The Blasphemer

by Nigel Farndale

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ALTHOUGH THEY HAD TALKED ON THE PHONE SEVERAL TIMES, Daniel had not had a chance to meet his friend Bruce Golding face to face since the crash. When he did, in the County Arms, a pub equidistant from their two houses, he did not recognize him. He had known Bruce – a rugby-playing hospital consultant – since university, but a four-week beard and a bulky leather jacket had rendered him invisible. It was as if light was flowing around him and carrying on, like water around a rock in a stream. Daniel scanned the pub a second time and when Bruce, standing at the bar a few yards away, gave a small wave, he slammed into focus.

  ‘What the fuck has happened to your face?’ Daniel said with a snort of laughter as he strode over and gave his friend a handshake that turned into a hug.

  ‘Like it?’ Bruce asked, scratching under his chin.

  ‘You look like the Yorkshire Ripper.’

  Bruce was a heavily built man with thick wrists and an untidy tangle of hair. To friends and colleagues he was known as the Bear. ‘Well, my new tenant likes it. Did I mention that I have a new … ?’

  ‘Once or twice.’

  ‘I tell you he was an actor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that he’s twenty-two?’

  Daniel nodded. ‘How’s that going?’

  ‘He hasn’t slapped my face yet.’

  ‘Probably afraid to touch that beard. Doesn’t it scare the patients?’

  ‘Haven’t had any, you know, complaints. Not that I …’ Bruce stroked his beard again, more defensively this time. ‘Anyway, it’s just an experiment.’

  When they were together it was usually assumed that Daniel, not Bruce, was the gay one. It wasn’t that Daniel was effete necessarily, it was more that Bruce looked and sounded like the rugby player he was. The bridge of his nose was flat where it had been broken. His shoulders were broad, his thighs were stalwart. There was nothing gathered or defensive or apologetic about him. When he sat down it was solidly, knees apart. Women adored him.

  ‘You look more like Captain Birdseye,’ Daniel said, brushing the beard with the back of his fingers. ‘You’ve gone grey.’

  ‘It’s called salt and pepper,’ Bruce corrected. ‘Anyway. Piss off. What you drinking?’

  ‘Nah, I’ll get them in. What’s that?’ Daniel nodded at Bruce’s half-empty pint glass.

  ‘Bitter.’ Bruce tucked his hair behind his ear. ‘Not sure what it’s called. Old Tosser or something.’

  The words ‘Old Tosser’ echoed in Daniel’s head. Where had they come from? His friend could do better than that. They were being stilted with one another; trying too hard to feel relaxed in each other’s company. Something had come between them. He caught the barman’s eye, pointed at Bruce’s pint and held up two fingers.

  ‘So how, urm, how is, you know, everyone?’ Bruce said. ‘Morticia OK?’

  ‘Nancy is fine.’

  ‘She still carry a knuckleduster in her handbag?’

  Daniel smiled and handed over a note as the barman placed two pints on the bar. He took a sip from his, leaving a moustache of white foam on his top lip. ‘Well, when I say fine, I mean as fine as can be expected. She was badly shaken by it all. She’s seeing some charlatan counsellor. I sometimes catch her crying.’

  ‘Those aren’t tears, they’re leaks of battery acid from her brain.’

  ‘How about you, my ursine friend? They haven’t struck you off yet?’

  ‘Nope. They can’t prove a thing … And how’s my little goddaughter?’

  ‘Fine … Good.’ Daniel paused. ‘She asked me where babies come from the other day.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘That the stork brings them.’

  Bruce frowned. ‘You said that?’

  ‘And then she said. “Yeah, but who fucks the stork?” ’

  ‘What!’

  ‘It’s a joke, Bear.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Bruce had a sip of beer and noticed his friend’s darkly circled eyes. ‘Anyway, how are you? You look like shit, and I’m not just saying that.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Taking any exercise?’

  ‘Haven’t been able to swim since the crash. Sounds nuts, but I can’t put my head underwater.’

  ‘You mentioned headaches on the phone.’ Bruce sounded too nonchalant.

  Daniel nodded and rubbed a two-inch square of hair that had turned white since the crash, the spot where he had hit the seat in front. ‘They come and go. Quite painful at times, like a migraine. This helps …’ He took another sip.

