Sucking Sherbert Lemons

by Michael Carson

  Benson stopped, contemplating the hill up to St Bede’s. My side of the street. Don’t make me laugh! What about his side of the street?

  But that was no good. Ted had nodded sagely – he was a master at nodding sagely – and said that Brother Hooper’s side of the street was Brother Hooper’s own concern. It was clear that Benson had been haunted by his old headmaster in the forty years since leaving St Bede’s. Time to lance the boil – first boiling the lance. Then walk away to become the New and Improved and Sober Martin Benson.

  ‘But what if he gives me a hard time?’

  ‘Not your concern. Ninety-nine per-cent of what happens is not your business, Martin.’

  ‘But what if he won’t accept my apology?’

  ‘Not your concern. You’re doing this for your own peace of mind.’

  ‘But what if he runs to the drawer and brings out his big black strap?’

  ‘Make an excuse and leave ... this isn’t about pleasure.’

  ‘But what if...’

  The conversation had gone on and on. Every time Benson encountered Ted – several times a day, seeing as they lived together – he was asked if he had done the deed. Benson shook his head like a naughty boy. Ted, unimpressed, said, ‘You do want to keep your sobriety, don’t you? You do want to be happy? You’ve got to root out all the things in your life which made you drink.’

  Benson had nodded.

  ‘Okay, okay, I’ll do it,’ he’d said.

  Ted said he had heard that before. He did not want to see Benson again until he had done the deed. They would stay in their respective parts of the house. Neither did he want any of Benson’s succinct text messages, long phone calls or walks on sandbanks in the interim. Only with amends made to Brother Hooper would he be allowed back to Ted’s scrawny bosom.

  Benson looked at the grand gates. Across the gravel path was the front door of the Brothers’ House. Inside would be Brother Hooper, greatly changed, doubtless eking out his retirement in the big house and surrounded by big books full of great ideas, or, rather, Great Ideas, and praying for the souls of all those gone-before or gone-over-the-wall or closed souls in open prisons, Brothers.

  ‘This is a moment of decision,’ Benson told himself. He looked up at the sky, his favourite bit of Merseyside, for a sign. But, apart from a gas-guzzling Easyjet making its approaches to John Lennon Airport through the murk of grey, there was none that hit him as in any way definite.

  ‘Above us only sky,’ was John Lennon Airport’s motto. Benson shook his head at the line. It was obvious even to the dimmest gink that there was far more above us than sky. There was The Unknown for a start. But John Lennon couldn’t be bothered to sacrifice rhyming ‘try’ and ‘sky’. Probably wrote it in some purple haze with Yoko slicing the sushi in the posh kitchen looking out over Central Park little knowing that long after what he was to know of his story had ended, some grey committee in Liverpool Council would sit around an overpriced table and brainstorm his name and unimaginative line onto Speke Airport. ‘Good for business,’ they’d say. The bottom line. The world was always bouncing along the bottom line, or so it often seemed to Benson.

  Mind you, Wirral Metropolitan Council could be just as bad. They placed the little aspirational tag, ‘Wirral has heard the cry of The Earth’ on all their wheely bins, into which the populace consigned old computers, tins, plastics, rubble and, in certain notorious cases, body parts. They called Wirral ‘Eurowirral’ then stopped. They...

  Accept the things you cannot change... He heard Ted say it. Clear as anything. A sign?

  He fidgeted on the corner. Thought. Projected himself forwards into the next five minutes. Heard his feet crunch the gravel. The ring of the bell. The barking of the white Pyrenean Mountain dog the Brothers doted on (No, he’d have been dead for four decades.) The grand vestibule. The turning staircase. The door opening. A whiff of cabbagey dinners and incense. The sweat of middle-aged male virgins.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I don’t know if you remember me.’

  ‘I remember you. You’re Martin Benson who left the Brothers under a cloud and came back here to screw as much education as you could out of us. Glad to see you’ve kept the weight off. What can I do for you?

  ‘Er...’

  ‘Out with it, Man!’

  ‘Er...’

  ‘Married, are you?’

  ‘Er...’

  ‘Grandchildren by now, I suppose? Good Catholics all. Mind you, no Bensons at St Bede’s. I’d’ve remembered. Too thick are they? Isn’t the new pope a fine man?’

  ‘I’ve come to ... to...’

  Littlewood’s closing down sale sirened. They might run out. I’ll come back later. He put the earphones back in and switched on to switch off both present and past.

  He made a resolute left turn towards the town centre.