Now I Know (30 page)

‘Said please and thank you, did he?'

‘Lots of words you don't know.'

‘All talk but no action, by the sound.'

‘Wouldn't say that.' Michelle turned away and looked into the valley. A black-leathered figure on a motorbike, like a beetle on a matchbox toy, was circling slowly round a pile of crushed cars in the centre of the dump. She smiled to herself at the sight. ‘Nor would you,' she went on, ‘if you knew who he was.'

‘Why should I give a damn who you were with last night?'

Michelle shrugged and said, ‘Isn't that what you want to talk about?'

The confusion on Tom's face made her tingle with satisfaction. She had duped him, trapped him, hooked him; he knew it and was smarting.

A glance into the valley told her that the tiny motorcyclist had driven away. The dump appeared deserted.

‘All right,' Tom said, ‘let's cut the crap.'

‘You must watch the cops on telly a lot,' Michelle said.

Tom stepped down the bank to face her, the slope so steep his head came level with hers.

‘This is official, okay?' he said straining for professional neutrality. ‘The guy you were with—he had something to do with the crucifiction?'

‘You could say that.'

‘Say what?'

‘He was the one, of course.'

‘The one? Which one? The one on the cross or one of those who put him there?'

‘Ah!' Michelle said. ‘I see what you mean. The one on the cross.'

Tom's evident disappointment took her by surprise; she was even more startled by his reply.

‘You mean Nicholas Frome?'

Tom's turn for satisfaction now. He added with tart pleasure, ‘Tell us something I don't know.'

Michelle preened her hair in hope of hiding her sudden panic.

‘Like what?' she said.

‘Like who did it.'

She turned hard eyes on him and said, ‘If you know it was Nik why don't you ask him?'

‘Because I'm asking you.'

‘And what makes you think I know?'

Tom grinned coldly. ‘You know, and you're going to tell.'

‘Who says!'

‘Look—you've had a nice little game.' Tom snorted. ‘Snooker!' He pulled at his nose and sniffed. ‘Well, I can take a joke. And I'm not mean. I'll be generous. I'll give you a choice of balls—if you'll pardon the expression. You tell me what I want to know, all friendly, like a good citizen, or I take you in on suspicion of being accessory to criminal assault and for obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty.'

‘All right, all right, don't go on!' Michelle regarded him for a moment with undisguised dislike. ‘But only on condition there's no come-back on Sharkey. He's got nothing to do with this.'

‘Who said anything about Sharkey?'

‘Just so long as you remember, that's all.'

‘Sure,' Tom said, ‘no danger.'

‘Promises, promises!' Michelle said with scorn, and set off in the direction of Tom's car, saying, ‘Let's get it over with. Drive me down to the dump.'

REPORTS

NIK
'
S NOTEBOOK
:   I can write again.

Not tears, after all.

The crucifiction was what I needed.

Who would understand? One person's need is another person's bananas. Maybe one day I won't understand myself. So, for the record:

Len S. shouldn't have told me to observe other people. He should have told me to observe myself. I don't need to look elsewhere. All humanity is in me. All its history, all its quirks, quarks, and (w)holes (black and white). Therefore all its future too.

When you think about it, this is bound to be so. With all the fathers and mothers it took to make me, going back by compound interest to whothehellever Adam and Eve were, how could it be otherwise? And not only for me but for everybody.

My life is my specimen. My body is my laboratory. Last week the cross was my test tube.

Now I know that the only faith I can believe is an experimental faith.

STOCKSHOT
:  
The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me.

But I was barmy to think Michelle would help. When I told her what I was going to do she threw an eppie. I'm not going to help you do THAT! You must be MAD! You'll KILL yourself! Etc.

Wouldn't listen. Don't blame her. Not that there was time for explanations. Sunrise wasn't far off. Thought for a minute she would shop me. But she thought I couldn't do it without help. So I said no, I probably couldn't and loaned her my bike and she scooted off home.

I wasn't so barmy as to tell her I'd already worked out how to do it on my own. Though it would have been easier with somebody to lend a hand and would have saved some of the fash that happened afterwards.

Nature and conduct of experiment

Reasons
1. Believers (e.g. Old Vic, Kit, Julie) have been telling me that, if you want to know about belief, you have to behave as if you believed. You don't think it out, they say, and then believe, like solving a puzzle. You earn it and learn it by living it.

2. They have been telling me belief is a gift which you have to want. You obtain it by willing it. Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. (Matt. 7,7.)

3. They all talk about:

They perform the Last Supper, make pictures and sculptures of the Cross, and argue about what happened at the Resurrection.

I have taken part in (a), and quite enjoy arguing about (c). Sharing a meal with friends and having a jawbang about the Big Questions is understandable / fun / good / right / natural. But hanging two- and three-d pictures on the walls of your home, never mind in public places, of a man being tortured by the cruellest death known to the human race does not seem quite pukka, old boy, certainly not kosher, cobber.

Besides, the confessed believers in God's own religion also talk about the imitation of Christ, of living your belief. They act out (a), hope for (c), not being able to do much about their own resurrections as yet, but, apart from a few of their number that they tend to regard as nutters, none of them has a go at (b) crucifiction, which yet they say is so important to their belief. So what's all this about
living
your faith?

Of course, they talk a lot about the cross as a symbol, and that's okay. But 1 thought I'd take them at their word, why not? That's logical, after all. It's what any scientist would do experimentally, if he wanted to study a form of life closely. And as I am my own specimen, my own laboratory, and my own experiment . . . who else for the cross but me?

