The Translation of the Bones (25 page)

When she was carrying her baby, all that time ago, Fidelma used to worry that the unborn creature would be terrified by the small, dark space in which it found itself. She understood that a child did not miraculously gain consciousness with its first breath. What it knew or sensed or felt in its first minutes on this earth was the same as in the last days before birth. So if a baby cried for fear of darkness in the night when it was put down in its cot, would it not have felt the same fear in the womb? When it grew too big to dance and somersault in its liquid globe, when it could no longer turn, or stretch out a cramped foot, did it not experience sheer panic?

And would Mary-Margaret feel that now in the tight cell of her prison?

Oh God, the tight cell of a prison. Night after night Fidelma was returned in dreams to that black place, the place of punishment. Oh, you willful child, you are so bold and you must be made obedient. Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, take him as your model. In you go and think on him and tell him you are sorry. Only when you’re sorry enough will I come to fetch you.

And the shove through the dwarf-size door and the shriek of the rusting bolt jiggled into place. One last vindictive thrust to lock it tight. Dark, dark, dark; so dark it was much safer to close your eyes and keep them closed for the small light there might be behind them. When you opened them, you opened onto darkness that was hot and thick, furry even, as if you were buried by the hide of some great monster. Stone beneath you, the foundations of the building; brick around you, crumbling; the ceiling above you, close above you, arched like a slice of apple, or a rainbow, except there was no light. The vaults of the building these were, old and used for storage, but you as a child believed the bodies of other children rotted in them. Lying on the floor you reached the ceiling with your outstretched hand. You thought, what if the whole place were to tumble down and you in there, a prisoner, buried under a mountain heap of stone? What if Sister forgets that I am here? She is the harshest, her with the sharp nose and the mouth like a hen’s vent. And she is forgetful. Where did I put those keys? she’d ask. Whom did I instruct to scrape the porridge from the pot? Why, if she could not remember the words she said but seconds ago, would she
not forget that she had shut a child in the cellars? There were other doors to other compartments in these cellars which were always locked. The bones of forgotten children could lie undisturbed in them for centuries as no one in the world would think to wonder that they had gone missing, or to look.

How long would it take to die? Three days and nights, maybe, the time that Lazarus was in his grave—or was that more?—or Jonah in the belly of the whale. You could pretend this dusty tomb that you were in was actually the interior of a fish. That all around you, rather than the heavy weight of brick, was water. Cool seawater, with the sun scattering gold sequins on it and the wind that blows forever ruffling the white lace of the waves.

Three days and nights. But you cannot wait that long. Three minutes are three hours and you know that even if she does come back for you, she will take her time. Something scuttles closer to you. Claws skitter on the stone, sharp teeth chatter, something hisses, there is hot wetness on your leg and you cannot bear this and the terror roils like storm-whipped water in your guts. It’s not a feeling, it is real; it rises up through the channels of your blood and fills your head and stops you breathing and you flail around, you are a mad thing, and you scream, but no one hears and no one comes.

Fidelma, drowning in memories and in fear of the future, helpless under the great weight of her flesh, bereft by nightmare of the one small flash of hope that had briefly flickered, sank again into the black pit of her childhood. Now, as then, there was no way out. Then, each time—and in remembrance there were many times—the nun had
come back in the end to slide the bolt out of its housing and let the prisoner go. A cobwebbed child, dirt-streaked and damp with fright and piss, sent out into the yard for the smug ones, pets of Sister, who were never caught in mischief, to deride. But now? Who would let her out? Who would understand that it was beyond Fidelma’s strength to commit herself again to the coffin of the lift? Not again, not after the long night she had spent in it, with no light, no means of communication, no prospect of rescue. A failure of power supply, she supposed it must have been, when the next day she was free and calm enough to think. But who could say that it would not fail her once again?

She would not, in her waking mind, relive that night if she could help it. The first lurch of the heart when the lights went off and the lift machinery shuddered to a halt. The next minutes of suspense, when she waited for it to start to life again. And then the realization that something was gravely wrong. No light in the panel of buttons, no illuminated means to make the lift door open or to signal alarm. She had her box of matches, and she lit one. By its small flame she depressed the buttons. Methodically at first—doors open—doors open—doors open—and then randomly, in growing panic. Tearing at the door seal with her nails. Banging with her fist. Screaming out for help.

