Chapter 40
Chapter Forty
A s it happened, Eve wasn’t going to cut me into little pieces. She was going to cut an apple that she had on the dashboard, only I hadn’t noticed the apple before because I was so focused on the knife and then the dead cat.
Eve said she talked to her dead cat like it was still alive and that she slept with it next to her every night. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that it probably made it harder for her to grieve when she was with her dead cat every day.
She’d had it stuffed by a taxidermist just outside of Auckland and put it in the cupboard when someone had reported her to the RSPCA after they saw it in the van, curled up not moving, and thought that it had overheated in the sun because she’d not left any windows open.
In some ways Eve reminded me of me. And I went from feeling scared of Eve to feeling sorry for her because she wasn’t living at all, really – not with a dead cat in her van that she pretended was still alive.
I drank two cups of chai tea (I wiped the handles when I thought she wasn’t looking) and ate a slice of bread and butter that she kept in a little cool box under her seat. By the time I was finished, I desperately needed the loo and when I couldn’t hold it in for any longer, Eve said to choose my spot, so I chose a bush far enough away so that I could text Una without being seen.
It’s dead.
What is?
What do you think?
No…
And stuffed.
You’re fucking kidding me!
Nope.
At least she’s not a serial killer, oh wait … did she kill her cat?
I don’t think so.
You know it all starts with killing animals, right? How long until you get to Te Puke?
I’m not sure. We’ve stopped at a mountain. Have you heard from Shaun did everything?
I couldn’t stop myself.
Yes.
And?
And it’s complicated.
What’s complicated about him sticking his penis in Carmel’s vagina?
He says he loves me.
Oh, of course he bloody does.
There’s a new girl at the shop by the way.
Stop changing the subject.
I think Niall fancies her, you better not stay away for too long.
Good.
What’s she like?
Blonde, well, more of a shitty ash brown.
As long as she doesn’t keep my hours.
What are you doing now then?
I’m having a poo in a bush.
Lovely.
What about Shaun did everything lying to you? Are you going to see him again?
I don’t know.
He’s a lying bastard.
Yes, but he gives good cuddles.
You’ve slept with him again, haven’t you? Don’t let him suck you in. What about his girlfriend???
He said he’s ending it.
And you believe him? You know once a cheat, always a cheat – he’s cheated on her with you.
It’s different.
Why?
Because it is.
I’m sure it is with her too.
Where’s the cat killer?
She’s not a cat killer.
She drives around with a stuffed cat in her van…
She’s grieving.
Does she know about your weird stuff?
No.
You two must make a right pair.
Well at least I’m not sleeping with my ex who cheated on me.
That was a low blow.
True though.
I missed you today. It was quiet in the graveyard at lunch.
It’s always quiet in the graveyard at lunch. Any news?
Maggie Ryan’s left another card in the phone box.
No way!
She’s changed what it says.
What does it say?
‘Discreet conversations.’
Oh my God.
Do you think Mr Keele will phone her again?
Probably.
What do you think they talk about?
I don’t know.
Do you think he wanks off while they’re talking?
Yes, but discreetly.
LOL!!!
I’m going now.
OK, hope you have a nice shit. Text me when you get there.
Yep… Miss you too by the way.
* * *
Eve was turning her van around when I pulled up my pants and made my way back to it. She stopped and I jumped in. The cat was still out of the cupboard.
‘Can I hold her?’ I asked.
‘My cat?’ Eve looked confused.
I nodded.
‘I’ve never held a dead cat before,’ I reasoned.
‘Uh, if you like.’ Eve hesitated and I reached around, picked it up and placed it on my lap.
‘Beautiful eyes,’ I said because I couldn’t think of anything else to say while I tried to grab hold of the butterflies in my head to stop them taking over. ‘And she’s so soft.’ I ran my hand down the cat’s back. It was as stiff as a plank of wood and felt as dead as you might imagine a dead cat to feel.
