Mooncranker's Gift

by Barry Unsworth

  The boys were constantly balancing on the edge of the bank, crumbling the clay down into the pale brown water. It fell with a soft, sifting, sighing sound. They laughed and shouted, digging their heels into the dry overhanging banks, falling picturesquely, arms outstretched, down the sloping bankside, their feet sliding in the rubble of the bank, to stop at the shingled verge of the water.

  The sun was hot. Young corn in the fields around, still tender green in the shoots. We passed through a field of beans in flower, the whole field scented. Moorhens scattered away from us up river. An occasional plop as frog or vole took a header at our approach. The path got narrower and more overgrown and this slowed people down, brought the party more or less together. Mary dropped back to walk with Alan, but Miranda was still in front. A vole, slower than the others, jumped from the bankside almost at my feet, scuttled across the shingle and dived into the water, the water was shallow there. It did not attempt to get under the surface but struck out strongly across the river. When it was half way across Henry shot it in the back with his air pistol. I knew he had hit it because it dipped in the water. We stood there on the bank watching, streamlined body cutting through the water, outline beaded with tiny bubbles, nose and back one cleaving shape, smooth as flowing stone across the bright water, thin swirl following behind, so effortless. Then Henry raised his arm, the pistol must have been loaded all the time, pointed his arm full length and fired and the smoothly swimming back ducked or dipped in the water as if at some sudden weight and I knew Henry had put a pellet into the vole’s back. It swam on with the same smooth motion, and disappeared into the density of vegetation on the opposite bank. What chiefly lives in my memory is that resumption of its smooth swimming. It was involuntary of course but seemed a sort of dignity all the same.

  Henry said something in thoughtful derogation, something about there not being much power in the pistol after all. Frederick said the vole was as good as dead, the pistol was one of the most powerful currently manufactured. Father told me. Then Henry got tenser, remarking that the vole had gone on swimming with undiminished energy or was Frederick asking him to disbelieve his own eyes and Frederick said it was mere survival instinct that drove the vole thus and in the middle of this altercation Miranda’s voice, suddenly vibrant with feeling: ‘Do you realize that you are talking here and you have condemned that animal to a lingering death?’ Probably there was only me to look at her closely, see how upset she was, with bright eyes and a voice lower pitched than usual in the effort of control. ‘Just wantonly,’ she said, ‘and now you are talking about stupid things. You ought to be ashamed.’ Frederick said he wasn’t ashamed, but his face was red. ‘You don’t understand sport,’ he said, and then I spoke too, surprising myself by my own temerity, ‘I don’t call that sport.’ It was all for Miranda, not wanting her to be hurt or humiliated because I knew already from experience and would have known anyway by instinct that people in distress only get more hurt when confronted by such obstinately unmoved and fact-treasuring people as Henry and Frederick and that this ever more will be so. But the remark drew their combined contempt on me, what do you know about it, you can’t even throw or jump, remarks of that nature were heaped on me and the other boys laughed but I don’t think Alan did. Anyway I didn’t care. Then Frederick suggested building a dam.

  The river was narrow there and shallow. A few large stones, set irregularly across the stream, rounded, and sleek with wet moss. The stream gushed through the gaps they made, over and down in miniature rapids. Frederick’s idea was to reinforce this line with smaller stones prised up from the river bed, and clay and pebbles. Henry and Frederick both wanted to direct operations. They ordered the others about. The girls giggling, wading, sleeves rolled up, the hems of their skirts dark with wet. That boy with the noisy breathing earnestly responsive to orders, perfect labourer, his trousers rolled up over the fleshy knees. Alan got bored I think, went off somewhere, probably with Mary, I don’t remember seeing them any more that afternoon. ‘Why are you standing about up there?’ they asked us, and Miranda said, ‘I’m not going to have anything to do with your dam, not after what you did to that vole.’ I dumb and awkward up there on the bank beside her, heart however swelling at my own secret courage in thus withstanding their contempt, for her sake. Brown water flecked with white, stayed in its course by their constantly crumbling dam, eddied, sidled, crept up the shingle, the froth on it dirty looking as if fouled already by this delay.

