SAVIOUR

Ryan Lee

***************

"Go back in your room," Mary said, trying desperately to keep the tension - the fear - out of her voice. "Play with your Gameboy, okay?"

Lauren gave a disgruntled sigh. "It's broke. I've told you twice. What's dad doing?"

"Inside," Mary said more firmly, steering the child into the bedroom by her shoulders. "Just do a jigsaw or something."

"I've done them all," Lauren complained in an unhappy little voice. She gazed up at her mother in soulful bewilderment; Mary saw a solemn reflection of her own suffering in the girl's haunting blue eyes. "What's wrong with dad?"

Mary sat down on Lauren's bed, which was small and low to the ground and always made her feel like Goldilocks testing out baby bear's bunk. She patted the bed and put her arm around Lauren's shoulders when she sat down beside her.

"Your dad's not well, love," she began. Already she felt tears prick her eyes. How can I do this? She thought hopelessly. How can I tell a five-year-old her father is going insane? But she had to, one way or the other. The message had to get through. It was Don't Talk To Strangers time, only the stranger in the house was good old Manny McDonald, salt-of-the-earth farmer and dependable family man. Except poor old Manny wasn't the Manny he used to be. Something else lived inside him now, an obsessive, malignant something. A dangerous something. Lauren had to be told - warned - that her father, the imposing gentle giant who carried her around on his broad shoulders and had taught her how to draw a thumb dogs and steal people's noses, was a paranoid schizophrenic intent on murdering someone tonight. "He's got something wrong in his head, Lauren. Do you understand what I mean?"

"Like a hangover?" Lauren ventured.

"No, not that," Mary said, shaking her head impatiently . She sensed Lauren was a little hurt and gave her shoulders an apologetic squeeze. "Not with his head - in his head. Do you remember granddad telling you about his friend Jim?"

"Jim Coolly," Lauren said gravely. "The breath that sank a thousand ships."

Mary smiled absently. "Jim Coolly, that's right. Do you remember anything about him?"

"He ate all the fish in his pond."

"Yes, but do you know why?"

"'Cos he was mad."

"No. Yes, I mean he was sort of mad." Mary closed her eyes for a second. Hell, she thought. Can't we just discuss something simple like where babies come from or what Twin Peaks was all about?

"He was in the army!" Lauren almost yelled, her eyes brightening with sudden recollection. "He was in the army and he pulled a flag out of the ground, only the flag was a boo-bee trap and a bomb went off. His best mate went all the way to Kingdom Come and Jim's foot went with him." Her face scrunched into a frown as she tried to remember exactly how her grandfather had put it. "Jim Coolly had a nervous breakdown."

Mary nodded silently.

"And from that day on the wheel was going round but the little mouse had escaped. Jim used to hit his wife and chase his kids round the garden, but he couldn't help it because…because everything inside his head was diseased."

Lauren fell into a ruminating silence. She stared fixedly at her hands, her luscious mane of frosty blond hair falling over her face. Eventually she looked up at her mother. "Is dad like Jim Coolly then?

"Sort of," Mary said, stroking her daughter's hair. Instead of elucidating she decided to wait for Lauren to speak again. She wanted to know how much Lauren could work out for herself, how much she understood about what was happening to her father. Something told her it would be no less than she herself understood.

"Is that why he didn't bring the sheep down when it snowed?"

"It's part of it, yes."

"But it won't be dad's fault if they die will it?" Lauren said, her voice rising to a high, despairing wail. A snot bubble appeared and popped from her left nostril. Tears spilled down her flushed cheeks. Mary watched her tearing up, heartbroken, but didn't immediately attempt to comfort her. If she did that they might both break down and now wasn't the time. It just wasn't the time.

"Ber-because he car-car-can't help it," Lauren said, her thin, shaky voice coming between great whooping sobs. She tried to speak faster, cramming the words into one breathless sentence before her voice gave out "He can't help cow-cow-counting things and he can't help hearing the de-de-department men talking and he car-car-"

Mary pulled her daughter tight to her bosom and rocked her fiercely. It came as no real surprise when Lauren immediately shut off the waterworks with a simple twist of some inner stopcock. She had always been a strong girl with a nouse for priorities and practicalities; she was her mother's daughter alright. Mary hugged her tighter than ever, needing that strength and security for the uncertainty that lay ahead.

Mary? An inner voice gently inquired. It sounded like her mother, but at the same time, oddly, it also sounded like Manny. Don't you know what you have to do? Haven't you worked it out already, kid?

