I thought: I’m even sounding like my dad. Like I’d caught a disease from him. Verbal cancer. Why don’t I just shut up!
Switch off, goon! I thought. Or make it different, make it sane!
Selah.
Look, she said, I’ll try and explain. About the sex, I mean.
Don’t bother, I said, like a sulky boy who’s been refused an ice-cream.
For my own sake, as much as yours!
Pause. The night echoing its deadness.
She shuffled closer, as if crossing a boundary.
She said: It isn’t that I don’t fancy you. I do.
There was a change of tone in her voice, a new tune, a caressing sound.
She went on: I didn’t admit it before. Not even to myself. I’ve been pretending, I suppose—that you were just a funny, interesting schoolboy who said he was researching for a half-baked film project but who deep down was really trying to sort out his ideas . . . his relationship . . . with God.
And me, she said, I’d help you, wouldn’t I! I was older and more mature, wasn’t I! I’d open you to religion, show you the way, bring you to God! I’d convert you!
She laughed, self-mocking.
Isn’t that great! I hate it. That I’d even let myself think it, I mean, never mind try and do it. Wanting to make converts, wanting to persuade people to believe what I believe the way I believe it. I can’t bear it when I see other people trying to do that. Like those creepy evangelists on television, with their glossy suits, and their big rallies, and their stage-managed fervour, and their packaged sincerity, and their sanctimonious humility that somehow always makes you feel they possess a God-given superiority over the rest of us.
She heaved a sigh and rubbed a hand across her eyes.
One of the reasons I like Philip Ruscombe is that he’s hopeless at conversion. If you had to make converts in order to qualify for Heaven, he’d fail. Not because he doesn’t know how, but because he can’t bring himself to do it.
It’s one of the great temptations, you see—wanting to prove the strength of your own faith by making others believe what you believe. It shows you’re right.
She huffed.
But it doesn’t prove anything of the sort. All it proves is that you’re condescending and arrogant and good at doing what half-decent actors can do, or advertising agents, or pop stars, or politicians, or con men, or any of the professional persuaders. They sell illusions. And that’s all they do. And they feel good when they succeed. That’s what their lives depend on.
Which isn’t true about religion. Or shouldn’t be. Your belief shouldn’t depend on what other people think about it. And it certainly should not depend on whether other people believe the same as you.
She laughed.
But there I was, she said, falling into the trap. Wanting to make a convert! And the funny thing is that I was only pretending I was trying to do that. What 1 was really doing was falling into a different trap—fancying you and not admitting it to myself.
I said: Sounds as if wanting to convert me was a substitute for having it off with me.
Could be.
So you admit you fancy me?
Yes.
And you don’t have any worries about sex?
Not the way you mean.
And I fancy you and certainly don’t have any hang-ups about sex, so why don’t we—
Because, she said firmly, for me there’s a bit more to it than that!
Selah.
Can’t remember word-for-word what she said then, but do remember her reasons. They went something like this:
Sex is a maker of life, as food is a sustainer of life.
Sex can also be an appetite, as eating is an appetite.
Just as you can eat for the sake of eating, so you can enjoy sex for the sake of it.
There is necessity in sex for making life. There is no necessity in sex for the sake of it.
One of the illusions that the Big Persuaders have sold us is that sex for the sake of it is necessary—that we’ve failed or lost out or somehow actually damaged ourselves if we don’t have sex for the sake of it.
Julie doesn’t want to make a new life, just for the sake of becoming a mother. And her appetites are all for God. She wanted to know more about God—wherever that took her, whatever it demanded, whatever God meant. She wanted to know more about herself as she looked through God’s eyes, as she put it. She wasn’t denying herself anything so that she could have something else. She was using all she had for one main purpose that meant more to her than all the other things on offer in life.
She laughed a lot about all this. She knew, she said, that most other people would think her weird, which is why she didn’t talk about it. She also knew what she said sounded old-fashioned, just about extinct in fact. But it was the way she was and she just accepted it.
She wasn’t saying everybody should be like her, or that she even thought she was right. She knew most people thought that sex was there to be enjoyed any time you liked, so long as you didn’t force yourself on anyone and didn’t do anything that hurt the other person. And she didn’t disagree. But for her, she said, her sex, having sex, was such an important part of her, of herself, that she couldn’t treat it as if she was just having an enjoyable meal with a friend.
Anyway, she said, it was wrong to compare sex and food. They weren’t the same. When you share food, you share something from outside both of you. Each person takes part of the whole and enjoys it in the company of the other. When you consume food you consume something of the world about you and so you make yourself part of that world. But when you have sex you give part of yourself, part of your own interior being, and take a part of the other person, part of their inner being.
Something more is involved than simply keeping yourself physically alive, or enjoying yourself with someone you like. Food keeps you alive and binds you to the world we live in. But sex has to do with making life itself, and binds you to the life that’s greater than any of us, and greater than the world we live in—the life that Julie calls God.
