Sacrament (4 page)

0h, all the years he'd waited. Waited and watched with his dispassionate eye while something died nearby,
recording its passing like the truthful witness he was. Keeping his distance, keeping his calm. Enough of that.
The bear was dying, and he would die too if he let her go now; let her perish in the dark alone. Something had
snapped in him. He didn't know why. Perhaps because of the conversation with Guthrie, which had stirred up so
much pain, perhaps the encounter with the blind bear at the dump; perhaps simply because the time had come.
He'd hung on this branch long enough, ripening there. It was time to fall and rot into something new.

He followed the bear's trail along the shoreline parallel to the street with a kind of exulting despair in him. He
had no idea what he would do when he caught up with the animal; he only knew he had to be with it in its
agonies, given that he was to some degree their author. He was the one who'd brought Cornelius and his habits
here, after all. The bear had simply been doing what she would do in the wild, confronted by something
threatening. She'd been shot for being true to her nature. No thinking queer could be happy with his complicity
in that.

Will's empathy with the animal hadn't totally unseated his urge to self-preservation. Though he followed the
trail closely most of the way, he gave the rocks a little distance when he came upon them, in case there were
more animals lurking there. But what little light the lamps of Main Street had supplied was now too far behind
him to be of much use. It was harder and harder to make out the bloodstains. He had to stop and study the
ground to find them, for which pause he was grateful. The icy air was raw in his throat and chest; his teeth
ached as though they were all being drilled at the same time, his legs were trembling.

If he was feeling weak, he thought, the bear was surely a damn sight weaker. She'd shed copious amounts of
blood now, and must be close to collapse.

Somewhere nearby a dog was barking, her alarm familiar.

'Lucy...' Will said to himself, and looking up through the flickering snow saw that his pursuit had brought him
within twenty yards of the back of Guthrie's shack. He heard the old man shouting now, telling the dog to shut
up; and then the sound of the back door being opened.

Light spilled from it, out across the snow. A meager light by comparison with the streetlamps half a mile back,
but bright enough to show Will his quarry.

The animal was closer to the shore than to the shack, and closer to Will than either: standing on all fours,
swaying, the ground around her dark with her free-flowing blood.

'What the fuck's going on out here?' Guthrie demanded.

Will didn't look at him; he kept his eyes fixed on the bear - as hers were fixed on him - while he yelled for
Guthrie to go back inside.

'Rabjohns? Is that you?'

'There's a wounded bear out here-' Will shouted.

'I see her,' Guthrie replied. 'Did you shoot her?'

'No!' From the corner of his eye Will could see that Guthrie had emerged from his shack. 'Go back inside will
you?'

'Are you hurt?' Guthrie called.

Before Will could reply the bear was up, and turning her bulk towards Guthrie, she charged. There was time as
she roared upon the old man for Will to wonder why she'd chosen to take Guthrie instead of him; whether in the
seconds they'd stared at one another she'd seen that he was no threat to her: just another wounded thing, trapped
between street and sea. Then she was up and swiping at Guthrie, the blow throwing him maybe five yards. He
landed hard, but thanks to some grotesque gift of adrenalin he was on his feet a heartbeat later, yelling
incoherently back at his wounder. Only then did his body seem to realize the grievous harm it had been done.
His hands went up to his chest, his blood running out between his fingers. His yells ceased and he looked back
up at the bear, so that for a moment they stood staring at one another, both bloodied, both teetering. Then
Guthrie spoiled the symmetry and fell face down in the snow.

Still standing at the doorstep, Lucy began a round of despairing yelps, but however traumatized she was she
plainly had no intention of approaching her master. Guthrie was still alive; he was attempting to turn himself
over, it seemed, his right hand sliding on the ice as he tried to lift himself up.

Will looked back the way he'd come, hoping that somebody was in sight to help. There was no sign of anyone
on the shoreline; perhaps people were making their way along the street. He couldn't afford to wait for them,
however. Guthrie needed help and he needed it now. The bear had sunk down onto all fours again, and by the
degree of her sway she looked ready to keel over entirely. Keeping his eyes on her he cautiously approached the
place where Guthrie was lying. The delirium that had seized him earlier had guttered out. There was only a
bitter sickness in his belly.

