Sidney Chambers and The Persistence of Love

by James Runcie

  ‘But do you want me to give the boys down there a ring?’

  ‘That would be helpful; just in case I get into any trouble.’

  ‘Do you think Louis is a bit like you?’ Geordie asked.

  ‘Why do you say that? I do feel a kind of kinship with him; an understanding that he may want to do something unexpected.’

  ‘Well, he’s certainly done that.’

  ‘I know the Church of England is an institution, Geordie, but it was quite an act of rebellion to become a priest. I was supposed to be a doctor like my father.’

  ‘At least that’s one thing the world’s managed to avoid.’

  ‘You’re too kind.’

  ‘I’m sure you’d have been very good. But if you were as absent as you are from the Church, then God help your patients. At least as a priest you can do less damage.’

  Sidney drove down to London and on to Brighton in a recently acquired fourth-hand Rover from the early 1960s. It had over 50,000 miles on the clock and was, the salesman had promised, ‘the most sensible choice’ for his budget even though he had been quite tempted by a bright-red Lancia Flaminia coupé that had ‘needed a bit of work’. That would have been far more his kind of thing, but Hildegard had said that if he bought it she would be embarrassed to be seen with him. Who did he think he was?

  So now he drove a dull car in which he took little pleasure. It was the kind of vehicle that a sales executive who had missed out on promotion might drive, Sidney thought, unable to trade up to a newer model and on his way out. It was just that no one had yet had the heart to tell him.

  He wasn’t sure how long he was going to be in Brighton for, or even where he might stay if he had to, but flexibility of time and movement were crucial. He could always find a B&B, even if it didn’t confine itself to Sir Cecil Kendall’s definition of a heavenly safe lodging.

  There were far more people in Brighton than he had anticipated, both day-trippers and holidaymakers, and once he had parked his car he found the town to be louder, hotter and brighter than he had expected. He walked down Surrey Street and was assailed by gaggles of people toiling to the seafront, their voices drowned out by seagulls, their nostrils full of the familiar coastal smell of salt, petrol, fried fish and candyfloss. He turned into Buckingham Road (someone had scrawled EAT THE RICH on a house at the end) and then up into Victoria Road and Temple Gardens. The church of St Michael and All Angels was just visible. Sidney couldn’t picture his nephew at worship, but at least the priest might be able to help find him.

  The Brighton Voice was based in Victoria Road near the Open Café, an anarchist wholefood restaurant with small Formica-topped tables, mostly for two, offering tea, Coke and lemonade with a vegetarian menu of lentil soup and home-made bread, spinach omelettes, stuffed mushrooms, ratatouille and brown rice, nut loaf, apple tarts and chocolate-brownie specials.

  Advertisements in the window proposed ‘£50 Adventure Holidays to Morocco’ with a man called Eddie Brazil, a forthcoming Hawkwind concert and a touring production of David Hare’s Fanshen at Brighton Combination.

  Inside people were smoking, flirting, and reading NME, Catch-22 and The Anarchist Basis of Pacifism. The woman behind the counter had dyed blonde hair and a faraway look in her turquoise-shadowed eyes that Sidney mistook for disinterest but then realised was unhappiness. She was holding a swatter to keep the flies off yesterday’s fairy cakes.

  ‘Odd to see a vicar in here,’ she said.

  Sidney had thought it best to come in uniform. It lent an air of authority and people wouldn’t have to readjust when they found out later. ‘I hope it’s not unusual.’ (He didn’t bother to tell her that he was actually an archdeacon.)

  ‘“To be loved by anyone . . .” You’re probably more of a Tom Jones fan than the music we have in here.’

  ‘Jazz is more my thing.’

  ‘I thought we’d moved on from that.’

  ‘Is there any chance of a glass of lemonade?’

  Although all the doors and windows of the café were open to let in as much of the sea breeze as possible, the air was still languid with heat.

  ‘I had you down as a shandy man.’

  The woman poured out the lemonade from a large bottle. It looked a bit flat. A wasp now joined a second fly above the counter in a miniature aerial ballet. ‘These creatures drive me crazy. Do you think Jesus was the first anarchist?’

