The Leper's Companions (6 page)

Clack, clack, clack
, and with a shock she realized that a leper was entering the village.

She watched him drawing closer. The baby knocked its head against her breast, making the milk rush and tingle.

“Perhaps he has no hair,” she thought to herself. “Perhaps he has a hand missing or holes in his body where the flesh has fallen away. He mustn't touch my baby or he might kill it. He mustn't speak to me except with the wind blowing against him. He mustn't look at me because the sickness can jump out from a person's eyes and catch hold of you.”

The leper was close now, but he didn't stop or even slow down. As he passed he said, “I am going to sit by the wall of the churchyard. Ask the priest to find me there.”

His voice was soft and clear but the accent was very strange, and Sally had to run his words several times through her mind before she understood what he was saying. The fact that he came from somewhere far away made her suddenly ashamed of how little she knew of anything beyond the village where she lived.

She went at once to the priest, rushing in on him where he sat at his desk, copying a prayer onto a piece of vellum.

“There is a leper,” she said, aware of her own awkwardness, her hands chapped by the cold, the weight of the baby pulling at her.

“He has a clapper and he clacks as he walks. That was why I went out. To see what it was. He spoke to me. You must go to him. I'll take you.”

The priest had kept his head bent forward as she spoke and only now did he raise it to look at her. He placed the goose quill and the sharpening knife side by side on his desk
and got up slowly. He was not old, but he moved like an old man.

Sally led him to the churchyard where the leper was waiting close to the wall, as crouched and quiet as a hare. She knew there was no need for her to come but she wanted to hear the voice again.

The leper talked with the priest. He explained that he had come a long way and was going to continue on his journey, so there was no need to be afraid that he might be a burden on the village. But before he went he wanted something to be done for him. He wanted the priest to perform the Service of the Burial of the Dead over his living body.

“I have been told it would make this sickness of mine easier to bear,” he said in his soft voice. “I have the black cloth with me in my sack and I know the procedure. We could do it now if you are willing.”

The priest nodded his acquiescence. He took the cloth from the sack and went into the church.

He reappeared carrying the silver cross that was used for Saint's Day processions. He told Sally to hold the cross and lead the way. The leper followed through the arch of the door under the smiling mermaid, and the priest came last, chanting as he walked, “
Libera me, Domine
. Master, set me free.”

Two wooden trestles had been set up at a little distance from the altar and the black cloth was draped between them. The leper knelt before the cloth while the priest sprinkled holy water over him. He bowed his head and shuffled forward
on his knees until he was under the cloth. The priest continued with the recitation of the Mass while Sally stood to one side and watched what was happening. Her baby did not cry.

Once the service was completed they went out into the churchyard. The priest dug up a spadeful of loose earth and sprinkled it over the leper's feet.

“Now you are in the grave,” he said, “buried as well as dead, just as you wished. I hope it brings you peace.”

Sally and the priest accompanied the leper along the road until they reached the boundary stone that marked the end of the village. There were so many questions that Sally wanted to ask and yet could not. Who was this stranger and why had the sickness chosen to fix itself on him? Where did he come from and where would he go now? Would he live alone in some wild place like the hermit who lived in the forest, or would he go to a leper house? There was one not so many miles away and if he went there then Sally could visit him. She could show him how the baby was becoming a child. She suddenly dreaded the idea of losing this man as well, so soon after finding him. But she didn't speak, she walked in silence.

Before leaving, the leper rummaged in his sack. He took out a bundle wrapped in silk and a few coins from his purse. He placed these gently on the ground.

“The money can pay for prayers for my soul,” he said to the priest. “The book is for you,” and he turned towards Sally.

For a moment Sally thought she might see the face within the hood, but she saw nothing more than the eyes which swam towards her from out of the darkness like fish.

Already the leper had turned and was setting off down the road, his wooden boards clacking as he went.

The priest picked up the coins and put them in the pocket of his robe. He picked up the bundle, unwrapped it and revealed the bound pages of a little book.

He examined it carefully. “It is a guide for travelers to the Holy Land,” he said. “It describes the journey to Jerusalem and tells you where you can stay and what you can expect to see in the places you pass through.”

Sally took the book in her hands. The pages were as smooth as silk and they rustled slightly as she turned them as if they were alive. In the corner of one page there was a delicate brown stain and she could just see the thin lines of veins that had once carried the movement of the blood on this part of the animal's body. It was like a miniature tree or the skeleton of a leaf. The person who had written into the book had avoided touching the mark, as if it was dangerous in some way.

Sally looked at the words that had been flattened onto the pages like squashed insects. How could it be possible that marks such as these were the description of a journey? How could they contain the way to go, the dangers to be avoided?

She began to cry because of her ignorance, the book still open in her hands. The priest took it from her. “Look,” he said, “here is a map.”

He unfolded a double page and spread it out for her to see.

“Here is England,” he said, pointing at a ragged shape. “You must follow this red line over the sea, which is blue, until you reach the country called Holland. You go through other countries as far as the city of Venice and then the line takes you by boat around the edge of what is called the Great Sea, until you have reached the port of Jaffa. And here is Jerusalem. And that building must be the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”

Sally stared in amazement at the shapes that were countries, crisscrossed with lines that were roads and lines that were rivers and surrounded by the rippling waves of the sea. In the blue water she saw that there were ships and mermaids, whales and other fishes. On the land there were churches and castles, a wild man covered with hair, a unicorn, and some other beast that she could not recognize. She hoped to find her father, somewhere close to the red line, but she could not see him.

The priest folded the map and handed her the book. She tucked it securely under the cloth that bound her baby close to her.

