Apocalypse of Jude

In the bar’s yellow glow, Janice’s jewellery glitters. From her skin pours a profusion of perfumes that leaves a confused effect on the nose, but nevertheless excites the withered souls in the bar, stumps of time among whose dirty ears whispers of jug jug pass. Jude nods with mock courteousness at her.

“To what do we owe this increasingly rare appearance of yours tonight?”

Janice offers him her hand in courtly jest.

“Well, a prince in advancement is a fitting thing to be celebrated is it not?”

She allows her just kissed hand to lightly slide across Gary’s shoulders.

“A large glass of red wine Jude, if you please, to toast such success. One of those lovely goblets that you have hidden away Jude, with the cupids playing coy on the them.”

Janice sinks onto a stool between Gary and Caul in a way that belies tiredness with the world’s pursuit and crosses her short-skirted legs. Gary, somewhat red-faced at her words, a loosened tie around his neck, can’t keep from glancing at her legs. Audrey, feeling like an insignificant tapestry detail swallowed by a sylvan scene, shuffles her feet around the bar and takes the last remaining stool to Gary’s right, sitting like a bric-a-brac lamb on a mantel piece.

Janice meanwhile throws her head back and runs her hand through the locks of her curvaceous hair, the ends catching alight like fire in the yellow light until her locks sit sensuously and yet almost savagely still. She fixes her eyes on Caul, ravished by his looks, then burning a smile at him, gets up behind him and puts her hands on his shoulders and starts massaging gently, bringing her voice close to his ear allowing her thoughts to glow into words.

“What is it that brings you, goddess-born, to this bar over and over again, just to sit so among us? Are you shipwrecked here? Or did Heaven bring you here like it did me?”

“If I am shipwrecked here Janice, it is not from you that I seek refuge or entertainment.”

She looks at him slightly exasperated.

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever met a man as arrogant as you. There is not a man in this bar that wouldn’t go with me right now, and you’ve got yourself a personal invitation.”

Caul just laughs and takes a long draught from his beer. She sits back down on her stool as like on a burnished throne to pick the glass of wine from the marble imitation bar. She holds up the goblet supported by the glassy stem of a fruited vine.

“To Gary. May the Houses of Stetson and Anthony from this day in lasting concord combine.”

She tips some wine on the bar before raising the glass to her mouth, sipping from it, then passing it to Gary, who draughts deeply.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 31 

Janice moves through the arch into the pub’s poolroom and walks over to the couch below the window, ignoring Paul on the other side of the pool table. Gary and Audrey awkwardly occupy the couch. Next to it stands an arm chair. She goes over to it and sits, allowing it to enthrone her. As she looks at the seven-branched candelabra light fitting illuminating the pool table, she becomes aware of Paul’s many-headed shadow moving across the ceiling towards her. It’s beastly visage frightens her into looking directly at him waltzing round the table to take a shot. He glances over at her.

“Glad you could join us tonight Janice. We’ll be going to the club shortly.”

He leans over and gently pushes the cue across the green felt so that it slips its quarried ball into a pocket. She shoots a defensive look back at him, covering up her ruffled emotions.

“Always the club these days. The bar not good enough for you anymore is it?”

Paul simply scowls. “I thought you loved the club. There are so many more there than here to drink your wine.”

He stalks around the table angrily, blaspheming and calling her whore out loud to anyone who might care to hear before taking his next shot. She stares stonily back at him, but inside knows now that she is fallen. Janice turns coldly to Audrey.

“I’m going to the bathroom. Coming?”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 32 

Gary looks at the coffered ceiling, troubled, confused and drowning in the odours of strange ointments and perfumes that swirl from unstopped ivory and coloured vials. These odours are further stirred by the air coming fresh in an ajar window, mixing with the smoke from recently extinct candles that haunt the corners of the room. Janice lies asleep alongside him. But his mind is not on the bedroom and its allurements, but on how it is that he is lying here, the room where once he slept with Mae, the room next to where he raped Audrey. He tries to fathom Paul machinations. Had it not been Paul’s insistence that he divorce Mae and pursue a career with her father instead. Had it not been Paul’s insistence that he date Audrey so that they could use her to clean Paul’s money. Had it not been Paul’s insistence that he allow Janice to seduce him and then screw her so as to break things with Audrey? After that she’ll fall to pieces, and because she’s done what she has done, she’ll have no moral ground for accusation, Paul had said. And he, Gary, had done it all for the power and the money that was soon to come his way.

/everythings coming together/ /then why do i feel so out of my depth/ /as if i really shouldnt be in janices bed/

His Whitsuntide dream of being a whale suddenly swims its way through his thoughts complete with the image of his flesh being hacked to pieces. He goes cold at the remembrance and tenses his body with aggressive will to push the thought from his mind, his worked out muscles filling with blood. Janice awakens, feeling the energy lustily. She doesn’t waste time in arousing him. He, desiring to give no further thought to his troubled mind, rolls instead onto to her to satisfy their lusts.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 33

Audrey lies in the bath, inhaling the steam and letting it become tears falling from her eyes. Green and orange candles glow fuzzily in the vapour and soften the mournful mood in her. Behind the bath’s copper taps, on its ample tiled edge, a gnarled piece of drift wood lies, its one rising end carved into a dolphin. The bath, the room, the shelter are all foreign to her, yet form the sense of a haven to her. A soft clatter of plates and music echoes from beyond. She washes the water over her body, giving her surfaced skin the golden sheen of candle light.

There’s a light knock at the door. “Audrey. Dinner’s almost ready.”

She plunges beneath the surface and stays, hair entangling the meniscus in a fray of golden light, then she’s above again, pulling the same light hair back into its heavy beauty dazzling from the sheen of candlelight. She rises and steps from the water then dries and clothes herself.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 34 

After telling her story, Audrey settles her glass down again in front of her, then brings her two hands close together around her mouth. Evelin takes a sip from her wine, contemplating.

“Did you get your catharsis?”

Audrey laughs with irony in her voice.

“It makes me realise who I’ve never wanted to be, but seem to have turned into. Audrey Hepburn’s just got such an ephemeral femininity to her and that’s the one thing I’ve always tried to capture so I could please my mother. But look at me Evelin. I’m a big girl. Trying to do Audrey-style, I just end up looking like a ditz without the charm.”

Evelin shakes her head smiling while Audrey goes on.

“I must show you some pictures when I was a kid. There’s this big girl in all these dainty clothes. I was a regular big Bertha.”

Both of them are laughing between themselves. Then there is a pause before Evelin resumes.

“You know who looks a bit like Audrey Hepburn.”

Audrey squirms. “Who?”

“That hairdresser below where we work.”

“Oh don’t say that.” Audrey’s voice cuts with pain. “She’s Gary’s ex-wife.”

Awareness begins rising through Evelin, rearranging her understanding of the situation with new clarity.

“You knew this before your relationship with Gary started?”

Audrey is instantly aware of the change in relation with Evelin, and realises that any distortion of truth will rupture the flowing together of their two worlds. But more than that, she wants the truth out in the open.

“I saw her once at the club, not long after I met Gary. We were talking and suddenly there was this look of anger on his face. I turned around and I saw her walk in. It was like walking into Audrey Hepburn. And then to see her dancing dress fitting her figure like she was elegance personified. I hadn’t thought much of Gary up until then. I was just putting on my ditzy show. But the way he looked at her just snapped something in me. He just got up and walked over to her. And then Paul did something strange. He just said you girls go off and get a pool table. I’m going to get Gary. Janice took my arm like that and we went. But you know Janice. She’s one for gossip, so I knew the whole story by the time we got to the pool table. So yes, I knew, and for the first time in my life, so I thought, I felt I could get at Audrey Hepburn. Stamp her into the dust and show her how worthless she is.”

Both look past each other.

“I suppose you’re going to say I got what I deserved.”

Evelin turns sharply to face Audrey. “Why would I say that?”

“Well it’s true isn’t it. My jealously got its just desserts.”

