Chapter Eight
Of course, it wasn’t Jesus. At least, Nathaniel didn’t think so. He couldn’t be sure; no one could. There was supposed to be a Second Coming, and in 1969 the teenage male fashion in England was to grow the hair long and adopt a serene disposition. The person waiting in Nathaniel’s bedroom had grown his hair long, but had not adopted a serene disposition. He had been born with one.
He had been nicknamed ‘Gentile Jesus’ because his cruel classmates had decided that he looked like Jesus. He didn’t; he looked like an illustration of Jesus in a missal his class had used in a Religious Education lesson. That illustration didn’t look like Jesus either. The Jesus in the picture was far too pale, too rosy-cheeked and altogether too European to be a convincing first-century AD Palestinian prophet. Mark Lyon had pointed out that Christopher Proctor couldn’t be Jesus because he wasn’t a Jew. Nigel Blockeel then coined the label ‘Gentile Jesus’ and thus Christopher Proctor ascended to divine notoriety.
The renaming had a profound influence on Proctor. Instead of begrudgingly accepting the tag, as you were expected to do with mockery-based nicknames, he sublimely acknowledged it. He accentuated his natural serenity, became notably compassionate and exercised a wholly unjustified perspective that implied he was privy to exclusive wisdom, only smidgens of which he was willing to impart. The followers of Gentile Jesus, colloquially known as ‘Proctor’s Apostles’, became convinced that G.J. himself had grown to wonder if indeed he was some kind of reincarnation.
How had he found his way into Nathaniel’s bedroom? Had he climbed the stairs, or had he been hoisted there and adoringly installed by gull-winged seraphim?
He had climbed the stairs.
There was mud on the threadbare carpet. It was still wet, and looked suspiciously sandy.
“Jesus!” proclaimed Nathaniel as he pushed the bedroom door further open to be presented with the alleged Prince of Peace sitting on his unmade bed and twiddling the propeller of a seventy-two times too small Airfix Focke-Wulf FW190 fighter.
“Blessings Nathaniel,” said Jesus without looking up.
“Didn’t know you were into planes.”
“I was considering the crosses on the wings.”
“What are you doing in my bedroom?”
Jesus gently positioned the miniature killing machine on his unpunctured palm and regarded it with melancholy. “Forgiving,” he said.
“The Luftwaffe or me?”
“Everyone.”
“I don’t need forgiving. I haven’t sinned enough.”
“Need is not necessary for donation to be made.”
Nathaniel did not have a close relationship with Gentile Jesus. They were in some classes together – Religious Education and General Studies – but they had attended different schools prior to college. Nathaniel had noted that Gentile Jesus wasn’t particularly observant of Catholic ritual, and surprisingly ignorant with respect to knowledge of the Bible. Mark Lyon took malicious delight in probing him on ancient Palestinian geography. He also asked him on an almost daily basis to turn two sardine sandwiches into five thousand. G.J. serenely declined and shouldered the jibes with silent tolerance.
“What do you want?” asked Nathaniel.
“Peace,” said Gentile Jesus.
“Why have you come to my house?”
“Nudge.”
“What about her?”
“She said you’d been to 13A.”
“What about it?”
“Take me there.”
“It’s just down the road. The number’s on the gate.”
“I want to grace the inside.”
“The door’s always open.”
“We should go together.”
“Why?”
“Four feet; two souls.”
That was the kind of remark on which Gentile Jesus built his reputation. Others of the same ilk included mind your own mind and eternity will not last for ever. Nathaniel was becoming convinced that the issuing of a nickname could reconstitute the biology of the brain. Here was a boy about to become the son of a moniker.
Gentile Jesus placed the model plane back on Nathaniel’s bedside table, not by landing it on its undercarriage, but by standing it on its tail and propping it against the paperback copy of Virgin Soldiers so that it became a cross not quite obscuring the well-smudged page ends.
“Nudge tells me that 13A is a hornets’ nest of iniquity.”
