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…Ride with Madness starts here - I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for visiting. Feel free to leave comments.

Chapter 5:a

In which there is discord between the couples

It is the scented candle on the mantelpiece Addison notices when he finally emerges from upstairs on Saturday morning. He is still dressed only in boxer shorts. He is subdued: barely sees Carla, and totally ignores the baby. Even the few steps to the galley kitchen tire him. It could be the endless heat, he tells himself, or it might be that old devil in his head, wheedling into his consciousness and telling him he’s no good, he’s failing, he’s making a bad job of too many things. 

The clear light filtering through the dusty window makes his eyelids half close and his forehead wrinkle. He jumps as the letterbox flaps and deposits a pile of envelopes at his feet. The slight change in air stream, caused by the movements in the room, sends a smoky, jasmined whiff to his nostrils. 

He stoops to gather the mail. ‘This air is so stuffy,’ he snaps. ‘Do you have to make those smells? It’s New Age nonsense…’ Aware of a sudden silence behind him, he adds: ‘I don’t know what’s worse, the smell or the stupid idea causing it. It’ll have to stop.’ He straightens and turns.

Carla is staring at him. Addison registers not only the surprise on her face but also the red rims of her eyes, betraying the weeping he heard in the early hours. 

***

Helen’s stomach tightens involuntarily as she registers the change in Malcolm’s eyes, from soft brown and harmless to hard and glinty. The mugs and dishes on the breakfast bar echo the glint as each curve and plane catches the early sun slanting through the oriel window and sends it perversely awry. 

‘Why is it so much to ask of you?’ she says. ‘It was just a casual invite – nothing to get steamed up about. It might even be fun. They’re an interesting couple.’

Malcolm diverts the question to his own ends, as she knows he will: ‘I didn’t think you’d seen them again.’ 

No, thinks Helen. I wasn’t where you thought I was every minute of the day. ‘I said I’d take Carla home and I did. It solved a problem in the most efficient way and didn’t take more than a couple of hours. So what?’

‘Where do they live?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Of course it matters. There are some things it’s worth putting up with, and others not… So where does this do-gooder live?’

She reluctantly tells him.

‘Grief, I might have known.’

The knife in his hand wavers dangerously. ‘What are you thinking of? Have you nothing better to do than gad about in the slums, causing trouble?’

Helen is furious – with herself as much as with Malcolm. She should have refused on his behalf at the time. 

But if she can solve things amicably then she will, rather than have a row. (The after-shocks of a row will rumble on for days.) She takes a deep breath. ‘I knew you wouldn’t be keen,’ she says. ‘I know you’re busy. But will you just think about it while you’re at your mother’s? We can decide later.’

Her eyes follow the determined set of Malcolm’s shoulders disappearing through the arch to the back porch and out into the driveway.

She slumps in the wicker chair - it is so tiring having to make the regular effort to smooth a path for them both. She hates scenes, disputes, tempers and bad feeling. And Malcolm is insensitive to anything outside his own needs – especially to the residual lumpiness of the atmosphere they have just stirred. A change of heart is not likely.

Chapter 4:b

In which Addison buys presents but Carla has a nightmare

Moving out of the air-conditioned centre a few moments later, Addison is struck by the stifling heat of the morning. He turns towards the main shopping centre and heads for a particular shop where he has seen both clothes for mothers and toys for babies. He wants to buy something for his new family. Perhaps a loose smock for Carla, a mobile for Dinah. He will become an active participant in this new world. The baby will become more theirs and less Carla’s legacy.

He can’t quite reconcile the two parts of his life in his mind. He always pictures himself not as both but as one or the other: the rescuer-priest or, since nine days ago, the father. 

He views the row of ceramic name plates for doors. There’s no Dinah. 

If he were to choose another name for himself, it would be Melchizadek though he can’t find that either. When he reads about the guy in scripture, he feels a kind of kinship: no beginning, no end, a priest forever in his own city. (Like Carla, Addison has no contact with his family now.) And people bringing him tithes. That’s how Addison lives, in a priestly way, on the tithes of the Followers, money gladly given in appreciation for his work among them. He never mentions money, of course. They just give spontaneously out of love for the God who has rescued them. Addison has mediated, and the tithe is rightly his. 

He chooses a mobile with six plastic swans and battery-operated flashing lights on each neck, and then a cotton nursing top for Carla. The assistant helps him with this, explains the front buttons as though he were an idiot. He smiles at her, nevertheless, and pays. The Followers couldn’t have chosen better.

On the Superbus he forgets about godless humanity and contemplates soberly his invitation. What if by a stroke of chance she is married to some highly educated professor of Divinity? And Addison has invited him to tea? 

Addison feels like a warrior sent to battle, armed only with basic counselling and aromatherapy.

***

Carla’s mug of tea slops dangerously as she lowers herself stiffly onto the living room settee. 

She sits, awkward and hunched, trying to calm herself by inhaling the sweetly pungent aroma wafting from the coconut and lavender candle on the mantelpiece. A nightmare assaulted her in the early hours and she needs to clear her head before Addison returns. It’s over an hour since he went. Dinah is in her cot upstairs, heavily sedated with the comfort of a full breast of milk. This should be a mother’s space. 

But the warmth of the morning barely touches the cold in her soul. Maybe an oil burner would work better than candles - if she ever gets to go shopping again. She hugs herself instinctively.

Will I dare be in town? 

Her body remains in the grip of the dreamt terror: she can still feel herself being dragged by a relentless and unseen force from Helen’s moving car into Steve’s, the cars remaining locked together as if in battle; Helen holding her round the waist, her spine stretching as she begins to tear apart; the traffic circling past them, mindless of her screams for help, the drivers only interested in reaching their destination. And Steve calmly pronouncing a list of charges to do with her character, like a grand judge summing up the decision. Mixing in promised revenge as a deserved punishment.

