‘You were right,’ Helena said, handing me a doubled-up plastic cup. She blew across the top of her own and sat opposite me, facing the screen. ‘Moholy must be very angry. Why did we never think he’d test them?’
‘I even prepared him for it,’ I said, remembering the time I’d suggested his clients couldn’t tell the difference between one bone and another. God. No wonder he was being careful. He must have been expecting me to test out my theory, but on him. ‘He was already suspicious when he arrived at the church. He was always on his guard.’
‘There’s something I still don’t understand,’ Helena said. ‘He hasn’t had the results of the carbon tests. But he sent Rifka anyway straight to the cemetery.’
‘Makes sense. If our bones weren’t Calvin, then Calvin still had to be where he’d always been, under the ground. He assumed we’d never even tried.’
‘Okay, so our bones weren’t Calvin, let’s face it. But before the test results, how could he be so sure?’
‘I wish I knew,’ I said. ‘My Calvin impersonation might have been limited, I admit that. But it wasn’t completely useless.’
‘Rifka in the digger was fairly extreme,’ Helena said thoughtfully, sipping the top off her coffee. ‘What’s he going to be like when he finds out Calvin isn’t there?’
We both looked bleakly at each other, our paper cups in both hands. Then Helena glanced over my shoulder at the Imperial Japanese in full military assault on China. At least here we were safe.
‘I should never have got involved in the first place,’ I said. ‘Utter lunacy.’
‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. It was a very promising idea.’
‘Yes. But for a different type of person.’
Someone special and singular, with virtues and qualities I could only ever approximate. I couldn’t do what distinguished people did because I wasn’t distinguished, and the characteristics which made great men great overwhelmed a man of ordinary merit, like me, a Mr Mason Smith.
I suddenly felt embarrassed to be thirty-four, an underemployed deacon and self-imposed exile. I was embarrassed by my everyman fears and ambitions, which after thirty-four years had made me nothing but a beacon of embarrassment, the English disease and enemy of all achievement. In retreat, as Mr Smith, I discovered a resilient nostalgia for Anglican safety and reticence. If we escaped this situation unscathed, I swore to devote the rest of my professional life to summer fêtes and donkey sanctuaries, and other fail-safe institutions the God of England was known to favour. I’d lose myself in a forgotten parish in the dales. It would be something, and more than most people: the Reverend Smith.
An American Marine Mr Smith attacked a bunker of German Wehrmacht Mr Smiths with a flame-thrower. We all flinched.
We needed some kind of miracle, and I lifted the bag on to the bench beside me, pulling open the broad-gauge zip. Relics inspired miracles; it was a fact of religious history. I therefore reached into the bag for a hollow fragment of bone, a vertebra about the size of a boy-scout’s toggle. It had a hole in the middle for the vital spinal fluid, and from almost every perspective it could be turned and blurred to make a face. It wasn’t a charm: I was too knowing for that. But I closed my fingers on it anyway. However scattered, however small, the grace of relics remained intact.
‘Me too,’ Helena said, holding out her hand. I gave her the clavicle, and it was light, so light, such a lightweight angle of bone. She pressed it against her forehead.
Nothing.
We swapped bones, but no special attributes rubbed off, nor any evidence of that wistful odour of sanctity which lifted the lowest spirits. Quite the opposite. We felt disappointed, drained, ordinary. Embarrassed to be in possession of a bag of bones with no obvious qualities.
Which didn’t necessarily mean that relics had no power.
Just that the bones of a Mr Smith had this particular influence. I asked Helena if she felt in any way changed.
‘I feel a bit silly.’
‘A bit sheepish?’
‘Exactly.’
At the mercy of events, passive, buffeted, buildings on the screen crumbled for no apparent reason around Iraqi and Afghan Smiths. We hunched our shoulders, sipped at our drinks, and withdrew into a smaller version of the people we wanted to be. Our ingrained sense of our own Smithness would not go away, no matter how hard we tried, no matter what we did. We were ordinary people, with the standard Smith-issue bones.
