The Book of Paul

two

Mr Samuels woke before dawn in order to supervise the coming of the day, as always. The morning star and others still pinpricked the purple of the night. All was hushed as he took to his small patio, a china cup in his hand to watch the brightening sky. It was already hot. Yet there he was in full pyjamas, sipping a cup of tea. Mr Samuels swore by tea and thought highly of pyjamas. They were brown with a pin-stripe in orange. The tea had a drop of milk and no sugar. The milk was always first into the cup.

A lesser man, I think, would have perhaps heaved a sigh, or let go a yawn, but not Mr Samuels. He simply stood, drank his tea and stared at the sky. The stars faded as the East asserted itself. Day would soon be upon us all.

Ablutions done, suit donned, Mr Samuels tapped on the door of the boy. He tapped again, and added ‘Morning.’ He tapped again and further added, ‘Time to get up.’ Something groaned from behind the door.

There was time for an egg to be properly boiled – so that is ten minutes with the water starting from cold – and for bread to be toasted, buttered and soldiered before the boy emerged. He sloughed into the kitchen, his feet splayed and his head hung. He did not favour pyjamas, despite the two fine sets he had been bought, and instead wore only a baggy pair of boxer shorts, under which an erection of sorts suggested itself. His blonde hair flopped into his face down to the level of his full lips, which were firmly set. No sign yet of hairs on his chest and, in truth, his armpits weren’t making much of a showing either; a fact not lost on Mr Samuels as the boy thrust his arms in the air, stretched and yawned before sitting in front of his egg.

At least the lesson about breakfast being the most important meal of the day had taken hold. The lesson about not eating with your mouth open had not. He mashed and masticated noisily, prodding the egg with a soldier and then crushing it mercilessly between his teeth. Mr Samuels sat opposite and watched the pulp of the bread gather in the boy’s mouth before being swallowed. On principle, Mr Samuels always ate before the boy got up, reasoning that the sight of him eating his muesli would not be one to arouse respect. He ate muesli and not eggs because of past trouble with haemorrhoids. It had been a long battle with those, but Mr Samuels felt he had now won it and was not keen to go back to the days of taking salted baths and shoving piles back up his anus with a carefully inserted index finger. Not to mention the creams that had to be applied. Nor to mention the straining over the toilet, blood splashing into the bowl and the shock of pain racking the whole body. No, those were days best not revisited. He did miss his bananas.

‘Stop staring at me,’ said the boy.

‘Please try to keep your mouth closed while you eat.’

‘How am I gonna get the food in then, huh?’

The boy had carefully deployed his ‘gonna’ and ‘huh’ in what I believe is called a dead cat strategy. Mr Samuels was on the brink of remonstrating, but thought better of it. Some battles need not be fought, especially not when the foe has chosen the field.

‘Where is the belt I bought you?’ asked Mr Samuels as the boy once again emerged from his room, dressed for school. His shorts were somewhere south of his hips.

The question was apparently not worthy of reply.

To the mind of Mr Samuels, the school uniform left a lot to be desired, namely: a proper shirt with a proper collar; a tie; a blazer. The blazer he could live without, reluctantly, given the heat, but a tie never hurt anyone. Except for that one occasion, of course. Nor did a long-sleeved, pressed white shirt, rather than this short-sleeved polo variety that aped at being a shirt and only succeeded in showing how far short of a real shirt it was. And here Mr Samuels was torn, for on the one hand this uniform was clearly lacking in many crucial aspects, but on the other it was as the school rules laid out. If the school stipulated that this was an acceptable uniform then it was an acceptable uniform, even though it quite clearly wasn’t.

‘Where you going?’ asked the boy at the door.

‘Walking with you to school, of course.’

‘God! I’m not three!’

‘Nevertheless.’

So they walked to school, the boy lagging behind all the way. Thankfully it was not far and the hazards were well known, cars parked on the pavements being the most frequent. When there were pavements, and there were often none. Packs of cats eyed them as they picked their way, Mr Samuels striding with quiet purpose and the boy slouching along, scuffing his feet as he went. Mr Samuels did not rise to this.

‘Goodbye,’ said Mr Samuels at the great, green gates, and the boy disappeared into the throng of children, adolescents and what looked like young adults. Some slightly older young adults were teachers, but one could only tell this by the lack of uniform. Ties were not to be seen.

Was there something wrong with Mr Samuels? On no less than three occasions – the mouth open, the shorts, and the scuffing feet – he had not risen to the bait but preferred to largely ignore the challenge. And they were a challenge, clearly. Yet Mr Samuels had let them slide. This was not a thing he liked to do as he was wary of where such a slide might end. Was he a little defeated that morning? A little weary of the daily struggles?

But there was nothing wrong with Mr Samuels’ professionalism. He was well aware as he left the school gates that he was being followed.

To the untrained eye and ear the first signs would have been too subtle. But the eyes and ears of Mr Samuels were trained to a very high degree. His ears were the first to cotton on. Through the roar of engines and the wailing of children and the loving goodbyes and the plaintive cries of sullen schoolboys, Mr Samuels noticed a set of footsteps was matching his own. How, one might wonder, could he filter everything out to focus on this one thing? But, there you go, he could. As he walked beneath the plain trees that shaded the street, he experimented a little to test his hypothesis. He slowed; the footsteps slowed. He sped up; the footsteps sped up. He stopped to let a large car mount the pavement to disgorge its contents and the footsteps stopped too. This was when his trained eye came into play. In the wing-mirror of the car he caught sight of a woman dressed in running gear and consulting her mobile telephone. Not an uncommon sight, but as he resumed his walk the mirror gave him a sufficient view of this woman resuming her walk too.

