Sucking Sherbert Lemons

by Michael Carson

  So why are we as sick as our secrets? Well, why do we have secrets? Fear. Fear is at the back of everything. It’s the grand-daddy of vices... the one that sires pride, lies (kind and unkind), embarrassment, hypocrisy, sloth, envy, furtive gropes in public places...

  Trouble is, characters like Benson have fear hardwired into their makeup. It’s soldered there by the experiences of the Impressionable Age. Everyone has it to a greater or lesser degree. ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ is a cry of fear as profound as ‘You lookin’ at me?’ from some street ruffian (pointing out his own fear as he seeks to provoke it), or the overdraft letter from the bank.

  So what happened to Benson? Well, the child is father of the man. I wrote two further books on the character (Stripping Penguins Bare and Yanking Up The Yo-Yo), and – if my memory serves me right – left him looking for his destiny on the streets of New York. The fears are still there. The only difference is that he acknowledges them and, to a degree, accepts their presence. He has been seeking through the course of the three books exciting sexual fulfilment, and ‘Dearest Him’. These two aspects of relationships are, I believe, as hard to reconcile as Homosexuality and Catholicism. I wonder if he found them. Can the two things coexist? Dearest Him has maybe turned up, but the bath-house Benson will soon utter the words, ‘Let’s just be friends,’ to any candidate for a long-term relationship. Living together, growing old together, minding one another, would be far too boring. There’s a whole world of zippers out there waiting to be opened. No, to settle down with one would be to close the door on Life. Far too boring. And what is boredom but another example of the Great Demon, Fear?

  We do not – nor probably ever shall or should – live in a world without fear. Some fears can protect us from harm. One fear I would advocate each and every one of us cultivating and honing towards perfection is Fear For The Death of The Heart. But hindsight is a safe, but sad, place to stand and sermonise...

  Anyway, I hope new readers will be entertained and informed by the book – and laugh in the right places.

  Part One

  Wobbles

  His satchel bouncing against his fat bottom in time to his stride, Benson walked home from school through the park. As he walked he kept a weather eye out for the rough boys from Sir William Grout’s, while at the same time making certain that his Clarks E-width shoes were not touching any cracks in the paving stones.

  In his green and gold striped blazer, Benson knew that he presented an easy target for the Secondary Modern hooligans in their dull navy and grey uniforms. They could be hiding behind any tree. And, if they were, and if they emerged to rag him and push him and throw his spectacular cap into the branches of the winter trees, there would be nothing else for him to do, but, like a Catholic budgie cornered and pecked by Protestant starlings, expire with “Jesus! Mary! Joseph! I give You my heart and my soul!” ejaculating from his quivering lips.

  He pushed the possibility from his mind and concentrated on avoiding the cracks in the paving stones. What was at stake today were he to tread on one? Would dying sinners all over the world forget to repent, and be lost? Would the whole future of the Catholic Church be placed in jeopardy and people become Protestants? Would Our Lady of Lourdes stop curing cripples? Would Mother be out and he’d have to wait on the cold ledge next to the step until she came home?

  Deciding that the last horrific possibility would occur, Benson tripped warily towards the train station.

  *

  Benson did not think that he had trodden on even one of the cracks between the paving stones, and was greatly put out to find the doors and windows of the house locked against him. He surveyed all three sides of the family home, pressing his nose against the leaded windows, and was doubly galled to see all the well-known objects in each room getting on very well without him.

  The three doors at the back that belonged to the shed, the outside toilet and the wash-house were not locked. He opened each in turn and closed it again with a sound that was louder than strictly necessary. Benson felt he had to register his rising indignation somehow.

  “How dare she! How dare she!” he exclaimed, making his way to the front of the house. “If she won’t give me a key of my own like David Mulligan has, the least she can do is be here when I get back from school! I mean, it’s not as if my return is in any way unexpected. I always leave school at four on the dot and catch the four-twenty, or, if something really strange happens, the four-forty. It is all very predictable. Not too much to ask that someone be in!”

