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.?’
Julie, mocking, said, ‘Fill and sike!’
‘Philosophy and psychology,’ Nik said, not taking the bait.
‘Nothing so grand,’ Julie said. ‘Only just managed fifth-form English and maths. Didn’t even get as far as the sixth form, never mind fill and sike.’
‘You don’t seem to do badly without.’
‘Common sense, that’s all.’
‘So do you think it’s all sex really?’
‘I’m not quite that out of date.’ There was self-defensive sharpness in her voice.
‘And,’ Nik said, enjoying this sign of weakness, ‘you’ve enough experience to know?’
‘No one can ever have enough experience to know. I mean, to know the answer to a question like that. Though some people pretend to.’
‘So?’
‘You’re teasing.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘But it’s obvious.’
Nik shrugged. ‘Then tell me.’
‘Some things you know from your own experience, yes? Some you know because other people you trust tell you about them from their experience, yes?’
‘Okay so far.’
‘But no matter how much you set out to experience, you can’t ever experience everything. Not in one lifetime.’
Nik thought a moment before saying, ‘Agreed.’
‘And no matter how much you trust other people, you can’t know for certain they’re telling the truth about the things you can’t experience for yourself.’
‘True.’
‘But you believe them because you trust them. So some things you only know because of belief. Because of faith. Yes?’
Nik pretended to puke at having fallen into Julie’s trap. ‘Okay, yes, put like that.’
Julie pulled a face at his vulgarity. ‘How else can you put it?’
Their path was taking them close by the hang-glider. It was fitted together now, a large, neat, kite-like toy, hard to imagine carrying anyone safely into the air. A challenge to courage. The pilot, however, was preparing to take off. Nik and Julie stopped to watch as he harnessed himself to the frame, helped by his friend, gathered himself, ran, and launched into the air.
‘Would you like to do that?’ Julie asked.
‘Not a lot,’ Nik said, shading his eyes from the glare of the sky with a hand the better to see the pilot’s progress. ‘Would you?’
‘Yes. Must be fun. Think he’ll make it?’
‘Probably. There’s a good breeze now, and he looks as if he knows what he’s doing.’
‘But you don’t know he will.’
‘’Course not. Do you?’
‘No. But I believe he will. So do you.’
Nik grinned, eyes still on the glider fluttering a few metres above the scarp. ‘Does it matter whether I do or not? It’s his funeral.’
Julie gave him a doubting glance. ‘You say that, but you don’t really mean it.’
‘I don’t?’
‘You’re not that callous. Least, I hope you aren’t, or I’ve misread you. You’re just avoiding the argument.’
Nik grinned at her. ‘Sure? How do you know?’
r /> Julie shrugged. ‘What would you do if you knew he couldn’t manage, and would fall and kill himself?’
‘But I don’t know that.’
‘But if you did? Really knew.’
‘All right, what you want me to say is that I’d try and stop him.’
‘Yes. But would you?’
They were eye to eye now.
‘You’re being serious,’ Nik said.
‘I’m being serious.’
‘Okay, yes, I’d try and stop him.’
The glider, sails smacking, wobbled, dipped, slewed, steadied, hung for a moment between up and down, and at last soared, slipping and pawing, out and up and away over the valley, rising into the absorbing sky.
‘You believed he could,’ Julie said, sitting on a bench, ‘or you wouldn’t have stood by watching him try.’
INTERCUT: Long shot of a lake in northern Sweden. Late summer. Evening. The sun has just set. The lake, shaped like a Y, is surrounded by undulating low hills, some covered in fir and birch, a few with fields of grass and ripe corn. The water is mirror flat, reflecting in its darkness a cloud-cushioned sky.
A small rowing boat sits in the middle of the lake, at the elbow of the Y. A figure in the boat rests on oars, very still. The only movement comes from a dabble of ducks feeding and larking along the edge of the water nearest our view, and from a finger of white smoke rising unruffled from the chimney of a wooden cabin painted rust-red which is set on the brow of a hill at the edge of a wheat-blond cornfield that runs down to the lake near the foot of the Y. The only sounds are from the cackling ducks and the occasional echoing calls of a searching water bird.
Nik and Julie sat for a moment taking in the view.
‘Why didn’t you want to talk on the way to the church?’ Nik asked when they had looked their fill. ‘You said you’d explain.’
‘Do I have to?’
‘Yes. Research: Believers, behaviour of.’
‘In that case, did you make a note of your own behaviour just now?’
‘I’m not a trustworthy specimen.’
‘Can’t say I like being thought of as a specimen.’
‘That’s what we all are, us animals, didn’t you know?’ Nik said. ‘We’re all each other’s specimens. We’re all observed and we’re all observers of everybody else. You even believe Big Brother God—sorry, Big Sister God—is watching us all, all the time. The spy in the sky.’
‘Do I?’
‘What then?’
‘Another day perhaps.’
‘I’ve annoyed you.’
‘No.’
‘Irritated you.’
‘You’re a smarty-pants sometimes.’
‘Only meant in fun. Self-protection even, if I’m honest. I want to know. Really.’
‘If you’re that keen.’
‘I’m that keen. Cross my heart and hope to die.’
A young mother with a toddler hooked by its podgy hand to one of her fingers went strolling by at baby pace, mother-and-child a confession of pride.
When they’d passed out of earshot Julie said, ‘I was concentrating, that’s all.’
‘What on?’
‘The service.’ She looked at him, testing his seriousness. ‘On God.’
‘You mean you were praying,’ Nik said.
To their left the second hang-glider took off, a more confident launch than the first, and laddered its way into the sky.
‘The thing is,’ Nik said, ‘I’m not sure exactly what you were concentrating on.’
