Sucking Sherbert Lemons

by Michael Carson

“Sanctify my sufferings and save souls!” he commanded the starless sky.

  Then he saw Mum making her way down the road loaded with shopping. He sat down at once on the step and feigned sleep.

  “Been here long?” Mum asked apologetically, her blessed keys rattling.

  “Er ... What? What?” said Benson, emerging from theatrical sleep. “Mum, where have you been? I’ve been waiting here for ages.”

  Mum opened the door and went into the house. Benson followed.

  “Can’t be helped. You know what it’s like,” said Mum matter-of-factly.

  Benson asked the Lord to forgive Mum’s indifference. “Yes, but... “ he began.

  But to be fair, he did know what it was like for Mum round at the shops. Her friends seemed ever to lie in wait behind trees, pillar-boxes and shopfronts, aching to unload their news. He could not recall that Mum ever said that much back, but he could remember a hundred occasions when he was smaller and pulled at Mum’s coat to tug her away from the clutches of the highwaywomen in swagger-coats who stole mum and son’s time and fun at being out together, leaving them locked on pavements not doing what needed doing. But Mum had always remained faithful unto the slow death boredom brings, had smiled and stayed put while the sticky lava of hot gossip flowed over them.

  Mum made her way down the hall in her swagger-coat. She sighed as she lifted the bags of groceries onto the table in the morning room.

  “Can I help?” Benson asked.

  “Too late now,” Mum replied without turning towards him. She reached into her black handbag with the clasp that Benson loved to trap his thumb in, and took out her puffer. She aimed this at her mouth, squeezed the bulb two or three times, and inhaled deeply.

  “There! That’s better!” she said.

  “You’ll be needing a new one soon, Mum,” Benson observed.

  “It’s got a few puffs in it yet, son.”

  Then Mum sat down and lit a cigarette. “Guess what eggs were!”

  “Three shillings.”

  “Three-and-six. And that was at The Maypole. Still, at least we can get them. Do you remember rationing, son?”

  Benson stared at Mum, horror-struck that she could possibly think that he would ever forget the hell that was rationing. “Of course I remember rationing, Mum! I only had sixpence a week in coupons to spend on sweets! You don’t think I could forget that, do you?”

  Mum smiled and fished into one of her bags. She produced a triangular paper bag.

  “Only two ounces!” moaned Benson.

  “That’s right. More than enough. Now you get out from under my feet while I make the tea.”

  Benson, thinking it all a bit thick, went off to the dining room. There he drew the curtains, making sure that not a chink remained through which he might be observed. Then he rummaged in a pile of records by the gramophone until he found ‘Coppelia’. He put it onto the turntable, unscrewed the old needle from the pick-up arm and reached into the tiny tin of new needles. The tin had a picture of His Master’s Voice on the top. He inserted his index finger into the slippery pile of needles. The sensation was one of velvet rather than steel. He selected a new needle and screwed it into the arm.

  The music started and Benson stood in front of the octagonal mirror which hung on the wall opposite the window.

  He was a ballet dancer. His arms were raised above his head and as the music played it lifted Benson out of himself and away from his chubby reflection into a world of princes and swans and superhuman physical effort. He pranced around the dining room totally disembodied. When the record ended he bowed deeply to his invisible audience, who clearly wanted more. He would turn over the record and give them more. But first a sherbet lemon was called for.

  After years of practice Benson had evolved and perfected several methods of eating sherbet lemons. Apart from the easily mastered methods of ‘suck’ or ‘chew’, he was also adept at storing the sweet between front teeth and upper lip. In public this gave to his face a grotesque appearance which he amplified by jutting out his jaw and making his eyes cross. He had once sent Teresa Higgins into hysterics by so doing. She had run off screaming and told her dad who had rung his dad. Teresa Higgins’ dad was a plumber. They lived at the top of the road. Benson did not think that plumbers should he allowed to live in his road. After all, Mrs Brown’s sister’s husband had once been Lord Mayor of the County Borough.

