Fallow Heart Page 4

  The priest was at the far end of the church’s central aisle, preparing his teachings, beneath what Lori had come to know as the Three Mysteries. These were three sections of the highest parts of the ceiling, each adorned with five impressive stained-glass windows. From what she’d learned, years ago in Sister Agnes’s Sunday School, they represented different stages of the life of Jesus, from his earlier joys, to the agony of his death, and the miracle of his resurrection. It was the Sorrowful Mysteries that she found herself honing in on as they walked closer and closer to the altar, the tightness in her chest increasing with every footfall. The sight of Jesus, his crown of thorns digging deep into his bloodied head, was a little too much to bear.

  As she looked away, towards the two carved booths of the confessional, Lori caught a pair of eyes watching her. She smiled instinctively at the hazel gaze following her movements, recognising the youthful face that didn’t seem to have aged at all in the last four years. Sister Agnes was an imposing woman in her late thirties, easily over six feet, and her clothing gave her size all the more grandeur, the black habit ending several inches higher than it ought to. She nodded at Lori gently, extending one hand despite the set of pews between them. Her grandfather gave her shoulder an insistent nudge.

  “Go on,” he told her. “It’s all arranged.”

  By the time the priest had begun to address the congregation, his voice was a muffled echo through a thick wooden door. In a side-room where Lori used to draw crayoned pictures of the Ascension, she and Sister Agnes sat with a warm pot of tea.

  “So where did the Sunday School move to?” Lori asked, pouring milk into her cup from a cow-shaped miniature jug.

  “The next room over,” Agnes replied, her voice strong but quiet. “We don’t get as many children as we used to. I’m afraid this room has become something of a scriptorium for me now.”

  Lori glanced down at the glass coffee table as she picked up her teacup. The space was indeed covered with paperwork and books. There were computer print-outs, highlighted in yellow and pink, as well as Bibles and pamphlets with bookmarks sticking out at all angles. Nearest to Lori, there was also a handwritten list, with a series of names that she couldn’t make sense of. They caught her eye nonetheless, if only because they had been written so deliberately, circled and underlined, with dots beside them, as if the author had been tapping the pen on the page as they deliberated each and every one.

  “Pamukkale, Trout Run Road, Fengdu, Nicaragua…” Lori read. “Are these place names? I didn’t think nuns did much travelling?”

  “I’m cross-referencing some holy sites,” Agnes replied. She cleared her throat a little, and Lori looked up to find a kind smile crossing her features. “I suppose… you don’t want to talk about it,” she said carefully.

  “Granddad’s already told you it all,” Lori answered flatly, “or I wouldn’t be in here.”

  It wasn’t that she wanted to be belligerent with Agnes – the good sister had never done anything to upset her in all the years she’d been made to attend St Werburgh’s – but it was starting to feel like Lori was incapable of talking about anything else. The only other thing she could discuss was the antlered beast, but knowing where to even begin with that was quite impossible. She let the teacup warm her hands for a moment, then took a long draw of the hot, refreshing liquid.

  “You’ve grown so much, Lorelai.” The Sister smiled again.

  Yeah. Outwards.

  The tightness in Lori’s chest returned for a moment. She swallowed hard.

  “I should be grown-up enough to handle this, shouldn’t I?” she asked. Sister Agnes cocked her head a little, but did not speak. “I mean,” Lori continued, her voice starting to shudder a little, “that I’m seventeen now. Life and death… Well, bad things happen. I’m almost an adult. I should be learning to cope.”

  “No-one expects you to cope alone, my child,” Agnes answered. “Timothy - excuse me, your grandfather - is concerned that you might internalize the pain and confusion that you’re feeling. I won’t push you to speak. I want you to know that you can. And that the church is here for you in your time of need, as your family are.”

