Now I Know (18 page)

a joy that hurts with sadness

a sadness that is pleasurable

a pleasure full of terror

a terror that excites

an excitement that calms

a calmness that frightens.

And I feel I am just about to make sense of it when it fades away and is gone, leaving behind a longing for it to come again, to feel the power of it, the awe.

Now in the tent my nakedness was wrapped in an imprisoning envelope, like the body of a maggot imprisoned in its cocoon while it is changed into a butterfly. Was I being changed like a maggot? And if so, into what? Does the maggot know what it will be when the time comes to break out? And who is performing the trick? Or am I my own magician and don't know it?

The fat sizzled, burning thoughts to a frazzle.

And then the birds burst into their dawn chorus and blazed away, obliterating my thoughts and making me feel so exhausted at the sound of such wide-awake energy that I fell asleep at last.

But not for long.

Julie's morning cold hand woke me, searching out my face hidden in the warm depths of my cocoon. She was dressed, her stuff cleared away, all ready for off.

We'll stop, she said, somewhere along the road to wash and eat. Have this to get you going.

She stuck a slice of apple in my mouth.

Eve! I tried to say through her juicy gag.

If you're playing that game, she said laughing, just remember that the nasty little serpent who caused the trouble by lying to

Eve about the apple was a he.

Pax, I said, holding up crossed fingers, pax!

How about unpaxing yourself so we can get moving?

Groan groan.

Best I can do this early, she said, and left me to slough my cocoon.

Selah.

Forget the damp morning, the grey clouds, the soggy grass, the geriatric car coughing and wheezing before it would start. Forget the shivery trip down the road to the nearest caff. Forget the caff's tired washroom and the pongy loo. Forget the half-asleep waitress and the spongy toast. Forget our silence because I still hadn't come to and Julie was miles away like Sunday mornings and for the same reason. Forget the drive into Cambridge, both of us perked up now and warm and the grey clouds letting through shafts of sunlight, brightening our spirits. Forget our chatter and jokes about last night.

Forget parking the car. Forget the explosion we heard as we walked away, heading for the centre of town, where the noise came from. Forget the worn-out joke I made, that the revolution had started at last. Forget the screaming sirens we heard soon afterwards, and the crowd we saw as we turned a corner, and more people running to join it. Forget us wondering what was going on, and edging our way to the front. Forget the policemen holding the crowd back.

Forget the scene down the empty street. Forget the blackened, crumpled, smoking remains of the exploded car. Forget the shattered windows of the buildings all around, the junkyard rubbish littering the road.

Forget the man lying splattered in the road. Forget his ripped clothes, his blackened body. Forget the draining blood. Forget his tortured, torturing cries.

Forget Julie asking the policeman what was happening. Forget her distress, her outrage, that nothing was being done to help the wounded man. Forget the policeman saying they were afraid the man might be the bomber himself, that he might be boobytrapped. Forget the bullhorn announcement that we should all clear the district in case of a second explosion.

Forget Julie flaring into anger. Forget her suddenly slipping past the policeman and sprinting towards the stricken man. Forget the policeman yelling after her. Forget my own shouts, screaming her name: Julie, Julie, come back, come back! Forget the awful gut-sick sense of doom. Forget my own desperate unthinking wild dash after her, the policeman beside me springing off at the same second.

Forget, as I pounded with leaden feet, seeing her reach the splattered man. Forget, forget seeing her bend over him. Forget her hands outstretched as if towards a lover. Forget, forget.

And then there is nothing to forget because my mind was blown and there is nothing to remember.

Only the breathtaking shock of Thor's thunderbolt.

RETREAT

NIK
'
S NOTEBOOK
:   Now I know I must be calm.

Now I know I must write clearly.

Now I know my life has taken a new direction, and I must map it.

I know this because I've just got back from the hospital. What I saw there taught me.

They sent Old Vic for me. Julie's mother phoned him. Julie was asking for me, calling for me from her deep unconscious. They asked Old Vic to take me to her, hoping my presence would help somehow.

We drove there in his down-at-wheel Volvo, big enough for his bigness, big enough for Old Chum collapsed on the grubby crumpled rugs in the back. Not big enough though to lose Old Chum's decaying pong. But I hardly noticed after the first few throat-grabbing minutes.

We followed the same route we drove five days ago. Then in the dark, now in the light. Stared at the things I hadn't seen then but couldn't
see
now. Couldn't think about them. My brain was stalled. Couldn't move it from Julie.

I'm trying hard to write this the best I can. For Julie.

Because of her, the sight of her, a different voice speaks in my head now. But finding the right words, putting them in their best order, is taking ages. The green fingertip deletes and inserts and repositions time and again, and with long pauses, while I listen in the silence for the new voice, which comes like a faint radio signal from far away.

But writing—doing the writing—also soothes me.

Going through Banbury we passed a funeral.

I thought: I am seventeen and have not yet died.

A mother with a baby in her arms stood watching the coffin being loaded into the hearse.

I thought: I am seventeen and I am still being born.

Writing this now I think: The green fingertip writes my birth. I have not had such thoughts before. Where do they come from?

This is also how I know that I have changed direction. Have changed.

