THE LAST MONK. 5

Is the truth beginning to come out? Or is evil in the words of a caring nurse?

THE LAST MONK

5.

There was almost a pitched battle between the woman who had barged into my space and the nursey person who was caring for me, when a smartly dressed woman with the dinkiest beard and a curly moustache pushed her way in and forced the interloper out, and protesting loudly she did just that. I could hear her sobbing and complaining in the space beyond my door and I was glad that she had been made to leve me.

When peace had been restored the nurse smiled at me and suggested I try to get some more sleep. And, she said, to ignore the mad woman and everything she’d said because who’d had no right to be in the room.

It was easy to do that for the simple reason she had said that she had given birth to someone she called Betty twenty-two years ago and I know that I’m a great deal older than that. Celestial, the only voice I trusted even though he was no more, had assured me that I was an old man and when I chanced to see my own refllection in a shattered glass I could see what he meant. So if a Betty was born twenty-two years ago it can’t have been me!

For some reason the nurse stayed in my space though I could see that he had precious little to do but engage me in trivial conversation, which in a way I welcomed.

“I’m not much older than twenty-two,” he said, and when I looked at him I could tell that he wasn’t wearing a chest bandage and had consequently swollen quite a lot. It looked almost pleasant even though I had been warned by all three of the monks who cared for me to avoid such a thing. It was Colonius who had put it most succinctly.

“There are people,” he had said, “people who take a liking for boys like you in a most unhealthy way. My Lord Satan warned me of them, so I prevent their interest in me by binding my chest tightly, and you should do the same when you get older…”

I’d wanted a fuller explanation, but it wasn’t long after that conversation that he joned August in his tomb and I was left with just Celestial, who was more interested in my academic progress with books and the words in them than what Colonius had said to me and which persisted in my head. So I made sure that I was always well bound, so tightly so that when they had removed the last binding the nurse had said it was almost growing on me as part of me. That thought filled me with pleasure. There was no part of my mind that wanted my flesh to be a toy for some, I think the word Colonius had used was pervert!

By then, though, the only two people in my world were me and Celestial, and I could see that he was growing older by the day and unlikely to want to do anything improper to me because, besides being a monk in the church of Satan, he was surely an increasingly old monk. Sometimes weeks or even months would pass without me seeing him though I often heard him chanting rather hoarsly in his cell, so I hadn’t worried about his well being.

“Do you mind me calling you Betty?” asked the nurse suddenly while doing something with an nstrument that puffed up like a balloon on my upper arm. She said it had something to do with my blood, and I was able to assure her that should I prick myself accidentally I would surely bleed, so she had no need to inflate her equipment to find out if that was true.

“Betty’s my name, so of course you can,” I replied, and smiled at her, “if what what my true mother called me as she died,” I added, “she said I was such a pretty boy. Colonius told me that several times when he nursed me. Betty, he said to me, stroking my leg to keep the blood flowing properly like you have to with very young legs on young boys, Betty, your mother was a w***e, but a good w***e with a heart of gold, but like all mothers she had to die…”

“That’s not so nice a thing to say about your mother,” replied the nurse, and she added something that shocked me to the core, “soon after I wed my husband I had a little boy, you know, he’s Timothy and I love him so dearly. But I didn’t die when he was born, and not when Jane, my other child was born. She’s pretty, is Jane, and maybe when she grows a bit older she’ll look something like you. But let me tell you: if I can call you Betty you can call me Angela, because that’s my name like Bett’s your name. Angela Busted, if you want the whole malarkey!”

I don’t know what a malarkey is, but I didn’t feel like asking her because surely if she was a mother she would have gone to her tomb once her baby was born? Isn’t that what happens? August told me that it was. He made quite sure I understood what he called the sometimes unpleasant realities of life.

“They said, the monks, that she had to be slain when I was safely in the world,” I whispered, “they said it was a rule of nature, that it had always happened since the beginning of time.”

“What nonsense!” said Nurse Angela, “I have never heard so much silliness in all my life! Why, my own mother is alive and well and living in town! And she had me and two others, my siblings, years ago, and thoase siblings all have children of their own and yet still live.”

“But the monks told me…” I couldn’t help whispering.

“It strikes me those precious monks of yours told you a lot that was in their own interests and in nobody else’s,” Angela told me.

This was beginning to sound like heresy and I felt a cold fear beginning to suffuse my being. Satan, who hears and sees everything, will punish him for saying such things and me for listening, of that I was quite certain. But if I said anything to a nurse who I found to be quite friendly and even honest I would only make my outlook, and hers, worse. So I remained silent, but she didn’t.

“Take, for instance, the insistence you have that you are a man,” she said quietly, “when it is as clear as day that you are not only a woman but you are a beautiful young woman.”

“Now that’s quite enough!” I might have shouted those words, but I didn’t: I whispered them. But I meant them. This lovely nurse, and she was lovely, the way she walked, the sound of her voice, was trying to undermine the very basis of my beliefs, the truth of who I am. And those beliefs had been with me since I began to understand what I was told. I had been a boy, a lovely boy but a boy none-the-less according to Colonius who had proved the point by massaging my legs until all I could feel was the gentility of his fingers and all I could hear was the truth lying behind his words.

“You are a boy,” he had insisted, “and I love you for it…”

So what else could I believe? And it couldn’t be possible that I was a girl because girls, he said, were the spawn of the stars, and the stars are evil...

© Peter Rogerson 09.08.23

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