  Back at the front of the house, he directed a look of infinite hurt and loss up the cul-de-sac, kicked the garage door a couple of times, and decided to inspect the back garden. Anything to avoid settling down on the cold step to await the approach of darkness and double pneumonia.

  He fumed down the steps and into the greenhouse. It smelled of his dad. But, it being late February, there was neither warmth nor comfort there and he soon left it and returned to his customary waiting place on the ledge next to the front doorstep. There, after a few minutes of agonised indecision, he began to play Grocer’s Shop.

  The idea of Grocer’s Shop was that invisible customers came to Benson’s shop and gave him their weekly orders. Perhaps a customer might ask Grocer Benson for a dozen of his best eggs. To obtain this order, Benson had simply, seated as he was on the ledge, to lean back against the doorbell and strike two long rings, the code for ‘best eggs’, followed by twelve short rings to denote the number required. Over occasions past counting, exiled on the threshold of home, Benson had memorised a host of bell codes to cover all eventualities.

  So, an imaginary Mrs Owen came to Benson’s shop and complimented him on how fresh and good everything she had bought from him last week had been. And how cheap, considering the wonderful personal service which was, without doubt, the best in the area. “We aim to please, Mrs Owen. Your satisfaction is our reward. This is a Catholic Grocer’s, Mrs Owen, and it is my sole aim in life to find salvation among the tins and bottles and bacon rashers.” Mrs Owen, though only a poor flailing Protestant, was impressed. Benson wiped hands on his soul-white apron and beamed broadly.

  He entered Mrs Owen’s order into the unique bell system and imagined that behind the scenes a number of widows – he always employed widows, Catholic widows – were scuttling about, collecting together the items for the order and neatly packing them into a brown cardboard box. “It will be delivered, of course!” he told Mrs Owen, who left his shop nodding with admiration and satisfaction and determined to contact the Catholic Truth Society that very day to take instruction in the True Faith. Then, at the end of Time, there she and Benson would stand before the Divine Throne, and Mrs Owen in her dazzling heavenly crown would exclaim: “I owe it all to Mr Benson here!” and the Lord and His Blessed Mother would smile and nod and offer endless supplies of Mars Bars that didn’t make you fat and bottles of cream soda that didn’t make you wet the bed...

  But that was all in the life to come, and in this one Benson was becoming cold and uncomfortable. Ringing in all the codes was also giving him a headache.

  He gazed up the road for any sign of his mother making her way towards the house. He willed her appearance and closed his eyes for five seconds in the firm belief that, upon opening them, there she would be, full of apologies and with a quarter of sherbet lemons to sweeten her return and make amends for her sin against the Holy Grocer and Holy Punctuality. But when he opened his eyes the road was deserted.

  The lamplighter came down the road on his bicycle, carrying his pole in one hand. He approached the gas-lamp at the bottom of the road and hooked it on, not for one moment losing control of his bicycle.

  “Good evening!” Benson called out to the lamplighter. The man grumbled a reply, taking care not to drop the cigarette between his lips. Then, with a deftness that never failed to stir Benson, he turned his bike and went off up the road, where he hooked on the other lamp, and disappea
red.

  “It’s lighting-up time,” thought Benson and he kicked some pebble-dashing off the wall. “If I weren’t a good Catholic,” he told himself, “I’d give that mother of mine a piece of my mind when she gets back.”

  Rosemary Jenkins came down the road on her drop-handlebar bike. It made a noise like a motorbike because Rosemary’s big brother had attached a piece of cardboard clamped with a clothes peg to the back wheel so that it caught the spokes and clicked satisfyingly when the wheels revolved.

  “Hello, Rosemary!” shouted Benson. “It’s past lighting-up time and you haven’t got your lights on!”

