Mrs Caliban and other stories Page 21

  He dropped all his duties and lived a life of ease. Most of the brothers felt that he had a certain amount of justification for it, though not necessarily because he had been touched by God. Everyone knew now that he had turned or been turned into a woman, and that was enough to excuse a lot. That in itself was a breach of discipline. It was breaking the rules like nobody’s business.

  A few people agreed with Brother Adrian and sat with him for hours at a stretch, discussing just what evil, unnatural, or evilly unnatural, or unnaturally evil cause could be behind the whole thing. But most of the young ones were on Anselm’s side. And in his own wing of the building he became a focal point for afternoon meetings. He had a little club of admirers. They were zealously noted by Adrian and his followers, who reported the members to Frederick. But when Frederick suggested stamping out the coterie, Francis persuaded him that that would just make everything worse. They were to wait.

  ‘There’s a right time for everything, you know,’ Frederick said. ‘Remember the Bible. Sometimes it’s a mistake to wait.’

  ‘Not this time,’ Francis told him. ‘And that isn’t what that passage is about, anyway. Calm down, Frederick.’

  Anselm’s friends brought him quantities of pillows, many of them silk and satin, to help support his back. He lay reclined on them like an oriental princess, smiling sweetly at the other brothers as they confided their troubles to him.

  They drank coffee or tea or wine. Sometimes they’d flirt with him. Brother Elmo was especially obstreperous. You could still see the pierce-mark where he’d worn the earring in his left ear; he’d received the call, so he said, on a trip. ‘A trip to where?’ Brother William had asked. ‘A trip to outer space, man. A trip on speed. Get in focus, Billy.’

  Elmo was delighted with Anselm’s transfiguration. It proved, he claimed, that he’d been right all along: anything could happen in life, and everything did, only most people were so unaware, so lacking in powers of observation, that they didn’t notice. He stared possessively at Anselm and asked, ‘So when are you going to let us have some fun with you, babe? It better be soon, before you get too big.’

  ‘Don’t be naughty,’ Anselm said. He made a motion of hitting at Elmo with a small peacock-feather fan that had come wrapped up with one of the pillows.

  ‘Come on, Anselm. We’re your friends, aren’t we? Who else are you going to play around with if it isn’t your friends?’

  ‘It’s not a joke.’

  ‘At least let us see your tits.’

  Anselm fanned himself lazily.

  ‘We’ll bring you some extra food. You’re eating for two now, remember.’

  ‘I do have these terrible strong desires for certain tastes: dill pickles, cheesecake, raspberry ice cream, walnut and pecan mousse, smoked mackerel and watermelons.’

  ‘We’ll get them for you.’

  ‘Promise?’

  All the brothers nodded vehemently. Anselm undid his robe and exposed the full, cup-shaped breasts of which he was now immensely proud. There was a silence until he started to pull the robe together again.

  ‘Wait,’ Dominic said, and William begged, ‘Not yet. I haven’t finished looking.’

  ‘Crazy, man,’ Elmo said.

  ‘Weird,’ said Dominic.

  ‘Cute. They look just like a girl.’

  ‘Weird.’

  ‘Can I touch one of them, Anselm?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Why not? I just want to feel.’

  ‘That’s all meant for the baby, you know.’

  ‘How did you work it?’ William asked. ‘How did you get them to grow? Did you wake up in the morning and find them like that?’

  ‘No, it happened gradually. They got a little bigger every day.’

  ‘Did it hurt?’

  ‘Not hurt, exactly. Everything felt very tender and sore all over my chest. And so forth.’ He snapped up the front of his robe again.

  Brother James, at the back of the group, said he thought he had an explanation. ‘Maybe –’ he said, ‘it’s got something to do with radioactive fall-out from the atom bombs.’

  ‘Or Mount St Helen’s,’ Dominic added.

  ‘It was the angel,’ Anselm said. ‘I told them in the first place. It was Gabriel.’

