Now I Know Read online

  I HATE HEROES.

  Selah.

  But when I saw her splattered into the mud by a turd in black leather, something happened I’d never felt before. A Doer made me so angry I did something about it. Without thinking. That split-second. Even as his body hit hers. It was a violation against me as much as against her. Just because there was something . . . I don’t know . . . different . . . intense . . . separate about her. Something I wanted. Wanted to . . . know I suppose is the word.

  Right now, just an hour after leaving her, I don’t understand.

  But anyway, I piled in.

  Geronimo!

  JULIE [Singing]: Mud, mud, glorious mud,

  There’s nothing quite like it

  for cooling the blood.

  [She laughs.]

  Mum has an old record of that. I think it’s called ‘The Hippopotamus Song’. When I was little I used to play it over and over and end up hysterical.

  When I hit the mud and felt the mess on my face and hands and the stickiness squeezing through my clothes that song flashed into my head. They’d frightened me when they started running through us, yelling and thrashing about. But the mud and the hippo song cooled my blood and I thought, ‘Let them come after me again and it’ll be the hippo song for them this time.’

  Well, you know what happened then! [Laughs.] If my face hadn’t been covered in mud so that I couldn’t see, I would have known at once whose side you were on, because they were all in leathers and you were in your usual sloppy outfit. But I couldn’t see and you were yelling, ‘Get up! Come on, get up!’ One thing I can’t stand is people yelling at me. It infuriates me. I was trying to get up anyway. But you grabbed my arms and pulled at me, and that angered me even more because I don’t like people grabbing me either, so I struggled. And what with you pulling and me tugging to get loose we both went off balance and then I slipped in the mud and we both went flopping down, me onto my face again and you onto your bum.

  [She laughs so much she starts coughing, and breathing heavily, and has to pause to recover.]

  ‘Excrement!’ you said, using the crude word.

  ‘Don’t you swear at me, you barbarian!’ I said, or spluttered rather, because I got a mouth full of mud, and that made me furious with myself as well as with you, which, of course, only made things worse.

  And I know what you’re thinking right this minute, Nicholas Frome, as you listen. You’re thinking how prudish I still am about ruderies, despite all your efforts to corrupt me. But I don’t care. I don’t like them, and that’s that. I don’t see any need for them. In fact, I think they’re a kind of violence. You say rude words are just explosions that relieve tension. Well, I’ve some experience with explosions remember. And I don’t think any kind of explosion is meaningless, or is just a relief of tension, not even if they are only explosions of words.

  Words can’t ever be just explosions anyway. They’re always words. They all mean something. They all affect people somehow. The people who use them and the people who hear them. And I don’t just mean their dictionary meanings.

  Saying that makes me think words are like people. They have bodies. You can see them, and you can like the look of them or not, just as I like the look of Nik. It’s as interesting back to front as it is front to back. Kin as well as Nik. And the two tall letters protect the little eye. Like a spine. You. Always there. The core. The DNA of Nik. And you, the eye, the ee-why-ee. Watching. A lovely, neat, playful word. And just like you!

  And words have intellects as well as bodies. Their dictionary meanings, and their meanings when they’re put into sentences. Like these sentences I’m saying to you now. They make some sort of sense, I hope!

  And words have emotions just like people do. The things they make you feel when you hear them or read them. Like the words in the sentence ‘I love you’ which you have to admit no one can ever quite explain just from dictionary meanings, but which get you pretty stirred up if they’re said to you.

  And sometimes their emotional meanings don’t have much to do with their dictionary meanings. Just as sometimes what people think about something is quite different to what they feel about it. They aren’t thinking words, they’re feeling words. Isn’t that right?

  So I don’t know how you can say that any word can ever be just an explosion that relieves tension. Though I expect, as usual, you’ll find some argument to use, because you just love arguing for arguing’s sake. But really, in your heart you know I’m right. The truth is you like using ruderies for their shock effect.

  Hey, I’m starting to argue with you again! That’s a good sign, isn’t it? I must be getting better!

  [Pause.]

  Now I’ve forgotten what I was talking about before I started rambling on about words! None of which I’d thought before now, by the way. So that’s one good thing about being ill—it gives you time to think.

  INTERCUT: Crowd scattering in every direction. Police chasing squaddies. Platform party in disarray, scuffling among themselves while squaddies vandalize the scaffolding under their feet. Vocal truck continues its erratic course, ranting still. Arrests being made of belligerent members of both parties, who are frogmarched to a police van and bundled inside.

