Later, after Hutchinson had turned out the light, Baz was surprised to hear Ray whisper in the darkness, “You awake, Baz?”
“Yeah. I’m too hot.”
“Sorry I got so stroppy. Thing is, though, I’ve got to stay here for my mum’s sake.”
“Because of having to feed you? Well, it’s the same for my dad. And it’s hard on him, I know. But I figure he’d rather play an extra few hands of poker than see me wind up dead.”
“Yeah, that’s right. A few games of cards. But it isn’t so easy for Mum.”
“So what does she do? How does she get by?”
Baz heard Ray give a long sigh. “It’s just tough for her, OK? And so I have to stay. I got no choice.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The assembly hall was huge, with a high curved ceiling and a wooden floor, once polished perhaps, now dulled beneath a thick carpet of dust and grime. Along one wall stood a line of metal racks, on which hung many folded chairs. A few of these had been placed in front of the darkened stage at the far end of the hall – just four rows, with five chairs to a row. The group of chairs looked like an island stuck out in the middle of such a vast empty floor space.
Baz trooped into the hall along with the rest of the boys, and together they filled the first two rows. The chairs were the kind that hooked together, aluminum, with grey padded seats. Baz sat next to Ray at the end of the second row. Directly in front of him sat Taps, his hair still wet from the shower. Then Enoch, Jubo and Dyson.
Perhaps it was just coincidence, but Baz realized that the rows had naturally split into the same two groups that had divided over the food thing. Dyson’s group of four sat in the front row, with one spare space at the end. The five who had agreed to share their food occupied the second row. Weird.
Nobody spoke, or even whispered. Baz took his cue from the others and sat in silence too.
There was dust everywhere. Long curtains that hung to either side of the high windows, rows of pictures lining the walls – the remnants of former art projects – even the wooden lectern that occupied center stage – everything was furred in a coat of grey, all colors muted. It was like sitting in a black and white film. A piano stood at floor level to the left of the stage, its lid open. The bright shiny keys were the only things in the room that seemed to be in focus. Black side curtains framed the stage, and the backdrop too was black, so that the solitary lectern appeared to be hanging motionless in a dark universe of its own.
A wheezy gasp of breath came from the next row back, followed by a creaking of the aluminum seats. It sounded as though Cookie had arrived. Cookie had been last in the shower, entering the washroom just as Baz had been coming out. Ray, astonishingly, had once again been up first thing – already washed and dressed before the alarm bell rang – though he had collapsed onto his bed and gone back to sleep while everyone else took it in turns for the jakes.
Baz risked a quick look over his shoulder at Cookie, then saw that Steiner and Hutchinson had also taken their places at the far end of the same row. He hadn’t even heard them come in. Steiner scowled at him, an indication that he should turn round. But now there was a murmur of voices from the back of the hall, and in walked a group of men. They were dressed in dark suits and ties, hair slicked back. It took Baz a moment longer to realize that it was the salvage crew – the Eck brothers and Moko.
He dared not keep his head turned any longer, but the impression that Baz got was of discomfort. Moko in particular looked all wrong in a suit, his burly frame threatening to burst out of the cheap shiny material, his hand already at his collar in an attempt to ease the strain.
Baz faced front again and waited. He became aware of his heart rate – not pounding exactly, but definitely out of rhythm. He had to keep taking extra breaths.
Into the settling silence came odd musical sounds – a faraway chorus of high peeps and whistles, tiny chirruping notes that went round and round. Baz turned his head slightly to listen, and realized that it was only Cookie, sitting behind him. Cookie’s asthmatic wheezing sounded like a strange and distant birdsong. Baz felt a terrible urge to giggle, to shriek, to leap up from his chair and hurtle about the room, screaming at the madness of it all. But then there was a sudden stiffening of the bodies around him, an extra tension in the atmosphere, and Baz found himself instinctively looking towards the left-hand side of the stage. A flicker of orange... moving...
