But for a period of time that went beyond being awkward, Susan White never once removed her rheumy eyes from the tall flat facade of the house.
Kyle spoke to repress his urge to grin. ‘Hi Susan. Or do you prefer Sister Isis?’
Her small brittle body turned and lurched at him, the head extended in rebuke. Crystals on thongs drooped from her scrawny neck and chimed together, their sound accompanied by wooden bracelets rattling on her thin wrists. ‘Never call me that!’
36
LAST DAYS
Kyle flinched. The elderly woman cast a wary glance back at the house, as if this sufficed to explain her reaction to the name the cult had given her. ‘Not here. Please. Susan is fine.’
‘Susan it is.’ Kyle took her cold hand. The skin papering it was transparent; black veins networked under livered flesh, but the skin was as smooth as lambskin against his fingers.
He looked into her intense blue eyes. ‘This is Dan. My partner in crime.’ He nodded at Dan, who turned towards them at the mention of his name. His face was red and his eyes filled with water from suppressing laughter.
‘Can you feel it?’ she said, her attention again reclaimed by the house.
Here we go
.
Trying too hard
. He hoped she wouldn’t see his abject disappointment. It was a dull day on a West London street that recognized nothing but its own tranquil elegance in any season; a setting too incongruous for what Susan White already suggested. Her attempt to conjure an atmosphere of lingering presences and special psychic boundaries immediately wearied him. His estimation of Max’s ability to find suitable interviews also plummeted. Having a creature like Susan White in the film would undermine any credence of the surviving adepts’ mystical claims; the very sight of the woman encapsulated all that was ridiculous about the sixties.
Kyle nodded at Dan; a cue to switch from the exterior shots they’d been shooting of the street and building to set up for the first close-ups of Sister Isis. ‘Feel what?’ His question was more abrupt than he’d intended.
Silver earrings jingled against her pantomime cheeks when she shook her head. ‘I . . . I’ve not felt that way since 1969.
Extraordinary.’ She closed her eyes and turned her head on 37
ADAM NEVILL
an angle, as if listening to distant music. Her face seemed more haggard in the skein of sunlight that found it, if that were possible. The harsh lines scoring her chin deepened as her mouth sagged. ‘This is the first time I’ve been back.’
Kyle rolled his eyes. Dan smiled, and occupied himself with the light meter closer to the house, where Kyle wanted an establishing shot of Susan beside the front door. ‘And you live in Brighton.’
‘Yes.’
‘Never fancied revisiting old times then?’
‘Could not bear to.’ Susan White now kept her eyes closed against the sight of the house. But tottered forward like a woman upon black ice. Quickly but carefully, Kyle put the boom and sound mixer down, and moved to her side. Susan clasped his forearm. ‘I’m not sure I can.’
Dan peered over to see what Kyle wanted of him. But Kyle didn’t know whether it was appropriate to film her discomfort and frailty before a proper introduction, or even a semblance of familiarity had been established; probably not, though he wanted to. This was good footage: forty-two years after The Last Gathering fled the building and an ex-member was collapsing at the mere sight of the place.
The light was fine, but they’d need to mic her up and do sound levels quickly if they were to get any of this. After catching Kyle’s eye, Dan hurriedly fitted the camera back on the tripod.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. The powder on her face looked ready to fall away in floury platelets.
‘You want some water?’ He looked up at Dan and
mouthed
hurry
.
‘Please.’ Susan sat down upon the first of seven steps that 38
LAST DAYS
led up to the stone porch. She seemed to have sunk inside her dress, which now looked uncannily like a set of robes sweeping about her little feet. Her spine curved like a sickle, as if it suffered from a deformity.
Kyle uncapped his bottle of water. She gulped at it with her withered mouth, then gasped and offered the bottle back to him. The rim was smeared with red lipstick and he knew he wouldn’t be drinking from it again. ‘You’re very kind.
Thank you,’ Susan said, which snapped Kyle out of his unpleasant thoughts with a pang of guilt; she was old and frightened. ‘You have to understand . . . But how could you?
How foolish of me.’
‘Just get your wind back. Get yourself settled. And then—’
She clutched the back of his hand. Looked up; her eyes so bright with genuine fear, he thought her seriously disturbed.
