In brief: Was Jesus a con-man?
Seems to me a good con has to be (1) easy to set up, (2) simple in design so that there’s as little as possible that can go wrong and give the game away, (3) that it’s quick in yielding results, and (4) that it’s hard to detect.
If the Loaves and Fishes a con:
+ It didn’t yield anything except twelve and/or seven basketsful of leftovers that must have already started ponging badly in the hot sun, and that the conman and his gang had to pick up off the ground after the punters had gone home.
Whoever heard of a conman who stayed around to pick up rotting litter after the show?
+ It was far from simple in design or organization. For example, where would you hide the loaves and fishes to feed five thousand hungry people when you were stuck in the middle of nowhere? How would you cart all the stuff there unnoticed, when transport was by man or donkey power? How would you keep all that fish from going off without freezers to keep it in? And how could you know beforehand how many people would turn up and so be sure you had enough for all?
Anybody who tried a dodge like that in the middle of nowhere would have to be an idiot. And anybody taken in by it would have to be a jerk. Was Jesus an idiot? Were all his fans jerks?
Or is the story a fraud? And does it matter? Julie doesn’t think it does. So how can she believe in something that’s supposed to be historically true while thinking that it probably never happened?
Selah.
That’s as far as I got before I gave up. More questions at the end than when I started. I quite enjoyed it, but I’m not sure it did anything for me.
†
The local snooker hall was no prettier than an old lag at the best of times. That morning, a couple of blacked-out windows had been opened, allowing in thin daylight that made the neons above the tables look like they couldn’t get it on for yawning, and letting out too little of the stale stink of cold fag. Tom’s nose twitched.
Burleigh the bouncer was there, as usual, banging away as if a snooker table was a pinball machine. At another table, In-off Jones was playing a spotty-faced youth. Tom didn’t know the name. Thirteen? World champion before fourteen. Didn’t anyone ever ask why he wasn’t in school? He was already three up and it looked like In-off wouldn’t visit the table.
None of these any use. But lounging against the wall as far from the grey stream of daylight as he could get, a sour smirk on his designer-stubble face, was Tom’s lucky strike.
He sidled up with suitably nonchalant deference so as not to spook his quarry.
‘Morning, Sharkey,’ he muttered in the required bored and offhand manner.
‘It is?’ Sharkey said, flat as last week’s beer.
‘Early for you.’
‘Late, more like.’
‘All-night job, was it?’
Sharkey sniffed. ‘Job? Don’t know about no job.’
Tom chuckled. ‘Bird, I mean, Sharkey. Nothing nasty.’
Sharkey gave Tom an appraising glance. ‘Never talk sex before the pubs open. Bad for the heart.’
‘First I knew you had one.’
Sharkey spat at his feet. ‘Jokes is even worse. Give me violent headaches. Specially bad ones.’
‘No sex, no jokes! What’s left to talk about?’
Sharkey’s body showed signs of coming alive. ‘Honest, Tommy, I wish you wouldn’t. Does terrible things to my reputation just bein seen with you.’
‘In here! Come on, Sharkey! Bouncer can’t remember where his backside is when he wants to wipe it, never mind who he’s seen together. In-off is one of your own. That spotty kid has cue balls for eyes. Why be anti-social?’
‘Pimpin for the super is it?’
‘You’re not to his taste, Sharkey, you’ll be happy to know. Anyway, I’m not on duty, am I?’
‘Not on duty! When are you lot ever off? Listen, Tommy, I’ll tell you. It give me a horrible shock when I see you geared in blue. You was always all right at school. A bit on the swatty side, I admit, but a knockout at the footer and generally speakin on the right side. I quite liked you then. But when you come out in blue I thought, my God, you can’t trust nobody no more if a nice straight guy like Tommy goes and does the dirty. So do us a favour, eh?’
‘Just what I am doing.’ Tom turned his back to the room and spoke with befitting secrecy. ‘There’s some damage on hand.’
‘Oh, yes? Your bike had its tyres let down?’
Tom waited a tolerant pause. ‘Listen, Sharkey, I’m putting myself on the line to help you a bit. Okay?’
