The Programme

CHAPTER EIGHT-2

“It doesn’t work like that: build a family; become a threat. You know how it goes down: they can tolerate any kind of a different way of living if it’s somewhere else, in some other country; here, make a life that lasts from the cradle to the grave - with its own family structures, its own education, its own rules of conduct, its own resources - and we become the threat from within, we’re talking subversion, and we’re talking about time to nip it in the bud. If nip means an assault at Waco, or at Ruby Ridge, then so be it: they’ve got the power.

“In the end, it’s not enough to build a family: look at Charlie Manson; he built a family, if you like. David Koresh. Marshall Applewhite and his Heaven’s Gate. Jim Jones: he had a family. I knew him, liked him too.” He did not pause for reflection or remembrance but rushed on. “You’ve got to be going somewhere with it; you can’t just plod along thinking the end is the means.”

“Is this what you told Cassandra?” Matthew asked.

“Maybe. Something like it. Can’t say what she heard, though.”

Carey snorted:

“Bullshit. It’s all bullshit.”

Phillipe giggled.

“Maybe.”

Suspiciously, Carey asked:

“What’s your angle on The Programme?”

Phillipe replied promptly:

“Same as anything. It’s there; so am I. Berlinger pays me.”

“Berlinger?” Matthew asked. “You take money from Berlinger?”

“Sure. Doesn’t everyone?”

Matthew, angry for the first time, crossed to him, fists clenched:

“Don’t you believe in anything, Phillipe?”

Phillipe looked past his shoulders. Matthew glanced around.

Through an open doorway, he saw red-robed black men, as if from nowhere. Matthew laughed.

“Am I supposed to be frightened, Phillipe? What is this? You f****d Cassandra - now you want to f**k me?”

Phillipe was placid, Buddha-like.

“If you’re facing evil, Matthew, evil is what you’ll have to do to defeat it. Remember that, Matthew - Teacher.” He reached out a hand, took Matthew’s in his, squeezed it gently. “Is that all right with you, Matthew? Teacher?”

It was not a question but a challenge, a warning, even a premonition.

From The Seer’s Lesson On Pleasure and On Pain:

It’s easy - if impossible - to forget about our bodies. Mind, body, soul. The three basic ingredients that make us what we are. We take our bodies for granted. Without them, we do not exist as people. We attribute their needs and their limitations to a state of mind. We treat the mind as standing between the body and the soul. We are one and we are whole. The relationship between body and soul is ignored. The body is a vessel. To stretch the vessel is to stretch its capacity. Do not think about it - be it.

The injunction to cease s****l activity on joining The Programme is not self-denial but discipline. It is not about liberation from s****l desire or dominance but redirection. To make your body capable of doing things it has not been able to do before is to show yourself you are capable of changing. To change is what you came into The Programme for. Do not tell me you did not come in to change your bodily activities. Do not tell me you are concerned only with the spiritual, or the mental. Do not tell me you - and you alone - can distinguish between them.

They had driven down from New York in the Lincoln, through Maryland and Virginia to Asheville in the central mountains of the Western part of North Carolina; from Asheville, through Alabama and Mississippi to New Orleans. They drove, but it felt like they had stayed still as the South paraded before them like a line of whores waiting to be chosen.

The Appalachians and the Blue Ridge mountains dominated the drive to Asheville, Matthew’s home town: they came in on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Downtown Asheville was an architectural roller-coaster: neo-Georgian, neoclassical, Italian Renaissance, Spanish and even Art Deco. Matthew explained: Asheville was like nowhere else in the South; it was a health resort that had been virtually taken over by the Vanderbilts, who had built a mansion - Biltmore - now a major tourist attraction- and Biltmore Village - now a luxury shopping centre - and brought in the railroad - and jobs, money, housing and businesses; their influence had persisted to the present day. It had seasoned southern attitudes with northern culture, if only lightly.

This was a defiant, luxury trip. They were like fugitives on the run, spending as if they were using stolen credit cards, staying in the best hotels, like the financial parasites that Amanda’s lawyers were going to say they were. In Asheville, they had booked into the Richmond Hill Inn. The main hotel was an erstwhile Victorian mansion but they were lodged in a modern cottage in the grounds. The hotel housed one of the city’s best restaurants, reservations and jackets required. The night they arrived, they ate there to soak up the atmosphere of the city; Matthew made no secret of his wish to make a successful appearance.

Both his brother and a sister still lived there. His mother was in a retirement home on the outskirts. His father had died long since. He took Carey to meet his mother but she could barely appreciate who he was, let alone a stranger. Once, she called her Cassandra, a name lodged in her mind in association with her son, but she called him Jack, his father’s name. She was wrinkled and frail and the smell of urine in her bedroom told them she was incontinent.

“What do you want to know?” Matthew asked as he and Carey strolled the grounds of the Asheville hotel, in the middle of the night and, it seemed momentarily to Carey, the middle of nowhere.

“Everything that’s going on. I want to be a part of it,” she insisted. “Good or bad, whatever.”

“Reconciliation of God and Satan? Army of God and Satan according to Cassandra. Are you ready for that, Carey?”

“You don’t need to protect me from it,” she protested. “I am a member, remember?”

“Sometimes,” he answered lightly. “I’m not always sure if you’re my lawyer who’s dipping a toe into the water as a member; a member who’s still my lawyer; or, my lover the lawyer.”

