Life Times (78 page)

He's on particularly good terms – a calling-out exchange – with a young couple who happen to be white, like most of the shoppers. Of course he doesn't know that the husband is a junior partner in an advertising agency, TV and print media, and the wife a lawyer in a legal aid centre for people who can't afford paid representation in the courts, but he recognises the up-and-coming. Their car regularly bypasses other vacant bays to occupy one of their man's, under his surveillance, as he would expect. Later he uplifts a palm coaxing encouragement as he or she approaches with a burden of shopping achieved, and saunters over his territory to help load the stuff, questioning, commiserating along with them the robbery cost of everything.

While talking one Saturday he was looking at the young woman's shoes, gave the calculated observation: ‘Same size as hers', jerked his head back to his wife and as if at a command, she waved to the couple. ‘Haven't you got a pair for her you don't like to wear?' As naturally, in the winter: ‘She ought to have a better coat – you can see. Maybe you can spare.' If the suggestion was forgotten or overlooked (he never accepted the offence that it was ignored), he gave a reminder: ‘What happened to the shoes [coat, sweater] you had for her?'

The wife has never been seen wearing any of these items that were duly supplied. The young lawyer was too respectful of the privacy everyone was entitled to, to enquire: ‘What happened to . . .' Everyone's lives are unpredictable. The predicaments and unheard-of resorts turned to, as related to her at her legal aid desk. How unexpected (he lets her lie drunk on the grass) that now, a Saturday morning, the wife has her lap spread and he's sitting there locked by her crossed arms, her drinking coterie prancing applause around them. The young couple come shopping are drawn in. Their man struggles up and puts an arm on the shoulder of each, sways them into laughter at him, with them: it's not that they're one with the people, the people are one with them.

They don't have to remark upon it to one another, that would be unconscious admittance of what they were before: bleeding heart syndrome, believing they didn't have any class, let alone race feelings of superiority. Now this freedom of spirit is coming in its validity, granted, from the most unlikely quarter, on the other side of the divides. Here was a man, Lucas, organising people who have no recognised place, told they're Informal, a definition without function – except, of course, expected to create – whatever – for themselves. In his self-appointed domain of the shopping street, there is – something? – in him that brings coherence.

‘Without property, the principle of ownership?' The lawyer knows the sources of the economy. ‘But isn't that just it: they don't have the incentives we have' – she tries again.

‘Don't have the access.' That's her advertising man's response.

To herself, unspoken: They have found a way, and we haven't.

 

She sometimes bumped into him along the shops – literally, he would be in what was bantering argument or his tutoring advice with a few of his Parking Tax men in the middle of the pavement, assumed that people would step round them in recognition of their responsibility for the order of the street. He might follow beside her into the supermarket or the liquor store as if he also just happened to be shopping, talking about the new extended shopping hours, row over liquor on sale on Sundays, the church kicking up a fuss, local gossip (did she hear, that old man with the sports car – yes – the red one – bashed into a police patrol car) and loading her shopping cart for her, pushing it before her to her car that was his charge. In his chatter there were threads of reasoning and disciplined logic that made her think – no, shamed her that he had no real occupation to draw on what were probably his capabilities and provide remuneration earned, not handouts in small change.

Over Christmas he was seen helping out at the liquor store, on the pavement loading boxes of party supplies into delivery vans. When they exchanged the usual greeting, she called, congratulatory, ‘You're working here now?' He grinned vociferously. After New Year he was back outside the church, where one of the residents of the park toilets had been standing in for him. He turned away his head as at an intrusion when she remarked, ‘You're not at the bottle store?' (Local jargon on the shopping street.)

It seemed he forgave her, and closed the subject. ‘They don't know how to treat people.'

She knew what he meant. He's not the proprietor's ‘boy'. When she dashed to pick up food at the shops as an unwelcome distraction from her day's absorbed involvement in gaining redress for people whose ignorance of rights complicated their need, she was conscious – again, he really ought to have some proper employment. All the prevarication of authorities, and the frightened sycophantic obfuscation of victims she met with at Legal Aid – in this street man there's at last found something else; the only principle you can live by, now, another kind of respect. The something – can't define, within his presumption, crudity, that she can trust. He lets his woman lie drunk on the pavement. As if he'd just step over her. But drink is her only occupation; he's got nothing else to offer her but tolerance, her only freedom, to do what she's resorted to. He accepts people's laughter at this; it's his share of the informal situation. That's how one must recognise it.

