“Snake’s got one,” said Frenchie, nodding the remark at Milly. “Her boyfriend.”
“Snake?” said Angela.
“Not my boyfriend,” Milly objected. “Honestly. Stand within six feet of someone at the barbeque and folks have you married with children.”
Frenchie laughed. Albert wanted more information. “Can I use it?”
“You want to use Snake’s bike?” said Milly.
“Motorcycle?”
“Well, yes. That’s what some people call them. Bikes. You ride?”
“Yes,” said Albert without hesitation, adding the magic words: “I’ll pay.” The phrase recalled to Albert from the dim memories of childhood, the story of an Arab boy—whose name he couldn’t recollect—who could, with a word—which he also couldn’t remember—open a mountain cave full of wonders. Whatever the word or phrase might have been, recent experience had taught him that the modern equivalent was “I’ll pay.”
“Oh, well,” said Milly, “I think . . . won’t hurt to ask. I’ll ring him up. Meantime, you can go have a look. He keeps it in the shed back of unit seven.”
Jeremy Ash was stunned and, in that condition, having difficulty assembling something sensible from the suggestion of Albert on a motorcycle. Not so Angela for who, along with other residents of Tryon, the sight of Albert tootling through town astride a mechanized cloud of blue smoke—in which the angels of Ezekial's vision would have felt perfectly at home—had been a common one.
“You’ll kill yourself,” said Jeremy Ash.
Angela disagreed. “He’ll be fine, Jeremy. Don’t be such an old biddy.”
However, some minutes later when she opened the shed door with the key that Milly had given her, and daylight fell on the subject vehicle, she had second thoughts. So did Albert. They had both envisioned something much more moped-ish. The machine before them, leaning insouciantly on its kickstand with an attitude that said, “I dare you,” would have consumed Agnes at a bite.
“It’s big,” said Angela.
For Albert, it was love at first sight. He climbed on, righted the machine between his legs, sat in the saddle, and gripped the controls. The sensation that surged through him was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. Even with the engine off, he felt its latent energy pulse in his blood. He thought of Professor Runyan, in Tryon, who had been willing to part with Agnes because he’d bought a bike like this that he called Behemoth.
Though the machine was made of many components, each inert and impotent on its own—like those in a piano—the parts combined in perfect unity to create a mechanical masterpiece, a symphony in leather, steel, and chrome.
As with music, all he needed to get started was a key—and someone to show him how to turn it on.
These arrived in the form of a heavily tattooed, bald-headed individual with a face that had seen many years of hard weather, who might have been Goliath’s big brother. He approached the bike and ran his craggy fingers lovingly along the handlebar.
“She sits good, don’t she?”
Angela was trying to expunge from her mind the images that were trying to project themselves of Milly and this behemoth engaged in any sort of romantic activity. “You must be Snake?”
He flexed his right arm at her, causing an undulation in the tattoo—that of a snake—that extended from his wrist to his shoulder. “What give me away?”
She made introductions, at the end of which Snake turned to Albert. “So, you ride, ’ey?”
“Yes.”
“Milly says you’d like to rent ’er.”
A distinction occurred to Albert that, he felt, was an important one. “This,” he said, patting the controls. He didn’t want to rent Milly.
“What say $20 a day?”
“Fine,” said Albert, who would have said the same to ten thousand.
“And petrol?”
“Yes.”
“Fair go. Let’s get you on your way.”
What followed was a quick lesson in which controls did what, how to use the clutch and handgrip in concert to shift gears—which Albert conflated with the pedals and keys of a piano—and how to use the front and rear brakes, hand and foot. For some reason these things all came to Albert—to whom nothing but music, geography, and sounds came naturally—naturally. His experience with Agnes hadn’t been wasted.
Then Snake turned the key.
Suddenly, Albert was Thor astride a thunderbolt—at least that is the metaphor he would have drawn had he been aware of Norse gods and their tendency to bombast. When he twisted the throttle, the engine responded with a growl that gripped the little shed with its own, highly localized earthquake, knocking a can of assorted screws off the shelf.
The addition of Snake to the confines of a shed already choked with testosterone, had made it uninhabitable for Angela. She stepped outside and, establishing a safe distance, watched its transformation into a quaking backyard Vesuvius.
“Now, let the clutch go, real easy,” said Snake.
The clutch didn’t want to be released easioy. It sprang open in Albert’s fingers, and the bike leapt forward two feet and, it seemed, about the same distance straight up—nearly jerking him off the seat—and, just as quickly, stalled. His bottom slid back into place.
“That’s okay,” said Snake. “She’s liable to get away. You just need to show ’er who’s boss.”
Ten minutes later, Albert had shown Medusa—which Snake had named the bike and to which a multi-colored decal of a woman with reptiles sprouting from her head testified—who was boss. In the process, he had fallen twice, run into one of the garage doors hard, ripping it from its hinges, and reduced a concrete birdbath to rubble but, finally, he was on the road, headed north, and Medusa had settled to a warm contented purr between his thighs. The knowledge that she was ready, with a simple twist of the throttle, to leap at his command, filled him with sensations he’d never known—power and control.
