Millions

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

On the way home, Anthony flashed his Penguin at me and said, ‘Result. Told you. Works every time.’

  I said, ‘Are you sure it’s completely honest?’

  ‘She’s completely dead, isn’t she?’

  Of course I knew that already, but no one had ever been so biological before.

  When Dad caught up with us he said, ‘You two were great tonight. I’m going to buy you anything you want from the chippy.’

  Anthony wanted spring rolls and then chicken in black bean sauce. Somehow I wasn’t hungry. Even when Dad took me inside the chippy and showed me the menu, nothing really caught my fancy. I wasn’t hungry any more.

  When we got home, Dad and Anthony started to eat their food straight from the polystyrene trays. I went and got plates and knives and forks.

  ‘Damian, don’t bother. It’s late. We don’t want to be clearing up. Here, have some rice.’

  I just carried on setting the table.

  ‘Damian . . .’

  ‘We’ve got to do things properly. That’s the point.’

  ‘What point?’

  ‘You said we’ve got to do things properly. We’ve got to be excellent. You said. And now you’re eating out of the trays. We didn’t used to do that before.’ I was shouting now. ‘Sit at the table!’

  Dad tried to calm me down. ‘Damian, you think you’re upset, but really you’re just hungry.’

  ‘I’m not hungry. I just want us to sit at the table like a proper family. And do things right.’

  ‘I will if you eat a bit – like a proper family.’

  ‘OK, then.’

  Dad came and sat at the table and gave me some chow mein.

  Anthony said, ‘Why can’t you just act normal?’

  Dad said, ‘Things aren’t normal, are they? So how can we act normal?’ And he took one of Anthony’s spring rolls and gave it to me.

  It was horrible. It had cabbage in instead of bean sprouts. But it made me feel a bit better.

  I think it was the spring roll that stopped me sleeping properly. I kept waking up from these dreams (which I don’t want to talk about). I even got back into bed after a while to see if being comfortable made a difference, but it didn’t. As soon as it was light, I sneaked off down to the hermitage.

  When I looked inside, there was someone there – a tall, bony woman with bright blue eyes. I knew who it was right away. I said, ‘St Clare of Assisi (1194–1253).’

  She smiled and said, ‘Is right.’ She looked around. ‘I like a hermitage. Had one myself once.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Used to go and hide myself away up there. Anyone needed me, I’d send them a vision. Sort them out.’

  ‘Be good to be able to do that. I could stay here and send a vision of myself to school.’

  ‘It’s a skill not everyone has. I was unusual. I was like human television. That’s why I’m the patron saint of television. For my sins. Well, for my virtues, shall we say? You see all sorts on there now. Mind you, nothing shocks me any more. Keeps me busy, though. That’s why I like a hermitage.’

  ‘Our house seemed a bit, you know, inappropriate. Compared to St Simeon’s column or St Ursula and her 11,000 holy companions.’

  She gave a snort. ‘The 11,000 holy companions are a mistake in the translation. I wouldn’t let them keep you awake at night. There were only ever eleven of them, if the truth be told.’

  ‘But there are thousands of people up there with you?’

  ‘Tens of thousands. Dozens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Millions even.’

  ‘Only I did wonder if you’d ever come across a St Maureen?’

  She thought for a while. But the answer was no. Then again, as she said, it is infinite up there. ‘Absolutely infinite. In my Father’s house are many mansions. John, Chapter 14 .’

  I said, ‘Verse 2.’

  She said, ‘Is right.’ And then she was gone.

  Given the choice, I wouldn’t have picked St Clare for my first vision. But obviously she’s a good saint and she was very interesting to talk to. And any kind of vision is exciting. So, to be philosophical about it, it made me happy.