Her thigh muscles clench together involuntarily as she imagines him carrying out the threats - as he surely will if he finds her. It’s enough to make her stomach turn. Only a deep, slow filling and emptying of her lungs saves her from retching. Helen alone stood between her and Steve’s hell as she woke, sweating and rigid, to the sound of Dinah’s cries for attention.

She pulls her bare legs up onto the settee, as if to protect them, slumps suddenly sideways against the cushions, rests her head on her arms, drained of the energy to hold herself up.

She must concentrate and think. 

It is obvious that the nightmare was just that, something looming from a subconscious fear. But the precipitating event will not go away: how could Steve be at the window of a car behind them in town? She is sure that as they rounded the junction she recognised him. Neat floppy hair, straight nose, cigarette tilted just below it. She never wants to be close enough to Steve to know his features. Even across a football stadium would be too close. He’s dangerous. Her heart thumps again. Steady, she tells herself. Don’t start. This is now, not then. You’re safe here.

She forces herself to relax and breathe sweeter air. She makes her eyes move round the room, take in the reality of the home she shares with Addison: the simple furnishings, possessions they have been given, the piano, the table, the chairs. The ordinariness of it all. It’s impossible to think of her past being here with her.

Steve won’t have followed her here. He has other business, a living to make. He wouldn’t be able to spend time chasing her across more than ten miles to another city he hardly knows. She’s been unsettled by the sight of someone who merely looked like Steve: clean-shaven, handsome but steely. Tidy hair when calm, flopping forward like Steve’s would when his anger rose after a drinking session. Her head’s organising gremlin has made a mistake of identity due to the speed things happened.

Would it even take Steve six months to track her down? Would he bother? She was not that important to him. Others can do what she did. The special bond between them broke long ago. Long before she ran. Long before the refuge, Addison, Helen, Dinah. The list is a tool: pushing away the time when she knew Steve for what he was. 

In fact, it wasn’t Steve she feared. It was the man he became under the influence. And not just of drink. It was more. Jealousy? Competition? No. She tells herself it wasn’t that. She offered none. If he thought so, it had been in his mind. The mind does funny things when unbalanced. She knows that. She hadn’t been able to fight for herself before.

Before it happened. 

But afterwards, influenced again by the hormonal upheaval of pregnancy, she’d known she could do anything, anything, to ensure the safety of this baby. Perhaps Steve, too, is unstable. If he thinks her gone to someone else, maybe he will go to the ends of the world to take her back. Maybe it was him, after all…

Fear is encroaching again. The candle wavers as she stares into its golden flame. 

Then she thinks: the light that fear provides is not a good guide to right and wrong. Daylight is better for making judgements. She jumps up and goes to the window, blinking in its sudden brightness as she focuses again. For some moments she absorbs the clear blue of the morning.

‘This is my life now,’ she tells the blackbird on the wall outside. She must have shouted: the bird rises with a flap and disappears. 

‘Sorry.’ She is contrite at the sight of the vacant perching place. But the knot slips from her stomach.

It couldn’t have been Steve. She was less than worthless in his eyes once pregnant. Some stranger has put this idea in her head, just by happening to be within her line of vision when she glanced round. It’s too coincidental. She won’t contemplate it. It’s senseless to let unproven fears take hold. Besides, he never knew she was pregnant again. She’s sure of that.

So sure that she checks the time, strides to the candle, blows out the wick and pinches it hard, then retires to the galley kitchen and starts making coffee for Addison’s imminent return. He is strong. He will protect her, but it’s better not to add to his already heavy burdens. She may have no affinity with his mission, but there is an overwhelming need to repay him. Busyness will keep things in proportion. 

She pushes any lingering anxiety somewhere it cannot affect her face, and reaches for two mugs, noting how quickly the smell of coffee overpowers the coconut and lavender she knows Addison does not entirely condone.

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Chapter 4:a

In which we go to town with Addison, who has plans

Addison knows there is a God when he surveys the complexity and diversity of his fellow travellers on Friday.

The experience he gained amid the ‘hallelujahs’ and ‘amen, brothers’ of his father’s fellowship, together with the knowledge learned from his mother’s catechism, have taught him that there is a middle road to the religious experience (he would place it half-way between spirit and truth). But neither of the extremes told him what God was like, only how people might respond to him if they knew him.

On the other hand, right here on the crowded Superbus into town he can see such a display of godlessness that God’s nature and character are demonstrated by default. The people are like sheep without a shepherd; he could weep over them.

Someone declares (behind Addison’s back) with great unconcern, even pride, that he will arrive at work an hour late – he’ll say he had to take his elderly mother to hospital, but openly admits to having been out till the early hours with a mate at the Plazza Club. Another (across the gangway) is arriving early today, thus adding to his flexi-time dues so that he can go round to his girlfriend’s on the way home before his wife will expect him. There are youngsters (behind and in front) behaving like ruffians, and old women (seemingly everywhere) sharing the most private family details as if prizes for disloyalty and risibility were up for grabs.

He who shuts his ear to the poor…

But Addison hears it all. Oh yes, the poor are everywhere: the poor in spirit, the poor in truth, the poor in motivation, the poor in loyalty. From this he deduces that there must be a God and that this God is everything that people are not: spiritual in being, absolute truth, purposeful and faithful. This knowledge inspires and sustains Addison – that and the girl Carla.

Carla.

