‘Now for the sermon,’ shouted Pastor Finch, and we all settled back to enjoy ourselves. He told us about the doings of his tour, how many souls had been saved, how many good souls, oppressed by the demon, had found peace once again.
‘I’m not one to boast,’ he reminded us, ‘but the Lord has given me a mighty gift.’ We murmured our agreement. Then we were shocked as he described the epidemic of demons, even now spreading through the north west. Lancashire and Cheshire had been particular blighted; only the day before he had cleansed a whole family in Cheadle Hulme.
‘Ridden they were.’ His eyes roamed the hushed congregation. ‘Yes, ridden, and do you know why?’ He took a step back. We didn’t make a sound. ‘Unnatural Passions.’
A tremor shook the gathering. Not all of us were sure what he meant, but all of us knew it was dreadful. I glanced across at Melanie; she looked like she was going to be sick.
‘Must be the Spirit,’ I thought, and gave her hand a little squeeze. She jumped, and stared at me. Yes, definitely the Spirit.
At the end of his very fine sermon, Pastor Finch made an appeal, he urged any sinner to raise their hand, and ask forgiveness there and then. We bowed our heads in prayer, squinting up now and again, to see if it was working. Suddenly, I felt a hand on mine. It was Melanie.
‘I am going to do it,’ she hissed, and pushed her other arm into the air.
‘Yes, I see your hand,’ acknowledged Pastor Finch.
A ripple of joy ran through the church. There was no one else, so Melanie had plenty of attention at the end of the service. Not that she wanted it. ‘I feel terrible,’ she confided.
‘Don’t worry,’ breezed Alice, who was passing by, ‘It’s homeopathic.’
Poor Melanie, she didn’t understand any of them, she just knew she needed Jesus. Then she asked me to be her counsellor, and I agreed to go round to her house every Monday, while her mum was at the club where she worked. We left together, me on a cloud, and her with a handbag full of tracts on the gifts of the Spirit, and advice for new converts. As we reached the town hall, Pastor Finch shot past us, his gospel radio full on, windows wide open, and on the top of the van, a flag flying triumphant.
‘That’s his Salvation Flag,’ I told Melanie. ‘Whenever someone gets saved he hoists it up.’
‘Let’s get on the bus,’ she replied, a bit desperate.
So each Monday after that I went round to Melanie’s and we read the Bible together, and usually spent half an hour in prayer. I was delighted. She was my friend, and I wasn’t used to that, apart from Elsie. Somehow, this was different. I talked about her all the time at home, and my mother never responded. Then one day she bundled me into the kitchen and said we had to talk seriously.
‘There’s a boy at church I think you’re keen on.’
‘What?’ I said, completely mystified.
She meant Graham, a newish convert, who’d moved over to our town from Stockport. I was teaching him to play the guitar, and trying to make him understand the importance of regular Bible study.
‘It’s time,’ she went on, very solemn, ‘that I told you about Pierre and how I nearly came to a bad end.’ Then she poured us both a cup of tea and opened a packet of Royal Scot. I was enthralled.
‘It’s not something I’m proud of, and I’ll only say it once.’
My mother had been headstrong, and had got a job teaching in Paris, which was a very daring thing to do at the time. She had lived off the Rue St Germain, eaten croissants and lived a clean life. She wasn’t with the Lord then, but she had high standards. Then, one sunny day, without warning, she had been walking towards the river when she met Pierre, or rather Pierre had jumped from his bicycle, offered her his onions, and named her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
‘Naturally, I was flattered.’
They exchanged addresses, and began to court one another. It was then that my mother experienced a feeling she had never known before: a fizzing and a buzzing and a certain giddiness. Not only with Pierre, but anywhere, at any time.
‘Well, I thought it must be love.’
But this puzzled her because Pierre wasn’t very clever, and didn’t have much to say, except to exclaim how beautiful she was. Perhaps he was handsome? But no, looking in the magazines, she realised he wasn’t that either. But the feeling wouldn’t go away. Then, on a quiet night, after a quiet supper, Pierre had siezed her and begged her to stay with him that night. The fizzing began, and as he clutched her to him, she felt sure she would never love another, and yes she would stay and after that, they would marry.
‘Lord forgive me, but I did it.’
My mother stopped, overcome with emotion. I begged her to finish the story, proffering the Royal Scots.
‘The worst is still to come.’
I speculated on the worst, while she chewed her biscuit. Perhaps I wasn’t a child of God at all, but the daughter of a Frenchman.
A couple of days afterward, my mother had gone to see the doctor in a fit of guilty anxiety. She lay on the couch while the doctor prodded her stomach and chest, asking if she ever felt giddy, or fizzy in the belly. My mother coyly explained that she was in love, and that she often felt strange, but that wasn’t the reason for her visit.
