Two young women and a man were sitting at the far end of the room, using the machines to make what looked like small, floppy pouches, until Robin realised that the small group of people sitting at the nearer table were filling them with stuffing and turning them into small, cuddly turtles. The workers looked around at the opening of the door, smiling. They were sitting a chair apart, leaving space for each of the newcomers to sit between two church members.
‘Fire Group, called to service,’ said Taio.
A friendly looking man in his early forties got to his feet, holding a half-stuffed turtle.
‘Wonderful!’ he said. ‘Take a seat, everyone!’
Robin found herself a space between a very pretty girl who looked Chinese, and was sitting a little further from the table than everyone else, due to the fact that she was in late pregnancy, and a middle-aged white woman whose head was entirely shaven, only a tiny amount of grey stubble poking through. Her eyebags were purple, and the joints of her hands were, Robin noticed, very swollen.
‘I’ll see you all at dinner,’ said Taio. His eyes lingered on Robin as he shut the door.
‘Welcome!’ said the activity leader brightly, looking round at the newcomers. ‘We’re making these for street sales. All proceeds will be going to our Homes for Humanity project. As you’re probably aware…’
As he began talking about homelessness statistics, and the ways in which the church was trying to alleviate the problem, Robin took covert stock of the room. Large, framed signs hung on the walls, each containing a short declarative sentence:
‘… delighted to say our London hostels have now taken nearly a thousand people off the street.’
‘Wow!’ said green-haired Penny.
‘And in fact, we have a beneficiary of the scheme here with us,’ said the activity leader, indicating the pregnant Chinese girl. ‘Wan was in a very bad situation, but she found our hostel, and now she’s a valued member of the Universal Humanitarian family.’
Wan nodded, smiling.
‘All right, so, you’ll find stuffing and empty skins beside you. Once your box is full, carry it back to our machinists and they’ll seal up our turtles for us.’
Robin reached into the box between herself and Wan, and set to work.
‘What’s your name?’ the shaven-headed woman asked Robin in a quiet voice.
‘Rowena,’ said Robin.
‘I’m Louise,’ said the woman, and Robin remembered that Kevin Pirbright’s mother had been called Louise.
She wondered why Louise’s head was shaved. In the outside world, she’d have assumed she’d been through chemotherapy, but the UHC’s spiritual beliefs made that unlikely. Louise’s skin was weathered and chapped; she looked as though she spent most of her life out of doors.
‘You’re fast,’ she added, watching Robin begin to stuff the toy turtle. ‘Where are you from?’
‘Primrose Hill, in London,’ said Robin. ‘Where do you—?’
‘That’s a nice area. Have you got family?’
‘A younger sister,’ said Robin.
‘Are both your parents alive?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin.
‘What do they do?’
‘My dad’s a hedge fund manager. My mum’s got her own business.’
‘What kind of business?’
‘She provides external HR support to companies,’ said Robin.
Louise was working slowly, due to the stiffness of her hands. Her fingernails, Robin noticed, were all broken off. All around the table, the church members were talking to the newcomer to their right, and from what Robin could hear of the conversations, they were running very much along the lines of hers and Louise’s: quick-fire questions intended to elicit a lot of personal information. In very brief pauses in Louise’s questioning, she overheard Marion Huxley telling her neighbour that she was a widow, who’d run an undertakers with her husband.
‘You’re not married?’ Louise asked Robin.
‘No… I was going to be, but we called it off,’ said Robin.
‘Oh, that’s a pity,’ said Louise. ‘What made you interested in the UHC?’
‘It was actually a friend of mine,’ said Robin. ‘She wanted to go, but then she let me down and I ended up attending the temple on my own.’
‘That wasn’t a coincidence,’ said Louise, just as the blonde had said, on Robin’s first visit to the temple. ‘Most pure spirits were called like that, by what feels like chance. Do you know the fable of the blind turtle? The blind turtle who lives in the depths of the ocean and surfaces once every hundred years? The Buddha said, imagine there was a yoke floating on the ocean, and he asked what the chances that the old, blind turtle would surface at exactly the point that meant his neck would pass through the yoke. That’s how hard it is to find enlightenment for most people… you’re a good worker,’ Louise said again, as Robin completed her fourth stuffed turtle. ‘I think you’ll go pure spirit really fast.’
