Angels in the Architecture (22 page)

This is dumb.

F
riday, 21 August 1981

Libyan fighter jets ‘engaged’ a couple of US ones in
the Gulf of Sidra on Wednesday, and the US shot down one Libyan plane. All very tense. Sadat’s mediation between East and West of crucial value. Not making him so many friends in his own region though. A shame
.
How is it that this thing that is Islam, at once so beautiful and accomplished, should be so riven?

‘Do you
think Timmy’s got spiritual qualities?’ Tim rang his wife at her office.

‘What?’

‘I’ve just been thinking about it. I wanted to know what you thought.’

‘I’m at work!’

‘I know, but I thought you might like a call.’

There was s
ilence at the end of the phone.

‘Right.’

‘Sorry. Bad timing.’

‘No. No, it’s fine. Really. I’m bored anyway. Nothing unusual about that though
, I s’pose.’

‘I um
... just think sometimes there’re things going on his head that we don’t know about.’

‘I think you’ve been going to too many of those meetings.’

‘It’s not about that.’

‘Well
, what’s it about then?’

‘Well
, aren’t you after some answers too? About your science. This is all part and parcel.’

‘No
, it’s not. It’s nothing like it. I don’t confuse science with religion, Pete.’

‘It’s not about religion. It’s about what we don’t know and find hard to understand. It’s about making sense of things. Isn’t that what you want?’

‘Sorry hun, but I don’t think I’m with you on this one. Different planet for me.’

‘Okay, well
, I just wondered if you were curious about that. I guess not. See you later then, eh?’

‘Sure.’

Friday,
21 August 1981 continued

Timmy having another ‘disturbed’ period. Unsettled. I don’t know if I can ever make any really positive difference in his life. If he is ‘spiritual’ – if
what he’s all about is having some connection with the Universe that I don’t and can’t ever get, then I have no idea how I can ever support that in any way. Is it just enough that I love him and care for him and try each day to connect with him, and try to connect him to this world the rest of us live in? I feel some pressure to
be
something else
for
him. Is it possible that some instruction is being yelled in my ear but I can’t hear it? Nonsense.

Have tried to broach this all
with Lissy but there doesn’t seem to be a way of discussing it that would be comprehensible to her.

Paradoxically she has written a paper in response to
the Paris experiments which she asked me to read – it’s way over my head. Nice that she asked though. She’s spent hours, days and months pondering the implications of this. Is it that that draws her away from us, or does she pursue her work in order to escape us? Possibly she wouldn’t know the answer to that question herself.

Monday, 24 August 1981

Lennon’s killer sentenced to life in lieu of the
non-effectiveness of his insanity plea. Odd it took so long for this trial and sentencing. Nearly a year.

The year seems full of murder
.

Tim lay down on the sofa. His mind was buzzing with information and shooting lights. He’d worked hard to decipher all of it and translate it all on
to his painting paper at the easel. In the end, he was frustrated because he knew the message wasn’t coming out right. He’d tried to tell this to those who came with the message, but they seemed intent on delivering
their
message and not hearing his. He was confused about some of the lines of things, which way the light travelled and when it was coming and when it was going. There was so much of it sometimes that it began to all spin round in his head and then it would lack clarity, and he didn’t like it when everything was fuzzy. He wanted it all to be clear. When it got too fuzzy he would have to find a line to concentrate on, to try and make everything clear again.. Or else he’d have to lie down and close his eyes.

Even when it was fuzzy though it gave him lots of energy, so much sometimes he’d just jump up and down and up and down for such a long time. That helped make things clear too sometimes.

No one would have known that Timmy knew about other places and other times. No one really understood or believed either that if Tim jumped up and down enough then it would change the world, that his present affected the future. Some knew the idea in theory, but no one really believed that if a butterfly flapped its wings it could cause a thunder storm on the other side of the world. Nor indeed that in another dimension the future had already happened and that a particular flock of Angels were depending on the favours of small children to see and understand and create a different possibility.

Timmy stood at the crux of an idea between two worlds and many dimensions, and he had begun to gather the portent of his role in the universe. A great deal depended on his success.

9

             
Fulk was more animal than man – feral in nature, like the creatures he preyed upon. He’d known no person to make a difference to his life. His earliest memory was of straggling over a forest path alone, and later secreting through villages and peasantries in search of vague scratchings and rodents on which to survive. If he had another name other than Fulk, then it was lost to him, along with anyone who may have once known him, as well as from whence he came. It seemed an odd name to most ears, but Fulk knew he was Fulk and it seemed the right sort of name to him, although it wasn’t much heard and he didn’t much speak it himself, or anything particularly. He did not know his age since he didn’t count much past his two hands; a few who noticed a little of such things might have said they’d seen Fulk around about since Berta Draper’s husband passed on, or since Matthew Callim lost his leg to a foul creeping disease, or maybe even since Father Taylor arrived, a novice, to Lincoln, which meant around twenty-five years, and then there was the few years before that that Fulk had actually been on the earth at all. So he was not a young man. He had long hair like a mane, a beard which was really just a continuation of the mane, nothing for his feet to stand up in except the dirt that cased them, few teeth and quick-darting black eyes that held little thought behind them except an initiative to feed and avoid danger. His clothes were ragged and protected him from nothing. He smelt very bad, especially as it was hot these days, which at least meant he could be alive from the cold. Fulk didn’t notice his own smell so much and not many others had ever come close enough for it to be a bother.