Nathaniel didn’t want to admit that he had been disappointed by the degree and scope of iniquity and frustrated by the blandness of the one intoxication he had sampled there. “It’s a far-out place,” he said doing his best to sound like a veteran dope-head.
“Not that far out,” said Gentile Jesus. “This is number 30. That is number 13A.”
Nathaniel responded with a G.J. style idiom. “Not far is far enough for he who has not been there.”
“Explain the flawed numeracy, would you?”
Nathaniel was flummoxed. “What?”
Gentile Jesus inclined his head so that his hair bracketed his Caucasian countenance with a bad moon crescent. "Why is 13A on the even side of the road?”.
“I don’t know,” said Nathaniel, deeply upset that he’d never considered the matter.
“We need to discover the reason,” said Gentile Jesus, and left the room.
Nathaniel was relieved but also worried. Gentile Jesus was descending into the hallway with speed, but Nathaniel wanted to make sure this boy, of whom he knew so little, was leaving, and the strange but terrible thought that Gentile Jesus might be a petty thief, suddenly seared into his mind. He’d put the Focke-Wulf back but had he taken anything else? An absurd thought surely? But as he watched from the Benson and Hedges smoke ingrained staircase landing, he saw to his dismay that G.J. did not leave by the front door but diverted into the living room.
Nathaniel leaped down three steps at a time, sarcastically confident that should he break his neck Gentile Jesus would fix it with a wink and a prayer, and when he swept into the living room, he did experience a minor miracle. For a mere, but heavenly, moment he saw his schoolmate with a halo.
It wasn’t a halo; it was the octagonal mirror over the sideboard reflecting back the face of the blessed sixth-former and slightly distorting it. The teenager looked bizarrely older, and more middle eastern. This was the effect of a shroud of domestic dust across the glass and the fact that the living room curtains were still partly drawn, probably because his stepmother’s hung over head could not tolerate too much light when she had ventured in to find her fags.
“No figs,” said Gentile Jesus, regarding the fruit ball.
Nathaniel had never seen a fresh fig in his life. The only ones he had encountered were rubbery bladders that had come in orange and yellow packets mysteriously uncovered under Christmas trees.
“What do you want in here?” asked Nathaniel, but Gentile Jesus did not respond. He had entered a kind of trance. He stood transfixed by his own reflection. Nathaniel wondered why. Was it that Christopher Proctor suddenly saw himself through the eyes of those that mocked him, and perceived for the first time just how persuasive that perception could be? Or was it a moment of celestial pupation? Was Nathaniel privileged to witness the next moment in the sanctifying of Gentile Jesus? At first the sixth form blazer and tie worked against this interpretation and then they seemed not to matter. The boy before him was renowned for copying Michael Fisher’s Religious Studies homework, but the man in the mirror could well be the author of the universe.
Or it could just be that Proctor was becoming more adept at enacting spiritual pantomimes? Nathaniel leant against the sofa and the veil there brought him back down to earth. This was not a middle eastern mountain; it was the room in which the antimacassars had not been washed since his birth mother had moved out.
“I thought you were going to 13A,” he said.
Gentile Jesus snapped out of his reverie and looked upon his school pal. “We are,” he said, and whirled about so swiftly that his blazer flared out like a djellaba in a sandstorm. He did not exit the house, but strode instead to the kitchen where Nathaniel’s stepmother sucked a filter-tipped fag back to a dull glow from the ash dome of terminal cremation.
“Mother of Nathaniel, bless you for the water,” he said.
“Did you turn it into wine?” said Nathaniel.
His stepmother squeezed the cornices of her eye sockets where they were buttressed by her nose. “Tasteless joke, Nathaniel” she said.
“Depends on the vintage,” said Nathaniel. His smug satisfaction was cut short as Gentile Jesus laid his hands on his stepmother’s brow.
“Woman, heal thyself,” he said.
Nathaniel’s stepmother’s expression became pinioned between that of a delighted Disney dog and an Ealing Comedy bitter headmistress.
