Such Men Are Dangerous

by Stephen Benatar

  Naturally he told very little of this to Jimmy in the pub and what he did tell was in fact somewhat romanticized. Jimmy returned to the table with their second pints and said after a moment:

  “I was thinking just now. It may seem daft but—all that—it’s a bit of a success story.”

  Josh grinned self-deprecatingly.

  “I suppose it could be on its way to becoming one. Yes! Why not?”

  “What would you say, then, is the worst thing about being out of work? Apart from not having enough dough?”

  Since, with alarming suddenness, a tremendous tiredness was now bearing down on him, complete with growing traces of nausea, he would have liked to say: “Not having enough hope either, not being able to break away, see even a signpost to an exit route.” In any case, it was all part and parcel of the same thing. He would have liked to say: “Once you’re in the system, mate, you’re scared shitless that they’ve got you there for life. And then what is there?”

  But instead, despite the exhaustion, he laughed and did his best to enjoy this fairly rare kind of moment, by pursuing the theme of his success story.

  “Not being able to afford the vitamins to keep you young!” he said.

  There was supposedly something on the market now—well, if you were gullible—that could take ten or even twenty years off your appearance. Something indeed which he’d scarcely bothered to take note of. Superoxide Dismutase.

  “Vitamins?” his companion answered, pat on cue. “I wouldn’t have thought that you were in need of any of those!”

  17

  On his way home—it wasn’t really on his way home, merely another delaying tactic—he went to have a look at Tiffany’s (‘The Brightest Nitespot in Town!’) or more particularly at the car park behind it. In the main this was just a stony, scruffy, potholed area, with patches of coarse grass, crushed coke cans, armchairs excreting their stuffing, a pink plastic bath jaggedly disfigured, a dead, limply-leaved candelabra of a tree branch. A notice on the back of the building read, “Mecca Ltd. Private Property. All persons using or entering do so at their own risk.” (Angels included?) Another said, “Parking Fee 10p inc. VAT.” Who might collect the parking fee, however, remained a mystery: was it the spectral figure of a once-splendid commissionaire, from the days when this was a plushly-carpeted cinema having its own orchestra? “Cars parked at owners’ own risk,” Josh was further informed; there was certainly no shortage of good literature. “No responsibility will be accepted by the company.”

  Mecca Ltd appeared remarkably anxious to dissociate itself from whatever went on in its car park. Wise fellows clearly—these modern lords of the dance! Mecca. Birthplace of Mohammed, chief holy city of Islam, economy dependent upon pilgrims. Josh wandered restlessly across the holy ground, kicking aside an empty whisky bottle, watching it roll, savouring almost savagely its comic incongruity.

  A car stopped on Parkinson Avenue. Simon got out.

  “Good morning, vicar.” That last word was clearly parodied. “Tourists already converging on this hallowed spot? Let’s call it Angel Pavement. Or in the guidebooks will it soon acquire a different name? Something more like—let me see now—well, how about Exploitation Corner?”

  “I think you had it right the first time.” Simon was looking at him, curiously. “Has something happened to you since yesterday?”

  But Josh ignored this. “Come to look for sacred relics?”

  “Not really. Just to glance around.”

  “To work out the best location for the shrine? How about over there, by the armchairs? If they’re weary, people will be glad of those.”

  “Josh, I’m not sure why you’re doing it but stop trying to bait me. I’ve come here to feel close to where a messenger of God is known lately to have stood. I’d like to spend a little time in prayer.”

  “Say one for me while you’re about it.”

  “Willingly.”

  “I wasn’t being that serious.”

  “In fact, I already do pray for you. For you and Dawn and the family. I mean, not only since last Wednesday.”

  “Oh, that’s most terribly good of you, most terribly good. Not to mention most terribly, terribly patronizing. But I don’t like to think of anyone wasting his time on my account. Not even somebody who gets paid to do it.”