Fulk sat at a particular spot at the edge of
the Thane’s lands where he knew he was hidden from sight of the Thane’s men who trailed the forest as a threat to poachers. Fulk was only a small bit worried that a man he knew and had seen taking a beast from the forest’s keep had been caught and taken away screaming his innocence. Fulk didn’t know what would happen to the man, nor did he care, although it was clear it was far from the man’s liking, and Fulk thought to pay extra attention to his own movements. He knew better than others how to hide himself and was sure none of the groundsmen had ever laid their eyes on him.

Fulk had never acquired the traps other men used to catch animals. He was quiet and quick and he would catch small animals with his hands and rip their heads from their bodies or wring their necks. He could use his own teeth, such as he had, to bite into their fur and would skin the animals with his
fingers. Commonly he caught birds, ducks, ferrets or rabbits, and he was not concerned to give a long wait to his trapping, and in this way he would surprise the most alert and quick of small creatures. He saw though that other men with their traps caught much larger animals and he found himself harbouring some small curiosity now about the taste of such beasts, in addition to some sense of the productivity gains of a trap in these stinking hot days. He knew where the man who had been taken had his traps hidden, and he knew also that the Thane’s men had not found all of these. Already he had removed a hare from one such trap, dead from its bleeding. He didn’t much like the hare – rabbit was more to his liking, but he didn’t mind it so much as to discard eating it. He’d thought he would set the trap again somewhere new, somewhere only he would know to find it, and see what different beasts would come along. And so he sat here now with a full belly, hidden, watching the small clearing where he had reset the other poacher’s trap and wondering what might come along to it. He hoped it would be some larger animal, and he laid down, still with an eye to the trap’s spot and an ear to the movements and the sounds of the woods.

Bishop Hugh’s carriage wound its way through wandering peasant folk and townspeople at the edge of Lincoln, those who recognised him doffing their hats or bowing a little as they scurried about their way. Hugh scanned the horizon of the city’s walls and the structures rising up the hill of Lincoln. From this vantage point, he knew he should have seen the Cathedral, but as with the whole of his dusty journey across the vast flatness of Lincolnshire towards the hilltop town, there was no sight at all of its roof or towers.

The Cathedral
had stood for much of the last hundred years and was the first cathedral ordered built by William the Conqueror. It had cost a fortune then, as well as a generation of labour, and would do more than that again now.

Still, Hugh
looked out hopefully for some vestige of the great church and put thoughts of cost and sacrifice out of his head.

He wondered what the mood of the townsfolk might be. He couldn’t tell, but he recalled the stories conveyed
to him by the vicar of Torksey and the priest’s fears about a rising tension. Things seemed usual within the city, albeit that there seemed more people about than was usual. But he wondered at the precariousness of it. For the most part the people were inherently superstitious and Hugh knew the collapse of a church would have tongues wagging. Few would have considered the likelihood of an engineering weakness or the age or height of the building, or just the sheer power of the earthquake. Hugh himself was determined to understand all he could in this respect, for he would have it that the new cathedral would not topple with such ease in the future, and he knew also he must maintain a calm and kindly exterior, one that would lead people away from superstition. He also knew what a challenge that path would be. For as long as people had believed anything at all, he knew they’d believed what they chose to, even in the face of stupendous evidence to the contrary. Subtlety and Faith would have to come together for the sake of peace.

The Bishop
was settled back into his seat as he was conveyed through the city wall at the river gate and up the cobbled hill road to the crest. Once through the wall, he knew by now he certainly should have seen the cathedral rising proudly above all the surrounding structures, but he deigned instead not to look out and up. Already there were the signs of rebuilding as men carried all manner of tools and materials up the hill. Most seemed very young – boys even – and Hugh knew their labours were missed by their families already, all of whom would be poor. No family that was not peasant would feel cause to satisfy the Church’s call for so many, and such others as these would contribute anyway, in materials or fine adornment for the new building or its deaconry, whether from obligation, or to assuage guilt, or to make evident their affluence or position. For some it would earn their own pew or burial within the Church; the poor would wait longer for their reward.

Nearing the top of the
hill, Hugh’s eyes followed a young boy, of thirteen years or so, who pushed a small flat-topped handcart along the side of the road. Hugh’s own vehicle was slow as it wended its way up and through the streets of people and animals and carts, so he remained apace with the boy, who seemed singularly set on his task and apparently had no mind to the buggy beside him or the clergyman’s attention to him.

The boy’s clothes, although worn and old, were carefully stitched in many places, demonstrating some mother’s proud attention to her own handiwork and thrift and possibly to some idea of what was decent or respectable. He was
fair-haired and might one day be handsome. Hugh surmised the lad would have had little notion of God’s intention for him or his kin, knowing nought but work and his place in the world..

He gazed at the boy as both wended their way ac
ross the square atop the hill. Something caught the boy’s attention and he stopped and turned to a voice calling him from across the road. As he turned he caught the Bishop’s face peering at him and puzzled at it momentarily before halting his small cart and remembering to drop his head deferentially and doff his non-existent cap. With the mass of workmen and equipment at the front of them the Bishop’s carriage came to a halt and so the boy and the Bishop were left before each other, both briefly lost to the call of the wider scene and their role in it.