He left her this morning, sitting on the side of their bed suckling the nine-day-old Dinah. A shaft of light played on Carla’s fair hair, giving her a halo. It made Addison think of the Virgin, and recall the statues of Madonna and Child that he grew up with. He hadn’t liked the images in stone, but his heart expanded when he saw their parallel in Carla an hour ago. The aura of a goddess – and man, there were prohibitions around goddesses, things it wasn’t natural to do, it wouldn’t be decent to do… How could he…?

But there is still time before then. Neither child-like nor stupid, Addison believes that the God he serves will show him a way through the maze of conflict he experiences in relation to Carla. 

He returns abruptly to the matter in hand as the driver shouts ‘Exchange’ and pulls the bus up sharply at a row of shelters.

***

It is ten minutes from Exchange to the Priory Centre, and Addison walks along humming Crown him with many crowns, while slapping a reggae-style rhythm to it on his thigh, and contemplating the plight of the four young men he counselled earlier in the week. These, too, are the poor - poor in discernment. They are in danger, and in the intervening days he has consulted with his helpers and come to the conclusion that they need a safe house, a home where people with unsuitable accommodation can live, supported by others who will care about them. It is contemptible to have faith but no actions to back it up. Someone has suggested Action for Homes may help, and he mounts the stairs, two at a time to beat the escalator, with purposeful leaps and a flash of bright green-and-red lozenges. Underneath he wears a blue string vest and lighter blue cotton trousers.

He rings at the reception desk, his finger pressing for slightly longer than necessary.

A young girl enters from the back office.

‘I need a house,’ Addison announces, cutting through the preliminaries. ‘What arrangements d’you usually make?’

The girl hesitates, seemingly unsure how to proceed now the normal formalities are dispensed with.

‘I’m just helping out. I’ll see if someone…’ She disappears again. 

Addison taps his foot. He is in motion now and difficult to stop, like a watch spring that has been tensioned and is releasing itself automatically. He catches the odd word through the open door: bossy… waistcoat… He grins. At least someone will take note.

The woman who eventually emerges from the office is running her hand backwards through shoulder-length hair – and is familiar to Addison, though he can’t quite place her.

‘It’s Addison… isn’t it? Nice to see you again. What on earth brings you here?’

Now he remembers: of course, it’s the woman Helen who befriended Carla. What a sign from the Lord; surely he’s putting his seal of approval on the whole idea! Addison could never have known where she worked. He’s been led directly here.

‘I need help,’ he repeats, with a deliberately enigmatic grin.

Helen apologises. ‘I’m not actually the person you want but I’m the only one here today. I’m the screen and telephone minder. But if you explain–– ‘

Addison leans over the desk and tells Helen how they need a house. The Followers can afford to pay the rent and run it: they give generously out of their much and their little. But can the charity buy the house or provide one they already own?

Helen briefly details for him their system of buying derelict houses with the help of government grants, doing them up and renting at low rents to those in need. Has Addison experience of housing the homeless, of being a landlord? she asks.

‘We’d only be landlord temporarily,’ Addison explains. ‘The young people themselves will do the house up. We’ve carpenters and electricians among the Followers to teach them. That way they learn a skill they can use for a job later.’

‘So you’d only pay their rent while they finish the work on the house?’

‘Yep, you got it. After that they take jobs on building sites and pay the rent to you themselves.’

They come to an arrangement. Helen will speak with the relevant people and put them in touch with him next week.

‘Great. You’ll get things moving then? We need to act fast. People don’t hang around for help; and there’s a great abyss out there just wantin’ to suck them in.’ He is not joking and he stares at Helen to make sure she knows it.

‘You got time to drop by?’ he asks, straightening up. ‘Carla will want to show you how the baby is growing. Why don’t you come to tea on Sunday?’

He can tell, just by listening, that he has jolted Helen: she mentions the extra work for Carla, the existence of Malcolm, and shouldn’t he consult Carla or at least his diary? Anything rather than accept on the spur of the moment, he notes. She’s obviously the sort who relies on plans and order. Do her good to liven up a bit. ‘We don’t stand on ceremony,’ he says. ‘Bring your man too. Why not?’

She capitulates, as he knew she would. He has a way with people. Then he presses her hand in both of his. ‘We can discuss the housing project if you like,’ he says. ‘Or I could take you down to Holy Wind and show you around.’

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Chapter 3:e

In which Helen is further out of her depth

Carla is concentrating on taking a nappy out of the baby chest near the wall (a terry nappy, not a disposable, Helen notices); also some other things with which she is obviously going to change the baby. Helen thinks she will watch and then go. 

When the baby is lying on the changing mat staring hypnotised at the ceiling, Helen prompts: ‘Your family?’ Perhaps Carla didn’t hear first time.

The reflections of light from the piano’s shiny surface dance in shards on the off-white ceiling and Helen begins to think she has committed a faux pas. ‘I’m sorry… Maybe your mother and father…’

‘No, no… They’re fine.’ 

Nothing more is proffered. The silence grows uncomfortable as Carla manoeuvres Dinah in an effort to make the babygro fasten properly.

‘I must leave,’ Helen murmurs. She is in the way, like an old currant obstinately sticking to the baking tray when the next batch of buns is waiting to go in. Even the lack of fresh air in the room begins to oppress her.

Carla suddenly speaks. ‘It’s not like you think,’ she says slowly. ‘I left home a long time ago, no one knows about the baby. Mum’s probably stopped thinking about me. I have no brothers or sisters.’ The statement ends abruptly, like it started.

Helen detects neither self-pity nor bitterness in the girl’s words, rather a factual recounting for the sake of clearing the air. She accepts it as such and makes a sympathetic noise.

 ‘And Addison?’ She regrets the impulse as soon as the words leave her mouth but she can’t take it back. Something has weakened her control.