By the time he reached Guthrie's side the man had managed to turn himself over, and it was clear that he was
wounded beyond hope of healing: his chest a wet pit, his gaze the same. But he seemed to see Will; or at least
sense his proximity. He reached out as Will bent to him, and caught hold of his jacket.

'Where's Lucy?' he said.

Will looked up. The dog was still at the doorway. She was no longer barking.

'She's okay.'

Guthrie didn't hear him reply, it seemed, because he drew Will closer, his hold remarkably strong.
'She's safe,' Will told him, more loudly, but even as he spoke he heard the warning hiss of the bear. He glanced
back in her direction. Her whole bulk was full of shudders, as though her system, like Guthrie's, was close to
capitulation. But she wasn't ready to die where she stood. She took a tentative step towards Will, her teeth
bared.

Guthrie's other arm had caught hold of Will's shoulder. He was speaking again. Nothing that made much sense
to Will; at least not at this moment.

'This will ... not come ... again.. .' he said.

The bear took a second step, her body rocking back and forth. Very slowly Will worked to pull Guthrie's hands
off him, but the man's hold was too fierce.

'The bear...' Will said.

'Nor this...' Guthrie muttered, '... nor this...' There was a tiny smile on his bloody lips. Did he know, even in
his dying agonies, what he was doing; holding down the man who had come with such sour memories, where
the bear could claim him?

Will had no choice: if he was going to get out of the bear's way he was going to have to lug Guthrie with him.
He started to haul himself to his feet, lifting the old man's sizeable frame with him. The motion brought a howl
of anguish from Guthrie, and his grip on Will's shoulder slipped a little. Will stepped sideways in the direction
of the shack, half-carrying Guthrie with him like a partner in some morbid dance. The bear had halted, and was
watching this grotesquerie with black-sequin eyes. Will took a second step, and Guthrie let out another cry,
much weaker than the first, and all at once gave up his hold on Will, who didn't have the power left in his arms
to support him. Guthrie slipped to the ground as though every bone in his body had gone to water, and in that
instant the bear made her move. Will didn't have time to dodge, much less run. The animal was on him in a
bound, striking him like a speeding car, his bones breaking on impact, the world becoming a smear of pain and
snow, both blazing white.

Then his head struck the icy ground. Consciousness fled for a few seconds. When it returned he raised his hand;
saw the snow beneath him red. Where was the bear? He swivelled his gaze left and right looking for her. There
was no sign. One of his arms was tucked beneath him, and useless, but there was enough strength in the other to
raise him up. The motion made him sick with pain, and he was fearful he was going to lose consciousness
again, but by degrees he bullied and coaxed his body up into a kneeling position.

Off to his left, a sniffing sound. He looked in its direction, his gaze flickering. The bear had her nose in
Guthrie's corpse, inhaling its perfumes. She raised her vast head, her snout bloody.

This is death, Will thought. For all of us, this is death. This is what you've photographed so many times. The
dolphin drowning in the net, pitifully quiescent; the monkey twitching amongst its dead fellows, looking at him
with a gaze he could not stand to meet, except through his camera. They were all the same in this moment, he
and the monkey; he and the bear. All ephemeral things, running out of time.

And then the bear was on him again, her claws opening his shoulder and back, her jaws coming for his neck.
Somewhere far off, in a place he no longer belonged, he heard a woman calling his name, and his lazy brain
thought: Adrianna's here; sweet Adrianna

He heard a shot, then another. Felt the weight of the bear against him, carrying him down to the ground, her
blood raining on his face.

Was he saved? he vaguely wondered. But even as he was shaping the thought another part of him, that had
neither eyes to see nor ears to hear, nor cared to have either, was slipping away from this place; and senses he
had never known he owned were piercing the blizzard clouds and studying the stars. It seemed to him he could
feel their warmth; that the distance between their blazing hearts and his spirit was just a thought, and he could
be there, in them, knowing them, if he turned his mind to it.

Something checked his ascent, however. A voice in his head that he knew was familiar to him, yet he could not
put a name to.

