The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read: And Other Stories Page 7

  ‘Can’t miss.’

  He threw and threw and could not; even when he threw them up into the air, or away behind him, somehow the mouth caught and swallowed them each time.

  Waking, he lay quite calmly, with one question in his mind. What would happen? After he had not missed. What would happen?

  Slipping out was easy. The doctor had given his mother tablets after Charlie, and she still took them. He just stayed in his clothes, sitting on his bed and hardly breathing, until half-past ten, and then went, leaving the lights off and the back door on the latch.

  There was enough of a moon, lumpy and pumpkin-coloured, to see by. Mick slid close to the hedges, fences, walls.

  There was no getting out of it. It was the right time, long after confessions were over and the priests had finished preparing the altar for early Mass. No one would be there.

  Charlie, he thought, and said his name out, ‘Charlie, Charlie, Charlie’. His foot had gone black where the poison had filled and swollen the flesh. He had not recognised anyone.

  But now, for the first time, Mick could not picture Charlie. He saw everything else – the chicken run, the deaf and dumb brother’s soft open mouth and anxious eyes, the electric-blue nylon rabbit, even a mushroom night-light he had had by his bed until he was three.

  Not Charlie. He tried to force the pictures of him to switch on in his head but they would not come. He thought he might have lost them for ever then.

  Two shadows, merging with the gateposts.

  ‘Mick.’

  They just touched each other. Sluggy’s face looked dark and flat in the peculiar moonlight.

  ‘I didn’t tell Norrie.’

  No. This was nothing to do with Norrie, rat’s-tail thin, worldly.

  They had not needed to plan how to get into the church, they knew well enough, and went in file round the side to the door no one used. The priests went in at the other side, at the end of the path leading from the presbytery.

  Sluggy was the smallest and lightest and went in easily, up onto Deano’s shoulder and, after a second or two of fiddling at the inside catch, snaking through, while Mick held his legs and feet until the exact last moment before letting him drop. It wasn’t far. The bolts made too much noise and the key was stiff, the waiting there in the darkness made them old men; Mick could smell Deano’s dirty smell, the smell of his home.

  Then time reeled them in again, as Sluggy opened the door.

  It was another smell. He had never understood how they mattered. All the stale incense and snuffed candle smoke of his life came into his nostrils, making his head spin, whispering to him each word he had ever learned by heart. The Catechism. The Mass. The Sacred Heart. The Holy Trinity. ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned’, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace . . .’, ‘Glory be to the Father . . .’

  ‘Jesus.’

  They clutched at each other, standing in the great black hollow ribcage of the empty church. Above the altar, the red glow of the Reserved Sacrament.

  ‘The body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ preserve your body and soul into everlasting life.’

  ‘No way.’

  The whisper hissed out like a snake’s tongue into the incensed darkness.

  But then, when he had given up all hope of ever seeing him again, he saw Charlie, and not Charlie blackened and swollen with his eyes rolling in his head, but Charlie standing up straight and laughing into his face, Charlie waving both arms above his head, blazing, triumphant.

  Mick let go of Deano’s arm and walked forward down the side aisle, between the pews, and up again until he was at the foot of the altar steps.

  It was not black dark, only dim. He focused on the flickering ruby light. The others were behind him, close to his shoulder.

  He waited a long time, until his heart had slowed down, wiping his palm several times on his shirt. Then he reached behind him and Deano put the catapult and the stone into his hand.

  ‘Mick –’ but he didn’t bother finishing it. He knew it was all right.

  With Charlie just ahead of him, still laughing, Mick went up the three shallow concreted steps, and stood in front of the altar a few feet from the crucifix. At his shoulder, Deano switched on the torch and focused the beam.

  Charlie was still laughing.

  What would happen?

  But now something changed, though only for a fragment of a second. Now, instead of rage, he felt an extraordinary and overwhelming sadness; it raced up through him like the tide, filled him, drowned him in itself, and then ran back until he was left empty and stranded, trembling. He waited. Charlie laughed again.

