But Archie did not pluck Clara Bowden from a vacuum. And it's about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was^ from somewhere.
She had roots. More specifically, she was from Lambeth via Jamaica and she was connected, through tacit adolescent agreement, to one Ryan Topps. Because before Clara was beautiful she was ugly. And before there was Clara and Archie there was Clara and Ryan. And there is no getting away from Ryan Topps. Just as a good historian need recognize Hitler's Napoleonic ambitions in the east in order to comprehend his reluctance to invade the British in the west, so Ryan Topps is essential to any understanding of why Clara did what she did. Ryan is indispensable. There was Clara and Ryan for eight months before Clara and Archie were drawn together from opposite ends of a staircase. And Clara might never have run into the arms of Archie Jones if she hadn't been running, quite as fast as she could, away from Ryan Topps.
Poor Ryan Topps. He was a mass of unfortunate physical characteristics. He was very thin and very tall, red-headed, flatfooted and freckled to such an extent that his skin was rarer than his freckles. Ryan fancied himself as a bit of a Mod. He wore ill-fitting grey suits with black polo-necks. He wore Chelsea boots after everyone else had stopped wearing them. While the rest of the world discovered the joys of the electronic synthesizer, Ryan swore allegiance to the little men with big guitars: to the Kinks, the Small Faces, the Who. Ryan Topps rode a green Vespa GS scooter which he polished twice a day with a baby's nappy and kept encased in a custom-builtcorrugated-iron shield. To Ryan's way of thinking, a Vespa was not merely a mode of transport but an ideology, family, friend and lover all rolled into one paragon of late forties engineering.
Ryan Topps, as one might expect, had few friends.
Clara Bowden was gangly, buck-toothed, a Jehovah's Witness, and saw in Ryan a kindred spirit.
A typical teenage female panoptic on she knew everything there was to know about Ryan Topps long before they ever spoke. She knew the basics: same school (St. Jude's Community School, Lambeth), same height (six foot one); she knew he was, like her, neither Irish nor Roman Catholic, which made them two islands floating surrounded by the popish ocean of St. Jude's, enrolled in the school by the accident of their post codes reviled by teachers and pupils alike. She knew the name of his bike, she read the tops of his records as they popped up over the brim of his bag. She even knew things about him he didn't know: for example, she knew he was the Last Man on Earth. Every school has one, and in St. Jude's, as in other seats of learning, it was the girls who chose this moniker and dished it out. There were, of course, variations:
Mr. Not for a Million Pounds.
Mr. Not to Save My Mother's Life.
Mr. Not for World Peace.
But, generally, the schoolgirls of St. Jude's kept to the tried and tested formula. Though Ryan would never be privy to the conversations of the school's female changing rooms, Clara knew. She knew how the object of her affections was discussed, she kept an ear out, she knew what he amounted to when you got down to it, down amongst the sweat and the training bras and the sharp flick of a wet towel.
"Ah, Jaysus, you're not listening. I'm saying, if he was the last man on earth!""I still wouldn't.""Ah, bollocks you would!""But listen: the whole bleedin' world has been hit by the bomb, like in Japan, roight? An' all the good-lookin' men, all the rides like your man Nicky Laird, they're all dead. They've all been burnt to a crisp. An' all that's left is Ryan Topps and a bunch of cockroaches.""On me life, I'd rather sleep with the cockroaches."Ryan's unpopularity at St. Jude's was equalled only by Clara's. On her first day at the school her mother had explained to her she was about to enter the devil's lair, filled her satchel with two hundred copies of the Watchtower and instructed her to go and do the Lord's work. Week after week she shuffled through the school, head hung to the ground, handing out magazines, murmuring, Only Jehovah saves'; in a school where an overexcitable pustule could send you to Coventry, a six-foot black missionary in knee socks attempting to convert six hundred Catholics to the church of the Jehovah's Witnesses equalled social leprosy.