“Turn off at the Te One road,” Snake had directed. “The church is no more than a kilometer straight ahead on the left. Pastor’s name is Jim Simon. He rides.”
The name stuttered through the miasma of Albert’s recent memory. It was the name of the vicar he’d met recently in England. His impulse was to wonder if James Simon was a designation of some kind that all vicars in the Church of England shared. If not, the coincidence that, in the space of two years, his only two acquaintances with official clergy of the C of E should share the same name was, well, odd.
Not long after leaving the inn, Albert removed his glasses, which, far from clarifying things, had become little more than fog collectors. This left him squinting at the road through the thick veils of mist that pawed the coast to his left; droplets borne from distant lands condensed on his thick eyebrows and trickled into his eyes.
Fortune was smiling on Albert—and the populace in general—in that he met no oncoming traffic, which was for the best since he’d forgotten to keep to the left. In fact, taking Frenchie’s laissez-faire approach to the rules of the road as the island norm, he was inclined to interpret them generously.
The Te One road sign materialized from the mist a short distance ahead on his right, and reminded him where he was going, which nudged the ribs of a question: why was he going there?
He stopped, buttressing Medusa with his legs, and turned the engine off. The fog, as if it had been waiting for him to come to a standstill, embraced him, gently licking his cheeks and the nape of his neck, and settling thickly on the hairs of his arms.
He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, drawing his surroundings deep into himself: the salt, the surf, the sea, the tinge of damp vegetation, the mustiness contributed to the mix by exposed clumps of moist earth. He got off the bike, pulled it up on the kickstand, and walked across the narrow road toward the cliff top where, on a limestone outcropping, he sat.
Why did he want to go to church? Why had that been his response to his confusion, to the horrors exposing themselves all around him? His mother was not a church person
, even though she'd insisted on weekly visits to the building of that name, with he and Abigail Grace in train. But did one thing follow the other? Must he not be a church person just because he hadn’t been raised to be?
But, even so, why was his impulse to find a church? What did he hope to find there? He’d been in churches, of course. But he’d never seen answers written on the walls.
Perhaps he would have, had he been looking for them.
“If anyone tells me there’s no such thing as miracles,” said a voice behind him, “I’ll point to this moment to prove them wrong.”
Chapter Fourteen
Albert, whose currency was sound, knew to whom the voice belonged even before he turned. That didn’t lessen his incredulity upon seeing James Simon—the same James Simon he’d met in England—approaching him from across a narrow road, at an insignificant junction on an obscure island, at the outermost fringes of the inhabited earth—a smallish planet spinning amidst the embroidery of a modest spiral galaxy, a mote in eternity’s eye—with a beaming smile and an outstretched hand. He was too stunned to stand.
“It’s you,” he said.
“Never more so than at present,” said Simon, beaming even more broadly and seizing Albert’s hand that had, apparently of its own accord, drifted upward in greeting. “I had to slap myself when I got the call.”
Albert had heard of people getting the Call and, thereafter, abandoning themselves to lives of spiritual activity, or temporal inactivity. He wondered how the concept applied in the present situation. “Call?” His brain was trying to exercise authority over his legs, and make them stand, but his knees crossed their arms, stuck out their lower lips, and refused to obey.
“No, no. Stay. Stay!” said Simon. “I’ll join you, if you don’t mind my pulling up a rock.”
Albert sidled to make room. He took his glasses from his pocket, wiped them with the tail of his jacket, and put them on. It was still James Simon.
“It’s you,” he said again.
“And it’s you!” said Simon, throwing an arm around Albert’s shoulder and giving him a tug. “Either hell’s frozen over, or it’s a blue moon, or a month of Sundays. Whatever it is, here we are!”
“Here we are,” said Albert, though with less conviction. He righted himself.
“Could’ve knocked me over with a feather when Snake called and said to keep an eye out for you.”
The scales fell from Albert’s eyes. “That was the Call?”
“I bet I held the phone out and just stared at it for thirty seconds before I could say ‘what?’ I couldn’t believe you were here—on Chatham, of all places!” He tilted his head to accommodate the impossibility before him. “If I’d read it in a book, I wouldn’t believe it.”
Albert was having the same trouble, but he didn’t have a phone to stare at.
“Of course, he told me, well, frankly, what he told me about all that’s been happening was unbelievable. But here you are!”
“And so are you.”
“I’d been on a little retreat at a cottage up at Maunganui,” said the vicar. “Apart from nature, the world and I have been entirely unaware of one another for the last ten days. I hadn’t thought it would fall apart without me, but . . .” He smiled and laughed. “And look what I return to find, you, of all people, and on your way to see me! I mean, I’d have been less shocked to hear Queen Elizabeth was dropping by for a chat!”
Albert had chatted with the Queen, several times. She was a nice lady, but she liked weak tea with lots of milk. Albert preferred his strong, with no milk. Her preference seemed to carry the day. And when she talked, Albert had the feeling she was repeating things that someone else was, simultaneously, whispering in her ear. Still, a nice enough lady. Albert wondered if she had a Tuesday bra like Mrs. Bridges. Probably. She was a queen, after all. Who knew what proclamations were written on her underwear? Maybe whole books. Of course, the length of the book would depend on the size of the queen.
