Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam Read online

  Their shoe-sizes alone refused to converge, although lying together in bed — naked, limb-entwined — they would occasionally compare their four bare feet, and pretend, playfully, that there had been some shrinkage or enlargement.

  ‘Is that your foot or mine?’

  ‘Wriggle your toes.’

  ‘It must be mine — but it doesn’t look like mine. Is it my right foot or my left foot?’

  ‘Perhaps you should have them tattooed.’

  ‘Left and Right?’

  ‘Love and Hate — like bikies have engraved on their fists.’

  ‘Which foot is the love foot?’

  ‘Let’s find out.’

  After the initial hesitations and shames, their bodies had become sources of astonishment, companions on a nightly descent into the deepest trenches of pleasure. Two years of such bliss followed the wedding — the years before the birth of Ben, their first child — but when they looked back on those two years later, their lives still seemed to be lacking something. Even the memories of those early days of awkward, thrilled sexual discovery faded, even the milestone of their graduation from university, and their first appointments as teachers in the same suburban high school seemed to belong to a previous life: Life Before Ben.

  The birth was premature, the labour difficult, the baby undersize. Afterwards, Rick sat on the edge of his wife’s bed, holding the tiny, scrawny bundle with great care.

  ‘He’s very beautiful,’ he said, ‘for a frog.’

  Linda clutched at her sore belly, groaning with joy: ‘Don’t make me laugh, please.’

  The baby refused to sleep. He sniffled and wheezed. He regurgitated more food than he ate, but still filled an endless procession of nappies, refuting all known laws of the conservation of matter. And, always — and even more always at night — he cried. He screamed .To Rick and Linda, still surprised to find themselves parents, energised by astonishment and excitement, these trials seemed no more than rites of passage, small sufferings that were more ritualised pleasure than pain: trials half-dreaded but also half-hoped for, expected, imagined, and therefore surmountable. Once again there was no end of outside help: both pairs of grandparents competed with offers of daily child-minding. Linda’s mother, a volunteer worker for Meals-on-Wheels, once even dropped off a spare meal for the young couple, driving miles out of her weekly round among the pensioners and disabled.

  ‘Leftovers from the kitchen,’ she explained, defending this small corruption. ‘We would only have thrown it out.’

  It was thrown out, after she had left, behind her back. The thought counted, Linda declared, even if the food was inedible.

  The world that surrounded the young family seemed charmed; every face that turned towards them was smiling, wishing them well, offering help. Their neighbours — Greeks, mostly, in their inner-city suburb — showered them with baby-gifts, and honey-cakes, and pastries drenched with icing-sugar, and incomprehensible advice.

  ‘He’s so ugly!’ one black-clad widow peered into the stroller and declared, loudly, to persuade the Evil Eye the baby was not worth troubling with, and the phrase soon became a refrain, and then, after a month or two, a pet-name.

  ‘Your turn to bath Ugly.’

  ‘Ugly needs his nappy changed.’

  At school, their fellow teachers were benignly tolerant of late arrivals and missed classes. Even the occasional hurried escape from a Church sermon with a howling baby on Sundays was warmed by the glow of a hundred older and more knowledgeable faces — and a pause and patient smile from young Reverend Cummings high in the pulpit.

  His boyish, slightly podgy smile seemed to bestow on them God’s personal, unspoken benediction.

  2

  Their world was charmed and protected, but not ignorant: news from beyond the municipal limits filtered through. That the lives of others might not be so charmed was clear to them, at least in abstract. Their imaginations did not fail them. They dropped generous donations into the Church Christmas Bowl and Easter Appeal each year; they fostered a World Care child in Bangladesh after the birth of Ben, and after Emma’s birth three years later, fostered another in Ecuador.

  Once a year a Christmas card and letter arrived from each child, written with obsessive neatness in Spanish, or the weird extra-terrestrial script of Bengali. Typed, misspelt English translations always accompanied both haiku-sized letters, their tones identically flat and formulaic despite their separate origins, as if written by the same child, or the same computer. Snapshots were sometimes clipped to the letters, and perhaps these were also of the same child: a small hollow-eyed waif, dressed in ill-fitting Best Clothes, probably an older sibling’s, posed in front of a squalid shanty, half Kim, half Oliver Twist.

  They decided not to answer these letters. It seemed demeaning, even humiliating to compel a child to write thankyou letters, to report annually to its benefactors — to beg, in essence. They sought no gratitude. Nor did they seek knowledge. Their quarterly donation was offered up to prevent misery, not to learn about it. The payments were debited, automatically, invisibly, against their joint bank account.

  ‘We do more than most,’ Linda argued. ‘We shouldn’t have to wear a hairshirt as well.’

  ‘You don’t think we’re sticking our heads in the sand?’

  ‘I can’t see the point in torturing ourselves with details. It won’t change anything.’

  After the birth of Emma she refused, suddenly, to go to the movies for similar reasons — disturbed, she explained, by their increasing violence. The announcement, again, caused only token argument from her husband — their minds, moving in tandem on most issues, had converged again on this. She had merely put their joint thought into words.

