Little Fingers! Read online

  The last time, I was in a room talking to some people, and I was commenting on how seldom people notice the supremely obvious. I turned to Richard and said “You know, Richard, you could be sitting next to somebody most of the evening, and you would never notice that they were bald. Somebody would comment that your neighbour was bald, and you would say, oh, I never noticed.” There was a slight hush around me, and Richard looked rather embarrassed, and it was only then that I realised that the person sitting next to him was indeed bald. He took it in good part, but I spent the next three weeks intensively wishing my faux pas back inside my head.

  I have decided to begin with the car crash.

  I acknowledge that the crash is not the start of the story, but it is why I decided to live in Hanburgh. The real start of the story is my mother, who was brought up there. However I would never had bothered to go there if it weren't for the accident.

  I was coming down a mountain in the Alps, south of Grenoble. It was a stunning mountainscape morning. I had been driving for hours, only stopping to fill up with petrol, to drink coffee and to buy baguette sandwiches (gruyère, salami and ham in that open sweetened bread, as you ask). Actually, I did also sleep for about an hour in the car as I was feeling exhausted. You may know that feeling too, when you are so tired at the wheel that you begin to miss moments of your life, and you think “Was I asleep?” On a motorway there is a reasonable chance that the rat-a-ta-ta of the studs protecting the hard shoulder may protect you. On a mountainside you are unlikely to be so fortunate.

  As I was saying, I was driving this old left hand drive Mercedes 250 over the mountain. It was 22 years old, and I had not had it checked over. It had been pitch dark when I woke up, and then the skies were lightening, and finally it was like the most beautiful dawn I have ever seen, in late November, the fresh air layered over the open meadows surrounding me. Heaven beckoned me. The sun came up, and I put on my sunglasses.

  I started to descend the mountains, breaking carefully on each turn because I was not used to driving up there. I was wondering whether I could fill up with petrol shortly. The gauge had gone on the car, and I feared I might be approaching empty. I had a spare 5 litres of petrol in the boot, but a Mercedes 250 is a big car and chokes through the fuel, especially with an out-of-condition engine.

  Cars occasionally crossed me from the other direction, their occupants feeling their way around the bends as much as I was. We were none of us going fast.

  Then, round one bend, there were no more brakes. There was no warning. I pushed my foot down on the brake peddle and it went flat to the floor. No pressure; no resistance.

  This is a problem in any car, but an especial problem in a Mercedes 250 as there is no handbrake as such, only a fourth pedal that ratchets on the parking brake. The trouble is that this is one of the few makes of car to be fitted with such a system, so applying it in an emergency is not second nature. I eventually remembered it when I found myself in mid air sailing over the bend and down about 200 feet into a village below, when of course it is no longer of any great benefit.

  It was at that moment that I experienced peace. Gliding through the air, silence, calm, the sun bouncing off the bonnet, the village clear below me, beautiful, chalets with their long swept roofs, a spired church with a cross. It did not feel that there was a fearsome distance between the car I was sitting in and the village. I saw everything arching very slowly. I let go of the steering wheel. In mid air it is of no more use than the handbrake. I looked around. I was probably going to die. Maybe I would live. I did not anticipate being hurt, perhaps being a quadriplegic for the rest of my life. I just thought that there was a straight choice - and not my choice - between living and dying.

  I was in a coma for three months after that. Sometimes such decisions take time.

  * * *

  Chapter 2

  After the accident, and back on the streets, so to speak, everything was shocking. I was numbed. I could not stand up without feeling faint. I was continuously anxious and afraid.

  In the hospital, I had been protected. I had been given six weeks of psychiatric help and psychological coaching by leading experts in their field (after all, I was something of an experiment). I felt really confident about returning to the world, impatient.

  Then, released out into that world, all of my expectations were turned upside down. It was like viewing a hotel from the kitchens and backstairs when you are used to being a guest. My automatic reactions were of no value. Worse, they were dangerous. They would lead me into exactly the wrong direction. I was repeatedly battered over the head with the difference from my previous life. I was running down a red carpet that someone was pulling out from under me, and I was barely keeping my balance.

  During the first few weeks, I would discover people staring at me.

  However, within three months, I had acclimatised.

  I went back to work in the City. That could have taken some explaining. I imagined trying to explain it, and I found that I couldn't. I foresaw the complete lack of comprehension, and to be honest avoidance, in the eyes of the people I would try to tell that the old me had died, and that the new me had come back all the hungrier after my near-death experience, and I knew that any explanation would just take up too many sentences for anyone to listen to, and demand too much attention and courage, and that if they did listen and react, it would be for all the wrong reasons. I would be labelled a freak, never to work again. So, after fifteen seconds of rehearsal, I stopped and resolved not to restart.

  I let Mark Findlay in on the secret, and he gave me a second chance. He also surreptitiously cleared up on the old me.

