‘I wanted to do this, I really believed, but I’m not what you’re looking for, I realise that now—’
‘That’s your false self talking!’
‘It isn’t, it’s my honest self—’
‘You’re currently demonstrating high levels of egomotivity,’ said Taio harshly. ‘You think you know better than I do.
‘I want to leave. I want to go.’
She was gambling on the fact that Taio Wace wouldn’t want to be responsible for her leaving. She was supposed to be rich and was definitely articulate and educated, which meant she might be taken seriously if she talked about her negative experiences of the church. Most importantly, she’d just witnessed a well-known writer leaving a Retreat Room with a girl who looked barely over-age.
The naked light falling from the overhead bulb highlighted Taio’s rat-like nose and dirty hair. After a moment or two’s silence he said coldly,
‘You underwent spiritual demarcation because you’ve fallen behind the other recruits.’
‘How?’ said Robin, injecting a note of desperation into her voice and still failing to wipe her nose, because she wanted to repel Taio as much as possible. ‘I’ve tried—’
‘You make disruptive statements, like that comment about Mazu’s hair. You haven’t fully integrated, you’ve failed in simple duties to the church—’
‘Like what?’ said Robin in genuine anger, every inch of her body sore after long days of manual labour.
‘Relinquishment of materialist values.’
‘But I—’
‘I don’t—’
‘Everyone else who joined with you has made donations to the church.’
‘I wanted to,’ lied Robin, ‘but I didn’t know how!’
‘Then you should have asked. Non-materialists offer freely, they don’t wait for forms or invoices.
Robin deliberately smeared the snot across her face with her sleeve and gave a loud, wet sniff.
‘“I live to love and give”,’ quoted Taio. ‘You were Typed as a Gift-Bearer, like the Golden Prophet, but you’re hoarding your resources instead of sharing them.’
As he said it, his eyes rolled down her body to her breasts.
‘And I know you’ve got no physical hang-ups about sex,’ he added, with the ghost of a smirk. ‘Apparently, you orgasm every time.’
‘I think I should go to temple,’ said Robin a little wildly. ‘The Blessed Divinity’s telling me to chant, I can feel it.’
She knew she’d angered and offended him, and that he didn’t believe any divinity was speaking to her; but he was the one who’d conducted seminars in the basement room about opening the mind and heart to the divine force, and to contradict her was to undermine words he himself had spoken. Perhaps, too, his desire had been quenched by her deliberate smearing of snot over her face, because after a few seconds he got slowly to his feet.
‘I think you’d do better to perform penance to the community,’ he said. ‘Fetch cleaning products from the kitchen, fresh sheets from the laundry and muck out these three Retreat Rooms.’
He ripped back the curtain, slid back the glass door and left.
Weak with immediate relief, yet full of dread of what harm she might have done in refusing him, Robin leaned for a moment against the wall, cleaned her face as best she could with her sweatshirt, then glanced around.
A tap was fixed to the wall in a corner, with a short length of hose attached and a drain hole beneath it. A slimy bottle of liquid soap and a dirty wet flannel stood beside the hole on a patch of mildewed floorboard. Presumably people washed themselves before having sex. Trying to dismiss a horrible mental image of Taio lathering his erection before joining her on the bed, Robin set off to find a bucket and mop. However, as she emerged from the bushes screening the Retreat Rooms from the courtyard, she stumbled to a halt.
Emily Pirbright was standing alone in front of the Drowned Prophet’s fountain, on a wooden crate. Her head was bowed and she was holding a piece of cardboard on which words had been written.
Robin didn’t want to approach the pool with Emily standing there, but she feared being punished if she was seen failing to make her tribute to Daiyu. Pretending she couldn’t even see Emily, she advanced on the fountain, but almost against her will her eyes were drawn to the silent figure.
Emily’s face and hair had been smeared with earth, as had her scarlet tracksuit. She was staring at the ground, as determinedly insensible of Robin’s presence as the latter had meant to be of Emily’s.
The words scrawled on the cardboard sign held between Emily’s mud-stained hands read:
