Andrew McGahan - Wonders of a Godless World

But to the archangel, his book was the most precious item in the world, even though it was worn and battered, its front cover missing, its many pages creased and greasy from where his fingers ran over the lines. The youth studied it perpetually. He prayed a lot too, on his knees. The orphan couldn’t quite grasp how prayer worked. There was a powerful being somewhere in the sky it seemed—a god —and other beings too, and prayer was how people talked to them. Even normal folk did it. Yet the orphan had searched the sky, many times, and never seen anyone up there.

But that was an old puzzle, and unsolvable. Anyway, the young man wasn’t in hospital because of his prayer. He was there because, as a teenage boy, he had begun harming himself. He cut himself with knives. To the death almost. Suicidal, the authorities declared, and sent him to the back wards. Like the duke, he had been placed in the locked ward at first, but the suicide attempts had abated, and now, as long as he had his book, he was no threat to himself or to anyone. He was, indeed, angelic.

He also had a very big penis, which the nurses liked to joke about. Sometimes they flirted with him, but he never noticed. The orphan didn’t fully understand the jokes, but she too rather fancied the archangel. And not just because he was so handsome. There was a hunger in him, she saw, a passion in the way he studied his book and in the way his lips moved when he prayed, that made something turn pleasantly in her stomach, imagining what those lips might be like on her own.

But of course he never noticed the orphan any more than he noticed the nurses. Even if he ever did, what would he see? A fat, ugly girl, mopping the floor. No, she wasn’t a fool, there was no point dreaming about that.

Lastly, there was the virgin . She was not much more than a girl, slender and slight, but the orphan found her the most intriguing crematorium inmate of all. There was an ethereal air about her. When she moved, she drifted . Languid. Indifferent to her surroundings. In fact, she barely seemed aware of her surroundings. She might have been blind, and deaf too. She never spoke, and if she was touched, she would turn away with an aloof displeasure, and shift carefully out of reach.

And yet she wasn’t really blind or deaf, the orphan knew, because the virgin liked to watch television. There were two sets in the back wards. One was in the main dayroom, placed high on a wall, behind wire mesh, where it was yelled at (or occasionally pelted with food) by crowds of inmates. But the other was in the crematorium, in the little dayroom, where the virgin had it to herself. Whenever it was switched on, a dreamy light would come into her eyes and she would fold her long legs to sit on the floor in front of the screen. She could sit unmoving like that all day, watching.

But if books were a riddle to the orphan, then television was an utter mystery. She knew that everyone else saw something fascinating on the screen, but all she ever saw were patterns of colour, randomly swirling. It didn’t matter how hard she tried. When she was very young, her mother had often left her alone in front of the television for hours on end. She had gazed at their little set until her head hurt, the flickering light teasing and promising her, eternally on the verge of becoming something …but invariably she’d had to look away, eyes aching, before she could see what it was.

Nor could she understand the sounds a television set made. Or the sounds that came out of a radio. They could be hypnotic, those sounds, rising and falling like peculiar voices, or thumping with rhythms that matched the beat of her heart. But if there was meaning there, it eluded her. So it baffled the orphan greatly that the girl in the crematorium apparently saw and heard so much when watching TV, her eyes fixed, her head tilted in repose, her mouth open in a distant rapture.

The staff called her the virgin out of mockery. There was her hatred of physical contact, for one thing. But it was also because of her only relative—an elderly grandmother who sometimes came to visit. The old woman would berate the girl endlessly for being such a disappointment and a burden. Oh, if the girl had been marriageable, the grandmother would declare to anyone nearby, it might have been different. Once, men had come calling. Men with money, men with fine houses. But a woman had duties, and what man would want a wife—even a beautiful one—who did nothing but watch TV all day, and who would shrink away every time he reached between her legs?

Well, she would find no man now, not in a madhouse. And with that settled, the old woman would be on her way. The nurses would laugh about it once she was gone, but the orphan never did. She didn’t know what delusion possessed the girl’s mind, but she knew one thing: she didn’t like the grandmother any more than the virgin did.

The foreigner wasn’t like any of these four, and didn’t belong in the crematorium, but that was of no importance to the nurses. They never intended that he should mix with the others anyway. He was a devil and needed to be isolated. The crematorium had a storeroom—reached down a short hall from the dayroom—and it was in there, on his own, that they meant to finally settle him.

The orphan herself helped to convert the room into accommodation, and she did not like the feel of it very much. There was barely space to install a bed, with one narrow chair beside it, and there was no window, only a grate that led into the blackness of the old chimney. The room was, in fact, the remains of the original furnace. It was dim and stuffy, and body parts had been burnt there once.

But it wasn’t for her to question the decisions of the nurses. And she was on hand again when they transferred the foreigner from the geriatric ward. He was in a wheelchair, sitting up calmly, his eyes open and clear. But he looked neither left nor right as he was rolled through the hallways and then down the passage to the crematorium. The place was empty. The duke, the witch, the archangel, they were all elsewhere. Even the virgin was away from her television. So none of them saw him arrive. The nurses navigated the chair through to the storeroom, and then manhandled the foreigner into bed. His eyes were open the whole time. And they were still open, staring up, the orphan saw, as they closed the door to leave him there, alone in the dark.

But even though the foreigner was now safely isolated and confined in his cell, the orphan couldn’t put him out of her mind.

Why that should be, she didn’t know. For all his mystery, he was just another patient, one of dozens that she had to attend to in her rounds. Among them were inmates she’d known for years, inmates who talked to her and laughed with her; inmates who played hide and seek with her when it was shower time, who loved to play in the mud when it rained, who did a thousand interesting things that the foreigner didn’t; inmates she liked and inmates she hated. But at the end of each evening, as she lay in her bed, the only face that came into her thoughts was his.

True, she spent considerable time with him. Someone had to spoonfeed him his mush and give him water. Someone had to change his sheets, and sponge his body down, and wrestle him into a wheelchair for toilet trips. If the nurses were busy—and they were always busy—many of those tasks fell to the orphan. Indeed it seemed that most of the tasks involving the foreigner fell to her. But that didn’t explain her fixation. She dealt every day with patients who were likewise unconscious, and sad as it might be, such inmates were little more than bodies to her—an anonymous collection of mouths and bowels and bladders that merely needed to be fed and cleaned up after.