A distant memory pricked her with a kind of howling grief and love, that of burying her face in an apron which smelled of marzipan and vanilla, and listening to her mother's soft reassurances that the medicine would sting a bit, sure enough, but the cut would go septic if they didn't do something about it.

"Mum?" Lauren's voice, hoarse and tired, drew Mary back to the present. "Will Jesus help dad if we ask him?"

No, Lauren, because Jesus is only Santa Clause without the beard, she wanted to say. The words would have been spat out like a cobra's venom. He's just a figure we cling to, something to hold the anchor so we don't float around feeling pointless and hollow. But he isn't real, Lauren, same as Santa and the Easter Bunny aren't real. Come on, wake up and taste the Sugar Puffs!

"Some people think Jesus is just another word for ourselves, Lauren. When we pray to Jesus we're really looking inside ourselves."

Lauren drew away from her mother. Her expression was quite stunned and despairing. "But we learn about Jesus in school. He was born in a hut with a donkey because the hotel was fully booked and the three wise men brought Gold, Frankincense and More."

"Some people think that's just a story."

"Jesus is real," Lauren whispered. The words came out like a vehement response to a litany.

Mary gave a defeated sigh. She couldn't argue theology with someone who wasn't yet totally convinced that Big Bird wasn't real. "Jesus is real," she agreed, and planted a long hard kiss on the top of Lauren's head. "He's real if you believe in him, just like Tinkerbell in the story." Mary stood up, signifying an end to the discussion. She felt her stomach churn and thought with a kind of screaming hilarity: Two minutes to curtain, Mrs McDonald.

"Dad believes in Jesus doesn't he?" Lauren said in a gently prodding, just-suppose sort of voice. She reached over to the bookshelf by the side of the bed and picked out a well-read copy of One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

It was true - Manny had believed in Jesus all his life, but he no longer believed in the Jesus who was born in a hut and got presents of Gold, Frankincense and More. He no longer believed in Jesus the saviour, the humble Jewish chippie who died for our sins. The Jesus Manny believed in these days was a kind of shadowy Hoover figure, a watcher of all and whisperer of secrets. Jesus saw reds under the bed, rapists in the cupboards, whores and fornicators in the village pub and demons in every stranger's eyes. Moreover, J. Edgar Jesus was imparting these secrets to Manny McDonald, his number one flag-waving John Wayne figure down here on planet earth. Sometimes he came through the radio just like Jimmy Young (at least in Manny's deluded mind he did), but mostly he just whispered. Took him to one side, you might say. For the last few nights - ever since the blizzards started - Jesus had been instructing Manny how to proceed. The funny thing was that at the same time as the rancid Christ, Lord of Paranoia, had been detailing his instructions to Manny McDonald, Mary's own spiritual guardian had been doing the very same thing to her. There was no difference really, when it came down to picking sides. Neither was real. Manny's Jesus ranted about rapists and drug addicts over the opening guitar chords of Hotel California; Mary's god was her voice of reason, a level of consciousness with a better view of the world than the one she normally saw. Both existed nowhere but in the minds of their servants.

He came calling. It was an eccentric gesture, strange even in an age where it was perfectly acceptable to exchange telephone numbers with a stranger in a pub, but not simply the resurrection of a bygone tradition. It was something Manny held true, an intrinsic principle he believed in and lived by. Of course she couldn't fail to see there was something different, some might say odd, about the upright Christian farmer who introduced himself to her parents before waiting to be introduced to her, but at the same time she also couldn't fail to notice in him a kind of humble honesty and fundamental respect that was somehow awe-inspiring and saintly.

She could have married him for that alone but she didn't. Neither did she become his wife (and make love with him for the first time) because he worked so damn hard at trying to make her happy. These things were factors - and strongly persuasive factors when she counted all the relationships, both her own and other people's, which had crumbled through infidelity and a simple absence of mutual respect - but not decisive enough to make up her mind. That moment came when she realised how fast the currents ran below even the calmest of pools. There was time to eat and breed and that was it. You darted from the shallows to the deep, made your little splash and you were gone.

Fast forward through the years, fast like rapids. Manny had to pick up a new shotgun from a dealer in Huddersfield. On the same afternoon a radical evangelist named Nile Cooper was speaking at McAlpine stadium, rock and roll hellfire from the cotton states of southern America. That same evening Manny returned home, bursting into the kitchen with his eyes blazing wildly, his white teeth gleaming through a halo of black beard. "I've seen him!" he screamed. "I thought he was there all the time but that was the devil in his robes! Now I've really seen him! Jesus Christ is in my heart and he's in my house!"

