Dry Bones Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Richard Beard

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Becket’s Toe

  Davy’s Foot

  The Mason Family Ankle

  Burton’s Leg

  Jung’s Knee

  Jay Mason Minor’s Thigh

  Calvin’s Hip

  Mr Smith’s Back

  Chaplin’s Shoulder

  Jesus Christ’s Neck

  My Head

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Jay Mason is experiencing a crisis of faith. Disillusioned with his calling as a Deacon in the Anglican Church of Geneva, and estranged from his pregnant girlfriend, he’s about to fall into the murky world of celebrity grave-robbing. His church has been bought by the shadowy antiquities dealer Joseph Moholy, who arrives to claim its most interesting asset: the toe bone of Thomas - Becket. Moholy has a large collection of dubiously acquired relics and is keen to add to his collection. Jay, he decides, is the man to assist him. Jay finds that grave-robbing can be both lucrative and thrilling, however morally troubling for a man of God, and in Switzerland’s cemeteries he finds a rich cast to work on: James Joyce, Richard Burton, John Calvin and Charlie Chaplin all receive his midnight attentions. But Moholy is a ruthless man whose ambitions are perilously high, and as Jay assists him in his search for the holy grail of relics, he puts himself and his loved ones in serious danger.

  About the Author

  Richard Beard’s most recent book is Acts of the Assassins, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize.

  In the twenty years since his first book he has published critically acclaimed novels and narrative non-fiction, including Becoming Drusilla, the story of how a friendship between two men was changed by a gender transition.

  He was formerly Director of the National Academy of Writing in London, and is now a Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo and has a Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. He is an optimistic opening batsman for the Authors Cricket Club.

  ALSO BY RICHARD BEARD

  Fiction

  X20: A Novel of (Not) Smoking

  Damascus

  The Cartoonist

  Non-Fiction

  Muddied Oafs: The Soul of Rugby

  To Mum and Dad

  Dry Bones

  Richard Beard

  Becket’s Toe

  ‘Run away: you’re a dead man.’

  Reginald FitzUrse, murderer of Becket

  THOMAS À BECKET’S TOE-BONE DID exactly what a holy relic was fabled to do. It made its own wishes clear. It didn’t want to spend one moment longer on the restaurant terrace of the Hôtel Beau Rivage.

  I stood up. In the middle of the Chaplain’s farewell lunch, I left the table. And even though we had a four o’clock flight to Heathrow, I walked back through the streets of Geneva to the English Church of All Saints, a ring of keys in one hand, Thomas à Becket’s toe-bone in the other.

  At the church, a workman in blue overalls was up on the tower, checking a pulley, then fixing a rope to the cockerel weathervane. All Saints had a tower not a spire, in the Norman style, an English parish church which history had dropped into the middle of a busy street in the Swiss city of Geneva. It was squeezed between banks and hotels, and glinting shops selling watches and clocks.

  On the pavement outside the church, in the spring sunshine, the church furnishings looked out of their element, or from another world. Plain-ended bench-pews were stacked unevenly beside broad choir-stalls and the brass eagle lectern. In a patient queue, awaiting collection, folded altar-cloths and boxes of stained baptism pamphlets; hymnals ancient and modern; the slotted wooden hymn-rack, numbers still in place, white on black.

  The pair of Swiss removal men were now in the church doorway, wondering what I wanted. I told them to stop what they were doing. Go home. They nodded, shuffling a little, but they didn’t object or meet my eye: churches made everyone nervous.

  Inside, I pulled the door shut into its arch of solid stone, and Geneva’s traffic immediately damped to a more distant rumble of tractors on the brown ploughed fields of England. I locked the door from the inside, then turned to see the altar skewed half-way down the church, and the tiled aisle in black and white a pathway between two emptied halves. Dust rose from where the pews had once been, making rays to the coloured glass in the windows.

  The font had gone, as had the ragged banners commemorating England’s famous dead, at Inkermann and the Somme, at Waterloo. The crucifix had gone, and the sanctuary lamp, the chalice and flagons, all gavelled off by the auctioneers, leaving behind only the famous godspace. It was the sense of something absent, a god-shaped hole.