  ‘He might well have been.’

  ‘Where do you think it went wrong then, Vicar?’

  ‘I’m not sure it’s “gone wrong”.’

  ‘Probably when the early Church got too much money. That’ll be fifteen pence.’

  Sidney felt in his jacket for change. It would be good, he thought, to take it off, but he worried there were sweat stains on his shirt. ‘Here you are.’

  ‘When it was accepted. When it had authority. When it sold out. You lot should have stayed as monks. Then you wouldn’t have got into so much trouble. Did you ever consider that?’

  ‘I did, as a matter of fact. Do you think I could have some ice?’

  ‘We’ve just about run out. That’s all anyone wants. But then,’ the woman continued, adding an unasked-for slice of lemon as if that compensated for the lack of ice, ‘perhaps, you thought of all those vicarages you could live in. A nice house, two kids, a wife called Veronica who is good at baking and has a bright smile, and a dog. There’s your lemonade.’

  ‘It’s not quite like that.’

  ‘Bet I’m close, though.’

  ‘You’re not far off, I must admit.’

  The woman lit a cigarette. ‘Do you want a Numbie?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Player’s No. 6. It’s what we call them. My dad’s a vicar. That’s how I get to ask you all these questions. Being brought up in a vicarage is a passport to atheism, if you ask me. Our dads rebelled against their parents by joining the Church; now we rebel against you lot. What brings you down to sunny Brighton?’

  ‘I’m looking for my nephew, Louis Johnson.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting that you had.’

  ‘And why might he be here?’

  ‘He’s one of your readers.’

  ‘The Brighton Voice? Not one of mine – one of Jason’s. Well, there aren’t too many of them.’

  Sidney could not imagine too many anarchists called Jason either.

  ‘What do you want with him?’ The woman was positively chatty now. ‘Are you really his uncle? Perhaps you’re a pervert that likes pretending to be a vicar?’

  ‘I can assure you I’m not. He does know who I am.’

  ‘Have you come to take him back to Mummy and Daddy then?’

  ‘He’s not yet sixteen. He’s still at school. I do have a responsibility.’

  ‘Then he’s old enough to make up his own mind about what he does.’

  ‘Not legally.’

  ‘And you value the law?’

  ‘Without it, society falls apart.’

  ‘We believe that “without it” society has the chance to reinvent itself. Have you got a photo?’

  Sidney took out his wallet. ‘Here.’

  The woman inspected the image of Louis laughing with a friend, bringing it close to her face. ‘I need my glasses.’

  ‘It’s from last year.’

  ‘He looks a bit young. You know that’s an anarchist badge he’s wearing?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure.’

  ‘They sell them down the road.’

  ‘I don’t think Louis’s ever been to Brighton.’

  ‘They post them out. Even anarchists use the post office.’

  ‘Have you seen him before?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  Sidney made his way towards the seafront, past the Peace House, a shop selling incense and Indian cottons, joss-sticks and miniature wooden elephants in bright colours. A girl in a sleeveless white dress sat on a stool outside, in front of a glass-bead curtain, shuffling a pack of tarot card
s, asking people if they wanted their fortune told. A sign in the window of a furniture shop read:

  LAST DAYS!

  This shop will be closing soon due to the impending collapse of Western Capitalism

  In an arcade set back from the main road, two or three boys were working slot machines; any one of them could have been Louis. Sidney showed them a photograph and asked if they had seen him. They hadn’t.

  Closer to the seafront, people were sitting out at wooden tables eating chips with cheese and burgers served on green school china. Two of the men were shirtless, their chests sunburnt like badly grilled ham. Sidney wondered why he couldn’t see any fishermen, or indeed any signs of fishing at all. Perhaps the town had been entirely taken over by holidaymakers?

  A vagrant was raging at an old army veteran who was feeding breadcrumbs to pigeons and seagulls. He shouted out that they were vermin; rats in the sky. Sidney showed him a photograph, tried to be friendly, engage in conversation, because perhaps Louis was homeless too, but the man just swore at him, saying that the young still had so much possibility while he had none. His life was over. Unless Sidney could buy him a drink . . .