“Audrey. You made a bad judgement call on a guy based on you own prejudices. Who of us hasn’t? But you making a bad call does not justify what he did. Nothing does. Nothing nothing nothing ever justifies a rape.”

Audrey just shakes her head in disagreement.

“I’m a victim of my own stupidity. My own obsessions. What am I meant to do? Pretend that I wasn’t at fault for being where I was that allowed that to happen. I’m tired of blaming Audrey Hepburn for everything that happens to me.”

Evelin looks stonily at her.

“So you’re going to be like so many other women and take the blame?” Audrey raises her hands in a futile gesture.

“It happened Evelin. I was raped by a guy I should never have been with in the first place. Doesn’t that make me a perpetrator against myself? If I don’t convict myself of my guilt, I’ll end up living a guilty life for the rest of my life. I don’t expect you to understand me Evelin, but I’m going to need support.”

Evelin looks carefully at Audrey and takes a deep breath, determined to fill the desert that surrounds them with the inviolable nightingale’s song that sustains her.

“I do understand Audrey. I was raped. I was a naïve sixteen year old girl who got raped by two boys she thought were her friends. I cleaned up. I knew what had happened but had no way of knowing how to deal with it. So I shut up and I had to go through seeing them every day after that, laughing and smiling, no doubt joking about it between themselves. And when I heard you crying over the phone when you called me earlier, for the first time I knew some one understood me. But I’ve got to tell you Audrey. You cannot carry your own guilt. Neither can you convict yourself, nor can you absolve yourself. Neither is there a person in the world who can do so for you. But Jesus can. I can testify to that. He has given me freedom to forgive them and, it seems, redeemed that hurt they caused to be used now to show His love for you.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 35 

Caul draws deeply from his cigarette in attempt to stave off the encroaching rabbit hole and the pain hiding deep within it. He moves through an arch on the bar’s right into a room concealing a pool table. At the far end of the room, below a curtained window, he sees Gary. Pretending casualness, Caul goes over and drops himself into the couch alongside the swagger fellow.

“You know, it’s not like you to turn up at Mae’s father’s promotional galas.”

Gary’s shoulders shrug drunkenly.

“I’ve buried my career for Mae and my old man for long enough. Whether they like it or not, that golfing estate’s the future of property in this town.”

They sit in awkward silence for a few moments, nothing else to say to each other.

“I need to piss man.” Gary rises and stumbles away.

Wild conclusions fly though Caul’s head, but again, with practised hardness, he stubs them out with along with his cigarette butt and closes his eyes to let his body soak into the comfort of the couch. He is pulled to the surface by a hand resting on his knee. His eyes open to Janice falling back into the seat with him.

“Gary been ranting to you?”

He feels her fingertips work their sliding way up the inside of his thigh, tingling his nerves with a slight hardening desire. He pulls his leg away, unsurprised at her familiarity.

“Does Gary ever not rant?”

Janice laughs lightly, withdrawing her hand without any suggestion of rejection, and turns her nose to the nape of his neck.

“You’re wearing the cologne I gave you.”

“I was at Philip Anthony’s gala.”

Her forefinger and thumb start stroking the lapel of his shirt.

“Indeed. And you’re wondering why Gary was there. But I’ll tell you that Paul’s been at work while you’ve been buried in snow.”

Her choice of words serve to unearth him further than he has already been this evening, even as she smiles sweetly at him.

“Whose game you playing Janice?”

He looks back into her sweet, unanswering smile, its spirit of flattery unable to hide for a brief moment a trawling lust beneath before it is quickly masked again by flattery. She lights a cigarette, draws in close to his ear again, exhaling her smoke into it.

“Do you know why I gave that fragrance to you? It drives this woman crazy.”

She allows her lips to kiss his ear, but he pulls away, pushing his body up from the sunken seat and strides away to under the archway. Through his increasing hallucinogenic vision, his eyes drop to the pool table in mid game, waiting for someone to reorder it. The acid burns the scene photo-like into his mind, then as it loops in his head, the image metaphors to him the deathly inertia his life has been since Easter.

/can this be it/ /has it happened at last/ /my spirits death/ /without my knowing/ /impossible/

Lifting his eyes, Caul catches Paul from across the pool table, watching him as one who watches an animal recently tranquillised, keel. The manipulative design that Caul hallucinogenically witnesses underpinning his half brother’s curiosity conjures up an ugliness that seems to be what living death looks like, and it fills him with disgusted fear. From his limbo between bar and poolroom, he looks around as a hushed silence steals over his ears. All the faces now have that look of death in them, and on the maroon walls their shadows become moving, staring forms enclosing the room, leaning out as if they are contorted, prostrate worshippers trying to resurrect their spirits, but receiving no appeasement for their anguish, while, it seems to Caul, four men on shadowy horses torment them. Realising now his incomprehensible death, he watches with a sickening stomach as the walls suddenly melt into a sulphurous burning fire.

Caul looks desperately for Jude among the lights of the bar, around which worshippers gather to keep out the darkness. He sees him wounded by a fearful doubt that has turned him astray from his path. But on Jude’s face, the death he sees in others is not complete in him, though it has almost overtaken him. Around Jude is also a flame, but it is different, as though it were trying to burn away the death, yet itself is dying. This fraction of hope in desolation suddenly bursts from Caul a surge of strange compassion for Jude, and an unaccountable desire to help him escape from that death. To get him out of this bar. And it suddenly occurs to him that if Jude were healed, all in the bar could have the chance to receive their lives again.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 36 

Audrey rises without much option and follows Janice as she picks the route to the small space of the bar’s bathroom. Thrusting her wine glass into Audrey’s hands, Janice closes the door, locks it, places herself in front of the mirror and retrieves a small package from her bag. She looks up at Audrey, who just hangs there, lamb-like, in silence.

“Here, take the mirror. You’re looking pasty. See if you can rosy your cheeks up. You’re going to need it. Paul’s intent on conquering you.”

She moves around and lets Audrey take the mirror, closes the lid of the toilet and sits down.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s time for you to find out what Paul is all about.”

“That’s cocaine!”

“No sweetheart, this isn’t just cocaine. Come on. Blush your cheeks.”

There is a knock at the door. “We’re busy.”

“Janice, I want to go.”

“I’ll be out when I’m done.”

They hear Paul walk away cursing.

“Janice, I don’t know. Where does it come from?”

“Paul. Where else? You haven’t figured that out yet have you. Part of that’s because you’re so sweetly naïve. I like that about you. But it’s also been hidden from you. Paul hasn’t wanted you to know. He’s been waiting for the right time to initiate you. And once he’s done that, he will have you in his hands and reveal to you what it is he wants from you. That’s how Paul works.”

Janice finishes with a smirk.

“But I’m in a jealous, spiteful mood. Paul’s got something new going on in his life. I’m not quite sure what it is, but I know it doesn’t include me. He’s been pushing me aside more and more, so my loyalties are no longer what they were. I’m telling you, whatever plan he has for you, I’m here to say, don’t listen to him. Don’t let him get what he wants.”

Janice looks long into Audrey’s eyes until the acquiesce comes.

“Good.”

They carry on in silence.

“All right. Like this.”

Janice places a rolled note into her nostril and inhales along a small line that is on the top of the toilet cistern. Then she does a second line changing nostrils.

“Okay?”

“I guess so.”

“Put the note in your nostril okay. Now close your other nostril. Good. Now inhale, but do it slowly.”

A shock overcomes Audrey’s face. Janice laughs, relieved, feeling the control slip out of Paul’s hand into hers.

Audrey is sniffing. “It’s quite chemical hey. It feels warm down the back of my throat.”

“It will for a while. Do the other line now.”

Audrey follows the same procedure. A little easier this time.

“Ugh. I can taste it on my tongue.”

Janice reaches for the wine glass balanced on the basin.

“Here, drink the rest of my wine. It’ll take the taste away. Then just wait until the tingling sets in.”

“Janice.” Paul’s voice is curt and violent.

“Okay, okay, I’m coming.”

