The Blasphemer

by Nigel Farndale

  ‘Thought you said men make angels.’

  ‘No. I said that Darwin said men make angels.’

  ‘So you do believe in them?’

  ‘They have been described as the most beautiful conceit in mortal wit, and I would go along with that.’

  ‘And the museum?’

  ‘The idea has merit. Let me try it out on the provost.’

  Wetherby turned to go, turned back again and gently placed his hand across Daniel’s forehead. ‘You have an injury here, I think.’

  Daniel shrank back slightly but did not remove the hand.

  ‘It hurts because you think too much. You should try to think with this.’ Wetherby pressed the hand over Daniel’s chest. ‘Ponder with your heart.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Northern France. First Monday of September, 1918

  THE WEDDING CEREMONY IS TO BE A SIMPLE ONE, OF NECESSITY. Neither the bride’s family, nor the groom’s, will be attending. The priest has explained that Adilah will need to provide him with her late husband’s death certificate. The only other documentation required will be their birth certificates. Having written to the Registry of Births at Somerset House in London asking for a copy of his, and having received a letter in reply asking for proof of identification and a fee of twopence, Andrew has sent his army pay book by return, along with the fee in loose change. As soon as the certificate arrives they will marry. Their child will not be born a bastard.

  The light is dying as Andrew returns home from work. When he goes to lie on the bed, aching pleasantly from his labours, Adilah joins him, bunching up her skirt so that she can sit astride him. She leans over to cut a lock off his hair. As he stares up into her eyes, his face tickled by threads of her hair, he traces the length of her spine with his thumb. His hand moves under her skirt and feels the loose silk material gathered at her knees. Her skin is almost as silky: fine-textured and delectably soft to the touch, like flour – like dipping fingers into a bag of cool flour.

  Adilah leans forward to kiss him and the wetness of her kiss carries down to his groin. A thin, clear trapeze of saliva stretches between them as she backs away so that she can remove her clothes. Supporting herself on her good arm, she crawls back across the bed towards him, her slightly swollen belly and compact hips looking hugely foreshortened, as if she is a giantess looming towards him. Her small breasts are two downward-pointing conicals, the pigmentation of the areolae pink. Cupping the back of his head in her hand she draws his mouth to her left nipple, shivers, and swivels her shoulder forward to press the other nipple to him. They make love and, afterwards, wrap themselves in towels.

  Later, as Adilah heats three pans of water on the stove, Andrew drags the tin bath in from the pantry and places it in front of the fire. Next he pours two glasses of Armagnac and stares at the fire through its amber lens, shivering intermittently before helping Adilah plait her hair into a single fat rope. As she steps into the bath she flips the hair over her shoulder so that it covers her left breast. She no longer covers the pucker of her stump with her hair. Being naked in front of Andrew does not make her feel shy or awkward any more. The fatty deposits beneath her skin, the lines at the corners of her eyes, the freckles on her shoulders, Andrew, she knows, adores them all. She cups the slight swell of her belly and rakes her fingernails upwards, leaving tiny white trails on her skin. No kicks yet but she calculates it must be four months since she last bled. As she lowers herself into the bath, Andrew feels the reflex of desire. He lathers a bar of soap, pauses to pick a hair from it and rubs it over her back. When it is his turn to get in, Adilah puts on a dressing gown and tops up the bath with water from the pan. When he has washed, he asks her to pass him the towel. She holds it at arm’s length while he stands up and, as he reaches for it, she drops it. Laughing, and leaving wet footprints on the stone floor, he chases after her. She runs behind the table and feints left as he tries to anticipate which way she will run next. They are laughing so loudly they do not at first hear the knocking at the door.

  ‘Open up.’

  An English voice.

  Andrew feels a trickle of ice in his veins.

  Adilah tosses the towel across to him. As he wraps it around himself he reaches for a comb and parts his fringe to one side.

  ‘Open up.’

