Wake Up Happy Every Day

by Stephen May

  And, as she stands looking down, there is a spastic wriggle deep in the depths of the bag. A rustle that tells her there’s life here. And relief pulses through her, she can feel it moving through her body just like blood.

  And then she thinks sod it, and stuffs all the cash in her purse into the mug. A couple more fives, a twenty. A fifty. A lot of change. She fills the trente and hugs herself as she walks on. Nice to be nice. And it’s only money.

  Sarah remembers a live art project the council had funded back when she was with Cultural Services, and back when local councils still had money for art.

  A local performance artist sat next to an ATM in the town centre, styrofoam cup in front of him – not a trente – filthy sleeping bag over his knees, looking every inch the woebegone beggar. Looking exactly like this guy here in California Street. And every time someone approached he would mutter, ‘Want any change, mate?’ and try and give them handfuls of silver. Properly freaked people out. Not children. Children happily took the cash, but adults didn’t know how to respond. Some couldn’t hear what he was really saying and ignored him as effectively as if he’d been a real beggar, some got quite annoyed. One or two got violent and had to be restrained by council security. Because of course the change the artist was giving away was tax-payers money, part of a grant that she’d approved, so a health and safety assessment ensured that burly men were on hand to prevent trouble.

  It was a piece she’d always liked, and one of the few arts projects Nicky had ever supported with enthusiasm.

  Sarah goes to the ATM. She takes out her daily limit. Five hundred dollars. Twenty-five brand-new flat notes that smell of sophisticated inks and mischief.

  It takes her an hour to find twenty-five can collectors and convince them to take her money. Even the homeless are suspicious of free cash. And who can blame them? The homeless know the dangers of money better than anyone.

  She gives out her last note outside Grace Cathedral.

  Behind the hunched shoulders and haunted face of her last beggar she reads a sign that says ‘What they’re all talking about – Fifty shades of Grace’. It makes her stop and smile. And then she finds she’s actually inside the body of the church. On a pew. She isn’t really praying in here exactly, but she is thinking hard about things. And maybe that is all praying is.

  When her phone goes off she is mortified. There’s only one old guy in the pews near her but he gives her such a beady look that she turns her phone off without even looking at who the call is from. It only rang for a second, but the cheery ghostly echo of her ringtone seems to continue to reverberate around the vaulted Gothic space. Queen. ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’.

  She shuts her eyes.

  When she opens them again, it is to find that the old guy next to her, a bum she guesses at first, has scooted along the pew so that he is pretty close. Not offensively close, but right on the edge of her personal space. She can sense him staring at her. Staring and smiling. This is always happening to her. She’s the one the nutters warm to, the person they feel confident enough to approach.

  She looks down at the floor for as long as she can, tries to pick up her train of thought, but it’s too late – gone. Between her phone going and this old guy watching her, her concentration has dissolved.

  She’s thinking that she might as well go now, the cathedral clearly isn’t going to give her the peace she needs. She puts her hands on her bags and it’s then that the old guy speaks.

  ‘Interesting choice of tune.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘On your phone.’

  She’s made a mistake, she’s engaged with him. He scoots just a little closer. And as he moves up she thinks she can detect a sweetish smell, like sandwiches left too long in their Tupperware box on a long coach trip.

  ‘Beautiful place this, isn’t it?’

  He’s English she realises. So a tourist not a bum, and now that she gets a proper look at him she can see that he’s decently clad. Perhaps a little overdressed for San Francisco in late summer, especially with that tweedy jacket. And he’s very thin. But neat and conservative. She wonders if he’s with a group and looks around.

  ‘I’m here on my own. Don’t worry, there’s not a whole coach-load of coffin dodgers about to pounce.’ She hears the chuckle in his voice and relaxes a bit.