It was about one o’clock on a Wednesday morning. Even in that place of restless souls, nocturnal wanderers, there would not be many who would notice the malfunction of one lift, and fewer who’d do anything about it. Fidelma, again, was trapped, as helpless as a child. She lit a cigarette to soothe her nerves. There were only two left in the packet.
The smell of the man she’d been with was still sticky on her fingers, and the smell of the money he had paid her. Might her smoke swallow all the oxygen there was? Would this metal box admit a breath of air or was it airtight? Would she suck in increasingly shallow lungfuls until she had exhausted the supply? Mary-Margaret would realize she had not come home, but not till halfway through the day. Fidelma, of necessity, kept late hours and often slept till noon. If Mary-Margaret wondered why her mother stayed out at night, she never said so; probably, like all children—although she was by then twenty or so—she did not question what went on around her. In any case, she would not notice Fidelma’s absence for some time, she might even go out in the morning, taking one of the other lifts, returning only when it was too late.

Breathing hard and braced for death, marched toward it by the drumming of her heart, Fidelma O’Reilly swam in and out of consciousness for what felt like a lifetime, in the darkness of the broken lift. Repairmen, called by the caretaker, got her out of it at some point in the morning. She must have got into it again, or another one, to reach her dwelling on the nineteenth floor. But whether or not she did, she had no recollection. The terror of the night wiped her memory of the following hours quite clean. It was as if she had been precipitated by it into a numbness that lasted a long time. Only her sense of panic was not obliterated. When she recovered, she vowed absolutely she would never step into a lift again.

Fourteen years ago. And Fidelma had kept that vow. She made it privately; she did not discuss it with her daughter or with anyone else. If there was one thing she had salvaged
from her hard life, it was pride. In the yard of the orphanage Fidelma O’Reilly, begrimed and disgraced, had held her head up high.

She couldn’t now remember how she had told Mary-Margaret she no longer felt like going out. After a while, her staying at home was just the way things were. Mary-Margaret did the shopping, at which she soon became proficient, and went to the post office to collect their various benefits. Fidelma, trapped now in a tiny space and made desperate by confinement yet even more afraid of the one means of exit, found some comfort in the food her daughter bought. Soft things, sweet things—white bread, chocolate sponge—that cushioned her loneliness and hunger. And her bones also. As if the food were air pumped beneath her skin to make a space around her that was hers, Fidelma ballooned greatly, and as she did, that space became paradoxically heavy, so she could hardly move. Her weight became a medical condition, with the helpful side effect of extra money and certification from the state. Having diagnosed a chronic problem and ascertained that it was manageable, relieved social workers left the O’Reillys to themselves. Disability benefits. Fidelma savagely enjoyed the irony of those words.

She was no one’s fool. It had not escaped her that she had made a double prison for herself. Her huge bulk was a cell within a cell, an extra barrier to the outside world. So what? The world outside, nineteen floors below, that world of sour dregs and chip shops, screeching sirens, shit-smeared streets, sad gray drizzle, weary men with forlorn pricks and tightly folded dirty money, had nothing more to offer. She had her drip feed from it in Mary-Margaret.
But now that line was gone. And unlikely to be back. And Mary-Margaret herself in mortal peril.

The blackness of the thing descended on Fidelma like a pall. She jerked violently against it, seized by an overwhelming need to be up and moving, rushing round and throwing windows open, letting in a stream of cold, sweet air. A bat, a bird beating its wings against the walls of a closed room. She flung her coverings off and tried to lever herself onto her side. If she could stretch a little more, the switch on the bedside light would be within her reach. She swung her legs off the side too suddenly; the momentum brought her body with it and she fell, face downward, to the floor, the fall only briefly broken by her knees, which folded instantly beneath her, her whole weight on one buckled arm.

