Garden of Evil (17 page)

‘One day she didn't come home and they found her in Selma Park, and she was dead. One of those guys must have given her too much smack and then dumped her when she OD'd. So that's the true part of the poem. You give somebody too much, more than they deserve, and you end up killing them. They're gone.'

‘Well, that's a very sad story, Tommy, even though I'm not too sure that the poem really says that, and I'm not too clear what your point is.'

‘The point is, I was so glad when she died,' said Tommy, his face flushing even redder. ‘It was like I finally got my revenge on my dad, right? It was better than sticking a knife in him, because he had lost his beautiful, clever Khrista for ever, and he was stuck with stupid, ugly me, and it was
his
fault. Like,
yessss
!'

The classroom was silent. Jim saw that one or two students were staring at Tommy, and they were obviously shocked. But most of them looked as if they understood how he felt, and some of them were actually nodding in approval.

He turned to Simon Silence, to see if he was smiling, and of course he was. But it was not the sloping, self-satisfied smile that he usually smiled. It was a smile of quiet acknowledgement, as if everything was working out just the way he wanted it.

‘All right,' said Jim, ‘I think that's enough about
The Book of Years.
The poet who wrote it, John Lupo, said himself that it was all about memory, and how our lives seem to be so different when we look back at them. Why the hell didn't we see some of the things that were going on right under our noses? Why didn't we realize what was about to happen to us, before it was too late?

‘Anyhow – now I'm going to hand out some papers which have ten sentences on them. Some of these sentences have words that are spelled incorrectly, or very bad mistakes in grammar.'

‘
Grammar
?' frowned DaJon Johnson. ‘Like, a grammar coke?'

‘Grammar like in the English language, DaJon. I think even you know that.'

He started to walk slowly down the side of the classroom, giving four papers to the students sitting at the end of the benches, so that they could pass them down. He had just handed four papers to Tommy Makovicka when his attention was caught by one of the scores of pictures on the wall beside him.

Pinned up among the garish landscapes and lopsided vases of orchids and misshapen animals was a small, dark portrait of a smiling man. One of the reasons Jim noticed it was because its surface was shining in the morning sunlight, as if it had been freshly painted. Not only that, it looked much more professional than all of the other pictures.

He went across to study it more closely. As he approached it he experienced that same shrinking-skin sensation as he had when Bethany had appeared at the top of the stairs. The portrait was a scaled-down version of the last Storyteller that Ricky had been attempting to paint, with his gray skin and his knobbly horns and his triumphant grin. Six or seven small children were gathered around him with expectant expressions on their faces as if they were waiting for him to tell them how bombastic God was, and how effete Jesus had been, and how the Bible was nothing but lies and riddles and fairy stories.

Again, without any warning, Jim felt that deep surge of empowerment, as if this Satanic creature could give him the strength to do anything he wanted. So far, he had used his gift of seeing spirits and demons only to protect himself and his friends and the students of Special Class Two, and to give peace to some poor bewildered souls who hadn't understood that they had passed over. But now, when he looked at this picture, he felt that he could not only talk to the dead, if they appeared, but that he could
summon
them. He could call them, as many as he wanted, and once he had called them he could command them.

He stepped back. He was aware that Simon Silence was watching him. He could see him out of the corner of his eye, but he didn't turn around. Instead, he handed four test papers to Al Alvarez, and then went on to give four more to DaJon Johnson.

‘How long we got for this, Mr Rook?' DaJon Johnson asked him. ‘Like, I'm kind of a slow reader, innit? I have to savor every word like a fine wine, like.'

Jim didn't answer him. He was staring out of the windows at the back of Art Studio Four, down to the grassy slope and the eucalyptus grove. Standing on the slope were more than seventy or eighty people, all of them looking up at him. They were perfectly motionless, all of them, and they were all pale-faced. Even the African-Americans and the Asians among them had a gray, ashy appearance.

Some of them were dressed in dusty-looking suits, or faded sweats, in gray and maroon. Others wore yellowed nightgowns or crumpled pajamas. The morning breeze lifted their hair and made their clothes flap, but apart from that, none of them moved.