So Ryan was red as a beetroot. And Clara was black as yer boot. Ryan's freckles were a join-the-dots enthusiast's wet dream. Clara could circumnavigate an apple with her front teeth before her tongue got anywhere near it. Not even the Catholics would forgive them for it (and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate politicians give out promises and whores give out); not even St. Jude, who got saddled way back in theist century with the patronage of hopeless causes (due to the tonal similarity between Jude and Judas), was prepared to get involved.
At five o'clock each day, as Clara sat in her house attending to the message of the gospels or composing a leaflet condemning the heathen practice of blood transfusion, Ryan Topps would scoot by her open window on his way home. The Bowden living room sat just below street level, and had bars on its window, so all views were partial. Generally, she would see feet, wheels, car exhausts, swinging umbrellas. Such slight glimpses were often telling; a lively imagination could squeeze much pathos out of a frayed lace, a darned sock, a low swinging bag that had seen better days. But nothing affected her more deeply than gazing after the disappearing tailpipe of Ryan's scooter. Lacking any name for the furtive rumblings that appeared in her lower abdomen on these occasions, Clara called it the spirit of the Lord. She felt that somehow she was going to save the heathen Ryan Topps. Clara meant to gather this boy close to her breast, keep him safe from the temptation that besets us all around, prepare him for the day of his redemption. (And wasn't there somewhere, lower than her abdomen somewhere down in the nether region of the unmentionables was there not the half-conceived hope that Ryan Topps might save her?)If Hortense Bowden caught her daughter sitting wistfully by the barred window, listening to the retreating splutter of an engine while the pages of the New Bible flicked over in the breeze, she koofed her up-side her head and thanked her to remember that only 144,000 of the Witnesses of Jehovah would sit in the court of the Lord on Judgement Day. Amongst which number of the Anointed there was no space for nasty-looking so-and-sos on motorcycles.
"But what if we saved '
"Some people," Hortense asserted with a snort, 'have done such a hoi' heap of sinning, it late for dem to be making eyes at Jehovah. It take effort to be close to Jehovah. It take devotion and dedication. Blessed are the pure in heart for they alone shall see God. Matthew 5:8. Isn't dat right, Darcus?"Darcus Bowden, Clara's father, was an odoriferous, moribund, salivating old man entombed in a bug-infested armchair from which he had never been seen to remove himself, not even, thanks to a catheter, to visit the outdoor toilet. Darcus had come over to England fourteen years earlier and spent the whole of that period in the far corner of the living room, watching tele vision. The original intention had been that he should come to England and earn enough money to enable Clara and Hortense to come over, join him and settle down. However, on arrival, a mysterious illness had debilitated Darcus Bowden. An illness that no doctor could find any physical symptoms of, but which manifested itself in the most incredible lethargy, creating in Darcus admittedly, never the most vibrant of men a lifelong affection for the dole, the armchair and British television. In 1972, enraged by a fourteen-year wait, Hortense decided finally to make the journey on her own steam. Steam was something Hortense had in abundance. She arrived on the doorstep with the seventeen-year-old Clara, broke down the door in a fury and so the legend went back in St.Elizabeth gave Darcus Bowden the tongue-whipping of his life. Some say this onslaught lasted four hours, some say she quoted every book of the bible by memory and it took a whole day and awhole night. What is certain is, at the end of it all, Darcus slumped deeper into the recesses of his chair, looked mournfully at the television with whom he had had such an understanding, compassionate relationship so uncomplicated, so much innocent affection and a tear squeezed its way out of its duct and settled in a crag underneath his eye. Then he said just one word: Hmph. Hmph was all Darcus said or ever was to say after. Ask Darcus anything; query him on any subject at any hour of the day and night; interrogate him; chat with him; implore him; declare your love for him; accuse him or vindicate him and he will give you only one answer.
