Now I Know (10 page)

This sight did nothing for my equilibrium. Which was not at all helped, either, by my memory recalling at this inopportune moment that hymn they make you sing at infant school: ‘God be in my head, / and in my understanding; / God be in my eyes,/ and in my looking; / God be in my mouth, / and in my speaking; / God be in my heart and . . .'
Poop-poop
.

At which I really collapsed. I flung myself down behind the pew and rammed as much of my sweater into my mouth as it could take without suffocating myself. Here I slunk while the bout of laughter wracked my tortured frame.

O God, I thought, don't let me . . . don't let me . . .

(I've just realized this was the first time I've prayed since I was ten and asked for Mum back. When she didn't come, I decided God wasn't there after all or he'd have done something about it. As if God was nothing more than a megastar Santa Claus.)

So there I am, doubled up in this prayer box with a mouth full of sodden sweater, shaking with frustrated giggles, while Julie kneels beside me as rigid as a memorial, and the old nun goes on happily rumbling and pooping, and at the altar Old Vic tells the lord we're humbly sorry for all our sins, when this wizzened old guy appears in the aisle bending towards me with a worried look on his face and a glass of water in his hand and hissing: All right? . . . Like a drink?

Had to leave, nothing else for it. I'd have died if I hadn't or had hysterics. Death or cachinnation. Neither quite the thing in church. Not that church anyway. And I didn't want to make life worse for Julie, did I. A knave in the nave.

‘I'm not sure you're fit to be let out in public,' Julie said afterwards.

‘Why?' Nik said. ‘Doesn't God have a sense of humour?'

‘As she made you, I suppose she must have.'

‘She?'

‘Why not? If God is everything, that must mean God is a she as well as a he, mustn't it? So if you call God he, I don't see why I shouldn't call her she.'

‘Or it, as he/she is everything and must therefore be stones and stars as well as male and female?'

‘Why not?'

Nik shrugged. ‘It's your God. But I didn't know you lot went in for such explosive worship.'

‘She's a very old nun and a bit deaf.'

‘And full of the power of the lord.'

‘See what you're like at her age. If you live that long.'

‘The trouble was, I thought maybe you'd want us all to join in with a rousing chorus of—'

‘You're not going to turn crude, are you?'

‘Is it a sin on Sundays?'

‘No. Just tedious.'

‘You weren't exactly the soul of solemnity yourself.'

‘D'you always talk like that or only on your off days?'

‘Depends on the company I keep. But it was funny, though. Admit it.'

‘It was funny. But she's a dear old woman, and a friend of mine, and very devout. She'd be horrified if she knew.'

‘Won't say a word, honest.'

They were walking back to Julie's house.

‘Tell you what,' Nik said. ‘You've taken me to your church. Now I'll take you to mine.'

‘Surprise, surprise! Where?'

‘Selsley Common.'

Julie laughed. ‘With the kite flyers and the babies being aired and the dogs out for walkies.'

‘And the cows. Don't forget the cows. Free range cows as well. None of your battery farm religion up there. Not like your place, with everybody stuck in a pew being fattened up for heaven.'

‘So you're a closet pantheist really. That explains your mucky mind.'

‘No, no. You've got me all wrong. I'm not a pantheist. I'm a
pen
theist.'

‘Oh dear!'

‘Well, actually, if you must know, I just like a good view. Besides, when we get back to your place you might not invite me in, whereas, if we go up on the common—'

‘It'll take the rest of this morning and half this afternoon, and I've promised to help with the cooking. So we'll go in my car, if you don't mind, and be back by eleven. Will that do?'

‘You've got a car?'

‘Don't get excited, it's not a Porsche.'

‘I don't care if it's a motorized orange box, it's better than my leg-powered bike.'

‘Never mind. When you're grown up you can put an engine in your pram and be just like all the other big boys.'

‘Wow, thanks! Will I have to wait long?'

‘About another twenty years at your present rate of progress.'