  ‘Yes, it’s beautiful in here.’ And she looks around and realises that she hasn’t really taken it in at all before now. She’d just come in, found a pew, dumped her bags and started thinking about whatever it was she had been thinking about. Money. The homeless. Life. Scarlett. Work. Nicky. Family. What they’d done and where they were going. How it might all end. But there was no coherence to her thinking. It was all discordant and nonsensical, and it makes her panicky to be all over the place like this because planning and order are key parts of her skill-set. Only now, with this nice old English gent taking her out of the spinning waltzer of her own thoughts, she does start to breathe a bit. So at first she’s grateful to him for lassooing her back to the real and manageable world.

  She looks around now and admires the ambition of this place. Grace Cathedral was built in 1844 – she’d read that on the noticeboard as she’d come in – and what was San Francisco then? An outlaw town. Not even American then really – still Mexican – and a town about to explode with the gold rush and the railroad. But they didn’t know that was down the line when they built this. This was a statement of intent. It said: We are going to be somebody. It was like an intern spending her first month’s salary on a pair of Jimmy Choos and then living on lentils for weeks to pay for them. It said: I’m going places. Just watch me.

  ‘Have you been saved?’ The old guy says it conversationally, in the same way you might say, ‘Is it raining out?’

  Bloody hell. Turns out he’s a nutter after all. Shame, he seemed so normal at first. A nice old man. ‘No. No, I haven’t.’

  The old man nods, chuckles wheezily. ‘I was like you once. There wasn’t a bigger atheist than me. I was famous for it. Militant about it in actual fact. I used to say God was an imaginary friend for grown-ups. Someone we’d made up out of words just so we wouldn’t be lonely or sad.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to be somewhere.’

  He puts his skinny hand on her arm. Grips it. Christ, the strength that is in that feeble-looking claw. Like being grabbed by a belligerent lobster.

  ‘I won’t be long.’ He is smiling as he says this, showing his teeth. There’s some menace there. Some sense of threat. Sarah looks around for a vicar or a nun or someone obviously connected with the proper authorities, but there’s no one who looks like that. Just curious architecture fans, daydreaming day trippers, the prayerful, and her and this nutty evangelical with the ridiculously strong lobster-grip.

  ‘OK,’ she mutters, ‘five minutes then I have to go.’

  ‘Good girl,’ he says, and releases her arm. Pats it gently. The complete avuncular Werther’s Original OAP again.

  He pauses to gather his thoughts and she thinks bugger him, because she means it. She is only going to give him five minutes, if he wants to waste it in staging meaningful pauses let him. She glances at him, and too late realises that this is what he is waiting for – the chance for eye contact. He fixes her with his kindly eyes, and his thin, impossibly wrinkled face splinters in a broad warm grin. And he begins.

  ‘When you finally begin to see the end of the road, the tunnel at the end of the light, as it were – well, it’s natural to question things, and I just kept thinking – what if I’m wrong. What if, by some billion to one, impossible fluke there is a God?’

  ‘A white man with a flowing white beard, sitting on a cloud?’

  The old guy frowns, holds up a finger for silence. Clearly this is more a tutorial than a debate. ‘Sorry,’ says Sarah, and is immediately disgusted at herself. Put out because he’s the rude one here. He is the one intruding on her privacy.

  ‘And if there is a God, well, then the signs are that he is, as
the ancient books tell us, a vengeful God. A God who sent his only son as a sacrifice to us. A sacrifice that we have pretty much ignored. And I thought, well if there is a Day of Judgement my defence of “Oh well, it just seemed so unlikely, m’lud” is going to look weak. I could easily imagine this particular God – this capricious, jealous God – getting pretty furious. I could imagine him asking, hadn’t he shown me? Hadn’t thousands of years of art and literature and theology and philosophy, hadn’t that been enough in the way of proof of his existence and a guide to his personality? And the simple faith of countless ordinary people? Was that all out the window because of Darwin and his turtles? I imagined that scene and thought that would be pretty embarrassing, wouldn’t it? I mean if my first thoughts – my atheistic thoughts – were correct and there was no God well, fair enough, I’ll just be an unlikely collection of proteins returning to the earth. But if that position was wrong, well, I’d have to live with an eternity of hellfire. Because the books are pretty clear on this. Unless we accept God’s love we are going to have a pretty bad time of it. For ever. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t really fancy that.’