"I say, isn't dat right, Darcus?""Hmph.""An' it not," exclaimed Hortense, returning to Clara, having received Darcus's grunt of approval, 'dat young man's soul you boddrin' yourself wid! How many times must I tell you you got no time for bwoys!"For Time was running out in the Bowden household. This was 1974, and Hortense was preparing for the End of the World, which, in the house diary, she had marked carefully in blue biro: i January 1975. This was not a solitary psychosis of the Bowdens.
There were eight million Jehovah's Witnesses waiting with her. Hortense was in large, albeit eccentric, company. A personal letter had come to Hortense (as secretary of the Lambeth branch of the Kingdom Halls), with a photocopied signature from William J. Rangeforth of the largest Kingdom Hall in the USA, Brooklyn, confirming the date. The end of the world had been officially confirmed with a gold-plated letterhead, and Hortense had risen to the occasion by setting it in an attractive mahogany frame. She had given it pride of place on a doily on top of the television between a glass figurine of Cinderella on her way to the Ball and a tea-cosy embroidered with theTen Commandments. She had asked Darcus whether he thought it looked nice. He had hmphed his assent.
The end of the world was nigh. And this was not the Lambeth branch of the church of the Jehovah's Witnesses was to be assured like the mistakes of 1914 and 1925. They had been promised the entrails of sinners wrapped around the trunks of trees, and this time the entrails of sinners wrapped around the trunks of trees would appear. They had waited so long for the rivers of blood to overflow the gutters in the high street, and now their thirst would be satiated. The time had come.
This was the right date, this was the only date, all other dates that might have been proffered in the past were the result of some bad calculations: someone forgot to add, someone forgot to minus, someone forgot to carry the one. But now was the time. The real thing, i January 1975.
Hortense, for one, was glad to hear it. The first morning of 1925 she had wept like a baby when she awoke to find instead of hail and brimstone and universal destruction the continuance of daily life, the regular running of the buses and trains. It had been for nothing, then, all that tossing and turning the previous night; waiting for those neighbours, those who failed to listen to your warnings, to sink under a hot and terrible fire that shall separate their skin from their bones, shall melt the eyes in their sockets, and burn the babies that suckle at their mothers' breasts ... so many of your neighbours shall die that day that their bodies, if lined up side by side, will stretch three hundred times round the earth and on their charred remains shall the true Witnesses of the Lord walk to his side. The Clarion Bell, issue 245 How bitterly she had been disappointed! But the wounds of 1925 had healed, and Hortense was once again ready to be convinced that apocalypse, just as the right holy Mr. Rangeforth had explained, was round the corner. The promise of the 1914 generation still stood: This generation shall not pass, till all these things bejulfilkd (Matthew 24:34). Those who were alive in 1914 would live to see the Armageddon. It had been promised. Born in 1907, Hortense was getting old now, she was getting tired and her peers were dying off like flies. 1975 looked like the last chance.
Had not two hundred of the church's best intellectuals spent twenty years examining the bible, and hadn't this date been their unanimous conclusion? Had they not read between the lines in Daniel, scanned for the hidden meaning in Revelation, correctly identified the Asian wars (Korea and Vietnam) as the period spoken of by the angel, 'a time, and times, and half a time'? Hortense was convinced these were the sign of signs. These were the final days. There were eight months to the end of the world. Hardly enough time! There were banners to be made, articles to be written ("Will the Lord Forgive the Onanist?"), doorsteps to be trod, bells to be rung. There was Darcus to think about who could not walk to the fridge without assistance how was he to make it to the kingdom of the Lord? And in all Clara must lend a hand; there was no time for boys, for Ryan Topps, for skulking around, for adolescent angst. For Clara was not like other teenagers. She was the Lord's child, Hortense's miracle baby.
Hortense was all of forty-eight when she heard the Lord's voice while gutting a fish one morning, Montego Bay, 1955. Straight away she threw down the marlin, caught the trolley car home and submitted to her least favourite activity in order to conceive the child He had asked for.
