‘And if I am, as you appear to think at this very moment, nothing but some hallucination of your own mind, then wouldn’t that suggest your attempts at repentance have failed?’ Nora shakes her head and those eyes that so often flashed in fury, eyes that screamed and raged as loudly as her voice when she bellowed wrath at me as a child, eyes that judged and condemned, autocratic as any dictator, grow gentle before me.
We sit in silence for a further hour in the middle of the night, two sisters, so alike, separated by time. ‘Is this the price I must pay,’ I finally bring myself to ask, ‘this waking of the living?’
‘Price? You speak of a single price? There is not one price. There are many prices for what you have done, all the acts you have committed. Prices, debts, and balances against you, Clare. You have but begun to repay them.’
*
Now that I have summoned you and Nora, brought you forth, how do I make you go, Laura? If I wore black, if I fasted and lit candles and recited incantations, retreated to hermitage caves in the wilderness, perhaps you would allow me to live out the rest of my days and nights unmolested.
After her wedding, her embrace of her husband’s church, Nora chastised me for failing to be observant. ‘Faith is what you need,’ she said. ‘You need faith to put you on a better course. You are an evil woman, Clare, and someday that evil will catch you up.’
‘As a child I played at faith,’ I remember saying, furious that she should presume to lecture me about something so personal, ‘in the way that one will play at dressing up as princesses. I always knew it was imaginary. To you, I know, faith has always had a corporeal reality. I cannot explain how we came to see things so differently.’
Nora clucked at me, looking more superior than she usually did. We were in the old house on Canigou Avenue and Mark was crawling around on the floor while Nora photographed him. ‘Someday God will find you,’ she cooed, and snapped a photo. ‘He will choose you and take you. You are mistaken if you think you have free will. Faith is not a matter of individual choice.’
‘It is my choice!’ I shouted, feeling the rage pulse in my eyes. ‘It is my choice not to believe in comforting fantasies. Comforting fantasies are undoing this world. By the laws of comforting fantasies one group feels it right and proper to subjugate all others.’
‘And what about my nephew? Are you going to let my boy grow up outside of the church, without God?’
‘He is not your boy!’ Mark looked up at me, startled, and began to cry. ‘He is my child and William’s child and we will raise him to be an ethical man, a good man, not a man who feels himself above any other person because of the colour of his skin or the god he bows down before.’
‘Children can’t find their own way,’ Nora said, taking a picture of Mark wailing in my arms, my face wild with fury. ‘They must have guidance. They must have adults to guide them properly.’ Another photo: a flash and more screaming.
‘It’s time for you to go,’ I said, opening the door.
Nora came again last night, looking much as she did on that day I remember. She speaks as she always now speaks, with a salutation followed by hours of annoying pronouncements about my work. And then, rising from where she was sitting, she placed her ghostly hands over my face and I could feel my eyelids through her fingertips. As her hands fell away and I opened my eyes once again, I found myself in an unfamiliar room, still sitting at the end of a bed, but not my own, not in this house. I looked down at my legs and saw Nora’s in their place, sheathed in a nightgown. A man was lying beside me and I knew from the smell of his aftershave and the camphor cream rubbed into the soles of his feet that it must be my brother-in-law, Stephan. The door to this new room rattled with a sudden force and my hand rose to my mouth, though I had not thought to move it. My feet twitched but I had not compelled them to do so. Stephan murmured in panic and I turned to look at him. The body I inhabited was acting of its own volition; I was merely a visitor within it.
The door rattled again and I found myself running towards it, Nora’s body bracing against the wood, looking back at Stephan cowering on the bed. Nora hissed at him to call for help, but as his hand went for the phone her body was thrown back by the door crashing open. We landed on the floor against the bed’s footboard, a report of pain echoing along Nora’s shoulders — a pain I could feel, but only at one remove, more pressure than pain.
A man came through the door and closed it behind him, although the latch no longer engaged and it swung back open, letting in light from the corridor — just like the light from my own corridor coming into my own bedroom. The man did not bother to wear a mask. If a person could be said to look rational, this man did. But his was not the face of the man I had come to know in the weeks after Nora’s death, the man who was charged and found guilty and never denied the charges.
I wonder, Laura, what you looked like when you killed, if your face was composed, if you were fully conscious of your actions, as this man appeared to be, or if you were overcome with rage and the blaze of the moment. I picture your mouth drawn in a line, see the lips pushed together: a rational mouth, a mouth in harmony with what the rest of the body is doing. And then I cannot help seeing a different you, a woman enflamed, screaming vengeance, unfurling a tongue of fire.
There was nothing wild-eyed or impulsive about my sister’s assassin. He knew his task and undertook it without breaking a sweat or allowing his hands to shake. The smell of shit filled the room as the man rested the silencer of his gun against Nora’s face. I felt something release in my sister’s body and a hot wetness spread across the legs. In an instant Stephan had moved towards the window and, as if strings connected the two, the man moved in the same direction, firing his gun three times.
I did not want to turn around to look but Nora’s body did. I knew already what Stephan Pretorius looked like in death. The stench of shit and urine that seared my nostrils billowed out from Nora’s lap, mingling with the smells of gunpowder and the gun’s oils, the odours of a crude beast created by the highest of animals — a beast with no place in nature.
The man with the gun then turned to Nora. As he took aim, I felt the bowels of the body I occupied loosen again, the liquid warmth continue to flow down onto the floor, and though I wanted to plead, to beg this man to pardon my sister, I could not make Nora’s mouth move, could force no sound to come out.
As I watched the man’s finger curl round the trigger, I woke alone in my own bedroom with the memory burning across my eyes of Nora’s destroyed face — a screaming pope disintegrating into darkness.
Such experiences can be explained in only two ways according to the logic by which I live, a logic which does not allow for the supernatural, though it was by the trappings of supernatural practice, my sham nekyia round the fire, that I seem to have occasioned these recent phenomena. The cause is either psychological, meaning that my own sense of guilt and complicity in evil acts has grown to the point that even my conscious mind is affected as if in a dream state. Or the cause is physical, and perhaps, in that case, the crueller of the two: the loss of my mind by the process of a self-annihilating dementia, though I am not aware of any other psychological abnormalities, memory problems or confusions, and the doctors have all pronounced me sound.
I can understand the allure of the supernatural. To explain your and Nora’s visits as a haunting, as the intrusion of a world beyond the physical one before me, would be the more comforting explanation. And in the absence of any other, it may be the one I am forced to believe.