‘Oh Addison.’ Carla looks up, a smile breaking across her face leaving it impish and attractive. ‘I guess he’s not quite what they had in mind for my husband. But he’s so kind. This has been the best six months of my life.’

Helen feels herself becoming aphasic. Myriads of fragmented responses jostle for existence, pushing towards freedom - only to evaporate. In the cauldron of questions that need an answer she is incapable of formulating clearly one single acceptable comment. The home she left? Dinah’s father? Where Addison comes into the picture? She can’t ask outright. One doesn’t.

Yet the girl has covered up nothing and left everything open for inquiry with a kind of trust unknown to Helen. Helen is, after all, a virtual stranger to her – Carla has no idea where she lives or what she does.

Helen eventually manages to enquire if Addison will be back soon. Will Carla need anything before then? Because Helen has to leave shortly, she is expecting a man to deliver some vinyl flooring at four. ‘We are re-vitalising the bathroom,’ she explains, instinctively deciding not to say ‘house bathroom’.

Carla checks the clock on the shelf. ‘He’ll be back soon. I’ll be okay till then, now Dinah’s sleepy. He’s counselling some men who’ve been involved in the occult or something, before joining Holy Wind.’ She says this as if it were a normal everyday activity. To Helen it sounds double Dutch. In fact the whole place is alien. She must extricate herself now. She has been here long enough.

‘He’d like to meet you again,’ Carla is saying. ‘He won’t be long.’ 

Helen laughs nervously. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t wait now… but I’ll look in again soon.’ 

She immediately realises she has fallen into the trap of feeling indebted in some way, of feeling obliged to offer something in recompense that hasn’t actually been asked for. Or was it her own need speaking?

Carla is placing the baby in the carrycot. In the pause, Helen fiddles with the coffee mug, goes to place it, now empty, on the table by the front window, her forefinger running up the outer contour of the handle, down the inner, up and down, up and down. ‘If that’s okay with you,’ she finally says, pushing the mug away from her and moving towards the front door. She realises that somehow she hasn’t moved around the room until now; she has been inhibited by its casualness, by the fact that Carla hasn’t stood on ceremony or treated her as a guest. 

Carla says fine, that’d be good, she’s been wanting to get to know her better, it was funny how they met… There may be others, though, she warns. The Followers often drop in to see her and Addison, but it wouldn’t matter. They’re a nice crowd.

Helen walks out to the pavement. ‘I’m not really into religion,’ she says uneasily, opening the car and feeling immediately more secure than she has all afternoon. ‘I’m not even sure there is such a thing as God.’

There is an almost imperceptible pause – it could have been Helen’s imagination.

The girl looks at her levelly.

‘There isn’t. But I haven’t got round to telling Addison.’

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Chapter 3:d

In which Helen goes to Carla’s house and feels uncomfortable

Park End Road is in a part of the inner city that Helen has never driven through. She finds it difficult to follow Carla’s instructions without admitting her ignorance of the local streets, yet she doesn’t want Carla to feel that her home is in an area where people don’t go if they can avoid it. She is acutely aware of the incongruence of the BMW in roads of narrow, shabby terraces. 

The car, however, is at least a mindless object. Helen herself can hardly breathe as the houses crowd her on both sides. There is peeling paint on most of the window frames, a nauseating stench from the drains, and pulsating music from an open window a hundred yards away. Everything accosts her at once. She pulls up outside number thirty-nine and shuts the car windows. She has noticed a park nearby but it is not near enough to prevent a yoke of claustrophobia settling round her shoulders. 

Going round to help Carla and the baby out, she looks at a car chassis with two wheels and no doors, abandoned at the roadside further along. Two toddlers play happily amid jagged iron and sharp upholstery springs. One has only a nappy on, the other nothing. He will be lucky to survive to manhood with his vitals intact. Luckier perhaps if he doesn’t, she thinks, and is immediately horrified. Where did that come from? Was she thinking of his destiny as a man or his hopeless future in the face of such poverty? 

In the gutter she flounders in a sea of…stub-ends…crisp packets… drink cans… straws… gum… condoms? She swallows hard as her stomach objects to the evidence of her eyes. But it is her mind that is overloaded. 

She is being instantly and brutally swallowed by the reality she sought only twenty-four hours earlier. 

***

Helen sips her coffee whilst leaning stiffly against the edge of the piano. She is surprised at the presence of such an instrument, and yet not: Carla has a pleasant, tuneful voice, a melodious laugh – and slim fingers. Helen can imagine her sitting at the piano in the evening playing something to lull the baby to sleep. A hymn? A lullaby? More likely something jovial, she decides.

The baby is in a carry-cot while Carla has gone to the bathroom. Helen declined to hold Dinah, shrank from the very idea. 

There is only this room downstairs – a narrow through-room, incorporating both eating and relaxing areas. The ceiling is high and there is a small galley kitchen to one side. A house built for Victorian industrial workers, Helen judges. The cot and the piano are at the far end where a window overlooks a tiny square of untended yard to which there is no visible access. Helen gazes across this to the cobbled back road, barely wide enough for a car, and the house directly behind. So little privacy. A net curtain would help - perhaps scalloped.

Helen will not sit down. She has agreed to a few moments only, a quick coffee – she cannot, after all, simply leave Carla like she would a bundle of clothing for the SCOPE shop, neither can she take in much more without retreating to her own territory for respite. There is no pattern in what she sees. The area outside has all the marks of premature purgatory; inside (despite some damp areas at skirting level) there is care and attention to detail. Not, she tells herself, the kind of space she has created with Malcolm. That has the evidence of money behind it, she admits: anything they have desired, from the expensively turned side tables to the row of appliances in the kitchen. Here, in contrast, is a feeling of peace.