‘What happened here. What began here. It was terrible. There are so few of us . . .’ She actually trembled inside her collapsed garments.
‘Are you all right? A doctor?’ Kyle felt his scalp tingle with panic at the suggestion of a medical emergency, though her insinuation about the ‘evil’ house left him totally unaffected.
He tried to remember C.P.R. Nothing came to him besides something vague about tilting the head back, and forming a seal over the mouth. Now it was his turn to shudder.
‘I thought I’d be all right. I told Max I would be all right.
I don’t want to let him down. He sent train tickets to me and everything.’
Kyle looked at Dan, who had raised two impossibly thick eyebrows.
‘If this upsets you too much,’ Kyle said, ‘we can talk somewhere else.’
39
ADAM NEVILL
Susan shook her head. ‘No. No. What’s the point of me being upset now!’ Then more quietly, she said, ‘Bit late for that.’
A woman in tight jeans and high heels paused beside Dan.
Kyle heard Dan say, ‘OK, I think. Just a funny turn.’ The woman nodded, her smooth face creased by a frown. She carried on, the tips of her heels ringing out in the damp air.
‘Susan.’ Kyle held her hand. ‘You OK now?’
‘I feel foolish,’ she whispered.
‘Don’t. We’re really grateful you made the effort to come up. You sure you can do this?’
She nodded. ‘People need to know. They need to. Max is right.’ She screwed her face up and tried to stand. Kyle helped her back to her feet. ‘So much of me is still stuck inside there.
And I wanted to see if I could get it back. By coming here.’
‘Flats now. But we had the whole place. Right to the roof.’
Susan White miraculously regained her strength on the inside.
As they did the walk-through, she flapped about the ground-floor rooms like a flightless tropical bird trying to escape its captors.
All three of the luxury flats the building had been subdiv -
ided into were now vacant after a recent renovation. Steely light shone through the large sash windows and warmed the empty spaces, gilded laminate floors and silvered the bare walls in three unfurnished ground-floor rooms and the kit -
chen. A scent of fresh paint lingered about the white walls, the skirting boards, and the wainscoting around the high ceilings; all vast and spotless save for the decorative moulds framing the light sockets, from which bare bulbs hung on cables.
40
LAST DAYS
‘In here they printed the magazine,
Gospel
. We sold it all over London! In there was the office, where we brought the donations. Every day at six!’
Once she burned off the initial excitement, Kyle would need to step in and slow her down, then partition her narrative between the rooms to vary the footage; take it room by room as Susan imparted stories about the purpose of each space. He’d cut her narration with B-roll slides from the London period. They’d take light readings and line up the sound in each room as they moved through the building; do every segment from two cameras. In all of his films he edited mentally as they shot.
Downside: there was little variety to form backdrops to Susan’s dialogue. The rooms would have been better furnished, so they’d have to do something clever with the lighting. There was a front room with the glamorous street in view; a rear ground-floor room overlooking a painfully green garden; a second smaller bedroom; and the sombre stone steps before the front door. Two higher storeys had the same floor plan as the ground level, and there was a basement too according to Max’s notes. The entire second floor had been the penthouse for Sister Katherine, which he’d shoot last.
In the rear room the sun wasn’t so bright. Kyle asked Dan about the lights. ‘I’ll throw something soft against a wall. Use white paper. Bounce the light off. Maybe use a background light too. A rim. Get some ambience.’
They’d learned through experience to adapt the lights to each unique environment on location, at whatever time of day or night they shot. He knew what most of his peers would do here: they’d use a fill light and blanche Susan’s face because of all the white walls.
41
ADAM NEVILL
‘Key light can go on her face from the side. Get some depth, get all that character she has.’ Dan grinned.
‘Good man. Could even use the soft tubes,’ he dropped his voice to a whisper, ‘get some Lon Chaney action going on.’
Dan wandered off and left Kyle looking through the viewfinder of the second camera, the Panasonic HVX200, until Dan called for him from somewhere in the rear of the building.
In the room across the hall from the kitchen, Susan stood in silence in the middle of the bare floor. Painted claws clasped to her cheeks, her intense eyes gazed at the ceiling.
