You want to get to the man, go through the woman. Eden seemed like ages ago (grainy Super-8 footage in ropy colour) but I hadn’t forgotten its lessons. Complacency’s never been my vice, and it certainly wasn’t that morning in Judea, but I felt, you know, optimistic.
But. Well.
Actually things got off to a good start, what with Pilate’s irritation at having to come out of the praetorium into the courtyard to meet the priests (Passover’s dictates for clean and unclean objects, food and places) exacerbated by narked Caiaphas’s response to the governor’s question about what the prisoner was accused of. ‘If he weren’t a malefactor, we wouldn’t have brought him to you, would we?’ I watched the furrows appearing in Pilate’s brow and practically rubbed my hands with glee. I think if they’d stayed outdoors I might have been in with a shout. But God was interfering. Goddammit God was interfering. I could see it in the governor’s occasional slight head-shakes (as if trying to clear a ringing from his ears) and fidgeting hands. The sun hammered the stones in the yard, and when Pilate looked up, briefly, the sky struck him like a cacophony.
Are you the King of the Jews?
You say it.
Not to mention Junior’s elliptical style. If he’d just said ‘you bet your skirt I am, Punchy’, the procurate could have dismissed him as just another Hebe nutter, but the tone was all wrong for that, suggesting at best fearlessness, at worst contempt. Don’t be insulted, I’m going. He doesn’t mean to be insolent. Don’t do anything hasty, man. Meanwhile the Sanhedrin’s bigwigs are chunnering and gabbling like a gang of speeding turkeys, and the sunlight’s playing havoc with its boomerangs and spears. Tell them it’s nothing to do with you. Tell them to crucify him themselves if he’s getting on their nerves so much.
Which would be illegal, as both Caiaphas and Pilate knew well enough.
‘It’s too fucking hot out here,’ to no one in particular. Then to the prisoner: ‘You. Come inside with me.’
It was time to call in reinforcements. I picked the crême de la crême from the fallen angelic host and gathered them over Jerusalem. It’s going to get ugly, I told them. I’m pretty sure He’s going to make use of the mob. I want you in there. Right in there, understand? I want you whispering so close you can taste their earwax – got it? At least three of you to every member of the crowd. Is that understood? Let’s go.
I did some work with Pilate in the praetorium. Really some of my best, warped though it was by the irony of its application. On any other day Sonny’s clipped ripostes and sheer non sequiturs would have exhausted his patience and had him signing the crucifixion chit with his mind elsewhere. As it was, he spent most of his time in the judgement hall vacillating between curious fraternity with this wastrel and a strangely detached conviction that his own destruction would follow if he failed to execute him. His hands and face grew hot. The lamps weren’t lit (what need amid the motefilled and Godspeaking shafts of light?) but his breathing was troubled by the stink of burning oil. Tonight he would get Claudia to mix him a draught. Thoughts rose and burst, emptily, like painless blisters. He had an overwhelming desire (courtesy of moi) to understand the riddles. My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight . . . But the language – kingdoms, servants, fighting – kept yanking him back to his own world, one in which he was Pontius Pilate, Roman Procurator of Judea, with a city swelled for the feast, a gossip-fattened crowd outside the palace and a phalanx of ecclesiastical thought-police all but breaking down his door. And still I worked, amazing him and the hall’s guards with his own tolerance. His face found hitherto unseen alignments, a grammar of expression his own mother wouldn’t have recognized, featuring improbable segues from anger to bliss, from peremptoriness to a patience that amounted almost to bonhomie. I find in him no fault at all. The words dropped like gentian petals. A sweating centurion exchanged a risky glance with a standard bearer. Are we dreaming, Marcus?
No we weren’t. I was horribly tired, I don’t mind telling you, and in more than my usual amount of excruciating pain. All the back-and-forthing was killing me. I know this is a rhetorical question, but have you any idea how difficult it is to tempt a human being away from his fate? You see the conceptual clash, yes? It was a strain for Pilate, too, you could see. He scratched his neck a lot. Started up violently – then sat down again after three or four paces. The very stones of the praetorium were warm with incredulity, as if blushing.
To this end I was born, and for this cause I came into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone that is of the truth hears my voice. I remember thinking, Yes, it’s all very well standing there with your slumped shoulders and risen veins talking about bearing witness to the truth, but what you’ve just said could have come quite as easily from me, mate, and no word of a lie would it be. Some of which sentiment plainly rubbed off on our beleaguered guv, who, getting quickly to his feet, spat out ‘What is truth?’, before turning on his sandaled heel and storming back out to the priests.
You know, it’s quite exhausting just talking about this. Come aside with me a moment. Trust me.
Paedophilia’s what I call a flexible gain investment. It yields profit in umpteen different ways. Most obviously there’s the immediate suffering of the children, followed by the shame, the guilt, the self-disgust, the not being believed, the hatred. Not least the now loudly ticking clock of their own desire, all those dream-rich hours and days before the early damage gestates and they start fiddling with youngsters themselves. Then there are the perpetrators. Again the shame, again the self-loathing, again the useless guilt. Useless to God, I mean. Guilt’s only useful to God as prologue to penitence and a change of ways. But based on guilt no paedophile’s ever going to change his ways. The desire for nippers is too strong. Guilt’s simply no match for it. It goes: desire-gratification-guilt-desire-gratification-guilt-desire-gratificationguilt and so on. It’s a mechanism, interrupted if they get caught by the cops and banged up by a judge, but otherwise unstoppable except via hard psychic and professional graft which neither the perp nor his world is remotely interested in investing in. Then there’s the suffering of the parents (in cases where it’s not actually the parents wots dunnit, I mean). The horror of being afraid of their own sullied child. The shame of having suspected and done nothing. The shame of having known and done nothing. But best of all, by far the best of all, is the opportunity it gives the selfrighteous mob.