Apocalypse Next Tuesday

by Safier, David; Parnfors, Hilary;

  I was thinking far too much about a carpenter who was a few teeth short of a fretsaw.

  I lay down in my bed again, turned off the light and decided to think about something other than Joshua… and his wonderful voice… and his great laugh… and his charming ways… and those eyes… those eyes… those… Damn!

  I tried to think about someone else. Any great man. George Clooney, for example. Good idea. The best actor in the universe as we know it… but his laugh was not as great as Joshua’s… and his eyes weren’t as wonderful either… those eyes…

  Oh my God! Not even George Clooney could stop me from thinking about Joshua.

  Now there was only one thing left to do – I had to think about Marc. After all, the remaining feelings I had had for him had caused me to ditch Sven at the altar. I thought about Marc… about his looks… his charm… that could not be compared to Joshua’s… because Joshua had a better aura… and he was a kinder person… and he had a better voice… and those eyes… those eyes… eyes… eyes… eyes…

  Oh no! Although Joshua was mad, not even Marc could get him out of my thoughts. My sister was right – if anyone could fall for the wrong men then it was me.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘Jesus?’ Kata had a minor laughing fit at the breakfast table, and I regretted telling her about my date at all. After a long moment she finally stopped laughing and suddenly looked at me, deadly serious: ‘Have you done a pregnancy test yet?’

  ‘I didn’t sleep with him!’ I answered indignantly.

  ‘But what about the Immaculate Conception?’ Kata said, and starting laughing hysterically again.

  I threw a bread roll at her. And a spoon. And an egg cup. She didn’t stop laughing until I picked up the marmalade.

  ‘It’s not funny,’ I grumbled.

  ‘No, of course not,’ Kata snorted, and burst out laughing once more.

  When she’d finally calmed down, she reached for a bread roll and winced. She had a stabbing headache again.

  ‘Well, it’s not because of the red wine this time,’ I said anxiously.

  ‘Yes it is,’ she insisted, a little bit too adamantly.

  ‘When do you have your next check-up?’ I asked.

  ‘In three weeks.’

  ‘Can’t you get them to see you earlier?’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘And what if it is?’

  ‘Then,’ Kata grinned, ‘your Jesus can do some miracle healing.’

  I threw another bread roll at her head.

  Then the doorbell rang. We looked out through the kitchen window. Joshua was standing there with his toolbox.

  ‘Speaking of the Messiah…’ Kata joked, slurping her coffee.

  ‘Am I going to have to listen to Jesus jokes for the rest of the day now?’ I demanded.

  ‘You’ll be able to read some of them in my next comic strips,’ Kata replied.

  The doorbell rang again.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open the door for the Son of God?’ she asked me.

  ‘No. I want to hit the urologist’s daughter,’ I smiled, rather more sweetly than sourly.

  ‘Jesus wouldn’t like all this anger one bit,’ Kata said disapprovingly. She grabbed the Malente Post. I only had another five day’s holiday. Dad wasn’t there to open the door; he’d gone to Hamburg Airport with Svetlana to collect that bloody child of hers. I stood up, sighed, went to the door, opened it – and was amazed at what I saw. Joshua was completely unscathed. No black eye. No scratches. No swollen lip.

  ‘Good morning Marie,’ he greeted me. He was visibly pleased to see me again. And his cheery smile made me go weak at the knees again.

  ‘I’m ready to screw with you now,’ he announced soberly.

  I heard Kata having a laughing fit in the kitchen.

  I closed the kitchen door. ‘I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,’ I told Joshua.

  ‘You don’t believe that I’m Jesus,’ he declared.

  Why couldn’t he just say, ‘This whole Jesus thing has been a pretty stupid joke and I only did it because I smoke too much dope.’ I could have lived with that. We could have built a future together based on that.

  ‘You don’t have faith,’ Joshua stated baldly.

  And you don’t have a straightjacket, I thought.

  ‘Listen, if you really are Jesus,’ I said irritably, ‘then go and jump off a garage.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Joshua was mildly surprised.

