‘We are all miracles of the Creator,’ Dorothy reminded him gently. ‘And to keep ourselves in good repair we should never fail to read the manufacturer’s handbook.’
‘How’s that?’ father asked, as he battled to follow the conversation. I think he was still hoping for fun and games but his voice had an edge of desperation.
‘The bible,’ Dorothy explained.
Father missed his mouth with his fork and stabbed his chin with a parsnip.
‘Napkin!’ mother sang happily.
As we struggled through the meal, mother’s good humour increased in direct proportion to father’s tragic decline. While I watched him wither away in the glare of Dorothy’s shining light, so mother brightened and blossomed.
‘Now tell me,’ Franklin continued, ‘for here’s something that often troubles me: if Adam and Eve dwelt in innocence, without the knowledge of Right and Wrong, how might they be blamed for eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge?’
‘It was forbidden.’
‘Indeed! And yet, I trust you’ll agree, that to understand the concept of obedience demands a fundamental, nay, comprehensive grasp of the differences ’twixt right and wrong and Adam and Eve were both idiots. Whimsical puppets in the good Lord’s garden. Witless stooges in the paradise pantomime. Amiable automata in the cosmic theme park.’
‘The serpent tempted them.’
‘And thus they were betrayed by the burden of innocence that God had bestowed on them.’
But Dorothy merely smiled at his mischief. ‘I think you’re playing a little game with me,’ she twinkled.
And there the argument rested while the plates were cleared away and the ginger pudding brought from the kitchen.
‘And what do you do for a living?’ Dorothy asked Janet.
‘I’m a beauty consultant for a well-known department store,’ Janet whispered, licking ice cream from the back of her spoon.
‘How fascinating!’ Dorothy gasped.
Janet looked up in surprise and seemed so startled by Dorothy’s bright pink mouth that she blushed and grew confused and found nothing more to say on the subject.
We took coffee in the front parlour. Janet retreated to the safety of the table beneath the window where she soon settled down with Mr Marvel for her evening game of dominoes. Franklin spread himself across the sofa and Dorothy was left alone to choose herself an armchair. She circled the room several times before she made a decision, prodded the cushions and dusted the little lace antimacassar before she gave herself to its embrace.
‘Do you play dominoes?’ mother asked hopefully as she squelched up and down with the coffee tray.
Dorothy smiled but shook her head and spent a little time fiddling with the pleats of her skirt as she tried to hide her petticoats. She crossed her ankles and stared at her shoes.
‘Mr Marvel’s a wonderful teacher,’ Janet said.
Dorothy looked interested and glanced towards the table but there was no time to introduce her to the pleasures and perils of the game before Franklin stirred from his torpitude and demanded more attention.
‘So tell me,’ he said, fixing her with a jaundiced eye, ‘for here’s something else that troubles me: does your church yet find itself open to the wind-jammer’s powdered embrace?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Franklin propped his elbow on the arm of the sofa and moved his hand like a metronome. ‘Wind-jammer. Shirt-lifter. Dung-puncher. Dirt-tamper. Pillow-biter. Chutney ferret.’
‘Language!’ father growled, as he passed through the room with the sugar bowl. He glanced apologetically towards Janet but she didn’t seem disturbed. It must have been another topic missing from a Katie Pphart education.
‘We are clearly told to forgive,’ Dorothy said patiently. ‘We are urged to practise tolerance and understanding. We must not condemn those souls who are made of a different persuasion.’
‘Sugar?’ father said, pausing beside her chair.
‘No, thank you.’
Franklin stared at the ceiling and sucked his teeth as if he wanted time to consider the wisdom of her verdict. ‘And the Lord spake unto Moses!’ he thundered, lurching suddenly forward and slopping coffee into his saucer. ‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination!’
Dorothy didn’t flinch. She merely tipped her head and looked at him over the rim of her spectacles. Her dark eyes shone with sincerity. ‘The Lord loves all His children,’ she said firmly.
‘And he brake the houses of sodomites, that were by the house of the Lord!’ Franklin bellowed. ‘The Book of Kings.’
