The glass door of the nearest Retreat Room slid open. Author Giles Harmon stood there, wearing a velvet jacket, his hand still on the flies he’d clearly just zipped up, his dandyish hair silver in the midday sunshine.
‘Giles,’ said Taio, sounding surprised and none too pleased.
‘Ah, hello, Taio,’ said Harmon, smiling.
There was a small movement in the cabin behind Harmon and to Robin’s horror, Lin emerged, looking dishevelled and slightly sick. Without meeting anyone’s eyes she walked quickly away.
‘I didn’t know you were here,’ said Taio, maintaining his hold on Robin’s upper arm.
‘Arrived this morning,’ said Harmon, who seemed untroubled by Taio’s tone. ‘I’ve spotted a marvellous opportunity. The British Association of Creatives is looking for sponsorship for their Ethics and Art project. If the UHC were minded to, I think we could broker a really fruitful partnership.’
‘That’ll need discussion by the Council,’ said Taio.
‘I’ve emailed Papa J,’ said Harmon, ‘but I know he’s busy, so I thought I’d come down here and talk over the practicalities with you and Mazu. Thinking of staying a few days,’ he said, theatrically breathing in the country air. ‘Such a blissful change after London.’
‘OK, well, we can talk in the farmhouse later,’ said Taio.
‘Oh, of course, of course,’ said Harmon, with a small smile, and for the first time his eyes alighted briefly on Robin. ‘See you there.’
Harmon walked away, humming to himself.
‘Come on,’ said Taio, and he tugged Robin into the cabin Harmon and Lin had just vacated.
The dingy, wood-walled interior was roughly fifteen feet square and dominated by a double bed covered with a much-stained and crumpled sheet. Two grubby pillows lay on the floor and a naked lightbulb hung from its flex over the bed. The shed-like smell of pine and dust mingled with a strong odour of unwashed human.
As Taio pulled a thin curtain over the sliding glass doors, Robin blurted,
‘I can’t.’
‘Can’t what?’ said Taio, turning to face her. His scarlet tracksuit top stretched over his large belly, he smelled stale; his hair was greasy and his pointed nose and small mouth had never seemed more rat-like.
‘You know what,’ said Robin. ‘I just can’t.’
‘This’ll make you feel better,’ said Taio, now advancing on her. ‘Much better.’
He reached for her, but Robin threw out a hand, holding him at arm’s length with as much force as she’d used to prevent herself falling into the baptismal pool. He tried to push past it, but when she continued to resist he took half a step backwards. Evidently some wariness of the law beyond Chapman Farm lingered in him, and Robin, still determined to remain at the centre if she could, said,
‘It isn’t right. I’m not worthy.’
‘I’m a Principal. I decide who’s worthy and who isn’t.’
‘I shouldn’t be here!’ said Robin, allowing herself to start crying again and adding a hysterical note to her voice. ‘You heard me, in the temple. It’s all true, all of it. I’m bad, I’m rotten, I’m impure—’
‘Spirit bonding purifies,’ said Taio, again trying to push past her resisting hands. ‘You’ll feel much better for this. Come—’
He attempted to take her in his arms.
‘No,’ gasped Robin, wriggling free of him to stand with her back to the glass doors. ‘You can’t want to be with me now you’ve heard what I’m like.’
‘You need this,’ said Taio insistently. ‘Here.’
He sat down on the grubby bed and patted the space beside him. Robin exaggerated her distress, crying still more loudly, her wails echoing off the wooden walls, her nose running freely, taking deep gasps of air as though she might be on the verge of a panic attack.
‘Control yourself!’ commanded Taio.
‘I don’t know what I’ve done wrong, I’m being punished and I don’t know why, I can’t get any of it right, I’ve got to go—’
‘Come here,’ said Taio more insistently, again patting the bed.
‘I wanted to do this, I really believed, but I’m not what you’re looking for, I realise that now—’
‘That’s your false self talking!’
‘It isn’t, it’s my honest self—’
‘You’re currently demonstrating high levels of egomotivity,’ said Taio harshly. ‘You think you know better than I do. You don’t. This is why you drove away your fiancé, because you couldn’t subsume your ego. You learned all this in lectures: there is no self, only fragments of the whole. You must surrender to the group, to union… sit down,’ he added forcefully, but Robin remained standing.
‘I want to leave. I want to go.’
