Life: An Exploded Diagram

  In social and religious terms, the Hoseason clan had always been awkward, harsh, thorny. They were Methodists for a while, but found Methodism a bit slack. They joined the Baptists, but found them a bit wet. Eventually they formed their own sect, calling themselves simply the Brethren. The men grew beards and tyrannized their women. Their instinctive response to more or less anything was to rail against it. The delights of the flesh, in particular, got their backs up. They bitterly regretted the pleasure involved in the conceiving of children, and chastised their young because of it. Way ahead of their time, they were the Taliban of north Norfolk. And like all prophets, they were lonely and scorned.

  Then Enoch had a vision. It appeared one evening in his furnace and revealed the purpose of his life. Two terrible and beautiful angels of flame foretold him the end of the corrupt and mortal world. God, they confessed, had tried to purge the world with water, but sin had refused to drown. Now it was the turn of fire. All sinful flesh would melt, burn, vaporize.

  “We speak of fire from the fire,” the male angel said, “yea, even unto a man that worketh with fire.”

  “Hallelujah,” Enoch cried, dropping his tongs and falling to his knees.

  “Know that the earth shall be like unto thy furnace.”

  “Amen!”

  “Know this, also: the seed of the fire is already in the hands of men. It shall become a mighty tree that groweth up to heaven, and all shall be consumed in the leaves and branches of its burning.”

  Enoch’s eyes were wet with joy.

  “When, angel? When will this come to pass?”

  The female angel smiled at him. Her uplit breasts were perky under her flame-resistant robe. She spoke without speaking.

  “The revelation is in the Book.”

  This answer came as no surprise to Enoch Hoseason, who came from a long line of biblical fundamentalists. As soon as the angels faded back into the glowing coals, he reached for the Good Book with a trembling hand.

  The end of the world is almost as old as its beginning. In chapter one of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, God spends most of a week creating the earth and all that is in it; then a mere six pages later (in Enoch’s dog-eared copy), He destroys it all in a flood, the only survivors being, of course, Noah and his family and their floating menagerie. So it’s hardly surprising that for thousands of years people have been predicting another End. The Apocalypse. Armageddon. The Day of Judgment. Again. Nor is it unreasonable. Consider our brutal, bloody, and filthy history, our nasty habits. If there was ever a species that deserved purging from the surface of the planet, it is humanity. We are, or should be, a temporary infestation or infection, a smart virus awaiting its divine antidote. The prophets of the Bible return to the theme over and over again. Enoch was keenly aware of this. He had spent countless hours studying them. He was particularly interested in the book of Hosea — naturally, since the name was the seed of his own. The trouble was that the book of Hosea was almost impossibly difficult to understand. It was also drenched in sex. It began with God commanding Hosea to marry a prostitute:

  The LORD said unto Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredom and children of whoredom: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the LORD.

  Did this mean, Enoch had often wondered, that his own mother (long since gone to her reward) had been a whore? Well, yes, sadly. All women, from snake-fancying Eve down, were; this truth was the very foundation of God’s Word. Satan works his wiles through women. Salome, Jezebel, Delilah, the Whore of Babylon. But Hosea, like the other prophets, promised universal cleansing.

  Therefore shall the land mourn, and every one that dwelleth therein shall languish, with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven; yea, the fishes of the sea also shall be taken away.

  That last bit pleased Enoch. He’d always had problems with the Flood. If all things were sinful, it seemed odd that fish, not to mention ducks and seagulls, for example, had got off so lightly.

  But the female angel (whose breasts still troubled Enoch) had said, “The revelation is in the Book.” She was clearly directing him to the book of Revelation, the Bible’s violent and visionary climax. He was already deeply familiar with it: the Lion of Judah, the blood-soaked Lamb, the seven seals, and the seven candlesticks. The four horses and the seven plagues were constant visitors to his waking and his sleeping. But now he returned to the book looking for something precise: a date.

