“I really can’t believe that you believe this of me,” Adrian was saying, or something similar.
“I know it’s not you,” I said in my new voice. “I’m sorry.”
He looked at me. He must have been surprised. I know I was.
“It’s just some ghastly internet download error.”
“No, it’s not,” I said.
“What do you mean?” He was looking down at me, with concern, I expect. I may have been pale. I was staring through the wall.
“It’s a warning from hell,” I said.
Finally, I looked at him and focused. I could tell he wanted to ask the same question again. Instead, he just said, “I wouldn’t do that.”
“I know,” I said.
9
When the bombs went off on the London Underground in July 2005, I was in a stockbroker’s office, talking about funding mission in the City, and Sky News was running on screens suspended from the ceiling, a silent pantomime of a major “power failure” on the transport system. Do us a favour, I thought. The dark truth we suspected surfaced when we saw the lid blown off the bus and the faces of survivors, white, black and red. I can remember wondering what I should do, whether I should be somewhere, visiting the injured, comforting the dying, that sort of thing. These were promises I made when I was ordained, but my instincts had been nurtured in Africa.
As it turned out, the decision was made for me. Hugh called my mobile and told me I’d been allocated Aldgate tube station, under the London Diocesan Crisis Plan. I didn’t know we had a plan. I walked quickly up Fenchurch Street, the sound of sirens the only augur that this wasn’t a normal City day.
My dog collar was all that was needed to penetrate the police cordon and, as ever, I’d entered a brutish new world, devoid of anyone without a fighting role to play, like a war zone. In a small, hastily erected marquee, I was given an identity card to fill out, simply name, function and employer. In the final category, I wrote “God”. When I ran an errand later and had to show it to an officer at the tapes, he laughed. It is a laugh, really.
At the church, St Botolph without Aldgate, a light and airy seventeenth-century rebuild next to the Underground station, the incumbent staff and clergy were doing the best they could to become a field station for the emergency services, mostly an elite crew of fire and rescue firemen trained for bomb carnage.
I smiled. The atmosphere of suppressed desperation was very much like Africa, but we were fulfilling our caricature of old England. We were making tea.
“We must get them something to eat – to keep up their strength,” I said to a tall police officer in a hi-vis jacket. He took me across the road, traffic lights signalling dutifully to a road blocked by parked ambulances. Opposite, there was a City sandwich mini-mart, evacuated of its staff. They’d left in a hurry. It was unlocked; the swing door gave listlessly to my shoulder. Tight little gondolas freshly filled with tempting gourmet sandwiches and salads for a lunch hour that the local money men and international currency dealers would now be spending in the bars to the west.
“Help yourself,” said the policeman. “It’s OK.”
He held a cardboard box, while I randomly reached for salmon, couscous, all-day breakfasts, yoghurts and crisps.
“Better not take too much ham,” he said. “There may be Muslims.”
I filled plastic carrier bags too and we crossed with our booty back to St Botolph’s. The church was filling now with a shift just up from the dark underworld beneath. Big men in almost paramilitary gear, they stood about with mugs of tea and coffee or sat uncomfortably in small groups in the pews. I started to do what I do. I fed the hungry.
I’ve often found violence surprisingly easy. People don’t realise that. You just need to get started. Once you’ve hurt someone, really injured someone or just hurt them emotionally, you wonder, frankly, what all the fuss was about. And then it suddenly makes sense of all those assaults you hear about, the ones that make you wonder: why didn’t they stop to think for a second just before pushing the knife or pulling the trigger, like most of us would?
But you don’t think, you see, because it’s easy, because you’ve done it before and it’s over before you realise you’ve started. That’s why it makes no sense to people reading newspaper reports in their conservatory extensions. They see someone on death row or facing decades in prison and think, how stupid, all for a moment in which they could have weighed the consequences and made a different decision. Never mind thinking about the victim – why didn’t they think of themselves? Then they wouldn’t have ruined their lives too. But it’s not like that. You’re resentful, you’re angry, you even hate and then you do what you do, the opportunity arises so you just do it. Oops.