When the time was up, Azin Qureshi showed Mary-Margaret out, her hands still clutching crumpled tissues. He watched her walk away from him, down the corridor, a stumpy figure in shapeless clothes, unsexed and desolate. She swayed a little as she walked, like a drunkard or a toddler. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Her case troubled him. Mary-Margaret O’Reilly’s innocence was so transparent, and she so childlike and credulous. Indeed, only a young child could possibly believe the things she said that she believed: messages from Jesus, God in the form of a schoolboy, blood weeping from a statue on a cross. Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy, nursery tales and myths. On the surface, it was clear that anyone over seven who seriously believed this stuff was mentally unbalanced.
And yet Mary-Margaret, in many ways, seemed reasonably grounded. She showed no symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy or schizophrenia or any other disorder usually associated with religious mania. In different circumstances he would have said she had nothing more than learning difficulties of a moderate sort. This was, in fact, what other professionals had concluded when she was assessed at school. She was competent enough to take care of herself—she could count and read reasonably well, she could go shopping, cook a basic meal, keep track of money, understand a timetable, catch a bus. In an earlier age she would have been described as slightly simpleminded.

Azin went over to the window and looked down onto the hospital car park, where a constant crawl of drivers searched anxiously for space, and patients, with their minders, went back and forward with bent heads. If he shared Mary-Margaret’s cultural background, would he find her easier to understand? Well, but he
did
share it, to all intents and purposes, he who was born in Kensington and went to school at Harrow. All the mornings of his school days he heard chaplains reading prayers and sang the words of Christian hymns. He had played the tunes as well, as an organ scholar at Cambridge. If he had to choose one piece of music to take with him to a desert island, it would be Bach’s
St. Matthew Passion.

This music spun of hope and tears moved him profoundly, as did the fragile ribs of stone that arched above his head in his college chapel, interlaced in pleading, reaching to the sky. But he was equally affected by the adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony—he drew no distinction between the sacred and the secular, for the sacred was
meaningless to him. What he saw in those soaring notes and those impossibly perfect traceries of stone was human aspiration. And in this he was like almost everyone else he knew—his wife, his friends, his colleagues. Decent, civilized, tolerant, intelligent; people like him had no use for supernatural solace.

Azin thought of his grandparents, the last generation of his family to live by religious precepts. He could just about remember their rituals of prayer and mosque attendance, the rhythms of a year marked by feast and fasting. His parents had shrugged off these habits; he and his brothers had been brought up to respect their grandparents’ traditions as culturally important but no more. He felt the same about Christianity. It was good to be a citizen of a country that kept faith with its traditions; those societies that broke abruptly with the past endangered their own future. He enjoyed the seasonal aspects: Easter, Halloween and Christmas, chocolate eggs and jack-o’-lanterns, a faint ghost of pine scent in the branches of an uprooted Norway spruce—pleasing elements in the rich mix of a culture. Interesting too as symbols: fertility and death, darkness and light, mourning and renewal. Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain . . . the land made waste by the icy breath of winter comes back to life with spring.

It was curious, now that he thought about it, the sliding scale of respect. Primitive rituals score highly—though not perhaps the ones pertaining to sacrifice and blood. But while we are relieved there are no longer Aztecs excavating human hearts, we bow our heads in reverence to the awesome knowledge of the ancients. To build a chamber out of stone so precisely that the sun will find its one small opening
at daybreak on the winter solstice every year. Imagine! Hewing the vast stones of the pyramids, the temples at Ajanta, the monoliths on Easter Island, all by hand!

In the West, Azin thought, we calibrate the scale with a compass. The further east, the more respect is paid. Buddhist rituals are especially venerated: prayer flags fluttering in the wind on temples built upon the world’s high roof, lotus blossom and irenic monks in saffron robes—there’s nothing to dislike. Hindu beliefs are so complex that few Westerners begin to comprehend them, but they admire the power of the symbols: Krishna, lord of life; Kali, the destroyer. Datta. Dayadvham. Damyata. Islamic traditions are more problematic, especially when they relate to women, punishment and law, but it is nevertheless incumbent on us to dignify cultural difference. Christianity, as the compass moves, is a softer target. Harmless at best, a hangover from the past, mildly comic when it comes to vicars and gay bishops, an outrage when it reaches the fundamentalist Midwest. Who could forget the unedifying spectacle of a bellicose U.S. president and a British prime minister joined together in prayer?