  ‘Are you, urm, taking anything?’

  A shake of the head. ‘Just fistfuls of Nurofen.’

  Daniel pocketed his change, Bruce collected a half-eaten packet of cheese and onion crisps and the two walked across a sawdust-sprinkled wooden floor to a brass-topped table. Though it was still early December, the Christmas decorations looked tired: windows sprayed with fake snow, red and green tinsel dangling from framed pictures of hunting scenes, a menu on a blackboard advising patrons to book their Christmas parties early. It had been up since October.

  ‘Actually,’ Daniel said, pulling up his chair, ‘I’ve been feeling pretty weird, to be honest.’

  ‘Weird how?’

  ‘Thirsty. Can’t stop drinking.’

  ‘What colour is your pee?’

  Daniel found his friend’s bedside vocabulary comforting: Bruce always said pee, never piss, tummy, never belly, and all actions were described as popping – ‘pop up on to the bed’, ‘pop your underpants down and cough’, ‘if you wouldn’t mind popping your bra off. I need to do a UBE.’ (It stood for Unnecessary Breast Examination, a medical student joke.) ‘Purple,’ he said.

  ‘Good. Purple is normal for a man your age.’

  ‘I’m not dehydrated or anything, it’s more …’ Daniel searched for the right word. ‘I feel trippy.’

  ‘Hearing colours and seeing noises trippy?’

  ‘Not quite. It’s more … There are smells. I keep smelling cake. And I have a tingling sensation.’ He leaned over and held the tip of his finger to the space between Bruce’s eyes, without touching the skin. ‘You feel that?’

  Bruce said, ‘Mm, it tickles.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m feeling that all the time, right across here.’ He ran his fingers across his own brow.

  ‘That prescription I gave you. The diazepam. You been taking it?’

  ‘Only on the flight out to Ecuador. Not since. Why?’

  ‘It can make you delusional.’

  ‘Thanks for telling me.’

  ‘Don’t you ever read warnings?’

  ‘Does anyone?’

  ‘Well, anyway, it can.’

  ‘No, it’s more like dizziness. Room spins.’

  ‘What about the crash? You bumped your head …’ Daniel rubbed his brow and nodded.

  ‘Maybe you should come in for some, you know, tests. Would you like me to arrange some?’

  ‘Tests?’

  ‘Routine stuff. Safe side. Did they give you a CAT scan?’

  Daniel touched the side of his head again, as if contemplating the prospect. ‘Should they have?’

  ‘Not necessarily. They wouldn’t unless …’ Bruce’s tone had changed. ‘How you fixed for the rest of this week? I can book you in for an MRI. I’ll be in the hospital tomorrow afternoon if you can …’

  ‘Bear!’ Daniel was laughing. ‘You’re starting to freak me out!’

  Bruce ripped the cellophane off a packet of Marlboro, tapped a cigarette out and stared at it. ‘They can’t stop you looking at cigarettes in pubs,’ he said. ‘I should stop anyway. I wake up in the morning aching from arse to elbow. Coughed up something black the other day. Not well. Much worse than you.’

  ‘You’re so competitive.’

  ‘No, really, I’m falling apart.’

  ‘I’ll stand outside with you if you’re desperate for a smoke.’ Bruce shook his head. The wounded martyr. ‘Are you getting compensation?’

 
‘Someone mentioned it but, to be honest, I don’t want to go there.’

  ‘May as well.’

  ‘Nah, I’d rather forget it. You know, move on.’

  ‘Look, come to the hospital for your own peace of mind. It’ll take an hour and a half, tops.’ He drained his glass and put it down next to the full one that Daniel had bought him. ‘Apart from the headaches and the smells, how you been? It’s normal to feel a bit down, you know, for a few weeks … afterwards.’

  ‘Not really down. The opposite. I keep …’ Daniel shook his head and grinned. ‘I keep smiling unexpectedly. I only know I’m doing it by the look on people’s faces. I went back into work the other day and some of my students stared at me like I was mental or something. I feel sort of …’ He took another sip. ‘Safe ... I drove across three lanes on the motorway the other day without indicating. Didn’t think about it. Wasn’t looking.’