He thought for a moment that it was a flame – a fiery beacon gliding in from the wings. But it was a head. A great bearded head that appeared to sail through the void, alarmingly disembodied. The illusion held for a few moments longer, then the outline of a figure became more distinct. Red-haired, black-suited, a huge man walked across the darkened stage. There was a familiar bear-like roll to his movements, a heavy swing of his shoulders and upper body, yet his footsteps made no sound. As he reached the lectern, he turned and took an object from beneath his arm, a black book that carried the emblem of a gold cross. He raised the book in his right hand, held it there for a moment, and then slapped it down hard onto the lectern. Bang. The sound was like a pistol shot, and Baz felt his neck jerk backwards. Dust flew from the lectern and continued to spread in a slowly descending cloud. The man reached into his breast pocket and took out a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. He flipped them open with one huge red hand, gripped the lectern with the other, and looked out over the silent congregation. Every particle of him, every movement he made, seemed to give out the same clear message. Here was a man to be reckoned with. A man of power. A man who would be obeyed. Preacher John.
The preacher’s gaze swept across the gathering like the light from a watchtower. Baz caught his eye momentarily, an eye that looked yellowish, as though stained by nicotine, yet with a stare so intense that Baz felt a shiver run through him.
“We’ll start this morning’s service with hymn number one-four-seven.” Preacher John’s voice boomed around the hall.
Taps jumped to his feet as if he’d suddenly remembered something, and Baz blinked in surprise.
Preacher John looked down from his lectern. He had his glasses on now.
Taps ran over to the piano, snatched up a pile of books and scuttled towards the back row of the congregation. Three more times he did this, trotting to and fro in a flurry of confusion, delivering a stack of books to the end person on each row.
“One-two-three-four-five...” Taps was whispering to himself as he went, and Baz found himself the recipient of five cloth-bound copies of Songs of Praise. He kept one and passed the rest along.
And then, surprisingly, Taps was seated at the piano stool, an open hymn book before him. His ears, viewed from the back, were as red as tinned tomatoes.
“Isaac, I’ll see you about this afterwards.” Preacher John’s voice was quiet, but there was a hard edge to it. “These boys should be ready. I don’t expect to have to wait on them.” He lifted a hand to adjust his glasses. “Very well. Hymn number one-four-seven. ‘For Those in Peril’. All stand.”
Baz was still fumbling for the right page as Taps struck up the opening bars to the hymn. How extra ordinary it was to hear the sound of a piano again. The bell-like notes rose to penetrate every corner of the room, filling the grey and cavernous space with color, somehow.
“Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep,
Its own appointed limits keep.
O hear us when we cry to thee,
For those in peril on the sea.”
“Sing out! Sing out!” Preacher John raised his hands, palms upwards, and the voices of the congregation grew louder in response.
As the last line of the hymn died away, Baz found himself quite out of breath. He couldn’t remember when he had last sung like that – if he’d ever sung like that at all. It made him feel dizzy.
“Sit.” Preacher John was looking down at the lectern, turning the pages of his Bible.
Baz followed the exa
mple of those around him, taking his seat once more.
“O hear us when we cry to thee. O Lord, hear our prayer... Dear Lord, we beseech thee...” Preacher John raised his head. “This is how we carry on, forever pleading and begging for God’s help, but then expecting Him to do everything Himself. Save us, we cry. Deliver us from our enemies. Sort it all out for us, Lord, so that we don’t have to. But God helps those who help themselves, and despises those who will not lift a finger in their own defense. Turn the other cheek? These are not the words of God! Eye for eye, tooth for tooth – this is the way of the true testament!” And Preacher John leaned forward, pulling down the lower lid of his left eye and rolling it around in its socket.
Baz flinched at the sight, but couldn’t turn away. Preacher John’s presence was overwhelmingly powerful, impossible to ignore.