 Helen glances round, taking in the Afghan throws on the seating, the multi-coloured rag rug in front of the gas fire, the perfumed candles on the mantelpiece, the hand-embroidered tablecloth. 

The loo flushes with an embarrassing reaction of clanks and guzzles all round the house as Carla appears again. The stairs come right into the room just beside the carrycot, though they can be closed off with a door.

‘You’ve made the room really welcoming,’ Helen tells Carla  – though she refrains from commenting on the large poster reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper on the back wall (it is gigantic, and blu-tacked casually in place, a spiritual service-hatch to another room). Her eye has also been taken by a pile of old religious books on the shelves beside the piano. She would quite like to examine these some time.

‘Is it you who plays the piano?’

‘Yes. It was a wedding gift from the Followers. I used to play one at… well, I used to play.’

Helen hears the hesitation. For the very first time she feels a peculiar sense of aloneness. She wishes she was enough of a friend to be trusted with confidences. And yet that would lead to involvement. There is no one with whom she is on those terms, perhaps not even Malcolm. She cannot be bothered to make enemies, but perhaps she has not tried to make friends either. Too many house moves have occurred. And something inside pulls her back.

‘Will your parents come round? Do they live near?’ she asks.

The question is ignored.

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Chapter 3:c

In which we meet Stefan, and someone walks on Carla’s grave

The whiff of cigarette smoke threatens to choke her as she starts down the path to the front gate. It takes the edge off another glorious afternoon in the making. She wrinkles her nose, puzzled, wary even. No one comes up the side path in this part of town. They are front door people.

‘Sorry to bother you, Mrs Byrne.’

He appears round a bush. She stares accusingly at the cigarette.

‘As I said, sorry.’ He grins amiably. ‘Just in the area–’

His face seems vaguely familiar. Rather attractive, in a hard sort of way. Possibly he’s been before. All these salespeople have a patch. 

‘Look I’m sorry too,’ she starts to dismiss him politely. She explains she has no time now, is off to fetch a friend – she means, someone – from hospital. It just isn’t convenient.

His eyes on her are liquid and unfathomable. Someone probably just hired him for his looks, the appealing lock of hair taking a few years off his age. Pity about the cigarette. Seductive poison in a tube.

But he is disturbing her. She tries to pass him as he keeps pace with her down the path.

‘That’s okay, Mrs Byrne. Name’s Stefan. I’m canvassing for a new mail order supplier of bulbs. I see you keep a great garden.’

A swift talker, a flatterer. And he knows her name. Though probably from the electoral roll, nothing sinister. After all, he’s being polite, even charming. She simply has to reach her car and drive off, ignore her feelings of being rude and unreasonable. 

He fumbles for a pen, juggling his cigarette. She panics.

‘Look. I really mean it. I’m too busy.’

‘Maybe if you just give me your email address?’

‘Email?’ 

He is a step ahead of her, confusing her.

‘Sure. I’ll email you the catalogue and you can order the same way when you’re ready. We deliver free of charge and invoice you. I’ll just jot down your address and you can get off to your friend.’

He’s right. It will be quickest to comply. ‘Helen at Byrne dot clara dot net.’ 

The air feels strange when he has gone, and she shivers as if a dangerous wind has turned aside, leaving the day safer. He’s only doing what he’s paid to do, she tells herself resolutely. And she has given in, that’s all. It must be the sun. 

Safely in the BMW, she swings past a green car on the corner of the cul-de-sac and drives to the hospital via the building society.

***

At two o’clock Helen finds Carla dressed and waiting. 

Helen is anxious and the ward seems over-warm (a welcome breeze has sprung up outside during the late morning). She unbuttons her linen jacket and greets Carla, who is looking fresh and not at all fragile in a striped cotton grandad shirt and loose-fitting trousers. 

The tiny figure in the bedside cot is swathed in a shawl with no sign of hands or feet. 

‘Have you decided on a name?’ Helen asks, glad of something obvious to say.

‘Dinah. Addison chose it. I think she looks like a Dinah, don’t you?’

Helen has no idea. For that matter, she has no idea about any of this. Suddenly she is aware of the enormity of her ignorance. She wouldn’t even know how to pick the child up, let alone feed it or change it. She’d probably smother it accidently. 

She picks up Carla’s holdall. ‘Do you have to see anybody before we leave. The ward sister? The doctor?’

‘They checked me out an hour ago, but I’ll tell someone we’re off as we pass.’ Carla lifts the baby carefully out of the cot and holds it close. ‘Hope I don’t stumble! Her head’ll probably break off. Have you seen how big it is!’

Helen relaxes a little. At least Carla is not self-conscious in her new motherhood. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘It’s not far to the car. I’ve put a blanket and some old cushions in the back so you won’t wobble around too much.’

‘At least you’ll be protected from us this time!’ Carla says.

Helen is mortified that Carla sees straight through her, as though she were a hologram to be tilted and viewed from an angle other than the one she presents. It leaves her vulnerable. 

Later, as they drive through the car park and out onto the main road, they slip into inconsequential exchanges. After a while Carla says:

‘Look, I’m really grateful for your help. It’s a bit of a cheek really. Addison would have come in a taxi but–’

Helen assures her hurriedly that it’s no bother. She is almost brusque with the girl.

She worries that Carla will be a chatterer and, if so, whether she can manage to keep the conversation on the safer more distant grounds she is used to. It is hard to resist the girl’s enthusiasm but harder still to hold back from the more friendly relationship that is developing almost of its own volition. 

Told you so! warns the voice in her head. Watch out.

