Wake Up Happy Every Day (40 page)

Someone, somewhere, hasn’t just thought about this. Someone, somewhere, has done it.

There’s a knock at the door. She jumps. It’s like someone has been reading her thoughts and is so disgusted that they’ve come to stop her thinking any more of them. And it’s not her mum’s knock, her mum doesn’t knock. This is a man’s knock. A confident man’s knock.

The door opens and she sees Mervyn’s face. He looks serious.

‘Came as soon as I could. Got a lift most of the way. Cabbie who’d seen me on
Newsnight
. Wouldn’t take a fare.’ A pause, then, ‘I’ve had a look at Daniel. I think he’s had a big stroke. If he really won’t go to hospital then it’s probably just a case of waiting now. And keeping him comfortable.’

Polly is suddenly really glad he’s here.

‘Come in, Mervyn. Come and talk to me. And close the door.’

She can always eBay the package.

Forty-four

SARAH

A homeless guy. Nothing remarkable about him. Another motionless kid in the stained pupa of his sleeping bag, lying by an ATM on California Street. Next to him is a takeaway coffee mug. Starbucks. Trente-sized, though it looks like someone has actually bitten a lump out of the rim, there are jagged edges that are definitely suggestive of teeth marks. Nevertheless it’s half full of nickels and dimes. And Sarah bends down and stuffs in her own five-dollar bill. There’s no acknowledgement. The sleeping bag doesn’t stir. If the body inside was dead, how long before anyone noticed? And how long after that before someone removed the corpse? The money would definitely go first.

And, as she stands looking down, there is a spastic wriggle deep in the depths of the bag. A rustle that tells her there’s life here. And relief pulses through her, she can feel it moving through her body just like blood.

And then she thinks sod it, and stuffs all the cash in her purse into the mug. A couple more fives, a twenty. A fifty. A lot of change. She fills the trente and hugs herself as she walks on. Nice to be nice. And it’s only money.

Sarah remembers a live art project the council had funded back when she was with Cultural Services, and back when local councils still had money for art.

A local performance artist sat next to an ATM in the town centre, styrofoam cup in front of him – not a trente – filthy sleeping bag over his knees, looking every inch the woebegone beggar. Looking exactly like this guy here in California Street. And every time someone approached he would mutter, ‘Want any change, mate?’ and try and give them handfuls of silver. Properly freaked people out. Not children. Children happily took the cash, but adults didn’t know how to respond. Some couldn’t hear what he was really saying and ignored him as effectively as if he’d been a real beggar, some got quite annoyed. One or two got violent and had to be restrained by council security. Because of course the change the artist was giving away was tax-payers money, part of a grant that she’d approved, so a health and safety assessment ensured that burly men were on hand to prevent trouble.

It was a piece she’d always liked, and one of the few arts projects Nicky had ever supported with enthusiasm.

Sarah goes to the ATM. She takes out her daily limit. Five hundred dollars. Twenty-five brand-new flat notes that smell of sophisticated inks and mischief.

It takes her an hour to find twenty-five can collectors and convince them to take her money. Even the homeless are suspicious of free cash. And who can blame them? The homeless know the dangers of money better than anyone.

She gives out her last note outside Grace Cathedral.

Behind the hunched shoulders and haunted face of her last beggar she reads a sign that says ‘What they’re all talking about – Fifty shades of Grace’. It makes her stop and smile. And then she finds she’s actually inside the body of the church. On a pew. She isn’t really praying in here exactly, but she is thinking hard about things. And maybe that is all praying is.

When her phone goes off she is mortified. There’s only one old guy in the pews near her but he gives her such a beady look that she turns her phone off without even looking at who the call is from. It only rang for a second, but the cheery ghostly echo of her ringtone seems to continue to reverberate around the vaulted Gothic space. Queen. ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’.

She shuts her eyes.