Fast forward through the years, fast like a rapacious cancer. Signs that Manny McDonald was losing his mind, at first dim and elusive like shooting stars, were now coming like explosions on Bonfire night. The first big explosion came when Manny tried to attack a telephone engineer who was fixing up a second line at the vicarage (the extra line was needed because of the reverend Tony Stone's conversion to the Church of the World Wide Web). Manny, however, was convinced that the telephone engineer was part of a clandestine operation to drive him out of business, an operation instigated by the Department of Affairs, the sinister tip on the pyramid of organisations which included, amongst others, the Catholic church, banks (didn't matter which particular bank - they were all in it together), the Inland Revenue, the Post Office and homosexual rights groups. The telephone engineer was scared more than hurt by Manny's attack, which was largely a verbal one, but perhaps that was only down to luck and good timing on the part of Tony Stone and Boris Parker, a burly man who cut the vicar's grass and hedges for free as continued atonement for some private, long ago sin. Nobody called the police that day but someone did make an anonymous phone call to Manny's GP, Paul Osgood, which did absolutely nothing to convince Manny that his paranoia was groundless. In any case, Jesus had told Manny that Dr Osgood was part of the pyramid and Manny refused to let him into the house.

Mary had spoken with Osgood alone some weeks later. They didn't talk about having Manny sectioned until the appointment was almost over. Osgood had shaken her hand, then briefly held it in both of his, looking into her eyes with a sort of compassionate candour. He then told her about the kindest option. He actually said those words, as if he was a vet talking about some incontinent old pooch. She didn't hold it against him. And perhaps it was the kindest option, but it was one she wouldn't consider unless (until?) Manny threatened his family. Manny was ill. Manny was lost and afraid (and she had always sensed his fear, his frantic struggle to keep treading the water, his loneliness and his despair) but Manny wasn't a danger to society. She had truthfully believed that. And she still mostly believed it until three days ago - fast forward, fast like a tiger sprinting out of a thicket - when the first of the blizzards came.

She had known about Manny's obsession with counting for a long time. It hadn't been a difficult conclusion to reach. When he was sitting still, doing nothing, she had noticed his gaze wandering across the room, resting on something, moving on again, like a fly. His lips would twitch, and he would nod his head slightly in rhythm, the way people who are not very good at mental arithmetic nod their heads when they're adding up. She had never considered asking him why he was counting things, not even at the beginning, when the subtle symptoms of his madness had first begun to show. She had ignored it in a way, even though it came back to gnaw and nibble at her thoughts every single night. Then later, when Manny's strange behaviour took hold of his life, she didn't ask him simply because it would have been pointless to. His logic would make no sense to her. What are you counting for, Manny? Missing something? Misplaced a few marbles, have you? Is it something only you can see, or shall we count together? Have you driven me insane too, Manny?

His behaviour had grown increasingly bizarre, increasingly urgent, since the blizzards started. This morning he had been out of bed and dressed by four, something he hadn't done since before the dairy heard was sold off (in fact one of her main causes of concern over the last twelve months or so was Manny's unhealthy appetite for sleep). Too curious to go back to sleep, Mary had lain in bed listening to him thumping through the downstairs rooms. When she went down at a little after six she discovered her husband pacing back and forth, back and forth, counting his steps in a furtive little whisper. He ignored all of Mary's motherly attempts to keep him still, refusing her bribes of a cooked breakfast and numerous cups of tea. Manny didn't seem to resent her interruptions. He would merely smile indulgently, shake his head, and then begin counting his steps all over again.

If this had happened a week earlier, even a couple of days earlier, she would have called Doctor Osgood and asked him to come over. Manny would have raved until his head turned purple of course, but he wouldn't have done anything to harm them physically. It said so much about Manny McDonald that for all the hate and suspicion festering away inside him, the shaming behaviour, the irrational decisions which had brought them to the verge of bankruptcy, she couldn't remember a single instant when Manny had threatened either Lauren or herself in any way. Except this morning there had been something different about him, and it wasn't merely in the escalation of his strangeness. It was in his eyes. Had it been there all along? She wondered. She thought perhaps it had, only in the past it had lurked in a dark recess, watching them with the patient, predatory interest of a cat. But now this cat was venturing out of its dark corner, creeping into the light an inch at a time. And what she had briefly seen in Manny's eyes this morning wasn't even remotely connected to the feline family. What she saw was a wicked, cunning shine of alien intelligence.

Lauren had at first found her father's pacing and counting a source of bewildered amusement. But later in the morning, when Manny began to count at the top of his booming voice - ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR! - she had become anxious and distressed. At one point Manny had counted six paces to the wall and then stuck there as if he was a clockwork toy, repeating the number six over and over again like a scratched record at full volume. There he would have remained if Mary hadn't physically turned him around and set him on his way again.