  We walked away together along the bank, farther along the river, walking in file at first, then, as the path widened, side by side. We didn’t speak much to begin with, I felt an excitement and constraint almost unbearable at being alone with Miranda, two years younger, walking along with her, a sense of terrible responsibility, for the outcome of this walk. This wore off but it was very strong and almost choking at first, so much so that for a time I did not notice my surroundings. Then the scene fell into place as it falls now, around me, the long gleaming curve of the river, the quiet banks, gently rising fields on either side, the skyline on our side wooded.

  She said she couldn’t bear them any longer. Henry and Frederick. Imagine the mentality, arguing like that after what they had just done. Always concentrating on facts and disregarding feelings is a symptom of the fascist mentality. Mr Mooncranker said that. He is very much against all forms of authoritarianism. The father of course is quite dreadful, that’s your uncle isn’t it, I hope you don’t mind? I mean always going on about physical development to the exclusion of culture. Mr Mooncranker calls him the salt of the earth but concedes that he is an elderly barbarian.

  You seem to know a lot about Mr Mooncranker’s views and attitudes.

  Summer afternoon waning, paling. We met no one on the way. Rings of ripples denote the rising trout. Her face was vivid, flushed with the day’s sunshine and the vehement talking. A strong face. I watched her clear profile, the beautiful, faintly hollowed plane at the temple. ‘They have all got sexual hangups,’ she said, and this too turned out to be one of Mr Mooncranker’s dicta. ‘Yes, well, he talks to me quite often. He came to our school once, to give a talk about the importance of television and the need for standards. So when I saw him at your uncle’s house, I knew him at once.’

  ‘You won’t stop coming, will you? Because of Henry and Frederick?’

  I don’t think I actually said that, only thought it, experienced the anxiety of the thought, while she went on talking about Mooncranker who was the only one without sexual hangups. Separated from his wife because it wasn’t a perfect relationship. That is him all over, it is typical. Break down these outmoded conventions, break free. He is to the left in politics of course, but basically he doesn’t trust institutions at all.

  I tried to tell her something about my life. I remember describing my parents. Our purposes are seldom clear to us at the time and I think now that I was trying, with the inadequate resources at my command, to convey to her the feelings of one like myself, obliged before he is ready to consider his parents as mortal beings, seekers after a happiness to which he was not integral; knowledge that weakened precociously my own sense of permanence, and made me observant, as if the world were scattered with clues. This is what I probably intended to say to Miranda but whether she gathered it from my words I have no means of knowing, words mainly devoted to my mother’s tendency to wear large hats and get flustered on the telephone, my father’s fastidiousness and swearing. I think now that I was trying to make myself interesting to her and I think that in this I succeeded. I told her I had prayed for a reconciliation between my parents and for more amity and tolerance among the peoples of the world generally, but as they were going on with the divorce proceedings it must be God’s will. I told her about my twenty-five consecutive attendances and my New Testament. She said I was a funny boy. She said in reference to my parents that she did not think people had the right simply to consult their own happiness. She had a way, while she talked, in moments of eagerness or enthusiasm, a way of brushing asid
e the thick fringe of hair that fell over her forehead, dividing it at the centre of the brow with two light quick nervous gestures of one finger, left and right, very like the lateral part of the gesture of crossing oneself.

  We came to a place where the river formed a roughly circular pool with a little shingled shore at our side, and Miranda, I think it was Miranda, suggested wading. Laughter, and her hand in mine, down the bank. We left our shoes on the shingle. The water was very cold. Feel of stones underfoot. The current flowed past us, swirled at our ankles first, then higher as we waded in, and the minnows scooting off at our approach. Deeper than it looks, in the middle. Miranda had to gather her skirt, light cotton skirt of a summer dress, patterned in small blue flowers, lift it over her knees, up round her thighs at one point, and I saw the slender, firmly rounded fronts of her thighs, pale gold in colour, taut against the chill of the water and shifting stones underfoot, and this tentative taut posture of her body, the laughing face as she looked into the water before her, the modesty and necessity of the gathered skirt, all fused into an image of beauty that I was destined never to forget; my mind was still lost in it when she stumbled, seemed about to fall, I moved to her quickly put my arm round her waist and she stayed a moment like this against me and the glittering swirl of water, the stirring silver undersides of leaves above the banks, the blank sky, all reeled together …

