'Please!' She cut me off, holding up her hand in the air. 'Please don't. Please just go. I'll be fine.'
'I'll call you. If there's a signal out on the island I'll call you. I'll tell you how it's going — when I'll be back.'
'No,' she said. 'Don't. Really — don't. Just… just go. Do your thing.' She drummed her fingers on the table, not looking up at me. 'Go on,' she repeated, when I didn't turn to go. 'Just go.'
I sighed and touched her shoulder, opened my mouth to say something, then thought better of it. I tightened the rucksack and left, not bending to kiss her goodbye, quietly closing the kitchen door behind me. That was how it went, these days. Outside I stopped. At the end of the bungalow's long, rhododendron-crowded driveway the land opened into a funnel. There, basking in the glittering sea, was Pig Island.
4
'Rage against the Philistines of science. Do not allow the arrogance of the medical community to rape and subdue your natural self-healing powers. Wrest control over your life.'
The Psychogenic Healing Ministries, volume 14,
chapter 5, verse 1
The Psychogenic Healing Ministries would say my problems with Lexie were all about my godlessness. They'd say that if I only opened my heart to the Lord, that if I'd only grow towards his cosmic love, in no time I'd find myself growing back towards Lexie. And she'd grow towards me too. I'd never been to the Positive Living Centre on Pig Island, but I knew more than I needed about what the PHM would say about me and Lex. I knew their philosophies like I wrote them myself.
What happened between me and their founder, Pastor Malachi Dove, all starts back in Liverpool twenty years ago. It's the mid-eighties. Liverpool's the unemployment capital of Europe, and my cousin Finn is the closest thing to a God I know.