Nik: Now I Know

  The fourth optician wasn’t at first any more keen to get involved.

  ‘We do traces for the police sometimes,’ he said, ‘but frankly, it costs so much time and effort I’d only be willing if the case is really serious.’

  ‘Serious?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Murder, rape, something of that order.’

  Tom smiled. ‘Would crucifiction count?’

  The optician cocked his head. ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Confidential info, sir.’

  ‘Grief!’

  The optician bent his head to inspect the twisted spectacles lying on his desk where Tom had delicately placed them.

  ‘All right to touch?’

  ‘Carefully, sir.’

  The optician shifted them with the end of his pen, bent closer, and used a small magnifying glass to inspect the inside edge of one of the arms near where it hinged to the frame.

  ‘Could be in luck,’ he said, straightening. He was a tall man, thin, grey-haired with a bald patch on the crown that Tom thought looked like a monk’s tonsure. Grey-suited, rugby club tie, rotary club badge in his lapel, flushed complexion, very precise manner. Probably near retirement. One of the town’s pillars. Would know everybody. Worth keeping on his right side; never know when he’d come in useful. Like now, maybe.

  Tom gave the optician his best schoolboy grin of excitement.

  ‘For a time,’ the optician said, warming to the work, ‘we stamped a small mark on our frames. Thought it might prove useful, save time in other ways. Turned out not to be the case, so we gave up the practice about a year ago.’

  ‘And there’s a mark on these?’

  ‘Must have been among the last pairs we did.’

  ‘So you know who the owner is?’

  ‘When we gave it up, the records were stored in the basement. Almost threw them away, but somehow, records being records—’

  ‘When do you think you might know?’

  ‘Let’s see . . .’ The optician consulted his appointment diary. ‘Busy the rest of the day. Won’t be free till after we close. Then time for the search. Say seven. How will that do?’

  Tom, champing at the bit of his impatience, said, ‘Okay, sir, if that’s the soonest you can manage. I’ll call back then.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  The optician inspected the frames with his magnifying glass again, jotted down the mark. Tom carefully retrieved the evidence.

  ‘Seven o’clock, then,’ he said and left, feeling at once excited by his success and irritated by the enforced delay before he could get his hands on the reward for playing his hunch.

  †

  NIK’S LETTERS:

  Dear Julie: Meditation this morning was no better than yesterday. Is my mind always this slapdash and all over the place? After Silence, when I had to polish the upstairs landing (hands and knees and old fashioned gluey wax you have to buff up, which takes ages if you put too much on—sweat, sweat), I had a session with Bro. K. I told him I thought I’d like to do a Retreat but that I didn’t think I’d manage.

  Bro. K.: Why?

  Me: Because I’ve discovered I can’t concentrate for more than two minutes, never mind for three days.

  Bro. K.: We all have trouble with distractions. It’s normal. Most people never notice how much their minds jump from one thing to another. They can’t concentrate for long on one thing. One of the things Meditation teaches you is how to focus your attention, all your being, on one thing, one idea.

  I said: But apart from that, I don’t see how I can spend three days meditating and what you call praying when I don’t believe.

  He said: I thought you didn’t know what you believe?

  I said: I don’t.

  He said: Then this is as good a time as any to start finding out. Use your Retreat for that. You’ve got to start somewhere. Start there.

  I said: But how?

  Bro. K.: How does anybody do anything? Take something obvious. For example, how does somebody who wants to be a football player become a football player?

  Me: Practice?

  Before that. How does he know he wants to be a football player?

  Probably because he saw football being played and thought he’d like to do it.

  Right. Then what?

  Gets a ball and kicks it about?

  And?

  Gradually learns to control it.

  Watches good players playing?

  And learns from them. And joins a team. He’d have to do that because football is something you have to be in a team to play.

  Bro. K.: So he slowly gets better and better and if he really likes the game and is good enough at it, he might end up playing with a major side.

  Me: Yes. But belief isn’t a game, is it?

  Bro. K. laughed. No, he said, but it’s something you have to decide you want. Like you begin by deciding you want to be a footballer. At first you don’t know anything about it. But you find a ball and play with it. And—this is the important thing—you copy what real footballers do—the people who already know how to play well. The same with belief. You learn about it by doing it. And you learn what to do by copying what believers do. You want to know about belief? Behave like a believer. But the first thing is deciding you want to believe. Deciding to play football is an act of will, isn’t it? So is belief.

  Me: Julie—the girl we’re praying for—says that belief is a gift. She means a gift from God.

  Bro. K.: Doesn’t she ever doubt?

  Never asked her.

  Ask her then. I think what she might really be talking about is conviction—a kind of knowing—rather than about belief. Most people who believe in God have times when they doubt. When they lose their sense of conviction. But they go on believing. They make a decision to accept the idea of God, even though they’re doubtful, rather than the idea that there’s nothing. In other words, they make a conscious act of will to believe. There’s no other way.

  But that seems hypocritical to me.

