As acting Chaplin of the Church of All Saints in Geneva, I opened out my arms, and mimed a sermon. With silent insistence, I preached the slapstick of the times. Nothing seemed quite right or in its proper place. Modern life was like a fisherman trawling the harvest, a farmer ploughing for fish. I paused for breath, and to mop my glowing brow. Anyone in pursuit of purpose and meaning was setting themselves up to fall flat on their face.
There was someone coming, the soundtrack of civil disobedience starting and then stopping with the heavy wooden door. Unfortunately, I was still flat on my face, where in my mime I’d fallen. I tried to scramble up, but my socks slipped and slid away, and I fell again. I did, though, manage to compose myself. Unlike Charlie (unlike Roman and Gantcho, comic mechanics), I could still bring myself under control, count steadily to a measured ten, and refuse the decline from comic to worse.
Helena stood quite still beneath the western window. I started breathing again, slowly, and counted off the black and white tiles, all of them thankfully in order, one black, then one white, as far as Helena’s feet. I stood up very carefully, and raised my hand in greeting just as the bareness of my legs encouraged me to reconsider. A little tongue-tied, I held up my fingers, requesting five. Then I turned and skated with dignity towards the altar, straightening my non-sliding leg in a rapid one-footed turn to the vestry.
I slammed the door behind me, blocking it with a couple of bicycles. I didn’t want Helena to see me like this. I’d promised to stop living through other people, and I wasn’t sufficiently myself to face her. It was quite involuntary. It was the pills, it had to be, there was no other explanation, or none for which I could find the appropriate words.
The least she expected, since we’d agreed to make our life together, was a consistent and recognisable Jay Mason, deacon. I therefore pulled and scratched at the package of returned laundry, thinking that if I dressed the part, then the rest might follow. I piled all the clerical vestments over my head, one after the other, including two server’s cassocks, a set of six choir surplices, an alb, and a Geneva-style pulpit robe in wash-and-wear polyester. I finished with my dad’s thick red festival chasuble, like an over-stuffed cushion.
She was banging on the door. I had everything in place except one final embroidered stole, green and gold like a belt of achievement from an exotic martial art.
I wrapped it once round my extended waist, knotting it clumpily at the front. Moving side-on to the barricaded door, left shoulder forward, I adopted the stance, knees flexed, back straight, a very plump cushion prepared for combat.
Come on, then.
I bounced a little, my head and neck rigid with Eastern intent. Come on, Joseph Moholy, I’ll give you Jesus. Defying the bulk of the robes, I pulled my left elbow into my body, just so, and raised the other hand, deceptively limp and close behind my ear. I bounced again, poised to strike.
The door banged open, toppling the pair of bicycles.
I narrowed my eyes, maintaining the stance. ‘Hai!’
Helena stood there in the doorway, hands on hips. She clenched her jaw, which made her chin tremble, then stepped over the bicycles and into range. Without even the customary bow of respect, she launched a cowardly attack, cutting and slicing with stiff hands, chopping at my shoulders and head. I covered up and lost all martial shape as she gradually forced my retreat, over the bicycles, out of the vestry, as far as the edge of the altar. She finally subdued my spirit by clamping my arms to my sides, then clutching my head to her neck.
‘Jay, it’s me. It’s me. Feel me.’
She took my hands in her own, and the soft flesh and living blood of Helena easily outbid the dry residue of powdered bones in pills.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You spoke,’ she said.
‘I really am sorry.’
‘Are you alright?’
‘I think he gave me Chaplin.’
‘No, he didn’t.’
‘I’m sorry, but I think he did.’
‘Jay. One, the pills don’t work. Take that on board. Two, even if they did, Moholy can’t have given you a dose of Charlie Chaplin. So be a bit more normal. Please.’
She sat close to me on the step as I unknotted the stole. Then I tried for the chasuble, but it beat me. I couldn’t raise my arms high enough to pull it off, so Helena had to stand above me and help, tugging it over my head. And then again with the next vestment. And again, and so on. She repeatedly snagged my ear, which may not have been an accident.