‘That long!'

‘Be glad. Most of your sex never grow out of being little boys.'

‘Don't you like men?'

‘When I can find any. There aren't that many around.'

NIK
'
S NOTEBOOK
:   She's not butch, I don't mean that. Just tough-minded. You wouldn't think so to look at her. And she's poker-voiced but not poker-faced. So just to hear her, you'd think she was as hard as nails. When you look at her, you know she's a kidder.

Her car is a prehistoric Mini she claims she maintains herself with a little help from her brother who just happens to be a motor mechanic. She treats it like she was ignoring it. Drives like that too. Functional precision.

I said: She goes well.

She
, she said, refers to human beings. This is a machine and hasn't a soul.

I said: You don't like machines?

She said: They're all right. Very useful. But machines are machines. If you treat them like people you end up treating people like machines. Which I'm against.

I didn't argue about that because I don't know if she's right, but I shall have a think about it and when I've decided it'll make a nice subject for another day. And that's something else I like about her. Two things in fact. She makes me think. And she likes a good argument.

Selah.

Being such a Christian nation, the great British public was still fervently worshipping the lord between the sheets so, of course, the common was the way I like it. I.e.: Empty of the human animal. Except inevitably for one or two compulsive underwear flashers. It's amazing. It doesn't matter where you go or what time it is there's always at least one panting and puffing middle-aged duffer lolloping across the landscape like a lost soul everlastingly on the hunt for the way out.

Note for film
: If Christ came back today, he'd have to turn up as a body-building health-freak jogging fanatic with a regular programme on TV. Otherwise, none of the great proletarian masses would pay him any attention at all. So I suggest we start the film with a TV ad in which our recycled Christ performs his first miracle: turning a titchy chickenwhite wimp of a man into a bronzed Tarzan by one application of New Messiah suntan oil and then telling him to take up his metal and pump. That done, he says, Follow me, and they go off together, jogging into an explosive sunrise, as the title CHRIST COMES AGAIN appears on the screen.

Selah.

We parked at the far end, near the cattle grid, and walked to the edge. The usual great view, clear enough today to see Wales and the Black Mountains. In the valley, the glint of the Severn snaking; the twin towers of Berkeley nuke power station, square tombs picked out by the sun; the bluff of the scarp fluffed with trees gloomy in shadow close by on the bend, hiding Bristol; in the other direction Haresfield Beacon blocking the view to Gloucester. And through the upriver gap, the Malvern hills breasting up from the plain. A sharp blue sky edging on the horizon to pale grey.

We were standing side by side taking it all in when a strange thing happened.

In a field steeply below us was a man. He was bending over, his hands in the grass. As we watched, he suddenly sprang up, a rabbit grasped in one hand by its back legs. As he rose, he swung the rabbit up into the air, caught its head in his other hand and brought it down, across his raised leg, snapping its neck sharply across his knee. Then he held the rabbit out at arm's length by the back legs.

The animal gave a number of convulsive kicks that made its body jerk and its loose head flop about. And the man, waiting for the death to end, looked up the hillside, where he saw us watching. He grinned, and raised his empty hand and waved, and when we didn't wave or move at all, he held the dying rabbit high above his head and shook it at us in triumph, making its head flip-flap again. Then he turned and set off down the field in a bounding kind of run, the rabbit jigging about in his hand, till he reached a gate in the hedge, vaulted over, and disappeared from sight.

For a while neither of us, so stunned, even blinked. Then Julie let out a painful, bitten cry and slumped to the ground, where she sat cross-legged, staring across the valley, stonefaced, but her eyes pleading.

I waited, not knowing what to do or to say. What I wanted, just like yesterday, was to touch her, take hold of her. Yesterday I didn't. Couldn't. Today, seeing the bleakness of her, frozen there, a kind of grieving, I couldn't not. So I crouched down and put my arms round her.