'Where d'you think you're going?' the voice said. There was a sly humour in it. He tried to put a face to the
sound, but he saw only fragments. Silky red hair; a sharp nose, a comical moustache. 'You can't go yet,' the
interloper said.

But I want to, he said. It hurts so much, staying here. Not the dying part, the living.

His companion heard his complaints, and would have no truck with them. 'Hush yourself,' he said. 'You think
you're the first man on the planet lost his faith? That's all part of it. We're going to have to have a serious
conversation, you and me. Face to face. Man to-'

Man to what?

'We'll get to that,' the voice replied. It was starting to fade.

Where are you going? Will wanted to know.

'Nowhere you can't find me when the time comes,' the stranger replied. 'And it will come, my faithless friend.
As sure as God put tits on trees.'

And with this absurdity, he was gone.

There was a moment of blissful silence, when it crossed Will's mind that maybe he'd died after all, and was
floating away into oblivion. Then he heard Lucy - poor, orphaned Lucy - howling out her heart somewhere
close to him. And coming on the heels of her din, human voices, telling him to be still, be still, he was going to
be all right.

'Can you hear me, Will?' Adrianna was asking him.

He could feel the snowflakes dropping on his face, like cold feathers. On his brow, on his lashes, on his lips, on
his teeth. And then - far less welcome than the pricking snow - a swelling agony in his torso and head.

'Will,' Adrianna said. 'Speak to me.'

... ye ... s,' he said.

The pain was becoming unendurable, rising and rising.

'You're going to be all right,' Adrianna said. 'We've got help coming, and you're going to be all right.'

'Christ, what a mess,' somebody said. He knew the inflections. One of the Lauterbach brothers, surely; Gert the
doctor, struck off the register for improper distribution of pharmaceuticals. He was giving orders like a field
sergeant: blankets, bandages, here, now, on the double!

'Will?' A third voice, this one close to his ear. It was Cornelius, weeping as he spoke. 'I fucked up man. Oh
Christ, I'm sorry-'

Will wanted to hush the man's self-recrimination - it was of no use to anybody now - but his tongue would not
work to make the words. His eyes, however, opened a fraction, dislodging the dusting of snow in his sockets.
He couldn't see Cornelius, nor Adrianna, nor Gert Lauterbach. Only the snow, spiralling down.

'He's still with us,' Adrianna said.

'Oh man, oh man-' Cornelius was sobbing. 'Thank fucking God.'

'You hold on,' Adrianna said to Will. 'We've got you. You hear me? You're not going to die, Will. I'm not going
to let you, okay?'

He let his eyes close again. But the snow kept coming down inside his head, laying its hush upon him; like a
tender blanket put over his hurt. And by degrees the pain retreated, and the voices retreated, and he slept under
the snow, and dreamt of another time.

He Dreams He Is Loved

For a few precious months following the death of his older brother, Will had been the happiest boy in
Manchester. Not publicly so, of course. He had quickly learned how to put on a glum face; even to look teary
sometimes, if a concerned relative asked him how he felt. But it was all a sham. Nathaniel was dead, and he was
glad. The golden boy would reign over him no longer. Now there was only one person in his life who
condescended to him the way Papa did, and that was Papa himself.

Papa had reason: he was a great man. A philosopher, no less. Other thirteen-year-olds had plumbers for fathers,
or bus-drivers, but Will's father, Hugo Rabjohns, had six books to his name, books that a plumber or a bus-
driver would be unlikely to understand. The world, Hugo had once told Nathaniel in Will's presence, was made
by many men, but shaped by few. The important thing was to be one of those few; to find a place in which you
could change the repetitive patterns of the many through political influence and intellectual discourse, and
failing either of these, through benign coercion.

Will adored hearing his father talk this way, even though much of what Papa said was beyond him. And his
father loved to talk about his ideas, though Will had heard him once fly into a fury when Eleanor, Will's mother,
had called her husband a teacher.

'I am not, never have been, nor ever will be a teacher!' Hugo had roared, his always ruddy face turning a still
deeper red. 'Why do you always seek to reduce me?'