Hiding her fear from Audrey, she hastily puts everything back into the bag.

“My nerves are bad tonight. Give me a hug.”

Janice’s embrace catches Audrey by surprise in its need.

“Let’s go. And whatever happens tonight, stay with me. Do not leave my side.”

Janice opens the door.

“Can’t a girl have her privacy?”

She stares hard at Paul and stalks by, while Audrey follows, still uncertain how to compose herself and dealing with completely new sensations inside. As they emerge out of the passageway, Gary takes her hand and Paul falls in behind as they file forwards and spill out of the bar into the growing night, Paul with blasphemies on his breath.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 37

With the homily’s end, Jude’s mind is both at turmoil and amazed at the priest’s perception, the congregation standing to utter its creed.

“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen.”

Jude stands with them, again allowing the words to utter forth from his mouth along with the voices of others professing faith.

“For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man.”

But he is unable to shake the uncomfortable sense of the priest’s eyes boring into him during the homily as if intimately aware of all Jude has betrayed himself to.

“He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.”

And that insistence of knowing the truth evokes again in Jude the black hole on whose edge he has long been circling, a horizon enough to keep him in touch with the Light, but strong enough to keep him from breaking the deadlock that this darkness of spirit has on him.

“We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified, he has spoken through the Prophets.”

At this moment there is a revolt through his mind, and the rest of the profession that follows strangles in his throat.

/one holy catholic and apostolic church/ /and here i am despite betrayal and murder seeking the mystery of forgiveness of sins/ /the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come/

“Amen.”

/church first/ /then belief/ /i dont believe the church/

“The Lord Jesus is generous and patient with us despite our sins and failings.”

/a placebo/

“Lord, make us grow in your Love.”

/sometimes the placebo works/

“Give bishops and priests a heart that reaches out to sinners.”

/with a faith based in well meant deception/

“May those in sin and error come to conversion and new life.”

/and when the effect wears off/

“Make us grow in Your love.”

/isnt that what happened to me/

“May we prepare ourselves in celebrating the great jubilee of our redemption.”

/and yet here i still am/ /despite all my feelings of being violated by a placebo faith/ /desperate to believe in its truth/

“Heal our troubled consciences and wounded hearts Lord Jesus.”

/to escape this awful growing darkness/

“Lord, make us grow in your love. Amen.”

Jude sits with fear being processed within him as his eyes watch the priest and attendants prepare the alter for the consecration of the bread and wine.

/holy mother give me wisdom/ /for i cannot approach this table/ /i dont believe in the holiness of the church and yet the mystery of Christ prevails over me/ /challenging my doubting faith/

“Father, it is our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks through your beloved Son, Jesus Christ. He is the Word through whom you made the universe, the Saviour you sent to redeem us. By the power of the Holy Spirit he took flesh and was born of the Virgin Mary.”

/i cant receive this communion/ /my conscience is too much for me/ /oh my saint/ /my namesake saint/ /i cannot persevere for i cannot find faith in the Church as transmitter of Christs mystery/ /but you too despaired because of your great sin and lack of trust in Gods mercy/ /pray for me/ /deliver me from this despairing cause/

“Lord, you are holy indeed, the fountain of all holiness. Let your Spirit come upon these gifts to make them holy, so that they may become for us the body and blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ.”

/i want to but i cannot/ /i dont believe in the presence of flesh and blood/

“Take this, all of you, and eat it: this is my body which will be given up for you.”

/i dont believe that there is anything there to take this guilt away/

“Take this, all of you, and drink from it; this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all men so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.”

/and i can never drink the blood/ /you keep your faithful from the blood/ /you give them the holy body/ /but keep them from complete purification/ /you let our sinful blood corrupt the body/ /and only you priest/ /only you receive full purification/ /while we remain condemned to share the body but not the life/

“Let us proclaim the mystery of faith.”

Anger grows in him, passing slowly from his mind, ripened now by the fresh oxygenated blood of his deep breaths. It pulmonates through him, filling his body with the protein of anger and smouldering cloudiness comes over him. The rest of the Eucharistic prayer goes through him, but he abhors its meaninglessness to him as the mass moves into its rite of communion.

But beneath this ocean surface of anger, the mystery still haunts him, unsettling the surface with its shifting currents, trying to break through as the Pater Noster rolls from the tongues of the adherents.

“Lord Jesus Christ, you said to your apostles: “I leave you peace, my peace I give you.” Look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church, and grant us the peace and unity of your kingdom where you live for ever and ever.”

Jude hides his anger as he watches icily the adherents commingle and offer the sign of peace to one another before they seek mercy from the Lamb of God.

“This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Happy are those who are called to his supper.”

/not i/ /for i cannot bear the mark of faith they wish me to have/ /faith in the church/

“Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.”

He looks up again on the hanging death of Christ on the cross, and realises to his horror that unless the mystery is uncovered to him, there is no resurrection, no escape from slipping away from the horizon of light into perpetual darkness, and the Eucharist just dead flesh and blood. He explodes, screaming within his mind.

/speak to me/ /why do you never speak/ /speak/

“The Body of Christ.”

The bread and wine are consecrated. The priests come forward to administer as the faithful rise from their silent prayers randomly, and begin to gather and queue for the sacrament. But Jude can no longer bear the idea of consuming dead flesh, and he turns from the pew into the aisle and walks angrily out into the storm awaiting him.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 38

Caul and Jude sit on the veranda couch in the awkward silence of an unconfessed tension, cigarettes melting in their hands while watching the early morning thick mist roll in from the ocean. The mist obscures the lone mountain with its shroud and gives the earth the eerie calm of the morning before the deluge, when all men, bar eight, were destroyed from the earth for filling it with their violent ways.

Jude suddenly leans forward and sinks back again into the couch with guilt-edged laughter.

“When do they say the ice packs are projected to melt by?”

Caul looks across at him both humorously and warily.

“Where did that come from?”

“I have no idea, but it suddenly came to me that the Church teaches that after the flood, God put a rainbow in the sky and promised Noah that never again he would destroy the world with water. Well, if this were to be a true account of that ancient event, that means the world is going to end before global warming melts the ice packs.”

Caul laughs on his exhaled air. “I guess so.”

“What do you mean I guess so?”

Jude affects a mock abhorrence at Caul’s irreverence, hoping the to lift the mood.

“If the world’s going to end before the ice packs melt, we’ve got to find out how much time we’ve got left before we get destroyed. And we’ve got to know if we can get you into the ark.”

His voice and face suddenly go mournful like a clown.

“It’s going to be kind of difficult though.”

Caul this time looks at him in curiosity. “What are you talking about?”

Jude cannot hold the mourning façade and his voice cracks back into humour and mock seriousness, seeking to hide his desperate sense of guilt.

“You got to get baptised dude. What if you’re wrong about who you say you are. Baptism’s the only way you can save yourself from the fire if it comes to burn up the world.”

The tragi-comic gripping Jude turns his face ashen again.

“But baptism has got to be accompanied by faith that God can save you, because it’s only through faith that God can communicate His love into this world.”

From Jude comes the clown’s sigh.

“But how am I going to communicate to you what the Church cannot even communicate to its faithful anymore?”

Caul, knowing the clown in Jude, gazes intent upon him, guessing at the guilt seeking to exonerate itself. But he searches deeper for the profundity of the reasoning being expressed in what Jude is trying to say until he comes to understand at last in his own head how this enclosed universe might be broken in upon.

“But you still have the Spirit in you right? You admitted that yourself a while ago. And you’ve been baptised. So why can’t you communicate that faith?”

Wagging his finger with arm outstretched, Jude shakes his head.

“Ah, there Caul, you flatter me. I may have passed through the Red Sea, but sloth has gotten the better of me, and in the wilderness God destroys those who lose their desire to believe.”

He shrugs his shoulders, laughing ironically.

“After all, I’ve got to pay somehow for betraying my priestly duty, right? But we got to know when those ice packs will melt by. We got to know.”

“Got to know what?”

The voice emanates from behind them and Jude half jumps off the couch.