  ‘Or turn water into wine or walk over a lake, or turn the lake into wine to make people happy. Or make there be a sweetener that actually tastes good,’ I urged.

  ‘I think you have misunderstood why miracles occur,’ he answered sternly. Then he walked past me and up the stairs to the first floor.

  Who did he think he was, scolding me like that? I would love to have thrown the marmalade at his head. And then licked it off his body.

  Oh dear. My hormones really did run riot whenever I saw him.

  Should I go after him now? Or was it better to keep away from him, and do silly things like trying to get my life in gear again? Perhaps I should think about a career change. But I knew I couldn’t get a better job with my qualifications.

  I opted for the next-best thing – hanging out with a friend.

  Michi owned a video store, his love life was about as disastrous as mine, and before I met Sven, I’d spent more or less every evening with him. When he closed his video store at nine o’clock (really late for Malente), we liked to consume a balanced diet of takeaway pizzas, crisps and Diet Coke, while watching DVDs and providing our own running commentary, such as:

  ‘Leonardo looks a bit cold.’

  ‘I bet he wishes he hadn’t won that ticket now.’

  ‘There… now Kate has let go of him…’

  ‘… and he’s sinking down into the icy water.’

  ‘I think that the message of this film is that you sometimes just have to let go.’

  As I stood slurping a coffee at the counter in the video store, I told Michi, who was very knowledgeable about the Bible, all about Joshua. I kept a few minor details – such as the fact that I had feelings for this carpenter – to myself.

  Michi told me that those beautiful words that Joshua had said by the lake on the subject of ‘How to Stop Worrying and Start Living’ had already been spoken by Jesus in the Bible. I also found out that Jehoshua was the Hebrew version of the Latin word Jesus, and that Joshua was the modern Anglo-Saxon version of the name.

  ‘Your carpenter is a pretty well-informed nutter,’ Michi said admiringly.

  ‘So he’s a professional nutter,’ I noted.

  ‘Yes, and professionals are always impressive.’

  I sighed, and Michi looked at me disapproving. ‘Marie! You don’t have feelings for this guy, do you?’

  ‘No, no,’ I replied, staring at the cover of a DVD.

  ‘Since when do you like porn films?’ asked Michi.

  I immediately threw the cover on the floor, trying not to think about what kind of men had held it after whatever they did with it.

  ‘You really are keen on the carpenter,’ Michi declared.

  ‘Am I that easy to read?’

  ‘Do you want me to tell you the truth?’

  ‘No, lie.’

  ‘You’re not easy to read at all,’ Michi began. ‘Far from it, you are a mysterious woman, whose thoughts are as difficult to read as those of Mata Hari. No, Mata Hari is like Jane Bennett in comparison to you!’

  ‘Liar,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be easy to read.’

  ‘There are worse things,’ Michi tried to comfort me. ‘Like being alone in the world.’

  ‘Well, I am!’ I wailed.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Michi retorted, giving me a hug.

  He really was like a brother to me (even though Kata always claimed that if this were true, it would have been an incestuous relationship).

  ‘If you feel anything for this Joshua, you need to find out whether he is psychologically
disturbed or whether he’s just pretending to be for some reason.’

  ‘How am I supposed to do that?’ I asked. ‘Steal his medical records?’

  Michi grinned. ‘Well, either that or ask the Reverend Gabriel. He knows him, doesn’t he?’

  ‘You’re right. Although I’d rather go after the medical records,’ I sighed.

  I bumped into my mother in front of the vicarage. She was whistling away cheerily as she came out. She looked very pleased and I realised that both my mother and father currently had better sex lives than I did. This was a fact that could easily have pushed a woman into her mid-thirties with weaker nerves than mine in a depression. Mum smiled at me. ‘How are you, Marie?’

  ‘I’ve been better,’ I replied, wondering whether or not I should question her about her relationship with Gabriel. But then we’d just end up arguing again, as we did every time I asked her about her love life. My God, why couldn’t my parents just do what all other married couples did at their age – sit down on the sofa together and be bored?