  JULIE: Oh yes! Us in the mud.

  ‘I’ve had enough of this stupid game,’ I thought, and my anger turned red. I’ve a dreadful temper, if I give in to it, as you’ve good reason to know.

  Then you started pulling at my arms and yelling at me again, and I thought, ‘This barbarian won’t give up!’ So I grabbed a nice pat of mud in each hand and plopped them in the general direction of your face. You let out a terrible squawk so I knew I’d hit the spot. [Laughs.] I ought to feel sorry for doing such a thing. After all, I might have blinded you—she says with feeling! But I don’t so I’ll have to work at it. Please God, I’ll be sorry, honest—but not yet, because it’s still funny to remember, and I need all the laughs I can get.

  Whoops! Gloom and doom showing again,

  [Deep breaths.]

  ‘Hell!’ Nik said, letting Julie go, he recoiling bottom down as before, and she, released, slithering onto her front again.

  ‘I’m trying to help you, goddammit!’ he cried, wiping gritty mud from his face so he could see again.

  ‘Don’t you swear by God to me, you pagan!’ Julie spluttered, biting on mud and wiping her eyes.

  Nik spat. ‘I’m only trying to get you away from this.’

  ‘I can look after myself, thank you!’

  She could see him now and sat back on her haunches. ‘I thought you were one of those barbarians,’ she said, grudgingly.

  Nik, outraged, said, ‘One of that mob!’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t see!’

  ‘Excuses, excuses!’

  The rain began falling in torrents again.

  ‘Go and boil your head,’ Julie said, slithering to her feet.

  ‘A good Christian thought,’ Nik said, pushing himself up too.

  ‘I don’t feel very Christian,’ Julie said. ‘Not after being attacked by people like that and being soaked in mud and being pulled about by—’ She slipped again, and sat with a bump on her behind. ‘Dear God, give me strength!’ she shouted in anger, striking the ground with her hands.

  Nik broke up.

  ‘Thank you!’ Julie said, glaring at him, but then could not help herself smiling.

  ‘Here,’ Nik said, ‘give us a hand.’

  She did, pretending reluctance. He helped her, slitherily, to her feet. But at once she took her hand back; and without difficulty, for the mud greased their palms.

  Nik regretted this loss.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Gol’ Julie said, a fierceness returning. ‘Go! You mean run away from . . . [nearly speechless] . . . them!’ She looked Nik accusingly in the eyes. ‘Run away yourself. I won’t.’

  Nik stared back. Then held out his lonely hands, cruciform, and asked, smiling, ‘Run from what?’

  By now they we
re an island in a lake of mud. What action there was scuttled about on the shore. No one marauded near them. The platform was a shambles of collapsed metal and torn posters, the party gone. The demo demolished, ended.

  Nik could watch Julie close up at last. She was smaller than he, and smaller than he expected. Slight even. Her clothes clung, soaked, to her frame, modelling her small breasts, and bulgy, too thick buttocks, and fleshy thighs. Her triangular face, and cap of bobbed black hair, close-gripping from wetness, set off her round strong skull, which shone, for him, as if in a halo, out of which her blue-grey eyes stared fiercely at him.

  She was to Nik, quite simply, beautiful. A being he wanted to take hold of and fit to him.

  His limbs began to tremble. He hoped that if she noticed she would only think he was cold from the wet.

  ‘We might as well,’ he said. ‘Go, I mean.’

  Julie did not move, except to turn her head and look disgustedly at the scene around them, her dripping hands held comically out from her sides, as a penguin holds its flippers.

  ‘There’s nothing to stay for,’ Nik said, unable to think of anything brighter. His intelligence wasn’t working, or rather had slipped from his mind to his body. All he could think of was wanting to touch her. She had pale skin, almost bleached in this rain-cloud light. His eyes fixed on a small round scar indented into her left cheek near the corner of her mouth. Shaped like an O, it made him think that the blunt end of a pencil had been jabbed there. But the blemish only made her more attractive. He wanted to finger the mark and ask how she got it.

  As he drank her in she blinked and sniffed and sucked at her lips. She might almost have been cosseting tears, but he knew she was only placating the rain coursing her eyes.

  He was so engrossed he did not notice a young policeman running towards them.

  (Tom coming between them.)

  ‘Are you okay, miss?’ he asked, but he was sussing Nik.

