Now I Know (9 page)

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JULIE
:   I lie here now remembering that day. After you'd gone, looking so pleased with yourself, I got straight into a hot bath and soaked away the mud and soothed my bruises and thought, ‘Oh dear, what now! Have I done the right thing?'

You see, even after just that first sopping hour together I knew you'd get serious about me, and that I'd have a job keeping myself from getting serious about you. And the trouble was—the trouble is—I hadn't planned on boyfriends. Not serious ones, anyway.

You weren't part of my scheme of things, dear Nik. Not at all.

INTERCUT
:  
Julie's room. An upstairs bedroom in a small terraced house. The walls are painted brilliant white, and are bare of all decoration except for a slender cross made from two pieces of sea-scoured driftwood which hangs in the middle of one wall. Beneath the cross stands a prayer desk of plain oak on which lies a Bible and a loose-leaf file containing passages from books, poems, and other writing Julie has copied out for use during meditation.

JULIE
:   I haven't told you this before. Didn't want to. Couldn't bring myself to, if I'm honest. But now I have to tell you, I think. It's time. Because whatever happens when they take off the bandages—whether I can see again or not— nothing will be the same as before, will it? Can't be.

[
Deep breaths in and out.
]

I think about it a lot. About when the bandages come off. And about the future after that. When we know for sure what's left of me. [
Chuckles.
] Not that I'm any the wiser for thinking about it so much. More confused, if anything. Except, I know some things that weren't decided before will be then. What you are to me, and what I am to you. That'll be the important thing the great unwrapping will make me—us—sure about.

You see, dear Nik, what I haven't told you is that for years I've thought that I want my life to be all for God.

[
Laughs.
]

I know, I know! But don't give yourself a hernia from hilarity. Lots of girls go through a nunnery phase just the same as they go through having crushes on hockey sticks and horses and pop stars and even on yummy teachers. I know that. But I got over those things before I was fourteen. This is different. The same way it's different when people decide they'd like to become doctors or computer programmers or scientists. I want to be a God something. I don't know exactly what kind of something, but something for God.

I was trying to work out what that something would be when you came along. I was looking for the best way. A way that would be right for now, for today, and not a way that used to be right years ago but isn't any longer.

Not that I've said anything about it to anyone else. Mum knows, of course, and Dad, and my brother. Oh yes, and Philip Ruscombe. But no one else. I like to be sure of myself before I say anything to other people. And being a God-something isn't the sort of subject people talk about very easily without . . . well, without laughing, I suppose. They find it hard to believe you mean what you say, or that anyone could seriously want to do anything like that these days. So I was quietly sorting it out for myself. Till you came along.

Suddenly there you were, and I couldn't think why I cared. Not at the time. I remember lying in my bath that Saturday afternoon, half of me still smouldering with anger at the pagans, and the other half wondering what on earth it was about you that disturbed me so much. I mean, you aren't especially good looking. Sorry about that! You're fairly clever, I suppose, but you aren't a genius. And you're younger than I am. I don't mean only in years, but in yourself. You're still a schoolboy.

So I'm no fashion plate, and I'm not even as clever as you, but I do have a job, however lowly, and have had for two years. I feel like a grown-up woman, not a schoolgirl any more. [
Laughs.
] Yes, I know. But everyone can be wrong!

Apart from those things, you were big-headed. All the way home you made fun of everybody else. The leptonic OBD, the kids in the film group, Leonard Stanley, the CND organizers, the NF mob, the police. You were quite funny, I admit, but you were unkind too. So when you asked if you could see me again I only said yes because I thought you'd give up when you knew going to church was part of the bargain.

It wasn't until 1 was in the bath that I realized I wanted to see you again, and wanted to see you in more than an ordinary way. I worried about that for a while, feeling as if I were betraying God or myself in some way. But then I thought, ‘That's ridiculous. God will just have to take her chance.' And so will I. Because if I can't survive a crush on a bigheaded schoolboy, then I'm not likely to survive all the difficulties that'll be thrown at me if I work for God. So, I thought, ‘Perhaps this quirky schoolboy is a sort of test, perhaps he's a temptation I can use to find out how determined I am. In which case, I might just as well relax about him and get on and see what happens.'

If I'm honest, though, I have to admit I didn't think you were much of a challenge. Didn't think you'd last long after church, even if you actually turned up. But here I am weeks later, still battling! And I've enjoyed every minute. Truly.

[
Pause.
]

What I'm trying to tell you is that I've got the same sort of feeling now that I had about you in my bath. And just like then, I don't know why. But this time the feeling says the test is near its crisis. That there'll be an end . . . No, that's wrong. Not an end but another beginning . . . Very soon. Which is why I want you to know, before it happens, the way things are. So that whatever happens there's no deception, and no pretence. Only honesty and truth. Or the truth as near as I can get to it.

Does this make sense? Do you understand?

I'll worry till I know.

REVELATIONS

That first Sunday morning, when Nik met Julie at her front door, she said, ‘I don't mean to be rude, but would you mind if we didn't talk at all till after church? I'll explain later.'

‘If that's what you want,' Nik said.

So they walked side by side, unspeaking, along empty streets, up through town to St James's, set on a hill above the hospital and below the cemetery.

Nik smiled to himself as they approached, thinking, ‘On the trip from sickness to death stands the church of God, and it's uphill all the way.'