We allowed ourselves to become dispirited, and the result of this disarmament was a cynical bloom of egalitarianism: everyone was the same, the great and the good buried beneath the earth the same as we Mr Smiths. Those who tried to stand out were guilty, along with pride and arrogance, of hypocrisy. They knew they were no different from us, because we all ended up alike. Bones. All the same bones.
‘Even special people aren’t very special,’ Helena said, persuading me it was so. ‘Whenever they die, a neighbour or close friend can always be found to say that they were just like everyone else.’
‘They kept themselves to themselves,’ I said, nodding in agreement, looking at Helena over the rim of my cup. ‘He was just so ordinary.’
‘So down-to-earth. She used to work on her roses, like the rest of us. She was a person like any other. Not at all a star.’
I pictured Noël Coward, of Switzerland, in the last years, meeting David Niven, of Switzerland, in the last years. This was in the show-tent at the Circus Knie, at the height of its winter season in Geneva. They meet, heavily overcoated, in seats two or three rows back, both men at an advanced age and leaning forward on sticks, wattled chins on the backs of hands, gummily chewing at the best plastic teeth that millionaires can buy.
‘How are you, Noël?’
‘How are you, David?’
‘It’s my legs, Noëllie, my legs.’
‘It’s my hip, Davie, my hip.’
And Mr Smith from the row behind, unnoticed until now, pushes his unmemorable head between theirs, and he says, because it’s the same for everybody, ‘Personally I get it from my back. Oh, my back, my back.’
Finishing her coffee, Helena made nasty observations about people who thought they were special. And I couldn’t agree more. Pretentious. Idiots. We rediscovered the small, hard, surviving mind of Mr and Mrs Smith.
Thomas à Becket, lying brainless on uneven flagstones in his own blood, was found to be wearing a hair-shirt alive with worms and wingless insects. They were squirming and twisting towards his injuries, the surviving monks said, like ravenous black vermin.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘And for what? Look at the hopelessness of the Anglican Church today.’
Richard Burton crawling on all fours to the lifts at the Dorchester, howling and retching up his guts. How special was that? The carpets in his yacht the Kalizma were changed every ninety days, humming with the stain and stink of Taylor’s yapping lapdogs, the most beautiful woman in the world an ever-expanding harridan and scold.
Even Audrey Hepburn, too saintly to be raised from the dead, was a fake, a total phoney. She was born, the most famously English of actresses, as Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston, and during her early days as a dancer in London the virgin princess abandoned an unplanned baby. The discarded mite was raised secretly in middle America, by a fellow trouper with no professional future. Not after that, anyway. Hepburn constantly checked and regulated this parallel but unlived life. She made sure it never interfered in any way with her fabulous career in the movies.
‘Thanks,’ Helena said.
‘Not a problem.’
As an ordinary man, believing only in ordinary men, I had greater need of a God. Mr Smith needed a God, desperately, more desperately than other men. I sat forward and fingered my warm skull, the bones of my eye-sockets, and prayed for God to exist, if that was feasible. And if he did exist, for him not to be ridiculous, or embittered. As usual, whenever I tried to pray, the voice of ambition taunted me that I’d once wanted to be someone special. That I’d never prayed for anything else, an
d this was still what I was praying for now. If there was a God, somewhere up or down, it reflected well on His creation. It reflected well on me, because I was one of His. It made me special, and, if not that, then whatever else was worth believing?
Part of the excitement and incentive for my contact with relics was the feeling that it made me distinct. I’d just wanted to say, in the history of everything, I AM HERE. There was no harm in trying.
In the history of English literature, in temporary possession of the actual bones of the real James Joyce, I’d have staked my place on the map. This is the place, my place, next to the relics of Joyce. Picking over the remains of John Calvin, arranging him however I pleased, I was saying I AM HERE, on the still-changing chart of the Protestant Reformation. This was the John Calvin, stern and dressed in black, who’d caused so much of the trouble. I am here, in the History of the World, in the flesh, planting my flag among the great and the dead, who previously seemed so distant.
And if not Calvin, then here I am, in the history of the English saints, of electro-chemistry, of womanising and drinking, of psychoanalysis. I AM HERE. This is the place. I took some part.