  Lori’s eyes wandered back down to the table. The teacup rattled in her hand, bone china chattering as her hands shook. The beast was back. Red eyes watching her, glowing up and burning into hers. How was it possible? How it could be here now? Lori’s mouth fell open, a dry squeal in place of the scream she wanted to let rip. She could see it, inches away, the huge horns and gaping jaws. The teacup fell from her grip, falling towards the beast itself. Covering its image in a thin layer of weak, beige liquid.

  Lori blinked. She glanced under the table itself, then quickly spun a panicked glance around the room. On the wall to her left there was a painting. It had never been in the room when she used to attend Sunday School, for it would have terrified the kids who gazed upon it. A devilish figure with antler-like horns was flanked by three holy figures, who seemed to be trying to vanquish it. This was the garish vision she had seen, reflected in the glass of the coffee table. When Lori twisted back in her seat, she found Agnes mopping up the tea with a handkerchief. Lori was shaking a little, and drew in a deep breath which made her whole body quake.

  “I’m so sorry,” she mumbled, a guilty glance at the now-chipped teacup.

  “No matter,” Agnes answered. “What happened to you, dear? Are you feeling unwell?”

  “A bit flushed,” she replied. “It must be the tea.”

  The spilled tea had spread to the nearest edges of Agnes’s books and paperwork before the nun could catch its flow. One page in particular was soaked, a pink highlighted passage starting to melt before Lori’s eyes. The marked words caught her attention:

  Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Matthew 16:18

  “Gates of Hell,” Lori murmured, her spine tingling.

  “It might be better if you focused upon the rock,” Agnes said softly. “The idea that the church is built on the solid foundations of faith. It’s here to ground you, my child, if you’ll let it.”

  Lori couldn’t quite reach that idea. All she could think of was two vast iron gates with spikes attached, like the jaws of the beast that had almost eaten her alive.

  Boys, and all their stupidities

  One night at Granddad and Huw’s spanned into two, and Lori went to college on Monday with a heavy, unsettled sensation in her gut. It had been brewing the longer she stayed away from home, for it was all too clear to Lori that her grandfather had wanted to keep her in a bubble whilst the rest of the world went on spinning without her. Now, as she stepped out of the Clio onto the bustling campus, the whole world seemed to revolve back into place. It was strange, not having seen her mother for two nights, and the Monday morning shift she usually worked at The Greasy Spoon was cancelled too. It was threatening to rain that afternoon, and Lori lifted the peak of her hoodie to see back into the car as its engine gave a little rev.

  “See you next Saturday, if not sooner,” Granddad said.

  “Sooner?” Lori asked, raising a brow.

  Her grandfather gave a little shrug. It was unusual to see a full smile on his face, wry as he was, and it looked as though he was trying his utmost to present one. Lori didn’t like the idea that Granddad was pushing himself like that. More than anything, she wanted life to return to normal now, and as quickly as possible.

  “Sooner if you need me,” he replied.

  “It’s all good,” she assured him. “Really.”

  With a nod, he let her go, and Lori turned to brave the college world alone. She often dreaded Mondays, but most especially when there had been some sort of incident in class the previous week. A cruel word, a nasty smile, a bottle of water splashed up her skirt – those were the kind of things that had happened in her first year, none of them particularly bad on their own, but certainly enough to build an impending sense of dread. Lori realised now that her dread had moved onto things that ma
ttered. Life and death. Pain and blood. College, for all its faults, was now a welcome distraction.

  “Yeah. It happened on Eastgate Street. My auntie was down at New Look. She heard the screaming. But she didn’t get through the crowd to see the body. Someone had already covered it up with a coat.”

  Lori caught the conversation as she passed a bench beside a tree, and she paused without even thinking about it. Slowly, she took the old phone she’d borrowed from Granddad out of her hoodie pocket, pretending to tap the screen as she let her gaze wander back over her shoulder. Two girls shared the bench and the gossip, one of whom was in Lori’s Spanish class. She’d never spoken to either of them outright, never even exchanged an awkward glance. Spanish Class Girl had wavy hair, brown with a single red streak. She was toying with the strand animatedly as she recounted her auntie’s story.