  *

  ‘They’re sitting around drinking wine in there,’ Frederick said. ‘Next thing you know, there’ll be luxury and viciousness all over the place. Everybody knows about the stimulating properties of alcohol.’

  ‘We should,’ Francis said. ‘We make a living out of it. They’re just talking.’

  ‘It makes me jumpy.’

  ‘How can you stop them being interested? It’s an absolutely extraordinary thing.’

  ‘It’s unnatural.’

  ‘It’s what happened to Our Blessed Lady.’

  ‘I don’t want to get into that argument. Anyway, when it happened to Mary, it wasn’t a sin. It was pure. This is terrible.’

  ‘You’ve been listening to Brother Adrian.’

  ‘He talks a lot of sense sometimes, in spite of being a little over-emphatic’

  ‘Crass. He’s a crass man, and frightened. And now he’s infected you. Did you drink up all the whisky? That’s right, he always has that effect on you.’

  ‘Unnatural,’ Frederick insisted.

  ‘How can it be unnatural if it’s happened?’

  ‘It shouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘What do you call conception through the ear-hole? That’s supposed to be the way the Holy Ghost got in, isn’t it?’

  ‘We have to regard these events in a philosophic light, as representing symbolic manifestations of spiritual truths.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘And Brother Anselm just isn’t in that league. Also, the whole thing is against the teachings of Mother Church.’

  ‘Nonsense. A miracle is a miracle is a miracle.’

  ‘Is that what you really think this is?’

  ‘I don’t know what it is. Truly.’

  ‘Brother Duncan says he thinks Anselm was androg … an andr … whatever the word is.’

  ‘Hermaphrodite?’

  ‘And he lived all one way for years, even though the other half was there all the time, lurking under the surface, just waiting to show itself – which it finally did, all at once.’

  ‘Complete with child?’

  ‘No. That came later. First of all he hid it and had carnal relations with somebody in here, and when he found out he was pregnant, then he came to you.’

  ‘Neat.’

  ‘The whole rigmarole is having a profoundly unsettling effect on the order.’

  ‘Especially on you.’

  ‘On me too, of course. I don’t deny it. But look at Adrian. And in the other direction – what about Marcus?’

  Brother Marcus had become a regular visitor to Anselm’s room. He had been so completely won over that it was now his greatest pride to be responsible for making Anselm look as attractive as possible. He delighted in finding new arrangements in which to set Anselm’s luxuriant dark hair, which was growing so quickly that it was already down to his shoulders. ‘Let’s put it up today,’ Marcus would suggest, or, ‘How about side-swept for a change?’ He came every morning and evening, his sausage-like fingers deft among the glossy masses of hair. He had managed to acquire a set of pins and ornaments for keeping the hair in place and twining it into piled-up shapes. And while he worked, a light of happiness shone from his face. He had changed. He’d always looked as strong and coarse as a picture of a Victorian butcher, but now he displayed moods of elephantinely delicate playfulness and good humour.

  ‘God Almighty,’ Brother Adrian said under his breath as Anselm moved up to the table with his slow, billowing gait and his elaborately perched hair-do, ‘it’s like sitting down to dinner with the Whore of Babylon.’

  ‘You should be so lucky,’ Brother Robert told him. ‘What I hear is: he doesn’t sell it and he doesn’t give it away for free. Admiration from afar is
his line.’

  ‘Maybe he’s saving himself for another bout with the supernatural.’

  ‘If it’s true,’ Brother James said, ‘no amount of repentance is going to make up for the way you’re talking about him now.’

  ‘It isn’t true,’ Adrian told him. ‘And it’s a blasphemy even to think it might be.’

  *

  Before Frederick’s era, the monastery had been run by Father Clement. He had been a rather absent-minded, scholarly person, until Vatican Two. And then he threw over the traces with a vengeance. As Frederick had said at the time, no one could have suspected such an intense urge towards chaos in the man. All at once Father Clement espoused every cause and crackpot movement that had been hitting the headlines for the past three decades while he’d been supposed to be tilling the vineyards and praising the Lord. He went from Flower Power to Hard Rock in three weeks. He became interested in Scientology. And he allowed anybody in: Hell’s Angels, ballet dancers, health food freaks and gigolos.