I should probably tell you now that the reason I had to pick up the cat was because I’d had an intrusive thought. And the thing with my intrusive thoughts is they don’t warn me about when they’re coming. They don’t give me any time to get off the bloody bus. They just pop up, clear as day, and don’t go away until I’ve done whatever it is I have to do.
And this one was that I had to lick the dead cat – on its head – otherwise it was all going to go wrong with Jack. So I had no choice, did I? You can see where I’m coming from now, I’m hoping?
I could feel Eve’s eyes on me and I was running out of things to say about her cat on my lap (there are only so many compliments you can give a dead cat). I hoped she might start the engine and drive off so that she had to look at the road instead of me, but she didn’t.
‘So, tell me. Why are you going to Te Puke?’ Eve asked.
‘I’m going to see someone,’ I said bluntly. I didn’t have time for conversation.
‘Who?’
‘A man I met in Ireland.’
‘He’s a Kiwi?’
‘Yep, he’s called Jack. He doesn’t know I’m coming so I’m quite nervous about it. Need to just get there, you know?’ I pictured my tongue against its dead fur, would it stick to my mouth? Was it clean? Could a dead cat be clean?
‘That’s ballsy.’
‘Or just stupid.’ I reached in my pocked for my sanitiser and opened it with one hand. I felt it splodge out onto my skin and seep between my fingers. I’d become an expert at pouring it into the same hand out of sight.
‘Are you going to stay with him?’
‘That’s the plan but I’ll find a hostel just in case.’
Why wasn’t she driving?
‘Good idea, it’s always good to have a plan b.’
Eve didn’t strike me as someone who planned anything.
‘What about you? Will you ever go home?’ I needed to keep her distracted from what I was doing. What the bloody hell was I doing?
‘What for?’
‘To see your family?’
‘My family deserted me a long time ago.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said at the same time as I lifted my hand from my pocket and rubbed it over the top of the cat’s head to make sure it was clean.
Eve was still looking at me, damn her, but she didn’t seem to notice the top of its head was now wet. Why couldn’t she look out of the window or turn away? I glanced back down at her cat on my lap and with as much sympathy as I could muster for a dead stuffed cat; I lifted it to my mouth as if I was going to give it a kiss.
‘Such a lovely cat,’ I muttered and then as quickly as I could, I kissed the top of its head, stuck my tongue out and licked in one swift upwards motion.
‘I’m not sorry,’ Eve continued, and I breathed a sigh of relief that she’d not noticed the lick or thought anything of me kissing her dead cat. ‘My father was an alcoholic who left when I was ten and my mother was never home. I had to look after my brother, and when he left for America, there was no reason to stay.’
‘Don’t you get lonely?’
‘I didn’t when I had Ginger, but now?—’
‘What about a dog?’
‘Maybe one day.’
‘Will you keep Ginger forever?’
‘That’s the idea.’
‘Doesn’t it make you sad seeing her every day?’
‘I’d be sadder if I didn’t.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said.
Eve finally turned on the engine and pulled away and it wasn’t until we were back on the road that she said:
‘Why did you lick my cat’s head?’
I thought I’d feel more embarrassed but surprisingly I didn’t at all. So I decided to just tell Eve. Who was she anyway? She was hardly the type to judge – she had a stuffed dead cat in her van that she slept next to every night for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t like I was going to see her again and I doubted we’d keep in touch – how could we when she had no fixed address?
‘I have OCD,’ I said as I placed Ginger carefully back in the cupboard and closed the door.
‘Isn’t that when you check stuff?’
‘It’s hard to explain.’
‘Try me,’ Eve said.
‘It’s impossible to fully tell you everything.’
‘Why?’
‘Because a lot of it doesn’t make sense and comes into my head so fast that I can’t explain it in words.’
‘Like what?’ Eve asked.
‘OK, well I do all the usual stuff you probably associate with OCD, like checking light switches and taps, making sure doors are locked, plugs are turned off, et cetera. All that stuff usually happens at night, when I could die.’
Eve was listening intently, so I continued.