  “No shit,” said the other girl, a pretty blonde with dark roots. “Was it really half a body?”

  “It was all over Twitter,” Spanish Class Girl replied. “Some people even took photos of it, but they got taken down in, like, seconds or something. I saw one though. It was disgusting.”

  Lori flashed to the truth, the close-up view she’d had of poor Pauline, torn in half and tossed away like trash. The girls behind her were chatting as though it was a horror movie they’d seen at the Vue, not a real woman with a gruesome fate.

  “Rich Moss told me it fell from the roof of Debenhams,” the blonde said.

  “Near enough,” replied her friend, curls bouncing as she nodded. “My auntie told me. And I was like ‘Jesus, what sort of psycho cuts a person in half and throws them off a roof?’ It’s sick.”

  Not cut, Lori thought. Torn. With teeth. Or horns. Or antlers.

  She shut her eyes, her throat tight and hot. Pocketing her grandfather’s old phone, she forced herself away from the girls and their gossip. Perhaps she should have expected this, for the incident had happened on a busy Saturday in the middle of the city centre. It was basically Mecca for girls like that, shopping and lunching with their friends. The pictures of the body worried her too. Had she been in any of them? Would someone recognise her? Approach her and want to know the painful details that she couldn’t talk about?

  Lori kept her head down, the usual practice as she walked towards the Language Block. The homework she’d prepared over the weekend was a piece on immigration, written in Spanish, a cultural topic they were required to study. Phrases flitted through her mind, specific words that she tried to hold onto, pushing the girls’ conversation away as best she could. El inmigrante. Llegado. Mezclándose. Tensión. Screaming. Body. Photos. Twitter. Disgusting.

  She swerved to avoid a group ahead, looking up for a moment for fear of crashing into someone else. It was important not to draw attention to herself, now more than ever, so Lori curved away along the grass, skirting a slightly longer path which led to the same double doors where her Spanish class would soon be starting. As she passed by the grassy patch, she was surprised to see a figure sitting peacefully on a blanket despite the growing spit of rain that was threatening to fall. He was half-hidden by the shade of a large tree, but as Lori got closer, she spotted a battered guitar leaning against the trunk.

  It was him. The busker. The one who’d seen it all, who’d stopped smiling and singing when Pauline’s body landed in the space between he and Lori. The strange young man in the flat-cap with faraway eyes the colour of coal. In the flurry of all that had happened, Lori had quite forgotten the words to the song he’d been singing, that old church hymn which had caught her off-guard. Now that she saw his sienna skin covered in the thick, black lines of tattoos, the strains of the music returned, but not the lyrics. His body was half-turned away from her, sitting alone and cross-legged beside a backpack. Lori looked at the backpack then, and balked.

  That’s mine.

  A canvas, drawstring bag with black and blue stripes. It looked brand new, as Lori’s had been for college that year, and she knew with a furious certainty that it was hers. He hadn’t had it with him when he was singing on the street – she would have noticed – and for that matter, she’d never seen him at her college before either. Perhaps, she thought, he was here to return it to her. Her student ID card would have been inside it, after all. She approached the figure, observing the black soles of his bare feet and the ragged, oversized vest he wore that still managed to show off so much of his tattooed arms and shoulders. She tried not to linger on those too long, her cheeks hot.

  “Excuse me,” she said, forcing the nervous quake out of her voice.

  The busker broke his transfixed stare of concentration. He’d clearly been miles away, and his slightly-too-peaceful expression made Lori wary. He glanced her way, then hurriedly got to his feet, standing tall and broad before her. The stranger looked Lori over, dark eyes glistening, locking on her like they had when he’d been singing that hymn she couldn’t recall.

  “I was hoping I’d find you here,” he said, his lip curving up a little.

  His voice was as low and smooth as it had been in his music, though there was a strong accent now that Lori found hard to place. Her trembles were growing. He’d been looking for her. Waiting for her. Lori found herself toying with the pocket of her hoodie, and forced herself not to fidget.

