Look closely the next time a paedophile comes via the media to the attention of his peers, look closely at the faces of the outraged mob. That’s where you’ll find me. Those pixelated tabloid stills of good mums and dads transformed by righteousness into grimacing beasts, bellowing for blood, teaching their children to hate first and ask questions later (or better still never), buoyed and inflated by the gobbled-up lie that they’re doing God’s work. This is paedophilia’s quality yield: the indignant mob bloodthirsty with decency, obscenely relieved of the burden of thought and the yoke of argument. EVIL PERVERTS SHOULD BE TORTURED THEMSELVES. The bald leaders make me fizz with pride. You’ll have noticed, no doubt, how mum and dad’s first genuine expressions of grief and shock are telly-seduced and mob-lionized into studied outrage and the calculated stammers of disbelief. You’ll have noticed, I dare say, a dearly purchased and bitter confidence, now that their loss has excused them their own ethical failings and moral mediocrity. They’ve suffered the tragedy of poor Tommy and are thus absolved of further responsibilities. It is required of them now only that they exist as mascots for the mob. Please do look at the hangin’s-toogood-for-’em crowds in the tabloids – do look and tell me, if you can, that there’s any greater evil than the transformation of individuals into the lurching, self-congratulatory mob?
God taught me that. Yes, God Himself taught me the value of the mob a couple of thousand years ago in Jerusalem.
The boys told me afterwards they could barely believe what happened. What happened was nothing less than the mass scrambling of their myriad promptings in the ears of the crowd. (It wasn’t that big a crowd, by the way. Maybe a couple of hundred. Certainly no more than that. Still, the idea that there were fucking thousands of Jews of their own free will screaming for Jimmeny’s blood has come in awfully handy down the centuries, so I shouldn’t complain I suppose. Ill wind and all that.) What happened was that they told the crowd one thing; God made sure the crowd heard another. I mean ‘release Barabbas’ doesn’t sound anything like ‘release Jesus’, does it? Nor does ‘crucify him’ sound much like ‘let him go’. Not the sort of thing you’d accidentally mishear. At the time I thought the lads just weren’t pulling their weight. Pilate’s psyche was still wobbling like a blancmange, preoccupied – flabbergasted, as a matter of fact – by its own reluctance to do what it would normally do and seek the path of least political resistance. The sensation was both seductive and nauseating – and somewhere between the two he ordered the prisoner scourged.
I didn’t like it. Not the scourging per se, obviously, but the line of physical contact having been crossed. Wife batterers around the world will tell you: the primary effect of hitting your wife for the first time (assuming she doesn’t leave you immediately or cut your cock off while you’re asleep) is that it makes it much easier to hit her – harder – a second time. Then a third, then a fourth, and so on, until hitting’s nowhere near enough and you’ve got to start getting creative. Although he didn’t wield the whip himself, Pilate had now got his hands dirty with action; more importantly, he had seen that he could draw the man’s blood, and that it was red, just like any other man’s. It lowered the stakes. That wasn’t good for me. If he could scourge him as a man, he could crucify him as one – although it was after all somewhat diverting to see Arthur having such a terrible time of it, I admit. Then the message from Procula arrived, via a redrobed flunkey with a face in which all the dark little features seemed to huddle in the middle as if in fear of being shot. Have nothing to do with that just man. I’ve suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.
Well, it was a bit late for having nothing to do with him, since he was hanging from the post in bloody ribbons, thorn-crowned, dripping with sweat and glazed with the spit of Pilate’s soldiery. But not too late, perhaps (that’s right, go on!) to avoid nailing him to a cross on Calvary. Assuming my boys had by now swayed the crowd, I put it into the procurate’s seasick head (why did the floor keep pitching like that?) that he should take the prisoner out with him, let the morons see what a harmless and indeed pitiable spectacle the so-called ‘King of the Jews’ made against the backdrop of Imperial pomp and order; get him off, in other words, on the sympathy ticket. I didn’t know, I repeat, that God had already been at it among them. Neither, obviously, did Caiaphas, who’d sent cronies into the throng to buy shouts with coin. All redundant. God had released the force of the brain-dead righteous collective. They didn’t know why it seemed imperative to crucify the fellow – only that in some way he was Them and they were Us. It could have been the terraces of Old Trafford or the swaying Anfield Kop. I could see my angelic brethren among them like fragments of a smashed rainbow. Lack of results was plainly not due to lack of effort; they blazed and swarmed and whispered – and achieved precisely nothing. And this is where my earlier boasting about the importance of the right remark at the right moment comes back to haunt me, because Caiaphas leaned in close for the delivery of the one that clinched it: ‘Caesar’s subjects are united in their condemnation of this blasphemer and instigator against Rome. I’m sure the Emperor wouldn’t like to hear that his governor in Judea suffers such an individual to live and spread his lies. Rome, after all, gets to hear of everything sooner or later.’
Pilate closed and opened his eyes very slowly and wearily. Not as slowly or as wearily as Jesus, mind you, who was already having trouble staying on his feet.
‘This round to you then,’ I said, slipping alongside him. ‘Still, that business with the nails isn’t going to be a picnic, is it?’
You know, I’m going to miss you lot, when you’re gone. I’m going to miss our . . . our thing, our working relationship. I’m going to miss you listening to me, seeing sense, taking my advice. I’m going to miss your candour (the inner candour, I mean, the one that’s camouflaged by all that external duplicity, omission and pretence). I’m going to miss your self-love, your sense of humour, your crippling weakness for doing what makes you feel good. Makes you feel good initially, I mean. Soon, now, it’ll be gone, all gone. What’ll I do with myself when you’re gone?