  That was the trouble with tolerance: you could get too much of it. Too much – and people stampeded over you. The time came when Father Clement welcomed a set of what were to anyone’s eyes ordinary winos so far gone in the abuse of alcohol that they were already brain-damaged. There was a scandal. The papers got hold of it. It was deplorable; atrocious. Father Clement was now, so everyone believed, in Hawaii, teaching Shakespeare to the Japanese. And the monastery was still awaiting a replacement, although in the meantime Brother Frederick was in command. It meant a great deal to Frederick that his interregnum should be peaceable and well-ordered. A promotion to the top was more than merely possible.

  He had thought that he’d begin by weeding out the more sinister or cranky newcomers, but by the time he took over, the men were leaving so quickly they were practically tripping over each other trying to get to the door. They were like the rats leaving a sinking ship. And then, miraculously, the new influx arrived, even younger: a fresh generation of believers; however, their belief wasn’t of the old quality, their education up to the same level. Some of them had had hardly any religious instruction at all. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ Brother Robert had said over his wine one evening. ‘God’, Frederick had answered grandly, ‘does not need to beg.’ Robert had given him a pitying look and shaken his head, and almost immediately been proven right: a bad flu rampaged through the order, turning the place into a geriatric ward. The old monks began to die off. Those who didn’t die had to be cleaned, fed and manoeuvred on to bedpans. Frederick realized that he wasn’t going to be able to kick many young men out. The solution would be to keep them there and change them into better monks. And, all in all, having had inferior material to work with, he hadn’t done too badly. He was proud of his record.

  Sometimes he thought about the ones his own age who had left – who had voluntarily jettisoned the calling to which they had been dedicated, reneged on their vocations. He thought of them as deserters or, at times, escapees. They thought of him, too. A lot of them regularly sent postcards and letters back from the outside. When he was feeling particularly glum and grouchy, he’d remember the messages:

  I never knew what living was like till I left the order.

  What are you trying to prove?

  Come on in, the water’s fine.

  Freddie, you’re a jerk to stay.

  Often the more strait-laced they had been, the more fatuous their greetings were. The Classicists had gone, to become pragmatists. The Romantics stayed.

  Brother Francis used to say that there was no need to keep anyone who didn’t have faith. As far as the vineyards went, they could hire workers. The order was dedicated to God – there was no necessity, and should be none, to accept anyone below standard. But Robert told him, ‘We just cannot afford to turn down men who come to us for our novelty-value. We have to assume that there’s a genuine desire underlying the frivolous impulse.’ And it was true that now you could see he’d been as acute about that as about the grapes. They’d had many vintage years for wine lately; not so many for men. They needed the numbers.

  Most of Anselm’s admirers were entirely untutored; they’d had no religious training in childhood. Many of them had come to their faith, as he had, under the pressure of some dramatic event or crisis. Elmo, who had served with the Oakland Fire Department, had preserved the lives of people who later tried to murder each other; and he had failed to rescue the innocent. He’d had a breakdown after a particularly ferocious tenement conflagration in which they only member of a large and quarrelsome family that he hadn’t been able to save was the baby: it lay at the top of the house, its lungs scorched by smoke, while the demented relatives down below shrieked with frustration and beat him nearly to death, calling him a son of a bitch and a bastard. He had been furious, ashamed, and found that whenever he remembered the helpless baby up at the top of the fiery house, he wanted to cry. It took him six months to work out his thoughts and feelings. In the end, it came down to a simple formula: if there was nothing, he couldn’t stand it; but if there was something, then in some way – even though no one knew exactly how – the baby was all right.

