Requiem (24 page)

As on
his first visit, Ahmed had manoeuvred Sharon out of the door ahead of him, so
that he could have brief word with Tom. 'Does she know?' Ahmed had whispered.

'Know what?'

'Your
djinn
has split into two; and now it
also rides on Sharon's back. Surely you must know this?'

He'd
met Ahmed's steady gaze, wondering if the Arab was merely expressing a formula
for the fact that they were lovers. Then he'd passed from shadow into sunlight
to rejoin Sharon.

Meanwhile
Sharon was waiting for a response. 'Sorry. She wanted kids. I didn't.'

'Why not?'

'To
have children seemed to me like dying and beginning all over again. It was
like facing a lover's leap. I couldn't do it.'

'Was it a cause of conflict?'

'Only every day.'

When Tom
said 'every day', it was true only of the later period of his thirteen-year
marriage. Katie's biological clock stopped ticking and started chiming. He
thought back to the time he'd met her at the party where he'd grabbed her foot.

'Her foot,' he said, surfacing from his
reverie.

'What?' said Sharon.

'Her
foot. Did 1 never tell you the story of how I found her foot at a party? After
she died, when her absence became really strange, one night in the dark I found
myself holding on to one of her shoes. I even took it to bed with me. Like a
dog, eh? Still clinging on to her shoe. As if she hadn't died - she'd just
slipped her foot from the shoe.'

He's
opening,
Sharon thought. 'You must
have loved her a very great deal.'

An answer began to
formulate a scowl on his lips, but before he spoke a shadow inserted itself
between the neon light from the bar and  their  table.  They
both looked up.

The
shadow was cast by a short, dark-haired man in a black suit. Sun-tanned, he carried
a briefcase. His ingratiating smile looked as uncomfortable as his tight
collar. 'May I join you?' he asked.

Tom
looked at Sharon. 'This is the man who's been following me.'

'Sorry,'
said the man. The smile was forced all the way to his slightly yellow back
teeth. 'May I sit down?'. He placed his briefcase under the table. 'You
probably know who I am.'

'No,'
said Tom.

He
shot out a hand, making the sleeve of his jacket rise half-way up his forearm.
'Ian Redhead.’ The wide smile followed, again held for a second too long before
he added, 'English.' Tom accepted the handshake. Sharon followed up, languidly.
The man was a bag of nerves. He sat down at last. 'Of course, it's the scroll
we're interested in.'

'We?' questioned Sharon.

He spoke
rapidly. 'We think David Feldberg gave you the scroll. That is we had to wait
to find out who'd inherited Mr Feldberg's estate before making a generous offer
on the scroll, but probate is still being sorted out, and anyway there's no
sign of it among his possessions. We think he gave it to you.'

'He did.'

'That's a
relief; I mean, to know what happened to it. Did he tell you we've been trying
to buy it from him for years? Years. Do you still have it?’

'No.'

'Where is it?'

'I sold it.'

Redhead was
crestfallen. 'Who to? Who did you sell it to?'

Tom looked
at Sharon. 'What was the name of those people?'

'The institute or something or other?'

'Please don't say it was the
Christadelphians
.'

'No,' said Tom. 'What were they, Sharon?'

'Catholics?' Redhead prompted. 'A Jewish
group?'

'Anglican, I think he said,' Sharon
offered. 'Anglican.'

'But they
can't have been!' His voice keened. 'Because I represent the Anglicans!'

'We've been lied to,' Sharon said quickly.

'How much did you get?'

'Excuse me,'
said Tom, 'but I think that's my business.'

The Anglican
agent slapped at the table. 'I only mean I could have matched the offer. It was
my responsibility to secure that scroll. I've failed. You
don't.know
what this means.
¹

'Sorry,' Tom said.

Redhead looked up angrily. 'Are you a
Christian?'

'Yes, but I keep forgetting.'

'You can't
guess at the importance of that scroll to the Christian community.'

'Or to the Jewish community?' put in
Sharon.

'Are
you Jewish? Is she Jewish? I'm not saying it's not important to the Jews. But
it's even more important to us. Mr Webster, I think -'

'You know my name, then.'

'Mr Webster, I think
you're a Christian, whatever you say. I see the mark on you. Let me put
something to you.' He hoisted his briefcase on to the table, flicking open its
brass locks. Tom half expected to glimpse bundles of banknotes, but the case
contained a jumble of papers, crayons, coloured pens and stickers. Redhead
extracted a business card and handed it to Tom. He was about to close the case
when something caught Tom's eye. It was a wad of large stamps, gaily coloured
with biblical scenes, gilt-edged, the kind children collect for attending
church.

Tom pointed to the stamps. 'I used to
collect these.'

'I
do Sunday School.' Redhead sounded almost apologetic. 'Here in Jerusalem.'

'I had a collection with
one stamp missing. It was called "The Day of Resurrection".'

'What I was about to say
—' Redhead closed his case, '- was that the Church is also short of some stamps
in the collection. That scroll being among them. If in all conscience you can
help me, please get in touch. My address is on that card.' He stood up to
leave, shaking hands first with Sharon. 'Who knows? Maybe we could find you
that missing stamp.'

Then
he was gone, leaving Tom and Sharon to out-stare each other. 'I hate people who
talk in metaphors,' said Tom.

'I
think all he meant,' said Sharon, 'was that he might find you the stamp.'

'What
will you do?' Sharon asked. They'd had another drink since Redhead's nervous
departure.

'I don't know. I really don't know.'

'That
remark he made about you being a Christian. It got to you, didn't it?'

'It
made me think of Katie. She suddenly got religious some months before she
died.'

'Katie? She never had a religious vein in
her body.'