  Enoch knew, of course, that previous prophets of the End had come unstuck by getting the date wrong. Because the book of Revelation gave the number of the Beast as 666, there had been widespread panic, and rapture, toward the end of AD 665. But the following year had passed without incident, as far as global destruction was concerned. Then the idea took root that mankind’s term on earth was a thousand years. So Christendom was seized by terror and joy in the year 1000. There was anarchy, in fact. Lawless mobs roamed Europe, looting and pillaging and raping on the grounds that they were doomed anyway, so what the hell. But the sun rose, as per usual, on the first day of 1001. (The Muslims, who worked to a different calendar, laughed up their sleeves at the foolish Christians.)

  Nevertheless, the dread of dates with zeroes in them persisted. (Enoch’s younger brother, Amos, was among many who came to believe that AD 2000 was the cutoff date. He became a vegetarian in the hope that he would live long enough to be a witness to the cataclysm. To his great disappointment, however, he would die in 1998.) Other dates had come and gone. The American prophet William Miller had announced that the Last Day would occur in 1843. When annihilation failed to occur, the date was revised to 1844 — October 22, to be precise. October 23, 1844, eventually became known as the day of the Great Disappointment.

  Despite all this, Enoch Hoseason believed that the recurrence of particular numbers throughout the Bible, especially those in the book of Revelation, would, as the angel had promised, give him a date. The fact that earlier prophets had got it wrong did not daunt him. That men had failed to discover a thing did not mean that it did not exist. Australia, for example, had been there all the time. So, neglecting work, food, and rest, he made abstruse calculations on sheet after sheet of paper. Eventually he came up with the five numbers 2, 8, 10, 6, and 2:October 28, 1962. Soon. Very soon; hence the urgency of the vision. Hosanna!

  The date of the End, the search for it, had not blinded Enoch to the other message of the Scriptures: that there are those who will be saved, those whose penitence and purity of heart will pluck them from the fire and seat them upon the white pews surrounding the eternal throne of the Lord. Obviously — because the angels had appeared in his, Enoch’s, forge — the Brethren were the Chosen. While this was joyous, it was also a problem. Should they be told? If they knew, might they become complacent? Might they cease to spread the word, cease to labor in the sour fields of sin, sowing the seeds of salvation? Might they — God forbid — slacken into sin themselves?

  Enoch prayed energetically for guidance, but none came. He was not disappointed; he understood that the vision brought with it hard responsibilities. So at last he summoned the Brethren to his house and shared the revelation, swearing them to secrecy. Their joy and their fierce resolve assured him that he had done the right thing. Amos wept glittering tears of delight and beat upon his breast repeatedly. Jonathan Eldon uttered inspired words. Win Little rocked in her seat, hugging her stout old body, thanking the Lord for releasing her, at long last, from slavery and whoredom. Not to mention a bleddy uppity son-in-law.

  Enoch Hoseason was a big man. Not tall, but wide and powerful; a compressed giant. On the Saturday after he’d shared his vision with the Brethren, he carried the massive anvil from his forge, hugging it to his chest, and set it down in the archway facing the marketplace. Those who happened to witness the feat were mightily impressed. He was accompanied by Amos and Jonathan. Each carried blackboards painted with ominous passages from the Scriptures. They positioned them on either side of the arch. Enoch began to preach to the small but swelli
ng crowd of onlookers. He punctuated his sermon by smiting the anvil with a heavy, long-handled mallet.

  “Ye shall die. Be certain, ye shall die.”

  CLANG!

  “And sooner than ye think.”

  CLANG!

  After a month or two, Enoch also started setting up his iron altar on Wednesdays, early-closing day. As on Saturdays, he always attracted a jovial crowd.

  “Less see yer lift that thing agen, bor!”

  “How nigh is that enda the world, Enoch?”

  “I do hope yer gorna finish my gate afore that come, Enoch!”

  “Mock ye, yea. Let mockery be a comfort unto thee. For the seventh seal shall be opened, and death shall not be an ease unto thee.”

  CLANG!

  GEORGE, WITH HIS back to the bed, buttoned up his pajamas and said, “What’s up with your mother, Ruth?”

  “What d’yer mean?”

  “You must’ve noticed. She’s been different lately. She’s stopped bitching at me all the time.”

