Death of a God (4 page)

‘I meant the ones in the lifeboat, actually.'

They were too old, Jurnet decided. Himself certainly, his thirties sliding slowly but inexorably out of sight like a coffin in a crematorium, furnace-ward. But Miriam too. Delicious, still young enough to be called a girl without anyone cocking a cynical eyebrow; but she'd been around, as they said, she knew the score. More than her new coat, or the Gucci bag dangling from her shoulder, proclaimed a winner: it was implicit in every movement of her slender yet voluptuous body, in the assured posture of the head capped with a mist of bronze hair so artlessly natural it had to cost a bomb to keep it that way. More than all of this was an assurance – aristocratic was the only word for it – born of an ancestry ancient enough to make half the crowned heads of Europe look like a bunch of immigrants just landed on the Essex marshes. If Jews, Jurnet reflected, moving along at her side with a proper deference, didn't know where they were going these days any more than the rest of the human race, they sure as hell knew where they'd come from.

Almost all the others of the close-packed crowd inching slowly towards its goal of the Middlemass Auditorium were drearily, stridently, or touchingly young; so chuffed to be moving purposefully for once that it seemed almost a pity, the detective thought, they ever had to arrive, to find themselves confronted all over again with a new situation upon which a stance had to be taken, even if it was only what to do with your anorak once you got inside. A few, Jurnet's experienced eyes told him, had fortified themselves against all such decision-taking with a preliminary joint, and now floated along, smiling foolishly, but there was none, so far as he could see, with the yellow skin and the pupils which, to anyone who could read the signs, spelled smack, the big H. Seemingly, young Blaker had known whereof he spoke when he had predicted so confidently that there would be no trouble the night Second Coming came to town.

The Middlemass Auditorium, set down among lawns a prophylactic distance from the brutal bulk of the main University buildings, looked terrific in the moonlight. It could have been an aircraft hangar until you came inside, into an immense vestibule set about with the world-famous collection of ethnic statuary which Sir Cedric Middlemass, the super-market tycoon, had donated to the University among his many other benefactions.

For all their much-proclaimed liberation from the burden of sexual shame, the youngsters coming in from the frosty air all too obviously found these gods and goddesses from far-off places, with their protuberant jaws, exuberant breasts, and tumescent sexual organs, an embarrassment. They passed by with eyes averted, not looking at one another either.

Miriam, whom nothing could daunt, giggled, and nibbled at Jurnet's ear as if the proximity of such a predatory pantheon had awakened the praying mantis in her.

‘Can you imagine actually having them about the house? My guess is, Lady Middlemass said to Sir Hubby, ‘‘Either they go or I do!'' So the poor man, loving his wife, had this place built to house them. I mean, you could hardly leave them out for the dustman to take away.'

‘I could,' Jurnet said.

The Auditorium proper, apart from two garlanded figures which sat at either side of the proscenium arch with enormous hands on their knees, grinning at the incoming audience with the ferocious jollity of crocodiles viewing the arrival of their next meal, was blessedly free of ethnic artefacts. It was a place of cool plastered walls, and terraces which cascaded gracefully down to a stage, empty at the moment save for three stools, some amplifiers, a formidable set of drums, a couple of guitar stands, and several young men in jeans and T-shirts acting importantly amid a battery of microphones. An older man, nattily got up in a white polo-necked sweater, slacks that were a shade too tight, and a camel-colour hacking jacket whose side slits, whenever he moved, gaped like the beaks of ravenous nestlings, went to and fro speaking what appeared to be an officious word or two to now one, now another, of the young men who continued with their tasks without making any apparent acknowledgement of his existence. The backcloth to the stage was made of some dense black material decorated with an enormous rainbow. When the cloth moved, as it did from time to time, stirred by some draught or by bodies moving behind it, the rainbow, sewn all over with sequins, glittered and rippled in a scaly way that Jurnet, for one, found distinctly off-putting.

‘And why a black cloth?' he demanded, ramming himself into his grey-upholstered seat. At least the seating was comfortable, that was something to be thankful for. If he had only thought to bring along a pair of ear-plugs he could have been in for a tolerable evening, even managed to snatch a bit of shut-eye. ‘Never yet saw a rainbow in a black sky!'

