A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (37 page)

‘Check. And as men of faith we naturally wish to preserve our faith from any unnecessary slanders.’

‘Sure.’

‘Well, maybe before announcing the news we should, as men of
science
, check out what we as men of faith have discovered.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning I think we should shut our big bazoos until we’ve run some lab tests on Noah’s clothing.’

There was a silence from the other half of the tent as Spike realized for the first time that not everyone on earth would necessarily put their hands together the way they’d done for the astronauts coming back from the moon. Finally, he said, ‘I think you’re thinking good, Jimmy. I guess you’ve also got me wondering if we might have ourselves a problem with the clothes.’

‘How d’you mean?’

Now it was Spike’s turn to play the skeptic. ‘Well, I’m only just supposing. You recall the story of Noah’s nakedness? How his sons covered him up? Well, we can be sure Noah’s bones are something special, but does that mean his clothes are something special too?’ There was a pause, then he went on. ‘I don’t think we should give any free lunches to the doubting Thomases. What if Noah was laid out here in his burial robes, and after a few centuries they’d all been blown to dust and ashes. Then along comes some pilgrim – maybe some pilgrim who doesn’t make it back safely through the infidel tribes – and finds the body. Like coming across Noah’s nakedness all over again. So the pilgrim gives Noah
his
clothes – which would explain how he never got back through the lines to spread the news. But it means we get a serious mis-read on the carbon-dating tests.’

‘You’re right,’ said Jimmy. A long silence ensued, as if each were half-daring the other to make the next logical step. Finally, Jimmy made it. ‘I wonder what the legal position is.’

‘Nnn,’ replied Spike, not discouragingly.

‘Who do you think Noah’s bones belong to? Apart,’ Jimmy added hastily, ‘from the Almighty Lord.’

‘It could take years to go through all the courts. You know what lawyers are like.’

‘Sure,’ said Jimmy, who had never been in a court-room yet. ‘I don’t think the Lord would expect us to go through the legal process. Like appealing to Caesar or something.’

Spike nodded, and lowered his voice, even though they were alone on the Lord’s mountain. ‘Those guys wouldn’t need much, would they?’

‘No. No. Not much, I guess. ‘Jimmy relinquished his brief dream of a Navy helicopter airlifting out the whole caboodle.

Without discussing it further, the ex-astronaut and the scuba-diving geologist returned to the cave with two trembling flashlights and set about deciding which parts of Noah’s skeleton to smuggle out of eastern Turkey. Piety, convenience and greed were all silently present. Finally they removed a small bone belonging to the left hand plus a cervical vertebra which had fallen out of position and rolled across the right scapula. Jimmy took the section of finger and Spike the neck-bone. They agreed it would be crazy not to fly home separately.

Spike routed in through Atlanta, but the media were on to him. No, he couldn’t say anything at this moment in time. Yes, Project Ararat had gotten off to a fine start. No, no problems. No, Dr Fulgood was on a separate flight, he’d had to finalize a few things in Istanbul before departure. What sort of things? Yes, there would be a press conference in due course, and yes, Spike Tiggler hoped to have some specific, perhaps some joyous news for them on that occasion. How do you feel (all dressed in primrose), Mrs Tiggler? Oh, I’m one hundred ten percent behind my husband, thrilled to have him back.

The Reverend Gibson, after hesitation and much prayer, agreed that the two portions of Noah’s skeleton be subjected to scientific analysis. They sent the vertebra and the finger-end to Washington, using a trusted intermediary who claimed to have dug them up in Greece. Betty waited to see if Spike had managed to haul himself back onto the box car of the gravy train.

Washington reported that the bones sent for examination
were approximately one hundred and fifty years old, plus or minus twenty years. They volunteered the information that the vertebra was almost certainly that of a woman.

A sea-mist shifts listlessly across the black water as the seven o’clock ferry makes its way from Cape Hatteras to Ocracoke Island. The searchlight charges at the water ahead. Every night the vessel has to find its way again, as if for the first time. Marker lights, white and green and red, guide the boat on its nervous course. You come out on deck, shrugging against the cold, and look upward; but this time the mist has shut off the stars, and it’s impossible to tell whether or not there is meant to be a moon. You shrug again, and return to the smoky cabin.

One hundred miles to the west, in the Moondust Diner, Spike Tiggler, holding aloft a plastic bottle of water from a stream that flows uphill, is announcing the launch of the second Project Ararat.