  “Shush, George. She’ll hear us.”

  He grinned. “I doubt it. She’s gone a bit deaf, I reckon.”

  He took his socks off and looked at himself without pleasure in the mirror. How had he got so old? When had his hair started going Absent Without Leave? He got into the bed, and Ruth clicked them into darkness.

  He spoke to her broad back. “You know what I mean. Instead of moaning at me all the time, she’s gone all sweetness and light. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. Like last night, when I got in late. What I usually get is ‘Yer’ll hevta scrap around if yer want somethun, ’cos we had our dinner the usual time.’ But no. She goes, ‘I’re put yer dinner in the bottom of the oven, George. The gravy hev gone a bit thick in the saucepan, but that’ll be all right if you heat it up.’”

  “That was nice of her, George. I don’t see why you should get upset about it.”

  “I’m not upset. I’m not saying that.”

  “So what are you sayun, then?”

  “I dunno. Just that it’s a bit strange, is all.”

  “She’s gettun old, George. Thas all it is.”

  “No,” George said. “It’s something else. I don’t trust her. It’s like she’s looking at me, saying, ‘I know something you don’t.’”

  Ruth laughed, shuddering her bulk.

  “Dunt be so daft, George. Go to sleep.”

  CLEM AND GOZ wheeled into the field and dismounted. They eyed the other bikes leaned against the hedge.

  “Shite,” Clem said. “There’s hundreds here. All the good pickun’ll be gone.”

  “Nah. We’ll be all right, comrade.”

  They marched over the hot hard earth to the weighing tables and took six empty punnets apiece from the stack. There was a queue of pickers waiting to have their fruit weighed. Cushie Luckett was one of them.

  “Orright, Grammargogs?”

  “Orright, Cushie. Good pickun?”

  Cushie shrugged. “That ent bad. I’re made twelve shillun already.”

  Goz grinned at him. “I thought you had a proper job, Cushie. Whassup, the abattoir run out of pigs?”

  “I’m orf sick,” Cushie said. “And you hent seen me, Gosling.”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Goz said solemnly, “you have always been entirely invisible.”

  They made their way across the top of the field to where Mortimer’s watchful foreman stood. He looked up and raised an arm.

  “Over here, you boys!”

  “Hardly a necessary instruction,” Goz murmured.

  “Right, you boys. Set you onter the bottom of these two rows here.”

  The foreman had a hand-rolled cigarette attached to his lower lip by some magical adhesive. It bobbled as he spoke but did not fall.

  “How many baskets you got there? Twelve? I shunt think yer’d be needin aller them.”

  “Oh,” Goz said, all disappointment. “Why? What time are you knocking off?”

  “Six, sharp.”

  Goz had a watch on his wrist and he looked at it. “That’s a good hour and a half away. I reckon we’ll need another dozen, don’t you, Clem?”

  “At least.”

  “Hah bleddy hah,” the foreman said. “We’ll see. Now, you go all the way down the bottom of the row afore you start. And lissun —”

  “Clean the plants,” Goz said.

  “Clean the plants.” The foreman frowned, puzzled to find himself an echo. “You get all that fruit orf, other than the green uns, ’cos I’ll be along behind to check up. And dunt you even think about slippun stones into them baskets. Orf you go, then.”

  Clem and Goz had picked strawberries every summer since they were toddlers. They considered themselves experts. Pickers were either kneelers or stoopers, depending on their age. Older pickers, mindful of their backs, shuffled along the rows on their knees, like sinful pilgrims. It took two kneelers to work a row, because in that position you couldn’t see the fruit on the other side of the plants. And you were likely to miss the pick of the crop: the small, firm, and intensely sweet berries that lurked under the straw between the rows. You would most likely feel the sad squelch of them under you before you found them, and go home with stubborn gritty stains on your knees.

  Clem and Goz were stoopers. They straddled a row apiece, easing the straw aside with their feet as they moved up, uncovering the fruits that had snuck out into the sun. Their hands busily riffled the dark green leaves. Their fingers automatically assessed plumpness and ripeness, passed quickly over the hard dimples of whitish berries, recoiled from the gray fur on those that had gone to rot. Perfect strawberries pulled away from their stalks with a crisp little pop.

