The Running Grave, page 44
Moving among the children to offer encouragement and sharpen pencils, Robin found herself still more disturbed by their behaviour. Now that she paid them individual attention, they were unnervingly ready to be affectionate to her, even though she was a complete stranger. One little girl climbed into Robin’s lap unasked; others played with her hair or cuddled her arm. Robin found their craving for the kind of loving closeness that was forbidden by the church pitiful and distressing.
‘Stop that,’ Shawna told Robin from the front of the class. ‘Thass material possessiveness.’
So Robin gently disengaged herself from the clinging children and moved instead to examine some of the pictures pinned up on the wall, some of which had clearly been drawn by older students, as their subject matter was discernible. Most depicted daily life at Chapman Farm, and she recognised the tower like a giant chess piece which was visible on the horizon.
One picture caught Robin’s attention. It was captioned Aks Tre and showed a large tree with what appeared to be a hatchet drawn on the base of its trunk. She was still looking at this picture, which had evidently been drawn recently given the freshness of the paper, when the classroom door opened behind her.
Turning, Robin saw Mazu, who was wearing long scarlet robes. Total silence fell inside the classroom. The children appeared frozen.
‘I sent Vivienne to the stables to fetch Rowena,’ said Mazu quietly, ‘and I was told you’d removed her from the task I set her.’
‘Oi was told I could choose moi own helper,’ said Shawna, who looked suddenly terrified.
‘From your own group,’ said Mazu. Her calm voice belied the expression of her thin white face with its crooked near-black eyes. ‘Not from any other group.’
‘Oi’m sorry,’ whispered Shawna. ‘I thort—’
‘You can’t think, Shawna. You’ve proven that time and again. But you’ll be made to think.’
Mazu’s gaze ranged over the seated children, alighting on Qing.
‘Cut her hair,’ she told Shawna. ‘I’m tired of seeing that mess. Rowena,’ she said, now looking directly at Robin for the first time, ‘come with me.’
53
A yang line develops below two yin lines and presses upward forcibly. This movement is so violent that it arouses terror…
The I Ching or Book of Changes
Light-headed with fear, Robin crossed the classroom and followed Mazu outside. She wanted to apologise, to tell Mazu she’d had no idea she was transgressing by agreeing to accompany Shawna to the classroom, but she feared unwittingly making her predicament worse.
Mazu paused, a few steps outside the classroom, and turned to look at Robin, who also halted. This was physically the closest the two women had ever been and Robin now realised that, like Taio, Mazu didn’t seem to care much for washing. She could smell her body odour, which was poorly masked by a heavy incense perfume. Mazu said nothing, but simply looked at Robin with her dark, crookedly set eyes, and the latter felt obliged to break the silence.
‘I – I’m really sorry. I didn’t realise Shawna didn’t have the authority to take me from the stables.’
Mazu continued to stare at her without speaking, and Robin again felt a strange, visceral fear tinged with revulsion that couldn’t be entirely explained away by the power the woman held in the church. Niamh Doherty had described Mazu as a large spider; Robin herself had seen her as some malign, slimy thing lurking in a rockpool; yet neither quite captured her strangeness. Robin felt now as though she was staring into a yawning abyss of which the depths were unseeable.
She assumed Mazu expected something more than an apology, but Robin had no idea what it was. Then she heard a rustle of fabric. Glancing down, she saw that Mazu had raised the hem of her robe a few inches to reveal a dirty, sandalled foot. Robin looked back up into those strange, mismatched eyes. A hysterical impulse to laugh rose in her – Mazu couldn’t, surely, be expecting Robin to kiss her foot, as the girls who’d let the toddler escape from the dormitory had done? – but it died at the look on Mazu’s face.
For perhaps five seconds, Robin and Mazu stared at each, and Robin knew this was a test, and that to ask aloud whether Mazu genuinely wanted this tribute would be as dangerous as revealing her disgust or her incredulity.
Just do it.
Robin knelt, bent quickly over the foot, with its black toenails, grazed it with her lips and then stood up again.
