White corridor Read Free

kept beyond the door.
    How he longed to let the Devil in, just to see what he would do. He wanted to talk to his grandfather, to understand why the old man’s daughter was so much stricter than any of the mothers in the village, but the yellow-faced old man in the wicker chair was growing feebleminded, and the time was fast approaching when he would have no remaining power of speech.
    One Saturday morning in early October, just before the weather turned, Johann slipped the great iron latch and ran off down the hill towards the village. His mother allowed him no money, but he had already planned to do without; he would hitch a lift with one of the lorry drivers who drove vegetables down to the city. Once aboard, he knew he would be safe, for she would have no way of finding him. He hung around the dusty grocery store waiting for a delivery, and his patience was rewarded when a truck pulled into the depot.
    One look told him that the driver would never allow him on board. He waited until the lorry had been loaded, and was still trying to climb into the back when his mother arrived at the store on her bicycle, and spotted him.
    This time, his mother whipped him with the oiled birch she kept in the shed, in order to impress the fullness of her love upon him. After that he was kept at home, where he could be watched by God and his family. Her intention was to keep him pure and untouched by evil, but her prescription had the opposite effect. The boy became sly and dark. Subterfuge came naturally to him.
    He remained in the little house for five more years, waiting for an opportunity to free himself, and when the chance finally came, he seized upon it with the full violence of his trapped spirit.
    It was a storm-ravaged morning in late autumn, soon after his grandfather had been placed in the gravelled cemetery behind the dry-stone wall shared by the village’s only
petanque
pitch. He stood in the middle of his mother’s bedroom, knowing exactly what had to be done. Raising the ceramic pitcher she kept on her dresser, he hurled it with all his might onto the floorboards, and when he heard the approaching thump of her stick, went to wait for her in the corridor, where she kept the leather strap.
    Beating an old lady should be easy if you have the stomach to do so,
he thought,
if she has done everything within her power to deserve it, but it’s not if God can see you. If He witnesses your fall from grace, you are damned for eternity
. His mother stood before him, her small sharp teeth bared, the whip raised, about to strike him down—and then a miracle occurred.
    Earlier that morning the first snowstorm of the season had ridden over the mountain peaks and across the
haute route
above the village, whitening the tarmac. In seconds the sky had grown dark, as if someone had thrown a sheet over the sun, and God was blinded from His view of mortals. The silent blizzard dropped over the house and all around them. Now, he thought, he could do whatever he needed to survive. Hidden inside the caul of falling snow, protected by the purity of nature, he snatched back the whip and beat his unrepentant mother to her knees.
    He did not stop when the sky suddenly cleared and he could once more be seen by the Almighty, because he decided that God should see what he had done.
If I am to be damned, it is how I will live,
he decided. He looked up into the pin-sharp panel of azure that had appeared inside the banks of clouds, and openly defied his Maker.
See what I have done, I defy you to save me
. God saw all, and once He did there could only follow judgement, trial, repentance and suffering.
    He walked to the front door, kicked it back, and stepped out into the front garden. In the sky above, the white corridor that had opened through the vaporous mountains shone all the way up to the heart of the sun.

3

    GOOD MORNING, ARTHUR
    ‘The urge has come on me to speak to you about carpet slippers, Mr Bryant,’ Alma Sorrowbridge told her former lodger.