  She knows about all this.

  ‘Pascal’s wager,’ she says.

  ‘You know about Pascal?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Yes I do!’ She is aware of how excited she sounds, like the girl in the class whose hand stretches high to the ceiling, the girl who is desperate to be asked for the answer. She hates the way that girl is still there inside her, waiting for a chance to get a gold star and a smiley face. She hates this tendency towards swottiness.

  She makes the effort to slow herself down, to dial down the enthusiasm in her voice. ‘Yeah, Pascal said you might as well bet on the existence of God because you’ll only know about it if you win. It’s the exact point you’ve just made. That’s my uni first year Introduction to Philosophy unit that is.’ She actually thinks it might have once been a question on University Challenge. Most of the cleverest stuff she knows comes from that show.

  ‘Yes it is, and he’s right, isn’t he?’

  ‘Well, no actually. It’s like kids and Santa Claus. At first they believe completely and then, round about seven or eight, they start to wonder, but they can’t afford to really question Santa’s existence in case it’s true that he only brings presents to believers, so they are trapped in this kind of psychological limbo for a while. Blinded to the truth by the desire for presents. They have to believe and not believe simultaneously. It can’t be good for them.’

  ‘And what happens when they finally admit that there isn’t a Santa Claus?’

  ‘Well, the presents don’t stop coming, do they?’

  ‘No, but the children are never quite as excited about Christmas again. They have been robbed of something. And they never trust their parents again, which is probably why the younger generation are so ready to put their faith in material things rather than things of the spirit.’

  Sarah frowns and stretches her back, hears it click. Maybe she should treat herself to a massage later. Maybe Jesus would do it?

  Sarah blows a raspberry. Yes, she’s blown a raspberry. A loud and long one. In church. If there’s a hell she’s going there for sure now. But she couldn’t help herself. This funny old bloke doesn’t seem bothered. He does his wheezy chuckle again.

  ‘Not much longer, my dear.’ He makes a show of looking around him, his loose skin tightening on his face and neck, and she gets a sense of what a handsome man he might have been once. ‘Look at this place. Or, better, think about the medieval cathedrals in England. Think about the people who built them. Poor people using block and tackle to haul stone hewn and shaped at huge effort. No plans. Taking scores of years to do it. No one has built an atheist cathedral, have they?’

  It’s out before she can stop herself.

  ‘The Twin Towers.’ Shit. She groans inside. She knows it is the worst thing to say. It’s a gift to this annoying old git, an open goal. The Twin Towers are never the answer to any question worth asking.

  He twinkles. ‘Well, yes, the Twin Towers. The World Trade Centre. And what happened to them again? Without God – without the idea of God – human beings are always at Ground Zero scrabbling around for something more important than themselves.’

  ‘What about all the wars in the name of religion?’

  He waves a hand as if to say, not that old chestnut. Have you nothing better to offer than that? Is that really all you’ve got? Dear, oh, dear.

  ‘Well, now, war is something I know about. You might say war is my specialist subject. And I can tell you no war in history has ever actually been about God. For the people that start wars they’re about money and power. And for the poor sods that actually fight them it’s about the chance to ride around in a truck with a big gun making some exciting bangs. Never underestimate the appeal of fireworks. I’ll agree that religion has quite often been used as an excuse. A fig leaf if you will. And it’s one of the things He might be extremely annoyed about actually.’

  ‘But say there is a God. If you’ve lived a good life don’t you think He will let you into heaven anyway? Even if you didn’t believe.’

  ‘Oh, sweetheart. No, I absolutely don’t think that. I would say that from what has been written about God through the ages, He is very unlikely to react like that. That would be the reaction of a Guardian-reading God. A PBS God. And that particular God definitely doesn’t exist. And in any case’ – he looks away now, his skin loose and reptilian again, his voice dropping to an unnerving whisper – ‘I haven’t lived a good life. I have done terrible things. Terrible, terrible things.’

  He’s grave now. Still and silent. And, despite herself, she’s intrigued.

  ‘Really? Like what?’

