The Dome

by Katherine Mezzacappa

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

‘These are for blood pressure,’ said Wilson, glancing at the bottle I held out to him. ‘But haven’t you checked her whereabouts with the rest of her family?’

‘She’s gone to the Dome,’ I said. The skin of the doctor’s face seemed to tighten and become shiny, as though someone were pulling all the loose flesh together at the back of his head.

‘Do you work, Mr...?’

‘Doctor,’ I said, a mite facetiously — I enjoy such exchanges — ‘my PhD is in Restoration comedy.’

‘I see,’ he said coldly. ‘And what kind of employment is there in Restoration comedy?’

‘I work in a call centre... that is to say I did. Before that I worked in a bank, until they re-engineered.’

He stretched his lips, then stood up. ‘Your aunt will turn up. Try to enjoy the rest of your holiday.’

I wanted to observe them first, so I parked some distance away. They were dots in the field when I raised the binoculars.

They were watching me.

As I climbed over the first stile, the one who had told me of my aunt’s marriage stepped out from behind the hedgerow. He motioned to me to go back.

‘But I need to speak to you!’

‘You will. I’m coming with you.’

His directions took us to a sprawling former council estate on the outskirts of Norwich. 17 Wensum Gardens had retained its local authority appearance when others all around had been ‘improved’ and thus looked more original, more solidly designed than all its neighbours.

My companion led me through to the spartan kitchen. ‘Sit down,’ he said, indicating the formica-topped table.

‘Where’s my aunt?’

‘She’s married, I told you.’

‘Who on earth is her husband, then?’

He smiled patiently. ‘She has no husband. There are no husbands among us, and no wives, either. Those who come to us married abandon such ties. Hilda has sworn herself to us, to love us, to honour us, to obey us, and to endow the Deity with all her worldly goods. Our solicitor is drawing up her will.’

‘Who are you?’

He shrugged. ‘We’re all kinds... farmers, teachers, bankers, council workers. We have a doctor. He’s particularly helpful to those who falter at the rigour of our rule. We’re happy to take from science whatever will help us.’

‘This Deity, then... is this some sort of cult?’

He paused. ‘Our Deity precedes all cults. She looked on as Mithras killed the bull. She heard the mothers.’ shrieks in Nazareth when the soldiers came. She poured oils on Akenhaten’s bandages. She sang amongst the stones at Callanish. The Christians took her as theirs, but then they disowned her. They never really understood her. Christians accept pain, suffering and disappointment as though these are virtues. She frees us from all that. She accepts only what is her due in return.’

He stood up. ‘Your room is upstairs, the one above the front door. You’ll be able to live alone after a while, but you aren’t ready yet. There is everything you need here.’ He nodded in the direction of the small fridge, the microwave on the worktop, tins on a shelf.

I watched him drive off in my car. When I looked for my telephone, I found he’d taken that, too. Searching for a way out, I found there wasn’t one. They’d changed every pane of glass; they seemed to be made of the same stuff as the windows of high-speed trains.

Much later, two more of them came. I’d already crept into the bed I found ready along with two ragged but clean towels laid out for my use. I saw the shadows of their movements in the sliver of light under the door and heard them murmuring.

I don’t know what time it was when the light came on. A tight-skinned face came between me and the naked bulb, followed by a sharp pain in my upper arm. Wilson smiled, the light went out, and I dreamed of scything, my arm moving back and forth to ease the stiffness.

They woke me just before daylight, leaving me other clothes to wear, clothes like theirs. Overnight, my own things had gone. Breakfast awaited me on the formica table: two slices of buttered bread, a mug of weak tea. They stood in the door whilst I ate, watching me.

‘Time to go.’

The door of the minibus swung sideways, and I felt a hand in the small of my back.

There was something ‘the same’ about my six or seven companions. I don’t know a better way to describe it. They didn’t resemble each other as do relatives, because what stands out there is what distinguishes one brother from the other, what makes him different. A shared, silent intentness was what linked them, a deliberation in their movements.