Not that I ever thought of doing the Real Thing. Nails through hands and feet, and a crown of thorns, and a spear up the rip cage, I mean. I'm not a suicidal sado-masochist. What I had in mind was more like a practice version. Besides:

4. Julie says we are all in everything, and everything is in us. We are the children of God, she says.

Well, children are composed of their parents. They are their parents while also being themselves. Christ, the son of God, was/is therefore God. God is therefore also in me, and I am in God. The believers tell me this as well as telling me to behave as if I believed. And the irreligious OBD tells me I must play Christ.

Okay, I shall take them all at their word. I shall act as if, and practise being Jesus Christ. I shall do some field work, some flesh-and-blood first-hand research, and find out how he-she-it felt, even if only a little bit and not the very worst. After all, I cannot perform miracles, cannot preach to great crowds, cannot invent wise sayings. But I can be crucified.

NB: This sounds pretty lame now. But at the time, that night, after seeing Julie in hospital and hearing her tape, these seemed good enough reasons. And the only ones. But they weren't the only ones. Not even the most important. I know that now but hid it from myself then. (Another conclusion from the experiment: people do things more for hidden reasons than for stated ones. Each of us is a galaxy of secret lives.)

INTERCUT
:  
The shot from outside Nik's bedroom, as before but this time in slow motion. His face is unbearably tense as he listens to his Walkman. He rises and with studied violence hurls the Bible directly at us. It smashes through the window.

The Place
. Golgotha. The place of the skull. A burial place for rubbish. A dump outside the city wall of Jerusalem, a small town on a trade route on the outback edge of the Roman empire in the first century of the Christian era.

This was easy. The dump on the other (i.e. wrong) side of town, across the railway line and the canal, a burial ground for clapped-out motorcars. That seemed to me a pretty good twentieth-century stand-in for the original setting. Especially as the canal is dead, killed by the railway, which isn't what it used to be, having been crippled by the automobile, junked pyramids of which rise up as monuments to travel.

And Grandad's workshop being right next to it meant I could get all the gear I might need.

The Time
. Sunrise. JC was nailed up at 9 a.m. I couldn't wait till then because at that time there would be people around who would stop me. Failing that, sunrise seemed appropriate. New day, new way, etc. Not that I worked it out beforehand. Only decided to do the crucifiction experiment when I was on the common with Michelle. Though—hidden lives—the idea must have been rumbling about in the back of my mind like a brainstorm on the brew all the day before, if not longer.

The Cross
. Easy again. Two or three weeks ago I saw a piece of metal from the chassis of an old lorry lying on the dump. It was made of two pieces welded together in a T-shape that reminded me of the
crux commissa
. I soon found it again that morning.

The Method
. In Grandad's workshop there was a big roll of heavy-duty clear polythene sheeting. He used it to cover anything he wanted to keep dust or rain off. Also for making temporary cloches and cold frames for his garden. I cut five strips off it, each a metre long by ten cm. wide. I also looked out a six-metre length of strong rope, and cut two twenty-metre lengths of window sashcord.

I took this stuff out to the dump and laid it on the ground directly under the arm of the old mobile crane Fred Bates uses to shift wrecked cars and heavier scrap. Then I dragged the chassis-cross to the same place.

I tied the rope to the cross where the metal pieces were joined and made a noose at the other end. The strips of polythene I tied round the bars, two on each arm and one on the upright, leaving them loose enough so that I'd be able to slip my hands through the ones on the crosspiece and my feet through the other. I reckoned these would secure me to the cross while leaving my hands free.

Next I had to fix the crane. I've often helped Fred use it. When I was a kid, the crane seemed like a great big toy and Fred used to let me sit in the cab with him and work the levers. When I got old enough he started paying me pocket-money for working on the dump at weekends. Fred's a kindly, bumbling old guy who has no children of his own, which is maybe why he likes having me around. Grandad often tells him off for spoiling me but I suspect he's jealous. He and Fred have known each other since their infant school days and have a mock-insulting kind of relationship, full of jokes no one else can understand and that neither of them ever do more than half-smile at. The point is, though, that I know how the crane works and I know where Fred keeps a spare ignition key hidden in case he loses the one he carries with him.

So as soon as the cross was ready I took the two lengths of sashcord, found the key, and climbed into the cab. There I attached one length of cord to the lever that raises the hook and the other cord to the lever that lowers it. Then I ran the cords through the cab window to the point on the cross where my hands would be.

That done, I hunted out a stub of heavy metal about the size of a brick and took it back to the cab.

Everything was now ready for a trial run. I started the engine and tested the arrangement of the remote control cords. This meant first finding how to jam the stub of metal against the accelerator pedal in such a position that the accelerator maintained just the right revs to raise the cross. If there aren't enough revs for the weight to be raised, the engine stalls; if there are too many, it raises the load too fast and can jam the hook at the end of the crane's arm. As I couldn't find the right revs by trial and error, I had to judge them from experience.

When I'd done that I had to make sure it was possible to work the up and down levers by pulling on the sashcords. The levers have quirks. You have to lift and shift, rather like a motorcar gear for reverse. To achieve this I had to rig the cords round struts in the cab before a pull from outside of the cab made them function properly. I'd anticipated this, and had been thinking out the solution while getting everything else ready. So I didn't take long to get it right. Except that I discovered I only had one chance with each lever. If anything went wrong once I was in the air, I'd had it: I'd be stuck.