Mazu gave no sign that she’d even noticed the tribute, but dropped her robes and walked on as though nothing had happened.
Robin felt shaken and humiliated. She glanced around to see whether anyone had witnessed what had just happened. She tried to imagine what Strike would say, if he’d seen her, and felt another wave of embarrassment pass over her. How could she ever explain why she’d done it? He’d think she was mad.
At Daiyu’s pool, Robin knelt and mumbled the usual observance. Beside her, Mazu said in a low voice,
‘Bless me, my child, and may your righteous punishment fall upon all who stray from The Way.’
Mazu then got up, still without looking at or speaking to Robin, and headed towards the temple. With an upsurge of panic, Robin followed, with a presentiment of what was about to happen. Sure enough, on entering the temple, Robin saw all her former high-level associates, including Amandeep, Walter, Vivienne and Kyle, sitting in a circle on chairs set upon the shining black pentagon-shaped stage. All looked stern. With an increase of her awful foreboding, Robin saw that Taio Wace was also present.
‘Rowena had taken it upon herself to do a different task to the one she was assigned, which is why you couldn’t find her, Vivienne,’ said Mazu, climbing the stairs to the stage and sitting down in a free seat, spreading out her glittering blood red robes as she did so. ‘She has paid the tribute of humility, but we will now find out whether that was an empty gesture. Move your chair into the centre of the circle, please, Rowena. Welcome to Revelation.’
Robin picked up an empty chair and moved it to the centre of the black stage, beneath which lay the deep, dark baptismal pool. She sat down and tried to still her legs, which were shaking, by pressing down on them with palms that had become damp.
The temple lights began to dim, leaving only a spotlight on the stage. Robin couldn’t remember the lights being lowered for any of the other Revelation sessions.
Get a grip, she told herself. She tried to picture Strike grinning at her, but it didn’t work: the present was too real, closing in upon her, even as the faces and figures of those surrounding her grew indistinct in the dark, and her lips were tingling strangely, as though contact with Mazu’s foot had left some acidic residue.
Mazu pointed a long, pale finger and the temple doors banged closed behind Robin, making her jump.
‘A reminder,’ said Mazu calmly, addressing those in the circle, ‘Primal Response Therapy is a form of spiritual cleansing. In this safe, holy space, we use words from the materialist world to counter materialist ideas and behaviours. There will be a purging, not only of Rowena, but of ourselves, as we unearth and dispatch terms we no longer use, but which still linger in our subconsciousness.’
Robin saw the dark figures around her nodding. Her mouth was completely dry.
‘So, Rowena,’ said Mazu, whose face was so pale that Robin could still make it out, with those dark, crookedly set eyes shining. ‘This is the moment for you to confess to things you may have done, or thought, about which you feel deep shame. What would you like to reveal first?’
For what felt like a long time, though was doubtless only seconds, Robin couldn’t think of anything to say at all.
‘Well,’ she began at last, her voice sounding unnaturally loud in the silent temple, ‘I used to work in PR and I suppose there was a lot of focus on appearances and what other people—’
The end of her sentence was drowned in an outbreak of jeering from the circle.
‘False self!’ barked Walter.
‘Deflecting,’ said a female voice.
‘You can’t blame your profession for your behaviour,’ said Amandeep.
Robin’s thought processes were sluggish after days of manual labour. She needed something that would satisfy her inquisitors, but her panicked mind was blank.
‘Nothing to say?’ said Mazu, and Robin could just make out her yellowish teeth in the gloom as she smiled. ‘Well, let’s see whether we can find a way in. Since entering our community, you felt entitled to criticise the colour of my hair, didn’t you?’
There was an intake of breath all around the circle. Robin felt a wave of cold sweat pass over her. Was this why she’d been demoted to farm worker? Because she’d wondered to Penny Brown why Mazu’s hair was still jet black in her forties?
‘What,’ said Mazu, speaking now to the rest of the circle, ‘would you call somebody who judged another person’s looks?’
‘Spiteful,’ said a voice out of the darkness.
‘Shallow,’ said a second.
‘Bitch,’ said a third.
