The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read (9 page)

‘Goddit. We’ll shoot the crucifix.’

Two days later he went to Deano’s house, at the other end of the Bracken, which was just a block of five dirty white houses joined together and set down as if they had been dropped out of the sky from nowhere, and around them was only scrub and an old square of hardcore where there had once been Nissen huts.

The back door of Deano’s was open and the smell met you with the flies. He was used to it, though it still always choked him. They left raw meat in slabs on the floor for the dogs and open tins of sardines with forks stuck in.

‘Hiya.’

No one turned round. The little dark room was full of them, and all the same, with skinny dirty necks and skinny long arms.

On the plastic tablecloth they’d rigged up a cross of broken sticks punched into a lump of putty. The real
crucifix was on the mantelpiece between two candlesticks and a bunch of plastic flowers.

Mick watched. Norrie held the catapult up quite high, squinting down his nose. He had a cigarette stuck to his lower lip.

‘Pow.’

But the stone skidded onto the floor.

‘Give it here.’

At the end of an hour they were good, but Mick was best and couldn’t miss. They drifted out of the house and sat on the back step, except Norrie, who posed by the fence, eyes half-closed against his cigarette smoke. ‘Can’t miss.’

They looked at Mick.

‘No,’ he said.

‘You got to.’

‘It was Deano’s idea.’

They didn’t bother to answer. The words about Charlie being his brother just hung like Norrie’s smoke on the air. The vengeance was his, by rights.

Norrie flicked his stub into the pile of broken bicycles. ‘Right.’

Mick was almost out of the gate before Deano said, ‘Saturday night. Eleven o’clock.’ He hardly raised his
voice but Mick was so strung up he’d have heard a whisper half a mile away.

The bad thing was he couldn’t say any prayers about it, so there was no help from anywhere. After Charlie, he knew that prayers might not work, but they’d still seemed possible and now they were not.

He avoided the others and didn’t go near the breakwater, or to the other end of the Bracken.

Once his mother said, ‘Haven’t you got more to do than hang about here?’ in the old way, and the next second he saw the flicker over her face, the wish that she could bite back what she’d said. After Charlie she had sworn never again to say it, never to push him out of the house, never give him another tongue-lashing.

After Charlie, like everything. But it couldn’t have lasted and he was relieved because it felt normal again.

She had opened her purse. ‘Take it. Buy some chips. Go to the Amusements. Why not?’ She held out the guilt offering. He hated to look into her face, still shocked that eyes could change so completely, still appalled by the sadness.

He took the coin. He should have kissed her and could not.

They were allowed anywhere except for Fun Land, which was not in the open, but down steep steps underground, a place like a cave, smelling of damp. You didn’t know who might be hanging about down there and the air was bad, she said, and neither he nor Charlie had ever minded being forbidden to go, afraid of the look of it, opening at their feet like the mouth of hell, with orange and green sulphur lights and awful, echoing, shrieking voices.

But now he went straight there without hesitating or letting himself think or imagine, ran down the steps and paid to go through the turnstile.

And it was hell, as he had known it would be, and beckoning and exciting and terrifying as hell must be. The noise of the dodgem cars bounced off the walls and the electricity at the tips of their trailing poles fizzed and sparked.

He could hear the shots and went straight for them. No one else was at the stand. The line of ducks bobbed along past him and round the back and came bobbing round again, and each time he took aim he
had only to think of Charlie and his swollen bruise-coloured face, or the scarlet sock and plimsoll shining wet on the shed floor.

The ghost train screamed and howled behind its shocking hoardings and the laugh of the maniac policeman rang in his head, and he was in hell and triumphant, he could not miss. Crack. Could not. Crack. Crack. Crack.

The electric-blue nylon rabbit was huge and burned his fingers, he could scarcely hold it to run up the steps and across the Bay Road, and throw it over the railing into the sea. The tide was high, and turning.

‘Can’t miss.’

All he had to do was think of Charlie.

‘Can’t miss.’

Which was the worst of it now, that he could not, and was damned because of it.

He ran home to exhaust himself and not be able to think, but it was all there waiting for him at the bottom of the steps into the darkness of sleep, the open mouth of hell and the spit and hiss and the screaming. There was a grinning clown’s head on a
turntable, with wide-parted scarlet lips between which you threw plastic balls.

‘Can’t miss.’

He threw and threw and could not; even when he threw them up into the air, or away behind him, somehow the mouth caught and swallowed them each time.

Waking, he lay quite calmly, with one question in his mind. What would happen? After he had not missed.
What would happen
?

Slipping out was easy. The doctor had given his mother tablets after Charlie, and she still took them. He just stayed in his clothes, sitting on his bed and hardly breathing, until half-past ten, and then went, leaving the lights off and the back door on the latch.

There was enough of a moon, lumpy and pumpkin-coloured, to see by. Mick slid close to the hedges, fences, walls.

There was no getting out of it. It was the right time, long after confessions were over and the priests had finished preparing the altar for early Mass. No one would be there.

Charlie, he thought, and said his name out,
‘Charlie, Charlie, Charlie’. His foot had gone black where the poison had filled and swollen the flesh. He had not recognised anyone.

But now, for the first time, Mick could not picture Charlie. He saw everything else – the chicken run, the deaf and dumb brother’s soft open mouth and anxious eyes, the electric-blue nylon rabbit, even a mushroom night-light he had had by his bed until he was three.

Not Charlie. He tried to force the pictures of him to switch on in his head but they would not come. He thought he might have lost them for ever then.

Two shadows, merging with the gateposts.

