Not the End of the World

by Christopher Brookmyre

  It made him feel easier that he could talk to Nathan about this kind of stuff. In fact, he could talk to his uncle Nathan about anything, and figured that was what made him a good preacher. He always listened, he always understood, and if you needed it he had a lesson for you.

  Luther felt able to start telling him more of his memories, partly because it helped to relate them to someone else, and partly because Nathan was so close to him and his mom that it didn’t feel like he was betraying any kind of secret trust.

  He told him of the problems he’d had with his body when he lived with his mom, especially when his body started changing. He’d been curious now and again about what the parts that belonged to God looked like. He had gathered some information from the schoolyard, enough to know that girls and boys were different down there. He knew also that grown-up women had round chests where men’s were flat, and that on women, those parts also belonged to God. He was tempted to sneak a look sometimes, to leave off his bib when his mom was outside in the garden, or to leave his eyes open when he peed at the urinal, but his will was strong, and the curiosity was fleeting. Besides, these were the parts smelly things came from, and that aspect reduced the desire to investigate them.

  But when he got a little older, he became aware that his body was changing. His skin started to feel greasy, and his hair felt like it needed to be washed nearly every night, not just on Sundays before worship. Due to the frequency of his bathing, his mom allowed him to start doing so on his own, but she would still come in from time to time to check up on him. Hairs began to appear under his arms, and although he still never touched with his fingers, he could tell from the rubbing of the soap that there was hair growing around the parts that belonged to God too. He was aware also that they were getting bigger, and the temptation to look at them seemed to grow in proportion.

  His pee-spout sometimes grew on its own, very quickly, becoming longer, fatter and very stiff, and he often needed to adjust his underwear to make room for it. It could happen at any time, but he started to notice that it happened a lot if he was looking at pretty girls in class, or pictures of pretty ladies in magazines. Soon enough he noticed that it worked the other way around too: when it happened and he was on his own, it made him think about pretty girls and pretty ladies.

  The problem was, it started to happen more and more. It used to be just now and again, but by the time he was thirteen, it seemed that his pee-spout was stiff almost as much as it was soft. He wondered if the proportions kept changing until, when you were an adult, it was permanently stretched and hard. It happened all the time, when he wasn’t looking at girls or even thinking about girls (although he’d have to admit that was kind of seldom). But the worst of it was that it kept happening in class, and he was terrified someone would see. It was easy to hide it from his mom at home, because he always wore jeans and they held their shape pretty well, but his school trousers were made of softer cloth, and the lump it made was really obvious.

  One morning he had Mrs Harriwell’s English class first thing, which was the time of day it seemed to occur the most. She called on him to hand out the new textbook, and as he got up to approach the desk he saw Gloria Reese drop her pencil-sharpener into the trash basket and bend down to retrieve it. His eyes seemed to ignore everything his mind told them, and fixed upon her chest where a button was loose on her blouse. He could see two small, white mounds of flesh enclosed by white lace, like those things his mom hung up on the washing line, and his pee-spout sprang up in an instant.

  He picked up as many books as he could carry and held the bottom of the pile in front of his middle, hiding the bump. He walked slowly, handing them round, praying to God to make it recede before he got to the bottom of the stack. Unfortunately, the pressure of his pee-spout against the books seemed to make it worse, ruining all his efforts to think about Job and his boils and sores. The books ran out as he got to Andy Mulligan and Jake Delaney.

  ‘Woah,’ Andy said, ‘that’s a big candy bar you got in your pocket, Bobby.’

  ‘Hey look!’ Jake barked. ‘Baker’s got a woody! Baker’s got a woody!’

  All the boys round about started shouting and joining in, but what was worse was he was sure the girls were staring too. He wanted to run back to his desk or cover his middle with his hands, but he felt paralysed, standing there with this bump showing and the class chanting at him.

  ‘Baker’s got a woody! Baker’s got a woody!’