  “I lost a bag like that on Friday afternoon,” she said, pointing to the backpack beside the young man’s dirty feet.

  “I know,” he answered, his eyes still locked with hers.

  That intense stare of his was finally broken as he reached for the bag, and Lori released a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. He returned the bag to her, stepping closer, and the heat of his body hit her in a wave. Her stomach knotted itself, the faint scent of musk catching her nose amongst the rainy air. She supposed it made sense that a busker would have been the one to come across her bag on the street. Maybe he was an honest man, wanting to return it.

  “Thank you,” she mumbled.

  As he handed the bag to her, his other hand rose and rested on hers. Lori started and he increased the pressure, enough to keep her trapped in his grip. The skin on his fingertips was rough, calloused from the guitar no doubt. The touch gave Lori a trembling, breathless feeling in her chest.

  “I put my number in your phone,” he said. “You’re going to need it.”

  Lori’s face fell, her cheeks flushing pink. It was one thing to find someone’s address or school so you could return lost property, but this was something else entirely. She looked down at his hands, lines of thick ink swirling from his knuckles up to his wrists, and shook herself out of his grip. Hot tears pricked Lori’s eyes. She hugged her bag close to her belly.

  “You’ve been in my phone?” she breathed. “You had no right.”

  He didn’t seem sorry at all. In fact, he didn’t even seem phased. That serious look remained in his dark eyes, and he scratched the side of his long, proud nose casually.

  “Some of the messages the kids here send you on Facebook…” he mused. “Not a kind bunch, are they? You’ll need a friend, Lori, for what’s to come.”

  There was a drop in her stomach, an urge pulling her downwards, making her crave a rock to climb under. Her face flushed hotter still.

  “You’ve been in my messages?” she said, taking a sharp step backwards.

  Lori balled her fist hard around the strap of the bag. Her hackles were rising, but so was her concern. Everyone else had escaped from the drizzle, leaving her alone with this strange street man. Her feet burned, begging her to move.

  “I need to go,” she said swiftly, “I’m late for class.”

  Lori started to walk towards the classroom doors, horrified to find that the busker was now following her.

  “You’re scared,” he said, “and I get that. But don’t be scared of me, Lorelai. There are far bigger things that you need to worry about now.”

  He tried to touch her again, reaching for her shoulder this time, and Lori bit back a yelp. It wasn’t strong to admit that he was f
rightening her, and Lori did her best to fight back the panicked tears that struggled to fall freely. She shook her head, doubling her pace to get into the doorway ahead, hearing it slam behind her. Though she heard no second slam, no indication that the stranger was still pursuing her, Lori scrambled down the slippery hall until her aching chest forced her to halt. She reached A2 Spanish, taking her usual seat at the front of class with a heavy thunk. She shook in her seat for a moment, eyes racing around to be sure that everything was normal here. Thanks to her altercation with the busker, the lesson was only seconds from beginning. Profesora Marta was writing up the lesson targets on the board, reciting them in Spanish as she did so.

  Lori fixed her hair. She didn’t dare look at anyone else. They were sure to be staring at what a mess she was, rushing into class like that. She swallowed, willing her pulse to calm, but it just wouldn’t. What a freak. He put his number in my phone? He looked at my messages. Lori chanced a look at the door, but there was nothing beyond the window in it. The stranger hadn’t followed her. He’d invaded her privacy, frightened the shit out of her, and left it at that. She was safe. Safe among normality, with Profesora Marta and assignments and all that stuff.

  Lori took a few more long, slow breaths to get herself under control. For perhaps the first time, she was as tuned out as the rest of her classmates, concerned with rifling in her newly-returned bag. She found her phone, swiping the screen to unlock it, and quickly pulled up the contacts list. One finger dragged swiftly down the list of names, searching for something new. There was a name typed in all caps:

  KASABIAN

  Like the band? Please.

  It had to be false, but the number was real. Lori could see from the circular thumbnail that he’d added a photo to his contact picture, but when she clicked through, there was a lot more of it to see than she’d intended.