  ‘You’re probably wondering what I was doing at Gabriel’s. And you have a right to know.’

  I didn’t know whether I wanted to claim this right. But the prospect of having Svetlana as a stepmother and maybe even Gabriel as a stepfather led me to ask: ‘OK. Why were you at Gabriel’s?’

  My mother broke into song: ‘Girls just wanna have fun.’

  ‘The last time you were a girl it was in the last millennium,’ I snapped.

  ‘Right back at you,’ she quipped.

  ‘This is just too much right now,’ I muttered, trying to get past her. But Mum stood in front of me.

  ‘If you need help…’ she began.

  ‘I’ll be very unlikely to come and lie on your couch,’ I interrupted.

  ‘Well, I am responsible for all your problems, because I got divorced,’ she answered tersely. I nodded..

  ‘You know, Marie, at some point you reach the age when you have to stop blaming your parents for everything. You have to take responsibility for your own life.’

  ‘And when exactly do you reach that age?’ I asked sharply.

  ‘In your early twenties,’ she grinned. And as she left, she added, ‘But if you decide that you do need some psychological help, then I can put you in touch with a great therapist.’

  I watched her go. Her haughtiness made me so angry I felt like getting in touch with a great hitman.

  As I stepped into Gabriel’s office I looked at the painting of the Last Supper again, and saw that Jesus did indeed look like Joshua, even more so than a Bee Gee. That was actually quite creepy. Gabriel was busy clearing his calendar for the coming week for some reason. Without looking up he asked, ‘So, planning another wedding?’ Thirty years of laughter-free sermons, and Gabriel had still not understood that he had no sense of humour worth speaking of.

  ‘I… I want to ask you something. About Joshua.’

  Gabriel looked up at me sternly, but I wanted to know, so I bravely stammered on: ‘He… says that he’s Jesus. Is… is he mad?’

  Gabriel answered me with a stern question: ‘What do you want from him?’

  Thank God I was sober and didn’t answer ‘screwing’.

  ‘Is he mad?’ I repeated instead.

  ‘No, he’s not.’

  ‘So why did he lie?’ I demanded.

  Gabriel did not delve into this any further. He just said, ‘Marie, Joshua will never reciprocate your feelings.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, without noticing that I was admitting to having feelings for Joshua.

  ‘Trust me, this man is not going to fall in love with a woman,’ Gabriel explained emphatically.

  And I thought, ‘My God. Joshua is gay after all.’

  By the time I got home my head was buzzing. But Joshua had told me about another woman. Could he really be gay? But on the other hand, Palestinian carpenters probably had a hard time coming out, much like football players. Perhaps people there preferred to tell the women they weren’t interested in that they were Jesus, rather than having to explain themselves.

  Kata wasn’t at home, so I couldn’t talk to her about my suspicions. Instead I climbed up to the attic where Joshua was. He was busy sawing a new wooden beam and was singing another one of his psalms. When he saw me, he stopped singing and a gentler expression came over his face. His anger must have been short-lived. Right away, I began with my ‘Inconspicuous Questioning’ mission.

  ‘Joshua… did you have to sing your psalms alone at home as well?’

  Joshua was surprised at my question. ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘So whom did you sing them with then?’

  ‘I had friends.’

  ‘Men?’

  ‘Yes, men.’

  So he was gay, I thought.

  ‘So were there people among them whom you loved?’ I was really going for it now.

  ‘I loved them all.’

  All of them? I was aghast. ‘How many men were there?’

  ‘Twelve,’ Joshua answered.

  Good grief! ‘Not all of them at the same time?’ I giggled nervously.

  ‘Oh yes, of course!’

  Oh my God!

  ‘They were all very normal people. Fishermen, a tax collector…’

  One of his lovers was a tax collector? Well, the world is a colourful place. I gulped and played my final trump card: ‘But… what about Maria?’

  Joshua noticed my confusion and asked: ‘You think that these men and I shared a physical love for one another?’

  ‘No, no, no, no…’ I sputtered. But I just couldn’t lie to this man. ‘No, no, no… yes,’ I admittedly sheepishly.