  Apart from the altar, they’d left behind two bin-bags of unsold jumble, and a tight package of choir-robes back from the laundry. The organ was still there, and the wooden canopy over the octagonal pulpit, but only because Joseph Moholy had reserved them both. He’d also reserved Becket’s toe-bone.

  Which was in my pocket, wrapped in a circular handkerchief of embroidered purple silk, very soft and agreeable to touch. I put it on the altar, unwrapping the silk and smoothing it into a circle. The toe-bone of Thomas à Becket, English saint and martyr, was small and pointed and delicate. It looked like a marker, or a counter for some intricate game.

  I bent my head very close to it, closing my eyes, first my ear and then my nose almost touching it. I was smelling Becket’s toe, my eyebrows arching, twitching. I coughed into my hand, then reset myself, and smelled again.

  Hard to tell. I licked my index finger, and nakedly touched it. I rolled it over, and back again. And then I ran my finger against the grain, which made my own toes curl inside my shoes, scrunching back into my feet, feeling for the pulse of my own living blood and the stretch of my skin and the crack of my joints.

  I shivered.

  Of course I did. Since always, though most actively among Catholics and Buddhists, relics had been used as aids to meditation and prayer. Unfeigned concentration on a sacred relic allowed the true believer an insight into the character and virtue of that elected saint.

  However small the relic, from whatever part of the body, the grace remained intact. A toe-bone amassed as much saintly residue as a skull, preserving on earth in a distinct object some essential remnant of blessedness, of a chosen soul.

  Elbows on the altar, leaning forward, I concentrated hard on the stopper of Becket’s toe.

  Some believers were more susceptible than others. There were recorded instances of trance, and pilgrims knocked senseless by the proximity of a favourite saint. Through their stubborn human remains, godly spirits could be seen to intercede in this world now, a direct influence on everyday conduct.

  At Canterbury, Becket’s shrine had once been the most popular in all Europe: virtually as if Becket were there. He was the saint to whom pilgrims appealed in the crisis of their lives, his relics satisfying a common desire for self-improvement, and for change. His bones encouraged reflection and reassessment, and certain gifted pilgrims, those sincerest in their veneration, would begin to think and act like Becket the saint. That’s how relics work.

  If at all. The Reformation had insisted on a more earthly logic, and Protestants took against the idea, damming the transmigration of souls. John Calvin himself wrote an angry and definitive pamphlet, An Admonition Concerning Relics, and in 1538 Becket’s four jewelled shrines at Canterbury were smashed in all honesty by the commissioners of Henry VIII. From now on, Protestants and the English Church would be believing that enlightenment came from within.

  For the errors of the past, Becket took much of the blame, and his shrine was overtur
ned, his bones punted and bounced down the nave at Canterbury. The newly enlightened English grabbed him by the handful and hurled him outside, bones spinning through the trees of the cathedral orchard. Then the reformed sinners looked each other in the eye, suddenly shamed, before making amends by collecting the unsainted Becket into an unmarked grave.

  A hundred years later, guided to the spot by nervous vergers, Cromwell’s New Model Army grimly dug Becket up again. As a sign of their utter Puritan contempt, and fresh from felling the sacred ancient thorn of Glastonbury, they loaded all that remained of Becket into the barrel of a republican cannon.

  They didn’t even take aim. They lit the fuse and walked away, brushing the saltpetre from their hands. Boom.

  That night, the Calvinist roundheads slept deeply the sleep of the just. Meanwhile, dogged local opportunists ran hunched through the windfalls, like spaniels, scavenging fragments of bone into greasy leather aprons. For weeks afterwards, they skulked the inns at the cathedral gates, watchful for long-haired Catholics in secret flight to the coast. A modest, yeomanly approach would be attempted, eyes averted, gradually growing in confidence. Then, with a painful show of reluctance, miming a wail and lament for the cruel second end of Becket the greatest of saints, the Canterbury scavengers would suggest a vast and inflated price for the last-known bones of the martyr.

