The Woman Who Died a Lot

“Oh,” I said, suddenly realizing that it might be a secret, “just idle talk from Swindon, I suspect.”

“Hmm. Worth looking into. Sister Henrietta, would you conduct a gender check tomorrow? Nothing intrusive. Just find out if there is anyone who doesn’t know the name of Jennifer Grey’s character in Dirty Dancing.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Sister Henrietta, staring daggers in my direction as soon as Mother Daisy looked away.

“And what news of Swindon?” asked Mother Daisy. “We have no radio, no TV, and only The Toad on Sunday once a month.”

“There’s a new roundabout in the Old Town, Acme Carpets is having another sale, SpecOps is to be reformed—oh, and part of the city is to be wiped from the earth by a cleansing fire on Friday.”

“An Acme Carpets sale?”

“Forty percent off everything, I heard—with free installation, but you have to pay for the underlay.”

“Worth a look. And a smiting, you say? What level?”

We were now at the reception desk in the lobby. She indicated the visitors’ book for me to sign. I noted that the last visitor had been admitted in 1974.

“A Level III,” I said, “to punish Joffy for his impertinence, we think. That is,” I added, “unless my daughter Tuesday can perfect her anti-smite device.”

Mother Daisy reached behind the counter and picked up a length of lead pipe that happened to be there. She made a swipe in my direction.

“A daughter that should have been mine, you scarlet Jezebel!!”

I was quicker this time and took a step back. Sister Henrietta was on the ball, too, and had Daisy around the waist and grappled to the floor in less than a second.

“The Sisterhood likes to scrap, don’t they?” said Finisterre as the pair of them wrestled on the ground, with Mother Daisy howling and scratching and biting while Sister Henrietta attempted to calm her down. She did calm, eventually, and once more apologized for her conduct and asked for my forgiveness.

This I gave, although less readily, as one can take just so much of nun violence. We moved into the main part of the convent, a large room that served as living space and refectory. To either side of the chamber were smaller cells for the sisters to live in. All about us was the lobster motif that the order lived beneath, a constant reminder of the mildly deluded notion that the world would one day be unified under a single lobster of astonishing intellect, and all ills, sorrow, hunger and thermidor would be banished forever. Although this might seem peculiar— even when compared to other, equally wild religions—my father had often traveled into the distant future and learned that there was indeed a time when the earth was dominated by the arthropods. Two hundred million years away, he said. But any notion that the Sisterhood might be planning for this was doubtful— there would be only six species of mammal on the earth at that time, and none of them with a higher intellect than a confused hedgehog.

“How is he?” asked Daisy through half-gritted teeth.

“He’s . . . very well,” I said warily, making sure there was a reasonable distance between us. Sister Henrietta had guessed that this was over a man and had placed herself in a position where it would be most easy to intervene.

“A bestselling writer by now, I expect?”

“Not quite,” I replied slowly, as Landen’s career since winning the coveted Armitage Shanks Literary Prize had been in a somewhat downward trajectory.

“Why?” she asked.

“I guess he was looking after me,” I replied, as honestly as I could, “and the kids.”

“I would never have allowed that if he were my husband,” she scolded. “You should be ashamed of yourself. Has he still got one leg?”

I stared at her. “It’s not likely to have grown back.”

“He . . . he might have lost the other one.”

“He’s not that careless.”

“You had children?”

“Two.”

“What sort?”

“One of each.”

“A boy and a girl?”

“No, an ant and a whale.”

She glared at me, and a vein in her neck pulsed. “There’s no cause to be snippy.”

“I’ll stop being snippy if you stop making inane observations.”

“You were the one who stole my husband at the altar.”

I stared at her for a moment. Before she was Mother Daisy, she had been Daisy Mutlar and had almost ensnared Landen into marriage.

“He didn’t love you. He loved me, and technically speaking he was never your husband.”

“Only because of a short, meddling, plain-as-wallpaper, delusional ex-girlfriend with relationship issues and a borderline-personality disorder.”

“I’m not short.”