‘Moholy definitely doesn’t have a Chaplin pill,’ Helena said, doing her best to reassure me while ignoring my ows and ouches. ‘I remember reading about it. Before Charlie’s body was reburied, the entire family plot was embedded in steel and concrete. It was made impenetrable. Oona’s decision.’
‘Good thinking, Oona. Ow.’
Helena rested her hands on the top of my head, and by now I was back to a simple cotton alb over my clerical shirt and collar. ‘So calm down, okay? We’re in a tight spot. But it’s going to be fine.’ She gave my scalp a consoling scratch, keeping me safe in my senses.
‘Probably the trauma of the tram-tracks. That’s bound to mess up anyone’s head. A little bit.’
She came down to my level and looked into my eyes, though only with medical intent, checking I was back to my old self, that I was all there. I told her about being rescued by Rifka, which had Helena baffled.
‘Why would she do that? I thought she worked for Moholy.’
‘She does. She could have left me.’
‘There must be something in it for her.’
‘Maybe she’s secretly a good person, and just likes doing good things. She guessed you’d be there at the cemetery.’
‘Bully for her,’ Helena said. ‘And not a difficult guess. Moholy wants more bones. The cemetery’s the obvious place to find them.’
‘Don’t be mean,’ I said. ‘She saved me from the tram.’
‘There was no tram.’
‘They knew all the time there weren’t any trams.’
Monsters, the both of them. For a moment Helena looked unusually stern, her mouth a thin line which started twitching, then lifting at the edges. She snorted. ‘Oh lighten up, you silly man.’
‘Well, I would,’ I said, not finding it quite so funny, and keen to restore my dignity, ‘if it wasn’t for the small matter of Jesus. Which you seem to have completely forgotten.’
I flounced into the vestry to fetch my trousers, tying them tightly through the loops with a purple-tasselled cincture, which had fallen out with the laundry. I took off and discarded the alb.
‘There is no Jesus,’ Helena said, coming in after me. She was equally happy to argue in the vestry. ‘At least agree with me on that.’
I shrugged. ‘How would you ever know?’
‘Well, not in Calvin’s grave anyway. That’s Moholy’s private little fantasy.’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I found him quite convincing. What he said about Switzerland. It’s true that no other country in Europe has been so peaceful. Maybe the bones of Jesus are having an influence.’
‘Listen to me, Jay. No more Chaplin, no more jokes, and listen very closely. In the last century, the Swiss army opened fire twice, once in 1918, and once in 1932. Both times, it shot at its own people. They’re a bunch of clowns, with cuckoo clocks. That’s why they haven’t been at war.’
‘So the influence is comic?’
‘There is no influence, from any bones. Get that into your stupid stubborn head. The Swiss are never invaded because they safeguard the loot and spoil of whoever’s actually fighting, even if it arrives in the form of gold fillings. It has nothing to do with Jesus. In fact, you might say, quite the opposite.’
‘Try to imagine,’ I said, ‘just for a moment, that Moholy’s right.’
‘And Jesus is responsible for clean trains which run on time. Sure. Get to the point, Jay. Calvin’s grave was empty, wasn’t it?’
She stacked the bicycles against the wall, and che
cked they were steady. ‘Jay. Calvin’s grave.’
‘It was empty. Definitely empty.’
I was remembering the condition of the soil, which had been loose and easy to work. It was as if somebody else had been in there before me. ‘Maybe Moholy’s story is true. J.C. in Geneva stands for Jesus Christ, not John Calvin. It was just that somebody else got to him first.’
‘To who?’
‘To Jesus.’
‘Let’s not think that,’ Helena said. ‘For sanity’s sake. The grave was empty because the rumours about Calvin were accurate. He never wanted to be buried in Geneva with a headstone, and he wasn’t. That’s all there is to it. The grave was always empty, since fifteen-whatever. There were never any bones to be found.’
‘In which case, what do we do now?’
Moholy was still expecting us to deliver the bones of Jesus by the end of the day. It was either that, or run and hide. So running and hiding it was, then. Run, dodge, dive into vacant doorways.
‘Rifka,’ Helena said. ‘She must have been watching us. That’s how she knew where I was. She’s probably always watching. We can’t run and hide.’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘Someone’s keeping an eye on us. I’m sure of it.’
