On Loving Josiah

by Olivia Fane

‘I don’t go to school,’ said Josiah, with a certain pride.

  ‘So do you go out to work?’

  Josiah shook his head.

  ‘So what you like to do is coop yourself up here and occasionally go down to the fridge, is that right?’

  ‘I’ve got a girlfriend.’

  ‘Do you bring her here?’

  ‘I spend weekends with her at her place.’

  ‘Is she pretty? Does she live with her parents?’

  ‘She’s got her own flat. It’s good.’

  ‘I’m pleased you do something with your time.’

  ‘No, it’s good. It really is. And she cooks for me, too.’

  ‘Is she older than you?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘And do you love her?’

  Josiah paused to consider. ‘If you want a Mars Bar I’ve got some in my top drawer,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want a Mars Bar. I want to know if you love your girlfriend. To be able to love someone is a great gift.’

  Josiah switched on the light and pulled out the drawer. It was a swift, sudden movement. He looked down on her, and threw the Mars into her lap. The son and the mother, discrete physical entities now, individuated, alone.

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re doing here,’ he said.

  His mother looked at him, surprised, hurt.

  ‘I mean, hey Mum! Hey Mum! Why didn’t you bother dropping by last year? Or the year before that perhaps? Mum! Does it ring true in your ears, that little word? Who are you to tell me that love is a gift? Who are you to tell me anything, anything about love?’

  ‘I’m so sorry…’

  ‘“Sorry” is what you say when you tread on someone’s fucking toe at a bus-stop.’

  ‘I’m going to go now.’

  ‘No!’ said Josiah, ‘not this time!’ At which Josiah bent double on the floor beside his mother and clasped her legs for all he was worth, ‘You’re not going! You’re not going!’ he sobbed, ‘You’re staying here!’

  ‘I am!’ said his mother, ‘I am!’

  Eve got down onto the floor with her son, and they lay together like two seeds in a husk, barely moving. They were joined at their shins, their heads perhaps a foot apart, as though each were looking into a mirror.

  ‘Why did you go?’ asked Josiah.

  ‘Because I was a fraud.’

  ‘How were you a fraud?’

  ‘I was untrue to myself, to you and to Gibson.’

  ‘But on that day, at that time? Why didn’t you leave years before? Why did you ever marry him? Why did you even bother to give birth to me? Didn’t you ever think it might have been easier to have had me aborted?’

  ‘I only wanted to be kind. Gibson loved me. He’d never had a child. And the thing about kindness is that you can will it, you can make it happen.’

  ‘But you yourself were incapable of loving, is that right?’

  ‘I had done with love by then, Josiah.’

  ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘You can only love once in your life. Really, deeply, with all of you. So that not a speck of yourself goes on existing without that other.’

  ‘So who did you love?’

  ‘I loved a teacher of mine. His name was Gilbert.’

  ‘And did he love you back?’

  ‘He did, with all his heart. In the end, with his life. You don’t get over that. Ever. You don’t give like that again. You can’t enter that void again.’

  ‘What did he teach you?’

  ‘He taught me who I was. He showed me what it was like to be human, how to extend every sinew of my body and soul and feel every feeling that was there to be felt. There are some ancient tribes, Josiah, that chew up food before giving it to their young, mouth to mouth. Gilbert gave me his warm, wet, living wisdom to sustain me as it had sustained him. Knowledge is the greatest thing one human being can give another, the greatest blessing one can bestow. When he killed himself, it was as though he had said, ‘Fuck knowledge, fuck you.’

  ‘And what happened then?’

  ‘Well I was fucked, well and truly. Forever and ever.’

  ‘And that was why you ended up in a psychiatric hospital.’

  ‘So you know about that, at least.’

  ‘You met my father there.’

  ‘That’s right, that dear man.’

  ‘Did you need to be there?’

  ‘Who needs to be anywhere? It’s all so random. There’s my morsel of wisdom for you. Everything is so random. So tenuous.’

  ‘What can we do about it?’