  Andrew nods to Adilah to open the door. Instinctively he stands to attention; something about the tone of the man’s voice. Four military policemen, identifiable by their red-topped caps and armbands, are crowding the doorway. They are holding pistols in their hands. The tallest of them, an assistant provost marshal, looks at Adilah in her dressing gown then at Andrew. ‘Private Andrew Kennedy?’ he asks with a Scottish brogue.

  Andrew swallows. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You’d better get some clothes on, laddie. You don’t want to face the firing squad with a bare arse, now do you?’

  ‘Andrew?’ Adilah looks frightened.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ Andrew says with rapid blinks. Turning to the APM he adds: ‘My clothes are in the bedroom.’

  ‘Well, you’d better go and fetch them, then. On the double. And get that horrible thing shaved off.’

  A redcap follows Andrew into the bathroom where he slips on a singlet and a pair of shorts, before cutting off his beard with scissors. He has a shave after this and finds the sudden smoothness of his cheeks strangely disgusting, as if he were unpeeled, his skin exposed and raw. The redcap escorts him into his old room and watches uninterestedly as he pulls out from under the bed a blanket tied with string. It springs open as he tugs the string apart, revealing a uniform covered in dry mud and dark stains. It smells of mildew. As he puts it on, its scratchiness against his newly bathed skin makes him shudder. Though he has filled out slightly since he last wore it, it is still a size too big for him. He picks up the lock of Adilah’s hair that is lying on the bedside table and slips it in his pocket. When he returns to the kitchen, Adilah is crying.

  ‘Can I have a moment with her?’

  ‘Fraid not, laddie.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  London. Present day. Six weeks after the crash

  BRUCE CAME IN JIGGLING CHANGE IN HIS POCKET AND SMELLING OF disinfectant. He had a stethoscope wrapped up in his waist pocket. He could not meet his patient’s eye.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be wearing a white coat with pens sticking out of your breast pocket?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘Urm, take a seat, Dan.’

  Daniel clenched his fists, bracing himself. ‘Bad as that?’

  Bruce clipped a negative to a light box and said through a sigh, ‘I don’t think it’s, you know, anything we need to worry about. But there is a small shadow on your brain.’ He pointed a thick and hairy finger. ‘More a bubble on the lobe that controls perception, memory and so on. The temporal lobe. This bit here.’

  Daniel touched the back of his head. At first his mouth was too dry to speak. ‘It’s a tumour, right?’

  ‘Not typical of a tumour. It could be a form of aneurism. Could be. But again it’s, urm, not typical of one. I would need a second opinion.’

  Daniel rubbed his head again. He could feel the skin capillaries on his face cool as the blood left them. ‘Think I will sit down. Feel a bit faint.’

  Daniel knew that Bruce had been trained how to break bad news. They had talked about it. As a medical student he had done role-play sessions with students from RADA, learning how to cope if they reacted badly, how to console, how to impart information efficiently and tactfully.

  ‘What do you think it might be?’ Bruce said slowly.

  ‘Let’s not play that game.’

  ‘My guess is that it’s a blood clot from when you bumped your head. A minor haemorrhage that stopped before becoming a major one. If that’s what it is, it will probably disappear in a few weeks. You need to take things easy, that’s all. You’ve been feeling OK, haven’t you?’

  ‘Apart from the headaches, yeah. And the thirst.’

  ‘Then I don’t think i
t’s anything to get excited about.’

  Daniel shook his head. ‘Can you give me five minutes, Bear? I feel a bit … I need five minutes on my own if that’s OK.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll get some coffee. Milk, no sugar, right?’

  ‘No, put some sugar in mine, I’m feeling a bit shaky.’

  Five minutes later, when Bruce returned carrying two steaming polystyrene cups, Daniel was standing again, by the window. ‘What about the smells and the noises?’ he said. ‘They’re associated with tumour development, aren’t they?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ Bruce handed a coffee over and took a sip from his own. ‘We’ll need to do some more tests.’

  ‘Is there a test you can do for epilepsy?’

  ‘You didn’t tell me you’d had a seizure.’

