Chapter Thirty-Seven
THIRTY-SEVEN
He is definitely scared of dogs. Terrified. But he wasn’t always, not before his dad’s funeral.
Twenty-five years ago he was sitting in the church with his friends. They heard footsteps behind them and Joar turned around like he always did, fists clenched, prepared for war. The minister walking down the aisle jumped in surprise.
“Terribly sorry, you startled me,” he smiled.
“Don’t creep up on people in churches, you psychopath!” Joar roared back at him.
“I… work here,” the minister said in his defense.
“Like I care, you psychopath!” Joar pointed out.
The minister looked like he didn’t exactly know what to do with that information. So instead he turned sympathetically toward Ted and said:
“I’m very sorry for the loss of your father.”
“What for? Was it you who killed him?” Joar snapped, so quickly that even Ali gasped. Joar turned to her, first sullen, then surprised, and added: “Well? Was it?”
Then Ted laughed, out loud, and then they all joined in. Dear Lord, how Ted needed that.
The minister had taken all this with admirable calm, the teenagers had to give him that, with just a little twitch of the corner of his mouth and a fleeting glint in the corner of his eye. Then he nodded to Ted and walked on along the aisle without any hurry, gathering up the hymnals and forgotten umbrellas. But Joar, who was strong enough to control anything except his tongue, couldn’t help calling out:
“So was it God who killed him?”
“Sorry?” the minister said in response.
Joar held up his hands as if he were being mugged:
“Don’t get mad, okay? But when someone gets sick and recovers, you always say that it was God who did that, so it’s pretty damn cowardly for Him to escape the blame when someone dies!”
It would be wrong to say that the minister looked amused by the question, but he didn’t look unamused.
“I think that God’s plan sometimes involves a meaning that we can’t see,” he said tentatively.
“So God murdered him on purpose? As part of His plan?” Joar persisted.
The minister may have then looked a little like he wished he’d gone home for his lunch instead, but he replied with all the patience his training could muster:
“I don’t have all the answers, I’m afraid. That’s why it’s called ‘faith.’?”
Joar, who hadn’t been to a single science lesson all term, snorted with a confidence that was pretty impressive under the circumstances: “Right. If you want answers, we have something called science .”
If the minister felt insulted, he hid it well.
“Perhaps the one doesn’t necessarily rule out the other,” he suggested.
“Have you met God?” Joar asked.
“How… how do you mean?”
Joar shrugged his scrawny shoulders.
“I mean, God talks to you, right? Is it like watching TV, or is it more like talking on the phone?”
The corners of the minister’s mouth danced at that, albeit reluctantly.
“I’m probably the one who does most of the talking, I have to admit.”
Joar couldn’t have looked more disappointed if Santa Claus had turned out to be a dentist.
“So you’re full of shit, then?”
“Sorry?”
Joar’s arms flew out from his sides so fast that he almost hit his friends.
“What? This whole thing, with a big fancy church and asking people for loads of money, and you haven’t even TALKED with GOD? I thought you could, like, ask for favors and stuff! What sort of shit religion is this?”
The minister took a thoughtful breath, smiled briefly, and replied:
“Perhaps you should ask God yourself?”
Joar stared at him in genuine surprise, as if he were expecting the minister to hold out a tin can on a piece of string, with God sitting at the other end.
“How the hell am I supposed to do that?”
The minister gestured amiably toward the roof.
“God belongs to you as much as to me. You can ask whatever you want.”
Joar pursed his lips thoughtfully for a long, long time. Then he looked up at the roof, cleared his throat seriously, and said:
“Okay. Can you stop giving people cancer, you fucking bastard?”
The way Ted laughed at that, on that day of all days, probably saved his life. And the way Joar looked when he heard that, he had probably never felt so proud. If the minister heard it, he pretended not to have, and if Heaven existed, God was probably prepared to overlook it too.
“Come on. Let’s go and buy some pastries,” Ali whispered to Ted, and they stood up. And only then did it feel like Ted’s dad was really dead. That’s why he always thinks of himself as an adult when he thinks back to that summer, because he was never a child again after that day.
On the way out of the church, the artist dropped a page from his sketch pad, the sheet of paper drifted down the aisle and landed in front of the minister’s feet. The man leaned over and picked it up. He held it tight and was lost for breath.
“Is this…?” he mumbled in astonishment, looking up at the high walls of the church.
“I’m sorry!” the artist said, out of instinct, as if he had committed a crime.
The minister stammered:
“No… no, no, don’t apologize! I’ve never… never seen anything like this. Did you just draw this, while you were sitting here? Incredible!”
It was a drawing of the church windows, of Jesus on the cross, his naked, bleeding body. The minister looked at it one final time, as if he really wanted to memorize it, before he handed it back gently and said with a smile:
“One day you’ll be someone whose work sells for millions.”