Sharkey stuck a greasy-nailed finger into his ear and wobbled it about. ‘Am I hearin right? You’re helpin me?’
‘This is very nasty damage I’m talking about, Sharkey. And the super has you down for the villain. He’s thinking of having a fatherly chat.’
‘Need to send more than you to bring me in.’
‘I told you, I’m off duty. Here to help. In my own time. Don’t know where you are, do I? Haven’t seen you for days.’
‘Your boss wants me, and you come warnin me off. What do you want, Tommy?’
‘Last night a young bloke was hung on a cross by person or persons unknown.’
Sharkey gave a noiseless whistle. ‘Very nasty!’
Tom nodded. ‘As I said. He was found this morning but disappeared before we got to him.’
‘I can see why your boss might be a touch off colour.’
‘And why he’s acting supersonic.’
Sharkey tutted. ‘A supersonic super! Very good, Tommy. You’re comin on.’
‘And you’ll be coming in, Sharkey, unless a few answers are found smartish. Like who did it.’
‘Not me, that’s for sure. I’m a Catholic. I wouldn’t go round crucifying people, for God’s sake!’
‘Didn’t know you were religious.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You just said you’re Catholic.’
‘That don’t mean I’m religious, though, do it? I mean, I’m not one of them fanatics, always prayin and goin on about God and bein saved. That’s obscene.’
‘But you go to mass and make your confession and get forgiven and all that caper?’
‘Now and then. Not a lot, but enough.’
‘Well, how much is enough?’
Sharkey shifted uneasily. ‘Enough, that’s all! How the hell do I know, I’m not a priest. And I’m no saint, neither, I know that. I go when I feel like it and that’s enough for me.’
‘But you believe in it, all that about God and Christ?’
‘You have to believe in somethin, don’t you? Any idiot knows that. Anyway, I was brought up that way. All my family goes. Even my old man goes a couple of times a year so there must be somethin in it cos he don’t believe nothin till it stands up and hits him.’
‘Pity he doesn’t go a bit more often. Might have kept him out of the nick.’
‘Yeah, well, him bein in the nick doesn’t have nothin to do with God. That was your lot did that.’
‘What, putting him away because he couldn’t resist climbing through other people’s windows and carting off a few items of their property? Thou shalt not steal. Isn’t that what it says?’
‘He was out of a job and doin the best he could for the family. Not that a rozzer like you would understand family loyalty. You’d shop your own grandmother if it helped your record.’
‘That’s a bit unfair, Sharkey, seeing I’m standing here trying to help you so you don’t get any aggro for something you didn’t do.’
‘Sure you are, Tommy, and I’m still waitin to hear what you’re gettin out of it.’
‘Enlightened self-interest, Sharkey. That’s what keeps the world turning, didn’t your dad tell you? You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. I’m tipping you the wink about my super having the hots for you. If I can tell him some interesting news, like I’ve got a lead on the villains, I reckon I can hold him off for today while he checks it out. That’ll give you time to use your considerable powers of
persuasion among your friends and come up with a whisper. Somebody has to know something. Shouldn’t be too hard for you to give us a pointer that I can pass on to my guv. The culprit or culprits get collared and you get left alone. I get in good with the super, and that’ll do me for now.’
‘Very neat,’ Sharkey said with undisguised distaste. ‘You’ll make nice pork.’
‘Thanks for the compliment.’
‘Any time.’
Tom sighed. ‘So don’t bother. Let the super talk to you himself. I don’t care. You’re clean, you know that. You can prove you were somewhere else at the time in question. Why should you worry?’
Sharkey took a deep breath. ‘Yeah, yeah.’
‘’Course, you’ll be held on suspicion for a day or two. Till we check out your alibi. And while the super is concentrating on you and your mates, whoever strung the kid up will be spoiling the scent.’
Sharkey pushed himself from the wall and took an agitated couple of steps away and back again. ‘All right, all right!’ he said. ‘I don’t like what happened no more than you. But I don’t like bein fitted up neither. Which is what this is. I know what you’re up to, Tommy, and I tell you, it’s worse than anythin I ever do. Next thing, if I don’t do what you want, you’ll plant something evil as evidence against me.’