  Simon bit his lip. “I’m sorry if I sounded patronizing. An irritating occupational hazard. I’ve got no call to be.”

  “Cant. I bet you believe you’re better than I am. You’d never admit it but deep down—”

  “I only believe I’m luckier than you are. More blest.”

  “There but for the grace of God and all that rubbish?”

  “It’s a grace available to everyone.”

  “Sweet Jesus Christ! And you don’t call that patronizing?”

  “Look,” said Simon. “Let’s go and have a drink.”

  “‘Turning the Other Cheek…’ Oh, I can see it in inverted commas. Paragraph four-hundred-and-fifty-nine. How to be the Perfect Clergyman. But no thank you. I only drink with my friends.” He remembered Holden Caulfield, in The Catcher in the Rye, buying a trayful of his favourite food, then dumping it in a bin at the end of the cafeteria counter.

  Simon gave no sign of finding the remark childish. Instead, he gave a wry smile.

  “Please don’t think I’m referring to you, Josh, but I can’t help feeling it might have to come a lot earlier than paragraph four-hundred-and-fifty-nine. In case you should ever contemplate drawing up some sort of manual.”

  Josh didn’t smile. Wryly or otherwise.

  “In fact I’m glad to have this opportunity for a chat with you,” Simon said. “Apart from all else, I wanted to add a little rider to something I told you on the staircase. (Where I actually believed we might be all set to become friends!) I implied I didn’t want people thinking of me as a knight on a white charger. That’s not exactly true.”

  “The perfect introspective clergyman.”

  “I feel one can overdo the introspection bit but I can’t go round implying I don’t wish people to think well of me. Or that I don’t care much either way, so long as I know what I’m doing is right. One of my biggest faults, in fact, is that I do care.”

  “You’re worried about the image of the Church? Oh, but that’s not a fault, vicar. You haven’t stained your precious little soul, I promise you. Look, here’s another gold star.”

  Simon smiled again and persevered. “You see, I have too much ambition.”

  “Oh. You want to be Pope?”

  “Not immediately. But I do want to succeed; I mean, in a worldly sense. I sometimes think I’m more concerned with making a name for myself than with the actual quality of my work. So I’m not such a perfect anything that I can afford to feel superior to anybody. I only wish I were.”

  “But you pray about it, of course?”

  “Of course.”

  “Scunthorpe, it seems to me, remains a tidy step away from Rome. Or even Canterbury.”

  “‘Step’, however, is the right word. I’ve been here three years. In another three years I’ll probably be wondering what the next ‘step’ ought to be.”

  “Oh, but don’t make out you aren’t already, please. It will demand a further little chat.”

  “Wondering seriously, I mean. Apart from daydreams.”

  “This sounds like True Confessions.”

  Yes, perhaps it did. Simon didn’t normally indulge in breast-baring so why on earth should he be doing so now?

  “Wouldn’t you like to come and have that drink?”

  “No,” answered Josh. I can’t be won over that easily, he thought. I’m afraid your charming ways won’t work on me. Afterwards he almost wished he’d said it.

  But drinks were certainly flowing in abundance today. He’d have to see if this were mentioned in his horoscope.

  “Well, at any rate, how about our shaking hands to show there’s no ill feeling?”

  Josh, however, merely turned on his heel and said, “I t
hought you came here to pray, not just to hand out bullshit or go boozing.” Then he walked off.

  It was incredible to think that about an hour before, following his workout, he’d been feeling good. It was incredible to think that only the previous evening he’d said, “You’ve got yourselves the perfect champion,” and ‘perfect’ had neither been sarcastic nor had it seemed exaggerated.

  Now he thought, viciously, “By their fruits shall ye know them,” meaning the effect that so-called righteous people had upon those chance unfortunates who happened to cross their path during their long bullshitting day. At the bottom of Parkinson Avenue he again remembered Holden Caulfield.

