Adam turned. An elderly woman with thin, carroty-auburn hair and no front teeth stood smiling at the open small door with a steaming mug of tea in her hand.
“I was told I could get help here,” Adam said.
“God will provide, darling. Service starts at six, see you later.” She shut the door and Adam walked back to Tooley Street and asked someone the time—4.30. He might as well wait, he thought. He was hungry, his feet were sore from his too-tight golf shoes and having walked all this way it would be as well to see what was on offer. He found a boarded-up doorway next to a newsagent’s and sat on its step, settling down to wait until the church opened. He closed his eyes, hoping he might doze for a few minutes, happy to have put his faith in John Christ, whoever he might be.
But he couldn’t doze: across the street was an estate agent’s and he watched a plump girl in a pale grey suit and very high heels step out of the door and light a cigarette. She blew the smoke up into the air over her shoulder as if directing it away from an invisible someone — an invisible non-smoker, Adam supposed. Just like Fairfield Springer, he realised with something of a shock — that was how Fairfield smoked. And he felt a cold guilt creep over him and another feeling which he decided to call remorse, rather than self-pity. He saw Fairfield in his mind’s eye — her thick, straw-blonde hair, her powerful, black-rimmed spectacles. She had a pretty face but somehow the mass of hair and the spectacles prevented you noticing that for a minute or so.
In their two intimate encounters — a sex act and a dinner three days later — she had smoked a cigarette exactly like that girl standing outside a Bermondsey estate agent’s, blowing the smoke up and away over her right shoulder, out of consideration for the non-smoker she was with…
As he thought about Fairfield his memories inexorably drew him back to that night in the cloud chamber. In fact it was late afternoon⁄early evening but they were doing a night-simulation cloud-seeding run so it might as well have been night. The cloud chamber’s lights had been dimmed and an artificial moonlight was glowing dimly. Fairfield was one of his graduate students, a promising, bright girl, a little overweight, short-sighted (hence the spectacles), serious, attentive. She had asked if she could accompany him to the very top of the chamber, nine storeys high — and he had said, of course, by all means, anyone else want to come? But none of the other graduates wanted to — they were more interested in seeing the rain falling. He supposed, now, with the bitter wisdom of hindsight, that she had planned everything. Adam and Fairfield had stood there, leaning on the viewing gantry, looking out over the grey, shifting cloud-mass, covering an area the size of two tennis courts, bathed in the bluey-white light of a notional moon. They were standing shoulder-to-shoulder, elbows resting on the safety railing, watching the clouds billow gently beneath the acrylic-glass roof of the cloud chamber. Adam pressed the button to release the huge feeder-arms and they swung out, circling clockwise, over the clouds, releasing their tiny granules of frozen silver iodide.
“It’s so fucking beautiful,” Fairfield whispered. “It’s like you’re playing god, Adam.”
He turned to face her, to correct her — this was a scientific, climatological experiment, not some proto-numinous ego-trip — and almost immediately they were kissing, her spectacles pressing hard into his cheeks and brow.
“I love you, Adam,” she said, breathing heavily, breaking apart to remove her clothing, “I’ve loved you since the day I saw you.”
They made love on the viewing gantry at the top of the cloud chamber — above the clouds — with a quickness and urgency that did not inhibit his orgasm in the slightest. Adam came with a gasp of surprise at the unparalleled, animalistic sensation of release (the next day he found his knees scratched and his elbows and legs bruised). When it was over they replaced whatever clothing they had removed and sat beside each other on the metal floor of the gantry in silence, regaining their breath and thoughts, and Fairfield smoked a cigarette, blithely ignoring the no-smoking signs, blowing the smoke considerately away from him, up and away over her right shoulder.
Fool, Adam said to himself, now, bitterly — it had been an almighty risk; any one of the other students might have taken the elevator up to the viewing gantry and surprised them. Had that moment with Fairfield been the fatal catalyst that had led him here, to this doorway in Bermondsey — the throw of the destiny-dice that found him sitting on his arse on the threshold of a derelict shop, wanted for murder, penniless, bearded, filthy, hungry, wearing cast-off clothes? But no, he reasoned, get real, Adam — you could trace the causal chain back to the day you were born if you had a mind to. That way led to madness. But then why, as a relatively happily married man in a respected and secure job, with a growing academic reputation, had he chosen to have sex with Fairfield Springer, one of his graduate students? What had possessed him? Why had he not simply said, “No, Fairfield, this cannot happen, please,” and pushed her gently away? Their lovemaking, if that was the correct expression for something so instinctive and unrefined, must have lasted barely a couple of minutes, before he collapsed, gasping, and rolled off her. They had adjusted their clothes, sat for a while in silence, then Fairfield had kissed him, her tobacco-y tongue deep in his mouth, and she had taken the elevator down to the laboratory to rejoin her fellow students. That was it — the act, the sex act, had never been repeated.
Damage control, Adam had thought the next morning over breakfast, sitting opposite his smart and pretty wife as they both prepared to go to their respective jobs. Yes, damage control, that was what was required: a meeting with Fairfield, sincere apologies issued, a moment of madness conceded, his fault entirely, affection expressed, a rueful comment on this unseemly breakdown in professorial — student relations. It would never, never happen again. But by then the first streams of texts — explicit, not obscene; passionate, not crazed — had already started arriving on his cellphone.
“Fucking hell,” Adam said to himself and opened his eyes to see a man staring at him a few feet away. Big guy, burly, built like a forward in a rugby team, fifties, with a square, lived-in face, semi-bald, longish hair, wearing a blazer and grey flannels and carrying a small leather bag over his shoulder.
“You all right?” this man said.
“Yeah, fine, thanks,” Adam said, managing a vague smile. And the man smiled back and went into the newsagent’s next door. He came out a few minutes later with an armful of newspapers and magazines and leant forward towards Adam, with something in his hand.
“Good luck, mate,” he said.
He gave Adam a £i coin.
Adam watched him stroll away. Adam thought: what’s going on here? He looked in some amazement at the small heavy coin in the palm of his hand, experiencing a kind of revelation. He had money now — and it had been given to him. He didn’t need to steal, he realised — he could beg.
When the Church of John Christ opened its doors at six o’clock Adam was the only potential parishioner waiting. The small door was ajar so he stepped through it into a vestibule where the toothless woman sat behind a desk.
“Hello, dear,” she said. “Welcome to the rest of your life.”
He noticed that she was wearing a plastic badge on her lapel that said ‘JOHN 17’. She scribbled something with a broad felt-tip pen and handed Adam a small card. In fact it was a cardboard badge, with a securing pin on its back. On the front she had written: ‘JOHN 1603’.
“You’ll get a proper plastic one like mine the next time you come,” she said. Adam fastened the badge to his white denim jacket. “Take a seat at the very front, John,” she said, indicating a door behind her.