  5

  One of the big changes that has happened to women since the Middle Ages is skin care. St Clare had very dry skin, with little red veins in her cheeks. My mum used to wear a tinted moisturizer. It nourished her skin and it provided a good, light base for make-up. She worked on the Clinique counter in Kendal’s, in Manchester. Part of her job was to look more beautiful than normal mothers. She used to wait for us at the school gates. When we got home she used to take the moisturizer off with a piece of cotton wool. She used to call it ‘peeling her face’. Anyway, one day she wasn’t at the school gates at Home Time. We waited and waited and Mrs Deus, the secretary, phoned one of the normal mothers, who came and took us back to her house instead. After a while, Dad came to collect us and he kept saying thank you and also, ‘She’s in the best place.’

  We went with Dad to the best place and, to be honest, I couldn’t see what was good about it. Mum was not allowed out of bed. The telly was on all the time and everyone looked miserable. Mum stayed there for weeks and weeks and she looked more miserable every time we saw her. Her skin went grey and dry like St Clare’s. She even had the little veins in her cheeks. In fact that’s where I first became interested in saints. There was a lot of talk about saints at the time. Some of the doctors were saints. Some of the nurses were angels. St Rita – patron saint of wives – she was mentioned a lot. St Joseph – patron saint of the chronically ill – there was a card with him on it stuck to the bedstead. And our school at the time was ‘All Saints Primary’, which was helpful.

  When the three of us were at home, on our own, I used to look them up on Google. That’s how I found totallysaints.com. It was good to read about all the miracles they did and to think that things did not always turn out the way you expected. And then one day someone said she’d gone to a better place. Which only went to show that the best place couldn’t have been the best place after all, not if there was somewhere better. No one ever took us to the better place, though, and when we made inquiries, no one was very geographical about it. They just said, ‘She’s gone to a better place and now you have to be really, really, good boys for your dad.’ They seemed to be hinting that he might go off to the better place himself if we weren’t careful. So we were careful. Always. All the time.

  I definitely remember someone saying we would see her again in the better place. So when the talk of Cromarty Close started I thought, This must be the better place. Otherwise, why go there? The minute I saw those pointy roofs I knew I’d made a mistake. It was good but not that good.

  It turned out that when people were talking about the better place, they were just being metaphorical.

  6

  The next day, Dad stopped me on the way out to school. ‘You remember the trip you had the letter about? It’s today.’

  ‘Oh. But won’t we be too late?’ When we went to Llangollen with All Saints Primary we had to be there at half past seven.

  ‘No, no. It’s not the whole class. It’s just you and me. Come on, jump in.’

  So I got in the car and off we went. I don’t usually ride in the front passenger seat, but because it was just me and Dad I did that day. It was good. He gave me a little photocopied map with a yellow highlighter ring drawn round one of the roads. He said, ‘Keep that handy till I need it.’ It all seemed a bit unusual, but before I could ask him a question, he said, ‘Here. Look what I found. We haven’t listened to this for ages,’ and he put on a tape of Martin Jarvis reading Just William. It was really funny – the one about the baby with lumbago. I laughed so much that I didn’t notice till we got there that Dad wasn’t listening. Still, he was going somewhere he’d never been before, so I imagine he was concentrating on directions.

  We parked outside a big old house in a wide, curvy road at the edge of a park.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s just a house.’

&n
bsp; We were at the door. There was a brass name-plate.

  ‘Why’s it called Huskisson House? Are the people called Huskisson?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know the people.’

  ‘Then what are we doing here?’ I started to get one of my panics. I said, ‘I really have been trying to be good, you know.’

  ‘I know. And you are good. Very good. Excellent. I want them to see how excellent you are.’

  We went into a room with a wicker chair. There was a pile of magazines on the table – Scottish Caravanner was the most interesting-looking one. A woman with long straight hair and long straight earrings came and asked us to follow her. I realized when we got to the corridor that I’d accidentally brought the magazine with me. I didn’t want them to think I was stealing it, so I went to replace it. When I got back out into the corridor, there was no one there. I was under a great temptation to just walk out of the main entrance and run away, but then Dad looked out of one of the doors and called me in.

  When I went into the room, the woman with the long earrings was saying, ‘And he’s been self-harming?’

  ‘Well, he’s got some scratches.’