  William’s conversion had come through someone else: his young wife, who had fallen from an open stairway on a pier and hit one of the boats near their own. She had injured her spine so badly that at first the doctors thought she’d die in a few hours. It took her weeks, and during that time she was in agony. William had stayed with her right up to the end, when she suddenly received a revelation of God and said that the pain had vanished completely. She was dying then; they had a few final days together and William caught her belief as if it had been a germ in the hospital. But he didn’t want to be cured of it afterwards. He was happy with the monastic life – that is, he was happy until the strange business about Anselm took over.

  Dominic’s was another case of hospitalization, though he had been the chief actor in the drama: he had been struck by lightning, thrown forty feet into a neighbouring field, and was in the hospital for four weeks recovering. Then he was at home for three months, just thinking about it. Twelve cows in the same field had been killed by the bolt. He had an idea that he’d been given a warning of some kind because his life wasn’t the model of righteousness it was designed to be. A cow was a very big animal; twelve of them had died, yet he had been spared. That seemed to be a sign. He made preparations to try to save his soul.

  James was different. He’d gone to Italy on a holiday after college. ‘I was such a hick,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know anything. Some friends asked me to the opera, and that’s how it began. I stayed longer than I’d intended to. Then another friend took me to see the mosaics in Ravenna. And that’s how I became a Christian. I had no idea of the way of life. That all came later. I’m probably the only example you’ll ever meet of the redemptive power of art. Nature, and human nature, is so much more impressive.’

  ‘And how about you, Anselm?’ the brothers asked.

  Anselm had started out in the order by keeping the books, as he had done in the world outside. He had entered just in time to take over from a Brother Timothy, who died, as everyone had expected, the next day. In view of the fact that the auditing was just about to come up, Anselm’s arrival was seen as providential.

  He had been trained as an accountant, had jobs in various small firms and then begun to work in large corporations, finally settling in a well-paid and interesting job at a bank. He was ready to branch out in his career and aim for the heights, when one day he saw a newsreel about surfboarding. The next morning he quit work and went down to the beach.

  He had decided to become an expert. Only the experts could ride the big waves out in the islands: the ones like the one in the movie, which had shown a huge wall of green glass quivering forward, and – tracing a thin white line across the middle of it – a tiny dot: the surfer. He wanted to be good enough to go through the really dangerous waves – the ones that curled over on themselves, forming a tube, so that you could ride down the centre as if going
through a tunnel; but, because your feet would be lashed to the board in case it bounced up, threw you, and came back to hit you on the head at a hundred miles an hour, you’d be in danger of losing your foot: if a sharp piece of coral caught you as you were going by, that was it – the foot would be sliced off. At least that would be better, the other surfers told him, than getting killed by your board.

  He got night work in factories and as a watchman in warehouses. He finally found a job in a vast complex of storage buildings where he worked with two men who agreed with him to spell each other so that two of them could always get six hours’ unbroken sleep every night. And then he found the right day, when all the waves were perfect. And the right wave – just like the one in the newsreel – which he knew would never end; he’d be able to ride it for ever all around the world from ocean to ocean.

  And then all at once, unexpectedly, he was in the water. Something had slammed him hard on his head, shoulders and back and he was under the surface, not knowing which way was up. He must have taken a breath instinctively and saved his life that way. But soon he started to thrash around in terror. He needed air. He fought wildly – luckily without success, since the water itself buoyed him to the surface against his efforts. He was saved. And from those moments of remembered fear, his wish for a faith was born. Looking back, he figured out that – unlikely as it seemed – he must have been struck by some kind of fish jumping from the sea; a board or any other hard object would have broken every bone in his body. But the agent of the accident was a minor question. The truly puzzling mystery was his survival.

  He simply couldn’t understand how he had escaped death if something else hadn’t been helping him. What could it have been? What was more powerful than a great force of nature like the sea?

  ‘That was how it started,’ he said. ‘I tried to think it out. But now I know thought is useless when it comes to the important things.’