The Complete Roderick (34 page)

‘Hi Sister, gee it’s dark down here. How the heck can you see what you’re doing? Gee I hope you get it done in time to see the play. It’s neat, all about this metallic conception I guess and how the wise men and the sheep men get together to look at this star because they, because somebody didn’t count it in the census. Pa says about censuses what it is they figure if they can just count everybody once, they figure they got it made. He says what they want is to keep the population down to zero, everybody being just a big nothing. He says the whole point of science is people controlling birth and death. Only I guess in those days they didn’t have birth-control so they had to send out soldiers with swords to cut up all these babies. I guess we don’t get to do that part.

‘Anyway I gotta go soon because I’m one of the wise men, I
bring in the Frankenst – frankincense. So here’s a Christmas present for you. I made it myself. Should I open it for you? Here, see? It’s a rosary.’

The figure did not look up. Roderick sat on the step and held out the string of beads. ‘Ma says they got it all wrong about Our Lady giving the first rosary to St Dominic. She says really it was Lady Godiva gave it to the Benedictines. Ever hear that story? No?

‘Well see it was in England and they had this tax problem just like Caesar Augustus, you know? And this Lady Godiva’s husband was the tax collector and he was so mean she felt sorry for all the poor folks paying these taxes, so she did a strip in front of everybody. So her husband said he was sorry and he built this big monastary and then she gave them the first rosary. Only maybe that wasn’t the first one either even though it was a hundred years before Dominic, because Ma says the Hindus had rosaries a long time before that, 32 beads for Shiva and 64 beads for Vishnu, what do
you
think?’

The figure did not look up. ‘Well, Pa doesn’t like religion much, he always says the collection’s the most important part of it, you know? He sounds a lot like this other guy I heard once, who said religion’s all just counting and numbers, telling the beads like a bank teller. Number magic he said. Number magic. He said if you want to go to Heaven get a big goddarn computer. Sister?’

He leaned over closer. ‘Sister, if religion and arithmetic are just the same thing, why don’t we just put ’em together? Like the Protestants, see one time I went into this Protestant church and they didn’t have no crucifix or statues or nothing, just this big board up on the wall with a bunch of numbers on it – is that, is that the answer? Is that the right answer, Sister?

‘Well then look, why don’t we just, when we say prayers and get days of indulgence and stuff, why don’t we keep it all in a bank somewhere? And have like credit cards? Sister?’

The electric hand-polisher stalled, turned over and skidded out from under the wrinkled hand. Roderick made a move to fetch it, but stopped. Sister Mary Martha rolled over sideways and lay still and stiff, her withered cheek pressed to another withered cheek in
the gleaming floor. Roderick stared, and four colourless eyes stared back at him.

‘…
Holy Family Kit
hits the Chicago dealers just make sure your boys are on the ball there, work out some kinda sales slogan, not just the old family that prays together routine neither, something peppy like
Go! Go! Go for God!
maybe or no, okay something like
Say One For Yourself, Too.
Well I don’t know Frank, you’re the adman … hang on a minute … what is it?’

‘Father, there’s a stiff downstairs. You wanta call the cops?’

‘Oh very funny, now go away stop bothering –’

‘But Father it’s S –’

‘Go away.
You still there Frank? Nothing just … talking what? Ha ha,
host,
aw come on! Never get a dispensation in a million … need their head examined if they think … Ha ha, try that out on Jack, Father Warren here, he’s the science fiction nut around here …’

Chairs creaked, programmes fluttered, as a shrill voice finished flattening the notes of
Bless This House.
The man next to Pa wondered why they couldn’t turn off the heat when they had a mob like this, and the woman next to him wondered why they didn’t just run it all through closed circuit TV like they did over at the public. Pa said he didn’t mind, but then he was non-Catholic. Ma tried to nudge him but he went on, ‘Yep, getting ready for the eternal flames,’ he said. ‘Wanna see me weep? Gnash my – ouch!’

‘Oh you’re Mr Wood, aren’t you? I don’t suppose your little boy’s in the play – you know our little Traysee is playing Our Lady herself?’

‘Our Lady?’

‘The Blessed, you know. Mary. I don’t suppose your –’

‘Playing one of the wise men. Not sure just which one, Baal-hazar maybe.’