A silence settled upon the unbelieving duo during which, Albert conjectured, his companion was probably entertaining similar thoughts. It never occurred to him that the thoughts that occurred to him weren’t thoughts that occurred to everyone, and it didn’t occur to him now.
“Well, sometimes you just have to say, ‘there it is’,” said James Simon at last. “However unlikely. Impossible, even. What brings you here?”
The very question Albert was about to ask. However, he gave a short answer, which lasted about five minutes, a conversational marathon, for Albert. He ended with the same question.
“Well, you’re to blame for that, in a way,” said Simon, with a little puff of irony through his nose. “At least Angela is.”
“Angela?”
“Remember, back in England, she mentioned having a sister and brother-in-law in New Zealand?”
“Yes.”
“Not such a remarkable comment, in itself,” said the vicar, “but that very evening I happened to be leafing through the C of E Gazette—a newspaper for the professional clergy,” he clarified. “And there’s a page or two in the back about vacant postings around the world. Can’t help but take a peek. Human nature: no matter how content one might be in one’s position, there’s always the niggling suspicion that the grass might be greener on the far side of the fence, you know?” He smiled. Albert liked his smile, even if he couldn’t relate to anything he was saying.
“Anyway, I took a look, and what do you think I found?” He gestured widely. “St. Augustine! Here! On Chatham Island, New Zealand!” He emphasized the words New Zealand. “I don’t subscribe to coincidence. You might call it an occupational characteristic.
“So, however much I tried to stick the notion in the back of my mind, I couldn’t shake it. Was I being Called, with a capital ‘C’? Well, the longer the possibility marinated, the stronger it became.
“The result is before you,” he bowed from the chest up. “Your humble servant submitted his application and was selected by Providence—whose decision was made the easier by the fact that no one else applied—to serve the good people of this island for a period of three years, of which I am in my eighth month.”
They both stared westward into the fog for a minute or two, when Simon hushed the silence with a word. “Imagine.”
Albert couldn’t imagine, even though the evidence had reached out and embraced him. Then again, he’d slept with the ghost of a Spanish woman who had felt just as real, if not so warm; his imagination had proved unequal to reality.
You never know.
In any case, Albert decided it was best to live as if whatever reality was real at the time was reality. It made things easier.
He put his arm around Simon’s shoulder, as much to test his substance as to express any sentiment, and gave him a tentative squeeze. He intended to say, “Here we are,” but was shocked by an unfamiliar sensation—the result of spontaneously embracing a fellow human being—something he’d never done. His fingers, so long attuned to music, were sensitive to the symphony of life within James Simon—a music wrapped in warmth, and rhythm, and blood, and sinew and spirit —and telegraphed the little packet of wonder to Albert’s brain which said, “?!”
Albert withdrew his arm. “Here we are,” he said quietly, and slowly, haltingly, he related all that had happened during the vicar's retreat
For a long time they sat there, side-by-side in silence, staring into the fog and allowing whatever phantasmagoria formed there to entertain them. “Well,” said James Simon at last. “I guess we just have to accept the fact that the Lord has worked His mysterious way this wonder to perform. So, what can I do for you? Something to do with all this horror, no doubt? You think that’s what happened to Woolie-Woolie?”
Albert turned to James Simon and stared at him in a way that made the vicar want to repent for the sins of the world. For his part, Albert was trying to unbundle and prioritize the vicar’s words. What should he say about the Lord’s mysterious wonders? Which ones in particular? And which
horror? There were so many from which to choose. And which of them applied to Woolie-Woolie? In the end, the collection of words that bobbed to the surface was, “What can I do for you?”
That was the question. “I need to know why,” he said.
“Why?” said the vicar. “Why what? Why life? Why death? Why does a loving, merciful God allow such diabolical behavior and permit those who practice it to prosper? Why are we here? Why were we created? Is there life after death and, if so, where are we going and do we have any control over it?”
That was five “whys” an “is” a “where” and a “do”, but, overall, Albert felt that his companion had grasped the question. “Yes.”
“How long do you plan to be on the island?”
“I don’t know,” said Albert. “I have to go to the inquest tomorrow. After that . . . I don’t know.”
James Simon smiled. “I was being ironic,” he said. “That little nest of questions can take a while to answer. A lifetime, in fact.”
It was Albert’s turn to tilt his head, which he did and, still staring holes in the vicar’s soul, waited.
“I mean,” said Simon, “we’d have to have a lot of time to ourselves so we could sit down and take them on one at a time.”
Time had never held much interest for Albert. It was important to Huffy, who enjoyed talking about time management relative to things like concerts and television interviews, so in the firm belief that each should be left to exercise those abilities with which they were gifted, Albert left that aspect of his life to the one who expressed an interest in it: in the same way Mrs. Bridges supervised his finances, and Mrs. Gibson his housekeeping and Jeremy Ash and Angela, everything else. As far as he was concerned, he had all the time in the world. As for sitting, he couldn’t see that they’d ever be sitting to a greater degree than they were at that moment.
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