  ‘We have to pretend to be angels. We have to swoop down from on high and save deserving souls.’

  ‘I can’t think of anyone to save.’

  ‘Yes you can, Josiah. There’s always someone you can save.’

  Now they heard the older boys coming up to bed, deeper voices, angrier. There was a large, ugly belch followed by fucking this and fucking that and why the fuck and you fucking prick.

  ‘Is this what it’s like every night?’ asked Eve.

  Josiah didn’t answer her.

  ‘Listen Jo, let’s get out of here. I’ve got money now. I must practise using it. We can go to the Holiday Inn, you and I.’

  ‘No, you must stay here with me.’

  ‘But Josiah, there’s an indoor swimming-pool at the Holiday Inn!’

  ‘This is where I’ve always wanted you.’

  ‘Large white towels!’

  ‘I’ve always imagined you coming back, you know. I always knew you’d just walk in one day.’

  ‘Can’t we just get out of here?’

  ‘I would lie in bed and you would come into the room as though you’d barely been away. And if it was Dad, he’d bring with him a story book, or a book about growing vegetables, and if it was you…’

  ‘Ritchie’s First Steps in Latin.’

  ‘It was Ritchie’s First Steps in Latin, yes, that’s right. Now mother… no, I can’t call you “mother” either. It’s no good. But you are her.’

  ‘I am her, yes, Josiah.’

  ‘Now, mater. Perhaps I should call you “mater”. Perhaps that should be my name for you. Or perhaps I sound like a Victorian prep-school boy. I want to be lying in this bed in my pyjamas. God, I haven’t worn pyjamas for years, but I know I have some somewhere. I want the light to be off. And I want you to come and sit next to me and tell me the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece. And when I’m asleep you’ve just got to stay there, okay? You can’t move.’

  ‘My darling, I need to go to the loo, brush my teeth – see here my Neapolitan toothbrush!’

  ‘There’s a small bathroom on the next floor you can use.’

  ‘But what if I bump into someone?’

  ‘Just look glum and weary. No one will notice.’

  ‘What if I’m accosted by a member of staff?’

  ‘I’ll go out and make sure the coast is clear. I’ll be back in two ticks, okay?’

  A snoop around Josiah’s room was irresistible. But Eve was so moved by the very first thing she found in the drawer of her son’s bedside table that she stopped in her tracks. It was a copy of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and a small Latin dictionary. For Eve had adored Lucretius, whom she considered second only to Catullus. She had written essays at Cambridge for a wonderful man called Dr Sedley on the subject of Lucretius and sex, and when she thumbed through Josiah’s edition she saw boys’ handwriting in the margins and she couldn’t believe quite how astute and observant this child was, this child of her womb.

  She was sitting on the bed reading it when Josiah came back.

  ‘I know what bedtime story I’m going to be telling you tonight, my darling,’ she said. ‘Can you read this stuff? I thought you’d given up school.’

  ‘I can get through it,’ said Josiah.

  ‘Now, what about Chapter Four? Have you got that far?’

  Josiah shook his head and looked embarrassed.

  ‘I’m going to let you get into your pyjamas, dear boy, while I go and
freshen up, as they say. Next floor up…’

  ‘Immediately on the left.’

  ‘I’ll find it.’

  So now it was Josiah’s turn to be alone. Immediately he picked up his Lucretius to see whether Thomas had signed his name in the front of it, and when he saw that he hadn’t he felt a huge surge of relief. He got changed and sat bolt upright in bed, looking guilty.

  When Eve came back, squeaky clean, and without having bumped into a single soul, she took one look at him and exclaimed, ‘Now, that won’t do! Relax, darling! Do you want me to read to you in Latin or attempt some translation?’

  ‘I can’t speak Latin,’ confessed Josiah.

  ‘Well, we shall have to put that right. But tonight, as a concession, I’ll do my best to put it into English. My God, I love you, Jo! My God, I do!’

  So Eve sat down on the bed next to him like the mother she never was, and looked for ‘the good bits’, as she called them. ‘Aha,’ she said, ‘perfect!’

