by Paul Hoffman
Neither of the two men said anything, but as he got over his shock, Haynes began scribbling in his notebook. As they confessed to one another later, each felt that they were listening to the truth – so absolute was the conviction, so deep and sincere the sadness with which the patient told her story.
‘So,’ said Haynes, ‘I just want to be clear. You’re saying the human race was manufactured as an experiment in survival?’
She sat upright, with a look of alarm. Both men stared at her, wondering what she was going to say next.
‘No, I’m sorry, that’s not it at all,’ she said. The familiar grimace of pain was mixed with a look of dread. ‘You were manufactured as an experiment in extinction.’
‘Right, then?’ It was a Friday, Jane’s last day at Trevor Hat’s bookshop. He had received the news that she was leaving with complete indifference, interested only in whether or not she had finished sorting out the books. She had promised that she would do so and had arranged to go through them with him before she left.
Trevor looked at Jane morosely as he came into the small office. He sat down, a watchful grimness daring her to make him blanch at bad news. ‘Was old Mrs Fitzgerald ripping me off?’
‘No. In the end it turned out to be a series of . . . eccentricities. There are bits and pieces of good accountancy practice here left over from years ago but she had her own way of doing things. Unfortunately she wasn’t just idiosyncratic, she was hopeless. I mean, Trevor, not being able to add up is a bit of a liability for a bookkeeper. Look at this.’
She passed over one of Mrs Fitzgerald’s ledgers. In her immaculate handwriting it seemed a model of old-fashioned fastidiousness and attention to detail. It had always given Trevor immense confidence to see her fill in row after row of figures in her spidery italic.
‘This is called a transposition,’ said Jane, pointing towards a minor total of £879.12. ‘This is telling you you’re short. It often happens. It’s divisible by ninety-nine – nearly all these errors are. What she’s done is recorded £888 at this end of the transaction for these copies of Debbie Does Dallas, but only £8.88 at this end. As a result the sum of £879.12 seems to be missing. Only it’s not.’ She looked at him, shaking her head. There are lots of blunders like this. There’s practically every mistake I’ve ever come across plus a few that are entirely new. Look at this . . .’
‘Yeah, all right, I get the point. She was a fucking menace. How much am I down?’
‘Well, that’s the strange thing. There are loads of errors here. But they more or less cancel each other out. You’re poorer by £447.58, that’s all. God knows how.’
‘How much?’ he said, indignantly.
‘Look, I didn’t want to worry you so I didn’t say anything. At one point I couldn’t account for nearly seventeen thousand. Consider yourself lucky.’
‘Bloody hell.’
Jane stood up and took her coat from behind the door. ‘In future hire someone who knows what they’re doing.’
Neil put his head round the door. ‘It’s the phone . . . that git Carver from the British Board of Film Classification. He’s whining about us selling uncertificated tapes. Y’ know, Transvestite Apartment Wrestling.’
‘I want to talk to him. Tell him to wait.’
Neil vanished. Jane had finished putting on her coat. He looked at her.
‘So . . . you’re leaving.’
‘Yes.’
‘Right, then.’ He went back to looking at the ledgers. She knew he was doing it deliberately to taunt her but she was mildly put out at the loss of the pleasure of refusing his entreaties for her to stay. ‘Well,’ she said after a pause, ‘it’s been an education, Trevor.’
‘Of course it has,’ he said without looking up. ‘See you.’
She turned to leave but as she walked out of the door he called out, ‘Get what you were looking for?’
She stopped. ‘Not really,’ she replied.
‘Who does?’ he said.
‘Is that another example of your philosophy of life?’
‘Definitely.’
She started up the stairs and as she got to the top floor she heard him bellow, ‘NEIL!’
Neil, looking perplexed and gratifyingly alarmed at seeing her leaving so early, rushed past her towards the stairs. As Jane left the shop for the last time she heard Trevor call to Neil, ‘Is that Carver still on the phone?’
‘Yes, Trevor.’
‘On second thoughts, tell him to fuck off.’
Like some vast Leviathan of sound, thunder rolled up the Chess Valley, dying as it came to the moor that jutted into Maltby like an arrowhead. The cloud base was low, a thousand feet, thought Healey, but it looked lower, dirt grey like pavement snow a few days old. The wind was bitterly cold and a fine but heavy drizzle soaked everything. Getting wetter, Healey moved miserably from stall to stall. He had dropped off his two children at his house and had vanished before they even got to the door. The train back to London had been postponed for at least an hour because of a bomb scare. To kill time he’d gone to the moor for the town’s annual fete. By now it was late afternoon and the light had almost gone, but more people than he would have thought likely were wandering coldly around the exhibits which ringed the field in an historical order meant to demonstrate the continuity of the town’s small-scale industrial and agricultural past. He found himself standing in front of a pig. It was not an ordinary pig because no one had reared it commercially for more than a hundred years although it had once been the source of the area’s wealth. ‘It’s living archaeology,’ said the sour-looking man who fronted the stall. ‘Today’s pig, well, it converts low-grade food into muscle five times as quick, resists disease – these things are buggers for foot rot – and they’re a lot bulkier in the places you get your meat from.’