‘Magic!' pronounced Miriam. She had taken off her white coat, and with it the air of knowingness which so often troubled her lover:
what was it she knew that he didn't?
In her red dress, very short, she looked as young as the kids all about her. Her eyes, bright with excitement, were wide and wondering as a child's. If there was any difference between her and the teenagers breathlessly awaiting the appearance of their idol, it was, thought Jurnet, that she looked too innocent. Looking about him, the detective decided ignorance was OK, even something to be cultivated lovingly like a pot plant with its own finicky likes and dislikes in the way of light and water. But innocence! Acne was more socially acceptable.

Miriam said, ‘This is a night when anything could happen, rainbows in black skies included. For heaven's sake, Ben Jurnet –' she smiled with a radiance nicely calculated to take the sting out of her words – ‘can't you forget you're a policeman, just for once?' She leaned forward in her seat and pointed approvingly downhill: ‘Why, even that golden oldie in the front row, the one in the Fair Isle pullover, keeps bobbing up and down like a yo-yo –'

Jurnet followed the direction of her finger and commented, ‘Not surprising. It's God who's jerking the string. That's his Lordship the Bish.'

‘The Bishop! Got up like that?' Digesting her, at first, disapproving surprise. ‘Well, there you are, then! If even he can enter into the spirit of the thing, why can't you?'

The Bishop, benignly tonsured by time, in tweeds but with a pectoral cross to show that his heart was in the right place, was dividing his pleasantries between his chaplain, a young man with the terrible defensive jokiness of the lesser clergy and more teeth than he knew what to do with, and a grimly unresponsive middle-aged woman whose ample upholstery of bosom and bum was encased in a floral stretch cover at the end of its tether.

Miriam, appalled, exclaimed, ‘That's never the bishopess!'

‘Name of Lark, can you believe it? Chair, as they say, of the Parks and Recreation Committee.'

Jurnet bent forward for a better look. The ageing trendy in the hacking jacket had come down from the platform and was making himself pleasant to the distinguished guests. The Bishop bounced up and down co-operatively, the only one in the whole audience, the detective decided, who looked as innocent as Miriam. Parks and Recreation sat unmoved and unmoving.

On the stage, the gleaming array of drums and cymbals stood about on their insect-like supports, waiting for the kiss of life. Yet, strangely, the beat was there already. Stealthily, so that one could never have noted its beginning, it filled the air, as explicit as if the great Lijah already sat enthroned there, commanding the bass and the tom-toms, the snare and the hi-hat, to jump to it, babies, let's get the show on the road.

In the circumstances, then, when a deep, gong-like note resonated through his head, pierced his solar plexus, and fanned out into the space between his shoulder blades, Jurnet did not at first think to seek its origin outside himself. It was the beat, the beat. Only when Miriam nudged him and whispered, ‘Lijah Starling!' did he realize that the drummer had indeed arrived and was greeting his subjects.

Black against the black backcloth and dressed in black from head to foot, there he was, the noble figure Jurnet had last seen convulsed on a cross in the Market Place, resurrected, white teeth flashing, braids click-clicking, pink palms moving tenderly to adjust the angle of a cymbal, the tension of a snare.

There was no applause, except from the Bishop's chaplain, forever doomed to do the wrong thing for the right reason: none of the delighted screeches of recognition Jurnet remembered from the old days. Only a small collective sigh.

Not long now.

Next to appear was Johnny Flowerdew, the bass guitar, dressed in black like the drummer, but his whole appearance, nevertheless, so studiously undramatic as to appear, in that context, quite shocking. His guitar tucked under one arm like a tennis racquet, he raised his free hand in desultory salute to anyone who might be about, crossed the stage and plugged the instrument into the electrics with the absent-minded ease of one popping a slice of bread into the toaster.

All in all, it was a little gem of comic mime, a momentary lessening of tension nicely calculated to deepen the intensity of what was to come. Jurnet felt Miriam's hand seeking his own, which he surrendered with an astonished thankfulness, as if the two of them had never held hands before.

