After Gentile Jesus entered 13A Bohemia Way he never came out. Mother Eartha re-baptised him and he became a new woman. His father was well displeased, his mother confused, his sister unconvinced. Gentile Jesus, aka Christopher Proctor, had been a promising potential civil engineer, but the diversions of 13A become the only way. Bohemia Way was the only way. Love was all you needed, they said, and love was what they gave him; they said.
Nudge McBudge came and went, but Christopher Proctor always remained. He never went back to college because Jamaican Joel convinced him that there was nothing there that he needed to know. Joel was the kindly soul with a dental gap and a gold tooth, who made sharp nettle tea and super-strength spliffs. He loved everyone and was generous to a fault, provided the recipient was patient beyond caring. He had once carried Nathaniel home in a wheelbarrow. Joel and the former saviour of all Anno Domini good folk concurred that love was and all they needed to give. Love was what Christopher gave, badly at first, but Deborah tutored him well and frequently, which broke Nathaniel’s heart.
Nathaniel disappointingly discovered he could not manage more than three consecutive days inside 13A, and even that duration was a test of his infuriatingly conventional conscience. Once, in the throat-rasping heart of November 1969 he attempted a whole weekend, while his father was working away, and his stepmother was disinterested. He skipped lunch and decided to dodge double Biology on Friday afternoon. He hot hoofed up the lane hoping to find the pre-Raphaelite Deborah in a bed-hopping disposition. She wasn’t, at least not with him.
He found her in a snog, amid a hemp-fuelled fog, snuggled on Joel’s lap. Finding Deborah in such a sate of cosy abandon had driven Nathaniel scurrying back to double Biology with his deflated desire between only his legs. So badly was he bruised that he didn’t even hear the berating of Miss Stamen (not her real name) as she demanded a more convincing demonstration than “I lost track of time.”
As the weeks became Christmastide Nathaniel increasingly acquiesced to the realisation that he was not cut out to be Bohemian, instead he was carved into conventionality. Nudge was able to juggle the three-ringed circus of college, crazy nights and Celtic Catholicism, keeping college tutors, short-fused Irish parents and Father Fraudulent (not his real name or official parental status) at arm’s length whilst bending backwards to embrace Bohemia with both legs and an open mouth and mind. She was never unnerved by the hangovers, never deflected by maternal derision, and never sanctioned by barley-soaked priests or flax-favouring lecturers. She got away with it all. She overtook him in her school reports, in her sexual exploits and in peer approval. She matured, flowered and flourished. He lost marks, lost his way, lost all ambition and lost hope. The only thing he didn’t lose was his virginity.
Lord knows he tried, but all his hopes were highways cul-de-sacked by previous partners, or by polite condescension. People were kind, but not that kind. Meanwhile he really couldn’t handle heaps of alcohol or even the smallest piles of white powder. Everything he imbibed gave him a bad head, a twisted stomach or burning bowels; usually all three.
Then as the second week in December spat out the feast of St Nicholas he went to his College Student’s Union Christmas do, had three pints of watery lager, kissed eleven girls, two boys and an Afghan hound of indeterminate gender. In the lull before the last dance he found himself outside the parish hall fire exit and inexplicably inside Cloakroom Christine as she leaned between the drainpipe and the ‘members only’ sign. It was over pretty much before it started.
Half an hour later, she gave him a smile, his fawn brown duffel coat and a discarded stem of mistletoe with one tarnished berry. He kept his cloakroom ticket number 069, and resolved to return to 13A and put it inside the secret box Telescopic Titus curated for him. He could not know, and would not find out until the New Year, that Telescopic Titus had terminally collapsed that night.
Stupefied by his serendipitous coming of seniority, his end of term scores took an uptick as between the sessions spent re-dreaming his seven minutes under the stars hooked up with Cloakroom Christine he actually managed some productive revision and did okay in the end of term tests.
Tea-bar Terry who, unbeknown to Nathaniel, was Cloakroom Christine’s brother, handed him a note in the college Common Room saying that she would love to be with him again if he didn’t mind squeezing between the gabardines. He sent a reply saying “Stuff that. Let’s go and not see a movie.” And they did, and didn’t.
