A Taste of Heaven a short story by James Lovegrove Think'st thou that I that saw the face of God And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells In being deprived of everlasting bliss? -- Mephistophilis (Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus) Harold hadn't been down to the homeless shelter for several weeks. I asked about him, asked anyone that I knew to be a friend of his if they'd seen him, and got only shaken heads and frowns in reply. "Think he might've gone up north," was one suggestion, but I knew Harold: with winter approaching, the last direction he would be heading in was northwards. London, for all its faults, at least had the advantage of being a few degrees warmer than Manchester or Newcastle, and once winter set in Harold stayed here usually until the first buds appeared on the trees. More to the point, he never left the city for long. A week or two, three at the most, and then, his wanderlust satisfied, his footsteps would turn towards the capital again, London a Saturn whose heavy gravitational pull he could not escape. No, there was definitely something wrong, and once I had begun to fear the worst, every little symptom of poor health that Harold had exhibited the last time I'd seen him took on a new and sinister significance. That cough of his -- it had been getting worse, hadn't it? Had been turning bronchial, definitely. And the sore on his forehead -- just a lesion? Or a sarcoma? God, I'd lost count of the number of times I'd heard about one of the shelter regulars turning his or her toes up overnight, for no reason other than that the unending hardships of the vagrant lifestyle had finally taken their toll. Harold had been in no worse shape than most of them, but that didn't mean he couldn't still be lying undiscovered beneath a shambles of newsprint in an alley somewhere, clenched in a foetal knot of death. I missed him, and though I didn't give up hope that he might still be alive, quietly, privately, I began to mourn him. Of all the strange and mad and sad and extraordinary human beings who passed through the doors of the homeless shelter, Harold was perhaps the most remarkable. In his time, before answering the call of the road, he had been a fireman, a trawlerman, a professor of Linguistics at a minor provincial university, war correspondent for a French magazine, and campaign manager for a Colombian presidential candidate; he had worked as a missionary in Zaire and had also enjoyed a career as a petty criminal back here at home; he had fitted curtains, carpets and men's suits, had sold double glazing, life insurance and Jesus door to door, and had earned an Olympic Bronze for pistol-shooting, a gold disc for a song he co-wrote that was made popular by Marti Wilde in the sixties, and the respect of a number of peers of the realm for his sound advice on the preservation of British wetlands (his suggestions led to a Bill being passed in Parliament). And these were just the achievements I knew about. Harold darkly hinted that there were more, and that he had done some things so shady, so hush-hush, that if he told me what they were he would have to kill me. He said that he had run errands for people so nebulously important and powerful that even politicians in the highest echelons of government didn't know they existed, and that his eyes had passed over official documents the contents of which were so alarming they would have turned my hair white. He said this in that calm, cultured voice of his that only served to reinforce the impression that he was truly au fait with the secret workings of the world, the unseen cogs which turned the hands on the clockface of everything that ordinary people perceived. He was, of course, lying his arse off. Everybody knew that. Even I, who have the word "gullible" stamped across my forehead, had ceased to believe anything Harold told me after the first couple of fables I had fallen for. Harold lived to lie. It was his craft, his art, his true vocation. He did not do it idly or maliciously, to start gossip or spread a rumour or destroy a reputation. He lied the way you or I might collect records or read books. It was his recreation. It took him out of himself. It cleared his head of mind-junk, spring-cleaned the attics of his brain. It was a diversion, an entertainment, a stage act. Harold didn't expect anyone to believe his stories, but he told them anyway, and out of politeness or admiration or a weird kind of gratitude no one turned round to him and said, "Shut your mouth, Harold, I can't breathe for the stink." Once you'd been seduced by a tale of his -- and Harold was always careful to hook a new listener with one of his more plausible lines -- you couldn't help but admire the eloquence and the unselfconscious audacity with which he wove his webs of untruth, and marvel at the lengths he would go to in order to keep you, and himself, amused. Nothing in Harold's imaginary world could be proved. Nothing, equally, could be disproved, so it was foolish to try to reason or argue with him. Any objection would only be met with a bigger lie, and if you persisted in protesting, claiming that what he was telling you contradicted another story he had told you earlier or else was blatantly impossible, his tales would just grow taller and taller and taller until he had built a wall of mendacity so high it could not be scaled, and you gave up exhausted. Resistance was futile. It was easier simply to accept what Harold said at face value and, if you were in the mood, perhaps let drop a well-chosen question that would encourage him to yet more outrageous flights of fancy. And maybe, just maybe, if you got lucky, this lifelong liar might trip himself up and accidentally find himself telling the truth. You never know. I've always thought that Harold would have made a fine novelist or playwright. He had the vocabulary for it, the skill with language. He spoke the way most people write, in well-formed, thought-through sentences, which made it all the more logical for me to suggest, as I did once, that he set the story of his life down on paper (by which I meant compose a work of fiction). Harold's reply was uncharacteristically straightforward and self-effacing: "What would be the point, Mark? If I wrote it down, who would believe it?" And now he was gone, or so it seemed. As the days shortened and the trees shed and the sky turned hazy like a cataracted eye, and still Harold did not show, the hope that I had been nurturing like the last ember in a grate gradually dwindled and cooled. Every evening, having left the office and arrived at the shelter in time to help with the dinner shift, I would walk slowly along the rows of tables, checking each bearded face I saw, smiling if its owner caught my eye and offered a greeting, but smiling without any joy or conviction. And then, as I served out food to the shuffling, murmuring queue, each face would come under scrutiny again. Harold might, after all, have shaved his beard. He might have got rid of -- far more likely lost -- the battered, greasy Homburg ...
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