‘Mick.’

They just touched each other. Sluggy’s face looked dark and flat in the peculiar moonlight.

‘I didn’t tell Norrie.’

No. This was nothing to do with Norrie, rat’s-tail thin, worldly.

They had not needed to plan how to get into the church, they knew well enough, and went in file round the side to the door no one used. The priests went in at the other side, at the end of the path leading from the presbytery.

Sluggy was the smallest and lightest and went in easily, up onto Deano’s shoulder and, after a second or two of fiddling at the inside catch, snaking through, while Mick held his legs and feet until the exact last moment before letting him drop. It wasn’t far. The bolts made too much noise and the key was stiff, the waiting there in the darkness made them old men; Mick could smell Deano’s dirty smell, the smell of his home.

Then time reeled them in again, as Sluggy opened the door.

It was another smell. He had never understood how they mattered. All the stale incense and snuffed candle smoke of his life came into his nostrils, making his head spin, whispering to him each word he had ever learned by heart. The Catechism. The Mass. The Sacred Heart. The Holy Trinity. ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned’, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace . . .’, ‘Glory be to the Father . . .’

‘Jesus.’

They clutched at each other, standing in the great black hollow ribcage of the empty church. Above the altar, the red glow of the Reserved Sacrament.

‘The body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ preserve your body and soul into everlasting life.’

‘No way.’

The whisper hissed out like a snake’s tongue into the incensed darkness.

But then, when he had given up all hope of ever seeing him again, he saw Charlie, and not Charlie blackened and swollen with his eyes rolling in his head, but Charlie standing up straight and laughing into his face, Charlie waving both arms above his head, blazing, triumphant.

Mick let go of Deano’s arm and walked forward down the side aisle, between the pews, and up again until he was at the foot of the altar steps.

It was not black dark, only dim. He focused on the flickering ruby light. The others were behind him, close to his shoulder.

He waited a long time, until his heart had slowed down, wiping his palm several times on his shirt. Then he reached behind him and Deano put the catapult and the stone into his hand.

‘Mick –’ but he didn’t bother finishing it. He knew it was all right.

With Charlie just ahead of him, still laughing, Mick
went up the three shallow concreted steps, and stood in front of the altar a few feet from the crucifix. At his shoulder, Deano switched on the torch and focused the beam.

Charlie was still laughing.

What would happen?

But now something changed, though only for a fragment of a second. Now, instead of rage, he felt an extraordinary and overwhelming sadness; it raced up through him like the tide, filled him, drowned him in itself, and then ran back until he was left empty and stranded, trembling. He waited. Charlie laughed again.

The sound of the stone as it hit the brass crucifix, and then of the crucifix as it hit the stone floor behind the altar, cracked out like cymbals and went on cracking round and round inside the hollow darkness, wave after wave. It was the end of the world and the veil of the temple was rent in two, everything came down on them. The crash of brass grew fainter and fainter. Stopped. They waited for the row from the street outside and the breaking down of the door. The marching men and the torches.

There was only silence, and after a second the
squeak of a plimsoll as Sluggy moved his foot suddenly.

Charlie was fading now, he could hardly make him out.

From habit he genuflected, crossed himself and turned away from the altar. Deano clicked the torch off so that the darkness blinded him.

They parted from Sluggy at the corner, and he and Deano walked all the way to the Bracken without speaking. Deano evaporated into the darkness there, and even then neither of them spoke a word.

The back door was just as he had left it. The house still. The latch jumped down too loudly into its socket, but no one woke.

He had thought that he would never sleep again, but he slept at once and dreamed nothing. He had thought Mass would be late and the crucifix missing, with a different one put in its place, but Father O’Connell came out onto the altar as the bell stopped on the minute of eight and the great brass cross was upright and shining as it caught the sun, the splayed figure unharmed.

He had thought there would be mention made, an
inquest, an appeal for those responsible. But the sermon was about spreading the gospel through the missions to Communist China and nothing was said.

He had thought his legs might not bear him up in the line for Holy Communion and the host burst into flames as it touched his tongue, but he moved up behind his mother as usual and the host tasted of wallpaper and was cool in his mouth.

He did not look for the others. Anyway, Deano often missed. He had a different sort of mother.

Father O’Connell put out his hand, greeting them at the porch, and Mick had to take the yellow fingers but the look on his face was no different and nothing happened, nothing was said.

Which, in the end, was the worst of it. Nothing happened. Nothing ever happened and for the rest of his life he was waiting and the fear was always there, a cold, hard, bitter pebble lodged in his chest, cold but at the same time blazing red and burning into him.

He and Deano and Sluggy hung about by the breakwater and at the corner of the Bracken and occasionally at Deano’s house, where the smell was still terrible. Norrie turned holy for a while and even thought of going for a priest, but ended up staying at
home, forever half-closing his eyes against his cigarette smoke, his teeth rotten and always giving him grief and a foul temper.

Sluggy moved away after the operation on the hole in his mouth and they never knew whether it had made him talk better.

Mick took to carpentry and liked it, then threw it up, went south, married, left her, traipsed about, never settled. Never could. Because of the waiting and the fear and the dreams of the hollow, incensed darkness and the feel of the stone in the palm of his hand and the sound of the brass crashing down, crashing on and on and on. He took up smoking but it didn’t help, because nothing could. All that would help would be when something happened to punish him and put an end to it.

‘Goddit. We’ll shoot the crucifix.’

He often heard Deano saying it, and the thump of his fist against the wet wood of the breakwater, and waited, for the consequence of it all.