  The late sun scorched their backs. Not quite impervious to temptation, they gobbled only one strawberry every ten minutes or so, choosing it according to some selection process they could not have explained. A quickening of aroma, perhaps, or a perfection of shape in the hand. Slipping them quickly into their mouths without looking up. Most of the other workers were women accompanied by small children, whose mouths were smeared with juice like clumsy lipstick. Gossip and low laughter drifted on the warm air. There was a scattering of younger pickers, too; like Clem and Goz, they’d changed hurriedly out of their school uniforms and pedaled the mile and a half from Borstead. Twenty yards ahead of the boys, Doreen Riley’s ample backside was aimed right at them. Goz caught Clem gazing at it.

  “Ah, c’mon. You can’t be that desperate.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  Goz grinned. “It’s the heat.”

  They went into one of their little routines, doing Goon Show voices from the wireless.

  Clem: “It’s the heat!”

  Goz: “The heat, by God! The drums! The flies! The native women!”

  Clem: “It’s enough to drive a white man crazy, I tell you!”

  Goz: “Steady, old chap. Steady. Remember, you’re British. Think of the queen.”

  A punnet held four pounds of fruit. Six punnets earned you two shillings. Not in hard coin, though. At the weighing table, so long as you made the weight, or exceeded it, the cashier tore four tickets from a thick reel. Each was printed MORTIMER ESTATES LTD and 6d. At the end of the day’s picking, you queued again to have these sixpenny tickets exchanged for cash that was brought in brown bags from the estate office late in the afternoon. It was a system based on distrust; one wouldn’t want a load of money sitting all day in a field full of quick-fingered casual workers. It had the added advantage of keeping them there until the end of the day.

  In less than an hour, Clem and Goz had filled their twelve punnets. Forty-eight pounds of fruit. Goz straightened up, wiping his face on his sleeve. Gold straw dust glittered on the damp hairs of his forearm.

  “Are we done?”

  “Yep, reckon so. Look at this un.”

  Clem held up his pick of the day: a big, glossy, flawlessly scarlet berry. It was too good to eat.

  “Boo’iful,” Goz said. “The size of a dog’s heart.”


  They headed up toward the head of the field.

  “Not if it was a Pekingese,” Clem said.

  “Nor a Jack Russell. I was thinking more like a Labrador.”

  “Norfolk lurcher.”

  “Speak for yerself,” Goz said.

  They shuffled forward in the queue, pushing their punnets with their feet. The weighed strawberries were being loaded onto a trailer. One of the loaders was a girl neither of them had seen before. She had very dark hair that swung against her face and neck as she moved. She wore an old blue-checked shirt that was too big for her — a man’s shirt — its tails bunched into a knot at her waist. When she stooped to lift, you could see down into it, where white crescents could be glimpsed. Her jeans stopped at the calves of her slender legs. They were unlike the slack, cheap denims that the boys wore; they fit her. Clem could not help noticing the seam that curved down from her waistline and vanished under her bum. She was not used to the work. Her mouth was set in a pout, and she seemed to have some invisible barrier surrounding her, defying contact.

  A rough male voice awoke him.

  “Oi! D’yer want them strorbries weighed, or what?”

  Clem dragged his gaze away from the girl.

  “Sorry,” he said, and stacked his load onto the scales.

  He stood aside while Goz collected the tickets.

  “What d’yer reckon? Do another six?”

  “Yeah,” Clem said. “Might as well. I’ll get em.”

  He went to the pile of emptied punnets. He was closer to the girl now. He watched her lift filled ones; his own were on top. She carried them to the trailer, hoisted them up, then paused, reaching out. When she turned around, she was holding a perfect strawberry delicately in her fingertips. It was Clem’s dog’s heart. She turned it, examining it. She raised it toward her mouth.

  “You aren’t gorna eat that, are yer?”

  He was more surprised that he’d spoken than she seemed to be.