‘Oh yes he’s the little crip – handicapped boy isn’t he?’ The woman smiled a V-shaped smile. ‘You know I always think it’s best to keep them in a home. After all, if God –’

We do keep him in a home. Ours,’ Pa stage-whispered as the curtain rose on a centurion. A shrill voice began:

‘At thattime therewentforth a disease, a decree …’

*

The show, Roderick thought, must go on. Besides, nobody wanted to listen when he tried telling them, not Father O’Bride upstairs on his exercycle watching his own muscles ripple underneath his Sham Rocks t-shirt. Not Sister Olaf backstage here either, she was so busy keeping everybody quiet and trying to keep the choirboy from wiping his bloody nose on his surplice, and heck she didn’t even see anybody, didn’t even say she liked his costume it was just, ‘Okay get ready Wise Man Number Three’, as if he was jumping out of a plane or something, already the numbers one and two were moving forward (‘Little steps, little steps’) and the choir hummed
We Three Kings of Orient Are.
Then suddenly he was onstage in the blazing light …

The choir stopped humming. The audience stopped coughing and creaking.

Ma had taken a lot of trouble with the costume, saying that a sorcerer ought to look like a sorcerer. And since no one had made it clear which Wise Man Roderick was to play, she’d fixed up a kind of all-purpose outfit. She might have got away with the lunar bull-horns and the solar mask (even though its crazy blood-red grin would disturb children’s dreams for some time to come). Even when Roderick opened his giant wings to speak, the audience was less shocked by the fixed stare of some 500 dolls’ eyes, than by the revealed body draped in yellow, and bearing unmistakable appendages on the chest. 500 or more eyes stared back at him, at
them,
those lumps of painted wood which (Ma said) sorcerer-kings of old had worn to distract the gods. And between these great breasts nestled the sacred heart of Osiris, bright red, pulsing realistically, and gushing butane fire. With a bang, it went out.

A man snickered.

‘Jesus,’ began Roderick.

A woman gasped.

‘I mean here’s frankenst – Jesus, here’s –’

An angel screamed. A whispered command came from backstage and some of the larger choirboys moved to seize him. And then suddenly he was all over the stage at once, rolling, kicking, flapping his wings, disappearing under a heap of lace vestments to re-emerge minus a breast, dodging the black arm of a nun, crashing into the stable and emerging in a blizzard of straw –
– until finally he was pinned down as the curtain descended, so that the last thing seen by the audience was his Satanic grin.

That was how they would think of it later, Satanic. One or two in the audience went so far as to imagine they had heard him uttering curses and incantations, that they had seen a forked tail which coiled around him to make the Sign of the Cross in reverse … Others had more practical reasons for being upset. Mrs Roberts, whose little girl had not yet made her entrance (‘Fly! Fly to Egypt! King Herod …’), made her way backstage to deliver a slap that left her hand stinging, Roderick’s metal singing.

‘It was like seeing a peacock hunted down and plucked,’ said Ma as the three of them walked home.

‘Phyllis Teens,’ Pa muttered.

‘Except that it used to be a wren, didn’t it? At Christmas all the English villagers would go out in a big pack and hunt down a wren. Men of good will …’

‘Why?’ Roderick asked.

‘Now don’t get all upset, either one of you,’ Pa said. ‘The disguise was beautiful whatever they say. And you done just fine in the play, son. Anyway remember, Christmas is just another Julian day. Day two million, four hundred forty thousand –’

‘Men of good will! Industrial England it was, so of course they had all kinds of funny notions, they, they thought the machines wanted them to do it. Yes so they killed the little bird and crucified it and carried it around the village singing

We hunted the wren for Robin the Bobbin

We hunted the wren for Jack the Can

We –’

‘Yeah but why would they do that?’

‘Because, I don’t know why, because they were horrible Manxmen, maybe. People with so little imagination they call their home the Isle of Man –’

‘And,’ Pa said, ‘they couldn’t even put a cat together properly, left the tail inside. Sorry son.’

Roderick did not like jokes about body parts coming apart. Hearing one made him suddenly imagine he could feel the iron
rods in his legs. He felt them now, even as he smiled. ‘That’s okay.’