“Paul you beast. You scared the death out of me.”

Paul moves past them and sits on the veranda wall, locking his arms to it to hold him as he leans back.

“Got to know what Jude? What are you thinking of? What are you thinking? I never know what you are thinking anymore these days Jude.”

There’s a paranoid insistence in Paul’s voice.

“Got to know by when the ice packs will melt.”

It’s Caul’s flat-toned voice that speaks, but Jude breaks in quickly, laughing nervously.

“And then there was this ominous voice behind us and I thought it was the end.”

“You’re like a dog returning to its vomit Jude. Leave us, I want to talk to Caul alone.”

Jude merely touches his right fore and middle finger to his forehead in salute to Paul, and drifts away into the house. Paul waits until he has disappeared down the passageway before turning to Caul.

“Let’s go inside to smoke some weed. It’s getting way too light out here.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 39 

The sight of Caul still leaning vacantly against the curve of the arch after some hours, drowned in the flood of acid, catches Jude’s eye. With the music dead, Jude takes a moment to lean his backside on the bar shelf. He bitterly contemplates Caul’s almost knightly countenance, as if suffering from remorse.

/now that my spirit has been killed/ /seems like im wandering around with you in this dark wood youve been telling me about caul/ /is that what happened to you/ /did paul do it to you/ /i dont think you would know if he did/ /seems like he can have his way with both of us now/ /while we wait though/ /maybe we could lead each other out of here/ /out of this rats alley where dead men lose their bones/

“Hey Jude, don’t make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better.”

Ben’s tuneless howl sends a frozen fear through Jude as he knows Paul’s gaze is on him. Ben cracks into laughter from the side of the bar closest to the wall, where he now sits with Drew. The patrons around the bar exchange laughter and clink glasses, or at least raise them. Ben is emboldened.

“A bottle of beer for the performance?”

“You singing for your supper again Bennie?”

“It’s an honourable job.”

“What? Begging.”

Drew raises his voice in a growl. “It’s soothsaying. He sooths what we can’t see and you buy him a beer.”

“Bennie’s saying keep the bar open Jude. Make it better for all of us.”

“Fat chance. I’m calling last round people. This night’s wearing thin.”

“Comedowns!”

“You all don’t look so great yourselves.”

Jude lifts himself from the bar ledge and goes seeking a tape, inserting it to let the sounds of rhythmic ambiance emerge. He and the girl fall wordlessly into issuing last drinks, their hands moving in time with the orders, rhythmically grabbing and uncapping, exchanging currency, and filling glasses with liquids that reflect but hold no light. But he also watches as the shadows of death—those of the negligent, indolent and unshriven—mill around the bar, ever more seeking the comfort of the bar’s gloaming light as they feel the night thinning, but entering its darkest. And he listens in horror to their rootless voices over the electronic soundscape haunting the bar in an ominous drone of deep thunder riding in, as if heralding the coming darkness. Then he sees Paul walk over to Caul.

“Earth calling Caul.”

Caul turns with glazed eyes as he tries to navigate out of his wormhole, where shards of normalcy intersect with altered shards, switching him back and forth between hallucinations and distortions and sharp bytes of rational realisation. His eyes eventually focus Paul’s visage, cigarette hanging from the mouth, and sideburn daggers cutting deep into sharp cheek bones.

“You’ve gone and done it again Caul. Standing vacant there for the last few hours. What are we going to do about you?”

Caul leans forward in urgent whisper.

“This bar. It’s just trapping people for its own sick desire. Forget our little trip. This is like eternal living death.”

“It’s the acid you know. Makes you hallucinate.”

“Not like any hallucination I’ve ever had before.”

“So is the acid. Get a grip. Anyway, I wanted to tell you, Mae’s walking alone again.”

The confirmation of a hope Caul has done everything to suppress all night literally bursts open the gates of a garden he has long since entered, and long secreted away in his heart.

“Touch a nerve did I?” Paul is smiling almost warmly.

“Apparently it was her or her father, and Gary chose the money.”

“There’s a lot more to consider than them just breaking up Paul.”

“I know. That’s why I’m getting Gary to come stay with us. So that he doesn’t land up back in their apartment and making up.”

Paul smiles again an almost warm smile that of late, Caul has not been able to penetrate, and suspicion of his own death, seeded by Janice’s words, seeps its way from his soul into his blood.

“What have you been doing Paul?”

Their chests are parallel, a pool cue erect like a lance between them. Paul’s neck stretches his mouth to Caul’s ear.

“Screw you, you coloured bastard. This is what you’ve been pining for isn’t it, these past three years?”

Paul steps back to the pool table and scatters a litter of balls in violent fashion as if angered with Caul. The balls ricocheting off the table’s green felt edges send a tremor of shock through Caul, breaking up the inertia holding him, allowing him to heave his figure forward towards the door, confusion settling heavily into him about a half-brother whose intention he can no longer ascertain, a horrifying vision he cannot understand, and a question about despair that he cannot communicate.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 40 

Evelin drives her car up along a steep gradient of a hill of the lone mountain, that stands beneath the rib-clouded blue sky stretching across the east and west of things. She turns into a long avenue of gnarled oaks shading the road in dappled sunlight.

“My grandmother’s got this small house and garden tucked away in a little cul-de-sac, and stays with a woman whose looked after her for years.”

Evelin turns her car into a small enclave road and into a cobbled drive.

“Ah, this is so quaint.” “

“Isn’t it just so. It is always reminding me of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother’s house.”

“Does that make you Red Riding Hood then?”

Evelin laughs.

“Kind of. When I told my grandmother that, she was like, ‘Now don’t you worry about the big bad wolf dear. He’s been bound for a thousand years.’”

Evelin shrugs, showing she knows not what it means.

“I think that’s what I love about visiting Gran. It’s like I’m going into this magical realm that’s protected from this world. But Gran’s not out of time herself mind you.”

They leave the car behind and approach a small cottage with thatched roof, and simple rounded gables. Over the veranda rises the pergola hanging with beautiful small roses. On the veranda stands a strong matronly figure, robust and colourful with a glorious white smile.

“Hello my young Evelin.” Her voice is round and textured.

“Hello Sophie.”

Sophie envelops Evelin in a hug which Evelin gives into pulling a sideways goofy face at Audrey.

“Who is your friend?”

“Sophie, this is Audrey. She’s thinking about joining the family.”

“Is that so?” Sophie turns her beaming face to Audrey.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Audrey. You have a good friend in Evelin.”

“Is Gran in?” “Oh yes of course dear. Come in.”

She ushers them into the cool dark house where the smell of baking over powers the other senses. A flour-dusted figure in apron emerges from the kitchen directly in front of them, light pouring in from the window behind her, illuminating her grey hair in a silver lining.

“I knew you were coming, so I baked some Christmas Mince pies. But you’ll have to wait for a little while for the batch to cool.”

There is a twinkle in her eye.

“Now no need to fuss. Go settle yourselves in the lounge. I’ll just dust myself and be right with you. Sophie will get some tea ready.”

The wizened figure disappears back into the light. Evelin directs Audrey through to the lounge where they settle on the window seat. The bright light coming in somehow doesn’t lighten the room with its dark furniture and baked-tile floor, but rather gives the cool gloom its own illumination, while the softness of the cushions and the length of the curtains warm it all up.

“Hello my dear.” She comes matter-of-factly through and Evelin rises to meet her in an embrace.

“Hello Gran.”

“I knew you would come today. Strange isn’t it.”

Her eyes are bright, watery, twinkling. Audrey stands to greet her.

“Gran, this is Audrey. A new friend of mine.”

“Oh. How lovely.” She looks at Audrey peculiarly.

“You look so sad, but you know sadness is good for the heart. Sometimes it is in a sad heart that the wisdom of Christ lies waiting to be found.”

Audrey looks a little perturbed as she sits.

“Don’t be alarmed dear. I have things to tell you both today that will sound very dark. But they are not the idle words of a scared old woman. They have the light of Life.”