Why had the Lord waited so long? Because the Lord wanted to show Hortense a miracle. For Hortense had been a miracle child herself, born in the middle of the legendary Kingston earthquake, 1907, when everybody else was busy dying miracles ran in the family. Hortense saw it this way: if she could come into this world in the middle of a ground shaker, as parts of Montego Bay slipped into the sea, and fires came down from the mountains, then nobody had no excuses about nothing no how. She liked to say: "Being' barn is de hardest part! Once ya done dat no problems." So now that Clara was here, old enough to help her with door stepping administration, writing speeches and all the varied business of the church of the Jehovah's Witnesses, she'd better get on with it. No time for boys. This child's work was just beginning. Hortense born while Jamaica crumbled did not accept apocalypse before one's nineteenth birthday as any excuse for tardiness.
Yet strangely, and possibly because of Jehovah's well documented penchant for moving in a mysterious manner, it was in performing the business of the Lord that Clara eventually met Ryan Topps face to face. The youth group of the Lambeth Kingdom Hall had been sent door stepping on a Sunday morning, Separating the sheep from the goats (Matthew 25:31-46), and Clara, detesting the young Witness men with their bad ties and softly spoken voices, had set off alone with her own suitcase to ring bells along Creighton Road. The first few doors she received the usual pained faces:
nice women shooing her away as politely as possible, making sure they didn't get too close, scared they might catch religion like an infection. As she got into the poorer end of the street, the reaction became more aggressive; shouts came from windows or behind closed doors.
"If that's the bloody Jehovah's Witnesses, tell 'em to piss off!"Or, more imaginatively, "Sorry, love, don't you know what day it is? It's Sunday, in nit I'm knackered. I've spent all week creating the land and oceans. It's me day of rest."At No. 75 she spent an hour with a fourteen-year-old physics whizz called Colin who wanted to intellectually disprove the existence of God while looking up her skirt. Then she rang No. 87. And Ryan Topps answered.
"Yeah?"He stood there in all his red-headed, black polo-necked glory, his lip curled in a snarl.
"I...!..."She tried desperately to forget what she was wearing: a white shirt complete with throat-ruffle, plaid knee-length skirt and sash that proudly stated nearer my god to thee.
"You want som mink said Ryan, taking a fierce drag of a dying cigarette. "Or som mink Clara tried her widest, buck-toothed smile and went on to auto-pilot. "Marnin' to you, sir. I am from de Lambet Kingdom Hall, where we, de Witnesses of Jehovah, are waitin' for de Lord to come and grace us wid his holy presence once more; as he did briefly hot sadly, invisibly in de year of our farder, 1914. We believe dat when he makes himself known he will be bringing wid 'im de tree-fold fires of hell in Armageddon, dat day when precious few will be saved. Are you int' rested in'
"Wot?"Clara, close to tears at the shame of it, tried again. "Are you int' rested in de tea chins of Jehovah?""You wot?""In Jehovah in de tea chins of d'Lord. You see, it like a staircase." Clara's last resort was always her mother's metaphor of the holy steps. "I see dat you walkin' down and der's a missin' step comin'.
I'm just tellin' you: watch your step! Me jus wan'
share heaven wid you. Me nah wan' fe see you bruk-up your legs."Ryan Topps leant against the door frame and looked at her for a long time through his red fringe.
Clara felt she was closing in on herself, like a telescope. It was only moments, surely, before she disappeared entirely.
"I 'ave some materials of readin' for your perusal' She fumbled with the lock of the suitcase, flipped the catch with her thumb but neglected to hold the other side of the case. Fifty copies of the Watchtawer spilled over the doorstep.
"Bwoy, me ky ant do nuttin' right today '
She fell to the ground in a rush to pick them up and scraped the skin off her left knee. "Owl""Your name's Clara," said Ryan slowly. "You're from my school, ain't ya?""Yes, man," said Clara, so jubilant he remembered her name that she forgot the pain. "St. Jude's.""I know wot it's called."Clara went as red as black people get and looked at the floor.