10
THE DREAM

I
DREAMT THAT
I woke up. It’s the oldest dream of all, and I’ve just had it. I dreamt that I woke up.

I was in my own bed. That seemed a bit of a surprise, but after a moment’s thought it made sense. Who else’s bed should I wake up in? I looked around and I said to myself, Well, well, well. Not much of a thought, I admit. Still, do we ever find the right words for the big occasions?

There was a knock on the door and a woman came in, sideways and backwards at the same time. It should have looked awkward but it didn’t; no, it was all smooth and stylish. She was carrying a tray, which was why she’d come in like that. As she turned, I saw she was wearing a uniform of sorts. A nurse? No, she looked more like a stewardess on some airline you’ve never heard of. ‘Room service,’ she said with a bit of a smile, as if she wasn’t used to providing it, or I wasn’t used to expecting it; or both.

‘Room service?’ I repeated. Where I come from something like that only happens in films. I sat up in bed, and found I didn’t have any clothes on. Where’d my pyjamas gone? That was a change. It was also a change that when I sat up in bed and realized she could see me bollock-naked to the waist, if you understand me, I didn’t feel at all embarrassed. That was good.

‘Your clothes are in the cupboard,’ she said. ‘Take your time. You’ve got all day. And,’ she added with more of a smile, ‘all tomorrow as well.’

I looked down at my tray. Let me tell you about that breakfast. It was the breakfast of my life and no mistake. The grapefruit, for a start. Now, you know what a grapefruit’s like: the way it spurts juice down your shirt and keeps slipping out of
your hand unless you hold it down with a fork or something, the way the flesh always sticks to those opaque membranes and then suddenly comes loose with half the pith attached, the way it always tastes sour yet makes you feel bad about piling sugar on the top of it. That’s what a grapefruit’s like, right? Now let me tell you about
this
grapefruit. Its flesh was pink for a start, not yellow, and each segment had already been carefully freed from its clinging membrane. The fruit itself was anchored to the dish by some prong or fork through its bottom, so that I didn’t need to hold it down or even touch it. I looked around for the sugar, but that was just out of habit. The taste seemed to come in two parts – a sort of awakening sharpness followed quickly by a wash of sweetness; and each of those little globules (which were about the size of tadpoles) seemed to burst separately in my mouth. That was the grapefruit of my dreams, I don’t mind telling you.

Like an emperor, I pushed aside the gutted hull and lifted a silver dome from a crested plate. Of course I knew what would be underneath. Three slices of grilled streaky bacon with the gristle and rind removed, the crispy fat all glowing like a bonfire. Two eggs, fried, the yolk looking milky because the fat had been properly spooned over it in the cooking, and the outer edges of the white trailing off into filigree gold braid. A grilled tomato I can only describe in terms of what it wasn’t. It wasn’t a collapsing cup of stalk, pips, fibre and red water, it was something compact, sliceable, cooked equally all the way through and tasting – yes, this is the thing I remember – tasting of tomato. The sausage: again, not a tube of lukewarm horsemeat stuffed into a French letter, but dark umber and succulent … a … a sausage, that’s the only word for it. All the others, the ones I’d thought I’d enjoyed in my previous life, were merely practising to be like this; they’d been auditioning – and they wouldn’t get the part, either. There was a little crescent-shaped side-plate with a crescent-shaped silver lid. I raised it: yes, there were my bacon rinds, separately grilled, waiting to be nibbled.

The toast, the marmalade – well, you can imagine those, you can dream what they were like for yourselves. But I must tell
you about the teapot. The tea, of course, was the real thing, tasting as if it had been picked by some rajah’s personal entourage. As for the teapot … Once, years ago, I went to Paris on a package holiday. I wandered off from the others and walked around where the smart people live. Where they shop and eat, anyway. On a corner I passed a café. It didn’t look particularly grand, and just for a minute I thought of sitting down there. But I didn’t, because at one of the tables I saw a man having tea. As he poured himself a fresh cup, I spotted a little gadget which seemed to me almost a definition of luxury: attached to the teapot’s spout, and dangling by three delicate silver chains, was a strainer. As the man raised the pot to its pouring angle, this strainer swung outwards to catch the leaves. I couldn’t believe that serious thought had once gone into the matter of how to relieve this tea-drinking gentleman of the incredible burden of picking up a normal strainer with his free hand. I walked away from that café feeling a bit self-righteous. Now, on my tray, I had a teapot bearing the insignia of some chic Parisian café. A strainer was attached to its spout by three silver chains. Suddenly, I could see the point of it.