Your Parking Tax pet, the young husband teases, over her concern. A colleague of his own trips from the Olympic level of drinking tolerated among the publicity fraternity, goes into rehab, loses his job and, incidentally, his wife.

One Saturday there is no encouraging beckon when she approaches a church bay and no saunter to help load the contents of her week's provisions into the car. The man's preoccupied with some other of his regular shoppers to whom he's pointing out the problem of a flat tyre leaning their station wagon against the kerb.

Meanwhile a tenant of the toilets in the park belays her insistently, desolately, old, unshaven, dirty in worn cast-offs those people beg from the church. He doesn't ask for money: ‘Please, please just buy me tin of sardines. Please.' He sticks a forefinger down a toothless mouth. ‘Just one tin. Sardines.' She has tuna in her trolley load. She's fumbling in a carrier bag when
he
breaks away from his other regular clientele and thrusts between her and the imploring man. Ignoring her, he's shouting at the bowed head, words are blows in a language she doesn't know. Battered to less than a man, the other cringes, presses arms to his body, bends with knees locked, disowning himself. The ruthless debasement sets a shudder through her, the tin she's found drops from her hand. He, more than a man, an elect, among the rulers of the world, swiftly bends to retrieve the tin and toss it back to the trolley.

‘He's hungry, what are you doing!'

‘Hungry? – don't give him anything. Nothing. He doesn't eat it, he takes it to the park and sells it to get money to buy drink.' A hand of dismissal gestured not as at anyone worth threatening, but chasing a dog out of the way. He takes a deep chest-raising breath, snorts to clear his head of the interruption, and smiles. He's there to protect her from exploitation by the Informal Sector.

In her car driving away she sees she's got it all wrong – there's no new way. Nothing's changed. He's fitting himself for the Formal Sector. Some day.

C
hristians await the return that will raise the dead from the grave as He was raised. They rehearse this each Easter. Kafka records in his diaries ‘On Friday evening two angels accompany each pious man from the synagogue to his home; the master of the house stands while he greets them in the dining room.' Every Friday night Seder an extra place is laid at table. Maybe the one the Jews are expecting is not an angel but the Messiah, the lost son. Muslims don't anticipate the final physical presence of the Prophet Mohammed, they bless his name as if he were always among them.

 

He was clothed like any other man in the rough denim jeans that were the garb of men of any age in the era of the twenty-first millennium. No robes provided. And the return to the mortal state meant that the weals of nail-driven wounds came back, were there scarred under the shirt, and on the feet and hands. It's of no account where he arrived. Apparently no one was about to claim a vision, now that there was a reality. Many over centuries had been sanctified for declaring a manifestation of him or his mother, celebrated in more recent times graphically, digitally, by all the successive technological means of disseminating announcement of miracles, or were exposed as fraudulent hysterical girls and adults in a dubious mental condition of religious exaltation. The sandals that he wore in the carpenter's shop were the same as, himself ageless, he set out in now, the same as any young man might have been wearing if there were to have been any young men around. But no disciples appeared. No Romans manifest in their mutation as riot police with AK-47s, out to deal with suspicious immigrants of rebel reputation.

His sandalled feet took him along the ways he had to go, some of which had a surface hard and blue-black glinting, exploded, strange to the soles, and others receiving them sinking into familiar sand, the feel of the desert land come to be known as Holy, because of him. There were hulks of what must be some kind of chariot, unlike the ones the Romans used, but anyway too buckled and contorted to form a coherent image; a mass of sword-sharp glass shards, peeling colours, bent plates like some form of shielding, and hubs that must have held wheels as such objects have served since the power of the rolling circle was discovered, these in rounds of a black substance that had apparently disintegrated viscid, and set. He looked to someone to be regarding this – a consequence of
what
– as he did. But he was alone.