  “Hello, Wobbles!” replied Rosemary. This remark seemed enough to Rosemary to both greet Benson and counter his jibe about her lack of lights. She disappeared with her now slow-ticking bicycle down the side of her house before Benson could think of a suitable response.

  Instead he thought: “I will not get angry and insult her back. Anyway, it’s too late now. She’s gone. And it would be unchristian. I have, after all, been called to a Higher Way and must turn the other cheek even to Protestants and Methodists and other pagans.”

  He manoeuvred himself with difficulty from the stone ledge on to the doorstep: “I am wasting valuable time! Brother O’Toole says that time is gold and we shall be called to account for every second of it. Golly! This moment could be my last. The Angel of Death could be about to give me a tap on the shoulder!” He looked round for her in the murky dusk but forgot and looked for Mum instead: “Where is she? I should have finished my tea and be doing my homework by now.”

  He sat down heavily on the front doorstep, but finding the cold of it soon percolated through his bottom, stood up straight like the slim Roman soldier in Brother O’Toole’s English class.

  That day Brother O’Toole had brought in some postcards of a picture called ‘Faithful Unto Death’. It showed a Roman soldier guarding the door of a house. The soldier stood to attention but gazed upwards to his right, a look of some anxiety upon his handsome face. Behind him in the room gobs of fire were falling, and three people were panicking as the fire cascaded down on them. But the soldier did not move. Encroaching fiery destruction glinted on his breastplate and belt. He held his spear and continued to do his duty.

  Benson waited at the front door and attempted to emulate the soldier. Brother O’Toole had told the class that the picture had been inspired by the destruction of Pompeii. Apparently the body of a soldier had been found there and, like the soldier in the picture, the mummified body, preserved in long-cooled lava, had been standing loyally to attention.

  “Now what does this picture tell us, boys?” Brother O’Toole had asked.

  The picture had been passed round but Benson had only had a quick glance at it before it was seized from his hands by curious classmates. Still, even the shortest glance had told him what was happening. He put up his hand:

  “The soldier has a job to do and he is doing it. The people behind him are afraid because the volcano is erupting all over them. That’s why the picture is called ‘Faithful Unto Death’, because the soldier is faithful and he is definitely going to die.”

  “Good lad!” Brother O’Toole had said.

  Now Benson stood until he started to get pins-andneedles, and still Mum had not put in an appearance. He thought how hard it would be to remain faithful unto death. It was all he could manage to remain faithful unto Mum’s return.

  Reluctantly he gave up the good fight, and, placing his satchel on the step to insulate him from the cold, sat down. He took out his red Catechism from the inside pocket of his blazer and commenced testing himself at random:

  “Who made you?”

  “Well, I know that one! That one’s a cinch! God made me.”

  “In whose image and likeness did God make you?”

  “God made me in His own image and likeness,” rattled off Benson, wondering for an instant if God was also rather too ‘well-made’, but quickly blocking out the thought as a wicked temptation from the Devil.

  He picked another Catechism question at random:

  “What does the ninth Commandment forbid?”

  “The ninth Commandment forbids all wilful consent to impure thoughts and desires, and all wilful pleasure in the irregular motions of the flesh,” answered Benson, pricked by unease as quick as a sin stains the sheet of the soul.

  “What are the twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost?”

  “Er... “ replied Benson.

  In the encircling gloom, he started consigning the twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost to memory.

  The Religion examination was in three weeks. If he won the certificate again, it would make it the third time in a row and Mum had promised that she would get all three certificates framed in passepartout by the nuns and hang them in the lounge.

  The Jenkins’ porch lamp was turned on by Mr Jenkins, viewed as a shadow through the mottled glass of the front door. That meant it must now be night. The coloured glass in the lamp reminded Benson of Rowntree’s fruit gums, which he could never make last for an hour like some boys could, and during the day promised a wonderful light. But when it actually came to being switched on, it was something of a let-down. No gashes of crimson, blue, green and yellow painted the front square of lawn, just a warm pastel glow. Benson had pestered his parents to buy one that would really light up the night and make their porch ‘like church’, but up to now they had resisted his entreaties.