  The sound of the stone as it hit the brass crucifix, and then of the crucifix as it hit the stone floor behind the altar, cracked out like cymbals and went on cracking round and round inside the hollow darkness, wave after wave. It was the end of the world and the veil of the temple was rent in two, everything came down on them. The crash of brass grew fainter and fainter. Stopped. They waited for the row from the street outside and the breaking down of the door. The marching men and the torches.

  There was only silence, and after a second the squeak of a plimsoll as Sluggy moved his foot suddenly.

  Charlie was fading now, he could hardly make him out.

  From habit he genuflected, crossed himself and turned away from the altar. Deano clicked the torch off so that the darkness blinded him.

  They parted from Sluggy at the corner, and he and Deano walked all the way to the Bracken without speaking. Deano evaporated into the darkness there, and even then neither of them spoke a word.

  The back door was just as he had left it. The house still. The latch jumped down too loudly into its socket, but no one woke.

  He had thought that he would never sleep again, but he slept at once and dreamed nothing. He had thought Mass would be late and the crucifix missing, with a different one put in its place, but Father O’Connell came out onto the altar as the bell stopped on the minute of eight and the great brass cross was upright and shining as it caught the sun, the splayed figure unharmed.

  He had thought there would be mention made, an inquest, an appeal for those responsible. But the sermon was about spreading the gospel through the missions to Communist China and nothing was said.

  He had thought his legs might not bear him up in the line for Holy Communion and the host burst into flames as it touched his tongue, but he moved up behind his mother as usual and the host tasted of wallpaper and was cool in his mouth.

  He did not look for the others. Anyway, Deano often missed. He had a different sort of mother.

  Father O’Connell put out his hand, greeting them at the porch, and Mick had to take the yellow fingers but the look on his face was no different and nothing happened, nothing was said.

  Which, in the end, was the worst of it. Nothing happened. Nothing ever happened and for the rest of his life he was waiting and the fear was always there, a cold, hard, bitter pebble lodged in his chest, cold but at the same time blazing red and burning into him.

  He and Deano and Sluggy hung about by the breakwater and at the corner of the Bracken and occasionally at Deano’s house, where the smell was still terrible. Norrie turned holy for a while and even thought of going for a priest, but ended up staying at home, forever half-closing his eyes against his cigarette smoke, his teeth rotten and always giving him grief and a foul temper.

  Sluggy moved away after the operation on the hole in his mouth and they never knew whether it had made him talk better.

  Mick took to carpentry and liked it, then threw it up, went south, married, left her, traipsed about, never settled. Never could. Because of the waiting and the fear and the dreams of the hollow, incensed darkness and the feel of the stone in the palm of his hand and the sound of the brass crashing down, crashing on and on and on. He took up smoking but it didn’t help, because nothing could. All that would help would be when something happened to punish him and put an end to it.

  ‘Goddit. We’ll shoot the crucifix.’
r />   He often heard Deano saying it, and the thump of his fist against the wet wood of the breakwater, and waited, for the consequence of it all.

  He thought that almost certainly the waiting would kill him by itself, but it didn’t, and after a time he simply accepted that it never would but that he would die of something very ordinary, like old age.

  Until then, he just had to wait, and go on waiting while nothing happened. Nothing at all.

  Moving messages

  Moving messages

  Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life.

  ‘Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?’

  It rode with me up the escalator and my footsteps tapped it out in a rhythm along the street. My mother had a similar problem with hymns.

  ‘I am a little world made cunningly.’

  I wondered if Velma had ever suffered from poetic tinnitus. It might provide an opening.

  The restaurant was chrome and black and angular and a shock to the system. The table was square, the plates were square and the water came in a square glass, but the bread rolls were round and soft, like my life now, lived among hills like breasts and tender bales of fabric.

  They had tortured flowers with wire stays, and straitjacketed them in thin metal tubes. The table napkins were origami.