Here we go
. Though her stance and expression eroded his immediate suspicion of more hamming.
‘In here. The renunciation began.’
Dan took up a position to the side of Susan, to check the light.
‘Maybe we should start here then, Susan?’ Kyle offered.
‘With the
renunciation
.’ He kneeled down and untangled the cables and unpacked the sound equipment.
Susan removed a tissue from her clutch bag, sniffed, dabbed under her nose on both sides. ‘I gave away so much in here. So much of myself. And have never stopped wondering whether it was the right thing to do.’
‘What was it, the renunciation?’
Susan held two hands in the air as if she hadn’t heard Kyle.
He still wasn’t sure if she would play up like this for the camera, or whether she was so eccentric she was already oblivious to what a freak show she would be on screen. ‘
She
42
LAST DAYS
presided over everything. Every session. Listening. Always listening. Assessing us. Gathering intelligence. Things she could use. Later. Use against us. I have never forgiven her. I knew it would end badly for her.’
Kyle looked up. ‘Why do you say that?’
Susan laughed to herself, as if he and Dan weren’t present.
Sniffed, dabbed at the corner of her lurid eyes with the tissue.
‘We gave her everything. Everything to be a part of this. Our families, our jobs. You have to understand, some people left marriages. And their children. Their poor little children.’
‘So what went on in this room?’
‘Sessions. Sometimes they went on all night. Started in the evening and finished in the morning when you were empty.
Endless, it was endless. She was a seer of our shames. We were here to be cleansed of our pasts, our woes . . . responsibilities, disappointments . . . our attachments to anything but her. Everything. Memories even. She wanted everything.
All of it. Out of us. Everything that makes us people. Makes us unique. Anything that was a barrier between us and her.
‘You have to understand, back then, we were different.
Buttoned up. Terrified of boredom. Of being trapped. Afraid of the world ending. We were young. We wanted adventure.
Life! We had so much to say. To prove.’ Breathless with excitement and shaking with emotion, Susan turned to Kyle.
He paused in his hurried attaching of the XLR cables to the second camera and DAT sound recorder. Her eyes flashed wide and bright. A pinkish hue grew beneath the heavy make-up. ‘Think of finding a mentor, a teacher, who could release you from yourself.’
‘This was Sister Katherine, yeah?’
43
ADAM NEVILL
She slapped a hand against her forehead. ‘Someone to unclench the fist here.’ Dan jumped behind the first camera tripod. She slapped her bony chest. ‘And here. Wouldn’t you take it? I was a bloody typist. I lived at home. With Mum and Dad. But I wanted music and love and friends. I wanted to do something, be someone, to live. And this was new. You could talk here. Say anything. I was so shy, but she freed me.
She could be so kind. She was your best friend and your mother and your priest in the beginning. Oh, I cried here.
Cried as it all came out. You’ve no idea how good it felt. For all of us. To be here, together, sharing this. Young and foolish and in love all of the time. Living a life without secrets, but seeking the greater mysteries of life. We thought we were so free.’ Susan stopped. She released a long, weary exhalation and said, ‘And before we knew it, she had us all.’
‘You stayed with The Last Gathering for two years. Why did it take you so long to leave?’
Kyle wore the cans, had the sound mixer slung over one shoulder, and held the mic boom with both hands. He stood behind the second camera, while Dan filmed a close-up of Susan with the first camera. She was wired up with two Sennheiser radio mics. All three mics went into a hard-drive field recorder beside Kyle’s right foot. It was already the second take because Susan’s scarf had been playing hell with the sound on the first one. They were rushing and hadn’t noticed the scarf when lining up the sound. Dan had set up both cameras to get parallel shots of Susan from different angles at the same time; they knew from experience to get as many cutaways as possible to give Finger Mouse a palette if the interview became long. Which was just as well, because 44
LAST DAYS
it was as if a dam had broken inside Susan White ever since she stepped inside.
‘Oh, no, you couldn’t leave Katherine. No, no, no.’ Susan stood beside the sash window of the room on the first floor, and stared at the garden. ‘And we were special. We’d beaten the system, you know. We were very pleased with ourselves for what we achieved by being a part of this.’