‘Then there’s the other stuff, like I have to kiss my parents three times when I say goodbye to them, not when I say hello, and I have to say I love you . Not in my head, I have to say it out loud, three times, but it can be a whisper. And I have to say it and do the kisses before I think of a penis.’
‘A penis?’ Eve grinned.
‘Yes. It’s my boss’s penis, actually, Mr O’Callaghan. I work in his shop. I have to say The Lord’s Prayer on my hands and knees every night before thinking of it.’
‘Does he know you think of his penis?’
‘He’s dead now so not unless he knows from Heaven.’ I pondered this more to myself than to Eve. Then – ‘no, he definitely didn’t know.’
‘Did you ever see it? I mean his actual penis?’
‘God no!’ I exclaimed.
‘So do you have to say I love you to everyone you meet?’ The questions kept coming and I started to regret saying anything at all to Eve.
‘I don’t have to say it to everyone, just when I feel the urge.’
Eve laughed. ‘That’s crazy.’
‘It’s really not funny, not for me, anyway,’ I said, frustrated.
‘It must take up a lot of your time,’ Eve said more seriously.
‘My whole life,’ I sighed.
We both stared at each other for a moment and then I carried on, because it suddenly felt quite freeing to just say it as it was to Eve. ‘Then there’s the woodlice – I have to count them every night and make sure there are twelve. They live on my gate. If I don’t do it the guilt eats me up and I imagine them screaming, all squashed and dying.’
‘Do woodlice scream?’ Eve asked.
‘I’ve no idea, but they do feel pain. I have to brush them all off onto the ground before I shut the gate and then they come back again to the exact same spot the next night.’
‘How do you know it’s the same twelve woodlice?’ Eve asked.
‘It is.’
‘But how do you know?’
‘It just is,’ I said, irritated.
‘What else do you do?’ she asked, intrigued.
‘If I see a red car on my way to my best friend’s salon, I have to start all over again, otherwise she’ll die.’
‘That’s superstition.’
‘It’s OCD.’
‘It’s anxiety.’
‘Yes, but it’s also OCD,’ I snapped. ‘If I walk out of a room, sometimes I have to walk back into it again because I’ve seen something and have to go back to look at it.’
‘What do you see?’
‘I don’t even know. It might be a crease in the duvet or some fluff on the floor, but then the intrusive thoughts come and I’ll be there for ages. Sometimes it’s not a penis, sometimes it’s an incest thought.’
‘That’s wild! Like what?’
‘I’m not going to say what.’
‘Go on.’
‘No.’
‘Do you do anything else?’
‘Plenty,’ I said. ‘When my grandmother was alive, I used to watch her sleeping to make sure she was still breathing. I’d stare at the duvet for ages to check it was moving, whisper I love you three times and blow her three kisses. They had to land on her head, so I’d blow them to make sure they travelled in a straight line.’
‘That’s fucking nuts,’ Eve chuckled.
‘When I’d eventually crawl back into bed, I’d have to get up and do it all again because I’d convince myself she’d died on my way back to the spare room.’
‘Jesus. You must be knackered.’
‘I don’t even know anymore.’ I shrugged. ‘Then there’s the whole germ side and it’s not even about getting ill or the actual germs that bother me. I’m fine with horseshit or cow poo. I could stand in it with bare feet or have mud all over my face and it wouldn’t bother me one bit. But if someone sneezes near me or spits on the ground or I see some phlegm or have to touch money or pin machines or door handles – I can’t cope with it. I have to sanitise everything .’ I emphasised the everything.
When I finally finished, Eve looked at me with a frown and then said, ‘You need a sound bath.’
* * *
I had no idea what a sound bath was. Eve explained that it didn’t mean actually lying in a bath but involved being bathed by different sounds to relieve worries and anxieties. When I agreed to do it because Eve explained I wouldn’t have to touch anything, she went on to tell me that she knew someone on the way to Te Puke who could do it and I figured it wouldn’t do any harm before I saw Jack if it relaxed me as much as Eve promised it would.
