Pritam had been unable to stop himself watching her creamy-coloured spittle run down His wooden shin, down His pinned foot, to collect in an offensive egg-like sac before gravity drew it down to the carpet he’d only now just vacuumed. After the service, Hird had laughed, saying the ‘old bird was a bloody good shot’, but Pritam had been stunned by the action. Or was it the words that had preceded it? Something about the Lord only being pleased by the letting of blood.
He knelt and gingerly touched the flap of raw skin on his shin — it hurt like a bugger. He reached into his trouser pocket and removed a neatly ironed handkerchief, which he tied around his shin. Blood pleases the Lord. While he no longer laboured over it, the two faces of God had troubled him greatly in seminary. How could the God of the Old Testament be such a jealous, needy being, so demanding of fealty and, yes, blood, while the God of the New Testament was so much less proscriptive, so much more forgiving. An answer was carved not a metre from Pritam: He had a Son. But how could the Creator of the universe change so fundamentally simply by coming to earth in human form? Pritam had once described God’s behaviour in hypothetical terms to a psychologist friend, whose straightforward diagnosis was ‘bipolar disorder’. Pritam couldn’t accept that; there had to be more to this Holy mystery, The need to better understand his God became the reason he stayed in the clergy.
Pritam tied the handkerchief tight, rolled his trouser cuff down. Someone was behind him.
‘Is that you, John?’
He got to his feet and turned.
The church was empty. The windows were unrelieved black. The shadows in the apse behind the figure of Christ seemed as solid as the dark timber. Yet still Pritam had the feeling someone was watching him.
‘Hello?’ he called. His voice, carrying only the slightest hint of his Indian childhood, echoed among the polished pews and fell away to still silence.
He found his gaze settling on the spot where the strange man had sat during that same funeral service. Close, that was his name. Nicholas Close. That was the second unsettling thing about that day: the expression Pritam had seen on Close’s face as he looked up at the ceiling. Close looked as if he’d seen the hooded skull of the reaper staring back at him.
Pritam looked up through the chill air to the carved boss six metres overhead. Even in the dim, ineffective light cast by the fake candle globes, he could make out the carved timber face wreathed in oak leaves. Suddenly, a chill went through him.
He blinked. The Green Man’s face was mostly shadow, its eyes dark sockets. What nonsense. It wasn’t alive. It couldn’t see. It was inanimate; a decoration made from a tree felled by human hands not much more than a century ago; nothing more than wood shaped by iron.
Pritam reprimanded himself.
He remembered a similar cold thrill of recognition when he was taking his elderly mother on her last trip back to India before she died, and visiting one of the huge, amber-stoned Jain temples in Ranakpur. He’d felt the same sensation of being watched — which one always is in a country of a billion people — and turned to see carved into a column a face with long, slender leaves sprouting from the corners of its mouth, blank eyes regarding him dispassionately. Then, as now, he’d felt a frisson of apprehension and the sudden desire to be well away.
He’d assumed his discomfort with the alien visage was due to his own firm commitment to a Christian faith. However, when he’d received his appointment to this diocese and first walked into this church, he’d seen a strikingly similar carved face among foliage. He’d asked John Hird about why such an unchristian image was in such a holy place. ‘Christ knows,’ Hird had grumbled. ‘What am I? An architect?’ Then he’d lumbered into the presbytery to make tea.
And now, alone in the church, Pritam couldn’t shake the feeling that the Green Man was watching him from his headdress of hewn leaves. Suddenly, the words of the old Boye woman came back with sharp clarity.
The thought was irrational, childish, stupid. His heart was racing. His feet in his leather dress shoes were tingling and ready for flight. But he bent with deliberate slowness to pick up the vacuum cleaner. This was his church. He would not run from it.
‘This is a house of God,’ he said, loudly. The words rang against the cold, shadowed stone and among the dark old timbers.
He turned and walked to the apse door, all the while feeling the hairs on the back of his neck prickling like live wires.
When Suzette swung open the door of Nicholas’s flat, the first thing she saw was her brother’s pallid face, eyes wide in fright. The expression, quite frankly, scared the shit out of her. ‘Who did you expect?’ she’d asked. He’d simply shaken his head, and replied, ‘I don’t know if you’d believe me.’
And now she’d heard it, she wasn’t sure she did.
Nicholas had made them both coffee, sat her down, and told her about his day in the Carmichael Road woods. Following the Thomas boy’s ghost. Going under the water pipe through the cobweb-choked drain. Wandering lost. Finding a boat, of all things! Seeing an old lady and her dog; a dog whose bite marks he showed Suzette. They were two small red circles that looked days old. ‘They were much bigger earlier,’ he’d explained sheepishly. Falling unconscious. Waking to find himself unable to move, lying outside the old woman’s cottage. Bitten again by the dog — and the way he said ‘dog’ made Suzette feel there was a lot her brother wasn’t telling her. Waking wet, clean and nauseated in the tall grass on Carmichael Road, and staggering home.
‘Didn’t you get my note?’ she asked.
Nicholas’s blank stare was answer enough. Suzette turned and saw the folded paper still lying on the floor. Typical.
‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘You think I’ve gone bonkers?’
‘I think you’re a fucking idiot eating berries without knowing what they were.’
‘I told you. They were strawberries.’
‘Oh, you’re the Bush Tucker Man now?’
Her expression must have been cynical; she saw her brother’s face harden.
‘Look at it from my point of view, Nicky. You were starving. You ate some berries-’
‘Strawberries.’
‘Would you bet your life on that?’ she snapped, suddenly angry. ‘Would you bet your sanity on that? ’Cause that’s what you’re doing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Everything weird you saw, everything weird that happened to you, happened after you ate those berries.’
She watched him as this sank in. She could see the wheels in his mind turning behind his eyes, see him realise that everything could have been a hallucination brought on by the berries. A seed of doubt had germinated. She pressed the opportunity.
‘Trust me, I know how potent some herbs and berries can be. Datura, peyote, morning glory seeds. .’
She watched Nicholas frown, and his eyes turned to the wound on his hand.
‘And that isn’t a dog bite.’
‘No,’ he agreed, but he didn’t say anything else.
Suzette changed tack. ‘The old woman. .’ She waited until Nicholas was looking at her. ‘Was she Mrs Quill?’
He seemed to take his time thinking about this. Then he shook his head slowly. ‘She didn’t look like Quill. Like I remember Quill.’
Suzette nodded. For some reason, that answer was a relief.
Brother and sister drank their coffees in silence for a long while. Nicholas shifted on his seat, as if uncomfortable and wanting to speak. But he kept his silence.
‘I don’t think you’re crazy,’ said Suzette quietly.