Sex has something directly to do with God. And as God fascinates her, is the most exciting, most important Event (her word, her capital E), she wanted to use her sex (her sexuality, her womanhood) to help her get to know God. Even though she doesn’t understand yet how to use it that way, and fails sometimes to resist the temptations that confuse her.
But no giving in to temptation tonight? I said.
Not tonight!
We both laughed.
I told her I thought I understood but that I’d never be able to do it myself, even if I thought it was right.
She said: Because you don’t believe yet. You want to know what belief feels like, don’t you? Well, I’m telling you what it feels like. Belief makes it possible for you to do crazy things other people who don’t believe can’t do.
Not even if they want to?
Not even then.
So you could sleep in the tent and you’d be okay after all?
Now I can.
Now but not before?
Because, she said, now I know that I was unconsciously testing myself I’ll be okay. Knowing that, I can resist temptation.
I said, laughing: But what about me? I’m just a weak unbeliever! Maybe I won’t be able to keep myself under control.
Then you’ll get a good strong believing tweak where the temptation hurts most, and I’ll evacuate to the sanctuary of the car.
Selah.
We spent the rest of the night talking. Or most of it.
And it was the happiest night of my life.
I’m wondering why.
Because we shared without demanding?
Because we gave without taking?
Because we received without expecting?
That’s what Julie would say, I think.
But then the next day happened.
Dear God, if you are there, WHY?
Chapter Four THOR’S DAY
When we finally went to bed I lay awa
ke, mind frying fat after our talk.
Whenever Julie turned over I felt the shifting shape of her against me, but muffled through two layers of cloth, an echo of a body.
Mind frying fat, body hungry.
I sweated.
My bare arm outside to cool me, my hand on bare ground. Soil like flesh. Stones beneath my fingers like bones. Naked earth.
Remembering Sweden. The huge magnificent elk, the lake, the boat, myself starkers in the sky, in the water, knowing as never before never since how everything is part of the same beyond-everything life. Remembering the timelessness of it, how I seemed to see into the heart of things and understand the mystery of the universe. Remembering the randy longing to be absorbed into it, to come into it, to lose myself in it.
All that feeling swept over me again as I lay there, and is so impossible to put into words. The words contradict each other:
a joy that hurts with sadness
a sadness that is pleasurable
a pleasure full of terror
a terror that excites
an excitement that calms
a calmness that frightens.
And I feel I am just about to make sense of it when it fades away and is gone, leaving behind a longing for it to come again, to feel the power of it, the awe.
Now in the tent my nakedness was wrapped in an imprisoning envelope, like the body of a maggot imprisoned in its cocoon while it is changed into a butterfly. Was I being changed like a maggot? And if so, into what? Does the maggot know what it will be when the time comes to break out? And who is performing the trick? Or am I my own magician and don’t know it?
The fat sizzled, burning thoughts to a frazzle.
And then the birds burst into their dawn chorus and blazed away, obliterating my thoughts and making me feel so exhausted at the sound of such wide-awake energy that I fell asleep at last.
But not for long.
Julie’s morning cold hand woke me, searching out my face hidden in the warm depths of my cocoon. She was dressed, her stuff cleared away, all ready for off.
We’ll stop, she said, somewhere along the road to wash and eat. Have this to get you going.
She stuck a slice of apple in my mouth.
Eve! I tried to say through her juicy gag.
If you’re playing that game, she said laughing, just remember that the nasty little serpent who caused the trouble by lying to
Eve about the apple was a he.
Pax, I said, holding up crossed fingers, pax!
How about unpaxing yourself so we can get moving?
Groan groan.
Best I can do this early, she said, and left me to slough my cocoon.
Selah.
Forget the damp morning, the grey clouds, the soggy grass, the geriatric car coughing and wheezing before it would start. Forget the shivery trip down the road to the nearest caff. Forget the caff’s tired washroom and the pongy loo. Forget the half-asleep waitress and the spongy toast. Forget our silence because I still hadn’t come to and Julie was miles away like Sunday mornings and for the same reason. Forget the drive into Cambridge, both of us perked up now and warm and the grey clouds letting through shafts of sunlight, brightening our spirits. Forget our chatter and jokes about last night.
Forget parking the car. Forget the explosion we heard as we walked away, heading for the centre of town, where the noise came from. Forget the worn-out joke I made, that the revolution had started at last. Forget the screaming sirens we heard soon afterwards, and the crowd we saw as we turned a corner, and more people running to join it. Forget us wondering what was going on, and edging our way to the front. Forget the policemen holding the crowd back.
Forget the scene down the empty street. Forget the blackened, crumpled, smoking remains of the exploded car. Forget the shattered windows of the buildings all around, the junkyard rubbish littering the road.
Forget the man lying splattered in the road. Forget his ripped clothes, his blackened body. Forget the draining blood. Forget his tortured, torturing cries.
Forget Julie asking the policeman what was happening. Forget her distress, her outrage, that nothing was being done to help the wounded man. Forget the policeman saying they were afraid the man might be the bomber himself, that he might be boobytrapped. Forget the bullhorn announcement that we should all clear the district in case of a second explosion.