Tom looked suitably aggrieved. ‘Come on, Sharkey, you’ve got me all wrong! I’d never do a thing like that!’
‘Not right this minute, you wouldn’t. Not this time. But you will, one day when you want a villain bad enough you’ll do it. And you’ll tell yourself, what the hell, he’s a villain anyway; if he didn’t do this he did some other job we didn’t catch him for, so what’s the odds. That’s your sort of thinkin, Tommy. You always did act innocent, even at school, but underneath you’re as evil-minded as all your mob.’
Tom looked Sharkey eye to eye, heated himself now. ‘It won’t happen, I tell you!’ he said through his anger.
Sharkey grinned his bright teeth.
Tom looked away first. The room was unchanged from a few moments ago, the click of colliding balls echoing as in a dismal cave. He hitched his jeans and composed himself.
‘Up to you,’ he said, his voice still not relaxed, and shrugged, thinking he had lost.
But Sharkey spat and moved towards an empty table. He picked up a white ball from the baize and bowled it with a twist of his wrist that sent it bouncing off the opposite cushion, another and another, before returning precisely to his waiting fist.
‘The car park behind Hill Pauls at half-one,’ he said.
Tom couldn’t help smiling. ‘I knew you’d see sense.’
Sharkey sent the ball careering round the table again.
‘Piss off,’ he said. ‘You bog the place up.’
INTERCUT: The Swedish lake in longshot, as before. Hold the scene: the dying sun’s rays glancing on hilltops, the hut in dusk-time shadow with the white ribbon of smoke rising, the little boat utterly still on the water. Five seconds. Then pull a steady, unhurried, soft-focus zoom towards the boat and its occupant.
‘Now it’s my turn,’ Julie said as they walked back to her car.
‘For what?’
‘Research. You’ve been investigating me. Now it’s my turn to investigate you.’
The hang-glider came swooping to earth a hundred metres ahead of them, the pilot planting his feet neatly on the ground in a fine judgement of speed and height and moment of stall.
‘It’s all very well,’ Julie said, ‘being superior and snooty about religion and other people’s beliefs—’
‘I’m not!’
‘Yes, you are. But are you really telling me you’ve never wondered about God?’
‘Naturally. Doesn’t everybody?’
‘All right then, not just wondered but—I don’t know— experienced anything?’
Nik gave her an uneasy side-glance. ‘What sort of thing?’
They strolled past the hang-glider, now again a lifeless kit of spars and stretched sailcloth which the pilot was dismantling for transport in a bag you’d have thought far too small to hold a flying machine that could carry a man into the air.
‘I don’t know,’ Julie said. ‘Something that made you sure, even for just a minute, that there’s more to all this—’ she waved a hand at the view— ‘than some sort of meaningless accident with meaningless ingredients inside the meaningless stewpot of a meaningless universe.’
Nik smiled at her. ‘Do you always talk like that or only on Sundays?’
Julie grinned back. ‘Depends on the company I keep.’
They walked a few paces in silence.
‘Yes,’ Nik said, forcing himself. ‘Something happened once.’
When he didn’t go on, Julie said, ‘Are you going to tell me or leave me in suspense?’
‘I haven’t told anybody before.’
‘If you don’t want to—’
‘No, it’s not that. Not with you, anyway.’
‘Was it embarrassing?’
Nik laughed. ‘Not embarrassing. A bit silly maybe.’
It was last summer. Grandad took me to Sweden. I live with my grandad, did I tell you? He was in the merchant navy for a long time and made friends with some Swedes then. That was quite a long time ago but they’ve kept in touch. Christmas cards, a letter now and then.
When he retired last year he decided he’d have a holiday, go to Sweden, and look up his old mates. He took me with him for company, and because he thought it would do me good. He’s always going on about me seeing more of life instead of getting it out of books. He’s not a big reader, isn’t Grandad. Not a reader at all, as a matter of fact. For him, books are a last resort.
