“How come you didn’t want to tell me your name was Jesus?” she asked over her shoulder.
“You saw the reaction it got from the children,” he laughed. “It is a name which always elicits dramatic responses. Too many people have argued and fought about it over the centuries. It has too many connotations; some wonderful, of course, but many painful. It carries too much baggage with it. I like ‘Joe’ much better. Don’t you? So call me Joe.”
Nine
Although Hugo had been among the most outspoken of the children inside Sophie’s apartment, he returned to his position as an outsider in the group as soon as they had left the staff block. All the other children formed into clusters of two, three or four, in order to gossip about the evening and marvel at their own audacity in turning up at a teacher’s apartment uninvited. They all speculated on what might be happening now they were gone and the couple were in the room alone, some giggling foolishly and others feeling a little unsettled by their own imaginings. None of their chatter and gossip interested Hugo so he wasn’t bothered that they didn’t include him. He liked being alone with his thoughts anyway, having spent his first eight years as the only child in an adult household where everyone talked all the time about serious scientific, philosophical and political subjects regardless of whether he was in the room or not.
He walked alone to the dormitory, unnoticed by the others, which he preferred. Being invisible was better than being teased and it gave him the headspace that he wanted in order to process what he had just learned without having to pretend he thought the others were funny with their crude jokes and stupid innuendoes.
He changed into his pyjamas, folded his clothes far more neatly than anyone else, and brushed his teeth while the other boys lounged in groups on their beds, chattering excitedly about the events of a day that had without doubt been the most exciting of their young lives so far. He climbed into bed and took his glasses off, folding the arms and placing them carefully on his bedside table before lying on his back, barely disturbing the smoothness of the sheets and staring at the ceiling with none of the feelings of tiredness that would usually come over him at this stage of the school day.
The others gradually got ready for bed around him, all of them still talking, casually dropping their clothes on their chairs, unbothered if they slid to the floor, reluctant to quieten down even after the matron had come in to check they were in bed and to turn the lights out. As soon as she had withdrawn to her own quarters they went back to talking in the dark, none of them able to settle.
One voice after another dropped out of the conversation, until eventually silence fell over the whole room and the space soon filled with the rhythmic sounds of sleeping. Hugo, however, found himself still staring at the ceiling, his thoughts still churning and his imagination exploding like a firework display. After about an hour he slid out from under the sheets, slipped his phone from where he kept it hidden in his sponge bag, and headed silently for the bathroom.
He dialled his mother’s number.
“Darling,” she replied before it had even had a chance to ring, “are you okay?”
“Yes, definitely. Did you see the darkness?”
Yung rose from the chair where she had been sitting, listening to her guests arguing after dinner.
“Excuse me,” she said to the room in general, “it’s my son.”
“Why is she allowed to keep her phone?” May enquired loudly before Yung was more than five paces away.
“It’s her house,” her husband replied, “and Yung is a technology expert. I’m sure she knows what she’s doing.”
Yung ignored them as she walked over to the window and stretched out her shoulder and back muscles. The others went back to their conversation without her. Fuelled by a large amount of wine, and now brandy, Minenhle was becoming aggressively evangelical about the urgency of impending climate change and May was sighing a great deal more loudly than was strictly polite.
“Yes, I saw it,” Yung said. “Were you frightened?”
“No,” Hugo replied, sounding partly puzzled and partly indignant at the suggestion. “I thought it was really interesting.”
“It was certainly interesting,” his mother agreed.
She could hear May’s voice rising above the others. “But why does everyone have to be so boring about climate change? Going on and on. We know we have to do something, so let’s just get on and do it and stop lecturing people all the time, making us all feel depressed that we can’t do anything about it and guilty because we don’t do anything about it.”
The professor’s voice did not carry so clearly across the room but it sounded like he was attempting to quieten his wife with diplomacy and having little luck. Yung had a very soft spot for the professor. He was an engineer by profession and had been instrumental in designing and building a number of futuristic eco-towns all over the world. They provided low cost, prefabricated housing, which had zero carbon footprints and were one hundred per cent run on renewable energy. If governments in developing countries were to whole heartedly adopt the methods which he had perfected they would be able to wipe out the problems of the fast-growing slums which surrounded every big city within ten years. It was a subject which came up frequently at their meetings but the professor was a shy man by nature and not the best promoter of his own dreams – a fact that annoyed his wife endlessly. May believed her husband should by now have been awarded at least a knighthood. Yung was convinced that his ideas had the potential to resolve the housing problems of the whole world.
“He just appeared outside the window of our classroom,” Hugo was saying.
“Who did?” Yung asked, aware she had tuned out from listening to her son.