Forget Julie flaring into anger. Forget her suddenly slipping past the policeman and sprinting towards the stricken man. Forget the policeman yelling after her. Forget my own shouts, screaming her name: Julie, Julie, come back, come back! Forget the awful gut-sick sense of doom. Forget my own desperate unthinking wild dash after her, the policeman beside me springing off at the same second.
Forget, as I pounded with leaden feet, seeing her reach the splattered man. Forget, forget seeing her bend over him. Forget her hands outstretched as if towards a lover. Forget, forget.
And then there is nothing to forget because my mind was blown and there is nothing to remember.
Only the breathtaking shock of Thor’s thunderbolt.
The explosion lifts him up,
hurls him down,
a crotch-hold and body-slam.
Out.
Conditioning him for death.
RETREAT
NIK’S NOTEBOOK: Now I know I must be calm.
Now I know I must write clearly.
Now I know my life has taken a new direction, and I must map it.
I know this because I’ve just got back from the hospital. What I saw there taught me.
They sent Old Vic for me. Julie’s mother phoned him. Julie was asking for me, calling for me from her deep unconscious. They asked Old Vic to take me to her, hoping my presence would help somehow.
We drove there in his down-at-wheel Volvo, big enough for his bigness, big enough for Old Chum collapsed on the grubby crumpled rugs in the back. Not big enough though to lose Old Chum’s decaying pong. But I hardly noticed after the first few throat-grabbing minutes.
We followed the same route we drove five days ago. Then in the dark, now in the light. Stared at the things I hadn’t seen then but couldn’t see now. Couldn’t think about them. My brain was stalled. Couldn’t move it from Julie.
I’m trying hard to write this the best I can. For Julie.
Because of her, the sight of her, a different voice speaks in my head now. But finding the right words, putting them in their best order, is taking ages. The green fingertip deletes and inserts and repositions time and again, and with long pauses, while I listen in the silence for the new voice, which comes like a faint radio signal from far away.
But writing—doing the writing—also soothes me.
Going through Banbury we passed a funeral.
I thought: I am seventeen and have not yet died.
A mother with a baby in her arms stood watching the coffin being loaded into the hearse.
I thought: I am seventeen and I am still being born.
Writing this now I think: The green fingertip writes my birth. I have not had such thoughts before. Where do they come from?
This is also how I know that I have changed direction. Have changed.
I do not like hospitals. I do not like their barracked look, their clean metalled clatter, their disinfected smell, their contained air of calamity, of pain bravely concealed behind forced smiles. I do not like the way they make illness and suffering a public spectacle.
For years and years you can be healthy and live your life in private. But when you get ill, seriously ill, you are put into a public room with strangers and there must perform the most intimate details of your life in full view of everyone. And this happens at a time when, because you are so ill, you need privacy the most. A double suffering. Organized torture.
But I feel uneasy writing this. Because another thing I do not like about hospitals is that they always make me feel I should be eternally grateful for them. The slightest criticism seems like a blasphemy, a sin, for which I might be str
uck down by some ugly and revengeful disease. But this is superstition.
INTERCUT: Julie in her hospital bed in an intensive care ward. Her eyes are bandaged but the rest of her face shows, scorched. Her hair burned away from the forehead, she is grotesquely bald. Her arms lie by her sides, covered in bandages encased in transparent polythene and ending in what look like swollen stumps. The rest of her body is covered by a single sheet and looks barrel-shaped because a wire cage over it keeps the sheet from touching. Nik stands at the side of the bed between a nurse, Simmo, and Old Vic, with a middle-aged woman, Julie’s mother, behind them.
Nik is staring at Julie, appalled. Her head twists slowly, side to side. She tries to raise a hand but it flops back onto the bed heavily, as if weighted. She moans, an agonized, anguishing sound only just decipherable as Nik’s name.
Nik’s face buckles. Instinctively, he stretches out a hand towards Julie’s, but hesitates when hers falls back. Then, slowly, he gently places his hand against her cheek.
Julie’s moaning stops. And the twisting of her head.
For a moment the whole room is tense, waiting.
Slowly pull focus into a big close-up of Julie’s face. Nik’s hand on her cheek.
Silence, except for the sound of clinical machines and of Julie’s breathing, which gradually settles into a calm, quiet rhythm.
Then, with a just discernible movement, Julie’s head presses against Nik’s hand, snuggling.
Julie sighs.
In the car, coming back, the world was torn.
I have never seen anything that shattered me as much as the sight of Julie.
Yes, I have seen worse things, more terrible. TV pictures of thousands of people starving to death in the African drought. Old film clips from the second world war of the Nazis’ death camps with heaps of naked and emaciated bodies rotting outside the gas chambers round which the survivors shuffled like ghosts. Those are two of the very worst. They stick in the gullet of my memory. Just thinking of them upsets me. But not in the same way, not as crushingly somehow, as the sight of Julie and thinking of her now.
For I have felt her charred flesh on my hand and heard her pain through my bones.