  The thought was waiting to be spoken by one of them, its final choice of mouth was unimportant.

  To some extent the film-boycott was academic: their two infant children permitted little time for movie-going. Ben reverted to his earlier, more demanding state with the birth of his sister: waking at night, refusing food, vomiting at will whenever the baby received too much attention. House-moving added another upheaval to his life. They had outgrown their narrow student-house; now, with help from the four grandparents — a loan for the deposit — they took out a mortgage on a small villa a little further from the city, and a little closer to the golden suburbs of their childhood.

  Linda’s boycott of the television news a few months after house-moving was not so academic. The decision was reached, or cemented into words, on a late summer Sunday evening. The young couple had arrived home after a long day of tennis, tucked tired children into early beds — trapped them in bed, bound beneath tight sheets — and settled themselves in the television nook with chopsticks and shallow silverfoil trays of Chinese take-away. Was their mood too tranquil, too pleasantly weary, too resistant to any disturbance? The lead-story on the news was surely no more horrific, or blood-spattered, than usual, but Linda shivered — suddenly, involuntarily — and averted her eyes from the screen.

  ‘How horrible,’ she said, and turned to her husband. ‘Turn it off. Please.’

  He hesitated, momentarily: the evening news was a ritual he enjoyed, a warm shower at the end of the day. Its actual content was somehow less important than the comfort of the form: a cathode-ray squirt of images, a steady horizontal stream that washed through his tired mind, beaming him up and away to other places in the world, places so far removed from his world that they might have been other planets. As he wavered, Linda seized the remote control and waved it at the screen; a talking head contracted to a bright pinhead, then vanished, a smooth-shaven genie sucked back inside its bottle.

  ‘Why do they show things like that?’

  For once he felt the stirring of real argument: ‘Because it happens, sweetheart.’

  ‘Why can’t they show good news for a change? The million good things people do every day? They always choose the one bad thing.’

  ‘Perhaps we should try to understand it.’

  ‘How c
an you understand it? A man who murders his entire family, then himself!’

  She shivered again, as disturbed by her own blunt summary of events as she had been by the original story.

  ‘Maybe he did it out of love,’ Rick suggested, weirdly.

  She stared at him, incredulous: ‘ What?’

  He watched the blank screen as if waiting for more information, trying to understand this odd germ of a thought, to grow it.

  ‘Misplaced love,’ he said, groping. ‘If you’re depressed, and the world is not worth living in, you want to save your loved ones from it. You want to protect them.’

  He paused, caught her astonished eye, and added, hastily: ‘Maybe.’

  They sat in silence, stunned: Rick even more than his wife, mystified by the origins of these words that had jumped from his mouth, unpremeditated. With his chopsticks he poked a wad of rice into that mouth, and chewed, allowing himself a little thinking time.

  Linda saved him from further inspirations; she came up with a more convincing theory: ‘I think it’s merely selfish. They want someone to go with them.’

  Rick swallowed his food. ‘Like the Egyptian pharaohs,’ he said, ‘taking their whole households into the pyramids, buried alive.’

  Their thoughts were back in harmony.

  ‘Or the rajahs in India,’ she said, remembering a movie she had seen as a child, ‘burning their wives on their own funeral pyres.’

  She shuddered, then jerked up out of her chair as if disguising the shudder in a larger, more deliberate movement. Finding herself on her feet, she moved down the hall, and softly, protectively, closed the doors to the bedrooms where the children slept.

  ‘This is morbid,’ she whispered as she returned. ‘How did we get onto this?’

  ‘The news.’

  ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

  Her husband resisted one last time; still tantalised, perhaps, by his earlier heresy: ‘I know it’s unpleasant, but should we turn our backs on the world?’

  ‘If we can’t change it, what’s the point? I don’t want to know about those ugly things. I don’t see why I should have to.’

  She watched him, waiting for agreement.

  ‘We do what we can,’ she repeated. ‘We do our bit. Why should we thrust our noses in it?’

  She was right, he knew. You had to draw chalklines, erect barricades. There was so much pain and misery in the world you would drown in it: a great ocean of pain, of which the cathode-ray tube sprayed only a few selected drops in their direction each night. With the zeal of a convert, or of a fresh runner in a relay, he took the argument from her and carried it further:

  ‘Maybe we should sell the television. Or give it away. Get rid of it altogether. Especially with the children getting older.’

  They watched each other for a few further seconds. At length Rick rose, and wedged open the back door.Without a word he unplugged the television set, carried it outside and heaved it into the backseat of his car. A theatrical gesture, perhaps — the disgraced television would sit there for several days, tamely buckled in a rear seat-belt, before being traded in for a new sound-system — but both felt somehow cleaner, even purified: a satisfaction akin to the sweet aftermath of spring-cleaning.

  New routines quickly replaced the old. Their evenings were filled with music, with educational games — Scrabble, crosswords, Trivial Pursuit — and, once again, with books.