‘I suppose these taste better, though,’ said Healey, looking at the pig.
Cold and wet and fed up himself, the man looked at him as if seeing him properly for the first time. Healey felt his loathing, arbitrary and intense. ‘Not really,’ said the man and turned into the stall to get out of the rain.
The first wave spread through him like a red stain on a white cloth. He felt bad, the way only a cold, wet skin and too long living with an unpleasant truth can make you feel. And though millions were miserable for many reasons – lack of food, lack of love, lack of peace – no one on the blue planet was feeling the breadth and depth of his original shame in such an acute way. Some physicists believe the universe has no boundary; some biologists think there is no life among the stars but here; and if they’re right then Geoffrey Healey, standing in this market town, wet and cold and tired, became the centre of something un-imaginably old. Gist of reptile, essence of snake, Healey’s inheritance swept up the cold and stony field along with the ripple of thunder and the rain, laying him to waste and then leaving him behind, changed, new born, shocked. A few more seconds and he would have broken. Luck, perhaps, or something else (the wife, the kids) saved him from the early morning walker finding the locked car in an isolated place. This is the door we did not open; this is the path down which we did not go. Opportunity is not alone in knocking once.
Healey made his way to the station, where normal service had been resumed, and in the hour and fifteen minutes it took to get home, his personality came back, reasserting itself around what had been left on the moor. He opened the front door, concentrating on getting the stiff key out of the lock while the serpentine big bang still echoed around in his bones.
When he got inside there were three letters waiting. Two of them were identical. They were from Barclays Bank, financially randy identical twins imploring him to surrender to their unquenchable lust to lend him money. He threw them in the bin, then opened the third. The Abbey National Building Society was pleased to announce that his variable mortgage rate was to be lowered by one quarter of a per cent. The phone rang next to his bed and Healey picked it up. ‘Hello,’ he said. There was a pause before he heard a voice he did not recognise
.
‘Geoff?’
‘Yes.’ He wondered who the woman could be.
‘It’s Jane. I . . . thought you might have come in when you dropped the boys back today.’
‘Oh, I had to get back. You sound different. Is everything all right?’
‘Yes. Everything seems to have been sorted out over TLC – at least from my point of view. The FS have been very good. At work they’re pretending nothing happened. Thank you for your help. I really appreciate it.’
There was an odd note in her voice still, as if she were anxious, but more than that, the disdain had vanished.
‘Well,’ he said lamely. ‘I’m glad I could be of use.’
‘You were,’ she said. ‘Look, I wonder if we could meet. Would you mind?’
Healey’s Second Nun’s Tale
Every life has its magic door, its hidden threshold. If by accident or through a rash desire to understand yourself you should uncover that door and decide to enter, you should pause for a moment and consider. It is only in books that the hero endures to the end and is saved. In real life, for every man or woman with one hand on the glittering prize and the other on the unreliable thank you speech, there are courageous multitudes dying of thirst in the desert who will be dead by four o’clock, but have plenty of time to watch the vultures of failure circling above them in the air. Mostly heroes die, mostly champions fail. Some of these losers manage to stumble back, returning with who knows what. Not a magic sword but a disfiguring scar or a sliver of ice in their hearts put there by an evil queen to burn them up until the day they die. What’s done cannot be undone.
Play it safe is my advice. If you find an unexpected entrance to another world, brick it up and then forget about it.
Louis Bris, The Wisdom of Crocodiles
‘HEALEY . . . COME HERE!’ The priest was shouting at a boy of about fourteen, lounging with his hands in his pockets on a low wall that fenced off the square of tarmac from the rest of the school.
The boy started to walk slowly towards him.
‘Quickly . . . and take your hands out of your pockets!’
The boy moved faster but only by a margin small enough to demonstrate that he had not deliberately disobeyed. The priest considered the ways in which he would teach the boy a lesson, and as he approached, he noticed that he could make him have his hair cut on Wednesday when the barber came. An Italian barber without any talent beyond speed and cheapness, he was known to the boys, delighting in the geographical inaccuracy, as the Butcher of Seville. So disfiguring were his haircuts that even the least vain preferred to spend their own money on a cut in one of the hairdresser’s on the Cowley Road. The general length of the boys’ hair in the school was the result of an evolutionary battle between what they felt they could get away with when they paid for the haircuts themselves and what the man standing over Geoffrey Healey could plausibly reject and so send them to be shaved by the Italian.
