Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [110]
Goz said that the atmosphere got weird. Some of the onlookers started encouraging the Brethren to stick at it. Like they’d started wanting the Bomb to drop, too. Two carloads of police arrived to reinforce P.C. Newby, but they didn’t interfere. The Reverend Underwood had a heated discussion with them, then stormed off, waving his arms about.
Come evening, with the light going and a thin drizzle falling, the crowd started to dissipate. Goz went home and had his tea and returned to the square. There was still a good number of people there. Hoseason was still reciting, but some of his followers were clearly in a bad way. Doreen Pullen, who ran the Cosy Tea Shop, unlocked her premises and carried chairs out and persuaded some of the Chosen — including Win — to sit. She also brought cups of tea and rather dry slices of cake, but these were refused. Someone draped a coat over Win’s shoulders, and she didn’t cast it off. Goz was puzzled that none of us — Ruth, me, George — were there. He went to the phone box at the top of the square and called our house. (He got no reply, of course. By then, my parents were arriving at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital.) Newby and one of the police cars had disappeared; the remaining three officers were enjoying Doreen’s hospitality.
There was muted talk of an explosion — another one of them mines — on Hazeborough beach.
By the time the church clock struck eleven, the Brethren were wet, wilted, and dejected. Hoseason and his brother were the only two left standing. Enoch was now on his twelfth recitation of the book of Revelation, and his voice was as coarse as the rasp of a file on a horse’s hoof.
At the last stroke of midnight he fell silent and lifted his face to the rain. Some of the few remaining onlookers applauded, self-consciously. Most of the Brethren were now asleep or semiconscious on chairs or the ground. Enoch and Amos went around the circle, shaking them vigorously. Some responded; some did not. Then the two brothers, alone and caring not who followed, walked away in the direction of Angel Yard. Halfway there, on the pavement outside the Star Supply Stores, Enoch stopped dead and fell on his knees and cried brokenly, “‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’”
Amos helped him to his feet, and they went on.
Win was left slumped on one of the Cosy Tea Shop’s bentwood chairs. Goz was by now very perturbed that we were not there to get her home. Then Chrissie Slender and the poacher, Bert Emery — with whom she lived in sin — stepped out of the darkness and helped her into Bert’s van.
Some weeks later, Goz reported that Enoch Hoseason had disappeared from Borstead. The rumor was that he’d moved to the West Country, presumably to found another sect in preparation for the next end of the world.
It was during that same visit that Goz told me he’d heard that Frankie had gone to America for treatment at some special clinic. He didn’t know where.
I progressed from bed to wheelchair (Goz whizzing me along the hospital corridors in defiance of all protocol) to crutches.
I went back to Newgate at the end of September 1963. By then I needed only a walking stick. My new nickname was Frankenstein, and I answered to it, causing embarrassment. (Although, one day a Maggot burst into tears when he looked at me, and that hurt.) Tash Harmsworth and Jiffy and Poke Wilkins gave me extra tutoring. My right hand was undamaged. Writing and drawing were okay. Painting was more difficult then. Too much color mixing, too much changing hands.
I was solitary, dislocated. My few school friends had left at the end of the summer term. Goz was at Cambridge, the first person from Millfields to go to university. And thus getting higher Above Himself than anyone from the estate