  A drunk woman with her skirt halfway up her thighs was being helped into a taxi and a young man in a denim suit was saying: ‘Look at the state of her. You wouldn’t think she was my mum.’

  The town was a confusion of heat, noise and alcohol. Sidney began to sweat with the strain of not knowing where he was going or how to proceed. He knew that he should, perhaps, ask the police for help, but this trip to Brighton was still nothing other than a hunch, and would they really care about a boy who might not be in their town at all?

  He wondered how much Louis, if he was still alive, might have turned to drink or drugs instead of political action, but he was confident that his nephew’s youthful energy was still concentrated on an alternative version of saving the world: from nuclear disaster, environmental catastrophe, capitalist exploitation, economic collapse and social injustice.

  He looked for listings of activist meetings, collective calls to protest, and came across a group of men and women selling the Socialist Worker. He asked where a young political idealist might hang out in Brighton and, even as he said the words ‘hang out’, he felt embarrassed by sounding like an out-of-touch would-be trendy vicar.

  But this wasn’t about him; Sidney didn’t care about his reputation or what people thought: he just wanted to find his nephew.

  ‘Is he gay?’ they asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  He passed a burned-out bus, a boarded-up newsagent’s and a dead fox on the street corner. He asked everyone he thought might be likely to give him an answer – have you seen this boy? – groups of skinheads with dogs; poor girls with greasy hair and knackered faces begging for money; Pakistani boys trying not to get mugged; old men shuffling between the pub, the pawnbroker and the bookie’s, stopping either for breath or to smoke their next roll-up; bikers and bored heavy-metal fans looking for something to do or somewhere to kick off; drug dealers with Alsatians; and then, as he moved across towards Hove, he passed affluent middle-aged couples walking their fastest, on their way home to their villas in Tongdean Avenue, making no eye contact, fearing that if they slowed down they might catch the disease known as poverty.

  No one had seen Louis at all.

  Sidney looked at the town as if no one in it was innocent. Every single person could have had something to do with his nephew’s disappearance. Any stranger could be a criminal or a suspect or someone who knew something and yet, it seemed, no one was going to tell him anything: not the man going into the bookie’s or the women waiting for their washing in the launderette or the people at the bus stop; not the busker outside Sainsbury’s, the estate agents renting out rooms, the people in the bingo hall, in the record shop, at the grocer’s, or in the takeaway kebab joint; not the drivers queuing at the Shell petrol station, early lunchers in the Golden Egg; not the families in the estates, around the terraces and amidst the squats in Granville Road and Temple Gardens; not the rock bands with their feedback and dodgy amplifiers in abandoned buildings waiting for demolition; not the drinkers in the Gold Ship Inn, the Sussex Arms, the Southern Cross and the Fiddler’s Elbow.

  Surely they had to know something – for how, amidst the noise of the town, provided he’d got the right one; how, when there were so many people, could no one have noticed this boy?

  He thought of driving over to Beachy Head, and tried to imagine Louis looking out towards the coast of France, a sunny day, a blue sky, a calm sea, the run and the jump, but he did not think it possible. He could not think it possible, because if he could, then he might possibly dream it into reality.

  Then a student in a No Nukes T-shirt told him about an alternative café in Kemptown, off St George’s Road. It was a cheap restaurant filled with young people sitting round wooden tables eating paella and spaghetti bolognaise and listening to King Crimson.

  And there, at last, he saw his nephew lying on a beaten-up armchair at the back by the toilets.

  He could be dead, but then if he was, surely the restaurant would have done something about it? He had to be asleep or stoned. No one paid Louis any attention.

  Sidney stood for a moment in a slight daze. Had all their trouble and anxiety been for this? Did Louis have any idea of the terrors he had put everyone through? How dare he sleep so soundly?

  He asked the barmaid for two pints of tap water and woke his nephew up.

  Louis did not seem surprised. ‘I thought they might send you.’

  ‘Your mother’s worried sick. We all are.’