But Carla becomes absorbed with Dinah who is asleep in her arms, so Helen drives through the city centre in silence, a pensive frown on her face. A chance encounter. A polite visit. And a good turn. So little and yet so much in less than a week. She senses an unfamiliar yearning inside her. The passion she has begun to feel for the new, the unknown, has little in common with the affectionate acceptance, even indifference, she feels for Malcolm after a lengthy relationship.

She yearns for an eruption to obliterate everything that went before.

The cry from the girl makes her swerve.

‘What–?’

She pulls over and looks into the back. The girl is white like a tombstone. ‘The baby?’

‘No… no.’ Her voice is strangled. ‘I just saw– No, it was nothing. I’m going silly.’ She laughs a tiny bit hysterically. ‘My mother would say, someone walked on my grave.’ 

Helen watches her, worried. The girl is staring round the road. There are few pedestrians, though rather more cars. After a moment, she appears to regain some calm, returning to look at the baby, who has missed the drama. 

Helen says: ‘Well, I’m glad they weren’t jumping on it, then. I couldn’t stand it.’ She turns to set off again. It’s not her business to pursue the matter. She would prefer not to, in fact.

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Chapter 3:b

In which Helen and Malcolm attend the posh barbecue

Malcolm drives the Mercedes smoothly and fast, only just within the law. The miles pass, the countryside opens up as they travel north to a village where the Regional Finance Director is entertaining the London boss. Helen leans back carefully against the headrest. She supposes she is reasonably happy. She must guard against rocking the boat at this stage, when middle age is encroaching. Others fall at this point. She will not – she is known for her common sense.

The heat has lingered into the evening – there is no sign of rain (nor has there been for weeks) – but the air-conditioning in the car is refreshing and Helen lets Malcolm drive to the accompaniment of his James Bowman CD. Helen hardly listens. In her mind there is something faintly repulsive about the idea of countertenors. 

She feels herself wafting somewhere outside herself. An ethereal sense of being on the ceiling of the car and looking down at the woman in the reclined seat, the road speeding past and the still-handsome face of her companion. A sense of being free from it all – as though she had the chance of starting again.

***

Many have arrived at the Goodmans before them. They park some way down the lane and walk slowly up the tree-lined drive. The back garden stretches some five hundred metres in all directions and is already overrun with guests, lured out by the clarity and freshness of the evening to wander over the lawn and between the borders. Tonight is not muggy and clammy as recent nights have been: everyone is immaculately attired and clearly more aware of their posture than their conversation. The barbecue against the ivy-clad stone wall consists of a long unit set in brick with several smaller surface grills tended by uniformed representatives of the caterers. 

Seeing Roy and Jackie Goodman near the barn doors, Malcolm steers Helen over. They make their opening gambits and are serviced with wine. The game has started. There will be tiny hors d’oeuvre of catching up with several couples, a dutiful drink of nostalgia with a few earlier acquaintances and then the settling in to a main course of conversation with someone they feel they can suffer for that long. Helen knows that Malcolm has exactly the same opinion as she of the whole ‘menu’ but never allows himself to admit it. She recognises it from the way he curtails dessert conversations to a bored minimum, claiming, with a self-effacing laugh and a spurious yawn, to need his beauty sleep at his age. He will never tie things up, though, until he has exhausted the mental list of contacts he must make. After that, he ceases to take interest in anything.

The new boss, Liz Mayers, is the important contact this evening and Malcolm picks coffee as the right time to make himself known to her. The lady in question will not often appear in his territory, being mostly based in London, but will be an unseen influence (and someone to impress) as Malcolm climbs his way through this job to the next.

‘My wife, Helen,’ he says to Liz. ‘Helen is an expert bibliophile.’ 

Helen, unwilling to expose Malcolm’s embellishment, says disarmingly: ‘Oh, I just like books. You get fond of both old and new when you work with them.’ No, she doesn’t work in the library now. How does London seem to Liz as a place to live? Does she find the mix of old and new fascinating? 

Expertly, Helen has turned the conversation away from herself. Liz will talk at length now, and be pleased to do so.

Later Helen excuses herself briefly to wander to the farthest fence. They are all low; probably intruders are not common in the area. Gazing absent-mindedly at the view over the rolling meadows, she withdraws from her bag the mobile she always carries, contacts the night staff of Ward B and agrees a time to pick up Carla the following day. In the far corner of the garden there is raucous laughter from some over-enthusiastic drinkers, and then Malcolm is weaving his way toward her. 

‘Let’s go, shall we?’ he says wearily. ‘That lot’s at the dear pig stage.’

‘Dear pig?’

‘You know - Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling your ring?’

Helen laughs. ‘Said the piggy, I am.’ She takes Malcolm’s arm in hers as they return to the car. Malcolm would never be drunk enough to sell his birthright. She is glad. 

A pucker of a smile plays on her lips as she vaguely answers Malcolm’s intermittent comments on the homeward drive. She is happily drowsy. Tomorrow is already here in her mind.

Malcolm whispers, ‘Time for a quickie?’ as he turns low the bedside lamps. She hardly notices his attentions. The barbecued Joop is akin to anaesthetic.

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Chapter 3:a

In which Helen cloaks her frustration yet again

(Previous instalment: Addison forgot about his wife and new baby)

Helen, however, has not. The mirror reflects her preoccupation as she tries to concentrate on the mascara. She has experienced one life in her head and another in reality, ever since her visit to the ward. 

Her thinking revolves around the things she saw and heard on Saturday: the girl absorbed in a newly created life, the man looking slightly farcical but emitting something so winsomely genuine that she cannot forget it. At the same time, she has painted a radiator in the bathroom and helped Malcolm with the tiling – a project that must be completed soon, they will be leaving within weeks. Saturdays spent working in the house on a job leave both of them feeling sociable. The satisfaction they exude is almost palpable as they stand back to view a finished task. Neither would opt to get a workman in, they agree, reaching for the wine glasses.