“Follow me,” instructed G.J. and he turned, grasped Nathaniel’s sleeve and strode for the hallway with the assurance of a man who could walk on water.
“We’re going to 13A,” called the stepson. His stepmother had been shocked into health. Her demon headache had been cast out.
Nathaniel had no idea why he went along. Gentile Jesus no longer had him by the sleeve, but somehow, he had tethered his will. He was partially intrigued. The passive butt of so many classroom jibes was infused with confidence and purpose. Nathaniel had never seen him stride forth like this.
When they reached the gate of 13A, Gentile Jesus traced the house number with his finger as if he was inscribing it anew into the masonry. When he finished, he used the same finger to point at the properties on either side. “Look,” he said. “Numbers 12 and 16. This should be number 14.”
“Look across the road,” croaked a voice.
There was no one else in sight, but Nathaniel recognised the timbre.
“Ah,” said Gentile Jesus, who was obeying the instruction from the heavens. He pointed to the opposite pavement “Number 9, number 11, and number 12A.”
“Simple sarcasm,” said the aged African woman as she scrambled up from the overgrown flowerbed beyond the wall, where her behind had left a hemispherical crater.
“Mother Eartha!” declared Nathaniel, who hurried through the gate to help her to her feet.
“Who?” asked Gentile Jesus.
“Mother Eartha!” said Nathaniel. “Grand matriarch of the house.”
“Honoured,” said Gentile Jesus.
“You sure are,” said Mother Eartha wobbling erratically as Nathaniel guided her to the gate. She nodded at the house over the road. “Simple sarcasm. They went 12A, we went 13A.”
“Mother Eartha, this is Gentile Jesus.”
“Aha!” she said, tapping a permanently crooked forefinger on his always straight school tie. “Good Friday.”
“What about it?” asked Gentile Jesus.
“It’s your death day,” said Nathaniel.
“She’s not wrong,” said Jesus.
“Time will tell,” said Mother Eartha.
“What on earth were you doing sitting in the soil?” asked Nathaniel.
“Waiting for my driving lesson,” she said.
“Your driving lesson?”
“Yes,” said Mother Eartha, still struggling to establish her balance.
As if by command, Nobby Smyles silently slid his Austin saloon to a halt at the kerbside.
“You are going for a driving lesson?”
“I am.” Standing almost upright, she broke free and staggered through the gate. She turned back and gestured towards Nathaniel. “October eleventh,” she said.
It was only two weeks since she had first sentenced Nathaniel to his death day, and just three days since he had sat out the appointed doom date in Nudge McBudge’s garden shed. Slightly stunned by the poignancy of the old woman’s reiteration he reeled a little as he watched Nobby Smyles open the passenger door of his pride and joy. He grinned uneven teeth beneath bottle-bottom glasses. “First lesson,” he said. “Better take her somewhere safer.”
Nathaniel watched as the eighteen-year-old Nobby eased the surely eighty-year-old Mother Eartha into his car. Gentile Jesus took Nathaniel by the shoulders and twisted him in the direction of the door of 13A then leaped on his back and wrapped his thighs about his waist.
“Jesus!” said Nathaniel.
“To Jerusalem!” said his burden, jerking his ankles as if Nathaniel was his ass. At that moment the delectable Deborah opened the door and not wanting to appear feeble, Nathaniel went along with the boisterous display. He gripped his schoolmate’s thighs and staggered up the path.
“This is Deborah,” said Nathaniel unseating his rider.
Gentile Jesus knelt before the Pre-Raphaelite vision and kissed her feet between the thongs of her sandals. “You must be Gentile Jesus,” she said, as he dried his kisses with his hair.
“That’s what they call me,” he said.
“Nudge said you’d come. Go on in. The hookah is on.”
“Elevated,” said G.J. and surged towards the scent of cinnamon and thirteen other flavours.
“He’s not really Jesus,” said Nathaniel.
Deborah said, “And according to Nudge, neither is he Gentile.”
To be continued.
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