  It was impossible to get out at the far side. The clay bank was steep and crumbling. The water had undermined it, scooped it out from below, carried the subsidences of clay downstream. There were sandmartins’ nests amid debris, some with eggs inside still intact, victims of this undermining and collapse. We had to wade back again. She let me dry her feet and legs with my handkerchief. Then the way back and it was evening now, we had walked farther than we thought. We came to Henry and Frederick’s dam and Miranda asked me to go in and break it up, which I did gladly. The water, brimming at the barrier, poured away through the first breach. I demolished their dam stone by stone. The river gleaming now, an evening river. Sun and moon were in the sky together. Cows in the riverside fields, breathing, tearing and munching, raise their heads to watch us go by. I have forgotten what we talked about on the way home. I remember that she said, thank you for the walk, with a sort of smiling, teasing formality. She didn’t take me altogether seriously because I was younger.

  My late return had not gone unnoticed. At supper that night it was mentioned. ‘You had a good walk out then, this afternoon,’ Uncle George said, having first laid down his knife and fork.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Henry and Frederick were looking at me.

  ‘Along the river you went, did you?’ Uncle George said.

  He looked at me with complete seriousness and a sort of curiosity too, as if I were a species somewhat outside his ken. They were all looking at me and there was a silence. Again I felt their involuntary, almost helpless, collective contempt. In their minds it was accounted odd and unmanly, even perhaps degenerate, to have gone wandering off along the river with a girl.I knew that Uncle George was setting me down as a weedy specimen.

  ‘Nothing like a good hike,’ Uncle George said. ‘Blows the cobwebs away, good for the liver. Who was that philosopher who walked his thousand paces a day?Mens sana in corpore sano, eh? Who was it again?’

  Nobody knew, though both Henry and Frederick frowned and looked away into corners as though the name were bobbing about just below the level of consciousness.

  ‘Alcibiades was it?’ Henry said at last.

  ‘One of those fellows,’ Uncle George said. ‘Someone with his head screwed on the right way.’

  ‘No,’ I said, I found the defiance to say, stimulated probably by their scorn, ‘no, we just sauntered along, really. I don’t like strenuous exercise.’ I said to Uncle George, and to Henry and Frederick I said ‘sorry but I destroyed your dam on the way back, I just couldn’t resist it.’

  None of them made any reply at all.

  The day after that. I am walking in the garden, moving towards my secret place but with customary trepidation, as if some inadvertent movement of my own might start things up around me, and there is another feeling less familiar, a tension in the region of throat and breast, rigid like a spring yet tremulous too. White flowers, suffocating; swathes of heavy scent. Hum of insects, like the vibration of the garden. Sound of tennis from the courts. Voices of players and resonant sound of racquet on ball. People putting in some practice for the tournament. My agitation and excitement mount as I draw near the place, bend low to get under the branches. Once here it is as though isolation is the element that was needed, the precipitating factor. I touch my body and that image of Miranda which had been piercing and beautiful, the picture of her wading in the river, which had seemed only yesterday charged with, guarded by, this very beauty, I now imagine it as wanton, the revealing of the thighs, done to tease and entice, I begin to think of the parts of Miranda I was not able to see and the tumescence immediately consequent on these thoughts demands to be freed from the confinement of clothes, the swollen pulsing monster thus revealed I hoist and jerk about in my hands in a frenzy, handling myself roughly in my ignorant excitement until all this violent activity is stilled by a sort of distant threat, the terrifying intimations of the first orgasm of my life; and the thick greyish fluid that emerges in irregular spurts from between my helpless horrified fingers, tangible signs of that dissolution sinners are warned of. My semen. Sign of maturing powers, advancing manhood. Taken by me then to be the very discharge of disease.

