From the corner of my eye, I saw Helena swallow. We glanced at each other, then immediately looked away, awed by this bravura display of twisted thinking.
‘If we did have them—’ Helena said. She coughed, and had to start again. ‘Sorry. If we did have them, why would we hide them?’
‘To keep them for yourselves. Out of your own ambition. Or to sell to someone else. You’d find plenty of buyers.’
‘That would be a betrayal,’ Helena said, thinking fast. ‘Trickery, deceit, and a disloyalty to you personally. We’d have to lie without even thinking about it. Which would be unforgivable.’
‘Exactly,’ Moholy said, narrowing his eyes. ‘And quite frankly, no matter how much I admire you both for your resourcefulness, I’m not of a mind to forgive you.’
‘But if we had the bones of Jesus, we couldn’t do any of this, could we? We couldn’t possibly lie to you.’
‘Right,’ Rifka said, nodding at Helena’s evident wisdom. ‘She has a very good point there. If they’ve hidden the bones but are under the influence, they simply couldn’t do it. The deceit of it would be beyond them.’
Moholy stopped and looked thoughtful. Frustrated, but still thoughtful. He checked us both over. ‘I have to admit that right at the moment neither of you exactly reminds me of Jesus. You’re frightened, both of you, and a little pathetic.’
‘We are,’ I said, abject and mortal, Mr Smith and no big deal. ‘We’re so pathetic. We’re nothing at all like Jesus. We really don’t have his bones.’
‘Which could just mean you don’t have the bones here.’
‘Not here. Not anywhere. Promise. Cross my heart.’
‘Jay, be quiet,’ Rifka said. ‘You’re testing everyone’s patience. And if I were you, I wouldn’t risk doing that.’
‘Tell them why,’ Moholy said. ‘Tell them what they’re up against.’
With a certain weariness, Rifka explained that Moholy had a fresh batch of pills from the crushed bones of Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in all its heartless pomp. In many ways, Suleiman was the most enlightened of sultans, famous for his wisdom and aesthetic taste, and even a sense of humour. However, he showed no mercy to those who betrayed him, most notoriously after the conquest of Baghdad.
‘Have pity on us,’ I said, appealing to Moholy’s better nature. ‘I know you have it in you to show pity.’
‘Perhaps,’ Moholy said. ‘Perhaps I do. But I’m not so sure about Suleiman. I must say I feel quite nasty. Not nice at all. Give me the Jesus bones, which I know you have. And then pray their effect is positive.’
‘We don’t have them. Really. We haven’t found Jesus.’
In a rage, Moholy seized another bone and broke it over his knee. He used one jagged brown end to jab at us with emphasis. ‘Let’s go through this again. You had the mandala map. You had Jung’s knee. You were first into Calvin’s grave, and you fobbed me off with some crappy worthless skeleton, because, as you once ludicrously suggested, all bones look the same. All bones are not the same. You know that.’
‘Some time ago,’ Rifka added, inspecting the cuffs of her fleece, ‘Mr Moholy was cheated by our agent from Iraq. You may have heard.’
‘Please,’ I said, ‘I beg of you.’
‘One morning, before dawn, the poor man had his fingers securely taped to a city tram-line.’
‘And in Geneva,’ Moholy continued, with some force, ‘the trams run on time.’
‘Please, don’t,’ I said, shuffling forward on my knees. ‘I’ll do anything, anything.’
‘Too late,’ Moholy said, before reconsidering just for a second. Perhaps this was Suleiman’s famous wisdom, a stutter of reluctance before the vengeance. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I might just believe you when you say the bones aren’t here. If they were, you wouldn’t be so defeated. Of the two of you, the girl seems much more together. She can fetch the bones from wherever you’ve hidden them.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘But for you, James, the adventure is over. Rifka knows what to do.’
Moholy looked into my face, and he laughed. ‘God. You’re such a little nobody I almost feel sorry for you.’
From his pocket he pulled out a bottle of pills, shaking them next to his ear, then tapping one into his hand. Then another. And another. He checked the label. From where I was I couldn’t read it, but the label made Moholy smile. Briefly.
