Children Of Dynmouth

10

He was possessed by devils, Kate said, and then wept and could not contain herself. If you believed he was possessed, she whispered between her sobs, everything was explained.

In the kitchen Mrs Blakey comforted her and Mr Blakey sat at the scrubbed table stirring sugar into a cup of tea. Possessed by devils put him in mind of a case in the north of England: a man had become worse than ever apparently after clergymen of two denominations had attempted an exorcism ceremony. He’d seen on television once an exorcism ceremony, a clergyman’s hands on the head of the afflicted person, the clergyman jerking about with spasms, perspiring and dishevelled. Afterwards the clergyman had said he could feel the devils leaving the body of the afflicted person, like an electrical current seemingly. And then the evil was meant to flow into his own body, where it could do no harm because of the presence of God. A lot of malarkey, Mr Blakey had considered; clergymen on television looking for publicity. The man in the north of England had clearly been a nutcase. Extremely harmful it had been, meddling with him like that.

Kate’s sobbing subsided and ceased. She sipped some of the cocoa Mrs Blakey had made for her. She said she wanted Timothy Gedge to stop looking up at the windows of the house. She’d gone down to the seashore with the dogs and there he’d been, following her. He was an awful person.

‘Say things, does he?’ Mrs Blakey asked as casually as she could, pushing a packet of wafer biscuits towards Kate.

‘He says horrible things.’

She ate a biscuit and drank more cocoa, Mrs Blakey asked what kind of things, and she said just horrible things, things about people having secrets. He looked in people’s windows, like Miss Lavant’s. He followed people about. He listened to people’s conversation. He harassed people with jokes that weren’t funny.

She would not go into the detail that Mrs Blakey urged her towards. ‘Unless you explain to us, dear,’ Mrs Blakey began. ‘Unless you could say –’

‘He’s possessed, he’s not a normal person: you can tell that when you’re with him.’ She told them about the disturbed girl at St Cecilia’s, the girl called Julie who performed feats of levitation, and about the girl who could read a page of a newspaper and remember it, and Enid who could hypnotize with a fountain-pen top. She repeated what Rosalind Swain had said about odd things happening in adolescence, about adolescents harbouring poltergeists. Devils could get into children because children were weak and didn’t know what was happening to them. In the past there’d been cases of children who were witches.

Mrs Blakey, only a little less sceptical than her husband of this line of talk, nevertheless recalled how Timothy Gedge had affected her when he’d come on to the telephone with a woman’s voice, and her bewilderment when the silence had first begun in the house. Yet it was hard to believe that the explanation for all this was that a schoolboy was in the hands of devils. Hypnosis and levitation and poltergeists were all very well, and so was remembering the page of a newspaper, but what on earth did devils mean? A hundred years ago they might have made sense, due to ignorance: like the child said, there’d been talk of witches. In Africa they were probably believed in even today, because of drum-beating and that. When she thought about them, she saw devils as small creatures with hooves and a tail, horned and two-legged and yet at the same time resembling tadpoles. It was extremely difficult to imagine an association between such creatures and a Dynmouth boy.

Yet Mrs Blakey continued to sense the unease she’d been aware of on the telephone, which she’d first of all sensed when she’d looked out of the landing window and seen the boy with the children in the garden. The boy had waved at her. In retrospect his yellow clothes had seemed, just for a moment then, an outward sign of some disorder.

‘It had nothing to do with a penknife, had it, Kate?’

‘Penknife?’

‘You said he’d lost his penknife.’

Kate shook her head. Mrs Blakey smiled encouragingly. It would help to know in what way precisely he maligned people, but the child remained as mum as a mute, one hand gripped tightly into a fist, the other holding the mug of cocoa. ‘Don’t tell Stephen,’ was all she’d say. ‘Don’t tell him I told you.’

‘Stephen went off with a carrier-bag, dear.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Has it to do with Timothy Gedge? The carrier, Kate?’

Kate shook her head again, saying she didn’t know, and Mrs Blakey was aware she wasn’t telling the truth. You always knew when a child was lying, by the light in the child’s eyes, as she’d discovered twenty-seven years ago with her own Winnie.

Kate finished her cocoa, listening to Mr Blakey breathing while he drank his tea beside her. She wasn’t sorry she’d told them what she had. ‘I missed seeing you,’ Timothy Gedge’s voice said again, as it had on the beach. It had echoed after she’d left him, as she’d turned into the archway in the wall and passed through the shrubbery of azaleas and magnolias and tree mallows, as she’d passed through the drawing-room and the hall. ‘I missed seeing you,’ it had kept saying, just like it was saying now.

‘Mr Blakey’ll speak to him,’ Mrs Blakey said. ‘Mr Blakey’ll read the riot act if ever he shows his face again.’

Kate nodded, but didn’t feel reassured. What good were riot acts being read? What could you say to a person who was possessed since being possessed was a mystery? You couldn’t know anything about a person who was possessed. All there was was the voice, going on like a weapon, confusing and tormenting.

There was a secret, Mrs Blakey said, they were keeping a secret. ‘Won’t you tell us, dear?’ she pleaded, but Kate said it wasn’t her secret to tell.

That night in bed, not able to sleep, she remembered she’d once knocked on Miss Malabedeely’s door and when Miss Malabedeely hadn’t answered she’d just gone in. Miss Malabedeely had been kneeling by a chair, praying, and Kate had thought immediately that she’d been asking God to stop Miss Shaw and Miss Rist being so unpleasant to her. Miss Malabedeely had looked embarrassed, discovered on her knees like that, but it hadn’t mattered because of her niceness.

Kate remembered all that, and then she said to herself that she had been meant to remember it. She began to pray to God herself, seeing God quite clearly, as she always did when she said prayers, a robed, long-haired, bearded figure, partly obscured by clouds. She hadn’t thought of praying before. For all the week that Timothy Gedge had been tormenting them it hadn’t once occurred to her, which surprised her as she prayed now. She began to go through the whole thing in her prayer and then realized that God of course would know anyway, so she simply asked if it could be that Timothy Gedge was possessed by devils. The bearded face went on staring at her, the eyes not blinking, the lips not moving. But Kate knew she was being told she was right, that Timothy Gedge was possessed by devils and that before anything else could happen the devils must be taken out of him. Everything would be different if the devils were taken out of Timothy Gedge because God could do anything. He could perform miracles. He could turn what had happened into a dream. She could wake up and find that it was still the night of their parents’ wedding, that only that afternoon she and Stephen had been on the train. She could lie there thinking about a most unpleasant nightmare, thanking God that it wasn’t true.

She closed her eyes and communicated again with the figure. She promised that the devils would be cast out of Timothy Gedge, as it said in the Bible. When she concentrated, urging a reply, she was certain she was told that in return for her promise the facts of the last week would be altered, that yes, of course, a miracle was possible.

*

He smiled when Stephen came to him. He nodded and smiled, not reaching for the carrier-bag, waiting for Stephen to hold it out to him. He was sucking a gum. His sharp-boned face was lit with pleasure.

‘I’ll never forget it,’ he said, ‘the sound of your mum going over that cliff, Stephen.’