  He felt a burning shame, a vulnerability as if he was in fact naked in the midst of the whole English class. Then the shame turned into anger, anger into rage, rage into fury, and with a scream he lunged at Andy. Andy’s chair tipped backwards and Bobby fell down on top of him, punching, clawing and biting at him. Then he got hold of Andy’s ears and started banging his head off the floor.

  Mrs Harriwell had to get Mr Steiner from the class next door to help break it up. Bobby, Andy and Jake were sent to the principal’s office, and remained seated outside there while their parents were called in and informed of what had happened.

  Bobby’s mom drove him home in silence. She didn’t look at him the whole way, either, just kept her eyes straight ahead. When they got to the house she opened the back door and he walked in ahead of her, into the kitchen. He was caught on the side of the head with a blow that knocked him to the ground, then his mom started kicking at him as he lay there, reeling.

  ‘Filthy boy! Filthy, sinful boy!’ she shrieked. ‘No better than the animals, no better than the animals.’ She walked to the cupboard and took hold of the belt she kept in there. Bobby got slapped or spanked if he broke a plate or forgot one of his chores; the belt was for when he had sinned, a thick leather strap with three thongs at one end and no buckle at the other, just a rounded edge with a hole for hanging it up. It said ‘Lochgelly’ on it. Bobby didn’t know what the word meant, apart from pain.

  Usually she’d hit him on the BT or the legs with it. Sometimes she’d make him hold out his hands and hit them in turn. That day she just lashed out at his body as he lay on the floor, licking it across his back, his face, his thighs; whatever he presented as he squirmed and cried.

  ‘Base, filthy goat!’ she yelled, striking out with every word. ‘Disgusting, vulgar creature! Forsaking God, forsaking me, filling your mind with lust and your soul with sin. How could you do this to me? Have me sit there in that office in front of those people, and be told you had . . . a bulge!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mom,’ he sobbed. ‘It just happened.’

  That made her fall upon him again with renewed frenzy. ‘It didn’t just happen. It couldn’t just happen. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife. That means thou shalt not lust, Bobby Baker, and you’ve filled your mind with lust. Sinful boy! Wicked boy!’

  Mom kept him off school until after the next weekend, by which time most of the welts were starting to go down again. But still he had bulges, and no amount of effort, no amount of concentrating on the Bible could either stop them or reduce the regularity. If his mom noticed, he got belted. Not as much as after the fight in class, but depending on her mood it could still be pretty bad. She kept him off school a few more times, and made him wear long-sleeve shirts in the hot weather to hide the marks.

  Nathan got very sad when Luther told him this. He got this weakened, strained look on his face and his eyes went red, like he might cry.

  ‘I was bad, wasn’t I, Uncle Nathan?’

  Nathan shook his head. ‘No, Luther, no.’

  It wasn’t a sin to get a bulge, Nathan told him, or an ‘erection’ as it was properly called. It was sinful to think the dirty thoughts that could cause erections, but if one just happened, then that was nobody’s fault.

  ‘So was my mom wrong . . . to, you know, to, to . . . hit . . .?’

  ‘I’m sorry about what your mom did, Luther. I guess I should have been around more. Your mom meant to teach you right. Your mom was a good woman. It’s just . . . she had it hard. What happened to her, it made her confused. Angry abou
t things.’

  ‘You mean my dad getting killed before I was born?’

  ‘Your dad? Yes. Yes. That’s right. Your dad. She had a lot to cope with, mentally. I should have come around more.’

  Luther started to do better and better in his classes. The teachers began to make comments about what a bright boy he was turning out to be, and they complimented him on his enthusiasm for his studies. His greatest enthusiasm, however, was for the Bible. When he was younger, he’d liked the big adventure stories best; the Bible had seemed a compendium of wonder – giants, floods, plagues, wars, miracles. David slaying Goliath, the parting of the Red Sea, Noah’s ark, Solomon planning to cut that baby in half, the walls of Jericho falling down. Uncle Nathan had once given him a book about the Greek myths for his birthday. These were also full of incredible tales: heroes, monsters, warriors, kings and battles, but they didn’t seem as exciting because he knew they were just made up.