The bones of Mr Smith were a nothing place, in central middle of nowhere, flying no flags. It was where we’d always belonged, because as history repeated itself at the Battle of Solferino (40,000 Mr Smiths, wounded and suffering and all unnumbed), neither of us was feeling very singular, nor very brave. We knew what was coming, what was always coming, and we and our unborn baby could not withstand events, flame-throwers and tortures and garrottes. All we could hope for was luck, and an instinct that it was better to bend than to break. Heroes were charlatans, and heroic gestures offensive to those of us who’d learnt to bend.
Neither of us aspired to invading China. We just wanted to go home, our love the only way we’d ever be special. We’d go back to the flat, pack up and travel to somewhere forgetful, wherever it was that everyone else went, never to be heard from again. Accepting defeat, there’d be no more pushing ourselves forward, insisting I Am Here. We’d be there, anywhere, it didn’t matter where. Scared of the dark, we were also scared of the light.
In the flat, I’d leave a note for Moholy saying sorry. I’d contact Lambeth Palace, to regret my ordination, because a man like me had no obvious future in the Church. I was not a reverend but a Mr, through and through, and nothing more ambitious than that. I’d stop looking for spiritual answers, and Helena and I would marry. In the photographs we’d bride and groom, both going nowhere, but at least going there together. We’d set up a quiet little business, covering costs by supplying a steady demand among the young in love for the growing cult of love-lobes. Young lovers would exchange their earlobes as evidence of undying devotion. There was nothing gruesome about it: these were gifts freely offered between consenting adults. Earlobes had no known physical function, no operative value. Under anaesthetic, the removal of an earlobe, hygienically stitched, would cause only momentary discomfort, comparable to a piercing, or a tattoo. We’d provide a full service in our shop with parlour, though nobody would be served while under the influence.
The basic cut-and-stitch business would be supplemented with a mail-order line of lobe-lockets, in a choice of precious metals, some with small glass windows. Each exclusive locket-design would be offered as a matching pair, with a high-carat chain of adjustable length to wear the earlobe of the loved one as close as possible to the heart. We might invent a formal ritual of exchange, and a money-spinning little book of earlobe dos (wear this locket always, as evidence of the sincerity of your love) and don’ts (try this at home). With a little luck, and the absence of world events, we’d live anonymously ever after in the flat above the shop. And like all Mr Smiths in the English tradition, we’d try to look on the bright side. Mustn’t grumble.
That was it, the future for the family Smith, with our children the little Smiths an acceptable excuse for all those things we never did.
Helena moved across from her metal bench to mine, and squeezed my shoulder. Her eyes weren’t violet, they were blue. ‘You’re not worried?’
‘No more than usual.’
‘I mean that Moholy will catch up with us.’
I thought about it, then shook my head. It seemed presumptuous to think that Moholy would make the effort. It was too extreme, and not the kind of thing which happened to ordinary people, like us. We wouldn’t be worth it.
I locked the door of the flat from the inside, then went back to check it was locked. I threw the keys to Helena as I passed the sitting-room. I stood still, then took two steps back. Rifka was in the armchair, hands in pockets, fleece zipped to her chin. She shrugged. Then she winked. Moholy came out of the bedroom. He smelled of drink.
‘Come in,’ Moholy said, ‘come on in.’
He beckoned us into the sitting-room, and kicked Rifka’s feet. Rifka stood up. Moholy took over the chair, sitting forward with fingers steepled, trembling, his neat and compact body highly strung. ‘Been anywhere nice?’
Rifka still had mud from the cemetery on her jeans. She’d taken off her trainers, which was thoughtful of her. But she hadn’t left them by the door, to warn us, which wasn’t. They were underneath the window. She went into the kitchen in her socks, and noisily searched through the cupboards. Moholy held up his hands.
‘No complaints, please,’ he said. ‘None of this is yours. You have nothing. You are nothing. Sit on the floor. On the floor, I think I said. That’s right, side by side, facing this way. Thank you. To be honest, I’m not expecting a great deal of trouble.’
‘We don’t want to cause any,’ I agreed.