“Ouch,” she remarked sardonically on his choice of priorities. “You have so many people in love with you, I think you lose sight of what it means. I’m ready. For all of it. Whatever it is. I don’t want you holding back on me; I don’t want to hold myself back.”

“I know you don’t want to; but that’s not the same.”

“The same as what?” She was irritated. “Don’t you trust me?”

“Trust? That’s what we demand from new members.”

“Meaning I get to trust you, but you don’t need to trust me?” Trust; love. The words seemed interchangeable.

“Of course, I trust you as a lawyer.”

She leaned back against a tree, glowered at him.

“Am I just another moment? Are we all?” The conversation wasn’t going the way she expected.

“I don’t think of it as moments.”

“What, then?”

“What are the only two absolutes?”

“Being born; dying,” she recounted by rote.

“Right. That gives me just one more; you too.”

“What about being itself: can’t that be an absolute?”

“Very good, Carey; very good indeed.”

“Don’t patronise me, Teacher,” she taunted.

He placed his hands either side of her shoulders so she couldn’t escape, leaned down to kiss her. For a moment she let him, then she ducked out from under, threw her arms around him from behind, squeezed hard, dug her nails into his ribs. He covered her hands with his own.

“Go on, then,” he said tautly. “What do you want?”

“You’re leaving me out of things; I want to know what; and why.”

She had stopped squeezing to hurt him, rested her head instead against his back for warmth, stroked his chest. She wished he would understand how much she was with him; she wished she did. Being part of The Programme ought to be easier than this, easier than life.

“It’s Cassandra’s game for now, not mine to play - to leave you out of or let you in. I’m not even sure if I’m in or out of it.”

“Cassandra’s game? You wrote the rules. Or maybe what I mean is, you threw all the other rule books out.”

“Are we back to Lucius again? Something like that.”

She nodded, rubbing her chin against his back.

“Did it shock you so much?” When he had told her what he had done.

“No. I wasn’t shocked. You want me to be, but I’m not.”

“What, then?”

“I wonder sometimes, what did he think about it?”

“Lucius?”

“Yes, Lucius.” She clutched her hands together behind her back, pulling away from him. The night was growing colder, or she was. She rarely wore a bra these days: her n*****s were hard and itchy against her blouse. “I mean, I suppose what I’m asking - Lucius - other members you’ve slept with - one or other of you, you or Cassandra - I don’t think I mean me, or Helen - but the casual adventures - the Amanda Krogers - what are they supposed to feel? Blessed? And what do they feel? Used?”

“You’re beginning to sound like a lawyer again.”

“I never stopped being one. That’s one of the best things you’ve done for me. All my life, I’ve never really liked being a lawyer. There’s so many times I decided I didn’t want to be one any more. That’s frightened me. What would I do if I wasn’t a lawyer; and, if I didn’t do it, what would I be? Now, I’m not so scared about losing it, so I don’t mind it so much.”

“Well, then, there’s your answer.”

She was about to ask him what he meant when she understood: they did not need to choose between being blessed and being used; they were both a part of the same experience. She used his own words back on him.

“Very good, Matthew, very good indeed.”

He chuckled, held his arms out: she stepped forward, let him put his arms around her, wriggled against him for fun and friction. He said into the top of her head:

“It’s not my decision to leave you out; it’s your decision how far you want to go.”

“Maybe that’s true,” she sulked. She wanted to feel that the tough decisions had already been made; what he was saying meant that there were more to come. “It doesn’t make it any easier.”

“More difficult, really,” he said cheerfully.

From Programme and Progression:

There are no Gods who can do for you or to you what you cannot do for or to yourself; there is no faith that can make happen what you cannot make happen yourself; there is no power to invoke that does not come from within you. No one can enter your mind, let alone invade it; when so-called cults and like organisations - including The Programme - are referred to as “mind-bending,” or “brain-washing,” it would be amusing if it was not such a disturbing misrepresentation. The mind is not an entity with an independent existence which you can turn over to another. It is yours; it is you. Mind-bending, mind-control, brain-washing are synonyms for new experiences, new perceptions, offered by those with something new to say; the energy that feeds it, that gives it life, can only come from within, from the listener who decides that he is going to do something with it, and what. The moment that is accepted, the accusation falls.

Andrew Chettle came in early to buttonhole Colin. He had been in Brussels the night before, channel-cruising in his hotel room when he flicked through CNN and saw a short report on his new firm’s clients and the hearing which, he understood, was what had taken Carey to the States: it put what he knew of the Kroger case in a different and unwelcome light.

He had watched the report with a growing sense of irritation, perhaps even dismay, mostly professional, mildly personal: he had thrown in his lot with the Arnotts, but Colin was his friend and he had always enjoyed a soft spot for Carey. He was astute enough to appreciate that her relationship with The Programme was not exclusively professional: the idea of her being involved with them appalled him.

Andrew enjoyed life: he was not a careless or reckless man, but he was not overly-cautious: his team’s move to Arnotts had been described in the legal press as unusual and imaginative. So far, the boldness seemed to be paying off; most of the clients they had wanted to come with them were doing so; they had picked up some new work - including that of two unions.

Still, he could do without a distraction like The Programme. Colin was in. A couple of others had also arrived, but it was too early for appointments with clients. Andrew dropped his overnight case in the room that since the beginning of the week had been temporarily assigned to him, poured himself a mug of coffee and brought a cup and saucer for Colin. Colin, hunched over the mail, looked up in surprise.