‘To them that love God, all things work together for good.’
‘The saint and the sinner together?’
‘He gave His only begotten Son that we might be forgiven our sins.’
‘And so we continue to carry the guilt for God’s little robots, Adam and Eve, but no longer need to feel any shame for buggering boys in lavatories! Is that how the winds of change bloweth?’
Dorothy blushed and hesitated for a moment. ‘Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth!’ she said, at last.
‘You’re an oaf!’ Marvel shouted from the table. He turned and glared at Franklin. ‘An oaf and a scoundrel! And if I were twenty years younger I’d give you a damned good thrashing!’
Janet yelped and jumped back in her chair.
‘Ah, Mr Marvellous speaketh!’ Franklin roared, clearly delighted by so much attention. ‘The Kraken wakes! Do we suppose he’s found courage enough to enter an educated debate?’
‘Your education, sir, for all its pomp and circumstance, seems to have failed in providing you with any common decency!’ Mr Marvel punched the table, making his dominoes clatter, and turned around to confront his tormentor. His face was dark with rage and his eyes strained in their sockets. For a moment I thought he might spring forward, make a lunge for the sofa and seize Franklin by the throat. But Dorothy was there to calm and comfort him.
‘Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him,’ she said gently, turning her radiant smile upon him.
‘What?’
‘Proverbs.’
Marvel hesitated. He blinked at Dorothy. He scowled at Franklin. He turned once more to his game.
‘I’m much obliged,’ he muttered.
At midnight, mother was still in buoyant mood as we cleared the wreckage in the kitchen. Despite father’s great disappointment, Marvel’s gloomy silences and Franklin’s bad behaviour, she declared the evening a great success.
‘I think Dorothy took a shine to him,’ she said cheerfully, plunging plates into water so hot it threatened to melt her rubber gloves.
‘She’s already found a friend in Jesus,’ father said, wagging his head. He just couldn’t believe it.
‘It makes no difference,’ mother insisted. ‘She likes him.’
‘I didn’t notice anything,’ I said.
‘You’re a man!’ she said scornfully.
‘Marvel’s a man, in a manner of speaking,’ father said wearily, picking at the skeleton of the turkey. He was searching for scraps to turn into rissoles.
‘And he sprang to her defence,’ mother said. ‘When Franklin was making a fool of himself. He sprang to her defence like a proper, old-fashioned gentleman.’
‘I thought he would explode!’ I said, sorting through the mess of cutlery. ‘I’ve never seen him look so angry.’
‘That tells you something!’ mother said with satisfaction.
‘What?’
‘You wait,’ she said, smiling, wiping her rubber hands in her apron.
16
We waited but nothing happened. Despite mother’s best attempts, Marvel was not to be seduced by a woman with a bible in her handbag and for the next few days he contrived to remain in isolation. He continued to join us for supper but ate little and spoke seldom. Dorothy spent most of her time in the kitchen chattering with mother and devoted her evenings to reading the scriptures. Mother was stubborn and s
tayed optimistic but I lost interest in her plans for kindling romance because something sinister caught my attention.
Someone was mutilating my collection of Grappler magazines. It began with the issue featuring Junkyard Dog, the big New Jersey brawler who had recently been elected in a readers’ poll as the Crazy Man of the Year. Someone had been cutting holes in him. The Junkyard Dog had lost one eye and part of a wrestling boot. It continued with the tag-team special. The battling Buffalo Brothers had been cut in half by a lunatic with a pair of scissors. Rampaging Randy Buffalo had been chopped away at the knees. His brother had completely lost his head.
There was no doubt that the culprit was Senior Franklin. But why would he bother with Grappler? He pillaged the daily newspapers for essays and reviews, poetry and political cement. He plundered the weeklies for Dwarf droppings, snippets of tittle-tattle and literary gossip. He couldn’t be interested in the politics of the squared circle. It was a puzzle. And anyway, he hadn’t removed complete pages or even paragraphs from the magazines but contented himself with random headlines, phrases and isolated words. He wasn’t concerned with the photographs, of course, but the editorial on the back of them. He was making alphabet confetti.