‘You may well be in love,’ said the doctor, ‘but you also have a stomach ulcer.’
Imagine my mother’s horror. She had given away her all for an ailment. She took the tablets, followed the diet, and refused Pierre’s entreaties to visit her. Needless to say, the next time they met, and again by chance, she felt nothing, nothing at all, and shortly fled the country to avoid him.
‘Then am I …?’ I began.
‘There was no issue,’ she said quickly.
For a few moments we sat silent, then:
‘So just you take care, what you think is the heart might well be another organ.’
It might, mother, it might, I thought. She got up and told me to go and find something to do. I decided to go and see Melanie, but just as I reached the door she called me back with a word of warning.
‘Don’t let anyone touch you Down There,’ and she pointed to somewhere at the level of her apron pocket.
‘No Mother,’ I said meekly, and fled.
When I reached Melanie’s it was getting dark. I had to cut through the churchyard to get there, and sometimes I’d steal her a bunch of flowers from the new graves. She was always pleased, but then, I never told her where they came from. She asked me if I wanted to stay overnight because her mum was away and she didn’t like being in the house on her own. I said I’d ring a neighbour, and after much trouble finally got an agreement from my mother, who had to be fetched from her lettuces. We read the Bible as usual, and then told each other how glad we were that the Lord had brought us together. She stroked my head for a long time, and then we hugged and it felt like drowning. Then I was frightened but couldn’t stop. There was something crawling in my belly. I had an octopus inside me.
And it was evening and it was morning; another day.
After that we did everything together, and I stayed with her as often as I could. My mother seemed relieved that I was seeing less of Graham, and for a while made no mention of the amount of time I spent with Melanie.
‘Do you think this is Unnatural Passion?’ I asked her once.
‘Doesn’t feel like it. According to Pastor Finch, that’s awful.’ She must be right, I thought.
Melanie and I had volunteered to set up the Harvest Festival Banquet, and we worked hard in the church throughout the day. When everyone arrived and started to pass the potato pie, we stood on the balcony, looking down on them. Our family. It was safe.
Here is a table set at feast, and the guests are arguing about the best recipe for goose. Now and again a tremour shakes the chandelier, dropping tiny flakes of plaster into the sherbet. The guests look up more in interest than alarm. It’s cold in here, very cold. The women suffer most. Their shoulders bared and white like hard-boiled eggs. Outside, under the snow,
the river lies embalmed. These are the elect, and in the hall an army sleeps on straw.
Outside a rush of torches.
Laughter drifts into the hall. The elect have always been this way.
Getting old, dying, starting again. Not noticing.
Father and Son. Father and Son.
It has always been this way, nothing can intrude.
Father Son and Holy Ghost.
Outside, the rebels storm the Winter Palace.
DEUTERONOMY
The last book of the law
TIME IS A great deadener. People forget, get bored, grow old, go away. There was a time in England when everyone was much concerned with building wooden boats and sailing off against the Turk. When that stopped being interesting, what peasants there were left limped back to the land, and what nobles there were left plotted against each other.
Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don’t believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it’s still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind. Some people make a lot of money out of it. Publishers do well, children, when bright, can come top. It’s an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history.
People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe. This is very curious. How is it that no one will believe that the whale swallowed Jonah when every day Jonah is swallowing the whale? I can see them now, stuffing down the fishiest of fish tales, and why? Because it is history. Knowing what to believe had its advantages. It built an empire and kept people where they belonged, in the bright realm of the wallet…
Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way. And in some ghastly way Pol Pot was more honest than the rest of us have been. Pol Pot decided to dispense with the past altogether. To dispense with the sham of treating the past with objective respect. In Cambodia the cities were to be wiped out, maps thrown away, everything gone. No documents. Nothing. A brave new world. The old world was horrified. We pointed the finger, but big fleas have little fleas on their back to bite them.
People have never had a problem disposing of the past when it gets too difficult. Flesh will burn, photos will burn, and memory, what is that? The imperfect ramblings of fools who will not see the need to forget. And if we can’t dispose of it we can alter it. The dead don’t shout. There is a certain seductiveness about what is dead. It will retain all those admirable qualities of life with none of that tiresome messiness associated with live things. Crap and complaints and the need for affection. You can auction it, museum it, collect it. It’s much safer to be a collector of curios, because if you are curious, you have to sit and sit and see what happens. You have to wait on the beach until it gets cold, and you have to invest in a glass-bottomed boat, which is more expensive than a fishing rod, and puts you in the path of the elements. The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.
Or the people who found Atlantis.
When the Pilgrim Fathers set sail it was not without the opinion of many that they were crazy. History has now decided otherwise. Curious people who are explorers must bring back more than a memory or a story, they must bring home potatoes or tobacco or, best of all, gold.