The first time it happened to me, it was all over before I knew I’d taken any kind of decision. I suppose I was a little surprised I’d done it, but I knew in the instant of seeing what I’d done that I could do it again. I can’t say that I wanted to do it again, but I’d lost my violence virginity and, rather than remorse, all I felt was relief, like a rite of passage. Any mystery was gone and I could do it again and again if I wanted. I’d hugely injured another person, but I didn’t care about that of course. As for me, it was no big deal, really.
This is how it happened. My dad struggled not so much with the functions of bringing me up – that is, feeding and educating me, and I suppose being there for me, bless him – but with the logistics. He was a single parent, having lost Mum to cancer just as I was starting secondary school, and he had to get around his job and get me around mine, or so he thought. He’d take me to the cinema most Saturdays in term time and take care about what he took me to see. I suppose he was anxious not to patronise me – he’d raise the subject on Wednesday or Thursday evening, the local paper open on the kitchen table. He’d avoid the U certificates and go for the 15s, which was sweet. I noticed he took me to an 18 once when I was sixteen, but he must have asked his mates at work. It was a spy movie, with some violence and loads of swearing, but no sex to speak of. I guess that would have been toe-curling for both of us.
That’s what makes all this so disappointing, that he tolerated me being sexually abused. I can’t really forgive him for that.
It came about because of a mild little dad-like inadequacy. School was three miles away and the school bus went nowhere near us. The public buses were the other side of the park and Dad wouldn’t have me crossing that, especially not on dark evenings, which is ironic given the alternative he came up with.
There was his cousin. Actually his cousin-in-law. He was married to Dad’s uncle’s daughter, I think. But you don’t really concentrate on those family connections when you’re young. They lived on the other side of the park and he worked at a shoe wholesaler out on a light industrial estate the other side of school. So he’d pick me up and drop me at school in the mornings. Then he’d usually pick me up at whatever time I finished. I did wonder how he could finish work at my school times; sometimes it was 4.30, sometimes six or seven, if I had activities or the occasional detention.
They call it abuse and it was quite serious abuse. But I used to think it didn’t mess me up, then or afterwards. I know it sounds stupid, but I did feel in control. I’ve always felt in control.
He always said I looked nice in a smarmy way, and then – I can’t remember when it changed exactly – he seemed to concentrate on my legs, always going on about my black school tights, how “shiny” they were and how “shapely” my legs were, which made me sound like something out of my dad’s old magazines. I don’t think they were shiny at all. We weren’t allowed shiny tights at school.
I just stared out of the window most of the time, not really looking at the overfamiliar route home. The first time it happened, we were stopped at the traffic lights, his hand left the gear-stick and he ran his knuckles up and down my leg, between my knee and the hem of my skirt. I thought later that this was how I’d have described it, the vocabulary that I’d have chosen, with a prissy degree of ex
actitude, to a sympathetic but clipped woman police officer, if it ever came to that. I guess I’m meant to say now that my stomach knotted and I was scared and wanted to get away from him. But actually I just felt this strange sense of detachment, simply watching, while listening to his stupid mutterings as if from a distance, as if he was in a different place.
It became a routine. No touching on the way to school. Then the hand on the knee, moving to the thigh on the way home. After a while of this, he’d stopped talking as much and seemed as bored as I was. It was just a habit. I even wondered if he really knew he was doing it, staring out through the windscreen and idly stroking my right leg between gear changes.
Then suddenly it got worse, when I switched from art to woodwork for exams. The Head, a bouncy little freak called Pander in the way that we had to have at least one teacher who had a silly name, was very keen for her girls to do woodwork and metalwork. I welcomed the opportunity to get away from books and classroom and do something practical at last. I liked the curl of the shavings and the smell of glue and resin.