When I confronted him with the crime he looked surprised.
‘Were they of any particular interest?’ he asked. He was sitting in the sofa, happily slashing the arts section of the giant Sunday Superior. The scissors flashed in his bony hand.
‘I save them,’ I said. ‘I’m collecting them.’
‘Wrestling magazines?’ He looked astonished, as if the idea that I took such an interest had never before occurred to him; as if the magazines somehow came and went like mushroom rings. ‘You’re collecting them?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘They’re mine.’
‘Did you never suppose that the agony of your adolescence might best be served by the random application of drugs, self-abuse and rock and roll?’ he said impatiently. ‘Why can’t you be a crackhead like any respectable child of your age?’
‘I study wrestling to provide myself with a totally unrealistic view of violence and its consequences,’ I said, in my own defence. ‘At the earliest opportunity, I plan to go out and hurt old ladies.’
He frowned and then honked with laughter. ‘Ah, my squidgy bumblestrop, but the game is rigged, the lottery itself is lost! These warriors of your circus world are nought but acrobats, tuppenny tumblers, valgus vagabonds!’ He chuckled to himself as he went back to work with the scissors.
‘It doesn’t make any difference,’ I said defiantly. It just wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t going to be bullied into submission by a man who didn’t know a camel choke from a chin lock.
‘But these battles are nothing but comic routines, theatrical performances, carefully scripted, doubtless rehearsed and designed for no greater purpose than to pick the pockets of noodles, numskulls, nincompoops and simpletons,’ he continued, still hoping to shame me. ‘Shatterpates, jobernowls, loony-heads and dizzards. Drivellers, babblers, sappy-straws and halfwits.’
‘I know that.’
He paused and stared at me. The scissors dangled on a crooked finger. He was waiting for his venom to take effect. ‘I do declare I can’t fathom you!’ he said, at last, and wagged his head as if he were disappointed.
‘I don’t care!’ I said fiercely. Damn his eyes! ‘I don’t care for your opinion. And I’ll thank you for keeping away from my property.’
‘Why don’t you follow a real sport?’ he demanded, with a fair degree of prickliness.
‘Because it’s not the same,’ I said. ‘I mean, when you watch a tennis match you know that the champ is going to win because he’s a better tennis player than his opponent. And because he’s the champ he’s probably a millionaire with his own sportswear company and an aftershave named after him and everything. And if he doesn’t win, well, it makes no difference because the new champ will get his own brand of sportswear and his own range of personal hygiene products to peddle. So nothing really happens. It’s a fake. It’s just millionaires playing bat and ball. But if there was an element of danger, if you knew there was the possibility of a 300-pound, pot-bellied monster in wrestling boots with his name tattooed on his forehead crashing onto the court, shredding the net, eating the ball and then beating out the champ’s brains, well, you’d have something to catch your imagination. There’d be risk. And romance. And a real sporting chance that the golden boy would get his Rolex rammed up his arse.’
‘And that’s wrestling?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And zombies and werewolves and giants and dwarves and fire-eaters and missing links and mad monks and Pacific Island cannibals and Caribbean witch doctors and tattooed ninjas and rampaging Russians and moustachioed Mongols and tumbling Turks and fighting Fijians and cartwheeling cowboys and Syrian Stranglers and masked men of mystery and caped crusaders and gladiators from the grave.’
He opened his mouth but said nothing. He sat transfixed, his skin was wax and his eyes were glass. It was a curious sensation to watch him endure his own silence.
‘So why are you cutting up Grappler?’ I demanded.
His eyes flickered as he came back to life. ‘Alas, my frumious bandersnatch!’ he barked. ‘I’m flummoxed. I’m confused. I’m shocked to the core. I’m all thrown down in a heap! I wasn’t aware that I’d trespassed so far from the pastures grown for my grazing.’ He gathered together his torn newspaper and tried to stuff it under a cushion. ‘The scissors, I confess, must have gathered a life of their own. I’m hardly aware that I’m doing it.’ He snapped the scissors together and dropped them into a jacket pocket. ‘I trust you’ll accept my apology.’