  But today he felt like putting his sherbet lemon to more pyrotechnic uses. His audience still gazed at him, rapt, from beyond the mirror. He would floor them by squirting the sherbet!

  “Now I shall squirt the sherbet!” he told them. “For this – my most difficult trick – I need total hush.”

  He manoeuvred the sweet between his front teeth and then bothered each end of the lemon-shaped sweet in turn with the tip of his tongue. When both ends were judged to have been sufficiently worn down, he stood in front of the mirror, pursed his lips around the body of the sweet and blew mightily. A great billow of white powder settled onto the polished surface of the sideboard directly below the mirror. The audience gasped and cheered Benson’s versatility. He bowed, brushing the sherbet dust from the sideboard with a deft, theatrical gesture. Then he changed the needle and put on side two of ‘Coppelia’.

  There was a melancholy section on this side which Benson and his audience adored. It was preceded by a fast bit, and he flung himself around the room and jumped from the seat of the easy chair on the left of the fireplace to the stool below the bowls of hyacinths. Then, as the sad section started, he leaned backwards until his back lay against the top of the sideboard, his head lying on its surface just a few inches from the mirror.

  He rolled his eyes upwards towards the mirror, which had become a camera, and noted that the flesh on his face had pulled back from his nose and cheeks. Then, looking the picture of encroaching horizontal doom, Benson commenced an elaborate arm-dance to the music, which culminated in his demise on the sideboard.

  The music ended. A pregnant silence gripped the audience, which was at length broken by a sudden whoosh of applause. Benson chose not to acknowledge it. He would not step out of role. And he would make them wait for their encore, a piece of Rachmaninov from ‘Sparkie’s Magic Piano’.

  Then, through the applause and cries of “Bravo!”, another sound impinged:

  “Tea’s ready!”

  “I will return but my mother is sick unto death and I must go straight to her bedside. Please be patient,” Benson told the stunned and sorrowing crowds.

  After tea the front doorbell rang.

  Mum answered it. Eric Jenkins, Rosemary’s twin brother, stood there, fidgeting.

  Eric Jenkins never went round to the back door, even though Mum told him to at every opportunity. She told him today, as a matter of form, but without much hope. Eric, smaller than his thirteen years might have a right to expect, proved stubborn in his routine and could not be cajoled to go to the more easily answered back door like Benson’s other friends.

  “Eric’s here for you! At the front door!” Mum shouted upstairs to Benson.

  Benson’s heart sank.

  He had been kneeling in front of his open wardrobe in his room, putting the finishing touches to an altar, the centrepiece of which was a plaster statue of St Maria Goretti. This child Virgin and Martyr stood atop a copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare, which had been covered with a gent’s white linen handkerchief, one of three Benson had been able to raise little enthusiasm for when he had received them the previous Christmas from Auntie Muriel, whose son was a White Father in Fiji. Around Maria Goretti he had ranged in obeisance a number of holy pictures. Medals hung from the ceiling of the niche, and he had fashioned gold stars cut out from the paper inside Cadbury’s Bournville wrappers.

  St Maria Goretti held a special place in Benson’s affections. She had been knifed to death at the age of sixteen while attempti
ng to fend off a rapist. For this lethal defence of her honour, the culmination of a short life of quiet piety, she had been canonised by the Pope in Rome. Her body lay somewhere in Italy in a glass coffin and hadn’t gone bad. Her killer, following many years in gaol, had been present at her canonisation and then had resided in a monastery. He too died in the odour of sanctity.

  Only two years older than Benson when she died, Maria Goretti was extremely inspirational to him in his uphill struggle to preserve his own Holy Purity.

  He had just added a torch with red cellophane wrapped round the business end to give the correct ambience to the altar when Mum announced Eric’s arrival.

  “O my God! St Maria Goretti! Pray for me! It’s Eric Jenkins!” whispered Benson to the sadly smiling saint. “Ask him what he wants!” he shouted.

  “You ask him what he wants. I’m your mother, not the maid, and don’t you forget it!”