  ‘Cum primum roborat artus, when the limbs first grow strong, namque alias aliud res commovet atque lacessit … isn’t this just brilliant, Jo? Alias, aliud! Another time, another thing, in two words, just like that, to want that other place, that other time, that’s what desire is like, isn’t it? Commovere, lacessere, what verbs! Stirring strong young limbs into violent motion, he says it all, doesn’t he, this Lucretius?’

  Josiah looked anxious.

  ‘But you’ve read this, haven’t you? Or someone has.’ Eve ran a curious finger over the crease of an old earmark.

  ‘No, I haven’t got that far,’ said Josiah.

  ‘Whoever receives the shafts of Venus, whether it be a boy with girlish limbs who throws him off balance, or a woman … hey, Josiah, isn’t this a wonderful idea, toto iactans e corpore amorem, have you ever done that, have you ever known the experience of throwing love out of your whole body? Like it was just too much for your body to cope with?’

  Josiah gazed at his mother with a sort of wonder, not entirely appreciative. He said to her, ‘Can’t you just tell me the story of Jason, like you used to, in the dark?’

  ‘In the dark?’

  ‘Don’t you remember how you’d tell me stories, lying next to me in the dark?’

  Eve smiled and placed the volume of Lucretius back onto the bedside table. She turned off the light and both sat together for a while in the silence. Then when they lay down what a strange arrangement of bodies it was, Eve’s head level with Josiah’s waist, and Josiah’s hand never letting go of her hair, even in his dreams.

  The following morning, Josiah and Eve took pride in the fact they used only one holdall and one large plastic bag to pack all their worldly belongings. Josiah waited until after the school exodus, and then took his mother downstairs to introduce her to a flummoxed Angela Day, explaining to her that the time had come to ‘move on’, and that he would be leaving The Hollies forever.

  By ten o’clock they were driving North together in a VW Camper Van advertised in the Cambridge Evening News and paid for in cash.

  They walked in Wicken Fen; they lunched in Grantham; they took tea in York and bought blankets from charity shops and top notch sleeping bags and torches from Millets. By the time they reached Jervaulx Abbey it was almost dark, and the cold, damp air lent the ruin a gothic, eerie quality. It was the moment in a winter’s day when sun and moon glow faintly together, when all existence is luminous. Eve took hold of Josiah’s hand and asked him whether he had ever read Wordsworth.

  ‘Do you believe in the sublime?’ she asked him.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Josiah.

  ‘There’s a wonderful line in Virgil Book VI, Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore, ‘And they stretched out their hands in yearning for the other shore.’ We all do that, Josiah. Perhaps even people who buy themselves a new TV are really doing that. They want to be transported. And the people who built this place, and the people who prayed here, did so in hope of heaven. What is going on in the head of that kestrel, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Josiah, honestly.

  ‘Why do you think he’s chosen to land on the apex of the highest arch?’

  ‘To be close as he can to heaven?’

  ‘I should think so,’ said Eve.

  They walked on further, skirting round gorse bushes and tripping over dips and large stones, and then they came to the step before the altar and sat down there, and listened to the occasional crow.

  Eve said to her son, ‘Now, I used to know the whole of this poem off my heart, but hear this, and see if it makes any sense to you:

  I have learned

  To look on nature, not as in the hour

  Of thoughtless youth; but hearing often-times

  The still, sad music of humanity,

  Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power

  To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

  A presence which disturbs me with the joy

  Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

  Of something far more deeply interfused,

  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

  And the round ocean and the living air,

  And in the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

  There was a pause, and then Eve said, ‘It’s a shame we missed the sunset.’

  ‘It’s okay. The dark is okay,’ said Josiah.

  ‘Do you think the music of humanity is sad?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Do you think you’ve ever known the sublime, just for a moment or two?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Josiah, ‘I have.’

  It was nine at night and the two were cosily ensconced in their camper van, up to their necks in blanket after blanket, and quiet as dormice, at least for an hour.