She was gambling on the fact that Taio Wace wouldn’t want to be responsible for her leaving. She was supposed to be rich and was definitely articulate and educated, which meant she might be taken seriously if she talked about her negative experiences of the church. Most importantly, she’d just witnessed a well-known writer leaving a Retreat Room with a girl who looked barely over-age.
The naked light falling from the overhead bulb highlighted Taio’s rat-like nose and dirty hair. After a moment or two’s silence he said coldly,
‘You underwent spiritual demarcation because you’ve fallen behind the other recruits.’
‘How?’ said Robin, injecting a note of desperation into her voice and still failing to wipe her nose, because she wanted to repel Taio as much as possible. ‘I’ve tried—’
‘You make disruptive statements, like that comment about Mazu’s hair. You haven’t fully integrated, you’ve failed in simple duties to the church—’
‘Like what?’ said Robin in genuine anger, every inch of her body sore after long days of manual labour.
‘Relinquishment of materialist values.’
‘But I—’
‘Step three to pure spirit: divestment.’
‘I don’t—’
‘Everyone else who joined with you has made donations to the church.’
‘I wanted to,’ lied Robin, ‘but I didn’t know how!’
‘Then you should have asked. Non-materialists offer freely, they don’t wait for forms or invoices. They offer. Wipe your nose, for God’s sake.’
Robin deliberately smeared the snot across her face with her sleeve and gave a loud, wet sniff.
‘“I live to love and give”,’ quoted Taio. ‘You were Typed as a Gift-Bearer, like the Golden Prophet, but you’re hoarding your resources instead of sharing them.’
As he said it, his eyes rolled down her body to her breasts.
‘And I know you’ve got no physical hang-ups about sex,’ he added, with the ghost of a smirk. ‘Apparently, you orgasm every time.’
‘I think I should go to temple,’ said Robin a little wildly. ‘The Blessed Divinity’s telling me to chant, I can feel it.’
She knew she’d angered and offended him, and that he didn’t believe any divinity was speaking to her; but he was the one who’d conducted seminars in the basement room about opening the mind and heart to the divine force, and to contradict her was to undermine words he himself had spoken. Perhaps, too, his desire had been quenched by her deliberate smearing of snot over her face, because after a few seconds he got slowly to his feet.
‘I think you’d do better to perform penance to the community,’ he said. ‘Fetch cleaning products from the kitchen, fresh sheets from the laundry and muck out these three Retreat Rooms.’
He ripped back the curtain, slid back the glass door and left.
Weak with immediate relief, yet full of dread of what harm she might have done in refusing him, Robin leaned for a moment against the wall, cleaned her face as best she could with her sweatshirt, then glanced around.
A tap was fixed to the wall in a corner, with a short length of hose attached and a drain hole beneath it. A slimy bottle of liquid soap and a dirty wet flannel stood beside the hole on a patch of mildewed floorboard. Presumably people washed themselves before having sex. Trying to dismiss a horrible mental image of Taio lathering his erection before joining her on the bed, Robin set off to find a bucket and mop. However, as she emerged from the bushes screening the Retreat Rooms from the courtyard, she stumbled to a halt.
Emily Pirbright was standing alone in front of the Drowned Prophet’s fountain, on a wooden crate. Her head was bowed and she was holding a piece of cardboard on which words had been written.
Robin didn’t want to approach the pool with Emily standing there, but she feared being punished if she was seen failing to make her tribute to Daiyu. Pretending she couldn’t even see Emily, she advanced on the fountain, but almost against her will her eyes were drawn to the silent figure.
Emily’s face and hair had been smeared with earth, as had her scarlet tracksuit. She was staring at the ground, as determinedly insensible of Robin’s presence as the latter had meant to be of Emily’s.
The words scrawled on the cardboard sign held between Emily’s mud-stained hands read: I AM A DIRTY PIG.
55
Heaven and earth do not unite…
Thus the superior man falls back upon his inner worth
In order to escape the difficulties.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
… and Tao took me into one of the [illegible] rooms and wanted Spirit bonding but I managed to fend him off. Giles Harman had just been in there with Lin. She’s barely of age, might be underage, I don’t know.
Emily and [illegible] (can’t remember if I told you about her, she’s quite yung young) have been punished for disobedence. Emily had to stand on a crate with a sign saying she was a dirty pig but Shawna just [illegible] and came back 48 hours & looked terrible.
I found out why I’ve been [illegible] from top group. It’s because I haven’t given any money. I’ll have to go to Mazu and offer a donation, but how do we [illegible] this, can you think of anything because it’s the only way I’m going to be able to stay.