The Book of Paul

three

three

Yet there must be people, it seems. You can’t get by without them. People have tried, I know. Where are they now, those people who took themselves off to the desert or shoved themselves up a column to be far from man and closer to God?

There’s a little bit of knowledge I have retained over the years; the fact that there were such people. I have no idea why I have hung on to it, and even less of an idea as to whether holding on to it has done me any good. Still less what it says about me. If anything. I have also retained the fact that all the continents were once one big land mass. Everything jammed together, surrounded by a broiling sea. I have also retained the fact that necessary is one C and two Ss, and the reason for that is this; I can still hear a little rhyme in my head – en-e-cee-e-sus-sus-ary. I don’t know where this little gobbet of inner-noise comes from, but, there you go, I’ve always had it, rattling away in the mansions of the mind until it is called upon and I hack it up. Like an owl gobs up a ball of fur and bones.

They come with the house. That is how I reason it out, for they didn’t come with me. I became aware of them only after Cass had left. She must have dealt with them beforehand, saying, perhaps: ‘Let the poor chap alone; let him get used to things first’. Ever the optimist. So maybe they came with her rather than the house, but when she left they remained so the house was the prime mover in all of this after all. Otherwise, why didn’t they shuffle off with her when she bolted for pastures new?

But just to be clear – although god knows why – the people are not of the house but somehow attached to it. That could be clearer, but never mind. The things of the house demand there be people. Yes, it is the things that demand the people, and not the people the things. That seems to be the way of it. I have no need of the people, and yet there they are from time to time. So it is the things that are to blame.

‘My friend!’ said the man I had never seen before. He threw open his arms as if I was meant to rush into his embrace. I didn’t, for the obvious reason. But also for the less obvious reason that by throwing open his arms the man had revealed large sweat stains in his pits.

This was in the kitchen. I made sure the island-counter was between the two of us. The kitchen seemed a lot smaller with him in it.

‘There you are,’ which was undeniable. ‘I’ve been told all about you so don’t worry!’

I worried.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I am George. You’ll have heard of me.’

I hadn’t.

‘Mrs Johnson didn’t say anything?’

She hadn’t.

‘Never mind,’ he said, but it looked like he minded. His open face shrank into itself a little, just for a moment. When I say open, I mean it looked like it had been hit by a shovel. His nose sprawled across his face, and his mouth seemed far too big. I now realise why. The nose being flat to the face, or thereabouts, meant that he had to breathe through the mouth, so the mouth was perpetually open, and never more so than when at rest. When not talking, he exuded snuffling sounds. Breathing, I assume.

Let’s get it over with. We’ve done the face we might as well do the rest. His hair was undecided. Where there was any, it was thick and black. Bits of it were then scraped over the top of his head. In fact, the top of his head was the least hairy bit of him. His eyebrows were bushy and his ears sprouted thick tufts. From the top of this open shirt, a verge of dark material swarmed and glistened with sweat. If I had seen his back, which I did not nor hope ever to see, it too would have been thickly matted in dank hair. In this climate too! I should have pitied him, but I didn’t. No doubt hair swathed his stomach, although at a stretch, for it was very large and hung over his belt. I assumed the belt; it couldn’t be seen.

His legs were short and bowed.

His feet were large and splayed.

Now all this is very miraculous. To have seen so much and remembered so much! Are my powers increasing? I mean those of observation and recall? Perhaps. But perhaps also George was of a slight build, to the point of being wispy, with luxurious blond hair swept back in dramatic fashion, with a pinched face, sharp nose, slight freckles and unsettlingly light blue eyes. Perhaps he had a dainty foot shod in patent leather.

It doesn’t matter. Strange man in kitchen calling me friend; that is what matters.

There was a silence for some time. There had been a silence on my part throughout, to be fair, so now this George man was joining in. He didn’t like it.

‘I am here to help,’ he said.

I said nothing.

‘With whatever needs to be done.’ His eyes cast about looking for things that needed to be done. Nothing that I could see. Yes, a small sign saying ‘fridge’ where the fridge was might have been a help, but if I was that bothered I could have done it myself.

‘Little things. Or big things.’ He demonstrated the meaning of his words by bringing his thumb and forefinger into the closest possible proximity before squinting at them, and then throwing his arms wide with such force that I feared the buttons of his shirt would burst. It was then I confirmed my suspicions about his stomach.