  There was a metallic chatter as a slot machine paid out dozens of coins. Both men turned to look at it, momentarily lost in their own thoughts.

  ‘I’m sure it’s a temporary thing,’ Bruce said.

  ‘You reckon? I keep thinking about ... I saw something … Since the crash nothing has been quite real, as if I’m living in a shadow, waiting for the sunlight to return.’

  ‘What was it you saw?’

  A background murmur from the other tables – football, credit crunch, more football – filled a long silence between the two men. Daniel tried to get the word out. ‘I saw …’ He closed his eyes and grimaced. He couldn’t say it. ‘I ... I don’t know that it was ... I thought I …’ He imagined Bruce laughing if he told him. Why wouldn’t he laugh? It was laughable. ‘It doesn’t matter. The point is …’ Daniel’s shoulders started heaving.

  ‘I know, it’s all right.’ Bruce put a big paw on his friend’s shoulder. ‘You’ve had a tough time.’

  A man playing darts stopped mid-aim and stared at them.

  ‘You don’t know, Bear. There’s something I haven’t told you.’ He sniffed. ‘Haven’t told anyone.’

  ‘Finally. You’re coming out.’

  ‘The papers were full of what a hero I was, rescuing the others and all that but … The truth is …’ He rubbed the back of his neck. ‘I panicked. The cabin was filling with water and I panicked.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that? I’d have shat myself.’

  Daniel reached for one of Bruce’s cigarettes and began tapping it against the table. ‘There was one guy, one of the passengers, who left his wife. Climbed over her to save himself. Left her down there to drown. Deserted her. He was a deserter.’

  Bruce fell silent as he reflected upon this. He took a sip of beer and wiped his mouth. ‘But he came back for her, right?’

  ‘Yes but …’ A fat tear was rolling down Daniel’s cheek.

  ‘Mate, what he did was normal. The survival mechanism is …’

  ‘You don’t understand. He left her there.’

  ‘But he didn’t leave her there to drown, right? He went up for air then came back for her – is that so awful?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘People have to learn not to blame themselves. There have been cases documented of mothers escaping from planes and then realizing that they left their children on board. They’d seen a gap and gone for it.’

  ‘This was different, he could have, I mean, others didn’t get out. But … He put his hand on her face like this …’ Daniel demonstrated.

  Bruce gently removed his friend’s hand. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘The official advice given by airlines is that families shouldn’t try and stick together. You should make your own way to the exits and meet up afterwards.’ Daniel’s halting speech was making Bruce uncharacteristically fluent. ‘And think of the, you know, safety announcement on planes. “Always put your own mask on first before helping children to put theirs on.”... Sounds like you’ve got survivor’s guilt, Dan. Have you talked about it to Morticia? A little heart-to-heart while lying in the crypt at night?’

  Daniel sniffed again and shook his head. ‘I’m not sure she ... I’m not certain she knows what happened … She hasn’t mentioned ... I want to talk to her about it but …’

  ‘I’m sure she will understand.’

  Daniel blew his nose. ‘The truth is, Nancy and I … She has disappeared into herself. Something is missing. It’s like she’s in mourning for herself, like part of her died in that plane.’

  Bruce drained his glass. ‘I’m not nearly pissed enough for all this. Same again?’

  Daniel looked up, a pale smile on his face. He wiped his cheek with the heel of his hand. ‘James Robertson Justice.’

  Bruce looked puzzled.

  ‘That’s who you look like with that ridiculous beard. James Robertson Justice in Doctor in the House.’

  ‘Look, matey, when I get back with the drinks, you’re going to stop blubbing like an old poof and tell me what it was you saw. OK?’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Ypres Salient. Last Tuesday of July, 1917

  ANDREW DOES NOT KNOW HE IS BURIED ALIVE. LIFE DEMANDS breath and he, with his mouth and nostrils blocked by Flanders soil, is not breathing. He has neither sight nor sensation; no sense of up and down, right and left. There is pressure on his chest, a dead weight pinning him down, but he cannot work out from which direction it is coming – the confusion of the avalanche victim.

  The earth convulses abruptly and a fist of clay punches his face. He is tossed high above no-man’s-land in a fountain of black soil. His compressed lungs inflate again. He splutters and gulps the metallic air, gasping his way back to consciousness.

