Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam (7 page)

‘You know the cemetery’s a bit like home to me,’ he whispered to his wife, in bed.

She set aside the book she was reading, and looked at him, disturbed, uncertain of his tone: ‘Rick — don’t be morbid.’

‘No — I’ve been there before. As a boy. I once spent a Saturday night in the local graveyard — camping with a friend.’

She listened, reluctantly. Once such a story would have surprised her, now it seemed little more than tame; she knew that both of them had depths that were darker and weirder than had once seemed possible.

‘It was his idea,’ Rick was saying. ‘We each told our parents we were staying at the other’s. We took our sleeping bags, and lay there most of the night, among the gravestones, telling ghost stories, trying to terrify ourselves.’

She shivered: ‘You must have been crazy.’

‘It was a dare — you had to do it. But it was an anticlimax. Suddenly it was morning — we must have slept — and nothing had happened. Of course we were heroes at school — we made up all kinds of horror stories. But deep down I was disappointed. It was the end of something — the end of the tooth-fairy. There just wasn’t anything out there — no other dimension. There were no ghosts.’

Ben was told of the plan — after further intense discussion — the following night. Both parents were unsure what he would make of it, had even worried that he might demand to go too, jealous to the end of the way his entire world had come to orbit another, different focal point: his younger sister.

To him, their explanation was subjunctive again, peppered with ifs and maybes and even with the outright lie that the decision was not yet made, and what did he, Ben, think?

The boy moved to his mother’s side, and held tightly to her, and watched his father for some time, for once silent and undemanding, unable to fully grasp what was being said to him, but sensing its gravity. Rick prattled on, talking far too quickly, telling his son that one day they would be together again, all of them, that until then he would have to look after his mother, that he would be the man of the house.

The boy stared at him, uncomprehending — perhaps, even at nine, disbelieving. Explanations that had sounded profound the night before — talk of journeys, of waking in heaven, of future meetings — now sounded banal, or untrue, or even meaningless. Not for the first time, panic overwhelmed Rick, a wave of terror at the enormity, and absurdity, of the scheme. For the first time also — as his son watched him, suspiciously — he wondered also at the long-term effects it would surely have on the boy. Agitated, emptied of words, he left him with Linda, and swallowed a sleeping pill that Eve had prescribed for both of them some months before — knowing that he wouldn’t sleep, but that at least he might be calmed. Later, in the silence of the very smallest hours, as the rest of the household slept, he rose from his bed, and spent much of the night writing a series of letters to his son: letters to be opened yearly, posthumously, on each successive birthday. He began with simple declarations of love — messages to a little boy from his father in heaven — then for the later years a gradually more complex mix of explanations and exhortations, and, finally, requests for forgiveness. He tried to recall his own states of mind, his own level of development, at various ages — ten, thirteen, sixteen — and tailor his messages accordingly. This was not as difficult as it first seemed: the chronology of the letters, splashed here and there with tears, followed, simply, the evolving complexity of his own thoughts as the long night progressed. The earlier letters to a younger Ben were drafts for the more subtle and sophisticated versions that the boy would open as he grew older.

You are 18, it’s been a year since we last talked, and this is the last time we will talk. I hope these letters have not been a burden to you — hauntings from an old ghost. You are nearly as old as I was when you were born, writing this, and it would seem presumptuous to offer any more guidance …

Sometime before dawn he heard Linda rise and begin moving about in the kitchen. He finished the last letter, and joined her outside on the back terrace. She was sitting at the garden table with a pot of coffee and two cups, clearly expecting him.

He seemed to have spent all his agitation of the night before; extruded it, poured it into that pile of letters. The outside world was starkly defined: sharp silhouettes and edges, a world of knife-edge clarity. An early bird glided between trees in a neighbour’s backyard; the cool air was so still that Rick imagined he could feel the trace of its passage: a faint stirring of wings, a spreading ripple.

Perhaps the tranquillity of the morning seduced them, lulled them into the belief that their plan was not as difficult or as stupid as it had often seemed. Sitting there, holding hands, sipping coffee as light slowly flooded the eastern sky, they decided, almost matter-of-factly, as if scribbling a dental appointment in a diary, on the date.

On the second-to-last evening the four grandparents were invited to dinner. They arrived bearing gifts: big soft toys, chocolates for the children. There were no gifts for Rick; he watched, wistfully, as his parents and parents-in-law spent the evening fussing over Ben and Emma, careful to share their attentions, and their gifts, equably. There was no way of telling them what was planned, or receiving his due share of that attention. There was no proper way of saying goodbye.

Linda brought her father an ashtray as they sat in the family room, sipping pre-dinner drinks, but he declared that he had given up.

‘Weeks ago,’ his wife added, mildly. ‘It’s the one good thing to come out of all this.’

The evening ended with offers from both grandmothers to stay in the house ‘until the end’ — offers that were politely, even gratefully, declined.

‘It might be weeks, Mum,’ Linda lied.

On the doorstep Rick hugged his mother, and then — impulsively — his father. The older man, surprised to receive any sign of affection beyond the usual handshake — hugged him back.

‘Be strong,’ he said. ‘Our thoughts are with you.’

On the last evening the smaller family ate together at the nearby Pizza Hut, a favourite of the childrens. Unwilling to carry Emma, increasingly frail, past a hundred staring faces, Rick had rung the manager; they were permitted to arrive and eat early, half an hour before opening time. If this approached the dimensions of a Last Wish, it was never mentioned — and if the ride home would be by tumbril, it would at least be a short trip.