Things went so well with Christine that he lost interest in the mysteries of 13A Bohemia Way, but he told her about some of it. She was interested but showed no inclination to find out more, and he was okay with that. Then during the first week of January he bumped into Deborah in the corner shop in a repeat of the encounter than kick-started his 13A misadventure. She didn’t look well, with shadows above and beneath her eyes, and a purple haze beneath extra-translucent skin. He wasn’t going to say anything, but she grabbed him by the arm with a grip more vulture than bird of paradise.
“Telescopic contracted,” she said.
“Contracted?”
“Something. He passed.”
“Passed?”
“He was cremated this morning.”
“Oh, goodness.”
“We will scatter him somewhere distant.”
“I guess that’s what he would want,” said Nathaniel.
“We’re going to burn the boxes.”
“All of them?”
“In the garden. Tonight. You are invited. Iris will sing.”
“Iris?”
“Bearded Iris.”
“Bearded Iris?”
“Christopher. Gentile Jesus. She’s now Bearded Iris.”
“She is?”
“Mother Eartha will preside. Iris will sing. It will be blessed. You will come?”
“Can I bring my girlfriend?”
“If you can find one.”
Nathaniel ushered Christine through the unpopulated interior of 13A Bohemia Way, pointing out the places where this or that been declared, hallowed, repeated, reconstituted, reconsidered or overridden. He took her to the teapot from which he’d drunk the lees of the living Mother Eartha and her deceased husband. He bowed in mocking but sincere reverence of the tin caddy that contained the cremated leaves of the living and the lived. He pointed out the indentation on one of the legs of the table where the Duke of Wellington’s footman had kicked it long before it was re-purposed in this place, and the legend of its origin was invented.
They wriggled through the abandoned vines, webs and earthen pots of the lean-to conservatory and emerged into the garden where many more than Nathan had ever seen there before sat and stood in an arc facing the house. Their backs froze but their faces cooked as they sent salutations of tobacco, weed, beeswax, paraffin, belched beer and flatulent mushroom magic towards a sky that any sane magus would find fascinating.
A brazier improvised from a punctured dustbin blazed like a dozen dragons caged, as box after secret box was tossed into its grateful gape, by a brass-tinged Mother Eartha. Meanwhile, Christopher once Proctor, now Iris strummed a guitar than had seen better ballads. She wore a dress over a pair of jeans that Nathaniel was sure he had seen on Jamaican Joel, and boots that he’d been told once belonged Deborah’s dad. Iris was sitting on Telescopic Titus’s hippopotamus hide armchair, which they’d somehow brought down from the attic room. She was part way through one of her own compositions.
“He kept safe all your secrets
Not knowing what they were
His sharpened spy-glass focus
Showed up what was not there
His tower was a dungeon
For all the things that blight us
We all owe our freedom
To Telescopic Titus Lock away all your padlocks
And cast off all your chains
Forget about your losses
And never count your gains
Secure up in the attic
All the things that fright us
And raise a cup of ale
To Telescopic Titus”
At that point one of the boxes tossed by Mother Eartha into the brazier exploded. Bits of bin peppered the onlookers. After a short delay, imposed by illegal intoxicants, some persons screamed. Tears and suppressed shouts somehow summoned pans, bottles and the ceremonial kettle. The embers were reduced to hissing mush just before revolving blue lights lit up Bohemia Way.
Firemen shook their heads and hoses. Policemen produced pens and pads. Details were noted; an exercise that took more time than genuine names.
As Nathaniel walked Christine home, he revealed to her the one part of his 13A experience he’d hitherto withheld: the issuing by Mother Eartha of death days. He’d been told by Deborah that the matriarch had been spot on with Telescopic Titus who had shed his mortal sheath on December 6th.
“I will die on October 11th” he told his new love.
“Well,” said Christine, coming in for a kiss, “that gives us ten months.”
Former drama teacher, fringe theatre producer and director, and author of novels, short stories and some non-fiction work. I now hawk my output under the moniker of uneasybooks.
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