 Now, on Monday evening, the feeling grows in Helen’s mind that there is a chunk of reality missing from her life. For instance: where does she meet people like Carla and Addison? In the newspaper? On television? Certainly not in the office of Action for Homes where even the database address records have a line for ‘housename’. And certainly not at the evening do’s she attends with Malcolm.

She picks up the comb and re-draws her parting. Grey is appearing at the roots. She sighs: Chère madame had better ring cher Maurice again.

Malcolm strolls out of the en suite, announced by a tang of Joop and freshness. He opens his robe, holds it wide with both hands, encircles her from behind, and deposits a kiss on her still damp hair.

‘Hey,’ he says. ‘You look good. Nearly ready?’  

He could be initiating something, but Helen knows his only aim is to arrive at the Goodmans in time. So she merely queries, ‘Blue or black tonight? Then I’ll know what to match.’

Malcolm shrugs and goes to his wardrobe. He says he’s not bothered if they match but does she realise the new boss will be there? ‘Our new boss,’ he emphasises. Helen frowns. She is part of the purchase any boss acquires. She knows many wives would thrive on such inclusion - being remembered, being pertinent. But Helen chafes.

‘You just want me to make a good impression on him,’ she says, with a mild hint of reproach. She is always exactly in control of what she says.

‘Her,’ Malcolm corrects. ‘I’ve explained already she’s a her. She’s quite fussy, too, so best behaviour, hey?’

This is a warning to her, rather than a fear in Malcolm. Why fear when he has the job bagged – except that she, Helen, might let the side down. Helen sighs again. She has never let him down yet and doesn’t intend to start. The disloyalty (if it is that) has only been in her head: if only thoughts could be removed as easily as out-of-date tiles and tasteless paintwork.

Dressing in silence, while Malcolm adjusts his tie and combs his hair, Helen remembers the conversation on Friday evening. There was not much sharing of information but she managed to pin him down about the job and the move while watching a gardening programme.

‘Mid-western area office, darling. I’ll be responsible for all personnel in that region. Some travelling but mostly based in Wolverhampton.’

Helen was pleased for him. She asked during the following advert break: ‘When shall we go and check out the housing?’ 

‘Not necessary!’ he said with a self-satisfied smile. ‘The last manager is going to London and will sell us his house. No chain there – he’ll be in a company apartment. No chain here – they’ll give us a bridging loan.’

He was like a child expecting applause. Helen had wanted to shout at him: What about me? Don’t I get a say? He just dumped the house on you to save him a lot of bother. I wanted to choose things like the layout of rooms, the garden… But she didn’t shout then, like she hadn’t just now. And his next words had proved how wrong she would have been to jump in:

‘You’ll love the garden, there’s acres of it – well, two!’

‘Oh Malcolm.’ She was speechless.

‘Three reception and an enormous kitchen, re-fitted last year. Will it do?’

Thinking about it now, as they leave the bedroom together, Helen knows it will do, that Malcolm knows what she would like in all these practical ways, that they ought to settle unruffled into the new house. Bigger and better in every way – as usual. She briefly wonders what kind of house she will be taking Carla to – but then Malcolm escorts her to the car (they will be travelling in his car – he almost never lets her drive him if they go together) and she starts to relax for the first time in days. Nothing at the barbecue will cause her the least anxiety – she has long since perfected the art of doing and saying the right thing in public. On the surface she knows the glaze is uncracked and eminently suitable for display.

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Chapter 2:b

In which Addison battles with himself

By the time the Love Feast is concluded, the last hug enjoyed, Addison is feeling the onset of an unwelcome swing of mood. Following the emotional high engendered by so many Followers worshipping in his own church, he is sliding into a depression. He is not ashamed of this since many of greater worth than himself have been there before: Elijah, for instance, and Job, even the great king David. 

But in the last few days he has felt acutely the space in the house where Carla would normally be – even in a house as small as this one, a mere tithe of the Victorian family semi he grew up in. 

Carla owes him nothing, of course. Did he not marry her without any thought of return? Has he not gained satisfaction enough from her rescue, without demanding love? Has he not refused so far to consummate the union on account of the baby? Yet the fact is she mothers him despite his thirteen years’ seniority. And man, did she know how to make a fellow feel worth something! She accepted him, moods and all, and expected nothing. She knew how to soothe him when he was overworked or driven to the edge by the demands of those he cared for. She has become his refuge from the storms of life. He has not shut his ears to the poor and outcast – and God has therefore not ignored him but blessed him with a loving wife, and Followers, and a growing church at the Holy Wind.

He misses her all right. Even the walk home is lonely. Two more days and she will be out of hospital. But today he will have to manage without her. 

He shudders at the memory of the ward. Definitely not his scene; it makes him feel insignificant and in the way. His jovial comments to the other new mothers result in averted eyes, as if he is an embarrassment.

He enters the poky terrace in Park End Road and crosses to the bookshelf to pick up the handset. While he dials and waits, his eyes caress the pile of ancient volumes he has gathered over the years: a large embossed leather volume of Bunyan’s Classic Works published in Glasgow in 1864; an enormous lectern Holy Bible, thicker than his fist and dated in Liverpool, 1813; and a contrastingly tiny leather-bound New Testament with clasps, dating from 1643 and written with old-fashioned f-shaped s’s. Even the Roman numeral for 4 is IIII instead of IV, Addison notes with pride. These books give him a sense of tradition, and an identity of his place within that tradition. He is already feeling much better as the girl at the other end answers.

‘Preacher? Good service, wasn’t it?’

