Alligator - Lisa Moore [15]
It didn’t matter if they really did it; they couldn’t have really done it, but what a film. A claustrophobic community bandaged in snow squalls. And a girl is possessed by the devil.
There’s always a young virgin, and this one has streaming red hair and a white, white nightdress. A girl on a cliff in her nightdress, sleepwalking or fairy-led, the church bells rippling through the icy darkness.
And there is Archbishop Fleming! He comes from St. John’s to exorcise the old church bell and finds the girl, all wind-blown curls and shawl snapping in the gale. Isobel plays the girl’s mother; how Isobel commanded a scene, even without lines, everyone off set huddled around the monitors gripped by the simple arrogance of a woman in control of her craft. How Isobel makes the archbishop falter.
Madeleine has been haunted by the ghost of Archbishop Fleming ever since she read his letters in the Roman Catholic Archives — the rolling sentences, each clause stepping over the back of the last, blistering with vindictive ambition and scalding faith. They’d given her white gloves at the archives, and let her hold the actual letters in her hands. The paper was brittle. There was the old-man smell. Her heart would constrict in the middle of the night and she’d wake slathered in sweat, thinking, This is it, this is it. And she’d find Archbishop Fleming in the corner of her bedroom baring his yellow teeth like a dog. Once she dreamt he’d crossed the room, moonlight on the gold embroidery of his loose cream-coloured sleeve, and he put his pale, liver-spotted hand on her bare breast, and the pain receded. The pain left entirely and she woke rested and fresh. Sometimes it was just indigestion.
She had chosen a man for a doctor because despite her feminism — back in the late 1960s she had been on a floor of the Women’s Centre with twelve other women convulsed with laughter all trying to work a speculum and a hand mirror — she had chosen a man because the awful truth was she trusted a man more and now she gave him a look full of doubt and loathing. She was just her film and how much energy it would take to make it happen and she didn’t have time to argue with a doctor two decades younger than her. She needed to pass a physical in order to begin the summer shoot. Nobody would insure the film if the director had not passed the physical. The broadcasters wouldn’t release a cent.
My heart will hold up, she told him. She could unsettle and stir even a very young man by raising an eyebrow.
Stress is a determining factor, he said. He was rubbing his stethoscope against the inside of his thigh as if to get rid of some kind of static. His chair was on wheels and he pulled himself this way and that with his hand on the desk. He couldn’t seem to hold still.
You’re not a young woman, he’d said. He pulled himself a little closer to her with his heels on the tiles. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped before him, head bowed, as though lost in thought. Then he lifted his head and a lock of hair flopped into his eye. He ignored it.
You’re pushing your luck, he said. The casual gravity of his tone frightened her.
I know my own heart, she said, drawing herself up. He swivelled the chair suddenly and the castors battered over the tiles like a drum roll and he was at his desk ruffling the papers. He signed each form. She had wanted him to sign, but now that she heard him scribbling, it felt like a betrayal. He was casting her adrift. She was responsible for herself. He swivelled in his chair again and handed her the forms.
Must be some movie, he’d said. He turned his back on her and gathered up his papers and a plastic container of tongue depressors. He rose and slipped his pen into his shirt pocket and she saw he was wearing Birkenstocks. Grey wool socks and leather sandals. What had she done?
The film was all about the desolate, violent landscape and human triumph over nature, but it was also, in a much quieter, private way, about evil. A community in the grip of some religious fervour that had