Evelin has sat down alongside Audrey again.

“What is it Gran?”

The elderly woman rests gracefully into an armchair of out worn use.

“Remember child when you used to say you were Red Riding Hood coming to see me.”

Evelin laughs gaily at the memory.

“I just told Audrey that as we arrived. ‘Now don’t you worry about the big bad wolf dear. He’s been bound for a thousand years. And one day I will tell you why.’”

Evelin’s voice enters a hush as the last words fall from her tongue. Sophie brings through a tray and sets in on the table settling in the midst of the room.

“Come help yourself girls. Sophie does make a fine cup of tea.”

Both come forward, taking the china and silver awkwardly in the atmosphere of lightened darkness.

“You cannot imagine the pleasure it gives me to see your youth sit before me listening to my nattering over a cup of tea.”

Sophie settles herself in similarly worn chair across from grandmother.

“It’s funny the things you savour. Stupid little things. The first sip of tea. The sun in its right spot at tea time. It’s almost lovely living in the so constant present. But of course, Sophie sometimes over draws the tea or a cloud dulls the sun, and a memory comes out of nowhere. I daresay with no more intention than desiring to see hurt drawn from joy. Oh I do gabble on don’t I.”

She takes some time to sip from her cup and contemplate.

“It’s been a long hard year hasn’t it girls. For both of you. And it’s going to get harder. I don’t know if I want to be part of it much longer.”

“Gran, stop talking like that.”

“Oh go on child. You talk to me like I’m an adolescent playing for pity.”

“But look at you. Still doing it all by yourself. Full of vitality.”

“Whoever said I was doing this by myself. And I don’t mean Sophie here, though she’s a godsend. The vitality you see in me isn’t me. What vitality could possible be left in this old worn out body? It’s God my child, and He will keep me till it’s time for me to go out this world for a little while.”

They sit sipping in silence, with Sophie dozing her portly, ageing figure quietly in her chair.

“Now, come, tell me why you came?”

“I wanted to ask you if we could borrow your Christmas decorations. We want to have a celebration tonight, but both of us were just feeling too tired to brave the mad rush and go buy something.”

“Of course you are dear. You’re about to make two and a half generations three and a half.”

The blood drains from Evelin’s face as comprehension sinks in.

“You mean to say… How do you know?…Are you sure?”

“Yes I’m sure. The Lord showed it to me when you walked in the door. You’re about to complete your generation.” (more…)

A hand knocks on Caul’s door, followed without hesitation by Jude, who sees Caul sitting at his desk, staring blankly at the wall.

“Hey you introverted lump of clay, what you doing?”

It takes a few moments for Jude’s words to penetrate to Caul’s consciousness.

“Nothing much.”

“Good. Lick this.”

Jude’s hand holds out a bank card laced at the edge with the froth of a freshly cut line. Caul’s face contorts.

“Not now Jude.”

“Come on, it will tang your mouth. I kept it just for you.” These last words infect Caul and unearth a smile from him.

“Ha, a smile from such a morose piece of flesh is possible.”

Caul draws his lips across the card edge.

“Good hey!”

“Sets my teeth on edge.” He smiles again, half reluctantly. “You just get back now?”

“Oh yeah. For some reason, after last night, I feel as if I’ve escaped some dismal inferno. So I took in the sunrise up at the cliffs. Saw old man Cato up there. He wanted to know if the laws of hell had been destroyed to see damned old me up there at that hour of the morning.”

Caul stares somewhat stunned at his words as Jude laughs with delight and collapses into a grimy, cat-clawed sitting chair. Then, slightly unnerved by Caul’s continued gape, Jude throws a pointing arm towards Caul’s bed.

“Relax will you. I’m trying to approach calmness here. Slouch your rigid back on your bed and tell me what you’re reading at the moment?”

Caul tries to push Jude’s remark from his head, and goes sits cross-legged on his bed.

“Nothing. Again nothing strangely enough, but I need to. I need some healthy distraction.”

“From what?”

“This town.”

“The only thing for that squire is drugs and once the drugs are sorted this town becomes game for anything.”

“Except salvation.”

Jude throws his hands up in mock disgust.

“That’s what I can’t stand about you. You always point out what I don’t want to remember at the worst possible times. Come, come. I’m too snorted to think of salvation. Let there be no salvation. Let there only be dance, music, wine and song. Let us get drunk and dance away in this decaying castle of ours.”

“It’s eight a.m.”

“Can I at least smoke then?”

Caul nods, then heaves over on his bed and clumps his hand heavily down on a tape deck. Music begins to groove resonantly around the room. Jude tosses the box and lighter over to Caul and then loosely drapes himself all over the chair, arm hanging a cigarette in hand over the chair arm.

“You know what I love about smoking. You can watch yourself breathe. It’s the moment magnified in the most exquisite way. So different to the feeling confession gives you.”

Caul, sitting back up against the wall, legs up against his body held in fearful arms, head towards the ceiling, sucks at his cigarette and then looks over at Jude.

“Last night was your first mass and confession in how long?”

Jude ignores him, carrying on with his own thought.

“Confession’s a really constipated kind of feeling. I’d forgotten how hard it was. He’s a good priest though. Quietly suggested I come back later when my heart was truly in want of penance. So here I am, forced to wander in a kind of ritual excommunication for scorning the Church.”

He laughs the same rueful laugh Caul heard last night and hearing it triggers the question he wanted to ask last night but couldn’t find the wherewithal to.

“Three years ago, when you sold your family property to Paul…” Caul’s pause takes pensive shape. “…you quit the road to Holy Orders as well. Why?”

The inquiring lilt to Caul’s tone betrays a concern beyond simple curiosity. Jude notes its cry for truth and can no longer bear perpetuating his betrayal any further. Forcing down a well-worn stream of words about to burble from his throat, he stirs a still pool long since disturbed.

“I couldn’t bear any longer the Church’s vision of a priest rising to the alter and acting in the persona of being like the living image of God the Father.”

“Maybe it was just misplaced vocation?”

“No. I wanted to be a priest once. But then I discovered that it wasn’t God in the cathedral any more but a pagan pageant. Now if the Church’s ability to manifest and communicate the mystery of God’s salvation is a fraud…how do you come to God? And what point in being a priest! As for my vows. Obedience. Well and truly gone. Poverty. Well, still poor, but not willingly so. Chastity. Now, I still have that. It’s funny you know. One of my childish reasons for becoming a priest was so I could be faithful to Christ until he came for his bride. Ironic that. Of all things, this vow remains.”

The music takes over the silence in the room, brooding its swirling guitars repetitively in winding anxiety until finally their gyring tension breaks.

Jude gets up, scoops his cigarettes up from the bed and moves to open the door. “I’m going to get some sleep.”

Caul gives him a queer look. “Why did you go then? To mass and confession?”

Jude stops and hangs on the door, swinging slightly, looking round its corner at Caul.

“It’s Pentecost. I was hoping the Spirit might return. The Church’s curse is not the final word you know. Where there’s a hint of green, there’s hope of being purged. That’s what I felt like this morning. That I had entered a place where guilt is purged.”

A flashback of Jude’s face struggling against the death last night passes before Caul’s mind.

“I thought the Spirit was already meant to be living in you?”

Jude shrugs.

“So the Church says. Who knows any more? Maybe you’ll be able to explain it to me.”

Jude fades from the doorway, leaving Caul seated in the stillness of his room contemplating in perplexed fear at a town now divided in two before him: a place where guilt is purged with penitent hope, where initiation into joy beckons and where one emerges into light. But also a place also given to four horsemen to ride their havoc in conquest, war, famine and death, until the time given to the winds to blow destruction across the sea and earth is over. And the two begin to dissolve the one faith that since childhood his mother had taught him, frightening him.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 42 

In the living room, Mae’s eyes stare vacantly at the front door from the settee. A car goes by and its lights pass along the wall, silhouetting the burglar bars of the window onto the wall, moving them in fading intensity as the car drifts by. The room returns to its diffuse darkness. She continues staring at the door, cocooned in an ever smaller cage that her mind has created to protect her these three years from the inevitability of what Caul has told her has now happened. The sound of a car door closing, footsteps and a key passing into the door rattle the edges of her cage. She listens frightened to the movements, uneased by their vigour and being wrung with the knowledge that Gary once fit inside this cage. Her heartbeat now races in a wild desperation at needing to make him fit again.