“We allowed criminals to walk free and spared them the rod of justice, yet we prayed to God to save us from their evil ways. We put ourselves in the hands of moneylenders, yet we prayed to God to deliver us from our debts. We brought famine into the world, and then blamed God for it, even as we stood with our begging bowls held out to Him. And now we reap what we have sown. God’s fury upon us all. Hymn number seventy-one. All rise.”
Up again, a hurried rustling of pages, and Taps began to play.
“Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us
O’er the world’s tempestuous sea...”
Baz was carried along as though hypnotized. He stood up, sat down, mouthed unfamiliar words from the book he held in his hands, and all in a kind of trance. He was so transfixed by the figure before him that the psalms and the hymns and the prayers became just background noise.
“... and the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth: both man and beast and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air for it repenteth me that I have made them!” Again and again the preacher banged his fist on the lectern, so that dust and dirt floated down from the underside to land on the toe-caps of his shiny shoes.
“Gird up your loins like a man. These are God’s words to Job. We must act as men, not as whipped puppies. And we must look to the Old Testament in order to regain His grace. For I tell you this: God has not changed. The God that looks down upon me and speaks to me is the same God that looked down upon Job, aye, and Jacob and Moses and Abraham. And he demands the same of me as he did of them. Worship! Sacrifice! Not the feeble whimperings of a lost child, but the actions of a man!”
By now Preacher John’s slicked-back hair had dried. It circled his head like a fiery halo, a burning bush, so that he might have stepped from the pages of the very book that lay before him. His high glistening forehead looked solid enough to batter down the walls of Jericho.
“Men have died, and have always died, for the greater glory of God. Where there are great leaders, those who speak directly to God, there will be those whose lives are sacrificed in order that His word be obeyed. So will I build my altar to Him. And so will I make my sacrifice to Him, whatever He sees fit to ask of me, even to my own. Rejoice then, my sons, that we have been spared the coming of this second flood, and be glad that the good Lord has given us meat and shelter. But understand this: while the floods remain we’ve not been forgiven. God may ask for more of our blood before he draws the waters back into the fountains of the earth, and we must be prepared to pay in blood. Now let us pray.”
Then everyone leaned forward and bowed their heads. As Baz closed his eyes, he felt that a spell had been broken, that he’d been released at last, though the dark-suited figure still filled his inner vision.
“We thank you, God, for this day. We thank you for the harvest you bring to our nets, and for the comforts you deliver to us. We beg only for the chance to earn your forgiveness. Show us how to atone for the sins of the world, O Lord, that we may live in your good grace once more. Amen.”
“Amen.”
Preacher John closed his Bible. “Hutchinson, Steiner, stay behind as usual to receive your duties for the week. The rest of you, dismiss. Go and take some of God’s good air. Isaac, I’ll speak to you directly.”
“Quick, then. Let’s grab the swipes while we’ve got the chance.”
Freed from the assembly hall, the boys hurried out of the main entrance, Amit leading the way. They rounded the corner of the building towards where the washtubs stood.
“Who’s got the bags and the spoons? Robbie? Got the tin-opener?”
“Yeah, all here.” Robbie pulled two or three scrunched-up carrier bags from his pocket.
Several pairs of hands delved into the filthy water of the first washtub. Out came a dozen or more tins, dripping wet, and these were quickly put into two of the carrier bags.
“Come on, then. Don’t hang about.”
Baz and Ray followed as the boys ran towards the part of the school building that had collapsed. They began stumbling across piles of rubble, broken window frames, upturned desks – a landscape of devastation. Baz looked up and saw the remains of what had once been a spiral staircase, now partially exposed on the outside of the building. Its metal railings were kinked and twisted as though they had been made of coat-hanger wire.
“Where are we going?” Baz was out of breath.
Jubo pointed vaguely. “Up to da sports center. But we goin’ da back way, so they don’t see us.”
“How do we...?”
But Jubo was forging on ahead. There was a dirt lane beyond the mounds of rubble, overgrown by hedges and nettles but still just passable, and this rose in a steep winding pathway to the playing fields.