Cousin Derek had a shed in his garden, on the back of his garage, and was into lathe-turning. It was suggested by the weedy but kind man who took our classes that I might turn a couple of chair legs for my project. The rear legs of my chair were to be curved but squared, but the front legs could be turned, under proper supervision. Well beyond what was required by the syllabus, but there’d be a good grade in it.
I had a strong sense that I was performing an act of acquiescence in going to the shed. In truth, I wanted to do the carpentry. But I knew it looked like “consent” for Dirty Derek, even if consent doesn’t work for the under-sixteens. Sure enough, as I held the chisel to the lathe to get the feel of marking wood on the turn, he would run the palm of his hand down my bum. If I was in my school skirt, he lifted it and stroked through my tights. If I was in trousers, he was firmer, dipping down for little raids between my legs. The conceit, I suppose, was that I was concentrating and so didn’t notice – busy with my hands, I had abdicated ownership of the rest of my body. This happened a couple of times or more, an absurd routine in which the upper halves of us conducted carpentry tuition, while apparently entirely unrelated sexual activity developed under the bench. Then his breath shortened and his words cracked and faltered as he told me where and how much pressure to apply to the wood.
Derek made his move. His right hand left my bottom and reached over my shoulder and took the chisel from my hand. He turned me by the shoulders towards him and I realised he’d taken himself out. “Exposed himself,” I’d have told that kindly and imaginary police officer. He directed my hand downwards and I’m afraid to say that it’s funny, it makes me smile now anyway, to recall that I was wearing rubber-lined gloves. This evidently was sufficiently sensuous, however, and he wrapped my fingers around him and started to move his hips back and forth. I made no movement myself, didn’t even tighten my fingers, he applying the pressure with his own hand around mine. I just stood there, staring into his overalls. This didn’t go on for long. He didn’t quicken the pace and didn’t finish, at least I don’t think so. But after a couple of minutes, he was breathlessly telling me some crap about how beautiful I was and how he would look after me and that this was our secret place. He ran his hand through my hair.
After that time, I told Dad. I think it was the next day, at supper. “Derek’s trying to have sex with me.” Dad did look properly shocked, to be fair. Not the sort of shocked that people do when they want you to know they’re shocked. He did the expressionless, pale version that people do when they’ve evacuated their faces and moved inside to handle the horror of what they’re being confronted with. I’ve since seen it on the faces of people seeing someone starving for the first time.
I filled the silence. “He touches me. He’s started to make me touch him.” It sounded like a voice coming from elsewhere, like I was possessed. Now I’d said it, it was real for the first time and I wanted to cry. We ate a little more. Spam and beetroot, I think.
Eventually he said, “I’ll sort it out immediately. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Those were his exact words. I thought he might hug me, but he didn’t. Perhaps he thought I’d think that was the same thing. And he didn’t sort it out. I was back in the shed the following week. I know now that those few days changed me and Dad for ever. I never went to the cinema with him again anyway, always busy when he suggested it. Perhaps he thought I was growing up, but it was an odd way to grow up. I think I hated him for putting me back in that shed. And, in the end, I sorted it out myself, almost as if that was what Dad had meant for me to do.
Derek seemed bolder. It seemed as if carpentry had become an excuse to get to the shed and that we’d both signed up to that understanding. As soon as we got there, he was rubbing himself against me from behind. He turned me and took off the glove of my left hand this time, wrapping my stiff little fingers around his engorged tool.
I could see where this was going. We were going to have sex and I didn’t want it to start that way and I knew I was going to have to make a radical intervention, a game changer, as it were.
