The Last Act of Love.

Dr Love placed the folders carefully on the table between a tape cassettes, with ear-muffler headphones plugged into it, and an unplugged kettle the lead snaking behind the base of a circular metal tray. An ashtray sat flush against the wall and made the room lived in. Richie dipped into the top pocket of his shirt, pulling out the packet of Embassy Regal waving the open carton at Dr Love. ‘You want one?’

‘I’ll stick to my own.’ He scooted round a red plastic-stack chair and pushed the top drawers of the filing cabinet shut making more space for them. Pulling open the top drawer of the desk he lifted his cigarettes and sparked his lighter. He smoked foreign, Gauloises, and held the flame up for Ritchie to cadge a light.

‘Is that you?’ Richie inhaled, waving his fag towards a photograph on the wall.

Dr Love nodded. ‘Yes, a dig in Mesopotamia.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘The Tigris. Modern Syria. Iraq.’ Dr Love pulled out a chair from the desk for Richie to sit on and sat in the chair facing him.

‘Yeh, know where that is.’ Richie felt as if he’d flunked the exam he hadn’t prepared for, but blundered on. ‘But I thought you were a Doctor of…’ He tried to remember what Lawson had called it, but his memory jammed, like fingers in a till. He muttered, hazarded a guess ‘…sociology?’

 ‘I suppose you’re partially right,’ Dr Love said.

‘You don’t mind if I take some notes?’ Richie leaned over and pulled from his back pockets some torn up sheets of copy paper, he numbered and used when taking shorthand. He liked to use pencil, felt it made him look more artist than reporter and was less obtrusive.

‘I haven’t taught sociology,’ Dr Love corrected him, ‘but I have taught philosophy which is the starting point of most social science, indeed the base of modern science. I’ve also taught Modern Studies up to Higher level. And I’ve taught the rudimentary art of English to those that lacked those particular skills.’ He lifted his eyebrows. ‘Well most people here lack those skills, but in general this college has been really rather good to me.’

Richie looked up from his notes. ‘Why is that?’

‘Because they gave me a job. As I found to my cost most colleges find it difficult to employ someone with an obscure qualification from a Southern Mississippi college in America, even though it is a Phd.’

‘What’s your qualification in?’

‘Theogony,’ said Dr Love.

Not able to work out how to put it into shorthand, Richie wrote the word in full. He took a drag of his fag, shrugging his shoulders, exhaling, ‘I’m not sure what that is.’

‘Yes, I often have that problem,’ admitted Dr Love. Theogonia from the Greek theos “god” and gonia “begetting”.

Richie blinked and shook his head. ‘I’m still not sure what you’re getting at.’

‘Come now,’ said Dr Love in a cajoling tone, stabbing his fag out in the ashtray. ‘You know what theology is not doubt?’ His grey eyes peered at Richie.

He looked up and over Dr Love’s head. The sky darkened, rain beginning to slide down the window outside and the noise of traffic could be faintly heard. ‘I’m not sure,’ he finally admitted. ‘Something to do with God.’

‘Hmm,’ Dr Love sighed through his nose. ‘Yes, in a way. It’s related to religious beliefs about the nature of God.’

‘Right,’ said Richie, making a note in his pad, but not sounding very convinced. ‘And what’s the difference between your thing?’ Talking with his hands, his right hand half-circled in agitation. ‘And that other thing?’  

‘Well, Christian theologians, for example, posit there’s only one god. The gods I study are far older and far more diverse. But if you take the longer term perspective you can follow like Ariadne’s thread the creation and resurrection myths from the older to the newer religions.’

‘Right,’ said Richie. ‘So that’s what you were out doing in Iraq?’

‘Yes, in a way. I was helping with an archaeological dig, identifying sacred objects that invoked the owner, those people that lived and worshipped, but also the gods that they had worshipped.’

‘Sounds quite interesting,’ said Richie. ‘So what age where you in that photo?’

Dr Love leaned across and unhooked it from the wall. He cupped it in his fingers, his features softening as he smiled down at his younger self dressed with pith helmet and khaki. ‘I must have been twenty-three. It was our first time abroad.’   

‘You said “our”?’

Dr Love sniffed. ‘Yes, my wife, the twins and me.’

Richie’s pencil stood poised over the paper, a stillness between them.  

‘Malaria.’ He shook his head. ‘They didn’t make it back.’

‘Did you remarry?’ He regretted the carefree jigging tone he’d used, as if the old boy could have simply went out and bought some new toys.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No point. I was sure the world was going to end. You see I too had malaria. I too died, but was brought back. In my delirium the old gods told me that they were going to punish mankind for their neglect. They walked among them, but could no longer find a space in their hearts.  And I wanted them to. I wanted mankind to suffer.’ The old man’s voice rose and his cheeks flushed. ‘I was filled with a suffocating hatred. I was like Jonah entering the city of Nineveh and crying out for the four horsemen of the apocalypse and its destruction.’

‘How? I mean,’ said Richie, his question coming out in a rush, ‘how was it going to end? What were they planning to do?’

‘They said they would withdraw love from the world.’   

Ritchie smiled, he could almost taste that first beer. The old man’s retirement was turning into a far more interesting story than he’d anticipated. ‘And when do these old gods plan to do this?’

‘Oh, about twenty-three years ago.’

‘Right,’ said Ritchie. His pencil drummed on his piece of paper. ‘Can’t say I noticed much.’

In a more upbeat voice he enquired about Dr Love’s retirement, his plans for the future. He finished up with a quick handshake his fingers slipping away.

Dr Love turned his back on him, started pulling out folders and stacking them on the table. ‘I didn’t understand it either. Those gods and their ways. Then I realised that time had stopped in the passing for me, when my wife and sons died. And for the gods, living in eternities, as they do, twenty-three years is now.  I was frozen in time and now I have cancer of the oesophagus, the breath of life and my voice are in a race each slipping away from me.  

Richie stood in the doorway, not sure what to say.

‘I was cynical, just like you. I asked for a sign that love had left the world. And like Jonah I was whispered a story about the last act of love. It involved a little boy. Because what had happened to him at home he was scared of everything. He was at school. When he needed to go to the toilet, shit ran down his leg. Other kids made faces, held their noses and shrank away from him. The boy in the seat next to him jumped into the aisle. “Miss. Miss,” he shouted.’ But there was no need. The teacher had already seen what had happened. Like the children in her care she too nipped her nostrils shut. But she didn’t shy away.  She got up slowly, her eyes never leaving the boy’s face. He panicked, rubbed his hands in shit and scrawled it across his face and daubed it on his head. Then screaming and crying he made his run towards the door. The children shrieked, some of them weeping, but your teacher caught you. She held you close because she could see you. She held your pain and with it the promise that it would never happen again. She saved you.  Didn’t she Richard?’     

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