In a few minutes the boys were all gathered at the rear of the sports center building. A quick glance around to make sure that they hadn’t been followed, and they emptied out the two carrier bags onto the ground.
“What did we get in the swipes then?”
“Ten... eleven... thirteen, I make it.” Dyson crouched down beside the pile of tins, counting them. “Means we’ve got one each and some spares for next time. Let’s give ’em a swill, then, and put them in the sack. Whose turn for Santa?”
“Me,” said Jubo. He reached behind the nearest water butt and produced a black plastic bin liner.
The boys sat round in a circle, and it was apparent from the trampled-down patch of bare earth that they had visited this spot many times. Jubo put all the tins in the sack, shuffled them around a bit at his feet, then passed them out to the group one by one.
“Merry Christmas, Taps. Merry Christmas, Gene...”
This was obviously another little ritual. As each boy received his gift from ‘Santa’, he looked at the end of the tin to see what he’d got.
Baz studied the numbered code. Mincemeat? Yes, he thought so. Savory mince. Too much on its own, and he didn’t feel much like eating in any case.
“Merry Christmas, Amit.”
“I already told you about twenty million times,” said Amit. “I’m Muslim. We don’t do Christmas. Rats,” he added. “I got friggin’ tomatoes.”
“Ha, ha! Bad luck.” Dyson taunted Amit by waving his tin at him. “Beef curry, mate. Go, Santa!”
“Share mine, if you like.” Baz felt that he owed Amit a favor. “I don’t think I could eat a whole tin of mince. We’ll mix the two together. Be like a spag bol.”
“Yeah? OK, then. Thanks.”
“Have some of mine as well,” said Ray. “Look – I got spaghetti. Be even more like a spag bol then.” He glanced across at Baz and pulled a face. It seemed that Ray didn’t feel hungry either. The thought of what was hanging over them would ruin any appetite.
“Yeah, come on. We’ll just do the sharing thing again.” Robbie was up for it too. “Gene?”
“All right,” said Gene. “I don’t mind. But we’ve got no saucepan here to mix it all up in, only spoons.”
“Well... we can just put the tins on the ground and take a bit of each, can’t we?” said Baz. “Like tapas, or sushi.”
“Tapas?” said Jubo. “Sushi? Ey – you rankin’ me? What kind of
life were you leading, guy?”
Baz shrugged. “Dunno. Normal, I s’pose. We used to eat out sometimes, that’s all.”
“Yeah, we eat out too. Pizza Hut and KFC.”
Everybody laughed.
“Tell you what, though. I could kill a pizza right now.”
“Yeah. Or a kebab...”
“Fish and chips...”
“Proper Christmas dinner, with all t’ trimmings...”
“Don’t! You’re killing me!”
“Let’s face it,” said Amit. “Anything’d be better than this crap.”
But it was kind of fun to dip spoons into one tin and then another, and to share everything around. At least it gave a bit of variety, and Baz had the impression that the others might have liked to join in if Dyson would swallow his pride.
But Dyson said, “God, it’s like watching a chimps’ tea party. Your guts are going to be worse than ever on that mixture.” He took a spoonful of curry and made an elegant show of chewing it slowly and carefully.
“Yeah, yeah.” Amit changed the subject. He looked across at Baz and said, “So what did you reckon of Preacher John? Told you he was nuts.”
Baz thought about it for a moment. “It was scary,” he said. “That bit at the end... with the sacrifices and everything. What was all that about?”
Amit shrugged. “Dunno. He’s getting worse, though. He really believes that the floods and everything are a punishment. From Allah. God, whatever.”
“Yeah, well, we already know that,” Robbie said. “But he’s never said anything about sacrifices before. I didn’t like it...”
“Nah, it’s just Bible talk,” said Dyson. “It doesn’t mean he’s gonna start killing people. Not us, anyhow. That’d be mental.”
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