Allie can see in that moment that ‘everything will disappear’ is a fantasy, has always been a delightful dream. Not the past, not the lines of pain inscribed on the human body, not a thing will ever disappear. While Allie has been making her life, Mrs Montgomery-Taylor has also continued, growing monstrous as the clock turned.
Mrs Montgomery-Taylor keeps up a bright line of chatter. She’s so honoured to receive a telephone call from Mother Eve, although she always knew she would; she understood what was meant by the name Allie had taken on, that she was Allie’s real mother, her spiritual mother, and hadn’t Mother Eve always said that the mother is greater than the child? She understood what was meant by that, too, that the mother is the one who knows best. She is so happy, so delighted, that Allie understood that everything she and Clyde did they did for her own good. Allie feels sick.
‘You were just a young girl, so wild,’ says Mrs Montgomery-Taylor. ‘You drove us to distraction. I saw that a devil was in you.’
Allie remembers it now, as she has not brought it out into the light these many years. She pulls it from the back of her mind. She blows the dust from this heap of rags and bones. She stirs them with a fingertip. She arrived at the home of the Montgomery-Taylors, a jangled child, beady and birdlike and wild. Her eyes seeing everything, her hands in everything. It was Mrs Montgomery-Taylor who brought her, and Mrs Montgomery-Taylor who wanted her, and Mrs Montgomery-Taylor who spanked her when her hand was in the raisin jar. It was Mrs Montgomery-Taylor who grabbed her arm and threw her to her knees and commanded her to pray that the Lord would forgive her sin. Over and over, on her knees.
‘We had to drive that devil out of you, you see that now, don’t you?’ says Mrs Montgomery-Taylor, now Mrs Williams.
And Allie does see it. It is as clear to her now as if she were watching it through the glass panes of their own sitting room. Mrs Montgomery-Taylor tried to pray the devil out of her and then to beat the devil out of her, and then she had a new idea.
‘Everything we did,’ she says, ‘we did for love of you. You needed to be taught discipline.’
She remembers the nights Mrs Montgomery-Taylor would put the polka on the radio real loud. And then Mr Montgomery-Taylor would ascend the stairs to give her the teachings. She remembers, all at once and with great clarity, which order those steps occurred in. First the polka music. Then the ascent of the stairs.
Beneath every story, there is another story. There is a hand within the hand – hasn’t Allie learned that well enough? There is a blow behind the blow.
Mrs Montgomery-Taylor’s voice is sly and confidential.
‘I was the first member of your New Church in Jacksonville, Mother. When I saw you on the television I knew that God had sent you to me as a sign. I knew that She was working through me when we took you in, and that She knew that all I had done I had done for Her glory. I was the one who made the police documents disappear. I’ve been caring for you all these years, darling.’
Allie thinks of all that was done in the house of Mrs Montgomery-Taylor.
She cannot pull apart the strands of it, has never separated the experiences into individual moments to examine each one closely and particularly. Remembering it is like a sudden flash of light upon carnage. Body parts and machinery and chaos and a sound that builds from a reedy cry to a full-throated scream and then cuts off to a low-humming almost-silence.
‘You understand,’ she says, ‘that God was working in us. All that we did, Clyde and I, we did so that you would be here.’
It was her touch she felt every time Mr Montgomery-Taylor laid himself upon her.
She cuppeth the power in her hand. She commandeth it to strike.
Allie says, ‘You told him to hurt me.’
And Mrs Montgomery-Taylor, now Mrs Williams, says, ‘We didn’t know what else to do with you, angel. You just wouldn’t listen to anything we said.’
‘And do you do the same now, with other children? With the children in your care?’
But Mrs Montgomery-Taylor, now Mrs Williams, has always been shrewd, even in her madness.
‘All children need different kinds of love,’ she says. ‘We do what’s needed to care for them.’
Children are born so small. It does not matter if they are boys or girls. They are all born so weak and so powerless.
Allie comes to pieces quite gently. All the violence in her has been spent out a hundred times. When this thing happens, she is calm, floating above the storm, watching the raging sea below.
She puts the fragments together, sorting and re-sorting them. How much would it take to put it right? Investigations and press conferences and admissions. If it is Mrs Montgomery-Taylor, it is others, too. More than she can count, probably. Her own reputation will suffer. Everything will come out: her past, and her story, and the lies and half-truths. She could move Mrs Montgomery-Taylor quietly on elsewhere; she might even find a way to have her killed, but to denounce her would be to denounce everything. If she roots this out, she roots out herself. Her own roots are rotten already.
And with this she is undone. Her mind disconnects from itself. For a while, she is not here. The voice tries to speak, but the howling of the wind inside her skull is too loud and the other voices now too numerous. In her mind, for a time, it is the war of all against all. It cannot sustain.
After a while, she says to the voice: Is this what it’s like to be you?
And the voice says: Fuck you, I told you not to do it. You should never have been friends with that Monke, I told you and you wouldn’t listen; she was just a soldier. What did you need a friend for? You had me; you always had me.
Allie says: I never had anything.
The voice says: Well, what now then, if you’re so clever?
Allie says: I keep meaning to ask. Who are you? I’ve wondered for a while. Are you the serpent?
The voice says: Oh, you think because I swear and tell you to do stuff I must be the devil?
It’s crossed my mind. And. Here we are. How am I supposed to tell which side is good and which is bad?
The voice takes a deep breath. Allie’s never heard it do that before.
Look, says the voice, we’ve reached a tricky moment here, I’ll give you that. There were things you were never supposed to look at, and now you’ve gone and looked at them. The whole point of me was to keep things simple for you, you see? That’s what you wanted. Simple feels safe. Certainty feels safe.
I don’t know if you’re aware, says the voice, but you’re lying on the floor of your office right now with the phone cradled under your right ear, listening to the sound of beep-beep-beep, and you won’t stop shaking. At some point someone’s going to come in and find you like this. You’re a powerful woman. If you’re not back soon, bad things are going to happen.