  But Holden Caulfield had been a boy of sixteen, not a man of forty-six. The sudden recollection of this was startling and did nothing whatever to help.

  Another thing that did nothing much to help, yet which, despite his mood, he discovered that he couldn’t simply sneer at, was the spectacle of two men on a motorbike roaring along Frodingham Road. The one behind had his arms around the driver’s waist—well, naturally—but while Josh was waiting to cross he saw this fellow lay his cheek against the back of the other’s leather jacket. He straightened up again after several seconds but the quality of pure affection contained in that trusting and spontaneous gesture was unmistakable. Josh found himself gazing down the road long after the machine had gone.

  Still he didn’t go home. He strode past the turnoff to the flats and on towards the library. There he said to an assistant, “What have you got on miracles?” She walked him across to the religious section. “I mean,” he amended, “on alleged miracles.” He gave a twisted smile.

  He spent over an hour there, but more because he was reluctant to heave himself out of the low chair than because anything he read proved so engrossing, or, after a while, even mildly interesting. His brain felt stale, sick, unable to absorb. If he could have pressed some button and thereby been wafted, painlessly, into an eternal sleep, he was nearly sure he would have done so.

  Instead, he finally returned to the flat. Lunch was over, the boys were watching sport, Dawn had gone shopping. “Your dinner’s in the oven, Dad. Mum says she hopes it won’t be dried up.”

  “Your mother’s probably an optimist,” he answered grimly, suddenly realizing how hungry he felt. “In fact, I know she is.”

  He paused in the sitting-room doorway.

  “How can you just sit and gawp at wrestling, Billy, when on Wednesday you saw an angel and on Friday your spots fell off?”

  William shrugged.

  “Life has to go on, Dad.”

  “My God, how old are you? Already to have learned the whole tragedy of existence!”

  The meal was sausages, mashed potato, carrots and broccoli, with onion sauce as well as gravy. It wasn’t particularly dried up; it both looked okay and it smelt good. Careful to wear an oven glove on one hand but with the warmth of a kind of spontaneous premeditation swiftly spreading up his trunk he passed the plate into the other hand; made himself endure the pain; scraped the food into the pedal bin. Some of it spattered onto his sneakers, cleaned thoroughly the night before. An embossed brown ring was left around the edge of the white porcelain. He worked at it with the side of a fork. In the pedal bin the meal continued to steam. He made no attempt to cover it over, other than with the congealing but still fluid contents of his bowl of banana custard, for it mattered that Dawn should find it there.

  A little later, however, he retrieved and ate one of the sausages, and then the other two. He did it further to punish himself, further to punish Dawn too, in the event of his becoming ill. But unexpectedly this made him feel better: sufficiently so to cause him to eat an apple and some cheese, and even wash the apple.

  Before Dawn returned from her shopping he had emptied and cleaned the pedal bin.

  He had also fetched his dog-eared manuscript pad and composed another exercise for his projected textbook.

  Soon there were smears on it from the antiseptic cream he’d rubbed onto his thumb and index and middle fingers; under the cream, his skin had grown all red and blistered.

  However, he’d unexpectedly managed a tight smile. Near the foot of his current page he wrote How to be the Perfect Clergyman, paragraph 459, and thickly ringed it round, then bordered it with crenellations. He went on to draw a figure on horseback. But for all his pretensions to artistic flair and frustrated hopes of a youthful course of study in Paris, no one would have recognized it, quite, for what it was meant to be. ‘Behold a white horse,’ he scribbled underneath.

  18

  On their last night at Sea View Simon asked her to marry him and she said yes. They had known each other for less than a week but neither felt nervous about having done something foolish.