Jim stood and stared at them for nearly a minute. After a while he became conscious that Simon Silence was standing very close behind him.

‘I think you're forgetting that you have a test paper to complete,' he said, although he knew that he didn't sound very authoritative.

‘What can you see, Mr Rook?' asked Simon, quietly. ‘What are you looking at, out there on the grass? There's nothing there that
I
can see, Mr Rook.'

‘I think you know exactly what I'm looking at,' Jim told him. ‘The point is, what are they all doing here?'

Simon Silence didn't answer at first, so Jim turned around to face him. There was no doubt that Simon Silence's features had altered, and that his forehead seemed to be much more pronounced, as if he were permanently frowning.

‘You were the one who called them, Mr Rook. They heard you, and they came. It won't be long now, and you will have the power to call all of them –
all
of them, and they will come through from the other side in their hundreds of thousands. In their
millions
.'

‘But why the hell would I
want
to call them? Tell me that.'

Simon Silence reverted to that sly, self-satisfied smile. ‘You will call them, Mr Rook, because you are the only one who can, and because it will make you feel greater than any man on Earth, or in Heaven. It will make you feel even greater than the Lord God Not-So-Very-Almighty, amen.'

J
im stared down for another few seconds at the people standing motionless on the grassy slope, and then he said to Simon Silence, ‘Back to your seat, OK? Get on with your work.'

‘Aren't you going to go outside to welcome your flock?' asked Simon Silence, in mock surprise. ‘They're waiting for you.'

‘You said yourself that you can't see them,' Jim retorted. ‘How do you even know that there's anybody there?'

‘Oh, they're there all right, Mr Rook. I can feel them. My father says that you can always tell when the dead are close by. It feels as if the wind has changed around, and the barometer's falling.'

‘Just sit down and finish your test, Simon.'

‘Whatever you say, Mr Rook. I just hope your flock won't be too disappointed.'

Jim said nothing but returned to his desk. He was strongly tempted to go down to the grassy slope and tell the spirits who were gathered there that he had nothing to offer them, and that they would be better off returning to the other side. They were dead, and so far as he was aware there was no way that he could bring them back to life, even if Simon Silence said that he could.

He spent most of the afternoon teaching Special Class Two how to spell awkward words like ‘necessary' and ‘argument' and ‘geography.'

‘You just have to learn a little phrase, that's all. It's called a mnemonic, not that you have to remember that. Take the word “necessary” . . . just say to yourself “not every cat eats sardines – some are really yummy”. Or, “geography” . . . “General Eisenhower's oldest granddaughter rode a pony home yesterday”. Or, “argument” . . . “a rude girl undresses, my eyes need taping”.

‘I'll tell you something else . . . when two vowels go walking, it's the first one does the talking . . . like “beach” or “coat” or “rain” . . . words like that.'

‘So how come “bitch” is always pronounced “be-atch”?' asked DaJon Johnson.

‘I'm going to ignore that comment,' Jim told him. ‘I don't care how you speak out on the street. But in here, in this classroom, you're going to learn to speak and spell so that you can hold your own against anybody – a potential employer, a teacher, a cop, a store manager, a waiter in a restaurant –
anybody –
no matter what situation you happen to find yourselves in. Knowing how to speak grammatically and spell well, that's the greatest power that you can ever have.'

To finish up the day, he read them a passage from
Go Tell It On The Mountain,
James Baldwin's novel about a Pentecostal Church in Harlem called the Temple of the Fire Baptized. DaJon Johnson closed his eyes and nodded off while he was reading but Jim let him sleep. He wasn't snoring too loudly and Jim was mainly reading this for Simon Silence, nobody else.

In the last scenes of the novel, the hero, John, has a dreamlike vision of heaven and hell, and believes that he has found Jesus. But the Reverend Gabriel, the leader of the church which has inspired him, is a moral hypocrite, and has a sordid past of womanizing and drunkenness and adultery.

