Author: Aidan Chambers
Category: Young Adult
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Suddenly there you were, and I couldn’t think why I cared. Not at the time. I remember lying in my bath that Saturday afternoon, half of me still smouldering with anger at the pagans, and the other half wondering what on earth it was about you that disturbed me so much. I mean, you aren’t especially good looking. Sorry about that! You’re fairly clever, I suppose, but you aren’t a genius. And you’re younger than I am. I don’t mean only in years, but in yourself. You’re still a schoolboy.
So I’m no fashion plate, and I’m not even as clever as you, but I do have a job, however lowly, and have had for two years. I feel like a grown-up woman, not a schoolgirl any more. [Laughs.] Yes, I know. But everyone can be wrong!
Apart from those things, you were big-headed. All the way home you made fun of everybody else. The leptonic OBD, the kids in the film group, Leonard Stanley, the CND organizers, the NF mob, the police. You were quite funny, I admit, but you were unkind too. So when you asked if you could see me again I only said yes because I thought you’d give up when you knew going to church was part of the bargain.
It wasn’t until 1 was in the bath that I realized I wanted to see you again, and wanted to see you in more than an ordinary way. I worried about that for a while, feeling as if I were betraying God or myself in some way. But then I thought, ‘That’s ridiculous. God will just have to take her chance.’ And so will I. Because if I can’t survive a crush on a bigheaded schoolboy, then I’m not likely to survive all the difficulties that’ll be thrown at me if I work for God. So, I thought, ‘Perhaps this quirky schoolboy is a sort of test, perhaps he’s a temptation I can use to find out how determined I am. In which case, I might just as well relax about him and get on and see what happens.’
If I’m honest, though, I have to admit I didn’t think you were much of a challenge. Didn’t think you’d last long after church, even if you actually turned up. But here I am weeks later, still battling! And I’ve enjoyed every minute. Truly.
[Pause.]
What I’m trying to tell you is that I’ve got the same sort of feeling now that I had about you in my bath. And just like then, I don’t know why. But this time the feeling says the test is near its crisis. That there’ll be an end . . . No, that’s wrong. Not an end but another beginning . . . Very soon. Which is why I want you to know, before it happens, the way things are. So that whatever happens there’s no deception, and no pretence. Only honesty and truth. Or the truth as near as I can get to it.
Does this make sense? Do you understand?
I’ll worry till I know.
REVELATIONS
That first Sunday morning, when Nik met Julie at her front door, she said, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but would you mind if we didn’t talk at all till after church? I’ll explain later.’
‘If that’s what you want,’ Nik said.
So they walked side by side, unspeaking, along empty streets, up through town to St James’s, set on a hill above the hospital and below the cemetery.
Nik smiled to himself as they approached, thinking, ‘On the trip from sickness to death stands the church of God, and it’s uphill all the way.’
Julie plodded along with such abstracted concentration that she might have been by herself. Her gait was urgently mechanical, her eyes fixed on the ground ahead, unseeing.
What was going on? Nik wondered. What was she thinking about? Was she worried? Or feeling ill and forcing herself to church? Or fed up? She certainly didn’t look pleased or happy.
No, she looked more like someone utterly absorbed in a book. Consumed. That was the word.
Julie yomping to church puzzled him. Which made him all the more curious.
NIK’S NOTEBOOK: Must the insides of churches be like deep-freeze warehouses? St James’s is a late-Victorian stone pile with walls painted white to try and brighten the place up. But all this does is make it look cold as well as feel cold. Is this what Jesus Christ intended for his fans?
‘Thou shalt build in my name large, cold mausoleums that shalt cost thee a bomb to keep up. These thou shalt perfume with the odour of damp dust, dirty underwear and dry rot. There shalt thou gather with glum faces, sit near the back, utter long prayers in mournful voices, sing tedious songs out of tune and very slowly, and generally give thyselves a thoroughly bad time.’
Not that I’ve been in many churches. None at all for ages, in fact. Maybe they’ve changed. Maybe they’re terrific fun places now. But not St James’s, that’s for sure. I think the people who go there must be masochists. Or else they all have terrible guilt complexes and think going to church is a penance that they suffer for their sins in order to keep in with God.
One of the troubles I have with Christianity is that I don’t feel guilty about anything. Maybe I’m a religious defective?
Selah.
There were sixteen people. I counted while Julie was kneeling down, doing her kick-start prayers after we got settled in a pew near the back. She wanted to take me nearer the front but I wouldn’t let her. Who might be there and see me? I’d never live it down.
Early morning communion. You’d never get me up before ten on a Sunday morning for anything normally, and sitting there with the shivers waiting for the performance to start while Julie did her hands-together act beside me, I began to wonder why ever I’d got up so early this morning. Is Julie worth such sacrifice?