STOCKSHOT
:   . . .
by history and parables we are nourished; by allegory we grow; by morality we are perfected . . .

†

Something niggled at the back of Tom's mind. A hunch.

His sense of smell was as acute as Nik's sense of touch. And the old man at the scene-of-crime had smoked roll-your-owns. Had reeked of it, even in the open air, a musky-sweet acidy stench coming off his mucky sweater. Tom had disliked him at once, and not only because of the stink of tobacco. More because of the cheery pretence of being co-operative that didn't hide well enough a suspicious attitude.

One of the first things Tom had learned to recognize after joining the force was the prejudice, the mistrust, the dislike, that many people harboured against the police. For a while this had upset him; after all, he only wanted to uphold the law; and people were pretty quick to call the police when they were in trouble. But soon he had grown a skin thick enough to protect himself. ‘As a copper,' the sarge had told him one day when Tom was beefing about the way someone had treated him, ‘you're on your own. Don't ever expect anybody to help you. Then all you'll get are nice surprises.'

Besides, in criminal investigation the first rule is that nobody's above suspicion; not even yourself. So why care what people think? Mugs or villains, they're all the same because anybody can break the law. Some do more often than others, and some worse than others, that's all. Nobody's honest, everybody's a villain, and his job was to stop them if he could and catch them if he couldn't. As he enjoyed the excitement of running a villain to earth more than the steady plod of prevention, he'd always wanted to be a detective. Now he had an unexpected early chance to prove he was up to the job. And he was damned if he was going to balls it up.

What he needed was to know the chat. That was what all the CID bods started with. Straight on the blower to their snouts, thus saving themselves time and leg work. But not being a CID man yet, Tom didn't have any snouts to bell. Never mind, everybody had to begin sometime, and there was no time like the present.

At this present time of day there was only one place where the juvenile scum would be. Though eleven-thirty was early for the best mouths. They'd still be festering in their pits, giving themselves hand jobs over page three while waiting for their mums to nag them downstairs for mid-day fish and chips. But you never knew your luck.

Tom parked in the multi-storey and walked through the shopping precinct to the snooker hall.

†

‘My arm's going to sleep,' Julie said, easing away.

‘Pity,' Nik said, ‘I was enjoying that.'

‘Let's walk a bit. The breeze is cool.'

They got up and sauntered. A few more people were about by now. A pair of early teenage girls on podgy ponies cantered by. Further along, two young men, all togged up, eye-catching, prepared a hang-glider for flight, fitting together the jigsaw of the glider's bits and pieces.

‘This job you do,' Nik said. ‘What is it?'

‘Nothing special. I'm a dogsbody in reception at a health centre in Gloucester. I see the patients in, type letters, keep records, run errands for the doctors—that kind of thing.'

‘You're going to be a doctor?'

Julie laughed. ‘No no! I'm not clever enough for that. It's just a job. Not that I'd want to be a doctor, even if I could. Too squeamish. As you saw just now.'

Nik, not smiling, said, ‘Was that really squeamishness?'

Julie, glancing at him, shook her head. ‘Not just.' Her mouth was drawn tight. ‘Can't bear wanton cruelty.'

They walked a few paces in silence, letting the after-image fade. The cantering girls went galloping heavily by close enough to smell the animals' body heat and feel the earth shudder beneath their feet.

‘Do you ride?' Nik asked.

‘No. I did go through the phase of wanting to, though. Desperately. But the nearest I got was riding a bike, which I gather,' laughing, ‘doesn't provide quite the same thrill.'

Nik, laughing too, said, ‘They say it's all sex really.'

‘Some people say everything is all sex really.'

‘Do you?'

‘Do you?'

‘Well—'

‘Come on, be honest.'

‘Can't say. Haven't enough experience to know.'

Julie snorted. ‘Ha! There's a cop-out for you.'

‘But it's true! I don't have enough experience to know.'

‘Will you ever?'

‘What's this—sixth-form phil. and psych.?'