  The young couple had inherited a reverence for books. Both had brought several tea-chests packed with books to the marriage: an intellectual dowry of children’s books, old school texts, gift-sets of Shakespeare and Shaw and Jane Austen and assorted Brontës, plus, from Linda’s side, everything that Dickens had ever written: a metre-length, at least, of matching volumes, bound in calf, plus assorted dogeared school-paperback editions of the same. These had multiplied in the years since: each Christmas they received as gifts almost as many books as they gave. Their shelves — makeshift constructions of plank and brick — were crammed: unread books, many of them,but their presence alone was reassuring, their names were a kind of incantation, like the names of saints or household gods: small geometric household gods of learning and self-improvement and uplift; protectors against ignorance. The books had worn more sacred with time. They were dipped into, like the Bible, as sources of quotations, and poetry, and Trivial Pursuit clues — but seldom read.

  Until now. Delivered from television, Linda decided they should read aloud to each other every night, as they had in the first days of marriage, before children.

  ‘And as my father read to me,’ she announced over a meal one night, and immediately rose and began tugging books from the shelves before turning to invite Rick to help, or even to agree.

  ‘Where shall we start?’ she wondered aloud.

  ‘Anywhere but Dickens,’ he said, teasing.

  She smiled, and squeezed the calf-bound book she had already selected back into a narrow slot among its fellows, and tugged out a slim paperback.

  ‘I taught that last year,’ he protested.

  ‘Then you can read it to me.’

  ‘I’d prefer something with more meat.’

  ‘You mean more fat,’ she said, but returned the book to the shelf, before selecting something thicker.

  At first there were frequent interruptions. Emma, placid from birth, slept unbroken from early evening to early morning — but her older brother insisted on staying awake with his parents. The television had often kept him tranquillised in the past, now new routines were needed. A war of attrition followed — a war of tears and nerve and bluff — ending in the parents’ capitulation. Weary of running to the child’s bedroom every few minutes, it simply seemed easier to have him with them, playing on the rug in the lounge, late at night. Listening to, or at least hearing, their book-readings also had a soothing, hypnotic effect on the child. His eyes soon drooped shut, his restless twitching ceased — often, oddly, at the end of a chapter, or on the last page of a book, as if cued by some subtle change in the tone of his mother’s voice. Or was it some resolution in the music of the words themselves, words whose meanings were still largely beyond him?

  ‘The growing good of the world’, Linda recited, ‘is partly dependant on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half-owing to the number who have lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’

  Rick — if he was still awake — would rise and carry the sleeping boy to bed at the end of such passages; this was the sign for a general lights-out.

  Isolated from the wider world, their small life contracted even more tightly about their children, their family board-games and book-readings. Old friends from University, staff-room colleagues from school — many still single — were rarely seen. There seemed so little time. Linda had chosen to stay at home with Ben for the first year; Rick took leave without pay the following year while she returned to work. The opposite pattern continued with the birth of Emma. Rick spent the year at home, mothering her; Linda went back to school.

  ‘But what of Rick’s career?’ his mother summoned the courage to inquire one evening as she collected their weekly laundry.

  ‘The family is my career, Mum.’

  Linda added: ‘In ten years everyone will share work like this, Mother.’

  The young couple exchanged satisfied smiles behind the older woman’s back. They felt themselves to be pioneers, ahead of their time, and relished their notoriety among less ‘liberated’ friends. That Rick’s mother still did the family’s laundry, and Linda’s mother still bestowed a weekly meal, went unacknowledged. The mothers wanted to help; Rick appreciated the extra time this permitted him to spend with his adored baby daughter. Emma was a small serious child: slow and methodical in her movements, a watcher of games rather than a participant. Her nickname — ‘Wol’ — came from Rick, amused by his daughter’s solemn owl-like appearance, wise beyond her years.

  With Ben at kindergarten now for much of ea
ch day, Rick’s life revolved around his daughter: reading stories, reciting rhymes, singing songs, playing games, fingerpainting, visiting local playgrounds and paddling pools — and each Wednesday taking her to the neighbourhood play-group, sole father among a gathering of mildly discomfited mothers.

  ‘It seemed a little … awkward,’ he reported home to Linda after the first. ‘Long silences.’

  ‘They’ll get used to you.’

  He sat through the weekly coffee and carrot-cake and largely ignored the gossip that soon began to fill the silences. The women might not have been there, he had eyes and ears only for his precious Wol, studying her interactions with other children, protecting her against their viciousness, excusing her own as over-tiredness — and memorising every detail to report back later to Linda. And so within their family geometry a further symmetry, or mirror-reflection, was growing: the father was closer to the daughter, the mother to the son.

  3

  Emma’s sore throat seemed trivial at first: another of the shared communal viruses that were swapped back and forth between the toddlers at play-group like counters, or dice, in a board-game. Ben, at school now, also brought home a regular supply of sniffly noses and sore throats to share with her. He had always been the sickly one; missing one or two days a fortnight of school, his alleged ugliness failing to ward off the invisible influence of germs. Emma seemed made of tougher gristle — less complaining, more robust. Rick and Linda paid little attention to her symptoms at first.