‘Have you finished with that newspaper?’ I asked.
He lifted the cushion and watched me remove the rubbish.
‘Thank you,’ he said meekly.
And that was that. He continued to shred the newspapers every day, although he never again touched the Grappler. But the mystery remained.
17
Dorothy rested for three days before she sought to ask questions about the Jesus comic books. I’d almost forgotten them. They’d been hidden away in my room as if they were copies of Frolicking Fatties. But Dorothy must have been waiting for me to study and absorb their lesson.
She found me down on my hands and knees, picking old Burger King boxes from the roots of the privet hedge. It was a brilliant morning, the air was warm and high clouds streamed from the west with an early promise of summer. The privet was packed with empty beer cans, broken polystyrene cups, cigarette cartons, burger boxes, chicken bones, desiccated dog turds and scraps of discarded underwear. I’d once found an empty leather wallet, a bunch of keys and a cucumber wrapped in polythene. We lived in an interesting neighbourhood.
‘Did you look at those comic books?’ she inquired carelessly, strolling from the house and standing to watch me work. She was wearing another Doris Day dress, banana yellow with lots of buttons, a scoop neck and pretty soft brown shoes. Her dark hair was loose and whisked her shoulders. She was dangling a satchel on her arm.
‘Yes,’ I said, turning my head to find myself brushing against her skirt. ‘Thank you.’ I stopped rummaging in the hedge, stood up and wiped my hands on my apron.
‘And did you take the time to read them?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Did you like them?’ she asked anxiously. ‘I’m afraid they’re rather too young for you.’
‘No!’ I said. ‘I found them very interesting.’
She smiled her big, pink, open smile that stretched her mouth against her teeth, squeezed her eyes and tugged at her nostrils. She gave herself to these beautiful smiles with the shamelessness of a yawning cat. They were smiles that suggested such rapture, such abandoned pleasure, that you wanted to perform handstands in an effort to make her smile again. ‘Did you learn anything?’
‘Give your money away to strangers?’ I suggested.
‘Not exactly,’ she said.
‘I’ll read them again,’ I promised.
‘Are you doing anything?’
‘No,’ I said innocently, rattling my sack of flotsam and jetsam. ‘I was trying to clean out the privet.’
She walked to the corner of the hedge and glanced up and down the street. ‘I was going out for some fresh air,’ she said, wrapping the strap of the satchel around her wrist. ‘It’s such a lovely morning.’ She paused and watched me pack down the sack with my foot. ‘Why don’t you come with me?’
‘I should be working…’ I said doubtfully.
‘I’m sure you can spare a couple of hours,’ she coaxed. ‘I’d appreciate the company. You can tell me all about yourself.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, dumping my booty beside the porch. There were windows to wash and laundry to fetch and the best of Janet’s shoes were begging for a whipping with duster and polish. ‘Perhaps Mr Marvel would like to go with you,’ I said, rather reluctantly.
‘That’s strange. That’s just what your mother suggested. But I haven’t seen him this morning.’
‘Well, I’d have to go and get changed,’ I said, plucking apologetically at the front of my filthy apron. I was easily persuaded. ‘I’d have to find a clean shirt and get washed.’
‘I’ll wait,’ she said and smiled again and looked so pleased to have me as her escort that I would have followed her anywhere.
As it turned out I followed her on a guided tour of the city’s churches. Armed with nothing more than a tourists’ map to places of worship, we took the bus to Pickle Street, crossed the open cobbled square where people had stopped in the sunlight to gossip, and plunged without pause into the gloom of St Febronia the Martyr. It was cold and very dark and filled with the smells of incense and polish with a faint yet disturbing rumour of drains.
‘Perpendicular with Classical and Gothic additions,’ she whispered, gazing up at the massive ceiling. She shivered and sighed with pleasure at the sheer weight of masonry.
Mr Romance Page 9