Читать книгу The Testimony - James Smythe, James Smythe - Страница 51

The priests on the news after that first Broadcast looked so smug. There is nothing worse than a smug priest, Leonard said. He got so angry with one of them – I told you so, I said this was the case, the priest kept saying to the reporter; This is the Lord come back to speak to us – that he threw a tangerine at the television. It split all over the screen, burst like a water bomb. He cleaned it down – his temper never lasted for more than a single, regrettable second – but the apartment smelt of it all day, of that sharp citrus smell. It’s nice when it comes from a scented air freshener; it’s horrid to live with it all day when it’s not, so sweet and bitter and real.

Leonard and I used to be Jews. We’re Ex-jews, he would say whenever anybody asked, Capital E, lower-case j, as if that hammered home his point: I’ve got my own emphasis for these things. He liked having things in his life and then renouncing them, that was another of his things. (I’ve realized recently, thinking about it, how many things he used to have.) We stopped being Jews in the late Nineties, not long after we first started seeing each other. He had just left his first wife, an awful woman called Estelle, and we found each other in a bar one night. We spent hours talking about everything and anything, and that pattern stuck. On our fourth date we got onto religion, and discovered that we felt the same way – disheartened, mostly – and that was that. We woke up the next day and decided to not bother any more. We already both used to celebrate Christmas more than we did Hanukkah, so it didn’t affect us there, and all the other stuff, it just felt natural to ignore it. We did that until the end of the next decade, when Leonard got his cancer, and then I started to think about it, to wonder. He never did, of course; cancer was a fight, and it could be beaten by hard work and perspiration, as far as Leonard was concerned, but I didn’t feel that way. It was diagnosed in the late stages, and the doctor told us that if he operated the next day, Leonard might be lucky. Might be lucky, he said. That’s a chance of a chance, outside odds at best, I figured. I had to drive home to fetch Leonard his pyjamas and a book, and on the way I passed the synagogue on Willet, so I stopped the car and waited until the next service started. I remembered every part of it – it was so ingrained, even after over a decade of not thinking about it even once – as if it were deeper than memory, like it was a part of my DNA, even – and I prayed for Leonard to get better. I prayed for an extra edge over the Might be lucky. And he was lucky. They cut the cancer out, they did radiotherapy, he was sick for a while, weak as the old man that he never wanted to be, and then he started to get better. I don’t know what saved him, whether it was the luck, the doctors, the prayer, but something did. I carried on going to synagogue, once a month, maybe less, and Leonard stayed healthy. That felt like a fair deal, and I never told Leonard. Every relationship has its secrets.

After he threw the tangerine he kept on shouting at the TV. It doesn’t mean anything, he kept saying. It means sweet f-a! It’s a voice, could have come from anywhere. The priests were sure that it was God making contact. In the book of Revelation, it says that our God will return to us, speak to us again. This is simply Him making good on His promise. Sanctimonious pricks! Leonard kept shouting. They’re acting like this is definitive proof!

I didn’t say it, of course, but I wanted to ask him how he was so positive that it wasn’t.