  The soldier is lying on top of the soil now, surrounded by cadavers that have been disinterred with him. Some are putrefying, others are freshly mutilated, empty containers that were inhabited by men only hours earlier. There is a severed hand lying across his chest. He brushes it off and spits the soil out of his mouth. A rising whistle overhead signals an incoming shell and, instinctively, he scrambles to his feet, runs for a few yards and dives into a waterlogged crater. He turns in time to see the bodies he has been buried with vomited back into the air and buried once more. Foaming black smoke leaves him disorientated for a moment, but when it lifts in great wreaths he sees the moon. It is blood red. There is a warm wetness on his legs, distinct from the cold wetness of the dead water. He touches it with his hand, expecting to find an injury. None is found. He has been shocked into incontinence.

  As his concussion subsides he realizes he is crouching behind the lip of a shell hole that is at least twenty yards in circumference. He feels a burning thirst. This at least means he is still alive. It begins to rain heavily again, in vertical sheets that almost blind him. He tries to get his bearings. The smoke is blue and rising in coils. Through them he can make out concrete bunkers.

  He knows where he is now. He remembers being told about this place in Sunday school. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

  On the ridge ahead of him, the German pillboxes are chattering with sporadic machine-gun fire, a desultory conversation with the bodies lying scattered and torn on the wire in front of them. Andrew grasps that the Germans must have retaken the positions they lost after the British first and second wave attacked that morning. With every staccato bark of their guns they are riddling flesh that is lifeless, tearing at it like demented harpies.

  As Andrew’s awareness of his surroundings grows, he realizes he has neither helmet nor rifle – and this makes him question abstractly if he is still a soldier. Where is his unit? Has he been left behind? He tries to piece together what has happened. He remembers running towards the German trenches and then stopping, feeling paralysed with fear as bullets began to puncture the mud around him. He could not hear them, but he could see the ground bubbling as they blindly sought out their soft targets: the impact of bullets on mud and skin was not so different, each a lazy perforation. The faceless demons could not see their targets, firing from raised ground a mile and a half away, creating a moving wall of
metal, a swarm that anything living could not escape.

  He remembers seeing Second Lieutenant Willets stagger backwards with blood pulsing from his throat. He had dropped to his knees and pawed the air, his chest swagged with bright crimson. Andrew tried to help him stand, but he fell on to his back and drummed his heels on the ground. The young soldier had never seen a man die before. As he stared, he too was hit, by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel, a glancing blow that penetrated his helmet and sent him spinning to the ground. That was his last memory. A whole day must have passed since, because he has now returned to the relative safety of darkness.

  He touches his scalp with his fingers. It is caked with dried blood, or mud, he cannot tell which. He dabs at it and licks his fingertip. The taste of iron confirms it is blood. There is a welt. A stinging sensation. Feeling is returning to him. He hears the groans of dying men around him, like a thousand wet fingers being dragged down a pane of glass. It has been a background noise that he was unable to focus on before, a constant white sound that could not be isolated and identified until there was a variation in its tone. A last breath is exhaled, not inhaled, it causes a rattle in the throat. It is the rattling he hears now.

  There is a rushing scream and a white phosphorous artillery round bursts overhead. A ball of claret hangs in the air and explodes, showering blazing hot tendrils and illuminating a honeycomb of shell holes and the skeletons of trees. It also reveals thousands of bodies. Perhaps millions. The dying and the already dead. The landscape is black with them.

  With gluey mud clinging to his boots, Andrew attempts a crouching scuttle, wading through the darkness, trying to keep to the small spits of land that join shell holes. But he cannot go three yards without slipping and the heaviness of his legs means he is soon out of breath. He trudges past a sunken tank and follows with his hand some white tape left by engineers to guide the damned across the pitted ground to the very edges of the earth. He comes to some slippery duckboards and follows them for a hundred yards, jumping at the shadows that flicker on the margins of his sight lines. There is a horse screaming somewhere and men calling out for help, but he cannot see them in the gloom or work out from which direction their calls are drifting. When he strains his eyes he can make out giant rotting teeth – ghost trees reduced to charred stumps.