“This man. He’s called Joe, well I call him Joe. He’s so weird. He’s dressed like he’s a hermit who’s been living for a hundred years in a forest…”
“And he got into the school grounds?”
“Yes, during the darkness, as if by magic. He looks like a wizard…”
“Did they catch him and escort him off the premises?”
“Who?”
“Security. They have security there, don’t they?”
“No, because Miss Sophie invited him home to her room for his tea, and we all went round to see him, and that was when I decided to call him Joe, which he says is a name he likes. He’s very interesting. He says that he caused the world to go dark but I think he was just teasing. I mean, how could he have done that anyway?”
“Listen, darling” – she interrupted his stream of consciousness, aware that once he got started he might never stop – “we need to talk about this weekend.”
“Yes?” Hugo braced himself for disappointing news. So often when he was looking forward to seeing his mother she would have to cancel at the last minute.
“Well, I’ve got a lot of people staying in the house and we are going to be very busy and I won’t have much time to spend with you. So I wondered if you wanted to bring a friend or two home so you have someone to play with. Is there anyone you would like to invite?”
“Not really,” he said, and for a second Yung thought her heart would break.
“Can I ask Joe?”
“Who’s Joe?”
“The man I was telling you about, the one who appeared. I knew you weren’t listening.”
“I am listening. Do you think he would want to come? Do we know anything about him?”
“I could ask Miss Sophie too. I think they like each other.”
“Your teacher? You want to invite your teacher?”
“Yes,” Hugo sounded puzzled again, “what’s wrong with that? I like her. You met her at parents’ evening. She’s nice.”
“Yes, of course, I’m sure she is. Okay, ask her to ring me tomorrow and we will make the arrangements. How come you are still awake anyway?”
“I was too excited to sleep.”
“I’m not surprised,” she laughed, “these are very exciting times, Hugo.”
“I know. I’m really looking forward to the weekend now.”
“Okay. Get Miss Sophie to call then. And go to bed now. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“This sun thing is just a freak incident,” Minehle was saying as Yung rejoined the group. “It’s a side show. We cannot allow ourselves to be distracted from the main issue which is the long-term changes that are happening to the climate.”
“I don’t know how you can say that,” May said, her words beginning to slur from the alcohol. “If the sun goes out again we’ll all be gone within a few weeks. If you ask me it was an act of God. I mean exactly twelve minutes of darkness? Does that not seem like a sign of divine intervention to you?”
“I knew it was a mistake to invite guests for this week,” Minenhle said as she drained her brandy glass. “We will just get side-tracked by superstitious nonsense from the things that are really important.”
“There will be plenty of things to keep the guests occupied,” Yung assured her.
“Excuse me for even thinking I could have an opinion,” May said as she stood up unsteadily. “I’m going to bed, are you coming Austin?”
“I’ll be there soon, my dear,” the professor said, his voice as even as always, giving away nothing of what he was feeling.
Ten
Once the children’s excited voices had finally faded into the distance and Sophie had returned to cooking the meal, she settled Joe in front of the television with the remote control. He flicked inquisitively through the channels for a few minutes, his eyes wide with a mixture of amazement and puzzlement at the things he saw, before alighting on a documentary about pollution. There were pictures of factory chimneys and power stations belching smoke out over a town full of grey streets, tailbacks of cars on motorways, underpasses and flyovers, cranes towering out of the smog in newly built Chinese cities, islands of plastic floating in oceans and airliners leaving white trails across clear blue skies. A doom-laden voiceover was giving a history of the industrialisation process of the twentieth century and the toll it was taking on the health of people, plants and animals.
“Why do you think no one’s doing anything about sorting this stuff out?” he asked after watching for a few minutes. “Surely everyone knows about it by now.”
“Everyone knows about it,” Sophie said as she pushed things into the microwave, “but no one wants to give up their comfortable lives by getting rid of their car or cancelling their foreign holiday, and no one wants to stop earning money by closing factories or stopping drilling for oil and gas, and everyone wants their food to come conveniently packaged and unbruised. All the millions who still live in poverty look forward to the day when they too can drive a car or install an air-conditioning unit. Unless governments are forced to change the laws in order to make it illegal to pollute the air, land and water, then the clean up is going to happen too slowly to save the planet.”
“Do you think these people are going to be able to help?” Joe pointed at the screen.
Sophie came over from the oven to look. “It’s just a bunch of kids going on strike from school to protest about the number of species being forced into extinction by the things mankind is doing to the forests and the climate. They’re just idealistic kids with no power. They come out onto the streets for a day or two and everyone says how terrible it is and agrees with all the things they are saying and then tells them to go back to school and things go back to how they were. The ones running the oil companies and the banks and ruling the world are older people who will not be around when the planet finally overheats and is too hot to grow food on, and when the water runs out and millions of people in the tropics and sub-tropics come north in search of some means of survival. The kids have the right ideas but no one is taking them seriously, or at least no one who is in a position to do anything about it. By the time they are old enough to take over the decision-making processes it will be too late.”