‘I feel that, too.’
‘And then there’s Suleiman the Magnificent. Where would we go? He has spies all over the known world.’
‘Helena, don’t.’ I felt lost, and increasingly aggrieved. ‘You said the pills didn’t work. I thought you didn’t believe in them?’
‘I don’t,’ Helena said. ‘And I hope you don’t either. But all that matters is what Moholy believes, and among other things Moholy wants to believe in Jesus. There must be a way out of this. It can’t be beyond us.’
Personally, I still hadn’t dismissed the running and hiding option, but, failing that, I supposed it was always possible to believe in a providence which arranged for everything to turn out well. I certainly hoped so, because Jesus was a very big problem. Obviously, we couldn’t deliver the actual Jesus.
‘Let’s just accept that from the start,’ Helena said. ‘There are no Jesus bones hanging about that we can gratefully put our hands on.’
Other bones were now out in the open all round the city, but the skeletons liberated from schools and labs were far too young. We still had Richard Burton back in the closet. And Jung’s knee. I’d almost forgotten Jung’s knee.
‘Too recent, all of them,’ Helena said, ‘we can’t pass them off as Jesus.’
‘And we still have the other skeleton in the blue bag. The anonymous one.’
‘Which is next to useless,’ Helena said, ‘as we’ve already discovered.’
Basically, we needed other bones.
‘Moholy can’t actually test for Jesus, can he?’ I said, exploring a sudden aptitude for ingenious escapes. ‘Carbon-14 dating only dates. It can’t identify. He can discover the age of the bones, but not the identity.’
‘Go on.’
‘So if we had some two-thousand-year-old bones, they could safely stand in for Jesus, if that’s what someone wanted to believe.’
‘Brilliant. Only one problem. Where do you suggest we find a complete skeleton which is two thousand years old?’
‘Okay. So there’s a flaw in my theory. But try this. We can both not believe the Jesus story, and deliver the bones from Calvin’s grave.’
‘You’ve lost me. You said the grave was empty.’
‘Exactly. It was. But Moholy doesn’t know that, or doesn’t want to believe it. We get him some bones the same age as Calvin.’
‘I don’t understand. Why?’
‘When he tests them, Moholy will work out for himself that it must be Calvin, not Jesus. From the dates. He’ll be disappointed, obviously, but he’ll understand how it happened, which might just be enough to save us.’
‘That is quite amazing.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But we still have the same problem. Where are we going to get a complete set of five-hundred-year-old bones?’
We stopped. We looked at each other. At the same time, we both said:
‘St Ursula.’
I reached the Basilica of Our Lady without once tripping over a kerbstone, despite keeping a constant lookout for any sign of Rifka. I didn’t collide with a fat policeman. I didn’t fall down a manhole.
Helena was therefore right: I couldn’t possibly be Charlie Chaplin.
As if to prove it, I was still wearing my priestly shirt and collar, and I’d double-locked my trousers with a strip of police-tape found in the road. I looked shabby, but not entirely lost, even with Dad’s ex-army kit-bag slung over my shoulder. I’d been back to the flat for Richard Burton, to offer him in fair exchange for the bones of Ursula.
The Catholic Basilica, like the Anglican church, was unlocked. It was also empty, apart from a very tall nun with glasses who frightened me witless by gliding out quietly from behind a pillar. I lowered my head, out of respect for silent orders everywhere, and made the sign of the cross. Only I was half-way through before realising I didn’t know how it went, so I bluffed the ending by touching my nose, then scratching the back of my neck. I hurried past the nun to the Lady Chapel, and the bones of British St Ursula.
St Ursula wasn’t there. Senseless with panic, I flipped up the altar-cloth. She wasn’t underneath. I checked and double-checked a nearby confessional, one side then the other, both the forgiven and the damned.
She was gone. And in her place was the leg-bone of St Clothilde of Geneva, safely returned from her tour of the Italian south. St Clothilde was the wrong period, neither AD 64 nor AD 1530. Her label said she’d died in 734, but at least she was closer to Jesus than the bones I had in the kit-bag. I decided to take her. I was just fumbling with the clasp on the gold reliquary when the nun floated in to join me. I spun round, hands innocently behind my back. She peered at me through her glasses while continuing to shift her rosary, and again overcome by panic I attempted to rectify my sign of the cross, this time starting with my temple, both shoulders, navel, hip, and finally the inside of my knee.