The line the boys pushed did not consist of the meeting point between his tolerance and their ambitions, but a line defined by the relationship between him and the world of the late 1960s going about its business beyond the high wall that surrounded the school. Like a communist empire of watchtowers and state police and heavy punishments for dissent, the priests’ attempts to keep this world at bay seemed entirely successful: everywhere could be seen the signs of post-war austerity, from the glossy but drab paint on the walls to the poorly cut 1950s school uniforms. But it was not working. Seeping between the odd crack, something in the air invisibly worked to change the notion of what was acceptable. The boys were allowed an hour of television a day – an advance on a year ago from two, carefully vetted, hours a week. The important day was Thursday when the school acculturated itself with Top of the Pops and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. The priests, even if they only watched the news or the occasional documentary on Lourdes, unwittingly absorbed the propaganda for a hairier skull in everything they watched: even the television newscasters had hair touching their ears, even the paraplegic and his helpers at Our Lady’s shrine shadowed the hair of Jagger, Hendrix and the Mothers of Invention.
‘Next time I call your name, you jump. D’ye hear me?’
‘Yes, Father.’ Healey stared sullenly ahead.
‘There’s a pile of laundry-bags up in the main building next to the refectory. Take them round to the convent.’
The boy was astonished by this command. In over four years he had never been sent into the small convent that abutted the school and which fed it and washed its clothes. Neither had he heard of any boy who’d been sent there. He started to walk up to the main building, then turned.
‘How do I get in . . . to the convent?’
The priest sighed irritably. ‘Into Junction Road, first right and ring the doorbell marked “Convent”. Even you shouldn’t find that too difficult.’ Smirking, he walked off.
The boy watched after him, flicked a V-sign at his retreating back and turned on his way, still wondering at the task he had been set. Five minutes later, carrying four heavy laundry bags, all with the names of different priests printed on the outside, he stepped up to a door with CONVENT. RING, written on it. He pressed the bell. Almost immediately a nun opened the door.
‘Yes?’ she said pleasantly.
‘Father Corrigan told me to bring these around to you, Sister.’
‘Ah,’ she smiled, ‘that’s very kind.’
‘There are another two loads,’ he said.
She did not seem to notice the sullen tone. ‘Right you are. You run off now and I’ll be here when you come back. I’ll take these.’
Walking back up to the main building Geoff thought about this odd meeting. He recognised the nun’s voice but he had never seen her before. For the past year he had been a dinner server. This was a highly prized job because the dinner servers took the food from the kitchens and distributed it to the rest of the school. It allowed them to wield great influence at all levels because they determined, within limits, the size of servings. Extra portions for friends and people with influence meant that the job was a means of controlling a powerful black economy within the school. Chips and sausages were as stable a currency as a pre-war pound backed with solid gold.
Although vast amounts of food came out of the kitchens and vast amounts of soiled dishes went back, no one ever saw the nuns who cooked the meals which fed the school and allowed Geoff and the other servers to wield such economic power. The synapse of this exchange between the nuns and the servers was a huge cylinder, a drum with a sheet of wood running vertically through the middle like a wooden curtain so that you couldn’t see through to the other side. The servers turned the drum once, knocked on the dividing wall as a signal and whatever they sent across would be whisked away. Occasionally they would need to talk to the nuns on the other side to pass over or hear simple instructions, but there was nothing to indicate who it was that fed and cleaned them, other than the muffled disembodied voice he had just recognised. This was the way it had always been. But now the school was to close. The local council wanted it to become a comprehensive and to be mixed; but while the priests had no real objections to the first condition of change, they refused to teach girls. A female future was beyond either what they understood or wished to understand. To teach women would change everything. This was not a mistake, however regrettable the lack of egali-tarianism. They were misguided, but they were not wrong.
The council had insisted and, rather than bend, the priests had decided to close the school down and withdraw to their stronger bastions in Liverpool and London, where they were less reliant on government grants to stay open. The news had thrilled Geoff, a minion watching the collapse of an empire it had seemed impossible to dent.
When he returned with the laundry bags a second time, the smiling nun was waiting for him. And again when he returned with the final load.
‘That’s the lot, Sister,’ he said flatly.
She smiled, again not seeming to have heard the lack of grace in his voice.
‘Thank you. And what’s your name?’
‘Geoffrey Healey,’ he replied, as reluctant as Rumplestiltskin.
‘Come in, Geoffrey. Have a drink for your trouble.’ He was surprised at how nervous he felt, and wished he had made an excuse to avoid going into the convent, but it was too late now. The nun led him into the large kitchen with which he had had so much blind dealing during the last year. Around a large wooden table in the centre of the kitchen sat six nuns enveloped in black and with the contrasting white veil, all looking at him with expressions of anticipation and pleasure. The nun who’d invited him in sat him down at the head of the table while another fetched him a glass of diluted orange juice and a currant bun.
‘This is Geoffrey Healey.’
He smiled weakly at them.
‘Hello, Geoffrey, how are you?’ they chorused.
‘Fine, thank you,’ said Geoff.
‘Weren’t you at St Matthew’s when Sister Grace was the headmistress?’ said one of the oldest nuns.
At the mention of her name Geoffrey’s stomach turned over violently. ‘Yes,’ he said.