I put the cigarette back between his lips. He drew on it, then spoke with it still clenched between his lips. ‘That’s what the Big Nose George Parrotts will do to you given half the chance. I call them the heads-on-sticks guys. You’re fighting the same battle against them as . . . I . . . am.’
The hesitation in his voice lasted no longer than the beat of a gnat’s wing, a glint slipped across the waters of his eyes. I understood. I knew what was coming, but by the time the understanding had taken shape, four strong, hard hands emerging from the cuffs of combat jackets appeared and grabbed my arms. I had seen these hands before and I flinched as I recalled the slam into the hard basement wall. But it never came.
‘I’m sorry, Peeper, I really am.’
‘Don’t be, I should have known you’d arrange to have me followed.’
‘They were here before me. Once you turned off just before Ponterwyd it was pretty obvious where you were heading.’ One of the soldiers cut through the gaffer tape that bound Sauerkopp. He walked over to me, massaging the circulation back into his wrists.
‘So why the pantomime?’ I asked.
‘I needed to ask you for something.’ He reached into my pocket and took out the gun. ‘This.’ He smiled again and told them to let me go.
I drove back to town. The downpour continued unabated. On the passenger seat the wedding cake lay forlorn; the wasps were asleep amid the rubble of crumbs, or maybe they were dead, chilled by the dropping temperatures. The roads became greasy, wet ribbons and I passed a man with a broken-down car on the Lovesgrove straight. The bonnet was raised and he was standing bent over looking at the engine. I pulled up and reached over to wind down the passenger window. The man walked over and peered in. We both gasped in shock. It was Herod Jenkins. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. We stared at each other, open-mouthed, gripped by the same paralysis. Eventually the bubble burst.
‘You,’ he said.
‘Mr Jenkins.’
We both paused again in bafflement.
‘Lovely weather for ducks,’ he said.
‘Let me give you a lift to the garage.’
‘I couldn’t possibly trouble you.’
‘It’s no trouble, Mr Jenkins. I’m going that way anyway. Can’t leave you standing in the rain.’
He was torn. In one way accepting help from a boy he had so often reviled as a milksop was a blow to his pride, that pride whose fierce fire burns in the breast of every school games teacher. But the alternative was an afternoon of misery. I moved the cake to the shelf beneath the windscreen and brushed the wasps onto the floor. He climbed in.
‘You strap yourself in, Mr Jenkins, can’t have you falling out.’ I released the clutch and pulled out onto the main road.
‘It’s very kind of you, Knight. I’m obliged to you.’
‘Don’t be silly. You keeping well?’
‘Can’t complain. How about yourself?’ He looked at me and frowned. ‘Hope you don’t mind me saying, but you look a bit unwell.’
I shook my head. I was fine. Or was I? The truth was, I was becoming aware of a strange malaise rising through my body. ‘I’m fine, just tired, that’s all.’
He wouldn’t be put off. ‘Bit green about the gills if you ask me. You should take better care of yourself.’
‘How’s the mayoral campaign going?’
‘Not too well, to tell the truth. A lot of people have complained about the suitability of my candidacy. They say I am a brutal man, a man with no conscience and no heart. Can you believe it?’
‘Politics is a dirty business, Mr Jenkins. People make all sorts of things up.’ My conscience grew two heads and battled in my heart. This was the man who had sent Marty to his death on that cross-country run during the blizzard. Should I be giving him a lift? Should I be offering him succour? And yet . . . surely in the raging storm all men are brothers?
‘They say I set out to humiliate and oppress my boys on the games field. They say that their suffering gave me pleasure, but it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t.’
‘You mustn’t let it get you down.’
‘They don’t understand how it was. You were there, Knight. You know.’
‘Yes, but I have to admit, don’t take this the wrong way, it did sometimes seem like . . . like you were . . . were enjoying our suffering.’
He turned in the seat to face me. He was not a tall man, but he was large-framed with the repressed power and top-heavy musculature of a gorilla. He was too big for my Wolseley Hornet, and squirmed in the confined space in a way that reminded me of those terrible images from the animal-cruelty charities of black bears in cages in China, daily harvested for their gall-bladder bile. He spread his hands out in supplication, and his big, prognathous head tilted to the side in a way that I had seen once before, somewhere long ago. I struggled to recall the provenance of the image that rose up to the surface of my mind. And suddenly I knew: it was that moment when King Kong, clinging to the top of the Empire State Building with one arm and holding Fay Wray gently in his meaty paw, brings her close to his eyes to peer in wonder. The moment when the blessed sacrament of love enters the dark heart of the beast. Herod’s eyes shone in the gloom like two lanterns in the night. Across his wide face, confusion and uncertainty mingled with the ache to explain, to be redeemed. ‘Don’t you see, it had to be that way. You thought I was cruel and monstrous, but life is cruel and monstrous. Because of this, I had to hurt you in order to save you. I had to forgo your love in order that I might deserve it. In order to save you from the beast in man’s heart, I had to give you the beast’s cunning. Don’t you see?’ He shifted again and the safety belt across his huge shoulder became taut like a ship’s hawser. ‘I’ve been there, been to the nethermost cistern of man’s heart. I’ve seen the hobgoblins that live there. Do you know what I did before I became a games teacher? I was in charge of the chain gang out at the Cardiganshire State Penitentiary at Tregaron. You remember that, don’t you? When you were a kid, your dad must have taken you out there to see them, digging the peat in their hooped pyjamas. I saw the worst that man could do to his neighbour out there. I wish I could forget what I witnessed, but the horror of it will remain with me always. It was for that reason that I had to abjure the downy pillow, the grace and frivolity of the damasked path through the woods. Don’t you see? I was saving you from the chain gang.’
‘But what about the boys who died on that games field?’
‘We must try and see death not as the end but as the beginning of the next journey, the true journey, the one home to our Father.’
‘Is it right that they should start that journey so young?’
‘No, it’s not right. I had no control over these things. I did my best, but often my best wasn’t enough. For that I seek no forgiveness; the sin was mine alone.’
I struggled with the alien phenomenon – my games teacher suing for exculpation. ‘I don’t know, it seems too easy to say that now.’
‘Your problem, Knight, if you don’t mind me saying, is that you cling too stubbornly to your own individuality. It’s the principium individuationis, isn’t it?’
I blinked in surprise. ‘Is it?’
‘I’ve been going to night school, you see. I didn’t understand these things before, I saw through a glass darkly, but now I see more clearly. This life in which we are separated from each other through the process of individuation is an illusion; the separation is the cause of all our distress and we are so blind we mistake it for truth; after death we dissolve back into the continuum and become one, and this is supposed to be the real mode of being. This is Nirvana.’