Life: An Exploded Diagram (11 page)

From somewhere deeper in the house came the faltering sound of a piano.

George hung his jacket carefully on the back of a kitchen chair. Ruth was in an ecstasy of curiosity, and he knew it.

“George?”

He loosened his tie and pulled it off over his head.

“George!”

He grinned, relenting. “He offered me a job.”

“What d’yer mean, a job? What sort of a job?”

“He’s buying in a whole ruddy fleet of machinery. Big stuff. And he wants me to look after it all. Full-time.”

“Oh, my God, George. Whatever did you say?”

“I told him I’d think about it. Then he offered to pay me double what Bill’s paying me. Plus a car. So I said yes.”

Ruth put both hands to her face, shocked. After a second or two, tears of delight rolled onto her cheeks from behind her spectacles.

It wasn’t a car, as it turned out. It was a smartened-up ex-army Land Rover. It was instantly the talk and envy of the neighborhood. And three weeks later, two men from the GPO turned up to install a telephone. Win refused, absolutely, ever, to have anything to do with it. If it rang when she was alone in the house, she’d cover her ears and shout, “He ent here!” at it. She went to her grave (actually, it was a plastic urn) without ever speaking to someone she couldn’t see. Other than God, of course.

B
ORSTEAD OFFERED LITTLE
in the way of amusement, so Enoch Hoseason always attracted a small crowd on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons.

At the western corner of the marketplace there stood a narrow archway leading into an irregular space called Angel Yard, named after a tavern long since demolished. For well over a century, Angel Yard had been occupied by little businesses and workshops specializing in agricultural services: harness makers, twine merchants, seedsmen, and the like. Hoseason’s great-grandfather had built a forge there and had prospered as a blacksmith. But by 1960 that business, like the others, was fast becoming obsolete. Horses — and their shoes — were on the way out. Enoch had turned his hand to sharpening lawn mowers, repairing garden tools, and, now and again, to hammering out wrought-iron gates and railings.

In social and religious terms, the Hoseason clan had always been awkward, harsh, thorny. They were Methodists for a while, but found Methodism a bit slack. They joined the Baptists, but found them a bit wet. Eventually they formed their own sect, calling themselves simply the Brethren. The men grew beards and tyrannized their women. Their instinctive response to more or less anything was to rail against it. The delights of the flesh, in particular, got their backs up. They bitterly regretted the pleasure involved in the conceiving of children, and chastised their young because of it. Way ahead of their time, they were the Taliban of north Norfolk. And like all prophets, they were lonely and scorned.

Then Enoch had a vision. It appeared one evening in his furnace and revealed the purpose of his life. Two terrible and beautiful angels of flame foretold him the end of the corrupt and mortal world. God, they confessed, had tried to purge the world with water, but sin had refused to drown. Now it was the turn of fire. All sinful flesh would melt, burn, vaporize.

“We speak of fire from the fire,” the male angel said, “yea, even unto a man that worketh with fire.”

“Hallelujah,” Enoch cried, dropping his tongs and falling to his knees.

“Know that the earth shall be like unto thy furnace.”

“Amen!”

“Know this, also: the seed of the fire is already in the hands of men. It shall become a mighty tree that groweth up to heaven, and all shall be consumed in the leaves and branches of its burning.”

Enoch’s eyes were wet with joy.

“When, angel? When will this come to pass?”

The female angel smiled at him. Her uplit breasts were perky under her flame-resistant robe. She spoke without speaking.

“The revelation is in the Book.”

This answer came as no surprise to Enoch Hoseason, who came from a long line of biblical fundamentalists. As soon as the angels faded back into the glowing coals, he reached for the Good Book with a trembling hand.

The end of the world is almost as old as its beginning. In chapter one of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, God spends most of a week creating the earth and all that is in it; then a mere six pages later (in Enoch’s dog-eared copy), He destroys it all in a flood, the only survivors being, of course, Noah and his family and their floating menagerie. So it’s hardly surprising that for thousands of years people have been predicting another End. The Apocalypse. Armageddon. The Day of Judgment. Again. Nor is it unreasonable. Consider our brutal, bloody, and filthy history, our nasty habits. If there was ever a species that deserved purging from the surface of the planet, it is humanity. We are, or should be, a temporary infestation or infection, a smart virus awaiting its divine antidote. The prophets of the Bible return to the theme over and over again. Enoch was keenly aware of this. He had spent countless hours studying them. He was particularly interested in the book of Hosea — naturally, since the name was the seed of his own. The trouble was that the book of Hosea was almost impossibly difficult to understand. It was also drenched in sex. It began with God commanding Hosea to marry a prostitute:

The
LORD
said unto Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredom and children of whoredom: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the
LORD
.

Did this mean, Enoch had often wondered, that his own mother (long since gone to her reward) had been a whore? Well, yes, sadly. All women, from snake-fancying Eve down, were; this truth was the very foundation of God’s Word. Satan works his wiles through women. Salome, Jezebel, Delilah, the Whore of Babylon. But Hosea, like the other prophets, promised universal cleansing.

Therefore shall the land mourn, and every one that dwelleth therein shall languish, with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven; yea, the fishes of the sea also shall be taken away.

That last bit pleased Enoch. He’d always had problems with the Flood. If all things were sinful, it seemed odd that fish, not to mention ducks and seagulls, for example, had got off so lightly.

But the female angel (whose breasts still troubled Enoch) had said, “The revelation is in the Book.” She was clearly directing him to the book of Revelation, the Bible’s violent and visionary climax. He was already deeply familiar with it: the Lion of Judah, the blood-soaked Lamb, the seven seals, and the seven candlesticks. The four horses and the seven plagues were constant visitors to his waking and his sleeping. But now he returned to the book looking for something precise: a date.