  ‘We’re all right. I was knocked down. He came to help.’ Julie smiled, showing her teeth. One of the two front ones was chipped to a guillotine angle. She tongued it as she smiled, a habit of hers, Nik soon learned. He longed to kiss her mouth, tongue and all.

  The policeman waited a moment, summing them up before saying, ‘If you’re sure you’re okay?’ He turned to run back to the van waiting for him. ‘You’d best be getting home,’ he said, and trotted off.

  Nik resented him. Not so much for giving orders as for his intrusion.

  Tom gone, Nik and Julie, statuesque in the rain, looked at one another, aware now of how wet and cold they felt, how darted in mud. But neither moved.

  Julie ended their silence. ‘He’s right. I ought to go home.’

  ‘I’ll take you,’ Nik said. ‘If you like.’

  ‘Don’t put yourself out. Only if you’re going my way.’

  ‘I’m going your way.’

  ‘But you don’t know which way is mine.’

  ‘Yes I do. Whichever way you go is your way. And I’ll be with you, so I’m going your way.’

  Julie laughed at last, indulging him.

  NIK’S NOTEBOOK: I mean—it’s grotesque. All that puppy-dog stuff. Can’t believe I behaved like that. As if I’d lost control of my mind, as well as of my body. All a-tremble and saying pukey things. She must have thought I was some kind of schoolboy idiot, drooling over her like that. Not drooling exactly. Blethering.

  I daren’t think about the things I said on the way to her place. And I’m certainly not tapping them into this wp. The VDU would turn red from embarrassment (instead of staying green from envy of my brilliant mind, fantastic good looks, etc.).

  Naturally, I just had to tell her about this batty film, didn’t I! And she laughed, as any intelligent person would because it is unquestionably one big joke. So I came on all ho-ho-ho and smart-assed about it, which can’t have been any more winning. I can’t stand supercilious creeps, even when I myself am the supercilious creep I can’t stand. She must have noticed. But she took it well.

  I hope.

  Selah.

  I parted with the immortal words: Can I see you again sometime?

  Gawd!

  Yes, she said, and I nearly piddled myself. (Nearly relieved myself from relief!) Sunday morning, she said.

  I knew from the way she said it what the catch was.

  So long as I go to church with you?

  Why not? she said. It’ll be good for your research if not for your soul.

  At least I didn’t tell her, thank heaven, that I couldn’t care less if it wasn’t good for anything because I’d do anything for her right now.

  But why would I?

  It’s not that she makes me randy. She does make me randy, no question. But her body wouldn’t make me randy on its own. She isn’t like the girl playing the Magdalene. Her body does the trick all on its own. What does it with Julie is something . . . inside . . . her body. Something I want to reach in and take hold of. The sex would be a way in. A pleasant way in, sure. But it wouldn’t be for itself, like it would be with Mary M. Not just for the sensation, I mean.

  I think I mean.

  But what’s the ‘something’ inside her that I want to get hold of? And how do I know it’s there if I don’t know what it is?

  Come to think of it, it’s like a black hole in space. We know it’s there but we don’t know what it is, and we don’t really know yet what happens if you go into it. Maybe if you go into that dark magnetic space you suffer a total change. Become the opposite from everything you are now. Male to female. Weak to strong. White to black. Human to—what? Inhuman? Superhuman? Maybe you pop out through the binary white hole into a whole new universe? A bit risky. Or, of course, none of those things might happen. You might just vamoose. But fantastic. Worth the risk.

  †

  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.

  Against the opposite wall is a single bed with a white-painted tubular frame. The bed is covered with a light blue counterpane that matches the curtains hanging at the only window. In the corner between the window and the prayer desk is a small armchair. Against the fourth wall, by the door, is a light wood bookcase full of mostly paperbacks. One shelf contains religious books; the other three hold novels, poetry, some biography. After that is a door to a wall cupboard where Julie keeps her clothes.

  The bare deal floorboards are stained a shining dark oak colour. A strip of cheap, dark blue carpet lies by the side of the bed. The window looks out onto a small back garden—a garden shed, square of lawn, carefully tended vegetable patch chock-a-block with plants—and beyond, over the roofs of terrace houses stepping downwards, to the other side of the valley where some fields, then streets of houses, rise up to the skyline.

  The window is open and sun is streaming in, but the curtains are not blowing in a breeze, summertime sounds cannot be heard. Only now do we realize that we are looking at stills. But the noise of a football match being shown on television seeps into the room from next door.

  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.