‘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, ’opefully.’
‘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 fing 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 everyting 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, innit?’
‘Lemme tell you someting,’ said Clara, walking back over to the scooter and taking the back seat, ‘I’m a goat. I like bein’ 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 GS, 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 halterneck 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.
3 Two Families
It is better to marry than to burn, says Corinthians I, chapter seven, verse nine.
Good advice. Of course, Corinthians also informs us that we should not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain – so, go figure.
By February 1975, Clara had deserted the church and all its biblical literalism for Archibald Jones, but she was not yet the kind of carefree atheist who could laugh near altars or entirely dismiss the teachings of St Paul. The second dictum wasn’t a problem – having no ox, she was excluded by proxy. But the first was giving her sleepless nights. Was it better to marry? Even if the man was a heathen? There was no way of knowing: she was living without props now, sans safety net. More worrying than God was her mother. Hortense was fiercely opposed to the affair, on grounds of colour rather than of age, and on hearing of it had promptly ostracized her daughter one morning on the doorstep.