  ‘Mum’s nervous all the time. That’s why I had to leave.’

  ‘It’s in the papers. We made an appeal.’

  ‘I don’t read them.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘There’s a squat. Have you come to take me home?’

  ‘I can’t force you.’

  The boy laughed to himself, and spoke slowly and with amazement, as if he had only just learned how to talk and was still surprised by the sounds coming out of his mouth. Sidney recognised that his nephew must be on something but couldn’t think what it might be.

  ‘I like it here,’ Louis continued, gesturing without purpose. ‘There’s no one to order you around. That’s what the word “anarchy” means. No rulers. You can do what you want. As long as you don’t harm anyone, nobody minds how you behave.’

  ‘It’s hard to build a society that way.’

  ‘Not if it’s a different kind of society, Uncle Sidney. We trust and rely on our friends, neighbours and workmates more than on teachers or bosses or politicians. Everyone here tries to do everything for themselves and for each other. It’s a different way of thinking about money and the economy; you just trade the things you need. People don’t have to pretend to be what they’re not. They can be themselves. Life has to be about more than working so hard for exams that one day I’ll be good enough to get a job I hate.’

  ‘It might not be like that. I don’t hate my job.’

  ‘You’re lucky. You have faith.’

  ‘But I don’t have money.’

  ‘You probably have enough, Uncle Sidney.’

  ‘Yes, I do. And what about your father? He likes his job.’

  ‘More than his family, I’ll say that. He’s never home.’

  ‘He works hard. Drink this.’

  Louis took long hungry gulps of water. ‘You know he’s got another girlfriend? He thinks I don’t know, but I do. And anyway you don’t really like your job either, Uncle Sidney, otherwise you wouldn’t spend all your time being a detective. You and my dad are the same. Everyone thinks you work at your jobs, but what you work hardest at is avoiding them.’

  ‘There may be some truth in that. How long were you planning on staying here?’

  ‘I don’t know. Until my money runs out.’

  ‘Have you got much left?’

  ‘A few quid. I suppose you know I stole
from my dad?’

  ‘He has noticed.’

  ‘Is he angry?’

  ‘He just wants you home. Your parents love you.’

  ‘Then they should show it.’

  ‘Parents aren’t always good at that kind of thing. They don’t know how much to protect you or how much to let go . . .’

  ‘Or how to pay any attention in the first place.’

  ‘I thought you were running away to avoid their attention?’

  ‘Very good, Uncle Sidney. You reason well.’

  ‘You could have been the victim of a terrible crime, Louis. That’s why everyone has been worried about you.’

  ‘And now you probably think I’ve committed some kind of crime myself.’

  ‘I’m not sure what the law is on young people going absent. Perhaps it all depends on why you went . . .’

  ‘Whether I was “corrupted” or not; the supposed “fact” that I’m too young to know what’s best for me, you mean?’

  ‘There are types of crime and shades of criminality,’ Sidney continued, hoping that his nephew would understand and take him seriously. ‘People might suggest that you have been “criminal” in leaving your family without saying anything and causing so much anxiety. At the same time, someone else might think that an oppressive parental regime, which is, perhaps, a confusion of nagging and neglect, is equally “criminal”. And then there are your anarchist friends, planning what might be called “crimes against the state”, acts of violence and protest against a governmental system they don’t even recognise; so are they breaking any law if they consider the laws of society to be, in themselves, criminally unjust?’

  ‘That’s right, Uncle Sidney.’

  ‘So what is a “crime”? Can it only be defined in terms of a breach in the law? Or can it be extended to include the idea of hurting other people, letting them down, being thoughtless, careless and unloving?’

  ‘I suppose it could be.’

  ‘Let’s go for a walk, Louis. I think we need some air.’

  ‘I’m very tired.’

  ‘Then this will wake you up.’

  They went to the pier, bought fish and chips and passed a woman who was prophesying that this was the exact spot where Jesus was going to return to earth, walking out of the water to reclaim his kingdom. In Brighton. She was offering free chip butties. Those who stayed with her now and prayed and believed with her could become his first modern disciples.