At home afterwards the four played Monopoly — both children as engrossed as always, both parents unable to concentrate, but doing their best, buying and selling properties on autopilot. Apart from the care with which the fragile Emma had been set down on a sheepskin rug and soft pillows, they might have been one of the idealised families pictured on the boxes of other board-games stacked in their shelves, sprawled on carpet in family rooms, with a board between them. Reminders of their life together surrounded them: gift books, home videos, souvenirs of family holidays, framed paintings done by the children at school or kindergarten or home, family photographs. If the big open space at the back of the house was more family shrine or chapel than family room, these photographs were its icons: small framed group portraits of the four, a smattering of older ancestors, but above all, everywhere the glowing photographs of Ben and Emma, at various ages.

As the game finished, it occurred to Rick that this room had always been their true place of worship, not Church — and that these three people, his family, his ideal of Family, had always been the core of whatever he believed in.

Later, sitting at his desk in his study, listening to Mozart, he finished a long letter to his parents, asking for forgiveness, hoping for understanding. He also tore open the last letter he had written to Ben, to be read on his eighteenth birthday, and added several more words of love. Perhaps it was the Mozart, perhaps it was the sedative leaching into his veins, but with these tasks completed he found himself facing events if not with equanimity, at least once again with certainty.

Linda appeared in the door, agitated, trembling: ‘We can’t go through with this. It’s absurd.’

He led her into the bedroom, they lay down together on the bed, and held each other tightly. They had planned to make love one last time, but the act suddenly seemed irrelevant, and meaningless. She was still trembling; he rose and fossicked a Bible from the bookshelves, and for a time they read alternately: the poetry of Isaiah, Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, St Matthew’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, various Psalms. The texts held only a minimal promise for Rick — ‘we’ll see,’ he joked grimly to himself — but some deeper music in the words had a soothing effect on both of them, like the drug he had swallowed, or the Mozart itself:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me …

He might believe in little beyond family love, but these words seemed the culmination of all their nights of book-readings, as if those thick books — Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray — had been a preparation for this moment, this last distillation of the written word.

In the next room Ben landed on Mayfair, with hotels; the children abandoned their game and joined their parents in bed. Linda slipped a small butterfly-needle into Rick’s veins, and taped it in place, despite shaking hands; she then repeated the procedure on Emma, finding the task surprisingly easy: the girl’s veins were more prominent than her father’s, her skin far more delicate than any thick-skinned navel orange. Emma flinched, momentarily, then watched solemnly as two syringes were loaded with morphine. Her wide owl-eyes seemed to be looking at everything simultaneously, taking everything in. They lay together on the bed, all four of them — just as they had been together at Emma’s birth, six years earlier, in the Maternity Suite at the local hospital. Ben seemed finally to grasp the enormity of what was planned, his eyes had reddened, but the seriousness, the methodical ritual of events seemed to keep any terror in check. They had debated allowing him to watch, to participate, but even now, at the point of no return, there was surely something less terrifying, and certainly less bloody, about this occasion for him than there had been at his sister’s birth, when her strange alien-being seemed to burst from his mother’s innards. Linda felt that for his peace of mind later, as an adult, he should be a participant, he should be there. He listened quietly as they explained the last few steps, he kissed his father, and lay on top of him.

And so they lay together, a last few minutes of handholding, and tears, before separating. Emma seemed less concerned than her brother. Her clear contentment, lying there, clutching his hand, forced the last doubts from Rick’s mind, and induced a parallel contentment in him. His heart pounded, but the flow of his thoughts was suddenly calm and steady. Even Linda felt that her daughter’s serenity somehow cancelled out, at least for the moment, whatever misery she and her surviving child would subsequently endure.

When her husband was ready, she nodded, and pressed her face softly onto his, and he squeezed his own syringe, and waited, holding them all, but not for any length of time.

While much of what I have written becomes unreadable or embarrassing as it recedes into the past, a few things, at least, seem to move in the opposite direction, improving with age. Perhaps this is to meet the requirements of some unknown physical law, a conservation of achievement that requires an average mediocrity. If enough bad writing is written, an equal and opposite amount of good must therefore arise? If so, I should try to write more badly, more often.

Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam
has passed my personal test of time — so far. One reason a story or poem might avoid disillusioning is that it refuses to have its meanings exhausted by rereading; it will not allow the reader (and the writer is the first reader) to be bored. It continues to yield crops, including some from seeds which weren’t consciously sown at the time of writing. I haven’t exhausted
Sunbeam
— I still see new things in it.

Today I thought I saw this: the worship of family is a deep and nourishing religious practice. In our secular society, we might pretend to believe in very little — but of course we believe in much, even if we keep our deepest and most sacred beliefs hidden from ourselves. The urge to religious belief is hot-wired into us according to the anthropologist Walter Burkert. In his book,
Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religion,
Burkert traces how religious belief takes similar forms (e.g. sacrifice) in different cultures. Like our sexual impulses, our religious beliefs resist the attempts of local culture to suppress them, although cultural pressure always deforms these biological imperatives into interesting and unique local shapes, going by the names of (say) Christianity, or Animism, or Islam, or even High Church Modernism.

I’ve explored this in a little more detail in two essays — ‘The Biology of Literature’, and ‘Waiting for the Martians’ in my collection of essays,
Navel Gazing.

When other gods fail, there is still the worship of family, and the household gods of this last surviving religion are its children. But what happens when those cute gods fail? Family worship takes many forms — from the sentimental pieties of Hollywood, to the countless automatic rituals and routines that deeply nourish domestic life. In us we trust? The line from a John Berryman poem has always echoed in my head. The sacredness of family is also surely hot-wired into us, if partly for the usual genetically selfish reasons. What blood sacrifices might be offered to that sacred faith? What crimes committed in its name? Me against my brother; my brother and I against our cousins; our cousins and us against the world excuses everything from fratricide through clan warfare to ethnic cleansing and genocide — but there may be more subtle, suburban weirdness to emerge from family worship. This story explores one such little nuclear detonation.