CHAPTER 69
'Dear Keith,’ wrote Eldred in the history lesson, while his fellow pupils were chewing the ends of their biros and wondering what to write and he had long finished, 'it was nice of you to write to me. What make is your computer? I'm glad you didn't have to stay long in hospital and you're feeling better now. Thank you for praying for me. I don't think anyone ever did that before. Maybe my mum.
'I did what you suggested and read the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. You were right: they don't agree on the details. There's quite a lot of it I don't understand. I wish you lived nearer so I could call round and you could explain it to me. I don't want to tire you but I would just like to ask you two questions. If you can't answer them, that's all right. What does it mean when Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth and the life"? And when he says, "If you forgive someone's sins they are forgiven and if you retain someone's sins they are retained,” who retains the sins? The person who did the sin or the person who doesn't forgive them?
'Have you heard from Lulubelle? I had a postcard from Cheshire and she says the circus is coming down south. Wouldn't it be great if we could go and see the show? Then I could see you as well and we could have a good talk.
'My dad has told the headmaster of the new school he wants me to go there as soon as possible. I can't wait to go. We have to go and meet my new class teacher tomorrow at five o'clock.
'I'm writing this in class, the last lesson of the day, and I'm going to the library on the way home. I might have another read of those gospels and see if I understand any more of it. Sometimes if you read something over and over you see something new in it. What do you like to read? You said you had all the James Bond films on video. Which do you like best? Which was the one with the crocodiles in? Wasn't that wicked?
'Must go, write soon, lots of love, Eldred ]ones.
'PS - What do you have to do to become a prophet? Do you know anyone God talks to? Has he ever talked to you?
'PPS - Sorry, just realized that's three more questions as well as the other two. If you can only answer one, can you make it the last one? Thanks. Eldred.’
In the reference library after school, rows of students sat hunched over the long table, elbow to elbow. Eldred, finding no room, sat on the floor and opened the New Testament. It fell open at a page and he started reading halfway down. There it was again! 'I am the way, the truth and the life.’ Whose life, Eldred pondered? Everybody's life? Or the only life worth having - as when people lay back in the sunshine and said, 'Oh, this is the life!’? Or did it mean the source of life, like a river is a source of life to the ocean?
He tore out a page of his exercise book - near the end, in the hope that by the time Mrs Garcia discovered the theft Eldred would no longer be one of her pupils. With a blunt pencil, he started doodling. Sometimes it was easier to think on paper. He drew a river flowing into the sea, then scribbled it out. The image didn't seem right. Then he drew a tree with its roots in the water. Better. A bird hatching out of an egg. Getting warmer, he felt.
Then, from memory of a textbook found in the Sister's office in one of the women's wards in the hospital when he was five, he drew the female reproductive system and an egg in one ovary. He sketched a blur of travelling sperm and shaded one in.
Lying on his stomach to get a closer view, he re-drew the system with the next stage of progress, the moment of contact between the sperm and the egg. He drew an arrow pointing towards the fused elements and wrote in large capitals: THE MOMENT OF LIFE and then: I AM THE LIFE.
As he did, a strange sensation passed through him and he shuddered violently. He sat upright, looking around to see if anything had happened to anyone else, but they were all still writing steadily. It obviously wasn't an earthquake then, he reasoned, but something that affected only Eldred.
He bent over the paper again, and wrote, WAY, TRUTH, LIFE under the diagram. Then, without knowing why, he wrote, in very small letters, 'violence, rape, crime, womb, baby.'
It was coming back to him again, the way it had in the hospital, that terrible memory. Why now? Why wouldn't his mother explain to him what had been happening to her while her unborn child screamed and quivered and felt that oppressive weight of darkness all around him, a darkness so opaque that even when he had finally, after an eternity, been propelled down that long tunnel and into the light, his heart had refused to stop pounding and his lungs had refused to inflate?
What had happened that had affected him so badly that for five years of his life he had been unable to breathe for more than an hour at a time unaided, and he had thought that an oxygen mask was part of a child's normal clothing?
And what zeal to find out the truth had driven him, as a child who could barely walk, to begin his night-time forays for information, until finally, at the age of five, his researches brought him in contact with that article on pre-birth memories resulting in childhood trauma and impaired function of the pulmonary organs?
Eldred found he was on his feet, packing his bag and heading for the indexes, but others were ahead of him. The queue at the information desk was even longer. In a trance, it seemed to him, he drifted towards the only source of information that seemed in low demand - the microfiche reader in the newspaper archive section. Someone had left a fiche in the machine. The image on the screen was out of focus.
Eldred adjusted the focus control and found himself looking at the front page of the local newspaper, dated ten years ago. He scanned the headlines and was about to move on when a familiar name caught his eye.
Police were appealing for information following the attack in West Grove municipal cemetery last week on a local woman, Mrs Mildred Jones.
Mrs Jones, aged thirty-eight, who had been married for eleven years and had no children, had been severely beaten, raped and left for dead. Mrs Jones could not identify her assailant and no witnesses had been present at the incident, which had occurred at around four-thirty on the afternoon of Thursday July 6th.
A battered grey Ford Escort had been parked near the entrance to the cemetery at about that time. Anyone who had seen it or had noticed anyone behaving suspiciously should contact the police immediately on the following number.
Genius Page 69