‘So what did we learn from this little story?' said Jim, as he closed the book and dropped it with a bang on to his desk, so that DaJon Johnson woke up with a jolt. Before anybody in the class could answer, he said, ‘What we learn is that sometimes those people who set themselves up as messengers of God are not all that they pretend to be. Sometimes they exploit people's weaknesses and vulnerabilities to further their own ends. To make money, or to satisfy their sexual urges, or simply because they love to dominate other people – even to the point of deciding if they live or die. Think of Jonestown.

‘That's one of the reasons you need to be very good at English . . . so that you can tell when somebody's flimflamming you. They might be a salesman or a card player or a priest, it doesn't matter. It's important for you to be able to tell the difference between somebody who's sincere, and somebody who's a huckster.'

Simon Silence put up his hand. ‘You really are very cynical, Mr Rook. What about faith? If all of his disciples had suspected that Jesus was a fraud, there never would have been a Christian religion, would there?'

Jim said, ‘Maybe. But if everybody had been able to see that Satan was an out-and-out swindler, there wouldn't have been any call for a Christian religion. You don't need saving if you know how to save yourself.'

All afternoon, he resisted the temptation to go to the window to see if the dead people were still standing on the grassy slope outside. Eventually, as the last stragglers pushed their way out of the door, he went to the back of the classroom and looked out.

There was nobody there, only two girls from the West Grove Athletics Team, jogging together, one blonde and one brunette.

He stayed there for a while, but the dead had definitely gone back to the world beyond – for now, anyhow. He didn't know if he felt sorry for them or not. They were probably better off where they were.

He fastened his briefcase, closed the door of Art Studio Four behind him, and went home.

As he climbed the steps to his apartment, Summer's apartment door suddenly opened and Summer stepped out. Her hair was wrapped up in a towel and she was wearing a pink halter top and a short pink denim skirt with an appliqué picture of a smiling cartoon cat on it. She still had a purplish-yellowish bruise on her left cheek where he had slapped her.

‘Summer!' said Jim. ‘I was going to call on you later. I think I owe you an abject apology, to say the least.'

Summer slowly shook her head from side to side. ‘You don't have to apologize, Jimmy. It was just as much my fault as it was yours.'

‘Summer, for Christ's sake. I practically raped you.'

‘Only 'cause I wasn't in the mood for it. I would have willingly particified, else.'

‘Excuse me?'

‘I really, really like you, Jim. I'd love us to do the wild thing together. But like
equals
, right? Not you jumping on top of me or me jumping on top of you. Or taking it in turns, at least.'

Jim said, ‘I hit you. How can you forgive me for that?'

‘Well, that's easy,' she said. She turned away slightly and then she swung her arm and slapped him across the face, so stunningly hard that he almost lost his balance and fell backward over the railing.

‘Jesus!' he said. ‘Shit!'

He pressed his hand against his cheek and said, ‘Shit, Summer – that really, really hurt!'

Summer smiled at him and said, ‘There – you're forgiven! Is that OK?'

Jim touched his cheek again. ‘Shit.' Then he went up to her, wrapped his arms around her and kissed her full on the lips. She had just applied pink shiny lip gloss which tasted strongly of synthetic strawberries, but he didn't mind that – in fact he found its cheapness arousing. She put her arms around him, too, and they stood on the landing kissing for over a minute, their tongues fighting each other like two argumentative seals.

Summer gripped Jim through his pants and said, ‘I want you, Jimmy Rook. Don't ever think that I don't. But it has to be, like,
Paradise
.'

Jim stopped kissing her and frowned at her, although she was so close that her face was out of focus.

‘What do you mean, Paradise?'

‘Just you and me, Jimmy. Nobody else. Like the Garden of Eden.'

‘I'm not too sure I follow what you're saying.'

Summer gave him a second hard squeeze and kissed him. ‘You will when it comes, Jimmy. When kingdom comes. When
we
come, you and me. When we're naked and we know it and we couldn't care less what God thinks about it.'