  Certainly nobody could have claimed they’d been carried away by a romantic setting: moonlight on the sea, the distant strains of a lilting waltz from the bandstand, a gently caressing breeze laden with the scent of summer roses. It was raining; not just a soft refreshing shower into which you could stride out laughingly with heads held back and Pakamac-ed arms securely linked—stopping occasionally to kiss the drops off one another’s face. The rain was hurling itself down as if with an intent to penetrate and scar and shatter: rebounding off the pavements, forming fiercely bubbling rivulets along the sides of the promenade, turning the sea into a raging entity that would have been fascinating to watch; except that the sky had grown so dark that even from the windows across the road almost nothing of it could be seen.

  In the lounge of Sea View there was of course no other topic; it looked as though everyone had congregated with the sole purpose of airing their views on such freak climactic conditions, those residents who normally retired to their bedrooms after dinner obviously needing further contact with their fellow beings: possibly worried that when the rowing boats arrived (or else the marshalling two-by-two began) they might not hear the summons from the upper floors.

  “Oh, who remembers that dreadful Lynmouth flood, in 1953?”

  Well, everybody did, apart from Simon and Ginny and a very bored brother and sister of about twelve; but there was much animated discussion as to whether the year was right—in the middle of which, Mrs Bates tried to steal unconcernedly across the room with a supposedly reassuring array of nods and smiles and a most urgently whispered warning to deliver.

  “I don’t wish to start a panic, dears, but should you two really be sitting in front of the window like that? Supposing that the glass were suddenly to cave in under all this stress?”

  She turned fleetingly, for the benefit of everybody else, to give what she meant to be a jaunty little whistle but although her lips were nobly puckered her whistle proved less jaunty than inaudible.

  “The glass cave in?” repeated Simon, also in a whisper, after he’d stood up. “Oh, I don’t think that’s very likely, Mrs Bates.”

  Their whispers were only whispers in a relative sense but even so he had to repeat what he had said; twice, and rather loudly.

  “Well, I don’t know, dear. I don’t know.”

  “Then perhaps we had better move. Thank you for telling us about it.”

  When they were resettled and Mrs Bates had again nodded at them several times, wisely and approvingly, and they had nodded back with many smiles of gratitude, Ginny observed drily:

  “For your own sake, Simon, it’s probably for the best you’re leaving here tomorrow. I think I detect a sympathetic softening of the brain.”

  “Well, what would you have had us do?”

  “You’re very good with old people, aren’t you?”

  “It’s just that I like…” Suddenly he stopped. “I was about to make a very stupid comment. Some old people in fact, the same as children and people of every other age, are exceedingly difficult to like and only a halfwit could do it.”

  “Or a saint.”

  “No. A saint would love them but he, too, would be a halfwit if he liked them.”

  “Can’t you have a saint, then, who’s a
halfwit?”

  “I’m not sure. You might have to check with theologians. It could be just a natural state of innocence involving no effort.”

  “You mean, like a pussycat?”

  “You took the words out of my mouth. You’re like a pussycat!”

  “Oh, good, if that lets me off the hook about trying to be a saint. Do you realize that no one’s put the television on?”

  “You feel you could be missing all the action?”

  “No more than I do in this place when it’s actually switched on and going at full blast.”

  “Maybe you’d like to pop into the next room and watch our respected mums play bridge? If you’re looking for excitement.”

  “Believe it or not I’m honestly quite happy here with you.”

  “That’s good. Because I’m honestly quite happy here with you.”

  “And all the old folk.”

  “There’s a difference, I think. Subtle, indefinable, but there.”

  “Will you miss me a little tomorrow?” She was cross with herself for asking that. She tried to mitigate the offence. “Or have you plenty of nice almshouses back in Basingstoke?”

  “Innumerable,” he said. He took her hand, right there in front of Mrs Bates and Miss Retford and Major Blackburn et al. “I tried to count them once but I got helplessly distracted by all those dizzying geriatric charms waving to me from the windows. Oh, hell!” Bobby and Sandra had just thrown themselves lackadaisically onto the nearby couch where Ginny and he had recently been sitting. “We’d better lead them off and have another draughts session or snakes-and-ladders or ludo or something. What if the glass were suddenly to cave in?”