The boy squirmed uncomfortably and said down toward the floor:
“You can keep it, if you like.”
It was the first time someone other than his friends had said his art was worth anything. The first time an adult, apart from a janitor called Christian, had said what he drew was anything other than shameful and embarrassing. The minister held the drawing gratefully as the boy walked out of the church and disappeared into the rain with his friends.
“What did the minister say?” Joar asked outside, and the artist told him the truth.
So a moment later, the church door flew open again and Joar rushed back in and snatched the drawing out of the minister’s hands. The boy’s eyes looked apologetic, but all that came out of his mouth was:
“Not if it’s worth MILLIONS!”
Then he rushed out again, and the minister laughed and laughed and laughed. Perhaps God did too.
The four teenagers crossed the churchyard and jumped over the low wall on the far side, going past the parish hall where a happy family had just had a party. That morning, before Ted’s dad’s funeral, the minister had conducted a christening. Many years later Louisa will sit on a train and say that the best thing about babies is that they remind us that life goes on, but just then Ted didn’t do much thinking at all, he was busy with the noise Joar made. They walked past the kitchen door of the parish hall, where the cleaners had left some black trash bags, and Joar kicked every single one, because he was one of those kids, everyone knows one: a kicker. The first bag sounded like it was full of paper, the second full of plastic, but the third sounded… different. Joar and his friends stopped dead and stared at it.
“Was that…?” Ali whispered.
“It sounded like…,” Joar agreed.
He cautiously kicked the bag again, the sound was as easy to identify for a kid as the ice cream truck coming around a corner: the bag was full of drink cans and plastic bottles.
“Deposits!” Ali hissed.
The next moment, Joar had slung the bag over his shoulder and the four friends set off, running as fast as they could, their whole bodies laughing. One of the cleaners shouted angrily after them, but didn’t bother trying to chase them.
“How many paints and canvases and shit can we buy with this, do you think?” Joar grinned to the artist.
It was a good day, a really good day. Or at least it was until they ran past a house with a large garden and Ted caught sight of another black trash bag which looked exactly like the one Joar was carrying. That could only mean one thing: more deposits.
“Ted! Wait!” Ali cried, but it was already too late.
It wasn’t that Ted was particularly desperate for the money, it was more that he wanted to succeed at something. He wanted to do something, just once, that was worth a damn. He wanted to be the big hero, instead of it always being just Joar. So he climbed over the fence and ran toward the house to grab the trash bag. In his defense, it went pretty well, not a single person inside the house saw him. The only problem was that the big black bag wasn’t a big black bag at all. It was a big black dog. That was how the four friends found out that Ted really, really needed glasses.
Ted has never run so fast, before or since. He ran like a ferret on fire, with a barking, howling wild animal hot on his heels. It was never dogs he was scared of after that, it was death. From the corner of his eye he could see the tongue lolling between the razor-sharp teeth, and could imagine the sound they would make as they sank through his flesh and crushed his bones. He would dream about that a thousand times. If Joar hadn’t run along the fence and distracted the dog for a few moments, Ted never would have gotten away. Unfortunately, the only way Joar could think of doing that was to throw the whole bag of cans and bottles onto the lawn. The noise confused the big black beast, and when Ted jumped over the fence, Ali leapt up and yelled as loudly as she could:
“AAAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!”
The dog hesitated, just for a moment, then went on barking like a lunatic, but it still backed away a couple of paces. Ted would always remember that as the moment when Ali scared death itself into retreat. Not even death had the energy to argue with that girl.
While Ted stood there on the right side of the fence, bent double and gasping for breath, and the other three stared longingly at the treasure scattered across the grass around the furious dog, Joar muttered:
“Almost all those damn bottles are from that fizzy water! What sort of morons pay for WATER?”
“It’s called mineral water,” Ali corrected.
“You’re a mineral poo,” Joar informed her.
So they had a fight. Then an adult who had heard the dog barking yelled something from inside the house, and they ran off again.
“Sorry, sorry,” Ted kept repeating, but his friends just laughed it off.
“We’ll find the money for paints some other way,” Ali promised.
Joar nodded exultantly:
“It’s a good thing it was you the dog was chasing, Ted, because you’ve got such a tiny ass! If it had been chasing Ali, she’d have been bitten right away!”
Then Ali looked at Joar and did the kindest thing the boys had ever seen her do: she stayed quiet and let him win. Just that once. You couldn’t possibly love anyone more when you’re fourteen years old.
Twenty-five years later Ted is standing in a parking lot near a train station staring at a taxi. His suit jacket is crumpled, his shoes are full of dirt, his face is bruised, and his wrist is bare when he raises it to see what time it is. Somewhere out in the darkness, a dog is barking, but dogs are not what Ted is scared of. They never were.