  Their customers seldom lasted the night. Before dawn, the city’s visiting idolaters and vile purchasers of relics were denounced to Cromwell’s soldiers. Becket’s remains were then stolen back by local crones, who’d lurk toothless and cackling for next week’s wave of the faithful.

  Various fragments did escape to Europe, joining the detached fingers known to have reached Belgium with Becket’s family. In the centuries which followed, Becket relics were occasionally bartered between Roman churches, an English saint of fluctuating value in a market complacent with saints of its own. After the first modern war, to distance himself from the ancient cult of relics, Pius XI presented Becket’s toe to the Anglican Bishop of Gibraltar, as a gift of reconciliation between Christians. From there, despite protests from a sub-committee of cardinals, Becket was transferred to the Church of All Saints, in Geneva. As a quiet embarrassment, an unknown quantity, his toe-bone had been almost forgotten for nearly a century.

  In despair, less than a week ago, I’d turned to Becket for help.

  The Bishop of Gibraltar, responsible for the entire Anglican diocese of Europe, had just refused the Chaplain permission for a farewell service of deconsecration.

  It would be purely ceremonial, the Bishop explained in his e-mail, and besides, we can’t afford it.

  Churches abroad were expensive, and, unlike churches at home, they were seldom remembered in the legacies of English dead. The Swiss property taxes were ruinous, and progressive voices in the Synod had been murmuring for some time now about the embarrassment of an exclusively Anglican presence in the cities of a united Europe. There was the questionable taint of imperialism, and an isolationist variety of pride, each Anglican church an outdated and perhaps even offensive anomaly.

  Don’t blame me, the Bishop wrote, our Church is in crisis. Not to worry, though. It’s always in crisis. Just do the best you can!

  The departing Chaplain had already done the best he could, in several years of failed jumble-sales and cake-bakes. Among other ingenious plans for raising money to save the church, he’d asked his loyal flock to put something aside every time it rained, in memory of England. But there were quibbles (please, Vicar, one moment of your time) about how much rain counted as rain, and anyway that week was unseasonably fine, and the Chaplain found himself out among the banks and the watch shops, alone and palms upward, waiting.

  Eventually, after exhausting all Anglican methods of fund-raising, he tried the charismatic ploy of standing the congregation in a circle, holding hands, and pleading directly with God to save the church. God hadn’t answered. Or he had, but the answer was no.

  That was when I’d made my own contribution, turning to Becket for help. The results had been immediate, if unexpected, and ever since I’d felt unusually proud of being a deacon, as if it wasn’t, after all, the biggest mistake of my life.

  Thomas à Becket had also started out as a deacon. A forceful man, confident in his plated destiny, he’d helped Archbishop Theobald protect the status of the Church in a difficult period. Within ten years, in 1155, at the age of thirty-six, he’d been appointed Royal Chancellor to King Henry II.

  I felt good about myself for deserting the Chaplain’s lunch, even though I now had less than two hours before our plane was scheduled to leave. It had been the right thing to do, and I was as sure of it as a raving madman, a man possessed. I’d reappraised my capabilities, and I was stronger than I’d realised. At the age of thirty-four, only two years from the Chancellorship of all England, I could single-handedly save the Church of All Saints from closure.

  Shutting my eyes, breathing deeply, I allowed myself to feel untouchable, aloof from human frailty. All Saints had always been an unusual posting, but I now suspected I’d been sent here in recognition that I wasn’t like everyone else. God was asking something special of me in the city of Geneva, and Becket’s pride rubbed off as a kind of dangerous audacity. It made all virtue seem possible, and all ambition, and I foresaw a glowing future of heroic service and sacrifice, a glorious dying of the self. Arduous though my mission promised to be, and unfashionable, there was no other way to live.