When she opens them again, it is to find that the old guy next to her, a bum she guesses at first, has scooted along the pew so that he is pretty close. Not offensively close, but right on the edge of her personal space. She can sense him staring at her. Staring and smiling. This is always happening to her. She’s the one the nutters warm to, the person they feel confident enough to approach.

She looks down at the floor for as long as she can, tries to pick up her train of thought, but it’s too late – gone. Between her phone going and this old guy watching her, her concentration has dissolved.

She’s thinking that she might as well go now, the cathedral clearly isn’t going to give her the peace she needs. She puts her hands on her bags and it’s then that the old guy speaks.

‘Interesting choice of tune.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘On your phone.’

She’s made a mistake, she’s engaged with him. He scoots just a little closer. And as he moves up she thinks she can detect a sweetish smell, like sandwiches left too long in their Tupperware box on a long coach trip.

‘Beautiful place this, isn’t it?’

He’s English she realises. So a tourist not a bum, and now that she gets a proper look at him she can see that he’s decently clad. Perhaps a little overdressed for San Francisco in late summer, especially with that tweedy jacket. And he’s very thin. But neat and conservative. She wonders if he’s with a group and looks around.

‘I’m here on my own. Don’t worry, there’s not a whole coach-load of coffin dodgers about to pounce.’ She hears the chuckle in his voice and relaxes a bit.

‘Yes, it’s beautiful in here.’ And she looks around and realises that she hasn’t really taken it in at all before now. She’d just come in, found a pew, dumped her bags and started thinking about whatever it was she had been thinking about. Money. The homeless. Life. Scarlett. Work. Nicky. Family. What they’d done and where they were going. How it might all end. But there was no coherence to her thinking. It was all discordant and nonsensical, and it makes her panicky to be all over the place like this because planning and order are key parts of her skill-set. Only now, with this nice old English gent taking her out of the spinning waltzer of her own thoughts, she does start to breathe a bit. So at first she’s grateful to him for lassooing her back to the real and manageable world.

She looks around now and admires the ambition of this place. Grace Cathedral was built in 1844 – she’d read that on the noticeboard as she’d come in – and what was San Francisco then? An outlaw town. Not even American then really – still Mexican – and a town about to explode with the gold rush and the railroad. But they didn’t know that was down the line when they built this. This was a statement of intent. It said: We are going to be somebody. It was like an intern spending her first month’s salary on a pair of Jimmy Choos and then living on lentils for weeks to pay for them. It said: I’m going places. Just watch me.

‘Have you been saved?’ The old guy says it conversationally, in the same way you might say, ‘Is it raining out?’

Bloody hell. Turns out he’s a nutter after all. Shame, he seemed so normal at first. A nice old man. ‘No. No, I haven’t.’

The old man nods, chuckles wheezily. ‘I was like you once. There wasn’t a bigger atheist than me. I was famous for it. Militant about it in actual fact. I used to say God was an imaginary friend for grown-ups. Someone we’d made up out of words just so we wouldn’t be lonely or sad.’

‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to be somewhere.’

He puts his skinny hand on her arm. Grips it. Christ, the strength that is in that feeble-looking claw. Like being grabbed by a belligerent lobster.

‘I won’t be long.’ He is smiling as he says this, showing his teeth. There’s some menace there. Some sense of threat. Sarah looks around for a vicar or a nun or someone obviously connected with the proper authorities, but there’s no one who looks like that. Just curious architecture fans, daydreaming day trippers, the prayerful, and her and this nutty evangelical with the ridiculously strong lobster-grip.

‘OK,’ she mutters, ‘five minutes then I have to go.’

‘Good girl,’ he says, and releases her arm. Pats it gently. The complete avuncular Werther’s Original OAP again.

He pauses to gather his thoughts and she thinks bugger him, because she means it. She is only going to give him five minutes, if he wants to waste it in staging meaningful pauses let him. She glances at him, and too late realises that this is what he is waiting for – the chance for eye contact. He fixes her with his kindly eyes, and his thin, impossibly wrinkled face splinters in a broad warm grin. And he begins.