As I understand it now, of course, he was going to rape me, but that wasn’t a legal distinction that bothered me at the time. He was panting, his eyes closed, thrusting urgently. I was looking around, as if distracting myself, like some child prostitute trying to displace herself. His left hand was steadying himself on the bench, gripping the base unit of a round saw that fell across a kind of safety guillotine, his long, crinkled fingers across the locating groove in cast iron, bolted to the bench. There was usually a little safety grille around it, but he’d removed it for easier access. The round saw unit was hinged and of great weight, so that it didn’t move easily and could be guided into wood without splintering the grain.
Nothing was planned. I just saw the simplest logic of cause and effect and there’s a beauty in that.
So I reached out with my right, available hand, pulled hard on the handle and the round saw block swung a quarter arc, gathered a blind and irresistible momentum under its own weight and fell with a metallic clunk, not visceral at all, across the middle and forefinger of Derek’s fist. He exploded away from me and doubled up. Then came his cry, a deep, primal howl, and he fell past me at waist height, through the door and rolled on to the grass of his lawn. The wooden door flapped anxiously as I watched him, caught between holding his injured hand and fumbling defensively with his trouser flies.
In that moment, I could see everything perfectly. The clarity was overwhelming and peaceful. Derek would talk of an accident. My father would know the truth from my cold calmness, but he would never speak of it and it would be an impassable barrier between us until he was dead. And I was free.
I looked at the round saw. I heard later that his forefinger, which had lain where the curve of the saw left the block, was still attached by some sinew and stitched back on and saved. But his middle finger, the one that had dipped between my thighs in the car, lay there on the bench, turned on its back, lifeless. It looked, of course, like a little willy.
*
I learned a lot at Aldgate that warm summer’s day in early July. I learned that the paramedics who are first at the scene of a bomb explosion have a code system for the mortally injured. G1 for those with the best chance of survival who are to be removed immediately. G2 for those who have to be treated on-site before they can be moved. And G3 for those who aren’t going to make it. They’re filled with morphine and left to die while others are prioritised. G4 are dead already.
When we got back from looting the mini-mart, we started to distribute to the crew that had completed the first rescue shift. I wasn’t surprised that they were hungry – I’ve never had any trouble eating when I’ve been in famine zones – but I was struck by how little blood was on them. But then these were the boys with the axes and the coded stickers. The ambulance crews were now down below, in that Orphean hell.
I figured sugar was what was needed most. S
o I brought hot sweet tea. Then I took round a box of chocolate bars I’d taken from the shop, after they’d got some carbs down in the form of sandwiches and baguettes.
“I shouldn’t really,” one of the youngest said. “I’ve told my mum that I’ve stopped eating those.”
“Well, she’s not here, is she?” I said. “And I won’t tell her.” He laughed and took one. I could have been at a church fete.
The other priests were in black cassocks, because this was their church and it gave them a clear identity. The phone was ringing off the hook upstairs in the office. The Daily Mail, The Times and ITN reporters trying to find out what was going on.
“Tell them to fuck off,” said one of the older priests.
“They only need to know what’s going on,” I said. “Then they’ll go away.”
I took three of the calls.
“Who am I talking to?” asked the first.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Just say I’m one of the priests here.”
I realised I didn’t want my name in the papers again. Not this time.
Downstairs, the shift was changing. I heard the priest who’d taken the aggressive media stand on a mobile phone.
“Are you all right, love?” he was saying softly. Turned out his daughter had been on the Circle Line through the City that morning. Different time, but he couldn’t be sure. She was safe at home. He hadn’t mentioned it before. I wanted to kiss him.
There was a big bloke standing slightly apart, his tunic loosened at the neck. He was doing that stare into the middle distance, unfocused. I poured a mug and put three sugars in. “Tea?” I said. He took it. “I’m Nat.”
He didn’t look at me, but I’d given him permission to say something. So I just waited.
“Sometimes you wonder if they’d be better off dead. There’s a girl down there. Can’t be more than twenty. Both legs gone above the knee. Sometimes you think they’d be better off dead,” he repeated. There was a long pause that neither of us filled. “I thought she’d be better off dead.”
A Dark Nativity Page 13