‘That was a very strange play,’ said Ma. ‘All that business about the Virgin Mary, as if the infant didn’t count at all. She’s the big star, and he’s just a silly doll. Reminds me of the Egyptian priests, at the winter solstice they’d all gather in the temple and at midnight they’d come running out with this wooden doll, telling everybody the Virgin had given birth to this new sun, S-U-N I mean –’

‘Another yard of Frazer,’ said Pa. ‘Son, I get this every damn Chris …’

They had to stop to wait for Pa to finish coughing. Roderick looked at the stars. Damn Christmas, Christmas of the damned, dead souls. Burning like candles on a tree. If everyone lit one little candle, Pa always said, we’d have a candle shortage overnight. Pa coughing out his soul in a cloud right here on earth. Spitting in the snow to leave a wren-mark. For Robbie the Bobbin. Hunted by a hawk, up it comes, somebody marking its fall. Souls escaping on a sigh.

Ma always said that souls were only held to Earth by the weight of sin, they rose up to Heaven by dropping it: giving all your pride to the Sun, all your love of money to Mercury, all your lust to Venus, all your gluttony to the Moon, all your anger to Mars, all your envy to Jupiter and all your laziness to Saturn, finally entering the astral sphere to become a pure flame, a star. Which one would be Sister Mary Martha? If Roderick had his way, she’d be the brightest, nightbright as she had been dayplain, the almost invisible virgin now crawling up the stairs of the sky (cleaning each one) to her jewelled crown.

None of them, he guessed. All just burning globs of goop, so many light-years away. And when people died, they went the same place as the mark of a wren in last year’s snow.

Pa finished his cough. ‘Okay, home! Home, to hang up our socks!’

Christmas was all in the head, Pa said (the heart, Ma corrected). So really this home-made tree was just as good as any real one, wasn’t it?

Roderick looked at it and saw tall evergreens, cut down in the
mountains by singing lumberjacks, hauled to town on horse-drawn sledges with bells all over them. It was set up in a house where there were wreaths on the doors and red candles in the windows, to guide visitors who would arrive any minute in their top hats and bonnets, laughing all the way to the bank, through the banks of snow and loaded down with presents (and of course cards showing all of this), Bob Cratchit goose puddings, black servants beaming at them over silver trays of eggnogs, giant dolls and electric trains that Father would play with when not admiring his new pipe and shotgun, but not half as much as Mother admired her new automatic kitchen machinery or her genuine diamonds lasting a lifetime or her personal transit car, just right for shopping (for turkey and trimmings, gifting ideas or magazines showing all of this including cards on the mantel (showing all …)) or for getting the kids Back to School, so much easier and fun to learn with a homework computer, just coming out of that big box under the glittering tree. The tree …

At the same time, Roderick saw it was only the bottom of a cardboard box with a green triangle drawn on it and a light bulb stuck through a hole. The bulb wasn’t really connected to anything, but then it was burned out anyway. And anyway, they had to keep the power-bill down this month. And all the other bills, like food. Ma and Pa would be imagining their Christmas dinner too, and probably their presents.

All the same, they hung up three stockings on the back of three dining-room chairs. And in the morning there was stuff in them!

In Pa’s stocking there was a beautiful hand-painted certificate awarding him the Nobel Prize for Inventions. And a drop of water.

In Ma’s stocking there was a wonderful little machine to help her make up titles for her sculptures: two cardboard wheels with words on them
(Forest Sneeze, Shoelace Metonymy
; etc). And a drop of water.

The drops of water had been snowflakes when Roderick put them in the stockings. Ma and Pa said they could see that they’d been pretty terrific snowflakes, too.

In Roderick’s stocking was a foot.

‘Don’t look so puzzled, son.’ Pa went out to his workshop and
brought in the rest of the present: a complete, full-sized adult body in pink plastic, with a gleaming stainless steel head.

‘Oh,’ said Roderick, trying to sound pleased. ‘Clothes.’

‘Frankly, Father, I expected something like this. You would give him those
Protestant
books to read …’

‘Kierkegaard? But Sister, it’s just, just a book about faith, the blind leap into darkn –’

‘All the same, Father. All the same.’ Sister Filomena held out the essay by two fingers, avoiding contamination. ‘No doubt you’ll be wanting a word with him about this.’

‘Well of course I’ll speak to the boy if …’

‘Boy! Lord have mercy on us, he can’t even get his knees under the desk. He’s head and shoulders over all the other children. Yes and all the girls have been – well,
looking
at him. He’s just not natural.’