‘When you finally begin to see the end of the road, the tunnel at the end of the light, as it were – well, it’s natural to question things, and I just kept thinking – what if I’m wrong. What if, by some billion to one, impossible fluke there is a God?’

‘A white man with a flowing white beard, sitting on a cloud?’

The old guy frowns, holds up a finger for silence. Clearly this is more a tutorial than a debate. ‘Sorry,’ says Sarah, and is immediately disgusted at herself. Put out because he’s the rude one here. He is the one intruding on her privacy.

‘And if there is a God, well, then the signs are that he is, as the ancient books tell us, a vengeful God. A God who sent his only son as a sacrifice to us. A sacrifice that we have pretty much ignored. And I thought, well if there is a Day of Judgement my defence of “Oh well, it just seemed so unlikely, m’lud” is going to look weak. I could easily imagine this particular God – this capricious, jealous God – getting pretty furious. I could imagine him asking, hadn’t he shown me? Hadn’t thousands of years of art and literature and theology and philosophy, hadn’t that been enough in the way of proof of his existence and a guide to his personality? And the simple faith of countless ordinary people? Was that all out the window because of Darwin and his turtles? I imagined that scene and thought that would be pretty embarrassing, wouldn’t it? I mean if my first thoughts – my atheistic thoughts – were correct and there was no God well, fair enough, I’ll just be an unlikely collection of proteins returning to the earth. But if that position was wrong, well, I’d have to live with an eternity of hellfire. Because the books are pretty clear on this. Unless we accept God’s love we are going to have a pretty bad time of it. For ever. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t really fancy that.’

She knows about all this.

‘Pascal’s wager,’ she says.

‘You know about Pascal?’

‘Yes, yes. Yes I do!’ She is aware of how excited she sounds, like the girl in the class whose hand stretches high to the ceiling, the girl who is desperate to be asked for the answer. She hates the way that girl is still there inside her, waiting for a chance to get a gold star and a smiley face. She hates this tendency towards swottiness.

She makes the effort to slow herself down, to dial down the enthusiasm in her voice. ‘Yeah, Pascal said you might as well bet on the existence of God because you’ll only know about it if you win. It’s the exact point you’ve just made. That’s my uni first year Introduction to Philosophy unit that is.’ She actually thinks it might have once been a question on
University Challenge
. Most of the cleverest stuff she knows comes from that show.

‘Yes it is, and he’s right, isn’t he?’

‘Well, no actually. It’s like kids and Santa Claus. At first they believe completely and then, round about seven or eight, they start to wonder, but they can’t afford to really question Santa’s existence in case it’s true that he only brings presents to believers, so they are trapped in this kind of psychological limbo for a while. Blinded to the truth by the desire for presents. They have to believe and not believe simultaneously. It can’t be good for them.’

‘And what happens when they finally admit that there isn’t a Santa Claus?’

‘Well, the presents don’t stop coming, do they?’

‘No, but the children are never quite as excited about Christmas again. They have been robbed of something. And they never trust their parents again, which is probably why the younger generation are so ready to put their faith in material things rather than things of the spirit.’

Sarah frowns and stretches her back, hears it click. Maybe she should treat herself to a massage later. Maybe Jesus would do it?

Sarah blows a raspberry. Yes, she’s blown a raspberry. A loud and long one. In church. If there’s a hell she’s going there for sure now. But she couldn’t help herself. This funny old bloke doesn’t seem bothered. He does his wheezy chuckle again.

‘Not much longer, my dear.’ He makes a show of looking around him, his loose skin tightening on his face and neck, and she gets a sense of what a handsome man he might have been once. ‘Look at this place. Or, better, think about the medieval cathedrals in England. Think about the people who built them. Poor people using block and tackle to haul stone hewn and shaped at huge effort. No plans. Taking scores of years to do it. No one has built an atheist cathedral, have they?’