"Hopeless causes. Saint of," said Ryan, picking something surreptitiously from his nose and nicking it into a flowerpot. "IRA. The lot of'em."Ryan surveyed the long figure of Clara once more, spending an inordinate amount of time on two sizeable breasts, the outline of their raised nipples just discernible through white polyester.
"You best come in," he said finally, lowering his gaze to inspect the bleeding knee. "Put somefin' on that."That very afternoon there were furtive rumblings on Ryan's couch (which went a good deal further than one might expect of a Christian girl) and the devil won another easy hand in God's poker game. Things were tweaked, and pushed and pulled; and by the time the bell rang for end of school Monday Ryan Topps and Clara Bowden (much to their school's collective disgust) were more or less an item; as the St. Jude's phraseology went, they were 'dealing' with each other. Was it everything that Clara, in all her sweaty adolescent invention, had imagined?
Well, 'dealing' with Ryan turned out to consist of three major pastimes (in order of importance):
admiring Ryan's scooter, admiring Ryan's records, admiring Ryan. But though other girls might have balked at dates that took place in Ryan's garage and consisted entirely of watching him pore over the engine of a scooter, eulogizing its intricacies and complexities, to Clara there was nothing more thrilling. She learnt quickly that Ryan was a man of painfully few words and that the rare conversations they had would only ever concern Ryan: his hopes, his fears (all scooter-related) and his peculiar belief that he and his scooter would not live long. For some reason, Ryan was convinced of the ageing fifties motto "Live fast, die young', and, though his scooter didn't do more than 22 mph. downhill, he liked to warn Clara in grim tones not to get 'too involved', for he wouldn't be here long; he was 'going out' early and with a 'bang'. She imagined herself holding the bleeding Ryan in her arms, hearing him finally declare his undying love; she saw herself as Mod Widow, wearing black polo-necks for a year and demanding "Waterloo Sunset' be played at his funeral. Clara's inexplicable dedication to Ryan Topps knew no bounds. It transcended his badlooks, tedious personality and unsightly personal habits. Essentially, it transcended Ryan, for whatever Hortense claimed, Clara was a teenage girl like any other; the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity. Over the ensuing months Clara's mind changed, Clara's clothes changed, Clara's walk changed, Clara's soul changed. All over the world girls were calling this change Donny Osmond or Michael Jackson or the Bay City Rollers. Clara chose to call it Ryan Topps.
There were no dates, in the normal sense. No flowers or restaurants, movies or parties.
Occasionally, when more weed was required, Ryan would take her to visit a large squat in North London where an eighth came cheap and people too stoned to make out the features on your face acted like your best friends. Here, Ryan would ensconce himself in a hammock, and, after a few joints, progress from his usual monosyllabic to the entirely catatonic. Clara, who didn't smoke, sat at his feet, admired him, and tried to keep up with the general conversation around her. She had no tales to tell like the others, not like Merlin, like Clive, like Leo, Petronia, Wan-Si and the others. No anecdotes of LSD trips, of police brutality or marching on Trafalgar Square. But Clara made friends. A resourceful girl, she used what she had to amuse and terrify an assorted company of Hippies, Flakes, Freaks and Funky Folk: a different kind of extremity; tales of hellfire and damnation, of the devil's love of faeces, his passion for stripping skin, for red-hot-poke ring eyeballs and the flaying of genitals all the elaborate plans of Lucifer, that most exquisite of fallen angels, that were set for i January 1975.
Naturally, the thing called Ryan Topps began to push the End of the World further and further into the back-rooms of Clara's consciousness. So many other things were presenting themselves to her, so much new in life! If it were possible, she felt like one of the Anointed right now, right here in Lambeth. The more blessed she felt on earth, the more rarely she turned her thoughts towards heaven. In the end, it was the epic feat of long division that Clara simply couldn't figure. So many unsaved. Out of eight million Jehovah's Witnesses, only 144,000 men could join Christ in heaven.