She smiled beatifically. And moved on.
I turned back to the ornate box, opened it, grabbed the leg-bone, dropped it, caught it. After a shuffle through the kit-bag, I replaced it with the leg-bone of Richard Burton. With St Clothilde safely on board, I hefted the kit-bag and scuffled out into the side-aisle. It was blocked between me and the exit by the smiling nun. Forehead, both shoulders, navel, hip, both elbows, knee and the instep of my lifted foot. I smiled as best I could, and then walked splay-footed and bandy-legged to the door, turning only once to see her staring after me. I doffed my imaginary hat, did a running one-footed turn, and banged through the spring-loaded door.
As planned, Helena was waiting outside, and she wasn’t impressed. We had a single leg-bone, once of St Clothilde, not even approximately from an acceptable era. Moholy was expecting a whole body of bones. I let my shoulders drop, thinking wistfully of an idyllic domestic future in which a tricky bone would mean nothing more daunting than a plateful of tricky fish. In my mind there was grey sky above, and the white sun was shining, and I was sitting on a grey porch hugging my knees and coyly swinging my shoulders. I’d have no great ambition beyond a day’s work, smelling the flowers, and Paulette Goddard in the role of Helena Byczynski stewing my boots for dinner.
I was no fool. I’d show her what I was made of. Using only ingenuity and my native wit, I’d shelter Helena from all of life’s frustrations: I knew of somewhere else we’d find some plausible bones.
We waited until dark, after an afternoon spent quarrelling about the ethics of stealing a car. Helena correctly pointed out, more than once, that I wasn’t being myself. Of course I wasn’t; didn’t she ever want to get anything done? I was still Chaplin: despite Oona’s reinforced vault, Helena had forgotten the shoulder-bone pinched by Roman and Gantcho and sent to Oona as evidence. The police traded seized drugs, so why not bones? Moholy had obt
ained Chaplin’s shoulder and made it into pills, several of which he’d forced on me with the result, among other surprises, that I’d climbed into an unlocked car in a quiet side-street. I then discovered that my amateur hot-wiring made nothing work but the radio.
It was gypsy violin, and I danced back and forth, making Romany flurries with my hands, arching my feet, singing any old nonsense because the words were unimportant, le spinash or le busho, cigaretto toto bello.
‘Stop it right now!’ Helena shouted. ‘The villa, you clown! We’re supposed to be going to the villa.’
At that very moment, Rifka arrived in our deserted alley on a scooter. She kept the engine running, and planted both feet flat on the road.
‘It’s not stolen,’ she said. ‘It’s borrowed. Now. Do you want to be helped, or don’t you?’
‘One moment,’ I said.
Helena and I nervously put our heads together, and conferred. At one level, this was a gift from the gods. At another, it could be some sort of fiendish trick.
‘Why should we trust her?’ Helena asked, taking me aside.
‘I don’t know. But look at her. We do, don’t we?’
Rifka smiled, calm, queen of coincidences, and shifted forward along the seat. Helena didn’t think three people were allowed.
‘Look at it like this,’ I said. ‘How else are we going to get there?’
Reluctantly, Helena climbed on to the scooter behind Rifka, which left me at the back, facing backwards, kit-bag of bones across my thighs and my knees tightly clamped around what was left of the back-end of the bike.
Rifka steered us expertly out of the city, the scooter heavy on its rear spindle, taking long curving detours around roadblocks and sit-ins. We were heading for Moholy’s villa. As an idea, it was impetuous, hazardous, seemingly impossible, like a plan in a comedy destined to work out well.
We ran out of petrol on the dual carriageway, a few hundred metres short of the lay-by and bus-stop. Still wary of Rifka, Helena suggested we wait here until it was fully dark, but when we climbed over the crash-barriers, and slid down to the lakeside shingle, Rifka came with us. We watched her skim stones across the lake, so smoothly they seemed to end up floating, and never actually sinking. Helena wasn’t convinced.
Dry Bones Page 27