  ‘Shall we take a look, then? Damian, would you mind taking your shirt off.’

  I took my shirt off and she looked at my back and I looked at this big sad mask she had on the wall. I think it was African.

  She said, ‘Not very deep but lots of them. What did he do them with?’

  Dad looked at me.

  I said truthfully, ‘Holly.’

  ‘So you did this yourself ?’

  ‘Well . . . I put the holly in my shirt.’

  Dad said, ‘Why?’

  But before I could explain she raised a finger and said, ‘I want to avoid anything confrontational.’ She asked me lots more questions. She asked me how I got to sleep at night. If I had bad dreams at all. The strangest one was, ‘Do you see things that aren’t there?’

  ‘If you can see something, then it’s there, isn’t it? How can it not be there if you can see it?’

  ‘We’ll come back to that,’ she said with a big, bright smile. Then she took one of her earrings out and started to fiddle with it. ‘I’m going to say a few words and I’d like you to tell me the first word that my word puts into your head. Do you think you could do that for me?’

  It didn’t sound very difficult.

  ‘All right, then. And the first word is little.’

  ‘Flower.’

  ‘OK.’ She looked a bit puzzled and she wrote something down, saying, ‘Interesting. Unusual.’

  I said, ‘Like the Little Flower, you know.’

  ‘No need to explain. Just the first word you think of. The next word is cake.’

  ‘Soap.’

  ‘Very good. Bell.’

  ‘Leper.’

  She frowned and said, ‘Oh’, but then she said, ‘Kay’ a bit later.

  ‘Shirt.’

  ‘Hair.’

  She didn’t say OK this time. She said, ‘Excuse me?’

  Dad said, ‘Hair shirt, you know, like . . .’

  She flapped her hand at him but kept looking at me. ‘Fly,’ she said.

  I said, ‘Joseph of Copertino (1603–63).’ I could see this didn’t mean anything to her, so I went on, ‘He was a monk. He was supposed to be not right in the head, but he could levitate. When they were building the church at Grottella he used to fly up to the roof to help the workmen. I know it sounds mad, but all sorts of people saw him, including the famous cynic Voltaire and the great mathematician Leibniz. It’s illuminating to think of Leibniz – one of the greatest minds in history – being awestruck by a supposed simpleton.’

  I think she was impressed, because she dropped her earring. Also she didn’t ask me any more words. That one must have just hit the spot.

  Dad said, ‘I don’t know where he gets it.’

  I said, ‘Totallysaints.com. It has great links and you can search for saints by what they’re patron of. Say you wanted to know who was the patron saint of African masks . . .’

  She said, ‘I don’t. It’s not mine.’ And closed her notebook, picked her earring up and put it back in.

  On the way to school, I could see Dad was worried about something, so I decided to make conversation. I said, ‘It would probably be one of the martyrs of Uganda. They’re the most popular African saints. The main one was beheaded, but the rest were—’

  ‘Damian, will you please, for once, shut up about saints. In fact, not for once, for good. OK? It’s not . . . natural. It’s not excellent. OK?’

  ‘What!’ I was astounded that he could say something like that. ‘How can they not be excellent? That’s the whole point of them. The whole point is—’

  ‘Damian, I’m warning you.’

  I decided to forbear. I changed the subject to Scottish caravans and camper vans. There are two different sorts of caravan – tourers and statics. Statics don’t move. Tourers have names like Marauder and Ambassador and Highwayman. ‘Why, though? I mean, you can’t really see a highwayman driving round in a camper van, can you? Or an ambassador. Unless he was the ambassador of a very, very small country.’

  Dad looked like he wasn’t really interested, but he must have been quite interested in these observations because he did stop and buy me a king-size Mars bar. ‘Here, get your choppers round that,’ he said.

  At Home Time I tried to describe it all to Anthony. ‘I kept trying to be good,’ I said, ‘but I couldn’t figure out what they wanted.’

  Anthony said, ‘They think you’re bonkers.’