  I did well. Exceptionally well. Better than before in fact, so Mark did not lose out. Far from it, he made a killing. And he had a secret. Mark loves secrets.

  The strangest experiences I had during those first few months took place in City bars. They were recurring nightmares. This is a scene (only the name of the man changes)………..

  I am sitting opposite a considerably older man. He is not attractive. He has just slipped his wedding ring into his pocket.

  He asks me why money is such a terrible burden.

  “You may not believe this, Julia, but having too much money is a curse. I feel cursed. It would be so much easier to be poor”.

  That's funny, I reflect. I can bring to mind one hell of a lot of people who believe that having a great deal more money would answer all of their problems instantaneously. I should bring these guys together for a spot of match-making, and pocket the commission.

  It wouldn't work. While old floppy jaws would be only too delighted to give away his money, it can only be to someone who already has lots of money and is trying to get rid of it himself. Those who do not have all the money they can dream of simply do not deserve it. Those who are not already trying to give it away lack a moral perspective, and so don't deserve it either. So he is lumbered with it, which is of course what he wants to be, plus inside my knickers.

  The other development I had to come to terms with during that period was a newly acquired gift for unsolicited telepathy. I do not know where it came from, but it turned up with a flourish, and it stayed. However much a burden having too much money is, being on the wrong end of unsolicited telepathy is much worse, I promise you.

  Thoughts come from everywhere constantly. Not only thoughts - visions.

  The first time it happened, there was suddenly this enormous great Kerblamm! I leapt four foot in the air, and screamed.

  Everyone in the bar turned round on me and asked each other what was going on. I didn't have a clue. All I had was Kerblamm!, a blinding flash and a roaring monster in my ear. And such fear! Not only my fear, but someone else's fear underneath it.

  I searched all the faces around me trying to work out where the sound came from. Everyone was looking at me. There were no clues. I only saw what I saw, a huge explosion that someone else had witnessed, God knows where.

  And what I am picking up from this man opposite i
s that he would like to see all the girls in the bar naked, at least all the pretty ones. The uglier, fatter ones get to stay as they are. Men spend a lot of time thinking about sex. It is almost constant. I have now honed my technique, and I can track down to the square metre who is thinking what, but it doesn't matter because all men are obsessed by sex. The fantasies are interchangeable.

  I suppose that any attractive girl guesses that men want to peer down her front and slide their hands up her dress, but to know it absolutely and relentlessly is something else. It is like being dowsed in a carwash of lustful speculation. It is not a light drizzle to be quietly endured. It is a raging torrent to force you into the doorway and beg for a passing of the cloudburst. Imagine being caught in a downpour forever.

  I'm sorry if I am frustrating you, Inspector. I am just letting you know how it is. It is boring. I want other thoughts. I want stimulation. And all I ever get are the same thoughts in different voices.

  Well, the man opposite me has worked up the courage to ask me out for a meal. Is it true that in America, if you accept the third date, it is like the third match, you're skewered? No third date for him then, nor even a second.

  “Sorry, David. I must go back to do my hair. I have to work tomorrow, and I am seeing Suzie in the evening.”

  So many non-sequiturs in one statement.

  * * *

  The air is cool outside. It gets me away from all these fetid thoughts.

  The truth is that I am turning cynical from everything I experience, and I am becoming excoriated - I am losing my heart.

  I have noticed it in nurses and policemen, such as yourself. You see so much bloodshed, so many people at their worst, so many injustices, so many cruelties, so much stupidity.

  In the end you give up caring. You are employed for a special responsibility that you undertook because these things really mattered to you, and you become gradually overwhelmed by it.

  You have done better than us, me anyway. You have cared in the first place. You answered to your vocation. Sorry, Inspector, you have lost. I can see it in your eyes as we talk, in your whole demeanour. You are no longer trying to save the world. You are trying to solve a case for pride and professionalism's sake.

  With my now heightened understanding of the world, born of privileged glimpses, I am in danger of becoming lost too. That is perhaps what we recognise in each other. We are the damned as we sit at our table talking.

  I did not volunteer for this. I did not approach any humanitarian employer with a bleeding heart anxious to shed my blood. I had insight thrust upon me virtue of one God Almighty bang to the head, and who is to say that it was not He who arranged it. I must have been a prime target, the way I was living my life at the time. Maybe he decided to make me privy to what was really happening in the world, to see where I would jump. Would I turn my head away, or would I address the real world?

  I cannot turn my head away. Turning my head away does not tune down the voices, the fears, the joys, the passions, the anger, the affliction. Turning my head away does not allow me to escape for one second what I admit I should have been paying more attention to many years ago. If I had paid attention then, perhaps I would not be deafened now. Deafened without the hope of becoming deaf. All man's suffering is landing on my plate as a main course, with Death-by-Chocolate scratched form the menu.

  I did not choose this. Probably it was not chosen for me either. I survived, and this is my price, not for survival, but for surviving. It is the package I picked up on the way, and will never put down.