After breakfast, I put the tray down on my bedside table, and went to the cupboard. Here they all were, my favourite clothes. That sports jacket I still liked even after people started saying, how unusual, did you buy it secondhand, another twenty years and it’ll be back in fashion. That pair of corduroy trousers my wife threw out because the seat was beyond repair; but someone had managed to repair it, and the trousers looked almost new, though not so new you weren’t fond of them. My shirts held out their arms to me, and why not, as they’d never been pampered like this in their lives before – all in ranks on velvet-covered hangers. There were shoes whose deaths I’d regretted; socks now deholed again; ties I’d seen in shop windows. It wasn’t a collection of clothes you’d envy, but that wasn’t the point. I was reassured. I would be myself again. I would be more than myself.

By the side of the bed was a tasselled bell-pull I hadn’t previously noticed. I tugged it, then felt a bit embarrassed, and
climbed under the sheets again. When the nurse-stewardess came in, I slapped my stomach and said, ‘You know, I could eat that all over again.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ she replied. ‘I was half expecting you to say so.’

I didn’t get up all day. I had breakfast for breakfast, breakfast for lunch, and breakfast for dinner. It seemed like a good system. I would worry about lunch tomorrow. Or rather, I wouldn’t worry about lunch tomorrow. I wouldn’t worry about anything tomorrow. Between my breakfast-lunch and my breakfast-dinner (I was really beginning to appreciate that strainer system – you can carry on eating a croissant with your free hand while you pour) I had a long sleep. Then I took a shower. I could have had a bath, but I seem to have spent decades in the bath, so instead I took a shower. I found a quilted dressing-gown with my initials in gilt cord on the breast pocket. It fitted well, but I thought those initials were farting higher than my arse-hole. I hadn’t come here to swank around like a film star. As I was staring at these golden squiggles, they disappeared from before my eyes. I blinked and they were gone. The dressing-gown felt more comfortable with just a normal pocket.

The next day I woke up – and had another breakfast. It was as good as the previous three. Clearly the problem of breakfast had now been solved.

When Brigitta came to clear the tray, she murmured, ‘Shopping?’

Of course.’ It was exactly what had been on my mind.

‘Do you want to go shopping or stay shopping?’

‘Go shopping,’ I said, not really understanding the difference.

‘Sure.’

My wife’s brother once came back from ten days in Florida and said, ‘When I die, I don’t want to go to Heaven, I want to go shopping in America.’ That second morning I began to understand what he meant.

When we got to the supermarket Brigitta asked me if I
wanted to walk or drive. I said let’s drive, that sounds fun – a reply which she seemed to expect. On reflection, some parts of her job must be quite boring – I mean, we probably all react in much the same way, don’t we? Anyway, we drove. The shopping-carts are motorized wire-mesh trolleys that whizz around like dodgems, except that they never crash into one another because of some electric-eye device. Just when you think you’re going to have a prang, you find yourself swerving round the oncoming cart. It’s fun, that, trying to crash.

The system’s easily mastered. You have a plastic card which you push into a slot next to the goods you want to buy, then punch in the quantity you want. After a second or two, your card is returned. Then the stuff is automatically delivered and credited.

I had a good time in my wire cart. I remember when I used to go shopping in the old days, the previous days, I’d sometimes see small kids sitting inside a trolley as if it were a cage and being pushed round by their parents; and I’d be envious. I wasn’t any more. And boy, did I buy some stuff that morning! I practically cleaned them out of those pink grapefruit. That’s what it felt like, anyway. I bought breakfast, I bought lunch, I bought dinner, I bought mid-morning snacks, afternoon teas, apéritif munchies, midnight feasts. I bought fruit I couldn’t name, vegetables I’d never seen before, strange new cuts of meat from familiar animals, and familiar-looking cuts from animals I’d never eaten before. In the Australian section I found crocodile tail-steak, fillet of water-buffalo,
terrine de kangarou
. I bought them all. I plundered the gourmet cabinet. Freeze-dried lobster soufflé with cherry-chip topping: how could I resist something like that?