He found himself entering a city, recognisable as one because of the layout for human concourse that he had known, has existed in some design or another, in one era back behind another. Streets. Jerusalem. Streets; his way was barred by tumbles of rubble risen against great blocks of stone and brick conglomerates thrust about together. Lifted to his eyes he followed constructions that must have been the containments of this time he had come to in fulfilment of faith: fallen, half-fallen under some sort of quake (what evil power has challenged his Father's Creation). As once there had been a flood on earth. Disaster. Cosmic; or some unthinkable disintegration, brought about by human acts, attrition beyond the wars they had sinned against their own kind?

The Romans had constructions, palaces, barracks, great walls, temples of the gods, tall premises of power. Here were premises evidently once so aspiring as to be lost in the sky. Fallen into the shaft of such a ruin, its empty stagger to heaven, there was something part never-covered grave pit, part ordure heap. A confusion cast without respect. Scraps of unrecognisable coded script: Gordon's Dry, Dom Perignon: needles carrying no thread but pointing from small containers reduced to shapes of glass dust, from which, picked up, there is sensed a faint trace of something that was there, transporting essence, an agent of ecstasy not of the transports of the Faith. Where are the people to whom all this belongs, on whose possessions this disrespect was performed?

There are towers and steeples toppled, cast from what were his homes, each one his Father's house. The cross on which his First Coming ended in agony – yes, reproduced in dirt-smeared trinket gold, in rusted iron, and the sacrilege of the cruciform hideously distorted, the arms twisted, wrenched at the ends into an emblem of atrocities. Wherever they were, the people who awaited him, what desecrated heritage had they left as the detritus of their years?

Someone must have survived to bear witness. Surely he would come upon some of his Father's flock, hidden in the countryside.

There was the beginning of open spaces near the streets he had quit. No ruins but fallen icons flung supine or poking up, 7TH HOLE, 18TH HOLE; dead bushes, roots in the air, the condition of growth reversed, from under which he took a hard small object, a dimpled ball, it fits in his cupped palm on the scars. Dead trees, as beggar figures arrested against the line of sky, but then the fragile intricacy of beak-woven bird nests suggests there will be calls to be heard although there are no children playing whom he can tenderly summon.

The wind brings no cry, only stirs rasping branches in a movement he's alert to as that of a bird; no bird hiding from him. But on a measured stretch of open land there are what must be gigantic birds of inconceivable size, outside his Father's Creation, without bones, flesh and feathers, lying in the charred deformation of some self-consuming violent end, fires of hell. The broken skeletons of a kind of throne they evidently had inside them in place of the vital organs of birds and beasts lie within and spewed about them.

 

On and on. Where are fields of grain, terrace of vines?

The straps of the sandals curl worn, dragging between the toes, abrading the skin. No matter. There must be an encounter soon with the people of God who have waited so long. Everywhere animal and human bones – the feet stop, of their own volition, at the sight – the relics of life are indistinguishable except for the rise of hope that is faith, for here is a jaw that could only belong to one who could speak, and the wonder of a skull so magnificent it must testify to the continual resumption of life in that of a pachyderm mutated through the millennia, survived until – what? What catastrophe?

O Lord have you forsaken them? What have your people done to the beautiful earthly abode you gave them, that you have forsaken them?

Where are they, his Father's people to whom He has sent his son, come at last to save from the death sentence of Time itself; to save them from themselves? Always there have been some survivors. Receiving manna in the form of a plague of locusts become sustenance, consumed as food. Men, women, children, animals somehow clinging to a rock on Ararat. The Flood. Water: yes, he must direct himself to the waters, the sea, fishermen use an element of his Father's Creation other than earth, from which to take and sustain life. In this Coming as again a mortal, the paths he makes for himself, the mountain pass he climbs and descends are of a long duration, maybe more than two risings and fallings of the light and day ordained in the Beginning. Emptiness. Still no one, nothing walking, grazing, crawling, flying, scuttling from his footsteps, no one hearing his weary intake and release of breath, no face to meet with the sweat bleeding down his brow, the scars wakening under the sweat-soaked shirt. His thick-tongued thirst. The pools where he stumbled to quench it are so putrid they hold no reflected image of what bent to them and the swallows he took were vomited in rejection from his body. The pains the flesh is heir to that he took on for himself with human existence, the first Coming.