Gary’s eyes look up at her with disgust from the open door frame. “I thought you would be naked already.”

He tosses the door closed behind his back and stalks across the living room into a bedroom on the other side. From inside a cupboard he pulls out a bag, looking up to see Mae with an anguished query on her face in his doorway.

“What you doing?”

“Packing. What does it look like.”

He begins burying clothes into the bag. “I’m going to be living with Paul for the time being until I figure out what to do next.”

Her face blankly registers the name, but inside her, for some reason unknown to herself, a coldness sends a shrill shiver down her spine.

“What am I meant to do?”

He doesn’t look at her. “You can stay here for the coming month. I’ll take care of the rent. All you need to do is find your own place. I’ll deal with tying up this place.”

He stops, crouched, staring into his bag.

“And don’t try to come find me.”

The desperation that has been surfacing within her can’t restrain itself any more.

“Don’t leave me here alone Gary. Don’t leave me here to defy them on my own.”

His whole body becomes very tense and his raised right hand is shaking.

“Do you remember nothing of what you’ve done these past couple of months?”

He has turned scarlet, a sense of claustrophobia clouding his blood.

“You’ve been feeding off me to get the energy for whatever is going on inside you, and then expecting me to carry on like nothing had changed at all.”

“You weren’t interested in knowing what was going on Gary. You pretended you were. But you really weren’t. And that’s what has hurt me most. That you weren’t even bothered with wanting to go through the effort of digging up our love again. It’s like you have been happy to just freeze it completely.”

Nothing is said. There is his coldness and her mouth sucking in and biting. Then from the hidden depths of her soul, a cry comes unheard to all but her. It is a mourning cry not for her dying relationship with Gary as she had thought when they started erupting from her soul at Easter, but as she now realises, for Caul, but not quite Caul, like in a dream. A cry of incessant mourning for his dead spirit. Her hands clamp her head in a vice and start shaking it as she turns from his room. He takes his bag in his hand, crosses the living room and goes out the door, leaving her to her growing hysteria and the intense desire to be naked sweeping through her.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 43 

As he passes through the courtyard, Gary looks in the direction of Mae’s salon. He stops and after a moment’s hesitation moves towards the shop with a swagger in his gait. She sees him coming from through the salon window and moves to stall him at the door, not wanting him to enter her workspace.

“What do you want?”

“Oh, I just thought I’ll come and get my haircut before going to work.”

“You haven’t got the time.”

He carries on regardless. “You know, to look sharp for your father’s banquet tomorrow.”

He laughs at the disgust on her face.

“Me and your father have become real close now that you’re out the way. You are coming right?”

“You’ve got a cheek coming here, what with the little miss I’m-a-nice-Christian-girl you’re shagging just above us. I don’t know which offends me more. That you left me. Or that you chose her as a replacement. And to think I once thought you had pearls for your eyes.”

“There’s no need to be so brutal. She was just a stopgap to another end. It’s over anyway. I’m shagging the girl I’ve always dreamed of doing now, and I feel like a million bucks. Finally, I’m getting into the control seat.”

She simply looks flabbergasted at him. “Just get!” She throws her arm out to point him away, her voice, low and tremulous with both anger and tears. He looks at her with a mirth in his face, but turns and goes.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 44

Caul wakes, the day being ruthless in assaulting his mind as to its nature. Slowly a dream slips back into his head. He plays with the vivid pieces and puts it together, the old woman talking, a Bible in her hands, two old school classmates for some reason, and fragments of phrases as lucid and violent as his visions. But it is the talk of God and of knowing him that sings in his soul.

/can you teach me how to know you/ /because ive tried to figure it out myself and i don’t know how/ /and it feels as if death is now waiting to take my flesh as it already has my spirit/

Surprised though he is at his prayer, he assents with his heart, and rises, leaving his room to go upstairs. In the bathroom he relieves himself before walking towelled, waist clad, down the passage. He is about the enter the kitchen, but his eyes notice Jude sitting as a straw man smoking outside. The image shocks him with its portent, then he realises it’s dangerous for a straw man to smoke. He drifts towards the door leading out to the veranda and a world still enshrouded in mist. He looks warily at the dishevelled figure on the couch.

“Rough night?”

Jude’s response is a disinterested pursing of his lips. He doesn’t bother to turn his head, but just looks straight ahead smoking.

“What happened?”

Caul sits on the edge of the couch consciously aware of his naked torso. Jude doesn’t say anything for another minute, yet an anger of betrayal deepens in his face. Finally he turns to Caul.

“It’s a curious thing, Caul. Paul’s using me to usurp your place tonight Caul. I’m supposed to be death’s effigy waiting to be brought back to life.”

Caul’s heart is in his mouth with fear and sudden sickness. Jude watches Caul’s face change, grimness remaining on his.

“Yes, I sold my soul and my property to revenge a church that betrayed me, and at Pentecost, Paul prepared me ritually to be the priest who brings your god back to life.”

The colour drains from Caul’s face, his stomach churning nauseous on its emptiness. Jude looks at Caul almost piteously.

“Is there nothing in your head except your own pride? You’re not as important as you thought you were. It is the priest who has all the power. Not the consort. The power to save you lies with me Caul. ”

Jude’s laugh is demeaning.

“But you might still have a chance with Mae, Caul. Because what’s meant to be dead in me is not dead, and doesn’t seem to want to die. The hooded figure you claim to have seen beside me may have been the Spirit after all.”

The vapour of mist settling on Caul’s skin suddenly is no longer cold death enclosing its fingers of final doom around him, as he realises Paul has lied to him, but realises above all what a fool his pride has made of him.

A bitter, sullen tone continues in Jude’s voice.

“You’ve done a good job healing me Caul, making me walk through a purgatory of the sacraments with you these past seven months. It looks like you’ve unwittingly brought me to the edge of the eternal fire that I have to pass through if I’m going to enter into paradise. It’s just penance, then the Eucharist that I need now. But I’m afraid Peter’s gate would not open to me, even if I did choose penance. I knew that when I entered the first time, that he who looks back goes out again.”

“You may have never left, but just been stuck on the mountain for too long.”

Jude just stares stonily at Caul, and continues.

“I realise the grace of my baptism is gone. There is not enough in the Church’s treasury of saintly and virgin prayers and deeds to ever cover my apostasy. You’ve healed, but your healing is not enough. You’ve failed in your quest my knight.”

Caul breathes out heavily, but in growing relief as he feels the weight of his pride fall from his back like a large stone; unsure of himself, but wanting to speak of his heart.

“I know my healing is not enough. If I ever thought it was, it was just my pride.”

Jude looks at him half-angered, but feels amazement at the humility within Caul’s confession.

“So, if you feel I’ve done anything to heal you Jude, you’re wrong. I don’t know what it was that brought upon me such an urgency to see you healed that day of Pentecost. But when it came, my pride kicked in, thinking that I had been given the right to special knowledge to heal you, and that I could do it by seeking that knowledge in my own strength. But now I’ve realised that when it comes to restoring spiritual life, human effort is worthless. Only that which is not wounded by evil can save from evil. And that to me is God. So, I guess, if you are feeling healed, there is nothing that my words or influence have done to bring it about. It must come down to God’s work in you. And if He’s working at healing you, I can’t see why he would waste His time on someone who couldn’t be restored to full health. So I guess the question you have to answer is, are you alive, or not? And if you are then…”

For a moment, Jude wants to tear into Caul with hatred and beat and kick his half naked body. But then he oddly begins to fully enjoy the irony. Jude laughs lightly to himself.

“Guess I didn’t train to be a priest for nothing then.”

He looks back into Caul’s eyes.