‘Frightened?’
‘Of course we are,’ Helena said. ‘Who wouldn’t be?’
‘Sit down. You are frightened, aren’t you?’
‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘is it really that surprising?’
Moholy thought about it, working a little muscle in his jaw. ‘Yes, actually it is. I think you know why I’m here.’
Since leaving All Saints earlier that day, and after sending Rifka to the cemetery, Moholy had been waiting with some impatience to hear from his man at the lab.
‘I now have the results,’ he said.
‘I think I can explain.’
‘It’s not Calvin. Conclusively not. The initial test-forecast shows someone nearly contemporary. Male. No distinguishing bone characteristics. A little overweight, possibly. Otherwise healthy.’
‘Not that healthy,’ Helena pointed out.
‘Where’s my John Calvin?’
Moholy had already gone through the flat, and at the back of the closet he’d found an almost complete Richard Burton. After performing his own personal tests, which included a couple of slugs of sherry from the kitchen, he knew that these bones were not those he most badly wanted.
I held the blue sports-bag up in front of me, like an apology. ‘These are the only bones we have. Honestly. And you’ve already had them tested. You know these bones aren’t Calvin.’
‘They’re not, no,’ Moholy said, coming over and snatching the bag away from me. With some distaste, he held it out at arm’s length, and then dropped it. It landed and stuck. ‘These are nobody. Tell me where you’ve hidden John Calvin.’
‘Ask Rifka,’ Helena said. ‘She was in the cemetery, not us.’
After smashing Calvin’s 500-year-old recumbent stone, Rifka had used the digger to haul out the earth, deeper and deeper. All that came out was earth.
‘Imagine my surprise when she phoned to tell me,’ Moholy said, kicking the sports-bag hard against the wall. I flinched, but it was bones, not a corpse.
‘You offered me bones, and said they were Calvin. They weren’t. Yet Calvin wasn’t in his grave. It looks bad, I think you’ll agree. I tell Rifka that can’t be right, and ask her to check again. A little later, she rings me back saying she’s found paste round the seam of Calvin’s vault. Recent paste, which isn’t even dry. Someone has already been there, someone very skilful and discreet, as if they’d
already practised on someone else. I pay a visit to my own flat, and find Richard Burton. I realise someone’s been practising, without my knowledge. I’m disappointed in you, James. I was quite prepared, it turns out wrongly, to trust a man of the cloth. Now, I want John Calvin, wherever you may have hidden him. Somehow, and to be honest I don’t know how, you’ve understood his true value, which inspired your foolhardy attempt to deceive me with inferior bones. As if I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.’
‘We’re just ordinary people,’ I said. ‘We’re in a long way over our heads.’
‘It’s not what you think,’ Helena added. ‘Pick another body. Any body. We’ve got Richard Burton. We can get you someone else.’
‘I don’t want anyone else. I want John Calvin.’
‘He wasn’t there,’ I said. ‘He never wanted to be buried in Geneva, and his followers must have obeyed him. They secretly buried him somewhere else.’
‘Don’t be obtuse. That’s a fanciful story which nobody even half intelligent has ever believed. Everyone wants to be remembered.’
‘Not John Calvin.’
‘Even John Calvin. I want his bones. And you must have worked out why. Otherwise you wouldn’t be trying so hard to steal him away from me.’
‘Honestly,’ Helena said. ‘We know nothing. Why is John Calvin so suddenly exceptional?’
Moholy looked at us both in turn, his sharp fingers pressing hard between his furrowed eyebrows.
‘He isn’t,’ Moholy eventually said, exhaling, relaxing his shoulders, shaking out his hands. ‘And you know that. And I know you know, because you’ve already seen inside his grave. I want the skeleton you found buried under John Calvin’s stone. I want the bones of Jesus Christ, the man.’
The bones of Jesus are the great lost relics of history. They are the missing paragon of all other relics, and a model of the unique objective which shapes a collector’s dreams, dreaming of his own pre-eminence among collectors. They are the Secret, the Grail, the Philosopher’s Stone. Or would be, if they existed.
Dry Bones Page 23