  “All right! Coming!” Benson shouted. Then he added to the crimson altar in the wardrobe, “Sweet Jesus, save me! St Maria Goretti, intercede for me!”

  He got up off his knees and went slowly downstairs to face the fidgeting temptation on the step.

  “You’ve got a new scab on your knee!” said Benson, trying to avoid the inevitable.

  “Yes; I fell off my bike. It doesn’t half hurt,” said Eric, his voice squeaky with self-pity.

  “Eric, I don’t wish to be rude – we Catholics are not permitted to be rude, even to Methodists. It can under certain circumstances be a Mortal Sin. However, I must tell you that you are an Occasion of Sin for me and I really ought to avoid you for my soul’s sake. It’s nothing personal, you understand.”

  “But you started it and Bruno wants a meeting tonight,” replied Eric.

  “Bruno?”

  “Yes, Bruno. He’s in the garage now.”

  Benson suddenly had a vision of tears cascading from the eyes of the statue of St Maria Goretti and soaking into the gent’s handkerchief, where they became the colour of blood. Were that to happen, he thought, it would be a miracle and the handkerchief would be a relic, and might be put into a gold case for people to kiss. His road would be choked with charabancs, and Mrs Brown would write to the Council.

  But then he recalled himself to the problem in hand. “You mean Bruno is in the garage!”

  “Yes.”

  “And he is waiting for us to have a meeting!”

  “Yes,” replied Eric. “A meeting.”

  “You realise what that means, don’t you, Eric?”

  Under Benson’s gimlet glare, Eric shuffled and gazed at the worn doormat.

  Benson continued, “Bruno, Eric, has gone to the garage with the firm intention of committing a Mortal Sin! You do realise what that means, don’t you, Eric?”

  Eric looked uncomfortable, like a tourist being harangued in a language he does not understand. He pulled at his fringe.

  “It means,” continued Benson, “that were Bruno to get run over on his way home, or were his heart to simply stop – and they do, Eric, every day they just stop – were this to happen, Eric, Bruno would go straight to eternal punishment in hell.”

  “Would he?” asked Eric.

  “Of course he would!” rapped Benson. “You know, Eric, I sometimes wonder if you Methodists are Christians at all. Bruno has gone to the garage to commit a sin which contains serious matter. He has gone there with the firm intention of putting his soul to death! Who let him in by the way?”

  “I did,” said Eric unhappily.

  “Then you are as bad as he is. You are an accomplice. The Catechism says: ‘In how many ways may we either cause or share the guilt of another’s sin? We may either cause or share in the guilt of another’s sin in nine ways:

  (1) By counsel, (2) By command, (3) By consent, (4) By provocation, (5) By praise or flattery, (6) By concealment, (7) By being a partner in the sin, (8) By silence, (9) By defending the ill done.’ Now I want you to examine your conscience most carefully, Eric. Have you not caused or shared in Bruno’s sin?”

  “Are you coming or aren’t you?” asked Eric, addressing the doormat rather than Benson.

  “No, I’m not! I told you last time that last time was the last time!” replied Benson with all the certainty at his command.

  “But Bruno needs us, he says. He took it out and it’s all hard!”

  Benson felt dizzy. He knew that devils were hovering in legions around the front porch.

  “It’s huge!” said Eric. “I think he’s grown an inch since last week and he showed me hairs growing underneath as well as on top.”

  “St Maria Goretti, pray for me,” intoned Benson.

  “Come on, please! He’ll kill me if you don’t come. He will!”

  Benson was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “That would be adding further wickedness to what has already taken place. I will go to the garage, Eric. But I will go there only to exhort Bruno to change his ways before it is too late.”

  But as he spoke he knew he was lost. Once inside the garage he would never be able to resist Bruno’s whopper.

  “Tell Bruno I shall be over shortly,” he told Eric, and with his heart pounding wildly he closed the door on the little Methodist.

  Slowly, and in sorrow, Benson mounted the stairs and walked momentously along the landing to his bedroom.