“Well then my dear Caul, if it’s God you want, it’s repentance you need. If you really think you can know God, He ain’t going to listen to you till you confess you’re a bad boy. After that it’s the beautiful robe, the ring and the festive banquet for the prodigal, so the Church says.”

Jude draws heavily on the last of his cigarette and stubs it out in an overfull ashtray.

“I guess even you now have the chance to walk through the purifying fire. But not for me Caul. Please don’t come patronise me anymore.”

He rises and walks inside, moves through the passage to his room where he closes the door, leaving Caul alone in the shroud of mist, the idea of repentance driving deep into him, bringing him to slow realisation that his prayer has been answered and that the way to knowing God has been shown.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 45 

The shore wash of voices and plates resonate a warm glow of a subtly full restaurant, a benighted sea calm beyond its large windows. A jaunty piano piece starts up and the buoyancy of the restaurant lifts. Over the intelligent, elegant rag, a woman’s Shakespearean voice sings.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 46 

Caul listens but the skies are silent, as if to seal what the seven thunders have said till the day of the last trumpet.

/silence/ /what did i expect/ /what shall i do now/ /maybe i should take a wild run on the beach/ /take my shoes off/ /run and fling my arms to the wind/ /sound my barbaric yawp/ /pretend to feel alive/ /oh how i wish to feel alive/ /i am so dead/ /we are all so dead/ /devoid of any spirit but that of lustful desire to know only what we want/ /what shall i do then/ /what shall i do tomorrow/ /what shall i ever do/ /its ten/ /go home and take a shower/ /and try give these lidless eyes of mine some sleep/ /then go out with mae at four/ /so we can continue our game of chess/ /and in the meanwhile God/ /ill wait for a knock upon my hearts door/

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 47

Mae hears in Paul’s voice, someone kind and beneficent.

“Is it true then? That my father holds the office of priest?”

Paul nods gravely at her, and she stamps her foot in a moment of tempestuous fury, controlling a growl on her voice.

“Then let Jude kill him. This is driving me crazy. What should I do? I think I should rush out of here and walk in the street with my hair done so, tricked out with all its flowers. Maybe then they’ll see they’re driving me mad.”

He rests against a column holding up the roof.

“Your father’s right you know. About all those things that people want. A club house with hot water for tea at ten. A closed golf cart in the afternoon in case it rains, and instead, a game of chess.”

“Well, he’s just gathering a dying breed of people into his huddle.”

Her voice is now grumpy.

“I know. You’re right.”

She feels the weight of his statement.

“But this place is not going to be an upper middle-class haven for long. Times, they are a changing. And when the time comes you’re going to be amazed, because this whole system looks indestructible doesn’t it? Like it’s just going to roll right on over us. But people like you and me, we have the real power backing us, and after the rites tonight, the system will slowly become ours, and these wretched fools trying to hold onto their town will be in our hands. Then we will shove the meaninglessness of their obsolete faith in their faces. We will scare them with the prospects of the moors and barbarians ransacking them. So shocked, so petrified will they be that they will look to us for new meaning. And they will find us, Mae. You and me. And those who don’t like it, will die.”

The way his eyes penetrate her, the vehemence of his voice, and his mention of the rite gives way to the preternatural fear in her again, rising the fine hairs that follow the curvature of her spine upwards. But the madness grabbing her rebels, sending an excited shiver down through her nerve ends. Then he simply turns and fades away.

By the time she has returned to her table, her blood is pushing in its silent stream an agitated state of growing wildness. She forces her eyes out to the ocean to try still her own turbulent will, but merely sees candles reflecting back at her, making it hard to see the black ocean beyond.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 48

Janice walks into her apartment and suddenly feels scared to see Paul sitting there with Gary, the telltale signs of a cocaine rush on Audrey’s face. Paul turns brusquely to her, displaying no surprise.

“We better get going Gary.”

But before Paul can get up from the sofa, Janice slips languidly astride him and lets her mouth close on his.

“Let’s go snuff and have sex rather”.

He brushes her face away and with his hands around her waist, gives her a shove into the seat alongside him.

“I’d rather have a beer.”

Paul stands and collects his keys from the coffee table. “I’ll see you at the party later.” He walks from the house leaving Gary to follow him.

Janice laughs, feigning indifference to the force of rejection she feels.

“You’d better go Gary. Before I have to take out my sexual frustration on you.”

Audrey watches as Gary’s eyes betray for the umpteenth time his growing obsession with wanting Janice’s sex. But the Pygmalion metamorphosis of Mae into Audrey Hepburn inside Audrey’s head, and the jealous anger it causes, grips her soul, refusing to let it go at the expense of her self worth.

/this is the guy who rejected audrey hepburn and then chose me/ /you should be in the driving seat audrey/ /you should have him wrapped around your finger/ /why is his mind is wondering on to this slut/ /he is mine now/ /and i will be damned if im going to let this slut take him away from me/ /ive just got to keep on giving him a good time/ /cause if i dont/ /she will/

After Gary has gone, Janice stares viciously at Audrey.

“Paul’s up to something and you’re somehow involved. What is it?”

Audrey, with the icy confidence of cocaine thrilling her, is too angry inside to say anything. Janice feels vulnerable in the silence and laughs to protect herself. Only this time it is a flummoxed laugh at her increasing loss of control she thought she had over Audrey.

“I know something’s up. I tried to protect you that night I gave you snow. I hoped he’d leave you alone after that. That he’d see you as damaged goods. But he must really need you. I should never have got you a job with my sister.”

Her own words claw at her heart as if wanting to tear it out.

“Paul never lets anyone get involved with him unless he really needs them.”

Again she pauses as the realisation of her situation slices open her soul.

“But whatever Paul gets you involved with, when he’s done with you, he makes sure he gets rid of you.”

Momentarily, Janice is seized with horrifying fear.

“Get out of this Audrey.”

Janice’s sudden appeal of seeming genuine care only causes the Hepburn hand to tighten its grip on Audrey and she strikes back, no longer clear on what she is saying.

“You just want me to go so you can have Gary to flaunt before his ex. And I’ll be damned if she ever sees him in your pants.”

Janice stares nonplussed at Audrey, takes what is nonsensical to her as the cocaine speaking, and reacts with a flash of her own viciousness.

“Damn it Audrey, can’t you see the only reason Gary’s with you is because he’s doing what Paul wants him to do, and then to get regular sex on the side. And I should know. Paul’s been doing it to me for years.”

But Audrey is not listening.

/i should be ashamed of myself/ /looking so old fashioned compared to her/ /you got to make yourself look a bit smart he said/ /ill give you the money/ /i just want a good time after that miserable marriage/ /you are a fool audrey/ /what did i get together with him for if it wasnt to give him a good time/ /but there is still tonight/ /tonight ive got my chance to get him back/

Audrey stands up coldly arrogant before Janice and turns to go to her room.

“You just see that tonight you keep your hands off him.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 49

Janice cheers heartily as Gary drinks, then shoos him with her hand.

“Off you go and join Paul at the pool table, and let Audrey come sit here so I can talk to her.”

She gives him a wink as he acquiesces. Once he is gone, she taps her hand on the empty seat, inviting Audrey to move closer. Audrey moves over, pulling a long face. Janice leans over, speaking in a strong whisper, accusingly to her ear.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself looking this antique tonight. You’re only thirty-one, but you look like fifty tonight.”

“I can’t help it. It’s those pills I took to bring it off. That chemist said it would work out okay, but you can never be the same after doing that. But how could you know what I’m talking about?”

Audrey’s voice is bitter.

“Listen Audrey, I’m not going to mince my words. If Gary wanted kids, he’d of have stayed married. And if he can’t leave you alone, so what? Don’t be a fool. Now that Gary’s got his promotion, you’ve got to make yourself look smart. I know he’s going to ask you what you’ve done with the money he’s given you for that purpose. Don’t look shocked that I know. It’s my business to know these things. I heard him speaking to you, saying he can’t stand to look at you the way you are now. And can you blame him after the past three years of being married to that witch woman. He wants a good time, and if you don’t give it to him, there are others that will.”

