Fabric of Sin Read Online Free PDF Page A

staring down at her hands, mumbling something. Merrily bent to her.
    ‘I’m sorry …?’
    ‘
A face of crumpled linen
,’ Felix said. ‘She’s said that a few times.’
    ‘That’s what you saw?’
    Fuchsia nodded her head violently and bent forward as if she had awful stomach-ache, and Felix looked depairingly at Merrily, and then Fuchsia said, ‘Can we do it in the church?’
    ‘The blessing. Don’t see why not. But I’d need to clear it with the vicar.’
    ‘No. There’s no need, Merrily.’
    ‘Well, it’s what we usually do, but …’ At least she was on fairly good terms with the minister at Monkland; she could get away with it. ‘If you’d rather not make a thing out of it …’
    ‘Not
this
church,’ Fuchsia said.
    She’d insisted on changing first, into something white.
    The old-fashioned way. All due ceremony
.
    Merrily went back across the field, through the clearing mist, to the car and brought the blue case out of the boot. Inside it were the holy water and oil for anointing. Borrowed from Roman Catholicism but it was sometimes helpful. Partly theatre.
    She waited in the field, with Felix.
    ‘Those books on the shelf near the stove – are they yours or Fuchsia’s?’
    ‘I don’t read much nowadays. Half a page and I fall asleep. If they en’t technical books, they en’t mine.’
    ‘I meant the ghost stories.’
    ‘Oh. Aye, she likes the old ghost stories. Sometime she’ll read one aloud and it scares the pants off me, but she just giggles. Finds them comforting, mabbe. The old houses, the formality, the stiff way people talk. Stilted. Sometimes she says she was born out of time. Wrong place, wrong time.’
    ‘Where
was
she born?’
    ‘She didn’t tell you?’
    ‘She said Cardiganshire.’
    ‘Well, that …’ Felix half smiled. ‘That’s more or
less
right. You heard of Tepee City?’
    ‘Blimey, is it still there?’
    ‘I reckon. Likely the longest-surviving alternative community in Britain by now. I was there about a year, as a young feller. Gap year, as you might say. Nice folks, in the main. Had to pull your weight, mind, or you wouldn’t be welcome for too long.’
    ‘So you were a tepee dweller.’
    ‘Bender, in my case. You know – the ole bent-over sapling kind of thing?’
    ‘Vaguely.’
    ‘Only there a year, like I say, but I never regretted it. When you eventually graduate to building and rebuilding proper houses, if the first ones you ever put together was benders you’ve probably got your priorities right – make it warm, watertight and use natural insulation.’
    ‘Fuchsia said you, erm …’
    ‘Cut her cord? Aye, she likes to tell people that.’
    ‘Is it true?’
    ‘It is, actually.’ Felix squeezed his prickly jaw. ‘Childbirth in the valley, it could be like a communal event. I just happened to be nearest the scissors. Afterwards, Mary asked me to be her … godfather, kind of thing. Though we never went to church, just down the wood. Where we lit a fire, asked the gods to bless the child … bit pagan, sorry about that, but they did, kind of … you know, they included Jesus.’
    Merrily smiled faintly.
    ‘Then we played some music, smoked some weed, and I held the child for a bit and made some vows in the smoke.’
    ‘So you and Fuchsia’s mother – I’m sorry for asking personal questions but it helps to know a few basics …’
    ‘No,’ Felix said. ‘Me and Mary, that never really happened. I wanted it to, at the time, I en’t denying that. She was beautiful. Thin. Fragile. Didn’t have much to say. Needed looking after. When she turned up at Tepee City, she was already pregnant. Said the father’d buggered off to America to go on the road in a pick-up truck. I suppose I got closer to her than anybody, but not as close as I’d’ve liked, you know? She stayed a few months, and then she … she just left.’
    ‘With the baby?’
    ‘No, she left the baby in the Valley. With another family.’
    ‘Just like that?’
    ‘More or