  There he knelt in front of the statue in the wardrobe alcove. Avoiding the statue’s eyes, he reached behind it and extinguished the torch. The glittering red-gold and red-silver medals floating in the air of the alcove disappeared into blackness – a blackness Benson knew was shared by his soul.

  With a feeling made up of intense excitement and deepest mourning, Benson went to counsel Eric and Bruno in the garage.

  Eric Jenkins had summoned Benson to attend the weekly meeting of the Rude Club. He and Benson had been the founder members in the empty garage. The weekly ritual had consisted of a fondling of pre-pubescent parts while each boy intoned a litany of conjecture as to what the itchy attachments were really for.

  It had been Benson’s theory that the naughty parts had been placed there as a temptation, like the apple in the Garden of Eden or a cake on a table an hour before teatime. But Eric had countered that his sister Rosemary did not have one and that it didn’t seem fair. To which Benson had responded that every son and daughter of Adam had his or her own particular cross to bear, and that Rosemary, being in Benson’s eyes very much a fallen daughter of Adam, would have hers too, even though it might not be as tangible as Eric’s or Benson’s.

  If Benson was uncertain as to the exact use to which his rude parts should be put, he had been left in no doubt by the Brothers at school as to what uses they should not be put. He was not to take wilful pleasure in irregular motions of the flesh. That had been inculcated in no uncertain terms, and he had communicated the heinousness of what they were doing to Eric. Eric, hopelessly mired in Methodism as he was, had asserted that they met regularly and not irregularly, but this had not pulled any weight with Benson, who, while completely certain about ‘irregular motions’, had little inkling what the regular motions could be.

  What he did most nights between saying his night prayers and dropping off to sleep was definitely highly irregular, and had to be confessed to the priest every Saturday. And each Saturday an assortment of priests told him that he must bridle his passions or he would become their slave, and Benson said he would, but didn’t. And not bridling his passions imbued his night games with a disturbing sense of sin. He wanted to do it still. He did it still but he hated himself each time he did it, loathed the thought of his invisible soul turning from shining white to God-gone, decaying stench. So, added to his fears of punishment at school for homework undone, bullying for being fat, was added a lethal fear of the hell of red-hot pokers to which his sin would take him were he to die in its thrall.

  Each time he fell he prayed that he w
ould be spared until he could immerse his soul in the acid-bath of Confession. But in the interim he allowed himself full rein. Once blackened by Mortal Sin, the Catholic soul has no deeper to go. God, His Holy Mother and all the saints have turned away their faces in distaste. The worst has happened. He has already hit molten rock-bottom. May as well lay sin on top of sin.

  The meetings of the Rude Club had been lent extra spice by the arrival of Bruno, who went to the Technical School and was not a Catholic, nor a Methodist, nor anything else that Benson could discern.

  There was something foreign and exotic about Bruno, though when tackled about his ancestry, he always responded that his dad had fought in the war and his big brother was a Queen’s Scout. But he was dark, and though about the same age as Benson, had far outgrown the Fairy Cycle he was never seen without. So large was he growing that he had to ride his bike with his knees out wide to avoid scuffing them on the handlebars, And, most importantly, Bruno dangled while Eric and Benson merely peeped. He could also produce a grand finale to each meeting of the Rude Club which delighted, enthralled, appalled and entrapped his two less competent admirers.

  Bruno knew everything there was to know about motions of the flesh, regular and irregular. He had once gestured to the fluid on the garage floor that had just sent the other two boys into fits of disgusted giggles, and announced:

  “You can make babies from that.”

  Eric and Benson had stared down at the unbabylike drops of liquid.

  “Er ... How do you mean?” asked Benson.

  “Just what I say. You can make babies from that.” And he added: “My dad told me.”

  “Pull the other one, it’s got bells on,” giggled Eric, though Benson was silent.

  “You have to add an egg, of course,” said Bruno.

  “How do you mean?” asked Benson again.

  Bruno had sighed. “You don’t know anything, do you? I’m not surprised really. Your mum and dad are probably waiting until you can make stuff like me before they tell you.”

  “Tell us what?”