‘Take these,’ he said. ‘A little test. They’re not Suleiman the Great.’
He knelt down and popped them into my mouth, one by one. I tried to swallow them. I’d said I’d do anything to save myself, and I would. It took a while for the last pill to go down, so Moholy took my cheeks between his fingers, and pushed and pulled until it did.
‘Cheer up,’ he said, slapping me twice on the jaw-bone. ‘Try and see the funny side.’
Chaplin’s Shoulder
‘Inevitably one is led to the conclusion that Chaplin does not exist, or, at least, that a cohesive unity known as “Chaplin” never appears fully at any one time. It could be held that this applies to all of us, that no one is the same at seven o’clock in the morning as at seven o’clock at night.’
Raoul Sobel and David Francis, Chaplin: Genesis of a Clown
I FELT SMALLER, flat-footed. I couldn’t put it into words, but I felt somehow diminished. Though also, at the same time, strangely unvanquished.
It was just before dawn, darkness leaking conviction, and I was lying flat on my back on a hard public road, the heels of my shoes butting the kerb. My hands were straight out above my head in the gesture of surrender, the knuckles of each ring finger stuck fast with duct-tape to the stainless steel of the nearside tram-track. I’d been lying in this position, though not always so calmly, for several hours.
According to Rifka, this was Moholy’s way of expressing displeasure. He’d examine a map of Geneva’s tram network and, while it was still dark, have his enemy’s fingers duct-taped over the silver indent of the track, usually about ten metres beyond a right-angle bend. In Geneva, in the silence of early morning, the first punctual tram of the day could be heard from quite some distance. It would zing the overhead cables, thrum then rumble through the hard steel tracks, tremble into my knuckles, through my wrist, along my arm, my bones conducting the vibration to my shoulder and jaw, knowing all along what was coming.
Ahead of blind corners, as a precaution, the tram-drivers rang an electric bell like the end of lessons at school.
Fortunately, because Suleiman the Magnificent wasn’t all bad, Rifka had taped me half-way along a straight. The tram-driver might be awake enough to see me. If he was, he might even have time to stop.
Rifka had already been walking away, even as I tried to call out, but my throat was dry with fright and I couldn’t manage the words. I wanted to know who was in the pills Moholy had forced on me, and, even though no sound came from my mouth, Rifka had turned and soon understood what I wanted.
‘No idea,’ she’d said, ‘but wait until sunrise. Whoever it was, you’re about to find out if he was lucky.’
I lay there trapped, hands taped above my head, looking for signs in the sky of a new day dawning. I was impressed by the quiet. Like the solid citizens of Zurich, the Genevans valued their sleep, and even though it was Saturday and the first official day of an international anti-everything demonstration, the streets were still deserted. In fact, sleeping late on Saturday mornings was one of the many endangered liberties which justified the struggle.
Using my stomach muscles, I raised my legs, keeping them straight until they made a right angle with my body. Then I tilted them back further, my spine rolling up from the road-surface as my feet made a line with my shoulders, and still further, over my head, feeling with the tips of my shoes for the tarmac beyond the outer tram-track. I scraped my head under my shoulders, grazing my remaining earlobe. I was now on my knees, facing the palms of my hands, elbows out, fingers pointing back towards me. I felt like a floppy dog, or a water mammal.
The flat st
rip of duct-tape was wider than my fingers, and the edges and ends seamlessly affixed either side of the steel track. There was nowhere I could start biting, or tugging with my teeth, and from this position I could get no leverage on my single fingers by pulling with my arms. I tried twisting and turning. I had a go at chewing through my own wrist. I even almost shouted for help, but a floppy dog, a water mammal, I couldn’t endure the indignity.
I did a forward roll, and finished back where I’d started, hands in surrender above my head, heels against the kerb. Still no sign of the dawn.
Moholy was teaching me a lesson, and I was no fool: flat on my back I was learning my station. I was also learning the amazing adhesiveness of industrial duct-tape. And finally, down but never quite out, I discovered my astounding talent for the day-dream. Helena’s baby was only the start. After this one, we’d have two or three more, four or five. We’d have eight children, three boys and five girls. By then of course we’d be married, the traditional salvation of a ladies’ man like myself, who found himself unexpectedly compromised.