I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine.

Save for a weak bulb or two over the exits, the lights went out, onstage and in auditorium alike. In the distance a drum began to beat – impossible that it could be Lijah Starling playing with his shiny toys. The sound came, or seemed to come, not just from far away in distance – from outside the hall, outside the University – but from far away in time.

Far. Farther. Farthest.

In the beginning was the beat.

The drumbeat grew louder, nearer. Out of the darkness the bass guitar hailed its approach with deep, happy notes of recognition. The guitar became playful; teased the approaching drum, dared it to hurry up, go faster, come. The rainbow on the backcloth gleamed softly for a second or two, then burst into a brilliance which bathed the black face of Lijah Starling and the white face of Johnny Flowerdew in impartial orange. Jurnet passed his tongue over his dry lips.

Cheap, noisy, brainless, were adjectives which occurred to him fleetingly, glancing off his consciousness like tangents off a circle, touching but not intersecting. His fingers, entwined with Miriam's, had become hot and a little sweaty.

Cheap, noisy, brainless, he reminded himself, without conviction.

In the beginning was the beat.

And the beat was God.

A rustle went through the audience. What began as an inarticulate whisper expanded into a cresting wave of sound, its tone something between a petition and a demand.

‘Loy!'

It was the damnedest thing. There he stood, all in white between his black-clad companions, his back to a rainbow returned to its original scaliness; a gangling youth with pale, pinched features, nothing to write home about, the only note of colour his straight, reddish hair falling to his shoulders – hair that could have used a comb to advantage, to say nothing of a wash.
That's
the great Loy Tanner? There he stood, this bleached object, this nullity, possessed of a beauty so intense and so strange that the beholder, drawn by some invisible magnet, was absorbed into its strangeness and its beauty, dazzled by its wonder, racked with the pain of its transcendent loneliness.

‘Loy!' cried a voice among the multitude of voices crying ‘Loy!' as if their owners had beheld the heavens open. It came as no particular surprise to Jurnet to discover that the voice was his own.

Loy Tanner sang. His voice, like everything else about him, there in the Middlemass Auditorium that cold March night, was beautiful and strange. Etched against the backing of drums and guitars, it rose high and true as a choirboy's, except that it was no child's voice which enmeshed its hearers in a web of honeyed sound and held them there, collaborators in their own extinction. There was no perceivable showmanship, no acknowledgement, even, that an audience was there at all. He sang, strumming his guitar as if absent-mindedly, swaying slightly backwards and forwards – much as, Jurnet suddenly recalled with no sense of incongruity, Rabbi Schnellman every sabbath in Angleby Synagogue rocked to and fro on his heels whilst he chanted the praises of the One Lord, blessed be He.

Except that Loy Tanner's song was directed to a very different address.

‘The woman clothed with the sun,
She is the one!
She holds me,
Enfolds me
In a close embrace.
Face to face,
I feel the heat of her flame.
She calls me by my name.
She illumes me,
Consumes me,
The woman clothed with the sun –
The one!'

Outside, in the one-time kitchen garden, the cars were frosted under the freezing moon. They started sluggishly, moved off uncertainly, as if, like their occupants, reluctant to resume the life they were made for.

As Jurnet edged his vehicle along at walking pace between the crowds still patiently waiting, Miriam said suddenly, ‘Go by the Market Place, would you mind? I'd like to take a proper look at those crosses.'

‘OK. If you want. Though why –'

‘I've never seen them close to, and I should think they'll be taking them down after tonight.'

‘If you want,' Jurnet said again, contriving to make his ready compliance sound grumpy and disobliging. The detective was feeling deeply angry with himself. For the best part of two hours of twang, bang and boom, of indifferent tunes and crude vulgarizations of Biblical texts which deserved a better fate, he had been – like Bottom in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, and with as little say in the matter – translated. That all about him were fellow-asses in similar case was no consolation. When the lights came up in the interval he had seen them moving their heads about, vaguely smiling, unable or unwilling to surface out of the cheap but potent fantasy in which they had been submerged.