Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam (2 page)

‘One of each,’ friends remarked, enviously, after the birth of their second. ‘You’re so
lucky!

Linda always feigned chagrin at this: ‘Credit where credit’s due — it took years of careful planning.’

She was not entirely joking. If their good fortune was not exactly planned, it was, she felt, at least deserved. It was earnt.

More symmetries emerged as the years passed, equally unplanned — or at most half-planned. Often these were merely whimsical: that both adults were Capricorns, both children Sagittarians. Other symmetries seemed more significant, and meaningful. And even useful: that father and daughter were lefthanders, mother and son orthodox,would surely make for exciting family doubles on the tennis court in future years.

The more such symmetries came to light, the more both parents actively sought them out. It became a family game, from which data that didn’t fit were excluded, or conveniently ignored: that both children had been dealt their father’s mud-brown eyes, for instance.

Their mother’s were blue: a pale sky-blue.

Rick and Linda had been happy themselves as children, sheltered in the leafier avenues of the city. Both came from solid families, grew up in nice areas, attended good schools. Solid, nice, good: these were the specifications of their world, interchangeable, universally applicable. They had first met at a suburban Public Library, as teenagers, studying for final school exams, and felt their way cautiously into love. Their discovery of sex had come, equally cautiously, through each other, and only through each other: a slow, almost courtly process of escalating excitements spread over many months. Even after several dozen of those months, Linda would still involuntarily cover her face with her hands at the moment of greatest pleasure, as if shamed by that pleasure, and its sign: the crimson flush that spread across her cheeks and neck.

They had married while still at University. It seemed a precipitate step, the first missed beat in a measured rhythm. Both sets of parents were agreed on this — but the young couple, pimple-spotted, barely beyond their teens, had smiled their way past any objections. Strengthened by each other, they had grown immune to parental advice — they could, they found, outlast it. Their constant physical contact — twined fingers, pressed thighs, stolen kisses — seemed to fuse them ever more closely together, amoeba-like, doubling their intelligence and resolve. Both now knew that they were halves of something larger, that their lives before — their ‘previous lives’, Rick joked — had been incomplete.

They had married in St Paul’s, Linda’s parish church. They chose the recently arrived Father Cummings as celebrant — a young student-priest, or priest-intern whom Linda had met through the church Youth Group — rather than the older rector whom her parents preferred. John Cummings was their own age; he had permitted a revised set of vows in which both partners promised to love, honour and cherish, but from which the ancient asymmetrical duty of wifely obedience had been removed.

The young couple had salvaged a few dusty, spidery pieces of furniture from the cellars and attics and backsheds of their reluctant families, and rented a small student-flat in the inner-city suburbs. To the two families it seemed that their children were still playing at being grown-ups, that this tiny, cramped flat was not far removed from the dolls’ houses and backyard cubbies of a few years before. Both sets of parents offered the support of weekly meals, and a monthly allowance. ‘Pocket-money’ was the term the two fathers preferred, as if the words might somehow preserve a child-like dependency. At times, as if bidding against each other in an auction of allegiance, the two mothers offered help with house-cleaning and laundry.

‘You won’t have
time
with all your studies, dear,’ Rick’s mother urged her new daughter-in-law. ‘Why don’t I pick up a laundry basket each week?’

‘Rick does the laundry, Mother,’ Linda said, a little smugly. ‘You’ll have to speak to him.’

The older woman was incredulous:
‘Rick
does the laundry? But he’s never washed a thing in his life.’

‘He’s a quick learner.’

‘But the breadwinner
especially
has to study.’

To Rick and Linda it was the beginning of a shared, equal adventure. Snuggling together each night, it seemed a crime that both had been forced to sleep all those years apart, alone, in a narrow child’s bed. It might have been something out of Dickens, Linda joked: a cruelty that happened to orphans. Each evening after lectures they took long walks together through their new neighbourhood, holding hands, and at home afterwards shared a steaming, brimming bath. After making love, they often read passages to each other from their favourite books, which were, increasingly, the same books. Over breakfast they chose items from the morning paper which they also read aloud, as if feeding each other handpicked delicacies. They packed frugal student-lunches which they ate together on the library lawns between lectures.Each Saturday they played mixed doubles in the local lawn-court Club competition, each Sunday they pedalled their push-bikes — their old school-bikes, resurrected on the cheap — long-distance, visiting families and friends. Their physical resemblance to each other — near-identical height and body-build — seemed to become more pronounced through those first years of marriage, as if eating the same food, and sharing the same exercise caused an even closer convergence of body-types. Without exactly planning it, Rick permitted his hair to grow a little longer, Linda cropped hers shorter; they chose, independently, similar gold-rimmed glasses. They often wore each other’s T-shirts, and even, at a stretch, before the birth of Ben, each other’s jeans.

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.

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 can 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?’