Later, some time after midday, Manny had ceased his counting and taken a knife from the kitchen, which he used to slash open the sofa so as to get at the devil's agents hiding in the stuffing. This had upset Lauren so much that Mary had been forced to take her upstairs. The two of them had spent most of the day there, playing I-Spy and doing jigsaw puzzles. Mary had made the occasional check on her husband and didn't know whether to be relieved or afraid when she found him sitting silently in his favourite chair, staring abstractly at a stain on the wallpaper. He was gripping the arms of the chair with fingers like talons, his lips tight, not counting, just staring. The image that sprang to Mary's mind was a convicted man waiting to die in the electric chair. And all throughout the day the snow had fallen thick and fast.

Only half an hour before Mary had come down to make a light supper for herself and Lauren. Manny was sitting erect in his seat, a shotgun gripped between his clenched thighs. He was rubbing the barrels of the shotgun energetically with a cloth, his head back and his eyes half closed, his breath coming in hot, rapid little grunts. He looked just like a man trapped in the throes of sexual rapture. Yet despite being so engrossed in symbolic masturbation, Manny had been aware of his wife's presence in the room.

"Got to shoot him!" he had cried, sounding frighteningly cheerful and keen. "Got to shoot him, Mary! He 's the Exterminator, sent to carry you and Lauren away to the wolves! Got to shoot him, got to shoot the bastard!"

He had been talking about the young man staying with the Hudsons out on Ceder Road. Apparently, so the gossip went, he was Sally Hudson's latest boyfriend. From Leeds. People always added the from Leeds bit as a considered afterthought, as if it might go some way to explaining anything and everything the future held for them. Mary didn't even know the lad's name ( I need a name, pardner, she thought as she made her way dreamily downstairs, something to carve on your tombstone) or anything else about him other than the fact that he came from Leeds, a city that in Manny's fractured mind had strong cultural and bureaucratical links with Sodom and Gomorrah. Places where manfuckers lived, Manny had said. But now she knew something about the Hudsons' guest that nobody else was aware of: the poor boy had unwittingly set himself up as the target for all of Manny McDonald's persecutory delusions. At first it was the Catholics and the newspapers and the politicians and the Jews and the Africans and the dirty manfuckers, giant blocks of impenetrable glass at which Manny could indulge his relatively harmless stone-throwing. But it was personal now. Manny had trained his sights on the undergrowth, at the small things living among the leaves. The boy at the Hudsons first, then Sally and her Uncle Frank next. Then who? The police who came to arrest him? The countless others before the police made it into the snowbound village?

For a second or two, just before Mary pushed open the living room door, she hoped he was gone already. That way it was all in the lap of the gods and not in the hands of a weary little woman who felt twenty years older than she was. After all, decisions like this were for gods to make, weren't they?

The room was in darkness except for the demonic eyes of embers glowing in the fireplace. Manny was standing by the window, looking out at the night, silhouetted against the eerie phosphorescent glow of the snowy landscape beyond.

"We should have moved away from here years ago," he said pensively. "This is no place to bring up a baby. She needs kids to play with and dogs to run at her feet. She shouldn't have to grow up in a place that grinds to a halt whenever it snows more than a couple of inches. This place is an island, lost and miles from anywhere."

Mary took a couple of steps forward. She wanted so much to hold him, to be with him again, but she wouldn't do that. With this distance between them there was very little guilt inside her, just the sad, shameful anticipation of relief.

"We could still try," she said, ignoring everything her higher consciousness - her god - was telling her. "We could cut our losses now, Manny. Sell the property, sell everything that still belongs to us. We'll still owe the bank but not as much as we owe now. And who knows, we might-"

Manny spun round abruptly. She couldn't see his eyes but she knew that thing was staring at her, that mocking, malevolent thing inside him. "Got a job to do," he said eagerly. "Got to stop him before he comes out here to rape you and the baby."

Gone, Mary thought absently. He comes and goes and now he's gone again.

Manny stooped and picked up the shotgun. He broke the barrels over the crook of his elbow and loaded two cartridges, then snapped the shotgun closed. Now she was sure he was gone for good; the old Manny, even the mad old Manny, would never have a loaded shotgun in the house.

"Won't be late," he said with absurd ordinariness. "Lock all the doors, Mary. If I don't come back you'll have to defend the farm by yourself."

Manny started to go but Mary moved quickly and blocked his path.