“Is that right?” Audrey looks at Janice with a straight look.

“Yes, that’s right. So you had better hurry up about it.”

“Well then I’ll know who to thank, won’t I?”

“Oh go on with you. Go and find that man of yours and make him yours. I’ve got some seduction to do on Caul here.”

She gives Caul a short side glance. “He causes me such despair.”

Audrey complies by haughtily turning from her stool and stalking into the pool room alongside. Janice meanwhile turns back to Caul, goblet in hand and offers it to him. He shakes his head. “I find little in this success to toast.”

“Neither do I, but this is the way things are moving, isn’t it?”

Janice drinks resignedly from the glass, lays it on the bar, then takes his hand.

“You know, selling cosmetics, is not, despite appearances, a pretty world. I just can’t keep up with all these new fragrances and make-up styles anymore.”

He takes his hand back and looks strangely at her.

“What do you want Janice?”

“Tell me how it is that you landed up stranded in this bar.”

“The stories of my wanderings are my own.”

She laughs an exasperated laugh, letting her hand dust his knees to try disaffect any hint of the urgency to hurry up with him, because it is time.

“Seeing that’s the case, I’m going to go that side. See you later darling.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 50 

“You ask me how it will end? I know what you’re thinking in your minds. You’re thinking, hurry up please, it’s time. Do not desire the end because you wish to see it. For it is a time of woe unlike anything yet seen. Desire rather for Christ and remember that we do not know when it will end.”

The old woman looks at a group gathered around her in her living room, the afternoon sun filtering its diffuse golden light around them.

“Nevertheless, let me tell you as the Word describes it. The dragon will arise and the abomination set forth on its road to perdition, throwing by the wayside the false prophet who performed miraculous signs on the beast’s behalf, signs which deluded people to receive the mark of the beast and worship the beast’s image.

“The dragon will gather with it the beast and the kings of the earth along with their armies to make war against the rider on the white horse and his army who have reigned with their resurrected king for a thousand years, and who have been given authority to judge the earth because they have not worshipped the beast or his image, or received his mark on their hands or foreheads. They need not fear the second death for it has no power over them.

“But soon the time to reign is coming to its close, and Satan will go forth into the world and deceive all the peoples of the nations to gather for a battle. They will come from the four corners of the earth and settle around the camp of God’s people, the city he loves. But fire will come down from heaven and devour the beast and dragon and throw them into the lake of burning sulphur, which is the second death, to be tormented forever. The armies of the beast will be killed by the sword coming from the rider on the horse. And he will leave them to the birds to gorge themselves on their flesh.

“This then is the great supper of God, and He Himself will come down seated on His great white throne, dispatching earth and sky from his presence, for there will be no more room for them. And all the dead will be there, great and small, prostrate before the throne as the book of Life is opened. The sea will give up her dead, and death and Hades will let their dead go, so that they may come be judged according what deeds of theirs are recorded in the Book. Death and Hades will be tossed into the self-same lake where the Devil, his whore and his beast drown in eternal torment. And if anyone’s name is not found to be written in the Book of Life, he too will be thrown into that lake of second death. That is how it will end.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 51

The sun’s death falls spectacularly in through the windowed terrace of the self-same restaurant Mae and her mother dined in just the night before. The ocean soaks up the sun’s glow while clouds robe it in splendour. The effect comes streaming in, encircling tables filled with guests awaiting the banquet. A man stands from his table and glides to the shallow stairs rising to the bar. Halfway up he turns, open before him the sea of faces. His voice lifts sonorously, conducting authority around the elliptical room.

“Tonight we are here to celebrate romance recaptured. Life among the vineyards in the arms of seven towering peaks, the clean cool stream of birdsong in the glow of the early evening, and freedom from the conventional suburbs but with the security and history of an estate stretching back for centuries. Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you to a way of life perfected, and the official inauguration of Seventh Peak Golf and Country estate.
Around the world we are seeing the rising growth of gated villages in which tranquillity, natural ordered beauty, a sense of community and honest returns on investment are being returned to people. Estates like ours stand as medieval castles in a world of hostility, offering personal security in ways others can’t offer.

“Of all my years in real estate, the most valuable thing I have learnt is never to underestimate the value people place in their security. People will go to great lengths to get the best they can for their families. This town, I am proud to say, is one of those lengths, and our estate merely an added attraction to this utmost of lengths.

“Tonight you are all here as sponsors to ensuring that this way of life that is everything you’ve grown up with and more is being protected. Within our sanctuary, there will be no walls, only open fronts onto superb golf greens and greater neighbourliness and friendliness. Our vision is for a move back to community life, here with a golfing theme. And from this community setting we hope to see a greater expression of community living coming to the fore.

“But more than anything, our vision is that our estate will be a place that will give your soul the right to breathe. Tonight, on Christmas Eve, you are seeing the fruition of a long-term vision that has for many years been burning inside of me. For here is a place where you will be able to come and be freed from the world and be able to look into yourself and find your soul, while daily being soothed by beauty around you and ensuring that you get the best of what God has to offer. Let us then toast to our peace in this season of peace and goodwill.”

He raises a glass of champagne, the floor below him rising from its seat to join him in toast. Then he glides away down the stairs before the welling, reverent applause to his seat at the head of the table at which Mae sits.

She feels nauseated at her father’s oratorio, and still uncertain whether to believe what Caul told her as true. But more than anything else, she is grateful that her back is to Gary sitting across the room with Janice. Waiters filter in, bringing food to each table as the wine and chatter begin to flow. Behind Mae the shrill voice of a woman penetrates her mind such that she can’t keep it out.

“Last Sunday, the Anthonys invited me to dinner to enjoy the beauty of a hot gammon ham. And young Gary Stetson was there. Isn’t that surprising considering he divorced their daughter.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 52

The steeple’s bells begin to toll the violet hour, telling Jude to hurry up and that it is time. Behind his back, the late evening light is casting a pall of fading purple and scarlet sunlight onto the face of the seven peaks, while above him, the purple-pink mackerel sky is beginning to turn grey, as over the ocean the sun sinks lower unto its death. The bells continue their tolling.

/hurry up please its time/ /hurry up please its time/

He eventually lets his fishing stick fall into the river below, lights a cigarette and then turns to shuffle forward towards his confession.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 53 

Jude can hear the thump of music resonating from inside the house as Paul’s stooge escorts him with a hand on his shoulder, making sure he can’t make the break he wants to make. On entering the house, Jude sees the living room, all candlelit, prepared for a solemnity. Beyond its windows, on the sprawling garden below the veranda, around thirty people are dancing under the skies to a dithyrambic beat. He knows this is the beginning of his end.

“Sit Jude.”

Paul motions to him as he takes a sofa seat beside Mae, a certain possession in her eye as if in another world. Janice and Gary sit blindfolded and gagged on the other sofa.

/goodnight janice/ /goodnight gary/ /you were in the same boat as me/ /following the pied piper’s call/ /we didn’t know what we were doing following paul/ /but we have helped him dig up the god of his parents/ /now paul’s resurrecting it/

Jude lowers himself into Caul’s usual arm chair, noticing that the coffee table has been replaced with what looks like an alter and that on it lies a bough of fresh mistletoe. Then the mustard curtains are pulled shut as ten others in the room gather in a circle around them. Jude looks upon those circled around them. His eyes pick out Paul’s three loitering heirs, his trading kings whose wares had seduced him, Janice and Gary while Paul made way for his once-upon-a-time god to ascend.

/ta ta/ /goodnight/ /goodnight/ /goodnight/

Then he remembers Caul and notes his absence, feeling somehow comforted in the seat of Caul’s chair.

/goodnight caul/ /where ever you are/ /i hope you’ve found God and made your escape/ /as for me Lord/ /strengthen me once more/ /like samson/ /make me sing as the swallow here in this ruined house/ /that i might sing of your glory one more time/ /and cause their god to fall/

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 54