He admired her technique. She did not look up to check if he were moving. She merely moved too, looking at her mobile telephone all the while.

Thinking of it, I have underplayed Mr Samuels’ extraordinary skills, for was not the woman wearing running clothes? She was. It would follow, therefore, that she was wearing running shoes as well. It would have been odd indeed if she were to wear a pair of high heels, or heavy boots, when the rest of her wardrobe spoke of a fitness regime, or a marathon to be trained for, or a visit to the gymnasium. Now, if one accepts that running shoes were worn, then one must further accept that running shoes make less noise than high heels or heavy boots. They barely make a noise at all. Yet Mr Samuels could detect even this slightest sound, measure its speed and direction and estimate its distance.

Mr Samuels had another sense; one of which he never spoke. When he spoke of it to himself, not out loud of course, he called it his antennae, his radar, or his attunement. He never called it his sixth sense, or his gut feeling, or his gift. In fact, he barely spoke to himself of this thing at all, but he relied upon it nevertheless, sometimes without knowing he was doing so. It was a sense dependent on something shifting, almost imperceptibly, amongst the clatter and clamour of all else rushing about.

Now, being followed was not unusual for Mr Samuels. It came with the job. It is only reasonable that if your job entails, as it often did, following people then at some stage you too will be followed. You might even encourage the person you are following to follow you in turn. All grist to the mill. So he was not alarmed; merely a little curious. To assuage his curiosity, he detoured to the park that ranged behind the school.

The time has now come to choose a month. If we are going to the park, we need a month. Schools are open, so that rules out the end of June, all of July and August, and a fair bit of September. How do I know this? I have lived amongst the living, and that includes the younger varieties, long enough to pick up things, as if by osmosis. Perhaps Mr Samuels’ other sense was a form of osmosis too? It’s worth a thought.

Anyway, given the state of the schools, it shall be late September.

Ah, the season of dust and dried grasses; of scentless air, of grit at the back of the mouth, of ever-weeping eyes.

The park had long since given up as a park, for the year, or until the weather cooled, which ever came first, and there was no knowing. Shoes ploughed through thick mounds of dust with each step; Mr Samuels in his brogues, his follower in her gym shows. Clouds of dust around their ankles, billowing and falling.

Oddly, Mr Samuels chose to make his stand not in the shade of the trees, but beside a defunct pond, of the man-made variety. It had been drained, and the fountains at its centre were just metal stumps. Oddly, but reasonably. If he had taken to the trees a tiresome hide and seek might have ensued. No doubt the shade would have been welcome and staved off sweating for a while, but the added effort of any now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t nonsense would have only accelerated waves of perspiration. Mr Samuels is not immune to sweating. No one is immune to sweating, but our sweating is a sweating of such severity that it is best to be avoided. Anyway, Mr Samuels was making a stand, not trying to gain an advantage, so the clearing about the pond leant itself. He took himself off to the further side, turned about and had a clear view of his pursuer in her act of pursuing.

The woman took up her own position beside the pond, opposite Mr Samuels, and pushed her sunglasses onto the top of her head. She too was taking a stand. So, there she stood, looking at Mr Samuels, and there Mr Samuels stood looking at the woman. If it were possible, the air became more heavy and more still.

The air didn’t do anything. It didn’t care.

But for these two, the park was empty. Too early or too late, no matter.

The woman. Young, thought Mr Samuels. But what Mr Samuels considered young might not be young at all. Younger than Mr Samuels, certainly, although he had always looked older than his years so was younger than himself, as it were. Older than his years throughout the years, that was Mr Samuels. Had he sown his oats in wild abandon in this teens and twenties? Imbibing and snorting and popping and f*****g? Rolling out of strange beds in the late morning, little knowing where he was or who he was with? Little knowing who he was, if it comes to that. Staggering from one hangover to another, aiming for that sweet spot – enough drink consumed to overcome the worst, but not enough to slide back down again – but never hitting it? Taking his breakfast straight off of the mirror?

Young, thought Mr Samuels, but not so young as all that. He calculated 37. His calculation was based on the following:

The woman had long red hair, tied back but dangling free here and there. The hair was very red, so it was most likely dyed, to cover up an odd unwanted root, or to just give an impression of lustre.

The woman had applied make-up with care, but with taste. A natural look had been sought, and been achieved. Her eye brows were her own and well maintained. The need for the make-up suggested the odd line or blemish, because there is no look so natural as the natural look itself.

The woman had a figure which spoke of years but also of maintenance. She was slim, without being emaciated; thin in the hips, slight of bosom, long of leg.

In truth, the figure of the woman made him hesitate as to an age, but he reasoned thus: she exercises on a regular basis and has not borne children. He even let himself intuit a woman devoted to her vocation. The exercise and the childlessness allowed Mr Samuels to increase the age rather more than her figure seemed to suggest, but this brought it more in line with the lessons of the hair and face.

Of course, this was provisional, for was she not quite possibly in disguise? Disguise was not something Mr Samuels indulged in, but he recognised it as having its proper place in the resources of his profession. So, the hair could be a wig, the bosom could have been strapped and a strict corset donned. But, on the whole, he thought not.

She eyed him too, from across the empty pond.

It was she who made the first move. She raised her telephone to her face and aimed it at Mr Samuels. Having done this a second, she lowered the telephone, looked at it, looked at him, smiled, waved, turned on her heel and exited the arena.

Well! What it was one to make of that?