There was another oddity. They were smooth, as though their limbs and faces were formed of hairless wax, or latex. They reminded me of the images of locally venerated saints you find in southern European churches, bland effigies. I mentioned this peculiarity to Clip-board man. He nodded and murmured: ‘Androgen blockers.’

They put me to bundling the wheat into sheaves, three laid against each other and tied round, to let the air in. I was slow; my bones enervated, my muscles slack as though they still slept.

You might ask why I accepted this. Understand that if you have some purpose in life, even if it is not enough to have you bouncing off your mattress at dawn or scribbling feverishly far into the night, then you can shrug off many things. You can affect not to notice the man asking for ‘Any spare change,’ because you can look as though you’re going somewhere in a hurry, or are so deep in thought that you are beyond distractions.

If, instead, you live in a bedsit where muffled music thumps around you much of the night, where other tenants must talk loudly whenever they come in; if, instead, you took revenge on your patronising ‘pod-leader’ — ‘and how are we today, Doctor?’ — by signing up every poor purchaser of bread-and-circuses that morning to the adult channels, with the exception of those that wanted them — I gave them Nickelodeon instead; if, instead, your wife left you for the man who fired you from the Bank after giving you an assignment he knew was bound to fail (Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die); if instead, even your own mother thinks you can’t ‘frame.’ yourself, and, in any case, you want to leave her in peace with her new husband after she has endured years of your father’s infidelities, well, they found it easy to make me one of them. I could believe this was my home. It wasn’t as if I was giving up anything for this. Or was I?

Dr. Wilson repeated his home visit two nights later and in the same manner. The morning afterwards, I realised that one of the few companions to my solitary life had deserted me. I mean that my poor, hopeful, optimistic erection that nudged me most mornings of my newly single life, was gone, and could not be revived. I tried unsuccessfully to summon interest by recalling the few pornographic images I have seen. I’ve never been a highly energetic person, but as Wilson’s injections continued — for they did, although I was never able to predict his visits — a creeping lassitude took hold of me.

In the fields, I walked as though on the seabed, with feet of lead. Every action pushed against the weight of water. I watched my companions; their every move seemed to be studied, measured, timed, with that slow deliberateness of a Tai-Chi class I once stumbled upon in a church hall. I was looking for a second-hand book fair, but had got the wrong church.

With the coming of winter, I was brought to work in a vast barn where we sat at greasy trestles scraping the flesh and fat from sheepskins and cowhides with flints, before these were then cured above the great fire that heated the place. Where I am now, they once brought me a pork pie for lunch. I first separated the clear, solid jelly from around the meat, then tried futilely to pick out the pieces of fat. In the end, I ate none of it. Clip-board man wrote notes about this.

Then one morning I was taken back to the church.

You, too, will have read those accounts of pyjama-clad prisoners having to dig the pits they are to be thrown into. When life is lived at that extremity, then all that matters is that it is someone else you throw in the pit.

We dug on the side farthest from the road, shielded from view by the yews. I believe yews can be very ancient indeed, and these had been plentifully nourished. Here the pestilence that had laid waste to Emmington had been folded into the earth, bones tangled indiscriminately. We dug deep, but not tidily, the clay sticking to our shovels.

‘Come,’ said my companion. I never knew his name; I never knew any of their names, and they didn’t use mine.

He held the church door open for me. The high stone lip of the threshold held in the stalks strewn all over the floor, crunching under our feet as I was nudged towards the chancel arch.

He caught me by the upper arms at my first shriek, and held me hard, laughing. The bruises where his fingers pressed stayed for days (Clip-board man continues to ask me about self-harm).

‘It’s not for you,’ he kept saying, ‘It’s not for you!’

I believed him because I wanted to. Peel back our acquired layers of civilisation, of values, of compassion, of courage, even, and we are revealed as naked, snarling beasts. Do you think that the priest who once ministered in this church resisted when the iconoclasts came and tore down the statues and smashed the stained glass? Threatened with a partial throttling, eviration, and the dragging out of his reeking bowels, do you think he backed against his altar and clutched the monstrance in his arms? No, he took on the simpler vestments, a wife, and muttered Latin only in his dreams.

