Nick Harkaway - The Gone-Away World

“Ma says lunch,” Kid Gonzo says firmly. Old Man Lubitsch holds up a single gloved hand, a sinner lost to apiarism, requesting indulgence. The bee is on the flagstone in front of him, presumably coughing. It appears for a moment that Gonzo will stamp on it, rid himself of this impediment to family harmony, but his father is fast for all that his face looks like faded wool, or maybe it is just that Old Man Lubitsch understands the value of strategic positioning: he swoops, his body blocking Gonzo’s line of attack, and, lifting the bee in gentle fingers, he pops it into hive number three.

“Lunch,” Old Man Lubitsch agrees, and for a moment I believe he smiles at me.

We return to the house, but Gonzo’s mother is not mollified. Things are strained. They have been strained since before I arrived, since Gonzo’s older brother Marcus went to soldier, and neglected to duck on some forgotten corner of a foreign field that is forever Cricklewood Cove. Lunch is Ma Lubitsch’s small white witchery, her article of faith—if she can provide Gonzo with hearty nutrition and a solid, dependable centre, he will be well-fitted to the world. He will conquer, he will survive, he will feel no need to seek adventure. He will not leave her. For Ma Lubitsch, lunch defies death. Old Man Lubitsch, however, knows that sometimes, for reasons which are obscure even to bees, the hive must disgorge its children and see them set upon the wind. And so he prepares for the moment when this son either finds a queen and starts a family, or flies and flies until he cannot continue and falls to the dirt to become once again a part of the mossy meadow carpet all around.

Ma Lubitsch doesn’t speak to her husband during the meal. She doesn’t speak from the first potato to the last flake of chocolate icing, and she doesn’t speak over coffee, and she doesn’t speak as Gonzo removes himself to the creek to fish. It seems that she will never speak to him again, but when I return unannounced for a forgotten tackle box, I glimpse her, the enormous body racked with sobs, cradled in the arms of her tiny mate. Old Man Lubitsch is singing to her in the language of the old country, and his shadowed, sharp little eyes lay omertà upon me, dark and deep; these are secrets between men, boy, between the true men of the heart. I know it. I understand.

It is this image which comes to mind later whenever Gonzo is about to embark on some act of unconsidered heroism: a bird-like man in white overalls lending his strength to a shattered mountain.

Gonzo fishes. He catches two tiddlers of uncertain species, and throws them back when they appear unhappy. I never tell him what I have seen, and when I turn around, five years have passed.

GONZO LUBITSCH at ten: a ringmaster and a daredevil, he leads with the chin, gets back on the horse, hates rules and is the object of a thousand crushes. Lydia Copsen holds hands with him in public, making Gonzo the most envied boy in the region, though none of us is able to source our bitter disappointment, and collectively we put it down to the fact that Lydia’s mother is free with her sweet jar. Lydia is a tiny, imperious girl, proud owner of a selection of dresses with fruit patterns on them. She is also, it is clear to me from this distance, the daughter of Satan and the Wife of Bath. By turns haughty and adoring, Lydia dishes out featherlight kisses with an instinctive political acumen, and she deploys her ready access to confectionery to create a powerful and loyal clique of girls who yield secrets and obeisance to their mistress of the watermelon frock. At nine years of age, Lydia Copsen is somewhere between a tabloid editor and a Beverly Hills madam. Her admiration for Gonzo is matched only by her scorn for me, but Gonzo, loyal friend, will not ditch me, and thus I am gooseberry on their daily walks around the playground, and chaperone as he escorts her home. At Lydia’s insistence, I walk ten paces behind them, but here she scores her own goal, because my only wish is to be as far from the loving couple as possible.

It is around this time that I lose, absolutely, my faith in a merciful deity, through the agency of the headmistress of our school. Her real name is the Evangelist, and it is thus that God and his angels and Yahweh and his angels and Allah and his angels and all the other gods of the world and their angels, demons, avatars, servitors, minions and mugwumps know her, and it is thus that she is inscribed in the hundred lists of the living and the dead that they all carry around like so many celestial bookkeepers. She masquerades, however, as Mrs. Assumption Soames, of the Warren, Cricklewood Cove, where she is headmistress of the eponymous Soames School for the Children of Townsfolk. She is small and slim at an age which has never been disclosed, but any child with access to a Bible (and all children at the Soames School have plentiful, even overwhelming, access to Bibles) would confidently date her from the tenth chapter of the Book of Genesis as coming somewhere between Aram and Lud. It is rumoured among the brave and foolish who speculate on such matters that she may be as old as fifty. Mr. Soames, whose father’s father’s father founded the school, died sometime back of a marsh fever, and the tacit consensus among the parents is that it was with a considerable sense of relief. Mr. Brabasen even suggested that Mr. Soames’s sole intention in his frequent and prolonged fishing trips to the darkest and most pungent area of the Cricklewood Fens was to infect himself with said disease, a virulent virus which in 80 per cent of cases claimed either the victim’s hearing or his life, either sad outcome being, in Mr. Brabasen’s opinion, reason enough for Mr. Soames to seek it out.

If Assumption Soames’s nickname sounds sophisticated for our infant wit, the reason is that it originates among the teachers, a flea-bitten and secular motley of brilliant minds culled from institutions too prissy to put up with their foibles. To the Evangelist, these weaknesses are burdens given by Providence along with their gifts to test their metal. In accordance with the perfect wisdom of the divine plan, failure in these trials serves only to bring them into her healing and censorious arms so that they can teach her charges and atone and learn restraint. More than one of them has a nervous collapse during my time at school, and at least one of those surviving is heavily medicated purely as a result of Gonzo’s inventive deployment of a thirty-foot spool of number seven line, a plastic skull and a ragged horse blanket. For all this, they’re a solid lot, and despite the Evangelist they push the educational boat out further than they otherwise might. Mr. Clisp the gambler teaches us not only mathematics but also materialist ethics, setting logic puzzles on the board which appear to be value-neutral but which, when resolved, condemn the vituperative harridan in ringing tones. He also explains the rudiments of poker and the business of making book. Ms. Poynter (whose precise sin is whispered to involve negotiated services of a physical nature) includes in her biology classes a smattering of first aid and natural history, and also sexual education of increasing sophistication as the years pass, so that by the age of ten we can recite a list of erogenous zones and appreciate the difference between primary and secondary sexual characteristics in humans, and by the onset of puberty no one is in fear about the inevitable swellings and expulsions. Later, Ms. Poynter is temporarily relieved of duty by the Evangelist before the Board of Governors can object to her decision to teach a class on sexual technique to the girls and impart a stern lecture on mores and self-restraint to the boys (spiced with a brief but memorable digression on the theory and practice of cunnilingus). Mary Jane Poynter takes two weeks in Hawaii with Addison McTiegh, the PE teacher, and both of them return quieter and less twitchy and when the exam results come in with a near-perfect pass rate, the Evangelist elects not to fire her on the condition that no more parents are given cause to complain. The Board, who would for the most part have liked to see Ms. Poynter burned at some form of wooden upright, are too busy battling the Evangelist’s blazing determination to ban on religious grounds several of the texts students are required to study that year. Gulliver’s Travels survives the scissors, as does A Christmas Carol, but Modern Short Stories in English is consigned for ever to the forbidden zone. Sadly, it is so dull that not even this recommendation can make any of us read it more than once.