The good women and good-enough men would gain paradise on earth not a bad booby prize all things considered but that still left a few million who failed to make the grade. Add that to the heathens; to the Jews, Catholics, Muslims; to the poor jungle men in the Amazon whom Clara had wept for as a child; so many unsaved. The Witnesses prided themselves on the absence of hell in their theology the punishment was torture, unimaginable torture on the final day, and then the grave was the grave. But to Clara, this seemed worse the thought of the Great Crowd, enjoying themselves in earthly paradise, while the tortured, mutilated skeletons of the lost lay just under the topsoil.
On the one side stood all the mammoth quantities of people on the globe, unacquainted with the teachings of the Watchtower (some with no access to a postbox), unable to contact the Lambeth Kingdom Hall and receive helpful reading material about the road to redemption. On the other side, Hortense, her hair all wrapped up in iron rollers, tossing and turning in her sheets, gleefully awaiting the rains of sulphur to pour down upon the sinners, particularly the woman at No. 53.
Hortense tried to explain: "Dem dat died wid out de knowing de Lord, will be resurrected and dem will have an udder chance." But to Clara, it was still an inequitable equation. Unbalanceable books.
Faith is hard to achieve, easy to lose. She became more and more reluctant to leave the impress of her knees in the red cushions in the Kingdom Hall. She would not wear sashes, carry banners or give out leaflets. She would not tell anyone about missing steps. She discovered dope, forgot the staircase and began taking the lift.
October 1974. A detention. Held back forty-five minutes after school (for claiming, in a music lesson, that Roger Daltrey was a greater musician than Joharm Sebastian Bach) and as a result, Clara missed her four o'clock meeting with Ryan on the corner of Leenan Street. It was freezing cold and getting dark by the time she got out; she ran through piles of putrefying autumn leaves, searched the length and breadth of Leenan, but there was no sign. It was with dread that she approached her own front door, offering up to God a multitude of silent contracts (I'll never have sex, III never smoke another joint, I'll never wear another skin above the knee) if only he could assure her that Ryan Topps had not rung her mother's doorbell looking for shelter from the wind.
"Clara! Come out of de cold."It was the voice Hortense put on when she had company an over-compensation of all the consonants the voice she used for pastors and white women.
Clara closed the front door behind her, and walked in a kind of terror through the living room, past the framed hologram of Jesus who wept (and then didn't), and into the kitchen.
"Dear Lord, she look like so meting de cat dragged in, hmm?""Mmm," said Ryan, who was happily shovelling a plate of ackee and salt fish into his mouth on the other side of the tiny kitchen table.
Clara stuttered, her buck teeth cutting shapes into her bottom lip. "What are you doing here?""Ha!" cried Hortense, almost triumphant. "You tink you can hide your friends from me for ever?
De bwoy was cold, I letim in, we been havin' a nice chat, haven't we young man?""Mmm, yes, Mrs. Bowden.""Well, don' look so shock. You'd tink I was gwan eatim up or so meting eh Ryan?" said Hortense, glowing in a manner Clara had never seen before.
"Yeah, right," smirked Ryan. And together, Ryan Topps and Clara's mother began to laugh.
Is there anything more likely to take the shine off an affair than when the lover strikes up a convivial relationship with the lo vee mother? As the nights got darker and shorter and it became harder to pick Ryan out of the crowd who milled outside the school gates each day at three thirty, a dejected Clara would make the long walk home only to find her lover once more in the kitchen, chatting happily with Hortense, devouring the Bowden household's cornucopia of goodies: ackee and salt fish beef jerky, chicken-rice-and-peas, ginger cake and coconut ices.
These conversations, lively as they sounded when Clara turned the key in the door, always fell silent as she approached the kitchen. Like children caught out, they would become sullen, then awkward, then Ryan would make his excuses and leave. There was also a look, she noticed, that they had begun to give her, a look of sympathy, of condescension; and not only that they began to comment on her clothing, which had become steadily more youthful, more colourful; and Ryan what was happening to Ryan? shed his polo-neck, avoided her in school, bought a tie.