  Uncle Nathan told him the world had been full of crazy legends and weird religions before Christianity came along, but people now knew all those old stories were just remnants of extinct cultures, civilisations not yet mature enough to comprehend the true nature of God’s universe. ‘Folks back then would just make stuff up to explain the things they couldn’t understand. The Greeks, for instance, believed the Earth was a goddess and that her husband was the sky! But our knowledge is thousands of years advanced from theirs, so we know that God created the Earth, the sky and indeed all the rest of the universe.’

  There were other parts of the Bible that had interested him less when he was younger; parts with no real story, just ‘teachings’ that he had given up on as matters for the adults. But as his education advanced, he found that these were now the verses that most fascinated him. It was as though he had discovered a whole new Bible to explore. He began to appreciate the sheer wisdom of the words before him, how they applied to the world now as then, realising that the Bible set down the rules of life a great deal more specifically and elaborately than in the Ten Commandments.

  With growing anger he began noticing the many ways the world was straying from God’s path, how people were conveniently reinterpreting or even ignoring the clear designs the Almighty had presented to mankind.

  When his homework was done each night, Luther would study Uncle Nathan’s countless books of biblical scholarship, and often the two of them would sit up late discussing the meaning, divine intention and consequences of certain scriptures. These discussions soon began forming the basis for Nathan’s Sunday sermons, and it wasn’t much longer before Nathan was delivering homilies that Luther had penned alone.

  Luther was always top of Bible class, by a stretch too, and this despite his tendency to get engaged in rollicking arguments with Mr Woodburn. The first of these had erupted over the teacher’s assertion that the story of Adam and Eve should be interpreted metaphorically, which he had backed up with the off-colour remark that ‘you only have to take a trip to Alabama to see the disadvantages of too many people being descended from the same relatives’. Luther had drawn upon a wealth of reference in his refutation, gleaned from those nights in Nathan’s study, quoting philosophers, scholars and poets, Aquinas through Milton, in a rousing demolition of Mr Woodburn’s arguments, which the class thoroughly enjoyed. Mr Woodburn generously admitted defeat by saying he must ‘defer to your superior knowledge, Luther’, but he always found new ground to battle on the next week.

  Luther, for his part, enjoyed new levels of respect from his classmates, who had seldom witnessed such courage in a pupil gainsaying a teacher’s opinion, far less the oratory to come off best. Kids who usually skipped Bible class started to come along in the hope of seeing another duel, and they were seldom disappointed.

  ‘The boys say I’ve got Mr Woodburn outgunned,’ he proudly told his uncle, but Nathan said he suspected the teacher was ‘playing devil’s advocate, and doing a real smart job into the bargain’. Luther thought of the renewed interest and improved attendance in Bible class, and understood what his uncle was saying. He also understood that there was a great opportunity before him, too.

  He introduced Nathan to the idea of a youth service on a Sunday, earlier in the morning before the main one at eleven. At this, Luther suggested, the scriptures and sermons could be targeted at kids and teenagers, who had different interests, different worries and needed different wisdom from their parents and grandparents. Luther also figured they’d be happier to attend then because a lot of them thought it a drag to go to church with the whole family.

  Nathan decided to try it for a month, and to Luther’s delight insisted that he not only write the homily, but deliver it too. Nathan had taken a leaf out of Mr Woodburn’s book, realising what or rather who was the box-office attraction. Just about every kid who went to Nathan’s church came along to the youth service, but the real success was that kids whose families went to other churches started coming too. There were even a few Catholic kids, although their parents insisted they attend their own mass on a Sunday also. What worries these parents might have had about their kids attending another church were muted by the pleasant surprise of their youngsters suddenly taking an interest in their religion at all.

  ‘When you talk about God, and the Bible and stuff,’ one classmate said to him, ‘it ain’t like when the ministers talk about it, or the teachers or my parents. They make it sound all ancient history and far away. You make it sound like we’re all still part of it. Like we can get a piece of the action.’