  I stand there stained with my seed, in terror at what has happened, my hands sticky with my own corruption, while the sounds of the tennis game continue to reach me, signals from a world I have lost. I remember pamphlets glanced at without comprehension, picked up from the table at the entrance to the Sunday class, and the words of the Leader: ‘your body is the temple of God’.I know now, beyond doubt, that the interior of my temple is in a state of deliquescence. There is no Christ yet on the tree to pray to. But I slip to my knees and pray up through the branches, in murmurs. I am aware of the infinite distance my words have to travel. The fear and self-disgust abate however, by slow degrees, to be replaced as I come once more to my feet and prepare to leave the place by a feeling of sadness, a sense of irreparable loss. I feel singled out and apart from everybody, an outcast because of the enormity of my actions, and chiefly because I have perverted the memory of Miranda wading in the river which I had thought so beautiful. Where has it come from, this skill in perverting things?

  As I emerge I am aware of a sort of hush over everything, a silence in which the sounds of my moving body, my tainted body with its cargo of disease, seemed disproportionately loud. The sounds from the court had stopped I think. The game must have been over by then. Yes, Mooncranker had been umpiring, it was his voice I had heard, high, carrying, petulant-seeming voice, announcing the scores. The game must have been over because I met him there just beyond the shrubbery. I wonder if he was waiting for me. He was standing there, tall and thin, white hat, fawn-coloured jacket. His face bird-like, narrow, big-nosed, and patient somehow like a watchful bird. Patient, high-shouldered, slightly foppish. How do you find things here? You needn’t pretend with me dear boy. You are out of your element. Barbarians, shooting things, yes. Well it’s not your scene is it? George Wilson was at school with my father. They were great friends I believe. I keep up the connection. Salt of the earth, oh absolutely, in his own way, but limited, limited, and then those two sons of his. I believe you are religious. What do you think of Miranda? You had a rather long walk and talk together didn’t you, yes. She has a great capacity for freedom. Boundless, yes. And the energy. She and I have long talks. You must come and see me at my house. I live not very far away. It is my mother’s house. My father is dead you know, he died in the war. I will give you the address. He touches his hat in a gesture of courtesy perhaps ironic, and saunters away. I watch his thin erect back recede among the bushes, disappear finally from sight.

  I never
went to his house. The next time I talked to him was when he gave me the Christ. I do not remember anything of what he said to me. How did he know those things about me? Miranda must have told him, there is no other explanation. At the time, elementary and obvious as it seems now, at the time I do not think I came to this conclusion, that Miranda was his informant, rather, because of the potency of the gift, I attributed a sort of evil prescience to Mooncranker.

  That night an even worse thing happened. I had thought it might have been an isolated instance, a sort of warning, the over-mastering excitement, violence done to myself, the unexpected and terrifying issue of corruption. By prayer, by averting the mind, repurifying the images, perhaps I could recover health, be like other people. Or perhaps it had been a single stroke of punishment, not to be repeated. But that night in my sleep I dreamed of an elderly woman, with her hair in curlers, who underwent disgusting changes of feature, was at one time Aunt Jane, another the cleaning woman who used to come to our house, finally a stranger. I was undressing her in my dream and though she was willing, even avid, there were inexplicable delays while I wrestled with the various voluminous articles of her clothing. I tugged at the elastic of her navy blue bloomers while she, in my dream suddenly toothless, bared pale gums and fondled me. Before I could uncover her the awful spasms rose and assailed me and I woke in the midst of protracted shudderings, to find pyjamas and sheets wet with the same sticky substance … For a long time I lay sleepless in my clammy sin, possessed by fear and the certainty of my dissolution.

  I think now, however, that this experience, coming on me in the helplessness of sleep and so soon after the first, proving prayers and vows unavailing, after the first terror had been endured, hardened me, rendered me obdurate. I knew that I was lost, but this made me merely more circumspect, more deliberate in my pleasures. Not that I abandoned prayer. Indeed, as I became more convinced of my damnation, and more skilled too at extracting pleasure from my body, so I grew more adept at prayer and it sometimes seemed to me that all these things went together, were mutually reinforcing, dependent on each other for their peculiar nature, and there was a sweetness in their intermingling. I looked at the body of the Christ in my New Testament in a different way, with a different sort of scrutiny. His languor had become more ambiguous now. I looked at the declivities below the pelvic bones, the sleek convergence of the lines towards the groin, and I thought of what lay under the loincloth and wondered if he did it too. I knew such thoughts offended him, or at least I was ninety per cent sure they did, and in my prayers I expressed contrition. But in a certain way Christ became my accomplice …