Of course, like the mother of a drug addict or the neighbour of a serial killer, Clara was the last to know. She had once known everything about Ryan before Ryan himself knew it she had been a Ryan expert. Now she was reduced to overhearing the Irish girls assert that Clara Bowden and Ryan Topps were not dealing with each other definitively, definitely not dealing with each other oh no, not any more.
If Clara realized what was happening, she wouldn't allow herself to believe it. On the occasion she spotted Ryan at the kitchen table, surrounded by leaflets and Hortense hurriedly gathering them up and shoving them into her apron pocket Clara willed herself to forget it. Later that month, when Clara persuaded a doleful Ryan to go through the motions with her in the disabled toilet, she squinted so she couldn't see what she didn't want to see. But it was there, underneath his jumper, there as he leant back on the sink was the glint of silver, its gleam hardly visible in the dismal light it couldn't be, but it was the silver glint of a tiny silver cross.
It couldn't be, but it was. That is how people describe a miracle. Somehow the opposites of Hortense and Ryan had met at their logical extremes, their mutual predilection for the pain and death of others meeting like perspective points on some morbid horizon. Suddenly the saved and the unsaved had come a miraculous full circle. Hortense and Ryan were now trying to save her.
"Get on the bike."Clara had just stepped out of school into the dusk and it was Ryan, his scooter coming to a sharp halt at her feet.
"Claz, get on the bike.""Go ask my mudder if she wan' get on de bike!""Please," said Ryan, proffering the spare scooter helmet. "Simportant. Need to talk to you. Ain't much time left.""Why?" snapped Clara, rocking petulantly on her platform heels. "You goin' someplace?""You and me both," murmured Ryan. The right place, ope fully"No.""Please, Claz.""No.""Please. "Simportant. Life or death.""Man.. all right. But me nah wearin' dat ting' she passed back the helmet and got astride the scooter 'not mussin' up me hair."Ryan drove her across London and up to Hampstead Heath, the very top of Parliament Hill, where, looking down from that peak on to the sickly orange fluorescence of the city, carefully, tortuously, and in language that was not his own, he put forward his case. The bottom line of which was this: there was only a month until the end of the world.
"And the ring is, herself and myself, we're just '
"We!""Your mum your mum and myself mumbled Ryan, 'we're worried. "Bout you. There ain't that many wot will survive the last days. You been wiv a bad crowd, Claz '
"Man," said Clara, shaking her head and sucking her teeth, "I don' believe dis biznezz. Dem were your friends.""No, no, they ain't. Not no more. The weed the weed is evil. And all that lot Wan-Si, Petronia.""Dey my friends!""They ain't nice girls, Clara. They should be with their families, not dressing like they do and doing things with them men in that house. You yourself shouldn't be doin' that, neither. And dressing like, like, like '
"Like what?""Like a whore!" said Ryan, the word exploding from him like it was a relief to be rid of it.