  ‘Didi!’

  Her kiss scratched my cheek, dry as a quill.

  ‘Goodness,’ I said. I have not been Didi for thirty-four years.

  I had painted Velma in my mind and the picture had been a good likeness. She was blade-thin, wore cream, smoked.

  ‘You look so wholesome,’ she said. ‘London is foul.’

  The menus were startling, scarlet boards lettered in spikes of black.

  ‘Shall I order for us both?’

  They say we do not see ourselves as others see us, but I saw perfectly how Velma saw me and I was not having it.

  ‘Crab,’ I said, speaking directly to the waiter. ‘Turbot with buttered spinach. Pommes dauphinoise.’

  ‘Six gulls’ eggs, and a tiny salad.’

  Velma lit a cigarette.

  ‘You used to smoke Black Russian,’ I said. It had been a matter for wonder among the rest of us.

  ‘I’d have known you,’ I said.

  I meant, you look your age and more, look harder, smarter, slicker, dryer; look like this restaurant. Yet, oddly, still the same. They can do this sort of thing with computers now. Digital ageing.

  The hills like breasts and the soft folds of fabric and pillows of fabric have had an effect on me, too.

  ‘Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?’

  ‘Known you anywhere,’ I said.

  The crab tasted of seaside holidays and flaked sweetly between my teeth.

  ‘Extraordinary.’

  I wondered what, but she said it while looking round at two men who were walking into the restaurant. In fact I was not sure she had meant to speak to me at all, and buttered a soft, plump roll to fill in time. It is not every day I eat in a cutting-edge London restaurant with square plates.

  ‘I am a little world made cunningly,’ the moving message read, neon-green on black. ‘I need intellectual discipline,’ I said, though how could she have understood? ‘Fierce words. Analysis.’

  That was probably the reason for the tinnitus.

  In a train, when you are facing the moving message about not leaving personal belongings behind you it is possible to raise a newspaper to shut it out, but I have found no similar way of dealing with the lines inside my head. I should have asked my mother what she did about the hymns, whether she simply let Wesley flow reassuringly, upliftingly on.

  ‘Aren’t gull’s eggs very dry?’ I said.

  I caught Velma’s expression as I lifted a forkful of steaming, buttery spinach and potato to my mouth.

  I was everything she could patronise. I laid the forkful of food down uneaten on the square plate. At home I eat square boxes of soup and too much butter and live among full-breasted hills, and bales of soft fabric.

  The turbot was glutinous and very white on the black plate.

  Velma patted cigarette ash into the broken shells of her gulls’ eggs.

  ‘I daresay you’ve made a lot of money, too,’ I said.

  We ought to begin the conversation about the past now, the one we had almost begun on the telephone.

  ‘No, don’t tell me, let’s meet . . .’

  She had rung up the magazine that featured my quilts among the soft-breasted hills, and briskly obtained my number.

  ‘Do you remember Douglas Merton? He became a bishop. Do you remember Georgina Lee? She’s a prison governor. And a dame,’ I said. ‘Imagine. Imagine.’

  A smaller scarlet card was flourished, the spiked lettering in silver this time, making the puddings quite hard to decipher.

  When I looked up squinting from the parfaits and coulis and tartes, I saw that Velma was crying. They were discreet tears, and quite silent, caught trembling in the spider legs of mascara.

  ‘Oh God. What can I do? I must be able to do something. What can I order? Shall I order you brandy?’ I said.

  ‘Dear Didi.’ Cream, thin, hard, dry, smart, weeping Velma. ‘Practical Didi.’

  So then I did order brandy, which came with my softly mounded, smooth, shining, rose-red mousse, stuck with horizontal chocolate quills, like a chic hat on a plate.

  ‘I’ve no idea, really,’ I said, ‘what you do.’

  ‘Recruitment.’ Velma finished her brandy in one impressive swallow. ‘Until I sold the company.’