  ‘It’s more … I did see a blinding flash. That’s associated with epilepsy, isn’t it?’

  ‘It can be …The brain tissue behind the eyes is weak and when hit there the brain, you know, urm, bounces back and can cause an electromagnetic field …’ He trailed off and when it sounded like he had finished he added, ‘or seizure across the temporal lobes. A sensed presence, perhaps in the form of a blinding flash, can be stimulated in that way … There are some electromagnetic tests we can do. Look up at the ceiling for a moment.’ Bruce shone a small torch in his friend’s eye. ‘Nothing unusual there … although …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell you this but I ran what we call “a comparative” on your scan and …’

  The two friends stared at one another.

  ‘And what?’

  ‘You’re going to love this, Dan …’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The only recorded example of a shadow pattern like this dates back to nineteen ninety-three. A monk who had a scan after complaining of headaches.’

  ‘A monk?’

  ‘Think he was a Buddhist.’

  It was Daniel’s turn to sigh. He stood up and walked back towards the window. He was still rubbing his head. ‘You know that thing you wanted me to tell you about?’

  Bruce took another sip from his mug and wiped milky foam from his top lip with his sleeve. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I had a sort of …’ Daniel searched for the right word. ‘You’re going to laugh at me.’

  ‘I won’t laugh at you.’

  Daniel pouted. ‘OK.’ He sighed again. ‘I had a vision.’

  Bruce laughed.

  Daniel picked up the photograph of Kylie Minogue. ‘I was going to say “hallucination” but …’

  ‘You? A vision?’

  ‘Yes, me. But I was going to say …’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘A man. A young man. He was in front of me treading water when I was swimming for help. I was about to give up when I saw him. I was actually taking my life vest off. He smiled and signalled at me to swim towards him.’

  ‘You recognized him?’

  ‘Can’t say for sure. He looked familiar. I think I’ve seen him since. He’s a teacher at Martha’s school.’

  Bruce nodded again. ‘So you had seen him before?’

  ‘Guess I must have.’ Daniel drew in his shoulders defensively. ’Well, there it is.’

  ‘It’s not really my, you know, area, but given your condition at the time, the bump on the head, I mean, and the heat exhaustion, I think it would have been a miracle if you hadn’t been hallucinating. Hallucinations can seem very real. What we see is driven as much by what we expect to see, or want to see, as by the actual patterns of light and colour picked up by our eyes. Brain scans have shown this. You didn’t want to die alone out there. You wanted to see another human face. This was a guy you had seen around the school, that confirms it for me. Hallucinations are nearly always of things that we have seen before. Memories. People.’

  ‘It was a hallucination, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Course it was.’

  ‘The reason I called it a vision was because of the way it made me feel. I felt …’ He searched for the right word again. ‘Exalted.’

  Bruce grinned. ‘That’s why you asked about the epilepsy, wasn’t it? Frontal lobe epilepsy is associated with religious visions.’

  ‘You think that might be it?’

  ‘Could easily be. Also you were probably still traumatized from the crash. Seeing those people killed. Feeling guilty about having survived. It’s like with bereavement hallucinations. A lot of grieving people believe they have caught sight of the dead person. It makes them feel better. It’s all to do with the, urm …’

  ‘Frontal cortex.’

  ‘Exactly. Decision-making. Hallucinations relate to the, the … higher cognitive functions of the brain. I was reading about someone at Columbia who asked volunteers to differentiate between houses and faces. Signals in the frontal cortex became active whenever subjects expected to see a face, irrespective of what the actual stimulus was. They would look at a house and “see” a face. It’s called, you know …’

  ‘Predictive coding?’

  ‘Predictive coding. The brain has an expectation of what it will see, then compares this with information from the eyes. When this goes tits up, hallucinations occur. Our eyes don’t present to our brains exact photographs of the things we see. They are more like sketches and impressions chattering along the optic nerve for the brain to interpret. That’s what optical illusions are about. The brain’s software is perfectly capable of simulating a vision in this way.’ Bruce smiled again and raised his hands. ‘What can I say? It was definitely a hallucination, Dan. Definitely, definitely. There is no doubt in my mind. The only thing we need to check is whether it was triggered by temporal lobe epilepsy. Has it happened since?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Then stop worrying about it.’