"Like a loose woman!""Oh bwoy, I heard every ting now .. . take me home, man.""They're going to get theirs," said Ryan, nodding to himself, his arm stretched and gesturing over London from Chiswick to Archway. "There's still time for you. Who do you want to be with, Claz? Who d'ya want to be with? With the 144,000, in heaven, ruling with Christ? Or do you want to be one of the Great Crowd, living in earthly paradise, which is all right but.. . Or are you going to be one of them who get it in the neck, torture and death. Eh? I'm just separating the sheep from the goats, Claz, the sheep from the goats. That's Matthew. And I think you yourself are a sheep, in nit "Lemme tell you so meting said Clara, walking back over to the scooter and taking the back seat, "I'm a goat. I like being' a goat. I wanna be a goat. An' I'd rather be sizzling in de rains of sulphur wid my friends than sittin' in heaven, bored to tears, wid Darcus, my mudder and you!""Shouldn'ta said that, Claz," said Ryan solemnly, putting his helmet on. "I really wish you 'adn't said that. For your sake. He can hear us.""An' I'm tired of hearin' you. Take me home.""It's the truth! He can hear us!" he shouted, turning backwards, yelling above the exhaust-pipe noise as they revved up and scooted downhill. "He can see it all! He watches over us!""Watch over where you goin'," Clara yelled back, as they sent a cluster of Hasidic Jews running in all directions. "Watch de path!""Only the few that's wot it says only the few. They'll all get it that's what it says in Dyoot-er-ronomee they'll all get what's comin' and only the few '
Somewhere in the middle of Ryan Topps's enlightening biblical exegesis, his former false idol, the Vespa G S, cracked right into a 400-year-old oak tree. Nature triumphed over the presumptions of engineering. The tree survived; the bike died; Ryan was hurled one way; Clara the other.
The principles of Christianity and Sod's Law (also known as Murphy's Law) are the same:
Everything happens to me, for me. So if a man drops a piece of toast and it lands butter-side down, this unlucky event is interpreted as being proof of an essential truth about bad luck: that the toast fell as it did just to prove to you, Mr. Unlucky, that there is a defining force in the universe and it is bad luck. It's not random. It could never have fallen on the right side, so the argument goes, because that's Sod's Law. In short, Sod's Law happens to you to prove to you that there is Sod's Law. Yet, unlike gravity, it is a law that does not exist whatever happens: when the toast lands on the right side, Sod's Law mysteriously disappears. Likewise, when Clara fell, knocking the teeth out of the top of her mouth, while Ryan stood up without a scratch, Ryan knew it was because God had chosen Ryan as one of the saved and Clara as one of the unsaved. Not because one was wearing a helmet and the other wasn't. And had it happened the other way round, had gravity reclaimed Ryan's teeth and sent them rolling down Primrose Hill like tiny enamel snowballs, well .. . you can bet your life that God, in Ryan's mind, would have done a vanishing act.
As it was, this was the final sign Ryan needed. When New Year's Eve rolled around, he was there in the living room, sitting in the middle of a circle of candles with Hortense, ardently praying for Clara's soul while Darcus pissed into his tube and watched the Generation Game on BBC One.
Clara, meanwhile, had put on a pair of yellow flares and a red halter neck top and gone to a party.
She suggested its theme, helped to paint the banner and hang it from the window; she danced and smoked with the rest of them and felt herself, without undue modesty, to be quite the belle of the squat. But as midnight inevitably came and went without the horsemen of the apocalypse making an appearance, Clara surprised herself by falling into a melancholy. For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling sea-water to retrieve the salt something is gained but something is lost. Though her friends Merlin, Wan-Si, et al. clapped her on the back and congratulated her for exorcizing those fervid dreams of perdition and redemption, Clara quietly mourned the warmer touch she had waited for these nineteen years, the all-enveloping bear hug of the Saviour, the One who was Alpha and Omega, both the beginning and the end; the man who was meant to take her away from all this, from the listless reality of life in a ground-floor flat in Lambeth. What now for Clara? Ryan would find another fad; Darcus need only turn to the other channel; for Hortense another date would of course materialize, along with more leaflets, ever more faith. But Clara was not like Hortense. Yet a residue, left over from the evaporation of Clara's faith, remained. She still wished for a saviour. She still wished for a man to whisk her away, to choose her above others so that she might Walk in white with Him: for [she] was worthy. Revelation 3:4.
Perhaps it is not so inexplicable then, that when Clara Bowden met Archie Jones at the bottom of some stairs the next morning she saw more in him than simply a rather short, rather chubby middle-aged white man in a badly tailored suit. Clara saw Archie through the grey-green eyes of loss; her world had just disappeared, the faith she lived by had receded like a low tide, and Archie, quite by accident, had become the bloke in the joke: the last man on earth.