‘I’m sorry,’ Robin said hoarsely, ‘I honestly didn’t mean to—’
‘No, no, there’s no need to apologise to me,’ said Mazu softly. ‘I set no store on physical appearance. But it’s an indication, isn’t it, of what you think is important?’
‘Judge people’s looks a lot, do you?’ asked a female voice from behind Robin.
‘I – I suppose—’
“‘Suppose” is obfuscatory,’ snarled Kyle.
‘You either do or you don’t,’ said Amandeep.
‘Then – I did,’ said Robin. ‘When I worked in PR, there was a tendency—’
‘Never mind tendencies,’ boomed Walter. ‘Never mind PR! What did you do? What did you say?’
‘I remember saying a client looked too big for her dress,’ invented Robin, ‘and she heard me and I felt terrible about it.’
A storm of jeering broke over her. Taio, who was sitting beside his mother, was the only person remaining silent, but he was smiling as he watched Robin.
‘Did you feel terrible, Rowena?’ asked Mazu quietly. ‘Or are you just giving us token examples, to avoid admitting to real shame?’
‘I—’
‘Why was your wedding called off, Rowena?’
‘I – we were arguing a lot.’
‘Whose fault was that?’ demanded Vivienne.
‘Mine,’ said Robin desperately.
‘What did you argue about?’ asked Amandeep.
There shouldn’t be any points of resemblance between your own life and Rowena’s, Strike had said, but he wasn’t here, stupefied by tiredness and fear, forced to come up with a story on the spot.
‘I… thought my fiancé was kind of… he didn’t have a proper job, wasn’t earning much…’
She was reversing the truth: it was Matthew who’d complained about her poor salary when she’d started working for Strike, Matthew who’d thought private detection a joke of a career.
The rest of the group began to call her names, their voices echoing off the dark walls, and Robin could make out only a few individual words: mercenary fucking bitch, gold-digger, greedy slag. Taio’s smile was broadening.
‘Tell us specifically what you said to your fiancé,’ demanded Walter.
‘That his boss was taking advantage of him—’
‘The exact words.’
‘“She’s taking advantage of you”, “she’s only keeping you on because you’re cheap”—’
While they jeered at and insulted her, she dredged her memory for the things Matthew had said about Strike during their marriage.
‘—“she fancies you”, “it’s a matter of time before she makes a move”—’
Now the surrounding circle began to shout.
‘Controlling cow!’
‘Jealous, self-centred—’
‘Stuckup, selfish bitch!’
‘Go on,’ Mazu said to Robin.
‘—and he loved the job,’ said Robin, her mouth now so dry her lips were sticking to her teeth, ‘and I made it as hard as I could for him to continue with it—’
The shouts became louder, echoing off the temple walls. In the dim light she could see fingers pointing at her, flashes of teeth, and still Taio smiled. Robin knew she was supposed to cry, that mercy came only once the person in the middle of the circle had broken down, but even though she could now see little dots of light popping in front of her eyes, something stubborn in her resisted.
Now the circle demanded the excavation of intimate details and ugly scenes. Robin embellished scenes from her marriage, reversing her and Matthew’s positions: now it was she who’d thought her partner was taking too many risks.
‘What risks?’ demanded Amandeep. ‘What was his job?’
‘He was kind of—’
But Robin couldn’t think: what risky job could her imaginary partner have had?
‘—I don’t mean physical risks, it was more that he was sacrificing our financial security—’
‘Money’s very important to you, isn’t it, Rowena?’ called Mazu, over the continuing abuse of the circle.
‘I suppose it was before I came here—’
The slurs became more derisory: the group didn’t believe that she’d changed. Mazu let the insults roll over Robin for a full minute. Voices echoed off the dark walls, calling her worthless, pathetic, a craven snob, a narcissist, a materialist, contemptible—
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something white and glowing high above her on the balcony running round the temple. Vivienne screamed and rose from her seat, pointing.
‘Look! Look! Up there! A little girl, looking down at us! I saw her!’
