Nobody in the dormitory stirred. She worked out that it must be Sunday morning, and that Vicar Pemberton must be praying. Her new freedom allowed her curiosity, so she sat up in bed, slipped on her goggles and sou’wester, and then padded barefoot along the transept in her quilted under-robe.

Drawn by his voice, she approached the screen. Beyond it she saw him, stooping and straightening, bending one by one over a line of three kneeling women and a very blonde little girl. She wondered what he was doing. Behind him thick white candles burned on the altar. It was all very holy, and she wished… Coming quickly to the end of his tiny congregation, the vicar turned away, faced the candles, and raised his voice, the words becoming louder but still confused against the surrounding ancient stonework. His getup, she thought, already a snob, was ever so klutzy.

Suddenly she knew she was being watched. She turned, backed against the smooth wooden columns of the screen. At the far end of the nave, beyond the stoves and the lines of refectory tables, Rod was standing. He moved, and came toward her, trailing his hands on the table tops as he came. She felt his gaze. Was she so important?

‘I’ve been out for a walk around. The rain’s blown over. We’ll be able to get off right after breakfast.’

Then his voice was so ordinary, so safe, that she could have cried. ‘Don’t shout so,’ she said crossly. ‘People are praying.’

She turned back toward the altar and he came and stood behind her and looked over her shoulder. ‘It looks as if the service is just over,’ he whispered. ‘Early morning Communion.’

‘I know that.’ She noticed the big silver cup, no, chalice. ‘The giving of the body and blood.’

‘That’s right.’ She felt him shudder.

‘I think it’s rather beautiful.’

‘Do you?’

‘You sound surprised.’

‘Frankly I am surprised.’

He was saying something more. She stiffened, and waited.

‘I’m not saying I blame you, Katherine, but isn’t that more or less what you’re afraid of? People eating your body and blood?’

‘My name is Sarah.’

‘If you say so.’

She would have run, but his hands were closed tightly on her shoulders. The time and the place were wrong for an undignified scuffle. Besides, running away was useless. She tried to think. How had she been discovered? What should she do now to keep her freedom? Kill him? He had come so near to being her friend she could do it easily. But the idea was too high-pitched. Perhaps she could buy him.