  Suddenly Eve said, ‘Tell me about Thomas Marius.’

  Josiah said nothing.

  ‘The man who lent you, or perhaps even gave you, those fine books. I noticed his name on one or two of the flyleaves. He won a fifth form prize, I noticed. The Pilgrim’s Progress. Who is he, Josiah?’

  And when Josiah still didn’t answer her, she said, ‘Did he take you to Florence? The tag’s still on your holdall.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Is he a classicist? I’m sure I know his name.’

  ‘He taught me Latin,’ said Josiah.

  ‘I love him already,’ said his mother. ‘Will you introduce him to me?’

  It was only in the middle of the night when, sleepless and shivering, his mother watching him, he found his way to an answer for her. He kept Thomas’ letter bound up in a pair of socks, which he retrieved from his bag and handed to his mother with a torch.

  ‘You can read this, if you like,’ he said.

  She took it. The paper was small, thin and cheap; the address was Bedford Prison. It was dated November 21st 1999.

  Dearest Josiah, (she read)

  I shall never as long as I live forgive myself for what I have done to you. The month you gave me of your young life was inconceivably precious to me, but moments are moments, they can never be caught again, and I shall never be who I was and you shall never be who you were.

  I think of you constantly, dear Josiah. I suddenly realized last week that you’ll be in the sixth form now and I don’t even know what A-Levels you’re taking, nor how you did in your exams in the summer. I so want to know how you’re getting on, but don’t write if you don’t feel like it. In fact, you mustn’t write, and nor must I.

  We shall probably never see each other again, and I’m convincing myself that it’s better that way. I only pray that ultimately, when you’re a man, you will look back on our time together with understanding, if not forgiveness.

  With love, Thomas

  Eve put down the letter.

  ‘Did he hurt you?’ she asked her son.

  Josiah shook his head. ‘He loved me.’

  ‘Then you and I have a mission,’ said Eve.

  At 3 p.m. on Friday 2nd March, Elspeth was sitting in her office smo
king, waiting for Josiah. At 3.05 p.m. she balanced a piece of paper over her coffee cup and thrust the stub down into the middle of it, and watched, mesmerized, while the burning edge became a glowing ribbon.

  Josiah had never been late before. Even now she looked towards her closed door and felt Josiah on this side of it, his lankiness, his stillness, his power. And then she remembered, she had lost him, and she folded her arms on her desk and lay her head on top of them, as though the softness of her jumper could provide some comfort to her.

  Her reverie was broken at 3.15. ‘I’ve got Josiah Nelson on the phone for you,’ said the receptionist.

  ‘What, is he here?’

  ‘He’s on the phone. I’m putting the call through.’

  Elspeth feigned lightness. ‘Josiah, why aren’t you here? I’ve been expecting you, you naughty boy.’

  ‘Elspeth, I need you to help me,’ said Josiah. ‘I want you to find something out for me. I’m going to ring you back in fifteen minutes, is that all right?’

  ‘Where are you speaking from?’

  ‘We’re in Yorkshire,’ said Josiah.

  ‘How are you getting on with your Mum?’

  ‘It’s great, really great, but we need your help.’

  That word ‘we’ was unbearable.

  ‘Fire away,’ said Elspeth, and she wished with all her heart she were talking to a firing squad and not her boy.

  ‘When is Thomas Marius going to be released? Do you think you could find that out? I mean, it’s normally one of you lot that would pick him up, isn’t that right?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Elspeth.

  ‘So when shall I ring you back?’

  ‘Hold on. I can find out right now.’

  Elspeth typed Thomas’s name into the client box of the Probation Service Portal and the details of his prison sentence and aftercare programme were conjured up before her.

  ‘He’s out in five days,’ she said. ‘Midday’.

  ‘We’re going to pick him up,’ said Josiah, happily. ‘And thank you, Elspeth, thank you for everything you’ve ever done for me.’

  It was, as farewells go, quite a tactful one, thought Elspeth, as her forehead slumped forward onto her desk.