  It is all humanity screaming for something, and against something else.

  Imagine you were surrounded by a billion cabbies demanding justice and their fare. That is where I stand, God love me. And he probably does, not least for giving him the night off.

  * * *

  Every time I think of God I think of a man (because I am a traditionalist) who made the world by mistake.

  I have no specific “in” on this, so your guess is as good as mine, but that is what I imagine.

  God is a man who was absentmindedly rubbing some quarks together, and two quarks made a quawk. He examined it a bit, and He started rubbing the quawk, and it made a super-quawk. With a lot more rubbing He gained an atom, and from an atom eventually He got a molecule, and from a molecule a cell. Then everything was way out of His hands.

  So I doubt that He did it deliberately. I do not picture Him getting out His pens and His papers, muttering “Let's get to the drawing board”, and intentionally inventing life.

  Nearly all great inventions come about by accident. True, the inventors often had something in mind, but often not the same something as they got.

  I am not at all sure that God was after anything at all. He was just fidgeting.

  Then this thing grew bigger and bigger, like expanding foam except that it was intelligent expanding foam. It learnt things, and it adapted.

  God watched all this in awe. It gradually dawned on Him that one day this tumescent soup would be capable of rocket science and cloning.

  He got very excited. Well, you would be. Something He had created (His fidgeting was now reframed as a deliberate act) was taking on a life of its own. Think about it. Man has been desperate for centuries to create a new life form, and God had achieved it in the palm of His hand on an eternity morning while mulling over what to do that day.

  Show any child a patch of ground, and sprinkle seeds onto it. Take the child back to the same spot a few weeks later, and there are seeds growing. The child jumps up and down with glee.

  So God jumped up and down too. He was beside Himself with pleasure at His new creation. He spent all the hours that He had (so all the hours) watching it develop. And it got bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

  He lost himself in time while it grew, and it grew, and it grew.

  Then something alarming happened. It grew differently. It stepped out of the framework it had started with, and diversified. God bent down and watched, fascinated. This was even more exciting, this dysfunctional aberration. Then the aberrations got aberrational, and out of those by now multitudinous aberrations, life was formed. Imagine your first sight of life, man or God.

  At some point He must have asked himself “How do I control this?”, and then He thought “Let's put it off for a few centuries. Let's leave it be and see what happens.”

  And what happened happened quite quickly, at terrifying speed over millions of years, which wasn't long for God. And the more it happened the more He let it happen because it was so fascinating, so many ramifications and speculations. He tried to work out what was going on. He became a philosopher. He became a mathematician. He became a scientist.

  He gave things a little nudge from time to time, and provoked new outcomes. Was He interfering for the better or for the worse? For good or for evil? What was good and what was evil? It started out as what He liked and what He disliked; what He wanted to see happen and what He did not. After a while God, as a philosopher, examined His own motivations and decided that they were not enough. There had to be an objective basis for good and evil. So He travelled the path all later philosophers travelled down. It is difficult to entertain a thought that God has not pondered with great seriousness first. Except that He took a much wider view. He was concerned for the well-being of all creation, all materials, all formations, all substances, all life. Each element of His universe got a vote. He had some complex calculations to make. Did the benefit of 1,000,000 beings that lasted no more than a day outweigh the interests of 100 beings that lived 100 years? How does a life equate to a square metre of earth?

  To answer this He decided that He had to create an objective for His universe, a vision (He did not bother to tangle himself up in too many definitions, worrying Himself over the differences between visions, missions, goals and objectives. He took an empirical view - was it over here or over there that we should be striving to attain? He did not allocate random timelines, milestones and deadlines either. When He first heard people usin
g these terms with great earnestness, He roared with laughter because no corporate plan ever laid down that such and such an objective would be achieved in a million years, which was often about its realistic timescale. People laid down tiny timescales - next week, two weeks' time, next month, by the end of the year, in five years' time - then randomly hit them or missed them. However, He did notice that applying these timescales motivated people to do more than they otherwise would have done. Was that “more” for the better or for the worse? He could not answer that without His vision).

  And this is where He got stuck. The world was created without a vision. It had no original purpose. It was a fidget. God tried to superimpose a purpose. He considered that good was whatever was in the best interest of the continuation of the universe. You could ask why the universe should continue, that was a valid question, but unanswerable. It had to be considered a given. Now He got to the calculation. How do you calculate whether a tiny activity over here (say an ant's breath) benefits or not the continuation of the entire universe in some sustainable fertile form? When you think that there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on a beach, you begin to grapple with the enormity of the problem.

  So God gave up, and decided that He would just try to keep the volume down instead. There were all these cries coming up from everywhere in the universe - cries of happiness, of sadness, of distress, of exultation, of agony. They were making a huge eternal booming wave of a noise (as arrives in my head nowadays on a much smaller scale), and God decided that they were seriously interfering with His enjoyment of the universe.