The Peacock 214

 "She didn't even attend Mom's funeral.  Not that she would have been expected to. I think everything really went to hell between us with my father's death.  They always hated each other, and Tina boycotted the funeral, and this caused an eternal rift between us, which is to say the rest of the family.  never heard so much as one single peep from that mouldering old ingrate when Mom became ill with cancer, and of course absolutely nothing from her when she died, nor even a word of condolence after the funeral which, of course, she did not deign to cross the pond for."

"I would like to hear your sister's story", says Melissa.  

"Well, I could tell you a little more, I suppose.  This would have been our last conversation, I think around thirty years ago.  I was about to go on a performance tour, and for some reason she wanted badly to see me.  She was by then herself a widow, doing rather a bad job of raising her kids unaided.  She had just moved into her council flat in Shepherd's Bush.  My God, to think she has lived in that dreadful hole for three decades and counting.  It wasn't a comfortable visit.  They never were, with her anyway.  We really quite disliked each other, and my own success as a performer of music simply entrenched in Tina towards me a slow burning toxic hate.  Envy, you know.  She never met with this kind of success, and now look where she was.

"She was serving Sherry.  It was a Sunday afternoon, mid November, as colourless and dreary a late autumn day as could ever be imagined in London.  i really disliked her apartment.  It was rather cluttered and disordered, somewhat dirty and there was a certain cling odour of, what should I call it, an odour of sadness.  And she had really taken to drink..."

The Peacock 213

 "Does anyone here remember Mary Hopkins?" Carol asks.

"British folksinger, sixties and seventies", says Aaron.

"They were competitors, Mary and my sister.  Mary had greater popular appeal, but Tina had a better voice.  They still packaged and formed her into a minor success, but she never became rich, she never played to packed houses, but even in the small coffeehouses and other venues where Tina performed, she never failed to bring the house down.  We all became proud of her, nonetheless.  Family, you know.  Meanwhile, I pursued my future as one of the great classical concert pianists of this generation.  

"Tina burned out in her twenties and tried to do a crossover into classical music.  She was an adequate coloratura soprano, and did rather a decent job of interpreting the works of Vivaldi and Corelli, but she had lost her zeal, and soon had quite run out of money.   On the cusp of her thirtieth birthday, she married a bricklayer, a drinker himself, and she simply bred and crapped out three rather miserable and below average children with below average prospects."

"Where is she now, your sister?" I ask.

"I imagine she is still rotting away in her little council flat in Shepherd's Bush.  We haven't spoken in years.  It is as though we have long been dead to each other."

"What about her kids?"

"Oh, they all turned out abysmally.  Drugs and alcohol and petty crime.  It is suspected that my niece might even have done a few turns as a prostitute."

"Sex worker", corrects Melissa rather tartly.

"Oh, do spare me the politically correct rubbish!" Carol barks.  "She was a bloody prostitute.  And hardly much better than her deplorable mother!"

The Peacock 212

"In the meantime, I was already being entered into competitions, and I was winning almost every single one of  them, competing against kids older than me, with more years of practice, but I still excelled.  One of the rock stars who was regularly bedding her, later credited her with ending his marriage, since his wife had walked into the bedroom at the moment of flagrante delicto.  The scandal hit the gutter press, no one would shut up about it, and this sent poor Tina into a mental institution where she stayed for two years.  I remember going to visit her sometimes with Mom and Dad on Sundays, not too often.  They went every week, but I had piano practice and lessons to keep me occupied.  But my poor sister, looking so sad and broken, like a fine porcelain vase that had fallen down the stairs, not broken, but so chipped and cracked that no one would want to use it again.

"We didn't really talk much to each other.  I was simply taking it all in.  And I really didn't want to see her, but somehow I thought it was making my parents, especially my mother, happy, so I did keep going, maybe once every couple of months with them, if only to make them happy.  To this day, I still don't think I have forgiven her for abandoning me that night when she went away.  

"But when she was finally released, a few months later, as she got better, and became pretty again, one of the rock stars, not the one whose marriage she had ruined, started to contact her.  It turned out that someone had heard her singing, perhaps while in the bathroom.  So, he coached her in voice production, and actually made a minor star out of her..."

The Peacock 211

 I was curled up asleep in front of the telly when Mom and Dad returned from the cinema.  They wanted to know where Tina was.  I said I didn't know.  They asked about what time she left, and I said early.  They asked if I saw anyone and I said no, but I didn't think to mention the car with the two horn blasts outside.  Or that she was dressed like a film star.

"Tina came home in the morning. It was Saturday, and Dad was home.  I was sent to my bedroom, and I could hear them talking to her.  My parents were never ones for making emotional scenes.  Very well behaved English middle class, you know.  But Tina got emotional.  She started yelling and screaming about how dull, crass and unfair they were.  Then Dad spoke.  Then Mom.

