Chapter 12
It’s 5.03 pm when I let myself into Lela’s house on Highfield Street. The place is so quiet that I’m afraid of what I might find. But Georgia’s in the front room, packing up her gear, and she smiles when she sees me.
‘See you in the morning, God willing,’ she says quietly as I show her out.
I nod.
There’s a lamp burning in Lela’s mother’s bedroom, the familiar whirr of the humidifier running in the corner, the smell of incense and jasmine oil this evening. Mrs Neill turns towards the door as I enter and her gaze is almost luminous, though her eyes are sunken and the yellow of their whites seems more pronounced than ever.
I grab hold of Lela’s chair, and as I pull it closer towards the wasted figure in the bed, I see that there are tears on her face.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers, one thin hand grasping at the air above her bedclothes. ‘I know I’ve turned your life upside down, darling, and you’ve got every right to be angry, but you’ve been so good to me, Lel. You’ve never once raised your voice, or been impatient with me. No child should ever have to see their parent this way . . .’ She taps at something beneath the covers, attached to her body, and there’s a flat sound, as if she’s hitting hard plastic. ‘They’ve made a jigsaw puzzle out of me, Lel,’ she half-laughs, half-cries, and I realise that she’s trying to reach out for her daughter’s hand. My hand. ‘Only nothing quite fits together any more.’
She needs something from me, this woman. It’s more than just a feeling I get. She needs permission to go. And forgiveness. And the reassurance that Lela will be okay without her. I don’t need to touch her to know it. There’s something still unfinished between mother and daughter. Something unsaid.
I think of all the hurting words that Lela sensibly confined to her journal and never let pass her lips.
Call me a sentimental fool, but I lean forward now and place a hand on her sleeve, murmuring, ‘I love you, Mum, in case I ever forgot to tell you that. I love you, and you’ve never been a burden. You’ve done everything for me, you’ve been the best mum I could have hoped for, and I honour you for that.’
Lela’s mother closes her eyes, her mouth curving up in a tremulous smile, though tears leak out slowly from below her eyelids, leaving tracks down her gaunt cheeks. She doesn’t bother to wipe them away, so I do, then I place my hand on her forehead again, thinking that the gesture might ease her suffering, as it seemed to do once before.
The tension that is always there, like a knot inside, seems to leave Mrs Neill’s body, to disappear with my touch. Only, it’s as if my palm has suddenly become welded to her skin and I’m the one with the terminal disease, because, all of a sudden, I can’t move.
There’s something flowering between us, as if I’ve opened up a direct connection between my mind and hers, so that if she knew how, she might be able to read my thoughts, mine my memories for knowledge of me, the real me, as the malakh had tried to do.
But no, it’s nothing so simple as that.
It’s as if something has taken me beyond what’s inside the woman’s head. I can see inside her body; in some way I am become of her body. It’s like I’ve opened a doorway to the grand morphology, the physiology, of Mrs Neill. Her senses are my senses — I feel the intermittent stab of the morphine pump, the slow release of the corticosteroid in her system, the dull, constant ache of the weeping stoma in her abdomen, the bag that is anchored there. The overheated room, the exterior world, they’ve disappeared. She is laid out like a map before me: the highways of her bones, the canals of her lymphatic and cardiovascular systems, her connective tissue, her muscles, her nerves. All of them there. All of them laid bare.
Most of all, I feel her great love for her daughter, the howling fear she carries inside, all of it swirling behind that brave facade she buckles on, like armour, every day.
And though every fibre in me rebels, is screaming at me to rise up, out, of this red-hued world of nightmare, the cathedral of pain, remembrance and regret that is Mrs Neill’s self-devouring body, I tell myself to go under, to let the tide take me —
— I can’t begin to describe the feeling.
If Mrs Neill weren’t already unconscious from her latest hit of morphine, I’m sure she’d be able to feel my clumsy spirit navigating the chaotic metropolis within her slight frame. It’s like the wildest raceway in the universe, the human body, and I’m being pushed along, I’ve surrendered all volition. I have no control over the physical world, and no idea where I’m headed, how I’m supposed to use this incredible feeling of power, of . . . boundlessness. Capable of passing through the smallest micromolecule, the thinnest cell wall, yet unable to direct that weird sensation of being sentient yet liquid; at once mercurial, permeating, yet impermeable.
Once, I was able to do this; once. But the manual’s gone. If not erased, then altered, written in unreadable code.
Think. The voice inside me is stern. Think how it was, in that dream.
That fearful, punishing dream where Luc took us straight through an asteroid. Through solid matter.
I need less of Lela and more of me. That’s clear. If it’s truly possible to atomise, to scatter one’s energies into any shape one might desire, then maybe I can, too, even as damaged and malformed as I currently am. I glimpsed the possibility of it in my sleep,and this proves it. The ability resides in me. But the mechanism — like the meaning of the word elohim — is missing from my recall. Not lost, only forgotten.
Luc told me himself once: The knowledge is in you. But where?
I’ve lost all sense of time and place when I finally chance upon the epicentre of Karen Neill’s agony. It’s some kind of invasive mass that’s an angry red-yellow in colour, like a nest of plump worms, anchored deep into the walls and surrounding muscle of some long, tubular organ in the body that continuously winds back on itself. There’s evidence near the ugly, swelling mass of past surgeries, barely healed, that failed to halt the body’s instinct for self-annihilation.
All around me, diseased cells are exploding into life. They divide, mutate, evolve, until they are literally cannibalising healthy tissue in every direction. When I come into contact with them, I realise that these cells do not grow old and fade as cells are supposed to do; they have achieved a kind of voracious immortality, would turn on me, too, if I were truly flesh.
I feel like I’m drowning; that if I don’t soon find a way out, I will never be able to leave. But I also know that what I’m witnessing is both a privilege and a burden, and I gather myself like floodwater, like a plague of locusts, like the Holy Ghost itself, and surge through that cancerous mass. I flow through every site of disease and infection I come across, willing myself to burn the sickness from Karen Neill’s body, to purge her clean.
But I can’t. Everything I see, touch, taste, smell and feel that carries the taint of illness remains tainted after my passing. Finally that small voice says in me: This one is meant to die. This one cannot be saved. Azraeil has already placed his mark on her.
There is nothing more to be done.
Immediately I think these things, there is a sensation of abrupt coalescence and I am flung out of Karen Neill’s body, or pulled back — as if by an elastic and invisible cord — into Lela.
I come to, to find myself sweating and shaking and thanking God I got out of there alive.
Mrs Neill sleeps on, dreaming of who knows what?
Finally I sleep, too. Spent.
And dream — not of Luc, of his indelible beauty, his serpentine grace; not of Ryan, his mortal double — but of a fine, silver mist that enters the room. So subtly at first that it is already at the level of my ankles and rising slowly when, in my dream, I wake and rise out of the chair beside Mrs Neill’s bed, leaving Lela’s sleeping body still in it.
In my dream, I am myself as I once was. Tall, pale, shining. Like a being made of pure fire.
I look for the source of that thin fog that is building steadily, taking the warmth out of the air. It is not moonlight that leaves a thin pall of silver over everything: over Mrs Neill’s thin, pinched features, over Lela, sleeping, over the teetering possessions in this room, pushed aside to make way for bedpans and of it ibasins, a wheelchair and a ventilator, the paraphernalia that dogs the terminally ill, making them seem even more earthbound in their final days.