We drove for another forty-five minutes and I spent the whole time looking out of the window. The roads wound around valleys so green and vibrant it looked like a fantasy world (just like the shire in The Lord of The Rings, actually). There were mountains at every turn, much bigger than Slievenamon, and giant ferns everywhere – and I mean giant, as in bigger than me. The rivers were lagoon-blue and as wide as Auckland’s roads (and if I’d seen them first, I would have described Auckland’s roads like the rivers). The whole way, I imagined a raft of my worries drifting along beside me.
When we finally reached Waihi (that’s where we were headed for the sound bath), I had fallen in love with New Zealand more than the reason I was there. It captivated me in a way I didn’t know existed. And it only dawned on me when Eve pulled up outside a house that resembled more of a shack that I hadn’t done one OCD ritual the entire journey there (if you didn’t count sanitising the dead cat).
A man appeared at the front door – which had ‘Bathe House’ painted on it in blue – with a beard so big it was actually hard to see his face. He wasn’t old, probably in his late thirties, but he looked like someone who wanted to be older than his years. Like someone who wanted to escape his own reality, because when I looked into his eyes they were as anxiety ridden as mine. He had no shoes on and his fingernails looked like they had been digging in mud all day.
‘Hi, Pip.’ Eve smiled.
‘Namaste,’ Pip said with a slow blink, like he was controlling an emotion I couldn’t work out.
A few moments later (actually after quite an awkward silence), Eve explained to Pip that I was there for a sound bath then left me to it and waited in the van. Pip told me to get comfortable, which meant removing my shoes and socks, lying on the floor and allowing myself to just be , as he put it.
The problem is I couldn’t just be. I couldn’t lie on his floor. All I could see were his feet (the skin on his heels was hard and crusty and tinged yellow). My gaze trailed up his bare legs (he was wearing shorts) to his penis (I couldn’t actually see his penis, but imagined it dangling down above me on the floor like some weird porn film), and then I imagined giving him a blow job and his dead toes curling in delight.
I felt sick. There was nothing relaxing about it at all, nothing soothing – the butterflies were going crazy; had he walked on phlegm with his bare feet? Had he cleaned his floor after his last client? Who was his last client? Did he even clean his floor? (I already knew the answer to that one). I knew I had to say something but I didn’t want to offend him.
‘Can I sit instead?’ I asked. ‘I have a bad back and it’s not good on hard floors.’
‘Whatever is more comfortable,’ Pip said gently, and I let out a loud breath.
There was a huge gong next to Pip, which momentarily took my mind away from the floor. He picked up a club and banged it but it wasn’t as loud as I had imagined it might have been, the sound was gentle and soft and floated around my head like a cloud. Then he sat down in front of me, with his legs crossed and his hands clutching his dead feet, and before I had a chance to even think about my exit, he placed both his hands on my temples.
‘Close your eyes,’ he said in a breathy, humming kind of way but all I could think about was his crusty feet transferred to his hands onto my face. ‘Close your eyes and take a deep breath in, allow yourself to let go of anything weighing you down.’ He breathed out loudly. ‘Take yourself to a place of peace, a place of stillness.’ He hummed. ‘A place you can call home.’
I thought of Drangan, of Una in her salon waiting for me to meet her for lunch, of Niall and I stacking shelves and eating Rich Tea biscuits in the store room while talking about woodlice. I thought of my mum with her birds and my dad with his moles and then I started to cry. But not about any of that, I was crying about Pip’s dead feet on my face.
‘That’s right, let it all out.’ Pip sighed.
Dong, dong, doooong.
‘Let yourself be free.’ I felt him sway from side to side to the rhythm of the gong and I imagined his penis swaying too.
The sound of a spluttering engine startled me and it took me a moment to realise that it was getting fainter. And then a moment longer to recognise what it was – it was Eve’s van.
I opened my eyes and looked out of the window, grateful for an excuse to escape. And you know when you know something bad has happened, and it doesn’t hit you straight away even though it should because you’re watching it happen? It was like that.
I watched as Eve drove off, away from Pip’s house, away from me, away from my bag, which was on the pavement where she had been parked only moments before.