  Joshua laughed out loud. The whole attic vibrated. But this time I didn’t think his laugh was quite so wonderful.

  Then we suddenly heard a child screaming loudly. Joshua stopped laughing and we listened.

  ‘We need to put her on the floor,’ Svetlana was saying on the stairs. She sounded very worried. Joshua and I rushed downstairs and saw her pinning down her eight-year-old daughter on the floor with my father’s help. This fragile blonde little girl was having an epileptic fit. She was twitching uncontrollably and frothing at the mouth.

  ‘Is Lilliana in pain?’ my father asked anxiously.

  ‘She wasn’t screaming because of the pain. It was because she was frantically sucking in air,’ Svetlana explained, trying to remain as calm as she possibly could. ‘A fit like this generally lasts two minutes,’ she added.

  My father nodded and held the child so that she would not hit anything and injure herself. Joshua approached them and bent down over the twitching child.

  ‘What do you want?’ Svetlana asked him aggressively. You could tell that this mother would enter a Kung Fu tournament for her child. And she’d probably win, too.

  Joshua did not answer. Instead he placed his hand on the girl. She immediately stopped twitching. Then she opened her eyes and smiled as though nothing had happened.

  ‘From this very hour the girl is cured,’ Joshua declared.

  Svetlana and my father stared at the child in amazement.

  Chapter Fifteen

  This was definitely a ‘holy moly’ moment. Dad, Svetlana and I were completely perplexed, but the girl was not unnerved at all. She wiped the foam from her mouth with her sleeve, walked towards Joshua and smiled. She said something to him in Belarusian. (If such a language even existed. There is no such thing as Belgian after all, so on second thoughts it was probably Russian.) Joshua answered her in that same guttural language. Then they chatted until Joshua started laughing and went back up stairs.

  I turned to Svetlana and asked her (very nicely with no nasty undertone) what they had been talking about.

  ‘First Lilliana asked what had happened to her,’ Svetlana explained. She was also far too confused to think about making snide remarks. ‘Then that man said that God had healed her, and then Lilliana asked whether God could do everything, and the man confirmed that God really could do everything. Then Lilliana
asked God for a PlayStation Portable. And for me to find a man who was much younger.’

  Dad looked a little offended. At this moment in time it was hard to imagine that he could ever be fond of this little girl.

  ‘And what did Joshua say to her?’ I asked excitedly.

  ‘He laughed and explained that Lilliana still had a lot to learn about God.’

  I asked her whether she’d ever witnessed such a speedy recovery after one of her daughter’s fits and she answered that she’d never seen anything like it. And by ‘never’ she meant ‘never in the known history of medical research on epilepsy’. It was basically totally uncharacteristic for this disease.

  I didn’t want to know any more. I rushed after Joshua and caught up with him in my room, as he was about to climb up into the attic. I asked him, ‘You… you can speak Russian?’

  It might have been more pertinent to ask him if whether he could perform miracles. But as I wasn’t sure about what I’d just witnessed, I decided not to. I was also far too scared of what he might answer.

  ‘That was Belarusian,’ Joshua corrected me.

  ‘Who cares?’ I barked at him. ‘Just answer my goddamn question!’

  ‘I can speak all the languages of the world.’

  Of course he was unable to answer a question without seeming even madder.

  ‘Prove it,’ I blurted out.

  ‘If you wish,’ he smiled and then began a little address that started with ‘Have faith in God’ and then continued in various different languages. I didn’t know all of them. Some sounded like English, Spanish or whatever it was those Lebanese waiters babbled at the pizza place just around the corner. One made him sound like he had laryngitis – that was probably Dutch.

  If this was some kind of a trick, it was a pretty good one. After this short speech I certainly no longer dared to ask Joshua about the miracle healing. I was even more afraid of what he might answer.

  ‘So would you like to work with me now?’ he offered. He really did want to spend the day screwing in the attic.

  ‘I… I am not a great help.’ I made my excuses and left. This whole thing was just too creepy.