7. WIDOW WITH SHAWL, A PORTRAIT

So we reach the woman at the top of the stairway...

“Hey you down there,” suddenly and unexpectedly came the sweet voice of one who was possibly an angel.

The fat man paused as he clambered up yet another step he was sure he’d already climbed on. It was that kind of stairway. It added steps just when he thought he might have reached the top.

He looked up. There she was, the woman who had been standing at the top of the stairs since this horrible climb had begun, a warming shawl wrapped round her shoulders, blue like her eyes. And she was calling to him! It was her voice he could hear: there could be no other. And she sounded so sweet, so consoling, so loving, so filled with warmth and affection.

“Are you an angel?” he asked.

He watched the curve of her lips as a smile spread across her face and wrinkled the corners of her eyes.

“Are you an angel?” he asked again, “is that why you’re here? An angel to welcome me to whatever Paradise lies hidden behind that door?”

He pointed towards an ornate wrought iron framed oaken door that he’d only just noticed in the stygian and rather minimalist depths around him. Surely, he thought, that must be the entrance to wherever he was going after the monumental climb that all-but drained the life-force out of him.

She giggled and waved one alabaster hand in the air.

“Be careful what you want to know,” warned his alter-ego, “this is no place to be whimsical. I can tell that if you can’t.”

“An angel? Of course not!” she cooed at him, “have you not read your religious texts and the more esoteric philosophical treatises that were copied so laboriously by half-blind monks in medieval monasteries so that future ages may be enlightened by ancient wisdom? Do you not know that your average heavenly angel was a male? That we females are always subordinate to the muscular man, even throughout what has turned out to be a mind-blowingly boring after-life, that we have no place in any Heaven created in the nightmares of any men, be they muscular or merely weedy?”

“Then who are you?” he found himself asking even though that wretched alter-ego was nudging him and whispering ‘don’t’ into both ears simultaneously.

“You know who I am,” she replied, mischievously not answering with anything more enlightening than a riddle. “You’ve always known,” she added, “you’ve seen effigies of me in just about every corner of the western world, though I don’t think that any of them really does me justice.”

He blinked, confused, and thought a change of subject might provide him with a hidden clue as to the identity of the strange woman who was still standing there like the angel she said she couldn’t be.

“I’m Santa Claus,” he said, and blinked again. Foolishly, maybe, but he was confused.

“I know who you are,” she said, her voice like the sweetest instrument playing the most perfect melody. At least, that’s how it sounded to him and it didn’t cross his mind how ridiculous it was, hearing a woman’s gentle voice and thinking it was a piccolo.

“I enlighten children at Christmas,” he said unnecessarily, “I tell them stories and give them presents.”

“I know,” she nodded.

“And I suppose that I’m dead and that you’re the angel who’s supposed to show me my bunk in the hereafter,” he murmured, half gravely and half light-heartedly.

“I told you, I’m no angel. Not at all,” she said. “I’m here, like you, because I caused a death on Earth. The death of a loved one, and this is my torment and my punishment.”

“What is?” asked a shocked Santa.

“Being here. Waiting. Over the years, like you must. For something or other. Forgiveness? I don’t know that I need forgiveness! I don’t think I ever did anything wrong, being basically pure at heart. But we’re here, on the portals of the afterlife, the state that parsons and priests and old men like that call Heaven.”

“I told you so!” chirruped the old man’s alter-ego, “we’re on our way to Heaven!”

“Heaven,” said the sweetest of women, “isn’t a place that we can go to. It hasn’t got a door we can walk through and mystic semi-naked spirits playing lyres at the feet of a great Master. It isn’t anything like that because it isn’t a place.”

“But I’ve read about it!” spluttered the fat man, “I’ve heard preachers go on about it! It’s just got to be a place or why did I have to behave myself at the dinner table when I was a child...take your elbows off the table, Nicholas, my mother would say in that severe voice of hers, take your elbows off the table or you won’t go to Heaven… And stop playing with yourself, Nicholas, because little boys who do that don’t go to Heaven but spend an eternity in the other place I can’t bring myself to name… There were all sorts of things I had to stop doing or I’d be condemned to a Heavenless death when I was too old to live!”

“So it must have come as a shock to you when I said that Heaven isn’t a place,” smiled the woman, “cheer up Nicholas or Santa or whatever it is you want me to call you, we all end up being totally gobsmacked when we’re told the truth. You struggled up that stairway...”

“And it wasn’t easy,” grumbled Santa, ignoring the way his alter-ego was using none-verbal communication in the small of his back with what he took to be an elbow.

“I had my own struggle,” acknowledged the woman, “though it wasn’t a stairway for me. I had to swim here, across a mighty ocean with surf and waves driving me back and only this voice in my ear urging me on.”

“See! I have a purpose after all!” put in the alter-ego, “me and my kind, helping you see the way forward and forget the past! Who wants the past when he’s dead, anyway. Or she. When she’s dead,” he concluded, glancing at the woman on the top step.

“So I swam here and reached you,” smiled the woman.

“You knew that you’d meet me? But I only just died… I think.”

“Yes. You. We have one thing in common, you and I. One terrible truth.”

“We have?”

Santa was hard-pushed to see how he could have anything in common with the beautiful woman who suggested they shared something rather important. After all, she was slender, beautiful with the most radiant of smiles, and if he was anything at all he was a grumpy old overweight man whose only delight was telling tall stories about Christmas to bored infants.

“Of course,” she smiled, “but before I explain I’ll introduce myself properly.”

“That would be nice,” he acknowledged, still one step down from her and wondering why he was suddenly getting wet.

“You see,” she said, still smiling though a wave crashed at her feet and its foam burst over a startled Santa, “you see, my name’s Mary, and I’m a virgin.”

© Peter Rogerson 11.11.18