  Luther liked that. It summed up what he was trying to say. Christianity shouldn’t be about remembrance and observation, as though most of the story had been told and we all simply had to sit tight until our own individual grand finales. It was about making the next chapter happen here and now. Fighting the same battles in the name of God as the Israelites once had, and recognising the armies of the enemy where they manifested themselves. Once they were Philistines and Romans; today they might be Communists and atheists, but the fight remained the same.

  However, around this time something happened to knock Luther painfully out of his stride. It didn’t seem like much at the time, but somehow it unlocked the door in his mind behind which his darkest memory had lain confined. He woke up one morning to find his underwear damp, and found a sticky, bleach-smelling fluid inside. He didn’t know what it was, or how it had got there.

  And then in one awful moment he realised that he did know both those things. The words, the feelings, the images came rushing in upon him like a flood. The doctors said his memories would be released when he was ready for them, but he knew he’d never have been ready to remember this. He tried to shut it out of his mind, but it was all around him, and when he closed his eyes it was inside his head, staring back out.

  He lay in his bed and cried, cried and cried, bawling uncontrollably like he was a baby again. The noise brought Nathan into his room, white with concern, asking whatever was the matter. He couldn’t tell him and yet he had to tell him, didn’t want to tell him and yet couldn’t contain this, not on his own. Not for ever. Not even for a day.

  He sniffed back his tears as Nathan sat on the bed, rubbing a hand through his hair.

  He had to sit at the side of the hall or the field and watch while the other boys did PT, he told his uncle. He didn’t get along with them much, but that was still when he felt loneliest, not being able to join in, listening to their laughter, hearing their shouts of encouragement and congratulation. But the worst part was having to wait in the change rooms with them before and after.

  They played games while they waited for coach. They used to play ‘run the gauntlet’, whereby everyone got given a number while Jake turned his back. Then Jake would pick one at random, and that kid had to run through the change room while the others lined the benches and punched and kicked him as he went past.

  One day Jake and Andy and Jimmy O’Rourke started playing a different game, called a ‘come race’. Bobby always sat with a book to stare at while his classmates go
t changed, as he knew it was an even worse sin to look at the parts that belonged to God on other people than on yourself. There were plenty of times he accidentally caught a glimpse of someone’s BT, and he’d always say extra prayers for forgiveness in bed that night. But despite the beltings, the fascination with his pee-spout continued. He’d feel a nervous thrill if he heard what his mom called ‘dirty talk’, or when he saw the girls doing PT in their tight T-shirts and short skirts that let you see their underwear when they jumped up.

  He felt that same thrill when Jake, Andy and Jimmy started playing their game, aware that they had all exposed their pee-spouts. (They called them ‘cocks’ and ‘dicks’ and ‘pricks’ but he knew it was a sin even to think these words, let alone say them, and he tried to keep them from slipping into his head.)

  Everyone else was looking at whatever the three of them were up to. Bobby desperately wanted to look too, but he knew he had to resist. Then he noticed Johnny Finnegan staring at him. He knew that look: it was the look Johnny had when he was about to make a big deal of whatever Bobby was doing or specifically not doing. This time he was specifically not looking at the game.

  So it was a reflex, really. He didn’t mean to look, he just did it without thinking, in response to the threat of Johnny making another excuse to pick on him.

  The three of them were sitting in a line on the bench with their pee-spouts exposed, standing and stiff. Each had a hand around it, rubbing up and down, while staring at pictures on the floor. They were black and white pictures Andy’s dad had brought back from the war, from France, and though he was a few yards away, Bobby could make out that they were of women, and he guessed they must have no clothes on. Once Bobby began to look, he couldn’t take his eyes from the scene. His stomach felt like it was turning cartwheels, and his own pee-spout was rock-hard. He felt a driving urge to get closer, to see the pictures of the naked women; in that moment he wanted to see those pictures more than he wanted anything else in the world.