I remember how the room they had put me in smelled of disinfectant and crisp sterile sheets. I was wearing a white gown. I knew that I was in trouble, that I was in a place where broken men like me came to be mended. I had lost track of time and I recall being grateful, but I also knew that there was a price to be paid, there always is when a man renounces the hand he has been given to play. They left me alone for long periods, calling in only to make me swallow a pill or to readjust my bedding. But I knew that they were never far away. I was highrisk and they were watching, they always were. When I see him now, that man lying in that white room, his mind tearing him apart, I have trouble believing that it was me, but it is something I must never forget. His forehead glistens, his mouth is dry and he craves the one thing that has almost destroyed him, a drink. He is shivering but it is not from the cold. He believes he is in danger, but he will not ask for help. He will not admit that he is beaten, no matter what they say or do to him.
How I came to be there and the prisoners I took along the way was not something that was available to me as I lay in that bed. My curse will be that as the days pass I will fall in and out of memory, good and bad, terrifying and benign. My name was the last thing to go and as I sit here now five years later, healthy and in good spirits, I feel pity for the animal I had become.
A doctor came to see me shortly after I was admitted, she was young and I remember her breath falling on my face as she bent down to me, it was cool like summer lemonade.
‘You seem a little better,’ she said to me. ‘A little less agitated.’
I saw that she was not alone, two men stood behind her, their arms folded.
‘Please…Try not to upset yourself…It serves no purpose…’
Then she wiped my brow and smiled at me, and for a moment I wanted to trust her, but my heart was too sore and too poisoned.
I didn’t want her to leave. I wanted to tell her that I feared my mind and that when I was alone I lost sight of myself, and that I was at the mercy of the past with its dark assassins. That’s why they tell you to live a good life, because there is nothing worse than a bad memory, it will grow a mouth and sing cruel songs.
My mother loved butterflies and she loved God. She was a tall woman; He had made her like that, she said, because her mind would be closer to the sky and His love. She had been gifted by His divine power, she had one of the fruits of the holy tree, she could speak in tongues. When she was young God had moved through her. He had laid His joy across her heart and asked her to move forward to spread His Word. She said that she had been standing in a field that overlooked her house and she could see her mother and father moving about their garden tending to the flowers. It was an autumn evening and the land around shimmered in the fading light. She was sixteen and she wore a dress that had small butterflies embroidered on it. Her father had bought it for her, just after he was told he had cancer. He had gone into the town one day and returned with it. As he handed it to her, they both knew that he was saying goodbye, and that it was a gift that she must treasure. She told my sister and me that she had been sad all day as if her world had come to an end. As she stood in there above her house she watched the shape of her father in the garden below and she said she knew from looking at him, the way his back was bent and the way he held himself that he had hardly any time left. He had lied when he had said that it could be a year or so before he left, she could tell that it was only weeks. She remembers how the certainty of it moved through her and she said that in that moment something happened that changed her life forever. A monarch butterfly landed on her shoulder and nestled next to one of the embroidered ones stitched into her dress. She said she knew that it was a sign that God was saying that our lives were just the same, as brief and as beautiful as a butterfly’s. Just then she felt a power move across her heart, she said she knew immediately that it was God’s love, reassuring her, letting her know that no matter what happened she would be alright and that her father was going to a better place. She said she knew that God was touching her for a reason, and that she was being prepared for something. Two weeks later to the day her father died, he collapsed in the garden, just as the weather was beginning to close down for winter. He was waked in his favourite suit, the one he wore for special occasions at the bank of which he was manager. It was for special customers, so it was only right that he should go to meet God in it. It was as she stood over his open coffin that she felt the force come to her again. This time it brought language, an ancient tongue that the first apostles had spoken when the Holy Dove had touched them on the brow.
It happened when she placed her hand on her dead father’s forehead; she said that she felt a rush deep inside her like the sea spilling onto a shore and she knew that God had chosen her. She heard a voice, it spoke deep inside her next to the place where she kept her dreams. She saw the hem of her Lord’s gown as she bent to wash His feet, she was among His disciples. She was favoured and loved. She saw the blood on His brow and the wound in His side as He gazed down at her from the Cross. She tasted His despair on her tongue. She said that the passion of His final hours filled her heart and flooded her mind. Such pain, she told us, excruciating and unending, but through it all His love shone through, she could feel it sitting like a small sun in the darkness of her grief. As her fingers felt the cold of her father’s dead flesh, she knew that she was chosen and that she must speak, to tell the world. So her tongue spelled out the code of his love in that room where the mourners had gathered. Some thought her mad, because they would not or could not be open. Others fell to their knees and praised God in His wonder. Her mother was not so pleased; she thought that she was making a show of herself in front of the mourners and pulled her away from her husband’s dead body, spitting at her to be quiet. She told us that her mother may as well have been trying to halt a spring flood; God was in her as surely as there was breath in her body. One of her mother’s friends followed them out to the hall and tried to reason with her, telling her that this was a sign that the Lord’s own hand was behind this. But our grandmother wouldn’t listen, telling her friend to mind her own, that this was family business and didn’t concern her.
Mother said she was saddened by this and that when they buried her father two days later she felt God knocking on the door of her heart again, but this time she had to refuse Him entry for fear of angering her mother. She said that as she stood there in the new soil of the opened grave she vowed never to betray Him again.
When she met my father, he told her that God was his friend and had steered him through many lonely periods in his life. He had been a sickly child who disappointed his father, and had spent his childhood toughening his body and building muscle so that he would be accepted by him, of course he never was, his father died still cursing him for being frail. So when he met my mother he became what she wanted him to be, he presented her with a caring, Godfearing man. He was used to being what he wasn’t.
She got married in the butterfly dress. She had it altered slightly to fit the occasion. It was her way of staying committed to her calling, she said. Her mother, by then broken by old age and a failing memory, didn’t put up much of a fight; she wasn’t able to, she said. Some people thought that it was inappropriate, that a good Catholic bride should get married in virginal white not in a faded mauve dress with the butterflies of the world dotted all over it.
My father, she said, never objected, he wanted her and would do anything to get her, even betraying his own nature. It was all done so he could possess her, and when she accepted the wedding band he offered her he changed almost overnight it seemed and the world darkened. Later she would have to hide the dress from him. God was now a threat to my father. He resented his hold on my mother’s spirit. He began to taunt her belief and hunt down the goodness that she was trying to bring to their home. He began to ridicule the butterfly dress saying that my mother was cracked in the head and that if he had his way he would have them married again properly