  It’s only hypocritical if you pass yourself off as someone who knows. You only have to say you believe but don’t know. A true believer is someone who’s searching for knowledge. That must be true, mustn’t it? Because as soon as you know something, you’re not a believer any more. You’re a knower. You’ve found out the truth and can prove it. But first you have to be a believer. So a believer is simply someone who’s decided what kind of knowledge he’s searching for. Not just any knowledge, but knowledge of what he calls God. Just like a biologist searches for knowledge about animals and how they live, and a medical doctor searches for knowledge about human sickness and how to cure it. They can be those things—biologist or medical doctor—and be a believer as well—a searcher after knowledge of the ultimate, the above all, the source of all knowledge. See?

  I see what you mean. Don’t know if I accept it!

  Sounds to me like what you want to be is an academic, God help you!

  It’s just that I don’t have any strong feeling 1 want to believe. All I think I want is to know about belief.

  Bro. K. sucked in his breath. Then you’re on dangerous ground, he said. Because where belief is concerned, you can’t find out about it without taking the risk of accepting it—of becoming a believer. So watch out!

  Why?

  Look, Nik, the problem is that you’re trying to behave like a biologist studying the behaviour of an animal, when the subject you’re studying isn’t an animal and can’t be investigated like that. You’ve made the classic mistake of using the wrong tools for the job. Like wanting to know what the air around you is made of and trying to cut it open with a hammer and chisel to find out.

  With belief, he said, you have to live it if you want to know about it. You have to be your own laboratory, your own set of tools, your own specimen. You have to observe belief at work in yourself, if you really want to understand it. That’s why some people say belief is a mystery. You can’t take it out and examine it. You can’t cut it open on a dissecting table. You
can’t even describe it very successfully. And you can’t explain it to someone else. Plenty of people have tried, and they’ve all failed. You can only experience it and know what it is by living it.

  I said: But you have to will yourself to believe first?

  No other way, I’m afraid, Bro. K. said.

  By the time we’d got this far, it was coffee break.

  After coffee I told Bro. K. I’d stay till the end of the week, and do a Retreat, and that during the Retreat I’d think about what he’d said about belief and try and behave as if I believed. I mean, what had I to lose?

  He said that was okay so long as I agreed to follow his guidance. I said I would, unless he asked me to do anything I thought was wrong.

  He said: Right, you start now. Between now and lunchtime I want you to write your Confession.

  I said: What! My confession! I don’t have anything to confess! I don’t feel guilty about anything.

  He laughed his funny squeaky chuckle and said he was very glad I was already fit for Heaven. But guilty or not, he wanted me to write whatever came into my head under the title The Confession of Nik Frome.

  I said I didn’t know where to start.

  He said: Start at the beginning, with your birth.

  But why? I said.

  Explanation later, he said.

  I said: This is too much like school.

  He said: So why are you complaining? School is where you should be right this minute!

  So I said I would try but he wasn’t to be surprised if all I had by lunchtime was a blank page.

  He said: If your life has been nothing more than a blank page so far then at least there’s nothing you want to cross out, lucky chap!

  Anyway, I did it. You won’t believe what came out! And because you won’t believe it, I’m sending you a photocopy. I had it done when I was sent for my afternoon exercise in the park. Walked into town instead and had the copy made at a quick-print shop. (I’m not supposed to go into the town. Too much of a distraction! But as far as I can see the place is a dump with about as much to distract you as there is in a morgue. I.e.: only dead bodies.)

  I’m not really telling the truth. The real reason I’m sending you what I wrote is that it tells you about something I want you to know about but never told you.

  The Confession of Nik Frome

  (or as much as he could manage in an hour-and-a-half)

  I was born seventeen years and four months ago. This is not really a confession, as it is not a secret and I do not feel guilty about it. The guilt belongs to my parents. I did not ask to be born. They caused it to happen. I do not know if they decided to create me or if I was an accident. I never asked them. All I know is that, judging by what happened afterwards, I feel like an accident.

  I can’t ask them now because my parents aren’t around to ask. They were divorced seven years ago, when I was ten. Since then I have lived with my grandfather (my mother’s father). He was a ship’s carpenter who set up his own woodwork business when he gave up the sea because he wanted to spend more time with my grandmother. She died the year before I came to live with Grandad. He is now officially retired, but he still has a workshop which he goes to every day as if he were still working. He does odd jobs for people. He says a person is the size of his work. I think he means that people need their work to give their lives a purpose and to make them feel useful. He can be cantankerous sometimes and difficult to live with. Everything has to be just right and ship-shape, and he hates clutter. But he is mostly fun and I love living with him. He has been very good to me, and has taught me many things. One of the things he has taught me is to be sceptical.

  My parents divorced after many rows. And now I come to think of it, I do feel guilty because of something I didn’t do during the last and worst row. I will confess this.

  The problem was that my father couldn’t, as my mother put it, ‘keep his hands off other women’. And my mother’s problem was that she was nearly insane with jealousy. (This may explain why, ever since that time, I have disliked people who sleep around, especially when they boast a lot about it. And I have disliked even more people who are possessive. So I guess I think jealousy is a worse sin/crime than lust. Another thing I like about Grandad is that he doesn’t try to own me, or coddle me, but wants me to be my own independent self.)