Mostly the sixteen were old women on their own. One young couple carrying a nearly new baby. Nobody paid any attention to anybody else. I thought Christianity was supposed to be about brotherly and sisterly love and doing unto others etc. Going by this morning’s evidence, what Christians want others to do to them is pretend they aren’t there. Not that I was there long enough to find out if things warmed up because I disgraced myself soon after the service started.
The trouble was caused by an old nun kneeling in the pew in front of me. Julie said afterwards that she was on holiday from her convent. I knew she was a nun because she was dressed in a dowdy grey frock and thick wool stockings and black clodhopper shoes. Her head was covered in a blue scarf-thing with a white face band. Nothing like the old-fashioned nuns in books, who always look weirdly fetching to me. I mean the ones in flowing robes tied with rope and with crucifixes and beads and holy baubles dangling all over them. And their faces peeking out from their fly-away wimples. The climb-every-mountain sort of nuns.
Well this modern C. of E. nun wasn’t anything like that. She wasn’t just dull, she was actively unattractive. I expect they think they should look as unfetching as possible so as to avoid dreadful temptations of the FLESH. The sins of the flesh always sound so cannibalistic. Not that you’d want a nibble at this old dame or make a pass at her of any kind unless you were ninety and feeling pretty desperate.
I wouldn’t have paid her much attention except she was right in front of me and her insides kept gurgling like a water system with dicky plumbing. After a while, the eruptions went into another phase. She’d rumble, then there’d be a short pause. Then she’d let off a string of three or four very lady-like little farts. Nothing gross. And very quietly. So quiet in fact that I don’t think she could hear them herself. But I could, being in direct line of fire. Maybe she was gunning for the heathen spy behind her.
At first I just smiled. Things got started. Old Vic came in dressed in a white nightgown with a piece of green curtain like a poncho over his shoulders and pottered about at the altar. He looked a lot better doing that than he looked when I talked to him. More at home, really. I could see he believed it all, just the same way you can tell when a good actor likes his part and is really into it. Completely absorbed. So I was getting interested in what was happening, and forgetting about the cold and how early it was. Meanwhile, old rumble-turn was bubbling and popping off in front of me.
But then the prayers started. I managed the Lord’s Prayer all right. It’s a great piece of writing when you come to think of it because it’s so easy to remember and always seems okay to say even when you’re not in the mood and don’t
actually believe all the other religious stuff. Like a great poem, I suppose.
At any rate, we got through that without any trouble. But then Old Vic launched into: ‘Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open [rumble, gurgle], a desires known [glug] and from whom no secrets are hid [pause]: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts . . .’
And she pooped.
That did it. I started to get the giggles. Julie gave me the kind of sideways glare your mum does when you’re little and being naughty, which didn’t help. So I buried my face in my hands like a humble sinner having the thoughts of his heart cleansed, and hoped the noise of my half-stifled guffaws would be taken for the sound of a holy purgative at work.
Which I’m sure would have done the trick. Unfortunately, just as I was composing myself again, there came an ominously prolonged growl from the old girl’s innards, followed by a cliff-hanger of a pause. Then she let loose a very unlady-like raspberry.
This Julie also heard. She gave the old girl a startled look, then glanced at me, who was watching events through my fingers. We eyed each other for a second. And then she broke up. She stuffed the knuckle of her thumb in her mouth and hung on to the prayer position, eyes front.
This sight did nothing for my equilibrium. Which was not at all helped, either, by my memory recalling at this inopportune moment that hymn they make you sing at infant school: ‘God be in my head, / and in my understanding; / God be in my eyes,/ and in my looking; / God be in my mouth, / and in my speaking; / God be in my heart and . . .’ Poop-poop.
At which I really collapsed. I flung myself down behind the pew and rammed as much of my sweater into my mouth as it could take without suffocating myself. Here I slunk while the bout of laughter wracked my tortured frame.
O God, I thought, don’t let me . . . don’t let me . . .
(I’ve just realized this was the first time I’ve prayed since I was ten and asked for Mum back. When she didn’t come, I decided God wasn’t there after all or he’d have done something about it. As if God was nothing more than a megastar Santa Claus.)
So there I am, doubled up in this prayer box with a mouth full of sodden sweater, shaking with frustrated giggles, while Julie kneels beside me as rigid as a memorial, and the old nun goes on happily rumbling and pooping, and at the altar Old Vic tells the lord we’re humbly sorry for all our sins, when this wizzened old guy appears in the aisle bending towards me with a worried look on his face and a glass of water in his hand and hissing: All right? . . . Like a drink?
Had to leave, nothing else for it. I’d have died if I hadn’t or had hysterics. Death or cachinnation. Neither quite the thing in church. Not that church anyway. And I didn’t want to make life worse for Julie, did I. A knave in the nave.
‘I’m not sure you’re fit to be let out in public,’ Julie said afterwards.