“But man has had choices all through the last two millennia,” Joe said. “They didn’t have to do any of this. They could have followed a different path.”
“Where have you been all your life?” Sophie was genuinely shocked, as well as charmed, by his apparent innocence. “Of course we had choices, but we chose greed and self preservation. We put ourselves and the human race above everything else. We wanted to increase our populations and live longer, be warmer in winter and cooler in summer, eat more food, be safer from predators and travel wherever and whenever we wanted, all of which meant destroying everything from tigers to potentially valuable bacteria. We did everything too fast and unbalanced all the natural systems. Now we are going to have to pay the price.”
She topped both their cups of wine up as he went back to watching the screen, noticing that they were already more than halfway through the bottle, even though she had only had a couple of sips herself. She finished preparing the meal and carried the plates over to the sofa, sitting carefully down beside him. He was obviously hungry and had cleaned his plate by the time she was still only halfway through hers. She was stupidly flattered by this sign that he had enjoyed her cooking. She could feel the warmth of his thigh as it rested casually against hers and found it uncomfortably hard to concentrate on chewing and swallowing her food.
“I would offer you more,” she said, getting up and going to the cupboard, “but there isn’t any. I think there’s a packet of biscuits, though, which will do for dessert.”
“Sounds great,” he said, taking the packet from her and eating his way through it, taking occasional gulps of wine and staring intently at the television screen, every so often firing a question at her.
It felt wonderful to Sophie to have someone so interested in her opinions and so keen to hear her voice them. Most people either raised their eyes to the ceiling when she started talking about the state of the planet, or they tried to convince her she was overreacting and being too dramatic. Her family were forever telling her to “lighten up” and have “more fun”, which was one of the reasons she didn’t bother to go home that often anymore. She knew that she made them all uncomfortable with her intense opinions and her apparent inability to find a partner she could bring home to meet them. But Joe didn’t argue with anything she said. He simply listened, nodding to indicate that he had understood whatever point she was making, and then returning his attention to the screen. He was the best pupil she had ever had the pleasure of teaching and Sophie had never felt so comfortable sitting this close to a man before. The feeling confused her. Every part of her longed for him to touch her, but the fact that he didn’t seem to have any intention of making a pass made him all the more attractive.
Once they had finished eating, she took the liberty of snuggling in close to him on the sofa without being invited. He put his arm around her shoulders in a brotherly way, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, giving her an affectionate squeeze. It was as casual and relaxed as if they had been living together all their lives.
“I had a dream about you the other day,” she confessed after a few minutes of companionable silence.
“Oh, yes?” He didn’t sound surprised.
“Before I even met you,” she added, wanting him to understand how weird it was, “which is strange, don’t you think?”
He cocked his head to the side so that he could see her face more clearly and she felt the softness of his beard brushing across her forehead, filling her head with the aroma of warm spices.
“So what happened in this dream?” he asked.
“You were just there,” she said. “But I had another dream at around the same time, which was about some Bible scrolls being discovered during an archaeological dig in Jerusalem. It was a bit like an Indiana Jones movie or a Dan Brown story. Everyone was very ex
cited because the scrolls were a source for the well-known gospels. There were all these old theologians who had been convinced that they existed, but now they actually had the evidence.”
“Do you think that’s likely?” he asked.
“I don’t think I am the right person to be pontificating about theology,” she laughed.
“But what are your beliefs?” he insisted. “Whatever they are, they are just as valid as any theologian’s.”
“I’m a fully fledged atheist,” she said, hoping that was not going to prove to be a problem in their developing relationship. He didn’t seem to have judged her about her veganism, so maybe it was safe to talk about more contentious things like her religious beliefs, or lack of them. She couldn’t imagine him becoming upset about anything, which was one of the things that made it so pleasant to be curled up next to him.
“You don’t believe in God or anything?” he asked.
“The whole thing is a bit far-fetched, don’t you think?” she said, tucking herself in so close to him that she could feel his heart beating steadily against her shoulder.
“There have been a lot of pretty amazing stories told over time,” he agreed. “I can understand that it is hard to know what to believe, how to sort the fact from the fiction.”
“Especially now that we know everyone in power lies all the time.”
“All of them? Do you think so?”
“It’s beginning to seem that way.” She gestured towards the television. “It’s like one revelation after another and none of them show our leaders in a good light. Not just here, everywhere. In fact it is better here than in most places. Everyone is out for themselves.”
Call Me Joe Page 6