Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency

‘No, it wasn’t Antony’s joke,’ Tim said. ‘It was another boy, at school.’

‘You’ve been saving it up for five weeks?’ Daniel said.

‘I only just thought of it,’ Tim said. ‘There are these three bears, right?’

‘I thought this was a joke,’ Daniel said. ‘I don’t want to hear Goldilocks.’

‘It isn’t Goldilocks,’ Tim said. ‘And these three bears, they’re in an aeroplane.’

‘Not very likely,’ Jane said. ‘They wouldn’t let three bears on an aeroplane. They’d eat all the meals and then they’d eat all the passengers. And they’d open the doors at the other end and there’s no one there except a lot of bones and three bears who weren’t hungry any more.’

‘Well, there’s mummy bear and daddy bear and baby bear,’ Tim said, persevering, ‘and they’re in an aeroplane.’

‘Where were they going?’ Daniel said. ‘I can’t remember stories like this if I don’t know where they’re going.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Tim said. ‘They never got there, anyway. Listen to the story and you’ll find out.’

‘Is this a joke or a story?’ Jane said. ‘You said it was a joke. Now it’s a story.’

‘I want to know where they were going,’ Daniel said. ‘Can they be going to Spain? I’d like a bear who went to Spain. Or can they be coming back? Then they’d have those hats on, those sombreros. A bear in a sombrero, there’s a sight you don’t see every day.’

‘They weren’t going anywhere,’ Tim said. ‘Stop interrupting. I’m telling a joke.’

‘They’ve got to have been going somewhere,’ Jane said, ‘or they wouldn’t have been in an aeroplane in the first place. Go on, tell us your joke.’

‘All right,’ Tim said. ‘So they’re in this plane, and suddenly the engines catch fire. I forgot – I should have said there’s only two parachutes on the plane.’

‘There’s only two parachutes on the plane?’ Daniel said. ‘For three bears, and a plane full of passengers, and the crew as well? That’s not very sensible.’

‘There’s not a plane full of passengers,’ Tim said, getting red in the face. ‘There’s only three bears.’

‘But even supposing there are only three bears – I suppose they’ve eaten all the other passengers, or maybe everyone in the departure lounge saw three bears getting on the plane, and thought, Hmm, do I want to get into a confined space with three hungry bears or, really, do I want to go to Spain that much anyway, and changed their mind and went home – I mean, even supposing that, there’s got to be someone flying the plane.’

‘Or even two,’ Jane said. ‘I think you have to have two pilots. When we went to Paris last year there were two pilots in case something went wrong with one of them.’

Tim thought for a very long time, breathing noisily. Finally, he said, ‘Daddy bear was flying the plane. Because he knew how to.’

‘Oh, that makes perfect sense,’ Daniel said. ‘An untrained savage wild beast from the Canadian wilderness who’d learnt how to fly a jet plane. One of the most majestic yet complex machines ever invented by the human race.’

‘No, it was invented by a moose,’ Jane said. ‘Everyone knows that.’

‘Called Harold,’ Daniel said.

‘And the daddy bear said to the mummy bear, “There’s only two parachutes, one for me and one for you.” So the daddy bear puts one on and the mummy bear puts the other on and they jump out of the plane.’

‘What – they didn’t even try to hold their infant?’ Daniel said. ‘Their poor suffering infant who they loved better than anyone else in the world? They just left the baby bear to die in a plane crash? This isn’t a funny story at all. It’s deeply moving and tragic.’

‘No, wait, because they go down, they go down in their parachutes, I mean, and then at the bottom, when they get to the bottom, there’s baby bear anyway.’

‘I’ve heard this before,’ Jane said. ‘It’s crap.’

‘And they say, “Oh, baby bear oh, kissy kissy, how did you get down safe and everything?” And the baby bear says, “Me not stupid, me not silly. Me hold on to daddy’s willy.”’

There was a lengthy silence. Daniel and Jane exchanged a sorrowing look.

‘That’s it, that’s the joke,’ Tim said. ‘It was funny, I mean, it’s funny if you don’t ask stupid questions all the time.’

‘What I don’t understand,’ Jane said, ‘is why they have to be bears. They could be anything. They could be people, or they could be donkeys. It wouldn’t make any difference to the joke.’

‘They couldn’t be donkeys, though, could they?’ Daniel said pensively. ‘If you think about it.’

‘Why couldn’t they be donkeys?’ Jane said.

‘Well, you couldn’t hold a cock with your hooves,’ Daniel said. ‘If you were a donkey. Have some sense, woman.’

‘You could try,’ Jane said.

Tim was crying now, fat tears amassing at his already reddened lids. The other two watched the familiar phenomenon. ‘It’s not fair,’ he finally said. ‘No one ever listens to anything I say. I don’t want to talk to you any more.’

‘I wish,’ Jane said, in her mother’s posh or telephone voice, ‘I wish you two would stop making Timothy cry. It’s not kind or clever.’

‘Do you want to go and watch Why Don’t You?’ Daniel said. ‘I’m bored of this.’

It was at least another hour after Leicester Forest East before the car felt normal again. It felt to Francis like a bubble of discomfort taking its time to rise upwards in him and burst. It was no one’s fault; whatever Sandra had done or said, it had been forgiven by the family without inquiry. Bernie’s affability towards the men had not crumbled, but his posture had stiffened, a protective, resentful attitude with which there was no argument. But in time the atmosphere cleared; in an hour Francis thought only he was trembling with that strange Francis-dread, the sort of fear that could be stirred in him by what had happened to someone else, or by events that were not about to transpire, that, imagined, could end in some catastrophe, none worse to contemplate than being shouted at. Sandra had been shouted at, in some way, yet she, his mother and father had passed from a stiff front of bravery to a real sense of being in the right. If, indeed, they hadn’t forgotten about it.

That Francis-dread came with a smell, a taste in his mouth as of sour clashing metals; it came from inside, and took time to go. He wondered sometimes if he gave off the smell of fear; animals, they said, always knew when you were frightened. Aunt Judith with her dog, making a beeline for him, making him cringe, because the dog could smell the emotion in his mouth. Yes.

But that smell and taste, so strong to him but unnoticeable, he guessed, to the other three in the car, was now being beaten down by a smell of the earth. The landscape had been changing, presenting familiar sights in unfamiliar arrangements – those bald, hopeful trees – as well as the unfamiliar, the monstrous. Hills were rising up, black and softly yielding, the great dunes of a black Sahara; and here, a building, a huge black box on sort of was it stilts, there were windows – were they? – but white, opaque, just a grid of white squares. It looked like something you would draw if you couldn’t draw, the idea of a big house but just a big black and white square. And out of the side, like a giant lolling arm, an immense conveyor belt. You could see the wheels running, carrying something, some kind of rubble up or down. The most terrible thing: there were no men. It was just a huge machine, a factory – a factory? – like a big black flimsy box, a black hill both flimsy and vast, and that terrible motion of the belt and wheels. Puking out, or forcing down the throat, an endless motion of forced ingestion or rejection, stone and gullet. It would carry on all night, all day. You could see that. The only thing human about it was the retching smell.