"Wait!" she cried. She took a deep breath and tried to control the restless babble of panic she felt inside. "Wait, love. It's cold out there. You'll be needing your coat." She hurried into the kitchen and returned with Manny's warm jacket draped over her arm. Manny turned his back on her and automatically raised his left arm for her to thread the sleeve of his jacket over. That's when Mary slipped a bread knife from under the coat and sank it into his side.

Stabbed him, she thought through a wave of drowsy, dream-like horror, and a verse from an old country and western song mocked prophetically: Doin' time down in Arkansas/ cos my baby he's alive no more/ shot him dead and that's the way it stands/ but it wasn't me it was the devil's hands.

An ugly spiteful voice whispered this into her ear: Not him, Mary…Manny wasn't the mad one in the house - it was you! Manny was just ill, but you…you're criminally insane.

She let go of the knife when she became aware of the shocking little vibration travelling up her arm as the serrated blade sawed into one of Manny's ribs. Manny let out a gurgling sound of pain that was almost like choking laughter, then dropped to his knees. The shotgun slipped out of his hand and fell to the carpet, but thankfully didn't go off. He turned his head and looked at the knife poking obscenely out of his side, his expression one of utter disbelief. Then he glanced briefly at Mary, frowning, his head cocked like a dog that doesn't understand the command it's been given, and fell forward with a heavy thump.

"Oh, Manny," Mary said softly. "I'm so sorry." She looked dumbly at the blood on her hand. Some had splashed onto her blouse too, but not a lot. She wanted to cry - or at least she thought she ought to cry - but the truth was she felt nothing but hollow and dry; emotions lingered inside her like ghostly traces of perfume in an empty bottle, but their potency had lone since evaporated.

Lifting the cushion on Manny's chair, Mary took out a clean white sheet and shook it open, breathing transient life into the dying coals on the fire. As she did this she tried to remember when she had put the sheet under the cushion, and just what she might have told herself she was doing it for. She swatted the worry away. It didn't matter how long ago she had resigned herself to killing her husband, because all that mattered now was Lauren. Poor Manny had worshipped his little girl, but he would have been nothing but a thorn in her side for as long as he was around. Lauren was an inquisitive little beast, spouting questions as if she had sprung a leak, and over the last few months a great many of those questions had been about her father's increasingly strange behaviour. The kids she went to school with were probably too young to understand that something was very wrong in Lauren's house, but a few years down the line and they would know alright. They would know the way sharks can sense another animal's distress, and they would devour her alive, tearing chunks out of her until she was too weak and injured to care anymore. And if anyone ever dared to suggest that the worst of the torment would have amounted to little more than some name-calling and the odd skipping rhyme featuring Lauren McDonald's mad old dad and his hilarious antics, Mary would have calmly told them about Sonia Cheeseman.

Sonia was a quiet, introspective child who preferred books and puzzles to any of the more boisterous school activities. At break time she was more often than not to be seen plodding around the perimeter of the playground, her hands behind her back like a small poet, lost in her own lonely world. But that was not her stigma, and nor was it anything to do with her dowdy clothes and their unmistakable pong of mothballs. Sonia's burden - her crime - was to be born of a mother who was older than the other mothers by a good fifteen years. This qualified her as a witch, and Sonia thereby as a witch's daughter ( or a witch's tit, as Carl Anderson once called her, bringing hoots of savage laughter from the rest of the class). Sonia endured a daily ritual of abuse until the age of fourteen, when she threw herself under a train. And that's the story Mary would tell them if they ever doubted the nature of the beast or its capacity for pitiless cruelty.

But there was no good to be had from torturing herself with nightmares that wouldn't be realised. The rot was stopped. She had cut off the diseased limb and halted the cancer. She was the surgeon saviour.

Really? She asked herself. What about the legal repercussions of her merciful action? She was clever enough to know at once that she couldn't lie and claim she had killed Manny in self-defence, or in the defence of her child. The police had men, scientists, who would be able to tell in a jiffy that she had stabbed him from behind.

Still, he had died with a loaded shotgun in his hands, and if she could convince them Manny was intent on using it…

Oh, but it didn't really matter. In the hands of a good child psychologist Lauren would paint a frightening picture of a little girl and her desperate mother living on an isolated hill farm with a paranoid schizophrenic: the truth, in other words. There was nothing to be discovered which could prove detrimental to her case. A sympathetic judge, a few good character witnesses, a jury of her peers, and Bob's your probation officer. They all go out and the curtain falls to rapturous applause. Everyone loves a happy ending.

Mary covered Manny's body with the sheet, and then, just because it seemed somehow appropriate, she said a prayer for him.