  On the night when the last great row happened, my father arrived home late from work. My mother had already hyped herself into a state, convinced he was with ‘one of his whores’. She was stomping around the house, banging things, tidying and dusting, as if making the house ultra-clean would somehow show my father up, be an affront to him—his uncleanness against her cleanliness, like it was a competition.

  This is what usually happened, and was one of the signs that told me there would be a mighty row soon. During the rows she often shouted at him that he was ‘a filthy beast’. At the time I didn’t realize exactly what she meant. I was only eight, remember. I used to think she meant Dad didn’t wash himself enough, because Mum had a thing about being properly washed and used to say my hands were filthy if I came in with them even slightly grubby from playing in the garden.

  Mum had laid the table ready for supper and the food was overcooking in the oven. I was hungry but didn’t dare ask for anything. When Mum was in a pre-row mood she made a big production of getting anything for me and I had learned that it was best at these times to keep out of the way. That night I sat in a chair in the corner pretending to read a comic.

  Dad arrived two hours late. By then Mum was going at full throttle. She let him have it as soon as he got inside the back door. (I should mention that Dad was a big man. He worked as a fitter in a local factory and used to do body-building. Mum was thin and not very tall. When Dad had had a couple of pints of beer and was feeling in a good mood he used to call her his little sparrow.)

  Whenever Dad could get a word in he kept repeating that he’d only been kept on at work for an emergency job. But Mum wouldn’t listen. She rampaged on. Usually, Dad rode out these storms by letting Mum shout herself to a standstill and then wheedling himself into her good books again during the next day or two. But he didn’t do that this time. Mum started listing off his previous misdemeanours. Dad said what a good memory she had. Mum opened a drawer, took out a pocket diary, and said she didn’t need a good memory because she’d been keeping track of his ‘filthy habits’ for two years.

  This sent Dad into orbit. Now he started ranting and raving and stomping round the room, accusing Mum of spying and having a cesspit for a mind, and all sorts of stuff I couldn’t understand the meaning of and can only half remember now. I got so scared I hid behind the armchair I’d been sitting in. I could feel that the row was turning into a fight.

  They were standing either side of the table, yelling across it at each other. Mum shouted at Dad that he was a coward. This made him speechless with rage. His face turned red, his eyes almost popped out. I was sure he would burst. Instead, he grabbed the tablecloth and gave it an almighty heave that sent everything on the table flying off in all directions.

  There was a terrible clatter. Crockery smashed onto the floor. Cutlery flew into pictures that fell off the wall and shattered. A knife stabbed the chair I was hiding behind as if it had been thrown at my head. Salt and sugar and mustard and milk sprayed everywhere. A bottle of tomato ketchup burst against a wall, spreading a splat like blood across it. The room was a mess.

  After the crash there was a tense silence. I think we were all stunned by what had happened, even Dad. Then Mum let out a piercing scream, and the next thing I knew they were almost locked together. Mum was banging away at Dad’s face and body with her hands, and kicking his legs with her feet. Dad was trying to smother Mum’s attack while keeping his legs out of range. And they were bellowing and cursing at each other enough to bring the ceiling down. They looked like they were doing a very violent (and when I think about it now, comic) dance.

  At this sight I broke into terrified tears. I thought Dad
was going to smash up the entire house, including Mum and myself, and that Mum was aiming to murder Dad. Such a prospect crossed all my wires and I became hysterical. I ran from my hiding place and tried to hurl myself between them. Dad tried to push me away, but succeeded only in punching me in the face. Mum, aiming a foot at Dad’s shin, hit my knee instead. That made me scream and claw at them all the harder. Dad yelled at me to get away. Mum yelled at Dad that hitting children was all he was good for. In the ensuing struggle, with me less than half Dad’s height, the only result was that my head finally rammed into Dad’s groin.

  Dad doubled up, his hands grabbing his crotch. At that same instant, Mum’s feet got tangled in my legs. She tripped and went sprawling among the broken dishes on the floor. As for me, suddenly left flailing at empty air, I slipped and fell on top of Mum.

  Then began the worst part of all. Mum struggled upright and hugged me to her. Seeing what had happened, Dad came for me and tried to pull me to my feet with one of his hands while the other held his still no doubt painful goolies. Each of them tried to grab me from the other. So a furious tug of war got going. Accompanied by me screaming blue murder and them shouting at each other again. The frightening thing to me was that I felt like I was a parcel that two people wanted only because they hated each other. After that, even if they had patched it up and stayed together, I don’t think I would have trusted either of them ever again.

  As it turned out, Mum won the parcel. She was always more determined and stubborn than Dad. When he gave up, she clutched me to her till her grip was so tight it hurt. Dad stood, snorting and cursing, and glaring thunderously at Mum.

  Get out! she hissed at him. Get out and never come back!

  He stood his ground for what seemed to me like hours. Then, without a word, he turned and went out through the front door, which he rarely used. He shut the door behind him very quietly, I remember that clearly. It seemed somehow more frightening, more ominous than the noise there’d been. Right now, as I think of it, it echoes in my memory like an unfinished sound.