  It was getting distinctly chilly. A damp, penetrating wind blew off the Irish Sea, swerved around the Jenkins’ house and cuffed Benson squarely in the face. He shivered and offered up his sufferings for the Holy Souls in purgatory. He repeated the twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost to himself, but increasingly without enthusiasm, or even gratitude.

  A part of him thought if the Holy Ghost could go to the trouble of dropping those wonderful twelve fruits upon the Earth in general and Benson in particular, the least Benson could do was learn by heart what he had to thank Him for. But the other half of him was cold and miserable and unable to take any consolation whatsoever in the twelve fruits.

  Anyway, God the Holy Ghost was a bit of a mystery for Benson. He was always the last member of the Trinity to be mentioned, and by far the most mysterious. God the Father was easy enough. He was an old man with a beard, who had been fond of the Jews and sent His Son to make good Catholics of the World. God the Son was Jesus and Jesus was nice and human, and had long straight hair, a bit like Lilian’s at The Maypole, and was good with children. But God the Holy Ghost was a dove. He had hovered over Mary at the Annunciation and done the same thing over the Apostles at Pentecost, but Benson could not see why God the Father and God the Son could not do any of the things They had got God the Holy Ghost to do.

  Benson suddenly recalled himself: “What if I were to die here on the step? What if the Angel of Death approached me here in her black nightie and beckoned my soul to follow? It had happened to the Little Matchgirl after all. He wondered if he would rise straight to heaven like a cork to the surface of water, or if he would have to go to purgatory for a spell to burn off the sins of his past life. No, for sure, they were being frozen off here and now as he waited in the purgatory of the doorstep for the return of Mum.

  But then he reminded himself that he was not suffering for his own sake but for the sake of the Holy Souls. And top of the list of Holy Souls would have to come Grandma Benson, who had given him threepenny bits for as long as he could remember and had then stopped.

  A light went on in the front room of Mrs Brown’s house. The room was suddenly bathed in a harsh white light. But only for a second, until Mrs Brown, her left arm out wide, then her right, drew the heavy curtains across the window and completely shut in the light.

  Mrs Brown was a widow and lived alone. She had never had children, and Mum said a lump was the reason. But she did have a stuffed monkey which hung by its tail from a standard lamp in the bac
k room and held a banana in its fist. And nearby she had a wall cabinet with a little strip light that held her collection of miniature liqueurs. One of them had a gold leaf inside. Mrs Brown always showed it to Benson when he visited, after letting him stroke the monkey. Then she would make him a cup of coffee in a mug with the Queen Mother on the front and George VI on the back. Mrs Brown’s coffee had a special taste, much better than home. But it took her a long time to make, because her hand shook and she always seemed to be in danger of spilling the milk as she poured it.

  Mrs Brown did not talk much either, which was a pity because Benson loved to watch the way her loose neck-flesh wobbled. It was always left to him to make conversation, which could be good too, because Mrs Brown would nod or shake her head and that made her wobble almost as much as she wobbled when she talked.

  Her hair was steely grey and looked like it was a bird’s nest put on upside down. Her face was very white, kept that way by a Stratton powder compact with a flight of ducks on the lid. She didn’t go to church, and Mum told Benson not to go to Mrs Brown’s house if he wanted to sell flags for Canon McCarthy’s babies.

  Once, while passing her house, Mum had told him that Mrs Brown was anti-Catholic. Nothing else had been said until Mrs Brown had rung Mrs Benson and complained that Benson was calling her Auntie Catholic. Now, it was embarrassing for Benson to think about. Then, he had thought it a nice name. He had called lots of Mum’s friends ‘Auntie’ though they were not really aunties.

  Benson stood up and found that his left foot had gone to sleep.