  ‘Everything. I’ve done everything. I’ve done the very worst things you can think of.’ He shakes his head and it’s obvious he means it. Sarah tries not to wonder what the worst might mean. Rape? Murder? Child murder? Child rape? This harmless old guy? She remembers the extraordinary power in his fingers and shivers.

  He stands. ‘Well, it’s been lovely to talk to you. But that’s our five minutes up and I must tootle along. I’m sure I haven’t convinced you or converted you. But maybe I’ve planted a seed.’

  Good heavens, he’s ending the conversation first. It’s him dreaming up an excuse to leave. She’s surprised by that. And oddly offended, like it was a date with some hopeless geek and then he’s the one to say it’s never going to happen between them. She wonders for a minute how her life might have turned out if Nicky had said no to going for a drink after his annual review. Not that there was ever any chance of that. She’d known right from the off that he would fall in love with her.

  The old man puts out his hand. She stands to take it. Shy. Not wanting to be rude, but not really wanting to touch him. He looks her in the eyes again as if searching for something. She thinks that he doesn’t find it, whatever it is, because he frowns, his whole lizardy face scrunching up like an empty crisp packet. She catches a whiff of that hot, sweet, sweaty-sandwich smell again.

  ‘Jack Tough,’ he says. Good name. Can’t be real though, can it?

  ‘Sarah,’ she says. ‘Sarah Fisher.’

  ‘And don’t worry,’ he says, as he shuffles along the pew away from her. ‘You’ve probably got time to put everything right.’

  ‘What? Time to put what right?’

  He looks back at her. ‘Whatever it is you’ve done or left undone.’

  She watches him as he leaves the church. He walks with a martial briskness. It’s surely true that he’s been a soldier.

  And she sits there for a while. Could have been a long time, could have been a short time. She just sits there not really thinking of anything. And then she wonders how to put things right in her life. Scarlett, she thinks. Scarlett’s life will be my defence. If there really is a fierce old judge with a beard she will be able to say, Here my Lord, here is something good. And if it’s not enough. Well, fuck him.

  And now
, finally, here’s a vicar. A woman. Pretty, spiky-haired and pixie-faced. Her dog collar giving her the look of a singer in a punk band. She has kind eyes and a collection plate.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind . . .’ she says and waits. Expectant. And of course Sarah has no money. Not a dime.

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’ she begins and the elfin punky vicar just shakes her head, puts her hand on Sarah’s shoulder. ‘It’s OK. Really, it’s OK.’ She moves down the pew.

  Sarah gets up to go. She checks she has everything. Bag. Empty wallet. Keys. She switches her phone on and instantly the jokey bounce of her ringtone insults the cool ecumenical air. Heads turn her way. An Asian tourist with a heavy camera gives her a thumbs up.

  She is giving him a thumbs up back as she clicks Answer.

  ‘Nicky,’ she whispers, ‘I’m in church. What is it?’

  And then she’s running. Sprinting from cool gloom to the bright light outside. The light that hurts and leaves her blinking and disorientated. She has to stop. Shield her eyes, gather herself. And then she’s running again.

  Forty-five

  NICKY

  I hear her coming before she reaches the house. Even though I am inside and on the landline phone raging to Sarah, I still hear that distinctive tlot-tlot crunching unevenly over our gated gravel.

  I stop whatever it is I’m yelling, and am at the door in a stride yanking it open. Scarlett is smiling, face all pinked up in the September sun, curls the colour of vanilla ice cream swaying gently in the breeze, looking like a poster child for hemiplegia. Looking like the kind of HD snap that brings in millions from soppy-hearted rich guys, or unlocks the dosh from those frightened billionaires trying to manipulate the karmic stock exchange before they snuff it.

  Scarlett sees my face and her smile wobbles and she looks behind her. Which is when I see the psycho nutjob. Catherine. She’s standing near the gate, also smiling – though thinly. Hands on hips. I’m gobsmacked and my first thought is a furious one. Did she have something to do with this whole abduction thing? I step forward and scoop Scarlett up. Hold her fierce against me.