‘SHE’S GONE.’
Enid Lazzari is silent.
‘Do you hear me? Simone is gone. We can’t find her anywhere. You always know so much. Is that why you warned me about the strangers coming from afar?’ The hysteria is rising in my throat. I can barely contain myself. Not again. Not someone else gone out of my life. Not my daughter. The hardest love of all. Not her.
‘Say something, Enid.’ My voice is a snarl. I am no longer human. I am the tigress whose daughter is lost in the jungle. I am begging on my striped knees.
‘You have never asked me more about his childhood with the secte,’ Enid says, pronouncing ‘sect’ as the French do. A propos of nothing, you think. In that way she has.
‘What about it?’ I have learnt enough to know there isn’t a word she utters that is a propos of nothing. ‘You told me enough.’
‘Perhaps she takes after her father.’
‘He’s not her father. You know that.’
She’s silent again.
‘Okay. I’m asking. What about his childhood?’
‘Gabriel was a little savage. A very unusual boy.’
‘Is that a little savage as versus a total savage? Or are you referring to his age?’
She sighs now. It is my logical streak that she finds so infuriating.
‘He was eight years old when he ran away to the forest and refused to return to the commune. There had been several incidents … They were very fearful of somebody reporting a feral child and the police descending on them. So they contacted me and asked if I’d assist. I was well known for my work with outcast boys who had to be reintegrated into normal society. The case interested me so I agreed.’
‘What incidents?’
Enid gives one of those amused barks that passed for laughter for her.
‘Oh, it went on and on for months. His nature was compromised so he made life hell for them. For instance, the eating of meat was strictly controlled and he would catch rabbits for his mother and himself to eat. Any punishment they meted out was met by more rebellion.’
‘What did his mother do?’
‘She tried to get him to toe the line – her motives were complicated – but nothing worked. Much later she did what was best for him when she took him away.’
‘What does this have to do with Simone?’
‘It was not just the boy that interested me. I had been trying to get closer to the leaders of that cult for a long time. I hoped that if I was able to understand their indoctrination methods, I might be able to break their influence over the outcasts that had to be reintegrated into normal society.’
Yes, yes, yes, and so?
‘Enid, we don’t have the time for this. Are you saying Simone has joined this cult? They seem to exert some power over her. She had this idea that if she went with them somehow it would change everything back to how it was before she contacted Daniel, as if she was some sort of bearer of bad luck.’
‘I don’t know where she is, Ms Dante, but I do know that she is a wild spirit who cannot easily be tamed. If she has gone with them there is every possibility that history will repeat itself.’
‘What do you mean? What history are we referring to?’
‘Daniel’s mother proved to be a resourceful woman. She evaded them with a small boy for the rest of her life. The question is why they let them go.’
I digest this slowly ‘What are you saying?’
‘In spite of his worst transgressions and most bizarre acts of resistance, Daniel evaded the ultimate punishment − he was not cast out. It is my belief that at some point the Great Leader decided to test the boy. The only person he would have told was his first wife, Amporia.’
‘But somehow Marie found out?’
‘Perhaps. For a while Marie was his favourite. Amporia must have seen her chance. Each time Daniel committed some act of resistance, the Great Leader prescribed harsher and longer punishments. It was an uneven game that might easily have ended badly for the young boy, who was not physically very strong. Marie herself believed that her son was an intransigent but exceptional child − she had expressed this sentiment to me often − and she feared more and more that Amporia might push the Great Leader into going too far.’
‘But the Great Leader died?’
‘Well done, Ms Dante,’ the singsong voice congratulates me. ‘You are beginning to understand. In spite of her husband’s numerous cruelties and infidelities, Amporia maintained the myth her husband had started around a boy child who was the expected saviour. She gave herself the title Prioress and began appointing female acolytes. But something has been missing.’
‘Let me guess, she doesn’t have a daughter.’
‘Precisely.’
My heart is booming. It is a train about to crash head-on into a wall it never saw coming. It is a train about to do a death dive off its rails into a bottomless gorge. It is a train about to slip away into an underwater lake of unfathomable depths.
‘They think Simone is Daniel’s daughter, so she’s the next natural successor.’ I say this flatly.
‘Yes, you could say so.’
‘But why now? Where have they been all this time?’
‘There were very few people who knew Marie’s secret − I always believed that they never found her while she was alive, but I’m not so certain any more. It’s possible that they were always there, in the wings, watching and waiting as Marie and Daniel lived their lives, trusting their time would come because it was written so in their Gospel. Or perhaps Simone came to their attention through a new source of information. I do not know. As to why now, the Prioress has an incurable condition − she does not have long to live.’
‘Do you know for sure Simone is with them?’
‘I didn’t say it was them, only that they form part of a greater plan, a plan that started with Marie’s actions on that day. For every force there is a counterforce. For every disturbance a greater disturbance,’ she chants. ‘Simone has gone to her day of reckoning. You cannot change anything.’
‘I don’t believe that. Just tell me what she told you. Something happened after she came to see you, she wasn’t so obsessed with the black cloaks any more. She told me that I should stop being so paranoid about the wrong things. The sleepwalking was better − I thought it was Sharon’s potions–’
‘We all have different sides to us, different identities.’
‘Yes, Enid, I know. Stick to Simone.’
‘It came out when I asked her to tell me what she did in her free time – that she had an online persona.’
‘Isn’t that normal for today’s kids? That they have several avatars?’
‘She only has one. Online she was Butterfly. I asked her why and she said, “You should get out more, Enid. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of the butterfly effect?” I lacked any real information, so she told me … I may have been wrong about her.’
‘Enid!’
‘Ah yes, the impatient Ms Dante. She told me that when she was Butterfly she felt real, that she could change things with one flap of her wings. I suggested that she try to integrate her online persona more into her everyday life. Later I discovered that she had deliberately misled me.’
She remains silent, and my terror is immense. I control my breathing, walk into the red mist.
‘You have to tell me, Enid, if I’m to help her. Doctor-patient confidentiality is not supposed to get your patient killed. She’s smart and manipulative, but she’s fourteen years old and when she hears certain music she’s back in that pig’s film studio with some adult man getting a hard-on while he feels her all over. Are you getting this, Enid?’
‘Are you calm enough to continue, or have you heard enough?’
Hang in there, Paola, don’t lose her. She’s all you’ve got right now.
‘Fine. Let me put it this way, I’m the only one who cares enough to never stop looking for her. You have to tell me, and stop bullshitting round the mulberry bush: what are you trying to say?’
Enid’s singsong voice comes down the line. ‘In her case I fear it has sent her to find the man who wanted to purchase her virginity. She spoke of him as the butterfly collector, and said that in her nightmares he gives her chloroform and when she wakes up she’s pinned to his board still in her white nightgown, and all around her are the other butterflies, all still in their white nightgowns, each of them lying in a patch of blood.’
The red mist envelopes me, I can no longer breathe.
I walk in a daze to the study and unlock the door. The Collector, the book I was reading when Daniel tracked me down to the laundromat after so many years apart, the book I never returned, is not on the bookshelf where it should be. I open the cupboard door and with a strong letter opener ease up one of the interlocking pine planks that make up the floor. The book shape wrapped in brown paper and tied with string is exactly where it should be in its hiding place. I undo the package with hasty, fumbling fingers but my heart is a squeezed-out tube of toothpaste …
The battered copy of The Collector I’d never returned to the laundromat has replaced Lady Limbo.