Julie plodded along with such abstracted concentration that she might have been by herself. Her gait was urgently mechanical, her eyes fixed on the ground ahead, unseeing.

What was going on? Nik wondered. What was she thinking about? Was she worried? Or feeling ill and forcing herself to church? Or fed up? She certainly didn't look pleased or happy.

No, she looked more like someone utterly absorbed in a book. Consumed. That was the word.

Julie yomping to church puzzled him. Which made him all the more curious.

NIK
'
S NOTEBOOK
:   Must the insides of churches be like deep-freeze warehouses? St James's is a late-Victorian stone pile with walls painted white to try and brighten the place up. But all this does is make it look cold as well as feel cold. Is this what Jesus Christ intended for his fans?

‘Thou shalt build in my name large, cold mausoleums that shalt cost thee a bomb to keep up. These thou shalt perfume with the odour of damp dust, dirty underwear and dry rot. There shalt thou gather with glum faces, sit near the back, utter long prayers in mournful voices, sing tedious songs out of tune and very slowly, and generally give thyselves a thoroughly bad time.'

Not that I've been in many churches. None at all for ages, in fact. Maybe they've changed. Maybe they're terrific fun places now. But not St James's, that's for sure. I think the people who go there must be masochists. Or else they all have terrible guilt complexes and think going to church is a penance that they suffer for their sins in order to keep in with God.

One of the troubles I have with Christianity is that I don't feel guilty about anything. Maybe I'm a religious defective?

Selah.

There were sixteen people. I counted while Julie was kneeling down, doing her kick-start prayers after we got settled in a pew near the back. She wanted to take me nearer the front but I wouldn't let her. Who might be there and see me? I'd never live it down.

Early morning communion. You'd never get me up before ten on a Sunday morning for anything normally, and sitting there with the shivers waiting for the performance to start while Julie did her hands-together act beside me, I began to wonder why ever I'd got up so early this morning. Is Julie worth such sacrifice?

Mostly the sixteen were old women on their own. One young couple carrying a nearly new baby. Nobody paid any attention to anybody else. I thought Christianity was supposed to be about brotherly and sisterly love and doing unto others etc. Going by this morning's evidence, what Christians want others to do to them is pretend they aren't there. Not that I was there long enough to find out if things warmed up because I disgraced myself soon after the service started.

The trouble was caused by an old nun kneeling in the pew in front of me. Julie said afterwards that she was on holiday from her convent. I knew she was a nun because she was dressed in a dowdy grey frock and thick wool stockings and black clodhopper shoes. Her head was covered in a blue scarf-thing with a white face band. Nothing like the old-fashioned nuns in books, who always look weirdly fetching to me. I mean the ones in flowing robes tied with rope and with crucifixes and beads and holy baubles dangling all over them. And their faces peeking out from their fly-away wimples. The climb-every-mountain sort of nuns.

Well this modern C. of E. nun wasn't anything like that. She wasn't just dull, she was actively unattractive. I expect they think they should look as unfetching as possible so as to avoid dreadful temptations of the FLESH. The sins of the flesh always sound so cannibalistic. Not that you'd want a nibble at this old dame or make a pass at her of any kind unless you were ninety and feeling pretty desperate.

I wouldn't have paid her much attention except she was right in front of me and her insides kept gurgling like a water system with dicky plumbing. After a while, the eruptions went into another phase. She'd rumble, then there'd be a short pause. Then she'd let off a string of three or four very lady-like little farts. Nothing gross. And very quietly. So quiet in fact that I don't think she could hear them herself. But I could, being in direct line of fire. Maybe she was gunning for the heathen spy behind her.

At first I just smiled. Things got started. Old Vic came in dressed in a white nightgown with a piece of green curtain like a poncho over his shoulders and pottered about at the altar. He looked a lot better doing that than he looked when I talked to him. More at home, really. I could see he believed it all, just the same way you can tell when a good actor likes his part and is really into it. Completely absorbed. So I was getting interested in what was happening, and forgetting about the cold and how early it was. Meanwhile, old rumble-turn was bubbling and popping off in front of me.

But then the prayers started. I managed the Lord's Prayer all right. It's a great piece of writing when you come to think of it because it's so easy to remember and always seems okay to say even when you're not in the mood and don't actually believe all the other religious stuff. Like a great poem, I suppose.

At any rate, we got through that without any trouble. But then Old Vic launched into: ‘Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open [
rumble, gurgle
], a desires known [
glug
] and from whom no secrets are hid [
pause
]: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts . . .'

And she pooped.

That did it. I started to get the giggles. Julie gave me the kind of sideways glare your mum does when you're little and being naughty, which didn't help. So I buried my face in my hands like a humble sinner having the thoughts of his heart cleansed, and hoped the noise of my half-stifled guffaws would be taken for the sound of a holy purgative at work.

Which I'm sure would have done the trick. Unfortunately, just as I was composing myself again, there came an ominously prolonged growl from the old girl's innards, followed by a cliff-hanger of a pause. Then she let loose a very unlady-like raspberry.

This Julie also heard. She gave the old girl a startled look, then glanced at me, who was watching events through my fingers. We eyed each other for a second. And then she broke up. She stuffed the knuckle of her thumb in her mouth and hung on to the prayer position, eyes front.