What had his mother said by way of reply? Something vague. She was always vague. Looking past him to
something outside the window, probably; or staring critically at the flowers she'd just arranged.

'Philosophy can't be taught,' Hugo had said. 'It can only be inspired.'

Perhaps the exchange had gone on a little longer, but Will doubted it. A short explosion, then peace: that was
the ritual. And sometimes a fond exchange, but that too quickly withering. And always on his mother's face the
same distracted look whether the subject was philosophy or affection.

But then Nathaniel had died, and even those exchanges had ceased.

He was injured on a Thursday morning, crossing the street: run down by a taxi, the driver racing to carry his
passenger to Manchester Piccadilly Station in time for a noon train. Struck square on, he was thrown through
the window of a shoe-shop, sustaining multiple lacerations and appalling internal injuries. He did not die
instantly. He held on to life for two-and-a-half days in Intensive Care at the Royal infirmary, never regaining
consciousness. In the early hours of the third night his body gave up the fight and he died.

In Will's mythologized version of the event, his brother had made the decision, somewhere in the depths of his
coma, not to come back into the world. Though he was only fifteen when he died, he had already tasted more of
the world's approbation than most men who lived out their Biblical spans. Loved to devotion by those who'd
made him, blessed with a face nobody could lay eyes upon without wanting to love, Nathaniel had decided to
let go of the world while it still idolized him. He had been adored enough, feted enough. He was already bored
with it. Best to be gone, without a backward glance.

After the funeral Eleanor did not stir from the house. She'd always liked to walk and windowshop; she no
longer did so. She'd had a circle of women-friends with whom she lunched at least twice a week; she would no
longer come to the phone to speak to them. Her face lost all its glamour. Her distraction turned to vacuity, her
obsessions grew stronger by the day. She would not have the curtains in the living-room open, for fear she saw
a taxi. She could not eat, except off white plates. She would not sleep until every door and window in the house
had been treble-locked. She took to praying, usually very quietly, in French, which was her native tongue.
Nathaniel's spirit, Will heard her telling Papa one night, was with her all the time; did Hugo not see him in her
face? They had the same bones, didn't they? The same, French bones.

Even at the age of thirteen, Will had an unsentimental grasp of the world; he didn't lie to himself about what
was happening to his mother. She was going crazy. That was the simple, pitiful truth of it. For several weeks in
May she could not bear to be left alone in the house, and Will was obliged to skip school (no great hardship
there) and stay at home with her -banned from her presence (she had no wish to see a face that resembled a poor
copy of Nathaniel's perfection) but called back with sobs and promises if he was heard opening the front door.
Finally, in the middle of August, Hugo sat Will down and told him that life in Manchester had plainly become
intolerable for all three of them, and he had decided they would move. 'Your mother needs some open skies,' he
explained, the toll of the months since the accident gouged into his face. He had, in his own words, a pugilist's
face; its monolithic rawness an unlikely rock from which to hear fine distinctions of thought and vocabulary
spring. But spring they did. Even the simple business of describing the family's departure from Manchester
became a linguistic adventure.

'I realize these last few months have been troubling to you,' Papa told Will. 'The manifestations of grief can be
confounding to us all, and I can't pretend to fully understand why your mother's distress has taken such
idiosyncratic forms. But you mustn't judge her. We can't feel what she feels. Nobody can ever feel what
somebody else feels. We can guess at it. We can hypothesize. But that's it. What happens up here-' he tapped his
temple, '-is hers and only hers.'

'Maybe if she talked about it-' Will tentatively suggested.

'Words aren't absolutes. I've told you that before, haven't I? What your mother says and what you hear aren't the
same thing. You understand that, don't you?' Will nodded, though he only grasped the crudest version of what
he was being told. 'So we're moving,' Hugo replied, apparently satisfied that he'd communicated the theoretical
underpinning of this.

'Where are we going?'

'A village in Yorkshire, called Burnt Yarley. You'll have to change schools but that's not going to be much of a
problem for you, is it?' Will murmured no, it wasn't; he hated St Margaret's. 'And it won't hurt for you to be out
in the open air a little more. You look so pale all the time.'

'When will we go?'

'In about three weeks.'