  Beside the altar, on the cold floor, I knelt and prayed for God’s pity on the Chaplain, for his doubts and his weakness, and his waste of a God-given opportunity to stand alone, defy secular pressure, and personally reinvent the Church. At the same time, I moved Becket’s toe loosely between my fingers. It felt both rough and tongueish, and I turned it like a one-bone rosary, just as I had earlier in the day on my way to the restaurant.

  The lunch had started badly. When I arrived, the minister from the American church and some of our regulars were already chatting. Everybody was well wrapped in coats and scarves, and they’d chosen the terrace for its view of the lake, glittering green and hard from the melt of glaciers.

  They were already on to the winds, Switzerland’s favourite weather. The Bise was a cold wind which froze the head. The Föhn was warm and enervating, and drove even staid professionals in horror from the streets. Today, everyone agreed, it was the Bise that was blowing, and several people hugged themselves and theatrically chattered their teeth.

  I wasn’t wearing a coat. I wasn’t even wearing a sweater. I had on a short-sleeved cotton shirt and the Bise was blowing and I was freezing, and it felt sublime.

  Apart from the American minister, who was now sitting on my left, I recognised Mrs Meier the stiff-lipped church treasurer, Mr Oti the warden, and Stella the attractive Hong Kong girl who worked as an interpreter at the United Nations. They were all staring, and on any other day I’d probably have wanted to check my appearance.

  On this particular day, however, my inner idea of what I looked like was unusually secure. I was tall and slender, with a pale complexion and dark hair. Many people found me handsome. My features were straight, though my nose was rather long. My forehead was wide, my eyes bright, and, despite a tendency to stutter, my expression was memorably calm as I prepared to disregard the demands of the secular world.

  They were all still looking at me, Mrs Meier wincing a little at the sight of their visiting assistant deacon usurping the head of the table.

  ‘We were saving that place for the Chaplain,’ the American minister said. He was an Episcopalian, an intense man with a square beard and a pocket Bible.

  ‘There’s an empty seat on my right,’ I said. ‘He can just as easily sit there.’

  It was a pointless quarrel, but I started it anyway. To discourage them further, I opened a menu, and felt disdainful towards the many luxury foods I wasn’t going to order. In the early days, as Chancellor, Becket had been famed for lavish extravagance. He kept more than twenty change
s of clothing, much of it trimmed with silk and the rarest of furs. He never travelled without hounds and hawks, wild monkeys and wolves, crossing the Channel on diplomatic missions with six boatloads of knights, stewards, lechers, harlots.

  The testimony from that time was unanimous. From the moment Thomas assumed control of the Church, his character underwent a spectacular change. In an abrupt conversion, he instantly renounced all the flim and the flam, and put on a new and better man.

  The Chaplain, later than expected, arrived in exuberant mood. He happily took the chair to my right. He laughed, and clapped me on the back, this living proof that God called to the ministry those people who already looked like vicars. It saved time. The Chaplain looked vulnerable and undecided and naïve, his beard gappy, his hair in need of a trim. At the same time, in the last few days, I’d noticed his face losing its uncertainty, relaxing into something more civilian.

  ‘Champagne,’ he said, clapping his hands for a waiter. ‘To celebrate.’

  Some of the people giggled, but the Chaplain was already emptying a large envelope, full of print-outs of the latest e-mails to the parish. ‘One final duty,’ he said, ‘and then I’m free.’ He handed a decent stack to Mrs Meier, and four or five loose sheets to me.

  ‘From Helena,’ he said. ‘And they all say the same thing.’

  ‘I asked you not to read them.’

  ‘Still, we’ll be home in a couple of hours. Sort it out then, eh? God,’ he said, leaning back in his chair and throwing his hands out wide, ‘free! For the first time in years, truly free.’

  He drained half his champagne before Mrs Meier could propose a toast. He laughed, then drank again to his own good health.

  I had one sip, a minor concession, and thankfully didn’t enjoy it. As the Chaplain moved round the table, effusively saying his goodbyes, other people came and went in the vacated seat next to mine. At one point, Stella leant towards me and asked how I felt.