I ran outside but I already knew what she’d done. I dug my hand inside the side pocket but it wasn’t there, my wallet. It wasn’t there because Eve had taken it and left me in the middle of bloody nowhere with a man called Pip and his crusty feet.
When I turned around, Pip was behind me shaking his head.
‘Not again,’ he muttered and I turned to face him.
‘What do you mean, not again ? She’s stolen my wallet.’
‘Sounds about right.’
‘I need my wallet,’ I said in disbelief. ‘She might have taken something else.’ I frantically rummaged in my bag.
‘No, it’ll just be your wallet.’
‘How do you know?’ I faced Pip, frustrated.
‘Were you staying at The Sky Hostel?’
‘Yes, but I was in a café just down the road from there when I met Eve,’ I said. ‘Why? How do you know I was staying at the hostel?’
Pip pondered for a moment.
‘She waits for travellers staying at the hostel, offers them a lift, and then takes their wallets and leaves them as soon as she can.’
I thought back to Eve turning her van around when I was having a poo. She was going to drive away and leave me there. I felt hurt and angry at the same time. What about everything she told me? Everything I’d told her? OK, we weren’t best friends, but we’d shared stuff, she couldn’t be a bad person, could she? I was desperate for there to be some kind of mistake.
‘Perhaps she thought I’d be a while and just went to the shops and borrowed my wallet because she didn’t have hers?’
‘You’re right, she didn’t have hers. She never has hers.’
‘But, she bought me lunch.’ I held on to the hope that perhaps he was wrong, perhaps Eve had changed, turned over a new leaf, but deep down I already knew the truth.
‘Courtesy of the last person before you, I should imagine,’ Pip said.
‘How do you know so much?’ I asked suspiciously.
‘Because I’m her brother.’
‘But her brother lives in America?’
‘Oh, I’m there this time, am I?’ Pip laughed. ‘Usually I’m in Hong Kong or Dubai.’
‘This doesn’t make any sense – why would she lie about you living in America? Why would she do any of this? What about your parents? Your alcoholic father who left when she was ten and your mother who was never around?’
‘At least that bit is true, our dad did used to drink but not anymore and our mum has been trying to get her to come home ever since she left,’ Pip said.
‘But why make it all up?’
‘Eve’s been a compulsive liar for as long as I can remember. Mum and Dad supported her in every way they could but they grew sick of it in the end when she stole from them. At least she dropped you here, she must have liked you, because the last one was left on the side of the road.’
‘Why did you let her wait outside with my bag if you knew what she was like?’ I felt my jaw tighten. ‘Why didn’t you make sure I brought my stuff inside?’
‘I allow people to make their own decisions, without control,’ Pip said softly.
‘Even when you know they are making bad ones?’ I snapped, turning my anger to Pip.
‘In Buddhism, we don’t resist. We are present in a situation without trying to control the outcome of it.’
‘So, what you’re saying is you’d stand by and be present if someone was in trouble but not step in to help them?’
I thought about the flies in the Venus flytrap. That’s what she was. Eve was a Venus flytrap and I was the fly. Pip was the spectator watching (and letting) it all happen.
‘Love is the soul’s motivation, not control,’ Pip pulled me back into the room from my growing frustration. ‘My intention was to give you love through a sound bath and give Eve the freedom to make her own choices, whatever they might be. She is on her own path to enlightenment, as are you.’
‘I can’t believe this,’ I said in shock. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to laugh at Pip or shout at him, but neither would bring back my wallet. ‘How am I going to get anywhere without my wallet?
‘I think I know where you’ll find her,’ Pip said.
‘Where?’
‘She works at Mick’s Orchard, kiwi-fruit thinning. It’s in Te Puke. I can take you there if you like?’
‘How do I know I can trust you? You might be in on all of this?’
‘You could walk, I suppose, but it’s about fifty-three miles to Te Puke and another mile or so out to the orchard. It would take you around eighteen hours. It’s a scenic route if you fancy it – or I could just give you a lift?’
What choice did I have?