‘Outside,’ he gestured. ‘Or in.’

I took this to mean outside as far as the boundaries of the property, for outside is an awfully big thing to be responsible for if not. Similarly, I took in to mean between the walls of the house and definitely not any spurious depths, his or mine.

‘The pool,’ he said. ‘You’ll need a man to do the pool.’

I had no idea that a pool came with a man attached.

‘My cousin, he’s a great pool man, I can have a word and it will all be sorted.’

‘Leave it.’

‘Leave the pool?’

‘Yes.’

I could see he was struggling with the concept of leave.

‘Leave it to nature.’

Nature was here the conceptual difficulty.

‘You mean, do nothing to it? With it?’

‘Yes.’

‘But it will stink!’

‘Then it will stink.’

He shook his head and sighed. Poor man. Perhaps he had promised his cousin a nice little earner, or perhaps the thought of a pool going to wrack and ruin disturbed him.

‘You’ll need a gardener,’ he said. ‘My cousin, he’s a good man, he could come and do the garden.’

Now a garden and a pool are two completely different kettle of fish, in my mind. I’d never had a pool and have a general dread of water, whereas I have had a little patch of dirt that I called a garden in the past and I had been quite fond of it, if I remember correctly. The garden that surrounded the house was very far from being a patch of dirt. There were fruit trees of various sorts, lots of palms and succulents and whatnot, I am not a horticulturalist. But most of all, there was a lot of grass and I knew, given time, the once pristine lawn would become more of a mess of undergrowth and weeds and invasive species of all kinds. I pondered. The invasive species, so called, would no doubt just have been indigenous species that weren’t wanted; the ugly ones, in effect, or the troublesome ones. There was good reason, I had to concede, for a man to come every now and then and do battle with all this. But was not I a man? Could not I do battle just as well? Obviously not as well as someone more practiced, but well enough when all said and done. When will that day come? The day when all is said and done? Each day means more to be said and more to be done; the more saying because there is more to do; the more doing in order just to say more. That doesn’t quite work. Saying and doing, doing and saying, it doesn’t matter which way around, they have some sort of connection that is beyond me at the moment.

‘I would like a goat, please,’ I said.

‘A goat?’

‘Yes. A goat.’

‘A goat goat?’

I was not aware there were any other kinds, but there you go.

‘For the garden,’ I said.

His already wide face widened still further.

‘To eat the grass. The weeds.’ I was growing expansive.

He sighed again and shifted his weight from side to side. He even stuck out his tongue a little, the better to concentrate.

‘So, my friend, you do not want a gardener, but you want a goat?’

I nodded. He nodded back. Then puffed out his cheeks, exhaled and let his lips ripple.

‘A goat! Well, well!’ He got a large mobile telephone from the back pocket of his trousers – at least I hope it was from there – and consulted it at length, dabbing and swiping at it from time to time. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Men I can do, but goats! Ha ha ha!’

It wasn’t an honest laugh, but it was passable.

He kept repeating the word goat over and over again as he stared at his phone, rubbing the back of his neck with his free hand when the need arose, flicking at the phone screen with his thumb. Lord knows what he was doing but it seemed to be a necessary process – nailed it once again – so I let him get on with it.

It may have been a necessary process, but it was not a successful one. He gave up after some little time and merely said that he would see what he could do.

‘Goat! That’s a new one! Ha ha ha!’ He threw up his hands the better to laugh. ‘So, that’s me with a job to do, isn’t it!’

It was. I hadn’t meant to give him a job at all, but he had said he was there to help and so I had asked him to help. It might not have been the sort of help he had wanted to give, but it was the sort of help I needed.

I thought that our interview was at an end, but I was wrong. He now introduced a silence. Yes, the silence definitely came from him and as we stood there in the kitchen, I eventually understood that the silence was designed to get me to recant, to say ‘My dear chap! The goat! Ha ha ha! What was I thinking? No, no, of course I must have a gardener and your cousin sounds like the very man’ – but I held my peace and let the silence gather until it proved too much for him.

‘Well,’ he threw up his hands again, ‘I’d best be off! Gotta get a goat!’

He was on the verge of the exiting the room, when he stopped, turned and said, ‘Of course, Marina will be in on Friday as usual for the usual.’ And he was gone.

Of all this, only the word Friday made any immediate sense. It would have made more sense if I had then known what day of the week it actually was, but, there you go, I did not.