‘He never prophesied for the black boys. He said they were free agents, outside his range of understanding. Work with materials you know, he said. He would lie under the Tree of Heaven flanked by Gabriel and Looksmart Dladla, looking rather like those porcelain slave boys. You know the kind in turbans carrying bowls of fruit you sometimes see in old pictures? Look at what wins and know why, Lynch always told us. Be sure you select a winner you know, where you’re connected. We weren’t connected to the structures of Government power, we had no input there, but by the grace of God we had an example a whole lot closer, we had holy Mother Church herself! That would do, he said, as an analogue. All power institutions could be expected to adapt in similar ways. Their trick was to forbid individual alterations to the status quo while presenting their own changes as a genuine response to popular demands and altered circumstances, at the same time ensuring that such changes, as and when they were permitted to occur, safe-guarded their sole reason for being, that is to say, the retention of power. The capacity to praise today what you executed people for yesterday, and of course vice versa, always vice versa, and with complete sincerity is essential for the maintenance of power. He invited us to observe that the changes transforming the Catholic Church were undertaken by the very authorities who had forbidden those changes in previous times, to notice the vocabularies used, words like “renewal” and “reaffirmation” and “renaissance”, and he invited us to apply what we learnt to the understanding of the way the Regime worked. The keywords for the Regime were “adaption”, “evolution”, “self-determination”. What the words actually said were — O.K. Carruthers let the fuzzies out of the pens but shoot if they stampede. We saw the parallels. Church and Regime believed themselves divinely inspired, both regarded themselves as authoritative and both maintained that they held the secret of salvation. The parallels weren’t exact but they were the best we had, he said. We would have to make do with them. And we did. The trouble was —’
Blashford interrupted angrily, ‘The trouble was Lynch was mad and he never understood.’
Blanchaille shook his head. ‘No, the trouble was we thought it was a game. Spot the connections. We enjoyed it but we didn’t believe in it.’
The Bishop paused before a large and blowsy rose. Very deliberately he took the head in his hands and shook the petals so that they fluttered and drifted in the wind.
‘This is a lovely garden. I remember it well,’ Blanchaille said.
‘You know my garden?’ Blashford clearly deplored this news.
‘I knew the other one better. The one behind the hedge.’
‘I never knew I had another garden.’
The Bishop’s official garden was very beautiful. The roses, large and blowsy, opened up their heavy red hearts and did not care where their petals drifted. Their perfume was heavy, meaty. Their bruised beefy solidity would have looked well on a butcher’s slab. Sweetpeas thronged against the further trellis, the bougainvillaea foamed and dripped and six clipped lemon trees showed bright yellow fruit among darkly gleaming leaves.
But of course it was in the Bishop’s other garden that the altar servers had grown up, the wilderness beyond the spiny hedge on the far side of the fruit trees, the neglected vineyard with its harsh, sour grapes, its choked lily pond, its loquat trees, its old disused well, its blackjacks and weeds. They met and smoked cheap American cigarettes, taking as their model the expertise of Van Vuuren who smoked with quite wonderful style and aplomb and adult poise. He was expert in making deep, lengthy inhalations which hollowed his cheeks and they watched fascinated as the jets of grey smoke expelled from his nostrils met and mixed with the single thick gust from his lips. They drank from quarter-bottles of brandy and vodka and dropped the empties down the well, too deep to hear the crash.
And they took girls there. He took Isobel Turner, first and foremost, not particularly highly rated it was true, in Ferreira’s opinion ‘no great shakes’, but the only girl to show an interest. He walked her home from Wednesday Novena, coming to the Bishop’s garden meant a lengthy detour but she didn’t complain. A stocky twelve-year-old strutting by his side, her little heels clicking on the road, dark curls, large calves, short white socks, a very boyish, broad girl built like a little pony. She was known far and wide as Izzie for short, not a name to do anything for her femininity. Somehow he summoned the courage to lead her into the garden, taking her hand and leading her beneath the trees and she following obediently with her little clip-clop. Once inside, the sharp rattle of undergrowth at their ankles and the moon high overhead, bright, severe and obtrusive like a naked light bulb in a small room, left him at a loss as to how to continue. He drew her beneath the trees where the shadows were and put his arm around her shoulders. They were so broad! He hadn’t expected that. He took her hand instead and held it for long minutes, very tightly, and soon their palms were running with sweat. He was at a loss to know how to continue and in despair he said that perhaps they ought to be getting along. There was enough moonlight even under the trees to show her shoulders move in an indifferent shrug and he was conscious of having fallen below expectations. She pulled an apple down from the tree and crunched it right down to the core, ate that, then with a sigh which was more like a neigh, wheeled around and at a fast trot led the way home.