  To one side of the rose-red hat was a small sphere of glistening rose-pink ice.

  ‘But mainly, I’m a mistress.’

  Do you remember Velma Prescott? She’s a mistress now. Imagine.

  But the spider-legs of mascara had released the tears, which slid down her porcelain cheekbones, until I wanted to cry with her.

  ‘Brandy makes it worse,’ I said.

  My ice tasted intensely of lavender.

  ‘I am a little world made cunningly.’

  ‘Has he left you, or something?’

  Almost an hour later, nervy with three tiny pewter-coloured cups of bitter coffee, I had learned that he had not. I had learned almost everything.

  After the restaurant, we had walked a long way and then sat down on a backless bench in a churchyard, though if I had worn such a suit as Velma’s I would never have done that. But Velma was immersed in trying to stop herself crying, rather as one is in trying to stop a nosebleed. I had no helpful suggestions, so I looked at the tombstones.

  (‘At the round earths imagin’d corners, blow Your trumpets, Angells.’)

  I welcomed the moving messages now, feeling a desperate need for the bracing sustenance of words.

  ‘It was seeing you,’ Velma said. ‘In that magazine.’

  The tears seemed to have dried.

  ‘There you sat. That view, all that wonderful coloured stuff tumbling off your lap. I haven’t slept properly since.’

  ‘Winter in the country can be quite testing,’ I said.

  Two buses roared past the churchyard, rows of faces peering down at us, round, white Os, such as children draw.

  ‘We got buses a lot, in those days,’ I said.

  ‘I still do.’

  I stared.

  ‘The underground is filthy.’

  I stared.

  ‘What did you think, then – the Bentley and the chauffeur?’

  Like sudden sunlight, the old Velma shone out. Looking at her next to me on the green, backless bench, I decided she had not, after all, had a facelift.

  We were fifty-four. Flesh and skin and hair betray us.

  (‘Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?’ I made a vow then, to embrace the old disciplines. The words.)

  We had been incongruous, unexpected friends from our first day, without anything but English Literatur
e and twenty-three other students in common.

  ‘I don’t think I could accommodate my life to someone else,’ I said, ‘on their terms. Not even for all the accounts at Knightsbridge shops.’

  She had told me everything about it, before my edible millinery had arrived. She had a taxi account, a dress account, a hair account, even a flower account.

  ‘Wives can wear slippers and tracksuits,’ she had said. ‘Mistresses can’t. Their hair must always be immaculate, make-up applied and the flowers must never have dead petals. And of course although I suppose an unavoidable major illness might be forgiven, colds are out.’

  ‘Wherever,’ I said, ‘is the benefit?’

  We both looked at the word money as it ran past us, a silent, moving message.

  A thin little wind had got up and scattered bits of paper about the churchyard.

  ‘I can’t tackle London often,’ I said; ‘you need your wits about you.’

  Still, I was sharpening up now. I did not want to leave. I was not missing the soft-breasted hills and the fabrics in any way.

  ‘It is just – uncreative,’ Velma said. ‘There is nothing to show for it.’

  ‘I am a little world made cunningly.’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ I said to Velma, ‘I have been thinking about a higher degree. There is nothing furthering to the cause of human endeavour in quilts.’

  A plastic cup had fetched up against my ankle.

  Perhaps I meant it. The texts were there, I knew most of the words, I’d been saving them up on the moving messages.

  ‘But you looked so right,’ Velma said. ‘Dear Didi.’

  She wanted me in my place. I saw that.

  She was older again and there were no marks at all on her cream suit from the green backless bench.

  ‘Dear Didi.’

  I felt confused emotions. Angry. Patronised. Dissatisfied.

  I kicked the plastic cup hard across the path.

  The green country that led towards the soft-breasted hills looked queer and different from the windows of the train. Strange, unfamiliar and unnerving. I did not know if I liked it any more. But when I thought of the angular restaurant and the dark churchyard I did not like those either.