"Tina stayed close to home until the next year.  To this day I do not know where she went that night, or with whom, or what she got up to. To this day, I still don't want to know.  But somehow, Mom and Dad were able to persuade her to stay home more.  She was fifteen when she started going out again.  all dolled up of course.  But she was careful to be home by ten, and it became a rule that if anyone was going to come and get her, that they would be expected to come in to the house and introduce themselves.  So she took the Tube instead, I imagine.  

That was when I began my piano lessons.  By the time I was nine I was declared a child prodigy. I didn't find any of this out until many years later, but at that time, barely just sixteen, my sister Tina had become a groupie.  To British rock stars.  To very famous British rock stars.  They traded her among themselves, John, Paul, George and Ringo..."

The Peacock 210

 "Tina, or Christina, is eight years older than me.  We grew up in a lovely middle class home just on the border of Notting Hill and Kensington.  She was a very talented singer, and also quite a rebel.  This was, of course, back in the sixties, in the days of Swinging London.  Things really began to get lively with her when she was fourteen, or in 1962.  To spare some of you the mental strain of doing the math, my sister was born in 1948, and I was born in 1956, making me sixty-five, and Tina now would be just about to reach seventy-three.

"Tina, shall we say, began to ripen on the early side.  She was barely twelve when she already had the body of a voluptuous young woman.  And even then she was hauntingly beautiful.  For me, just four, it was very strange.  For me, she was a grown woman.  She was already a lady.  I have no memory at all of thinking of her as just being a girl the way that I was a little girl.  So, it could be said, there was always a distance between us.  Of course she did babysit, and often, but she really seemed to resent it.  And she could be rather brutal at times.  She rarely actually hit me, but her voice, when angry, had for a little girl, quite a terrifying edge.  

"I was six, and Tina was fourteen, and one night our parents were away at the cinema, and she of course had to take care of me.  So, it was about seven in the evening, and we were both curled up in the sitting room watching the telly.  But Tina was all dressed up.  She was wearing makeup and earrings, and a tight green dress with a slit up the side.  And high heels.  She looked so glamorous and I felt oh so very proud of her.  but she was waiting for someone.  There was a blast from a car horn, and without telling me a word or even saying goodbye, out she went and was driven away somewhere..."

The Peacock 209

"I was just beginning to lose consciousness, when he found me nodding off on the bench.  He saw the pill bottle, then bodily dragged me to his car and drove me to the hospital.  Brother Laurence came with us.  We were later told that had it been five minutes later, I would be a goner.  They set me up with a psychiatrist, one of the few that still do talk therapy, so for four years, every other week, I saw this guy in Mission for up to an hour.  best thing I could have done for myself."

"The same thing happened to me, between 2002 and 2006", says Aaron, "A psychiatrist who practiced talk therapy, four years, just under an hour, every two weeks.  

"Funny how we seem to be connected by parallel experiences." Carl says.

"Is Brother Laurence still here?" says Carol.

"He left some time ago", Melissa says, "But later."

"You´re not off the hook yet, Carol", says Carl, smiling.

"But I am just so amazed at all this", she says.  "Something very similar happened to my sister.  She overdosed on pills, just as Graham and I were negotiating rather a nasty divorce, but aren't they all nasty divorces.  but I suppose I could tell you a bit about Tina, my sister..."

The Peacock 208

"For several weeks we coexisted, Brother Laurence and I.  This, as you know, is not a small house, and it became very easy for us to each get lost in our own little worlds.  What didn't help was that he took a room in the far wing of the house, where he basically brought to birth the entire community.  It was just as well, I suppose, because I was still battling one huge depression.  My guest's insistence on avoiding me only aggravated my sense of isolation, and even when I tried to reach out to him I was greeted by a kind of timid indifference from him.

"I was also being haunted by nightmares, of the cult that used to live on these premises.  It turns out, Jesús, that the small bit of Cosme's journal that we have heard thanks to you and Aaron's noble efforts at translation, was also the substance of some of my dreams.  People robed in white, chanting in procession while carrying torches and then suddenly vanishing, and threatening to carry me with them.  In those nightmares I was studiously resisting being swallowed up with them.

"I started trying to seek out brother Laurence.  From time to time, he would tolerate my presence, and stand and listen patiently while I tried to talk with him.  I could tell, especially with what I was going through, that he was suffering from trauma, but somehow we just weren't connecting.

"Like others here, I have also, of course, been obsessed with the southern magnolia out in the back.  One day, sick of everything, I picked up all my sleeping medication that the doctor had just put me on, and brought the pills with me along with a bottle of water.  I sat on one of the benches.  swallowed a fistful of pills, then drank some water.  I had forgotten that Robert was coming up that day, because he was especially concerned about how things were going.  Fortunately, he found me before it was too late..."