Read Merrily Watkins 11 - The Secrets of Pain for Free Online Page B

hatch of memory, just a crack, and out it sprang again, and she could almost feel it on the underside of her wrist.
    Scritch-scratch
.
    The smell coming back at once:
cat-shit and gangrene
, one of the nurses had said.
    ‘Mr Joy was a hospital patient in Hereford, and he didn’t have long. I was called out in the night because the nurses said he was asking for a priest and the hospital chaplain wasn’t available. The truth was that it was the nurses who needed the priest.’
    The nurses who didn’t like to touch Mr Joy. The nurses who had seen the way he used his wife when she came to visit.
    The nurses who never could forget the sensation of his fingers when they bent over him to take his temperature or change one of the tubes.
    Scritch-scratch
. On the soft skin on the underside of the wrist.
    ‘But I was new at this,’ Merrily said. ‘I told them it wasn’t my job to judge him, only to try and bring him peace. Something was still insisting, back then, that there was no such thing as an evil presence.’
    A hand went up. Shona, the woman who’d been a prison governor, hair like a light brown balaclava.
    ‘You mean your own life-experience or your training?’
    ‘Look,’ Merrily said. ‘Here you are at the bedside of a dying man.
He
’s dying, you’re a priest, there to bring comfort. How can you do that if you accept that he’s infested with evil? So you go with the rational view. No such thing as an abstract, incorporeal evil. You need to relax.’
    He can enter you without moving, that man
, one of the nurses had said.
    Merrily’s hand instinctively moving to the pectoral cross. Don’t shudder. Do
not
shudder now.
    ‘Cut to the car chase, lass,’ Huw said. ‘And don’t omit the exhaust.’
    She told them the rest. Well, most of it.
    Trying to convey that sense of all the light in the room being sucked sourly into a man on the very rim of extinction, whose touch was like an enema.
    ‘Looking back, it leaves me asking a number of questions. Fierce sexual energy coming from an old, dying man – can that be explained medically? Possibly it can, I’m not qualified to say, but the nurses didn’t think so, and nurses, no matter how compassionate, can be very cynical people.’
    It was quieter now, the wind in remission.
    ‘The psychological explanation,’ Merrily said, ‘might be that here was a man who’d enjoyed exploiting women sexually, degrading them. A man in search of increasingly perverse pleasures – to what extent you want to demonize this is up to you.’
    Huw was looking at her, head on one side.
OK, I’m coming to it
.
    ‘You can usually find a rational explanation, but there has to be a cut-off point. You need to recognize when you’re trying too hard to explain something away, because that can be when you’re most vulnerable. And if it reaches
you
, there’s not much hope for whoever you’re trying to protect.’
    Shona said, ‘When you say “if
it
reaches you”…?’
    ‘What do
I
mean by
it
? Not sure. But I think if you’re unableto accept the premise of an external evil, you may not be able to deal with some problems. I think… looking back, I don’t think I handled it forcefully enough. I let the psychology make too many decisions. And afterwards I failed to draw a line under it, as a result of which… something… seemed to be hanging around, for some time.’
    Looking at Shona, hoping she’d ask another question, move the thread.
    Nobody spoke.
    ‘I felt unclean. Bad dreams. Night… sensations. Subjective, you might say, psychological. I’ve since encountered criminals, accepted as being disturbed, and this was just an ordinary old man. Yet Mr Joy was a notorious case in that hospital. Canon Dobbs had had dealings with him before and could have done so this time, but he set me up.’
    She didn’t want to go into the burning of garments, and no way was she going to tell them about the essential advice which had come not from Huw but from an old woman who’d