Enoch knew, of course, that previous prophets of the End had come unstuck by getting the date wrong. Because the book of Revelation gave the number of the Beast as 666, there had been widespread panic, and rapture, toward the end of AD 665. But the following year had passed without incident, as far as global destruction was concerned. Then the idea took root that mankind’s term on earth was a thousand years. So Christendom was seized by terror and joy in the year 1000. There was anarchy, in fact. Lawless mobs roamed Europe, looting and pillaging and raping on the grounds that they were doomed anyway, so what the hell. But the sun rose, as per usual, on the first day of 1001. (The Muslims, who worked to a different calendar, laughed up their sleeves at the foolish Christians.)

Nevertheless, the dread of dates with zeroes in them persisted. (Enoch’s younger brother, Amos, was among many who came to believe that AD 2000 was the cutoff date. He became a vegetarian in the hope that he would live long enough to be a witness to the cataclysm. To his great disappointment, however, he would die in 1998.) Other dates had come and gone. The American prophet William Miller had announced that the Last Day would occur in 1843. When annihilation failed to occur, the date was revised to 1844 — October 22, to be precise. October 23, 1844, eventually became known as the day of the Great Disappointment.

Despite all this, Enoch Hoseason believed that the recurrence of particular numbers throughout the Bible, especially those in the book of Revelation, would, as the angel had promised, give him a date. The fact that earlier prophets had got it wrong did not daunt him. That men had failed to discover a thing did not mean that it did not exist. Australia, for example, had been there all the time. So, neglecting work, food, and rest, he made abstruse calculations on sheet after sheet of paper. Eventually he came up with the five numbers 2, 8, 10, 6, and 2:October 28, 1962. Soon. Very soon; hence the urgency of the vision. Hosanna!

The date of the End, the search for it, had not blinded Enoch to the other message of the Scriptures: that there are those who will be saved, those whose penitence and purity of heart will pluck them from the fire and seat them upon the white pews surrounding the eternal throne of the Lord. Obviously — because the angels had appeared in his, Enoch’s, forge — the Brethren were the Chosen. While this was joyous, it was also a problem. Should they be told? If they knew, might they become complacent? Might they cease to spread the word, cease to labor in the sour fields of sin, sowing the seeds of salvation? Might they — God forbid — slacken into sin themselves?

Enoch prayed energetically for guidance, but none came. He was not disappointed; he understood that the vision brought with it hard responsibilities. So at last he summoned the Brethren to his house and shared the revelation, swearing them to secrecy. Their joy and their fierce resolve assured him that he had done the right thing. Amos wept glittering tears of delight and beat upon his breast repeatedly. Jonathan Eldon uttered inspired words. Win Little rocked in her seat, hugging her stout old body, thanking the Lord for releasing her, at long last, from slavery and whoredom. Not to mention a bleddy uppity son-in-law.

Enoch Hoseason was a big man. Not tall, but wide and powerful; a compressed giant. On the Saturday after he’d shared his vision with the Brethren, he carried the massive anvil from his forge, hugging it to his chest, and set it down in the archway facing the marketplace. Those who happened to witness the feat were mightily impressed. He was accompanied by Amos and Jonathan. Each carried blackboards painted with ominous passages from the Scriptures. They positioned them on either side of the arch. Enoch began to preach to the small but swelling crowd of onlookers. He punctuated his sermon by smiting the anvil with a heavy, long-handled mallet.

“Ye shall die. Be certain, ye shall die.”

CLANG!

“And sooner than ye think.”

CLANG!

After a month or two, Enoch also started setting up his iron altar on Wednesdays, early-closing day. As on Saturdays, he always attracted a jovial crowd.

“Less see yer lift that thing agen, bor!”

“How nigh is that enda the world, Enoch?”

“I do hope yer gorna finish my gate afore that come, Enoch!”

“Mock ye, yea. Let mockery be a comfort unto thee. For the seventh seal shall be opened, and death shall not be an ease unto thee.”

CLANG!

G
EORGE, WITH HIS
back to the bed, buttoned up his pajamas and said, “What’s up with your mother, Ruth?”

“What d’yer mean?”

“You must’ve noticed. She’s been different lately. She’s stopped bitching at me all the time.”

“Shush, George. She’ll hear us.”

He grinned. “I doubt it. She’s gone a bit deaf, I reckon.”

He took his socks off and looked at himself without pleasure in the mirror. How had he got so old? When had his hair started going Absent Without Leave? He got into the bed, and Ruth clicked them into darkness.

He spoke to her broad back. “You know what I mean. Instead of moaning at me all the time, she’s gone all sweetness and light. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. Like last night, when I got in late. What I usually get is ‘Yer’ll hevta scrap around if yer want somethun, ’cos we had our dinner the usual time.’ But no. She goes, ‘I’re put yer dinner in the bottom of the oven, George. The gravy hev gone a bit thick in the saucepan, but that’ll be all right if you heat it up.’”

“That was nice of her, George. I don’t see why you should get upset about it.”

“I’m not
upset.
I’m not saying that.”

“So what are you sayun, then?”

“I dunno. Just that it’s a bit strange, is all.”

“She’s gettun old, George. Thas all it is.”

“No,” George said. “It’s something else. I don’t trust her. It’s like she’s looking at me, saying, ‘I know something you don’t.’”

Ruth laughed, shuddering her bulk.

“Dunt be so daft, George. Go to sleep.”