  I’d never thought of that. But the thing is, so what? They thought Joseph of Copertino was bonkers and he could fly. He could even fly away if he wanted to. Miles away.

  It was getting dark when we got back to ours. The Latter-day Saints passed us on their bikes. They all had reflective strips on their helmets. They glowed like little haloes. When we went to bed, I kept thinking about them and how good it would be if they were saints literally. But then I started to worry about what the latter-day bit meant.

  Dad was addicted to worldly knowledge. In our old house he belonged to a pub-quiz team called ‘The Know-Alls’. They always won. He used to wake us up and say, ‘Which sport do you win by going backwards?’ and so on. So I decided to go and ask him what latter-day meant. I admit it was three o’clock in the morning, but I was still surprised when he said, ‘I don’t know, do I?’ and rolled over and went to sleep. I climbed in next to him. He doesn’t have the general knowledge he once had.

  In the end, I couldn’t get back to sleep. I decided to go and Google something – the Mormons. I eventually found latterdaysaints.org, which told me all I needed to know. The Latter-day Saints or Mormons were founded in New York in 1827 by a man called Joseph Smith. An angel called Moroni gave him a set of gold tablets covered in strange writing. He found that if he wore a special pair of spectacles he could read the writing and that it told the story of how the lost tribe of Israel went to live in America in 600 BC. The angel took the gold plates and the spectacles back when Mr Smith had finished reading. It was all a bit literal.

  It was still dark, but I decided to put my uniform on and go down to the hermitage. As soon as I stepped outside, I changed my mind. It was freezing, like stepping into a cold shower when you think it’s warm. I suddenly realized what a great idea bed was. Unfortunately, the front door had closed behind me and I couldn’t get back in.

  It wasn’t any warmer in the hermitage. I began to regret putting windows in. I huddled in the corner and tried to take my mind off the cold by putting some of the tinted moisturizer on the back of my hand. It wasn’t the colour of her skin but it was the colour that her skin was, if you see what I mean. Then I tried to meditate on the difficulties of being good. You think you’re being good, then it turns out you’re being a problem or not natural. Then I started to think about the saints and how Dad didn’t seem to like them any more and maybe they weren’t all they were cracked up to be and it was just all
a big misunderstanding. Then I thought that these doubts were just another temptation, so I tried to say a prayer, but all I could think of to say was, ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. My Mum is Dead. Amen.’

  Even that little prayer took me about five minutes to say because my teeth kept chattering. God must have heard me, though, because he answered it. And you know what? He did the same thing as everyone else. He gave me something.

  Just as I finished the prayer a train went past. A huge gust of oily air burst into the hermitage, making all the flaps flap. I looked out. The train had no windows. It was just a huge block of night on wheels, screaming past the holly bushes.

  As I watched, a little scrap of darkness seemed to get free of the big darkness and come rolling through the air towards me. It crashed into the front end of the hermitage, smashing the boxes flat and letting even more cold air in. It squatted on the flattened cardboard like a big leathery toad.

  I went over and touched it. It was a bag. It had come apart along the zip and its insides were spilling out. And its insides were money. It wasn’t a vision or a visitation as such. I suppose you could call it a sign. A big loud sign. It was money. Banknotes. Piles and piles of them. Thousands and thousands of pounds. Millions, even.

  7

  For the record, this wasn’t the first time in history that money fell down out of the sky. For instance, in Turkey, in the second century, if a girl was getting married her father had to give the husband some money called a dowry. There were three girls who just didn’t have any money, so their father was going to sell their honour, which you could do in those days. Anyway, one night St Nicholas of Myra climbed up on the roof, dropped three bags of money down the chimney – one for each girl – and so saved their honour. He started being saintly when very young. For instance, he refused to breastfeed every Friday because he was fasting. He’s the patron saint of sailors, pawnbrokers, unmarried girls, children (because of a bizarre incident with some boys who were trapped in a pickle barrel) and people who sell perfume. Now he’s Santa Claus as well. He’s probably the most successful saint.