Yet when I thought they’d come for me that night in front of Wensum Gardens, I fought back. I wrestled in the darkness of the dusty blanket that engulfed me, but my arms felt as weak as sparrow-bones in the other man’s grip. I wept for their betrayal, the way they had brought me back to the place I had to think of as home, a place where I had begun to feel safe, even in the expectation of Dr. Wilson’s needle — only then for them to grab me from behind, throw that blanket over me and fling me into a deeper roaring darkness — the boot of a moving car.

When the noise stopped, I became aware of a babble of voices. I couldn’t make out words, just that peculiarly complaining cadence of the Norwich accent. Some of the voices I heard were female, young, I thought. There was a rattle of keys, the sigh of the door lifting upwards.

‘He don’t look too good.’

Their faces loomed at me. Fleshy faces, stubbly faces, one olive-dark face, disgusted faces, kind faces. Hands reached for me. Then the swish of the automatic doors, the swivel of heads as all turned to look, the duty sergeant’s pen poised over his book.

A thin bearded man patted my shoulder. ‘Sorry to have given you such a fright, mate. When Leanne gets an idea in her head, there’s no persuading her otherwise, is there, my woman?’

Leanne smiled at me. I gaped at her mutely. When you’ve not seen an unfeigned, real smile in months, you want to reach out and touch it, to understand how the muscles move under the skin.

‘Your aunt Hilda was always very kind to me,’ she said.

This room where I am now is decorated to soothe: dove grey walls, a white cornice and ceiling, a pale mint green cover on the bed. I wonder if Clip-board man will come again today. I don’t want to have to tell him my story yet again. I’ve told him already about Wilson, but he says chemical castration is reversible in time. He’s told me about my rescue, how Leanne had always insisted that Hilda had no sons, and that when I she heard I’d gone to talk to her mother, she decided to act.

* * *

I repeat to him what I saw in that church, but with every telling, it becomes somehow less believable though never less vivid. That vast rough-hewn cross propped against the chancel arch, the sheaves of wheat piled around its base, the rents and gouges caused by the driving in, and the pulling out, of nails.

Blood glistening on wood, shining like varnish, those great dried brown-red gouts, layer upon layer, built up until it could be chipped away. My companion becomes technical. He explains that the nails must go through the wrists because if they were to go through the palms they’d would simply tear through the hands with the weight of the body. Those are the nails that bring death, that cause lifeblood to gush. The others are there only to still the kicking and trembling.

He urges me to look at the blackening wounds in those contorted feet, the sagging face beneath the hair hanging forward matted and stiff with blood. He explains what an honour this is, that the girl vied for this, hoping all year that she would be the one chosen to join the Deity. She must be the most beautiful, but to make sure that she remains unsullied, he and his companions submit willingly to Dr. Wilson’s ministrations. He asks me if I enjoy the freedom this has brought me.

* * *

My binoculars have reappeared overnight. I climb down from the bed and go over to the window. It’s quite high up, so my shoulders are on a level with the window frame. I’ve tried moving the chair beside the bed over to the window, but it’s been screwed down, like the rest of the furniture.

I’m in Chittleborough Villa. Looking out, I can see three other villas dotted about and, beyond them, the main building, all turrets and towers. On a veranda, I see a man on a bench rocking back and forth, striking his knees, standing up, then sitting down and starting the whole process again. I train the binoculars on him; his eyes are closed and he appears to be talking.

I knock gently on the glass, not because I want to attract attention, but to hear what noise it makes: a dull sound, as of some kind of tough plastic like that in Wensum Gardens. So, if anyone throws a stone at my window, it’ll probably just bounce back again. I’m pleased about this, just as I’m pleased the door to my room does not open.

I see three figures on the path. One of them is in a nurse’s white tunic. He is just ahead of two women; the older one leans quite heavily on the other’s arm, and she shuffles. In her outer hand is a stick. Despite her slowed pace, I recognise something in the carriage of the other, in the tilt of her head, and then I see it is my mother.