‘The Gospel for the day.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘If you’d kept your mind on the service,’ Julie said, smiling at him, ‘instead of making fun of poor old Sister Ann, you wouldn’t have had to leave in disgrace, and would know what the Gospel for the day was.’
‘But I didn’t, I did, and I don’t.’
‘Every time the Eucharist—the Holy Communion, the mass, whatever you want to call it—is celebrated, a passage from one of the Gospels is read out. I was thinking about the one set for today.’
‘Which was?’
‘The Feeding of the Four Thousand.’
‘You mean the Five Thousand.’
‘No, I mean the Four Thousand. If you’d done your research better you’d know there are two stories.’
‘It happened twice?’
‘According to Mark and Matthew. Luke and John only mention the Five Thousand. That story comes up in November. On the twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity to be exact.’
‘It all seems pretty unlikely to me. But what were you thinking about?’
‘Not about whether it happened, anyway. I’m not very bothered whether it did or didn’t. Seems to me the literal truth about most things is never very interesting. What I was thinking about was what the story means. That’s the important thing. Jesus gave the four thousand food and after they’d shared it there were seven basketsful left over.’
‘Twelve after the Five Thousand.’
‘You’ve done some research!’
‘And what were you thinking?’
‘I was thinking how odd it is that supposedly Christian countries like ours and the USA and France and Germany and Italy have so much food we let it go to waste or hoard it, while non-Christian countries like India and most African nations are starving. And how both the story of the four thousand and the one about the five thousand are about sharing. They’re about Christ giving everybody who was there enough to eat so that they could stay and hear what she wanted to tell them.’
‘She!’ Nik laughed.
‘Leave that for now, till we’ve done with the loaves and fishes. It’s pretty shaming when you think of it like that. We hang on to the spare food we’ve got, while other people starve. No wonder they don’t want to listen to us. Never mind that it’s a sin, a real disgrace, that we behave so selfishly. So murderously, in fact. Because keeping food from a starving person, when you’ve got enough food to keep her alive, really is murder, isn’t it? There’s no other word you can honestly use for it, and nothing can excuse it, either.’
Julie drew breath.
Nik said, ‘But if you think that, why do you stay a Christian?’
‘Because I am a Christian. I believe in Christ. It isn’t Christ’s fault that we murder other people. It’s ours.’
‘Okay, I suppose what I mean is, why do you stay a member of the church?’
‘I didn’t say it was the church’s fault, either. I said it was what the so-called Christian countries did. That’s different.’
‘You mean most of the people in the Christian countries aren’t really Christians?’
‘Isn’t that obvious? But even if it were all the church’s fault—and, sure, the church is partly to blame—I’d still remain a member for all sorts of reasons.’
‘Like?’
‘One of them is that Christ is the image of God getting her hands dirty and I’m one of God’s people. You can’t put anything right by abandoning it. You only abandon something if you think it’s finished, or so far gone it’s beyond redemption. Sometimes, I’ll be honest, I do feel as if the world, or people anyway, have had it and might as well be dumped. But then I remember I’m a person myself, no better than anybody else, and that I’d rather not be dumped, if you don’t mind. Besides, God didn’t think we were beyond redemption so she got stuck in and dirtied her hands in order to help put things right. That’s what the story of Christ is about. And so that’s the least I can do.’
She paused.
‘Anyway, that’s what I was thinking on the way to church. Since you asked!’
Nik said, ‘You should be a priest.’
Julie laughed. ‘The thought had occurred!’
‘Your sermons would be a lot better than most, that’s for sure.’
NIK’S NOTEBOOK: She wasn’t preachy, though. I mean, she wasn’t trying to make me accept what she was saying. Wasn’t trying to convince me or convert me. More like she was thinking aloud. Trying to sort som
ething out for herself. The kind of thinking aloud that makes you interested, even if before that you were bored stiff with the subject.
It’s strange. She’s convinced, but unsure. I can’t think how to express it. It isn’t that she doubts, but that she isn’t satisfied that she’s got it right yet. She’s a believer who you feel won’t be happy—no, that’s wrong . . . Who won’t be content till she’s solved a vast, complicated mystery. And she’s working at it all the time.
Selah.
So she made me think about the Feeding of the Four/Five Thousand. Afterwards, I tried doing what she said she’d been doing. Concentrating on the story. Just to see what doing that felt like. And to see if the same sort of things came into my mind as came into hers.
They didn’t. What struck me wasn’t that there turned out to be enough food for everybody to eat all they wanted and leave great basketsful behind (so litterbugs are biblical as well). That’s fairly predictable when you think about it. I mean, if everybody shared what they had with them, because this guy they admired started them off by sharing the loaves and fishes he and his mates had brought with them, then naturally there’d be more than enough. That’s what happens at bring-your-own parties. They always end up drowned in drink and buried in food.
No, the really interesting thing, I think, is that four and/or five thousand people came all that way to be with him. (They’ve been with me three days now . . . some of them have come from a distance.: Mark 8, vv. 2,3.) Nobody yomps across miles of rugged country in scorching hot weather just to be with a schlunk. And in those days in that area there can’t have been a big population. So a high percentage of the locals must have turned out for the jaunt. Which means there must have been quite a lot of something about him.
If it happened at all, of course. The whole thing might be just a fiction. I.e.: all cod.
Is God a cod?
Were the loaves fishy?
Have we used our loaves about the five thousand?
Were the five thousand only bait on a hook in a crook’s book?
If so, who was shooting the line? Jesus of Nazareth?
Didn’t he have better fish to fry than a few thousand poverty-stricken peasants from an outback area of one of the third-world outposts of the Roman Empire?