‘Yeah… How about some of you folks coming round this afternoon. We could plan the August baptisms, and chat, you know.’

Others are summoned and they duly come, spreading into the little room a welcome sense of admiration and comradeship, which subtly works on his spirits, soothing his mood.

The afternoon is salvaged. He knows the Followers supply what his brothers and sisters never did: they are his brothers and sisters. 

It would be easier today if he hadn’t been competing with the snooker tournament on television: the men always go for sport. With a room full of pretty girls it is not easy to care only for the souls of these ones that God has sent him. He is tempted to think thoughts he knows a preacher must not think. But he can still master the temptation. He is, after all, their rescuer – there must be no stain on his record in heaven. If a thought slips in, he silently confesses it and starts again. In this way he cannot be accused of being morally weak – God forbid that anything so unspiritual should get the better of him. The sweat breaks on his face whenever he recognises again the internal battle that rages in his loins. 

Before the evening celebration, he changes into his favourite trousers and brightest waistcoat. He has completely forgotten about visiting Carla and the baby.

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Chapter 2:a

In which we visit Holy Wind with Addison

Addison Martin, at six foot three, with at least half a dozen dazzling waistcoats to his name, nevertheless feels diminished in stature, very much less than confident, when away from the Holy Wind, the Followers and his wife of six months. 

He surveys the arena now from the platform, smiles encouragingly at the youngsters near the front, waiting patiently while they settle, and tries to ignore the ache of his wife’s absence. The Sunday Love Feast is a time for togetherness.

The white baby he will love – sure, the Lord God makes no distinction about skin-deep issues; his love is bigger than that. And Addison has proved his own is too. But a wife – he only has to look at the lengths to which Abraham went to provide Isaac with a wife of his own people to know that he, Addison, has gone more than the other mile in taking in and sheltering Carla. 

The girl was a prodigal, he reminds the Followers. He rescued her from the jaws of hell and now loves her with God’s love. Sure, she was lost when he found her in the women’s refuge. But, brothers and sisters, the hand of the Lord God is on them all, each and every one gathered here today, no matter what their past. Including Carla. 

How does he know? 

He waits a significant moment and surveys the two hundred people assembled in this converted barn in an overgrown meadow, two miles out from the town centre. Sunday traffic on the nearby main road adds a background hum to the proceedings.

How? he repeats. Because he heard her playing the piano like an angel in heaven: Abide with me, fast falls the eventide. Loud and clear, bold as brass in the women’s refuge on an unseasonably sunny afternoon with the windows flung wide. What she had done before was God’s business. But her repentance and turning was clear. Why else would she be proclaiming it in the hymn for all to hear?  

Attentive expressions absorb all this. They have heard it before, of course, and he knows they love the way his preaching incites them to believe and have faith and go on in the Lord. The only difference this time is that they stand as one body to give thanks not only for the rescue of one from among them but for the safe delivery of the baby girl, as yet unnamed, whom God has given them as a sign of his favour and acceptance. Both Carla and the baby are potent symbols of their own rescue, which Addison has brought about for them. They lift their arms heavenward and give in to the urge of the Spirit to sing praises in a heavenly language of their own.

‘If the Lord is moving you today,’ Addison encourages during a gentle ebb in the flow of singing, ‘harden not your hearts. Come to the front and surrender to him once more. Let the workers be worthy of the work.’ 

In caring for them, he feels the hole inside him fill, little by little from the edges, year by year, like a slow-healing wound – a wound he refuses to attribute to his parents but which he knows came from his childhood. He has it worked out to his satisfaction without the need to blame. If he cares for others, he will be cared for. It is never too late – the evidence is before him now. They are responding to his nurture, and he is healing inside.

Many surge to the front. But it is not out of control – Addison will not let exhibitionism or disorder detract from the work of God’s Spirit. Yet the numbers keep on growing and there are days on which he fears he has lost his way. He dreamt of running a church since he attended first communion at his mother’s local Catholic church in Birmingham as a boy. The feel of the wafer, something that was his alone and during the giving of which he was the sole focus; the sign of the cross made over him specially, by the priest who looked into his eyes deeply and all-seeingly, and still went on looking, Addison’s dark colouring no barrier to the man’s enveloping gaze.

He planned how his church would operate during the time he was at his father’s black Pentecostal fellowship as a gangly teenager. He’d reckoned on the strength of inclusiveness; it pervaded every prayer vigil, every healing meeting and each hour of exuberant worship, during which his father had hugged him as warmly as the next worshipper. The intimacy was strangely unavailable at home. No matter, the fellowship was the thing. Addison had lived for it, ignoring the fact that other teenagers – even his brothers – had derided such displays. 

And now he provides it. He never intended to have a following. But the ways of the Lord are strange, he knows, and if he must pastor so many and give of himself so often, well, the Lord will provide strength to bear it. The Followers support him, they chose to be here, they love him. He knows this to be the pinnacle of his achievements: for as long as he can remember, he wanted to be loved. And if this is a sin, he believes it to be overlooked in the greater scheme of things.

While he and his assistants lay hands on those who have offered themselves, a young student is overtaken by a spirit of prophecy:

‘The baby will be called Dinah, which means ‘vindicated’. God has chosen her to be a Follower, not just the daughter of a rape victim.’

Addison is rapt. He has never told a single person exactly what Carla suffered before they met. The Lord must have revealed it to the young man. Enforced prostitution is not of course exactly like rape but the words are close enough. He jumps up on the platform again, his waistcoat distinguishing him far more quickly even than his stature. He spreads his arms wide.

‘Hallelujah, man. God has spoken by his Spirit. She is Dinah, named for the Lord. Praise him!’

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