  ‘What happened to him? The monk?’

  ‘His shadow went away eventually.’

  ‘Makes sense in a way. Do you know what I mean by the “God spot”?’

  ‘Read something about it in Nature once. They did an experiment in which quasi-religious epiphanies were induced under laboratory conditions. Didn’t they use nuns?’

  ‘Carmelite nuns. But they were also able to produce these visions in non-believers. Basically they showed that there’s a circuit of nerves in the brain which explains belief in God.’

  ‘There you are then. Angel, my arse.’

  Daniel started guiltily. ‘I never said anything about an angel.’

  ‘Look, if it makes you feel exalted, enjoy it while it lasts. I normally have to prescribe pills to achieve that effect.’

  ‘There’s something else.’ Daniel gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘I’m, sort of, priapic.’

  ‘Poor Morticia.’

  ‘Poor me. Since the crash we haven’t had sex once. Six weeks.’

  ‘I’m no expert but that’s not so unusual after ten years, is it? For heterosexuals, I mean.’

  ‘It is for us. Before the crash normality was two or three times a week.’

  Bruce shook his head. ‘Poor, poor Morticia.’

  ‘It’s probably because of her shoulder. The other night we tried sleeping in the same bed and … I shouldn’t be telling you this …’

  ‘But you’re going to.’

  ‘We always used to have this thing where … when we lay back to back we would touch our toes together. We don’t even do that any more.’

  ‘You told anyone else about your … whatever it was?’

  ‘I nearly told one of the professors at Trinity. Wetherby. Do you know him?’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Dunno. Didn’t seem fair. He believes in all that bollocks. Probably been waiting all his life for a vision …You know, he’s a pious man. If anyone deserves to have a vision-like hallucination it’s him. He’d think it was wasted on me.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s a bigger man than that.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure he is. Perhaps I will tell him … Bear?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘If someth
ing happens … If it is a tumour, I want you to look after Nancy and Martha.’

  Bruce grinned. ‘I’ll look after Martha, but Morticia’s on her own.’

  ‘What is it between you two?’

  ‘To be honest, Dan, she terrifies me.’

  ‘She’s only terrifying with people she knows.’

  ‘And strangers.’

  ‘And strangers, yeah, but she’s like that because she’s vulnerable.’

  ‘Yeah, right. About as vulnerable as the north face of the Eiger.’

  ‘OK, I ask you to look after her as a friend. You’re the only man I trust with her.’

  ‘You can look after her yourself, Dan. Nothing is going to happen to you. Now, I need to …’ He nodded at the door. ‘And so do you. Go home. Get some rest. Ring me in the morning. And Dan …’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Have a wank. Doctor’s orders.’

  *

  When he got home, Daniel sat in his car for a moment with the engine running. The sun glinting off the bonnet was making him squint. He slapped the steering wheel and smiled to himself.

  He had his explanation.

  Martha was reading a Harry Potter book in the kitchen. ‘Can I watch a DVD, Daniel?’

  ‘Call me Daddy. And why not carry on reading?’

  ‘I’ve been reading for, like, half an hour. Mum said I could watch a DVD if I did half an hour’s reading.’

  ‘OK. If Mummy said.’

  ‘She also said you had to give me my injection. Shall I go and fill it up ready?’

  ‘I’d better do it.’

  ‘I can do it. I’ve been practising doing the injecting, too. On an orange. Can I show you?’

  ‘OK, but don’t tell Mummy.’

  Martha filled her syringe as expertly as Nancy would have done and held it up for Daniel to see it was the right amount. She pinched loose skin on her waist and slipped the needle in without hesitating. ‘See?’

  ‘Very good.’ Daniel ruffled her hair. ‘How are things at school?’