He went to the Bishop’s other garden on a later occasion with Magdalena. The Magdalena who gave, the Magdalena who took up with the traitor Kipsel, who afterwards fled to London and was referred to in the papers as Red Magda, but at that time was no more than the amazing Magdalena who gave. Like crazy, without qualm, Ferreira had said. Like wow, Van Vuuren confirmed — his favourite expression of approval at the time. Blanchaille could remember him making the same response after Father Lynch had recounted the harrowing life of the great Italian composer, Gesualdo. Lynch’s eyes had closed and a spasm of pain passed over his face.
‘Wow? Van Vuuren. What is wow! It’s hardly a reaction that answers the scale of the human tragedy I’ve unfolded, you young devil. One makes the mistake of talking about things European to you boys. One makes the mistake of thinking because you are white you must be European. In fact you are African boys. No, not boys but bombs, and in place of minds you have drawersful of high explosives on a short fuse. Not young boys, young bombs, that’s what you are. Not listening, not learning, just sitting there waiting, fizzling, until the day you blow up and shower everyone with moral outrage.’
But with Magdalena, wow! seemed just about to cover it. He had invited her to Bishop Blashford’s vineyard, his other garden, and she had nodded with complete enthusiasm. She had streaked blonde hair. Her face ended in a pointed chin. Her eyes were blue-grey.
He led her through the darkness with a churning stomach feeling rather like a young man who has come into a large fortune and has no idea how to begin spending it. She looked like a model, Van Vuuren had promised. So this was how a model looked! Clearly there could be no holding hands this time. He would grapple her to him. Kiss her. Remove her bra and fondle her breasts, maybe take them in his mouth. Why not? He was fifteen, it was about time. They would lie on the grass afterwards. It happened to be raining softly so perhaps they wouldn’t, but if it stopped raining they could lie on her mac. That she wore a mac was evidence of her practicality and added to her charm. Would he try and take off her pants? He doubted it — but nothing was ruled out. They stood beneath the dripping trees and Magdalena drew him towards her and said: ‘You’re a pretty boy.’ Her thin plastic raincoat crackled as she pressed him against her. There was something so practised in the kiss she gave him. Her lips were wet. With a stab of despair he noticed that the buttons on her mac were large and stuffed tightly through their buttonholes. This presented a smooth and shining armoured front. But she was well ahead of him and had no similar problems. Her hand reached up behind him under his shirt pressing into the small of his back. The other hand expertly opened his fly — smooth, fast, deft movements, and then she had his penis in her damp fingers and was lifting it over the elastic band of his underpants which slid painfully upwards to trap his testicles. But then she rubbed and rubbed and soon things grew warm and better. Then he groaned and spurted and all at once she laughed delightedly. ‘But you’re quick! The quickest I’ve ever met.’ Not quite scorn in the laugh, but tones of someone pleased at their own handiwork and still willing to continue. He knew the matter wasn’t closed as far as she was concerned. He also knew he’d come before he’d even kissed Magdalena. There might be more if he liked, he could feel it. It was up to him, he could feel that too. But of course it wasn’t. What was to come had been and gone. The elastic cut more cruelly into his testicles. ‘You’re really nice,’ Magdalena said, ‘we’ll do this again.’ His own incompetence baffled and enraged him. Afterwards he picked a small bunch of the Bishop’s grapes. Magdalena declined saying they were too sour, but he finished them anyway, sour or not, punishing himself. The perfectly ordinary, reasonable and agreeable reactions of human beings seemed closed to him. A few, like Magdalena, dwelt happily among them. And there was that girl he’d met when he was very much younger, somebody’s big sister, whose he couldn’t remember. He went to play with her, at her invitation. They played in the empty garage. Postman’s knock and spin the bottle.