I do not like hospitals. I do not like their barracked look, their clean metalled clatter, their disinfected smell, their contained air of calamity, of pain bravely concealed behind forced smiles. I do not like the way they make illness and suffering a public spectacle.

For years and years you can be healthy and live your life in private. But when you get ill, seriously ill, you are put into a public room with strangers and there must perform the most intimate details of your life in full view of everyone. And this happens at a time when, because you are so ill, you need privacy the most. A double suffering. Organized torture.

But I feel uneasy writing this. Because another thing I do not like about hospitals is that they always make me feel I should be eternally grateful for them. The slightest criticism seems like a blasphemy, a sin, for which I might be struck down by some ugly and revengeful disease. But this is superstition.

INTERCUT
:  
Julie in her hospital bed in an intensive care ward. Her eyes are bandaged but the rest of her face shows, scorched. Her hair burned away from the forehead, she is grotesquely bald. Her arms lie by her sides, covered in bandages encased in transparent polythene and ending in what look like swollen stumps. The rest of her body is covered by a single sheet and looks barrel-shaped because a wire cage over it keeps the sheet from touching. Nik stands at the side of the bed between a nurse, Simmo, and Old Vic, with a middle-aged woman, Julie's mother, behind them.

In the car, coming back, the world was torn.

I have never seen anything that shattered me as much as the sight of Julie.

Yes, I have seen worse things, more terrible. TV pictures of thousands of people starving to death in the African drought. Old film clips from the second world war of the Nazis' death camps with heaps of naked and emaciated bodies rotting outside the gas chambers round which the survivors shuffled like ghosts. Those are two of the very worst. They stick in the gullet of my memory. Just thinking of them upsets me. But not in the same way, not as crushingly somehow, as the sight of Julie and thinking of her now.

For I have felt her charred flesh on my hand and heard her pain through my bones.

Those other, greater horrors someone else saw for me. Camera men, reporters. Professional peeping Toms. Their pictures come between me and those famished Africans dying now, those humiliated men and women and children herded to their deaths before I was born.

Knowing about famished Africans and murdered Jews sickens me, angers me, saddens me, but does not change me.

Knowing about Julie has already changed me only hours after seeing her. Even though I am not yet sure exactly how.

But being there, putting my hand on her suffering, is what caused this.

These are two different ways of knowing. Now I know this too. Two different kinds of knowledge. One is the knowledge of history. The other is the knowledge of my own life, my own being.

And now I also know why the man they called Doubting Thomas insisted that, until he placed his finger into the holes made by the nails in Christ's hands, he would not believe. They should not have called him Doubting Thomas but Knowing Thomas.

Every I is a You; every you is an I.

We were through Bedford before either of us said anything. I couldn't have done before then. Too screwed up. Too near to tears. I think Old Vic was too.

How do you speak about such things? How do you write about them, come to that? Without diminishing them, I mean. Without
insulting
them.

How do you tell such truths? I don't know.

Why do I try?

I don't know.

I only know that I want to try. Must try.

Not speak about them. Write about them.

So I must try and find out how to write the truth. Not for Len Stanley. Not for the stupid film.

For Julie. For me.

Vic broke the silence after Bedford's bottleneck, which seemed to put a wedge between me and Julie.

It wasn't up to him to advise me, he said, but didn't I think it would be a good idea if I went away for a while, had a change, did something different away from news reporters and over-kind friends? There was nothing more I could do to help Julie
just
now, he said, and I would be better able to help her later on, when she was on the mend, if I was fit and well myself.

I said I didn't know where I could go or what I could do, and didn't have any cash anyway.

Vic said he didn't want to press me on the point but I might consider going to stay with the monks he mentioned before. He'd be happy to take me there and fetch me back and the monks didn't charge anything for staying with them so I wouldn't need any money for travel or accommodation. And there was always plenty to do around their house or in their garden if I wanted to repay them and keep busy. Besides, he said, trying to make light of it, I'd get some more material for my research.

I said I'd think about it, talk it over with Grandad, and let him know. Vic said: I've come across people before who say they'll let me know. They often don't. So, if you don't mind, I'll call in now and hear what your grandfather thinks.

And he did. Grandad was keen, surprise, surprise. I thought he'd pooh-pooh the idea. He can't stand anything to do with the church usually. But he said: Go, get out from under my feet, better than drooling round here all day.

I'm not sure. Going there seems a betrayal of Julie. Like going on holiday while she is sweating it out. I want to be here, ready, in case. But Grandad says there's no point. They can fetch me from the monastery as easily as they can from home.

They both went on at me. I argued, but then Vic said we should take the doctor's advice, and he phoned him. Much matey chat; they obviously know each other. The doc said if I felt up to it, it was a good idea.

So in the end I said yes, and Old Vic phoned his monk pal and arranged to take me.

†

‘Could be anybody's,' the sergeant said.

‘But might be his,' Tom said.

‘Could have been there for months.'

‘Don't look it. Forensic will tell.'

‘Up to their eyes. Take a day or two.'

Tom thought, then said, ‘Suppose our chappie lives round here. And suppose he gets his specs from a local optician. And suppose the optician can fit specs to customer. We'd have a trace, wouldn't we, sarge?'

‘That's a lot of supposes.'