'I
know. But you know how it is with old people, how they start to pick up on
religion. Same with her. I'm sure she knew she was going to die.'

No one had been more surprised
than Tom when Katie had asked him, a couple of months before she died, to go
with her to church. Her religious instincts had always resolved into a New Age
mist. Gothic cathedrals exerted less of a pull on her than stone circles. Thus
Tom was baffled when one morning she'd interrupted his reading of the Sunday
newspapers by saying, 'Harvest Festival.'

'Harvest
Festival?' he'd repeated. He was lounging in his dressing gown, unshaven and
stupid.

She might
have said 'Tottenham Hotspurs, White Hart Lane, three o'clock.'

'No, thank you.'

'You used to
have a faith. You- always told me you used to have a faith.'

'Used
to. Don't now. Anyway I thought you were interested in Earth Mysteries.'

'Oh
it's all the same, Tom. It's just about being grateful.'

'Grateful for what?'

'For
God's sake! Are things really so bad?' Then she'd jumped on him, put her arms
around him, kissed him. 'Please come, please come, please come.'

'Why?'

'Because
something's about to happen, Tom. I can feel it. Like the sky is going to break
open at any moment, and something the colour of that tattoo is going to come
out of it.'

He
stared at his tattoo so as not to have to look her in the eye. He didn't want
to go to the Harvest
sodding
Festival and said so. To
his astonishment, she cried. It had been a long time since Katie had cried to
get her own way, but there she was gulping and sobbing as if he, standing over
her, was the neighbourhood wife-beater.

He
could have capitulated, but it had become too much a matter of principle. In
the end she went alone. When he saw her later that evening, he asked her if
she'd enjoyed it. She shook her head and didn't speak to him for the entire
evening. It was another small death between them.

'I didn't want to go to the Harvest
fucking —'

'What?' said Sharon. 'What are you
shouting about?'

Tom
remembered where he was. 'It's just. .. It's as if she knew she was going to
die.'

'That's
nonsense, Tom.' Sharon recalled what Katie had said the last time they were
together.

'Come up to Gethsemane with me,' he said
urgently.

'What, now? At this time of night?'

'Yes, now.' He stood up.

'What for? The gates will be locked. It's
pointless.'

'I have to do it. I want to light a candle
for Katie. Will you come? For her?'

When he put
it like that, how could she refuse, though she didn't want to go there at
night? She hadn't liked it on the one occasion she'd visited the garden by
daylight; for her, as for many Jews, the Christian sites were sullied by
accusation and soured with associations of Jewish
scapegoating
since medieval times. The resonances of betrayal and suffering made the Garden
of Gethsemane spooky rather than beautiful. She mistrusted it. But the place
already triggered a strange energy for Tom. A bee from the garden had stung him
on the mouth - at least that was all she'd understood from his garbled version
of events that day.

No, she
didn't want to go up there in the dark at all, but what could she do when he
put it to her like that? She drove across the city, and he sat in the passenger
seat in brittle silence. She parked the car, and they walked up the incline
towards the entrance to the garden of betrayal.

As Sharon
had predicted, the gates were closed, but a small yellow light burned inside
the cave where Tom had met the Franciscan monk. Tom seized Sharon's hand, leading
her up the hill away from the gate until they found a place where they could
clamber into the garden. Ignoring Sharon's protests, Tom went first, pulling
her behind him.

A sickle
moon cut through the wisps of passing cloud, offering a little light. The
shining leaves of the ghostly olive trees were pressed like a hoard of silver
coins at the mauve sky. Tom leaned a hand against one of the knotted, twisted
olives.

'What are we doing here?' moaned Sharon.

Tom
noticed something at his feet. Half buried in the dry earth at the foot of the
olive tree was a small, standard-issue Bible. He rescued it from the dirt. It
was quite old and almost rotted. Some visitor, some pilgrim, must have dropped
or forgotten it, or had even left it as a votive offering. He opened it. The
spine crumpled in his hand as it fell open. Tom wanted to see what random
reading the Bible might offer, but instead saw a sleek, slug-like worm that had
tunnelled a hole clean through the pages. The worm writhed from the hole,
wriggling to the edge of the page and climbed on to Tom's thumb.

'Ugh!' He flung the Bible down in disgust.

'What is it?'

'A black maggot.'

‘I didn't
see anything.' Sharon too had examined the book to see where it had fallen
open. All she'd seen was the white page.

'Come on.'

As
they approached the cave-shrine, they could see a monk in Franciscan habit
sitting at an angled desk, busy with his pen. From his actions it seemed he was
repeating the work of the monk Tom had met the day the bee had stung his mouth:
ruling lines on a sheet of paper. But the monk was not the same man.

Tom thought he was
looking at a child in a brown habit. As he drew nearer he realized the monk was
dwarf-sized. Not only that, he was a black man. He must have heard their shoes
scuffling the dust because he looked up from his work, cocking his head as if
to listen. Tom and Sharon drew back to the cover of the trees.

The monk put down his
pen, slipped off his high chair and waddled towards the cave entrance. They saw
his eyes were almost all white with the sclerotic coat of the completely blind.

Tom
made a comment. The monk stiffened and turned his head towards them. He was
visibly straining to listen, the whites of his eyes oscillating wildly. 
He shouted something they didn't understand. Then, in English, 'Anyone there?'
They held their breath. 'Man or spirit?' he called again. 'Speak to me.'

After
a few moments he went back to his desk, climbed on to his chair and returned to
his task of ruling lines.

'Can we go now?'

'Not yet,' said Tom.

They
withdrew between the olive trees, Tom leading Sharon to the spot where he'd
encountered the Magdalene. 'Here,' he said, grabbing her roughly and kissing her.