That evening, when the baby was sleeping, she placed the book tenderly on her lap. She breathed in the musty smell of it. She licked the words in case they might taste of anything she knew. Without really considering what she was doing she tore off a small corner of the map and put it into her
mouth. She chewed it until the skin was quite soft and then she swallowed it.

She ate the map entirely. It satiated her hunger for a while and it made her feel as if she now contained the knowledge of distant lands growing inside her like a new baby.

T
ime has passed, winter has moved into spring. The red-haired girl is walking through a beanfield.

The sweet scent of the bean flowers makes her feel dizzy. She sits down abruptly on the side of the path. She traces circular patterns with her finger in the pale dust. She watches a line of ants moving with great purpose from one side of the path to the other. She becomes aware of the hum of bees and as she looks up at the sea of flowers all around her she realizes they are like insects too, with white petal wings surrounding a scrabble of black which could easily be mistaken for an insect's body.

She breaks off a bean stalk that leans over the path and picks one of the flowers to suck the drop of nectar it contains, the sweetness tugging a thin line through the inside of
her mouth. She examines the two tiny bunches of beans just beginning to take shape, the shriveled remnant of a flower clinging to each green tip like the umbilical cord of a newborn infant. She eats them and they taste as pale and delicate as their own color.

She gets up and continues walking, her head throbbing now with the rhythm of her heartbeat. She walks over the smooth brow of the hill and down towards the village, following a track hedged with cow parsley that leads directly to the church.

When she reaches the gate into the cemetery she pauses under the shadow of a huge yew tree. It was said to be the first tree to grow in this area after the waters of the Flood had receded. There is a solemnity about it which must come from the things it has witnessed over the succession of years, beginning on the day when the land for miles around was covered with the stinking drowned corpses of those killed by the anger of God, through plagues and wars, harsh winters and long summers, up until this present moment when a red-haired girl is gazing into the clustered darkness of its branches.

The girl enters the cemetery and pauses by the fresh earth of her grandmother's grave. Once again she can see her grandmother lying in a coffin on the floor in the house, her mass of gray hair still somehow alive even though her face was empty of the person who had once inhabited it.

Some people linger after they are dead. You can feel them peering in at a window, sitting quietly in a chair, moving
through a deserted garden. Others are impatient to be gone and they leave no trace behind. The girl's grandmother had been like that; it was as if there was nothing to hold her, nothing in the world she wanted and so she had quickly turned her back on it all and walked away.

The girl continued to sleep in the big bed she had shared with her grandmother, but every morning she would wake up before the lifting of the dawn with a sense of utter desolation that leapt out from the ambush of the night in the moment when she remembered how alone she was.

She had grown accustomed to looking at the old woman's face and seeing something of herself reflected there; listening to the old woman's labored breathing and being reassured that she was herself alive. Now she was out off from this sense of her own existence, floating in a space with no visible boundaries, no recognizable landmarks.

She stares down at the grave and wonders if her grandmother could even be persuaded to return to the village on the Day of Judgment. Was it possible to be so preoccupied with other things that you failed to hear the sounding of the trumpet? And even if she did come back along with all the others, a great bustling crowd of them shoulder to shoulder, bursting out of the earth, then would the girl be able to recognize her? The priest had explained that on The Day they would all be thirty-one years of age, even little babies and the very old. They would all be fit and healthy, even the ones who had been torn apart by an accident or some terrible illness. The girl could suddenly see herself moving desperately
through that crowd, going from face to face in search of a face that was familiar to her.

People change so much with death. When Sally found her husband washed up on the sand close to where the mermaid was buried, the sea water had turned him into a different person, his body white and soft. Sally had not been convinced it was him until she saw the ring on his finger. She had insisted on putting shoes on his swollen feet before shutting the lid of his coffin. She said he might be confused after all that buffeting in the waves and if he was wearing shoes then at least he would be ready to step forward as soon as the angel called out his name. The swelling would have gone down by then so his feet would not cause him any pain in the tight shoes. “He will be as he was,” said Sally and the priest had nodded his head in agreement.

Now the red-haired girl remembers that young man's feet and how helpless and fragile they looked; quite different from her grandmother's, which were as hard and dry as firewood and seemed closer to a tree than a person.

She pauses as she walks into the church by the east door. The man with leaves in his hair hangs from the corner of the roof and stares down at her. His big hands tug the sides of his mouth wide open and his crouching body seems ready to leap forward like a huge frog.

And there is the mermaid, her fat fish legs spread wide above the arch of the door and a look of lechery on her face as she smiles to reveal a row of pointed teeth.

The red-haired girl is in the church and the dim underwater
light is all around her. The air smells of stale urine because in the winter the children like to piss against the big stone pillar over by the bell tower; grown men do as well sometimes, but not the women. You can see the crystals of dried piss glinting on the floor when all the candles are lit.

The girl looks at the picture in the stained-glass window. An angel covered in feathers is telling the Virgin Mary that she will soon bear a child. The angel's face is filled with compassion and the girl feels his eyes meet hers across the immense distance that separates them and she is strangely comforted.

Someone puts a hand on her shoulder, gripping tightly at the bones beneath the skin. She turns to be confronted by a man she has never seen before. Instead of speaking he sticks out his tongue, which is very pointed and wet.

He wraps her into his arms and she lets him take possession of her body, as if it belongs to him by right. She doesn't even cry out or protest when she feels a brief stab of pain in the pit of her belly, but lies quiet and limp on the floor with the weight of the man pressing down on top of her and the cold stone eating into her back.