Our children would all be darlings, naturally, occupying the top floor with Pinnie their nanny, though I’d be delighted to see them at dinner, on those evenings I wasn’t engaged.
Helena would be the happiest wife in the world. All I asked was that she change her name and renounce any life she might have of her own. She could spend her time checking the household accounts, planning the rose garden, and preparing gourmet feasts for the cook’s day off, thus leaving me free to think intricate thoughts of astonishing depth.
In return, I’d find gainful employment at a higher annual salary than the President of the United States, though I wouldn’t let it change me. My tastes would remain simple: our own Swiss home, a potted palm, tiger rugs, a den panelled with fake Oriental weapons, and oil paintings of Arabs detonating their flintlocks from the saddles of piebald ponies. As far as possible, I’d do my bit to spread the wealth of nations to the littler people, whom I had once been among, and would gladly address their socialist movements in the lapses between yachting with my equals.
I was flat on my back, arms outstretched, two fingers taped securely to a tram-line in Geneva. I was staring up at the blackness of the universe, and smiling. Cretin. If my hands had been free, I’d have slapped myself about the cheeks. I’d have knocked myself out with a single punch. Instead, I banged the back of my head twice against the road, then looked left and right. No one. My eyes and mouth shrivelled. I was going to cry, but then my eyebrows regrouped, clenching into manly resolve.
Keep a grip on reality. For the sake of your fingers, little man, for sanity.
Realistically, in the real not the dream-world, don’t get married. It significantly decreases the risk of divorce. And without divorce, there could be no ex-wife to upset fastidious dinner-companions by flinging mud at the picture windows. Having children was asking for trouble. Open your eyes. The girls were anorexic and stayed out late, or travelled Europe in a camper van with gypsies and the Cirque Imaginaire. The boys were just biding their time, before writing vicious memoirs and auctioning my pyjamas.
As for spreading the wealth of the world, that was always fine in principle, though with the obvious exemption of all 200 million US dollars of whatever was rightly mine, kept safe and somewhere pleasant without taxes, like Switzerland. Be realistic: be a capitalist reactionary. There was no purpose or beauty in life, but at least there were amethyst pinkie rings, and custom-made lavender automobiles, and loyal Japanese domestics.
The sky above, beyond the delicate grid of electric cables, was definitely a shade lighter. I sensed the first hint of a silver ribbon, and then the shadows of broken clouds slowly rippling into early-morning scoops of raspberry and grey. In the curtains of an apartment window, the abrupt fly-killing blue of television. Maybe all Moholy’s victims saw the same thing, exactly that, just before Geneva’s first tram. Or felt this particular softness in the weather, like a concession, or this warm wind, well travelled, or this ringing in their ears, or this uncontrollable twitch in their straight but trembling legs.
Not my life, but all my stupid ambitions flashed before my eyes, versions of me in many different guises, and every ambition just the urge to change, to be different, other than Jay James Mason Minor, the person I actually was.
Vibrations skittered down the tracks. Then a rhythmic tapping, and turning my head to the left, along the converging parallel lines, I sighted Rifka walking towards me. She was banging the rail with a stick. She was concentrating each of her steps on my single tram-line, like an acrobat on a tightrope, each footfall in line with the last, but banging and scratching the rail with a bamboo cane.
‘Dring-dring,’ she said. ‘How much do I sound like a train?’
She knelt beside me, opened a saw-blade from her penknife, and jagged it roughly through the tape. I glanced behind her for the early tram. ‘Not today,’ Rifka said. ‘All public services suspended for the duration of the protest.’
I stood up slowly, flexing my fingers and easing the ache from my back. I brushed some dust off the knees of my trousers. Then, with a straight arm and a closed fist, I swung hard at Rifka’s head, aiming a decisive clout. She ducked, and I turned a complete circle, finishing where I’d started. I swung with the other hand, missed again, and lost my balance. As I fell over, something jarred hard against my leg. It was Mr Smith’s useless shoulder-bone, still in my pocket, the shape of an undersized boomerang. I sat up and hurled it away.