But happiness is not a potato.
And El Dorado is more than Spanish gold which is why it could not exist. The ones who came home were mad with a vision that had no meaning. And so, being sensible, the collector of curios will surround himself with dead things, and think about the past when it lived and moved and had being. The collector of curios lives in a derelict railway station with a video of various trains. He is the original living dead.
So the past, because it is past, is only malleable where once it was flexible. Once it could change its mind, now it can only undergo change. The lens can be tinted, tilted, smashed. What matters is that order is seen to prevail… and if we are eighteenth-century gentlemen, drawing down the blinds as our coach jumbles over the Alps, we have to know what we are doing, pretending an order that doesn’t exist, to make a security that cannot exist.
There is an order and a balance to be found in stories.
History is St George.
And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished. Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth. God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced with mustard of my own.
The salt beef of civilisation rumbling round in the gut. Constipation was a great problem after the Second World War. Not enough roughage in the diet, too much refined food. If you always eat out you can never be sure what’s going in, and received information is nobody’s exercise.
Rotten and rotting.
Here is some advice. If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches …
JOSHUA
‘THERE, ‘ DECLARED MY mother, laying down the vacuum cleaner. ‘You could keep a coffin in here without feeling guilty, not a speck of dust anywhere.’
Mrs White came out of the lobby waving a dishcloth. ‘I’ve done all them skirting boards, but me back’s not what it was.’
‘No,’ my mother answered, shaking her head, ‘these things are sent to try us.’
‘Well at least we know they’re holy,’ said Mrs White.
The parlour was certainly very clean. I poked my head round the door and noticed that all the seat covers had been changed to our very best, my mother’s wedding best, a present from her friends in France. The brasses gleamed, and Pastor Spratt’s crocodile nutcracker took pride of place on the mantelpiece.
‘What’s all the fuss about,’ I wondered. I went to check the calendar, but as far as I could see we weren’t down for a house meeting, and there was no visiting preacher due on Sunday. I went into the kitchen where Mrs White was making a sad cake, a round flat pastry filled with currants and spread with butter.
For a moment she didn’t notice me.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’
Mrs White turned round and gave a little screech. ‘You’re supposed to be at violin practice.’
‘It’s cancelled. Anybody else here?’
‘Your mother’s gone out.’ She sounded a bit nervous, but then she often did.
‘Well I’ll take the dog out then,’ I decided.
‘I’m just going to the toilet,’ said Mrs White, disappearing out of the back door.
‘There’s no paper …‘I began, but it Was too late.
We set off up the hill, climbing and climbing until the town was beaten flat. The dog ran off down a trench and I tried to spot various landmarks, like the dentist and the Rechabite Hall. I thought I might go and see Melanie that night. I had told my mother as much as I could, but not everything. I had a feeling she wouldn’t really understand. Besides, I wasn’t quite cert
ain what was happening myself, it was the second time in my life that I had experienced uncertainty.
Uncertainty to me was like Aardvark to other people. A curious thing I had no notion of, but recognized through second-hand illustration. The feeling I now had in my head and stomach was the same as on that Awful Occasion, and that time, as I stood by the tea urn in the vestry, I had heard Miss Jewsbury say, ‘Of course, she must feel very uncertain.’ I was very upset. Uncertainty was what the Heathen felt, and I was chosen by God.
That Awful Occasion was the time my natural mother had come to claim me back. I’d had an idea that there was something curious about the circumstance of my birth, and once found my adoption papers hidden under a stack of flannels in the holiday drawer. ‘Formalities,’ my mother had said, waving me away. ‘You were always mine, I had you from the Lord.’ I didn’t think about it again until there was a knock on the door one Saturday. My mother got there before me because she was praying in the parlour. I followed her down the lobby.
‘Who is it Mum?’
She didn’t answer.
‘Who is it?’
‘Go inside until I tell you.’
I slunk off, thinking it was either Jehovah’s Witnesses or the man from the Labour party. Before long I could hear voices, angry voices; my mother seemed to have let the person in, which was strange. She didn’t like having the Heathen in the house. ‘Leaves a bad atmosphere,’ she always said.
I remembered something I’d seen Mrs White do on the fornication occasion. Reaching far back into the War Cupboard, behind the dried egg, I found a wine glass and put it against the wall. It worked. I could hear every word. After five minutes I put the glass away, picked up our dog, and cried and cried and cried.
Eventually my mother came in.
‘She’s gone.’
‘I know who she was, why didn’t you tell me?’
‘It’s nothing to do with you.’
‘She’s my mother.’
No sooner had I said that than I felt a blow that wrapped round my head like a bandage. I lay on the lino looking up into the face.