‘That will be Daiyu,’ said Mazu calmly, glancing up at the now empty balcony. ‘She manifests sometimes when psychic energy is particularly strong. Or she may have come as a warning.’
Silence fell. The group was unsettled. Some continued to stare up at the balcony, others glanced over their shoulders, as though they feared the spirit would come closer. Robin seemed to feel the dull thud of her heart in her throat.
‘What finally made your fiancé end the relationship, Rowena?’ asked Mazu.
Robin opened her mouth, then closed it. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, use Matthew as her model here. She refused to pretend she’d slept with someone else.
‘Come on!’ barked Walter. ‘Out with it!’
‘She’s trying to invent something,’ sneered Vivienne.
‘Tell us the truth!’ said Amandeep, his eyes shining through his glasses, ‘Nothing but the truth!’
‘I lied to him,’ said Robin hoarsely. ‘His mother died, and I lied about being able to get back in time to help with the funeral, because there was something I wanted to do at work.’
‘You selfish, self-centred bitch,’ spat Kyle.
‘You piece of shit,’ said Vivienne.
Hot tears burst from Robin’s eyes. She doubled over, feigning nothing. Her shame was real: she really had lied to Matthew as she’d described, and she’d felt guilty about it for months afterwards. The cacophony of insults and taunts of the group continued until Robin heard, with a thrill of terror, a high-pitched childish voice joining in, louder than all of the others.
‘You’re nasty. You’re a nasty person.’
The stage tilted. With a shriek, Robin fell sideways off her chair as it tipped over. The rest of the circle were also thrown off balance: they, too, fell off their lurching chairs, Walter crashing to the ground with a yell of pain. Kyle’s chair leg caught Robin on the shoulder as she slid across the smooth surface of the tipping lid, preventing herself from falling into the sliver of black water revealed beneath only by throwing out her arm and pushing against the rim of the pool.
‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ whimpered Vivienne, scrambling to reach the foot-wide rim of the stage, where Mazu and Taio stood, untroubled.
Everyone was fighting to make their way off the slippery, tilted surface: all seemed to have a horror of slipping into the dark water, welcoming as it had seemed during their baptisms. Most of the group helped each other, but no hands were offered to Robin, who had to heave herself onto the ledge of the pool alone, her shoulder smarting where Kyle’s chair had hit it. When everyone had got off the tilted stage, Mazu waved her hand. The lid covering the water moved gently back into place and the temple lights went up.
‘Daiyu’s very sensitive to certain kinds of wickedness,’ said Mazu, her dark eyes on Robin, who stood tear stained and breathless. ‘She had no funeral herself, and so she’s particularly sensitive about the sanctity of rituals surrounding death.’
Though most of Robin’s group mates looked merely frightened, and continued to peer around them for a further sign of Daiyu, a few were looking accusingly at Robin. She couldn’t find her voice to say that she had, in fact, attended Matthew’s mother’s funeral. She was certain any attempt at self-defence would make things worse.
‘We’ll end Revelation here,’ said Mazu. ‘When Daiyu manifests in the temple, things can become dangerous. You may leave for lunch.’
Robin turned to leave, but before she’d taken a step towards the temple doors, a hand closed around her upper arm.
54
Six in the second place
Difficulties pile up…
He wants to woo when the time comes.
The maiden is chaste,
She does not pledge herself.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
‘You’re all right now,’ said a low voice in Robin’s ear, as Mazu swept past. ‘It’s over. You did well.’
Robin turned, realised it was Taio Wace who’d taken hold of her, and wrenched her arm free. His expression darkened.
‘Sorry,’ said Robin, mopping her tearstained face on her sleeve. ‘I – thank you—’
‘That’s better.’
Taio replaced his hand around her upper arm, the knuckles pressing into her breast, and this time, Robin didn’t resist.
‘Revelation’s always difficult, the first time you do it,’ said Taio.
Robin permitted him to lead her out of the temple, trying to stem the streaming of her nose with her free forearm. Mazu had disappeared, but the rest of the group was now heading for Daiyu’s pool. They threw furtive glances at Taio and Robin as they crossed the courtyard without stopping.