Anyway, he took me with him and I enjoyed myself most of the time. We ended up in northern Sweden, not far from the Arctic Circle, and Grandad met his old mates, three of them, and they all got high on the excitement of being together again.
‘Come to the forest,’ they said, which apparently is the big thing with Swedes when they want to let their hair down and have a good time and be specially friendly. So they bought a car-load of food and booze and drove us off for miles into the country to a little wooden house, more a hut really, all by itself in a field beside a lake surrounded by hills.
That was quite interesting because the cottage had been the farmhouse where one of the men had been born and where his father had been born and where his parents had lived all their lives. The place was pretty well unchanged. There were only two rooms. The biggest had an open fire with a huge brick oven behind that you could sleep on top of in winter to keep warm. There was no electricity and no running water. And an outside dry lav that stank. We had to use Gaz lamps and carry water in plastic containers from a modern house a quarter of an hour’s walk away.
We camped there for four days. Most of the time the men spent sitting around remembering the old days, telling stories about life on the rolling road in tramp steamers and grumbling about how dreadful it all is now with modern tankers and ships that just about sail themselves automatically and crews that are pampered and don’t know anything about real seamanship.
I got fed up with that fairly soon. There was a small rowing boat belonging to the house so I started going off in that and exploring the lake and the shore around it. And 1 would land somewhere and walk through the forest. The Swedes have a law that allows you to go where you like because the land is supposed to be for everybody. So you don’t have to worry about trespassing or tetchy farmers like you have to here. There was masses of wildlife to see as well.
Well, one evening I was walking through a wood when I saw a bull elk. It came looming out of the trees into a clearing. I nearly panicked. I’d no idea they’re so big. So strong and bulky. They’ve huge flattened antlers, really amazing in size, that grow out of their heads like the branches of a tree and make them look top heavy. And they’ve overpowering hind quarters that squash the breath out of you just to look at. Fearsome. But magnificent. Lordly. They really are. Proud. Regal
. I could see why people use words like that.
He mesmerized me. I couldn’t move, just stood there staring at him and feeling like an idiot. He looked me up and down and sniffed and then stalked off quite slowly as if I was beneath contempt.
When he was gone I felt so weak I had to sit down till I was calm and got my strength back again. I felt like I’d had a shock. I was shaking all over, my heart was beating fast, I was panting, the bones had gone out of my legs, and I couldn’t think at all, never mind think straight. And all the time I was grinning inanely. If anybody had seen me they’d have thought I was mad.
As soon as I recovered, all I wanted to do was get back to the cottage and tell Grandad what I’d seen. But when I arrived they were already three sheets to the wind, as Grandad says, and at the stage of laughing loudly and singing bawdy seamen’s songs in raucous voices. That made me spitting angry. I was desperate to tell Grandad about the elk and there he was, that stupid with booze he couldn’t have understood even if he’d have listened.
There was nowhere I could get away from them in the cottage. And nobody else for miles, except the local farmer and his family where we got the water, but they hardly spoke any English even if I’d felt like going to them, which I didn’t. I didn’t fancy wandering about in the forest again either. I did think of sitting like a spare part in the car listening to music on the radio till they were all so blotto they collapsed. But they might have taken it into their heads to drive off somewhere, and I’d have been trapped with them, which didn’t appeal at all. The only thing left was to take the boat out on the lake. At least I’d be well away from them, and I thought a good stiff row might do me good.
So I ran down the field and pushed off in the boat and rowed like crazy up and down the lake till I was drenched in sweat and was choking for breath and could hardly see for blood pumping in my eyes and my arms couldn’t pull another stroke. I felt like those guys look at the end of the boat race every year, the ones who lose. You know—the way their bodies slump over their oars and their faces are twisted in agony and they’re gasping. And somehow I felt I’d failed too.
I sat like that, letting the boat drift in the middle of the lake till I got my breath back and my muscles stopped snapping like overstretched elastic, and my mind settled down to being as normal as it ever is, and my ears stopped popping, and my eyes were seeing properly again.
Now I Know Page 9