Just my luck. It came spinning back, clocking me on the forehead, knocking me straight back down again.
‘Don’t blame me,’ Rifka said. ‘This was all Moholy’s idea. He knew there weren’t any trams.’
I was speechless.
‘He’s a very unhappy man, very lonely.’
I raised my expressive eyebrows, then took my cheeks between my fingers and forcibly pushed and pulled, like Moholy had. I was absolutely furious.
‘Forget about the pills. Joseph likes his little mind-games. Now come on. Helena’s at the cemetery. She needs your help.’
I glanced up at the brightening sky, and still sitting in the road I crossed my arms. I wasn’t going anywhere. As far as I was concerned, Rifka was Joseph Moholy’s stooge. She’d taped me to the tram-lines. And all that time ago it was Rifka who’d introduced me to Elizabeth Taylor’s dogs. If it wasn’t for her, I’d never have ended up like this, in trousers too baggy for me, in jackets too tight for me, always in somebody else’s shoes.
‘Helena needs you,’ Rifka said. ‘Moholy wants Jesus by the end of the day. He’s obsessed.’
The cemetery, of course. More digging, more hope, more failure. I was opting out, with a mite of dignity still intact, a Mason one rank up (at least one, maybe two) from a Smith. I stood up, I squared my shoulders and raised my chin, looking slowly about me for the uphill road which led to the lovely sunset.
‘Yes, the cemetery,’ Rifka repeated, snagging my collar with the crook of her bamboo cane, and yanking me off-balance in the opposite direction, so that I rapidly had to steady the hat I wasn’t actually wearing. I let my legs buckle, making her catch me under the arms. She dragged me, the heels of my shoes scraping the road. I crossed my arms. She dropped me, and I jumped back up, spinning my fists.
‘For God’s sake, Jay, trust me. Just follow me.’
I looked her in the eye, and gradually, ashamed of themselves, my fists stopped spinning. By small stages they opened again into hands, and found themselves patting my clothes for pockets, desperate for somewhere to hide. I then became engrossed in the point of my shoe, turning all by itself left and right on the gummed and speckled pavement.
‘Talk to me,’ Rifka said, ‘I’m trying to help you.’
But to be honest, I didn’t feel much like talking. Everyone had been making fun of me, and I wanted my mum, I wanted my mummy, who wasn’t like any of the other boys’ mummies. She used to call me Little Man, and cut me waistcoats from her old vaudeville costumes. She sometimes
threw crockery, or went up to people in the street and punched them for no reason, or handed them lumps of coal.
I’d never done enough for her. I realised that now, ragged in Geneva, after a sleepless night in the streets. I resolved to do better, and now that Dad was gone I could settle her close by in a Santa Monica cottage, with a friendly couple to keep house, a full-time nurse companion, and a self-replenishing stock of henna for the lustre of her silver hair.
‘Hey! Ho!’
Rifka was clicking her fingers in my face, and my head jerked up and I blinked wildly. She pushed me in the chest, and I toppled backwards on my flattened heels. I dropped off the kerb, and fell again, hard on my backside.
‘Listen to me,’ Rifka said, following me down to the road, kneeling over me, her wide face with its broken nose the only face in the world.
‘Look at me. Do you trust me?’
Her grey eyes, still scuffed with brown, were now very close, and filling my field of vision. Right from the beginning, I’d always trusted her. I had no idea why.
‘Listen to me. Jesus wasn’t in Calvin’s grave. You know that. You opened it up, and there was nothing there. Moholy has therefore set you an impossible task. Either you need a miracle, or you and Helena need to work out a plan. Now, I don’t know what that plan will be, but I’ll help you as much as I can. Why? Because I feel sorry for you almost as much as I do for Moholy. Now come on. Follow me.’
For reasons I didn’t yet understand, I believed her when she said she wanted to help. I stood up and dusted myself off, picked up Rifka’s discarded cane, and flexed it a few times. I checked I’d suffered no bodily damage by splaying my feet and bouncing at the knees. Then I sniffed the air and, in my own good time, gestured Rifka to lead the way.
Dry Bones Page 25