‘Why?’ Nik said. ‘Doesn’t God have a sense of humour?’
‘As she made you, I suppose she must have.’
‘She?’
‘Why not? If God is everything, that must mean God is a she as well as a he, mustn’t it? So if you call God he, I don’t see why I shouldn’t call her she.’
‘Or it, as he/she is everything and must therefore be stones and stars as well as male and female?’
‘Why not?’
Nik shrugged. ‘It’s your God. But I didn’t know you lot went in for such explosive worship.’
‘She’s a very old nun and a bit deaf.’
‘And full of the power of the lord.’
‘See what you’re like at her age. If you live that long.’
‘The trouble was, I thought maybe you’d want us all to join in with a rousing chorus of—’
‘You’re not going to turn crude, are you?’
‘Is it a sin on Sundays?’
‘No. Just tedious.’
‘You weren’t exactly the soul of solemnity yourself.’
‘D’you always talk like that or only on your off days?’
‘Depends on the company I keep. But it was funny, though. Admit it.’
‘It was funny. But she’s a dear old woman, and a friend of mine, and very devout. She’d be horrified if she knew.’
‘Won’t say a word, honest.’
They were walking back to Julie’s house.
‘Tell you what,’ Nik said. ‘You’ve taken me to your church. Now I’ll take you to mine.’
‘Surprise, surprise! Where?’
‘Selsley Common.’
Julie laughed. ‘With the kite flyers and the babies being aired and the dogs out for walkies.’
‘And the cows. Don’t forget the cows. Free range cows as well. None of your battery farm religion up there. Not like your place, with everybody stuck in a pew being fattened up for heaven.’
‘So you’re a closet pantheist really. That explains your mucky mind.’
‘No, no. You’ve got me all wrong. I’m not a pantheist. I’m a pentheist.’
‘Oh dear!’
‘Well, actually, if you must know, I just like a good view. Besides, when we get back to your place you might not invite me in, whereas, if we go up on the common—’
‘It’ll take the rest of this morning and half this afternoon, and I’ve promised to help with the cooking. So we’ll go in my car, if you don’t mind, and be back by eleven. Will that do?’
‘You’ve got a car?’
‘Don’t get excited, it’s not a Porsche.’
‘I don’t care if it’s a motorized orange box, it’s better than my leg-powered bike.’
‘Never mind. When you’re grown up you can put an engine in your pram and be just like all the other big boys.’
‘Wow, thanks! Will I have to wait long?’
‘About another twenty years at your present rate of progress.’
‘That long!’
‘Be glad. Most of your sex never grow out of being little boys.’
‘Don’t you like men?’
‘When I can find any. There aren’t that many around.’
NIK’S NOTEBOOK: She’s not butch, I don’t mean that. Just tough-minded. You wouldn’t think so to look at her. And she’s poker-voiced but not poker-faced. So just to hear her, you’d think she was as hard as nails. When you look at her, you know she’s a kidder.
Her car is a prehistoric Mini she claims she maintains herself with a little help from her brother who just happens to be a motor mechanic. She treats it like she was ignoring it. Drives like that too. Functional precision.
I said: She goes well.
She, she said, refers to human beings. This is a machine and hasn’t a soul.
I said: You don’t like machines?
She said: They’re all right. Very useful. But machines are machines. If you treat them like people you end up treating people like machines. Which I’m against.
I didn’t argue about that because I don’t know if she’s right, but I shall have a think about it and when I’ve decided it’ll make a nice subject for another day. And that’s something else I like about her. Two things in fact. She makes me think. And she likes a good argument.
Selah.
Being such a Christian nation, the great British public was still fervently worshipping the lord between the sheets so, of course, the common was the way I like it. I.e.: Empty of the human animal. Except inevitably for one or two compulsive underwear flashers. It’s amazing. It doesn’t matter where you go or what time it is there’s always at least one panting and puffing middle-aged duffer lolloping across the landscape like a lost soul everlastingly on the hunt for the way out.
Note for film: If Christ came back today, he’d have to turn up as a body-building health-freak jogging fanatic with a regular programme on TV. Otherwise, none of the great proletarian masses would pay him any attention at all. So I suggest we start the film with a TV ad in which our recycled Christ performs his first miracle: turning a titchy chickenwhite wimp of a man into a bronzed Tarzan by one application of New Messiah suntan oil and then telling him to tak
e up his metal and pump. That done, he says, Follow me, and they go off together, jogging into an explosive sunrise, as the title CHRIST COMES AGAIN appears on the screen.
Selah.
We parked at the far end, near the cattle grid, and walked to the edge. The usual great view, clear enough today to see Wales and the Black Mountains. In the valley, the glint of the Severn snaking; the twin towers of Berkeley nuke power station, square tombs picked out by the sun; the bluff of the scarp fluffed with trees gloomy in shadow close by on the bend, hiding Bristol; in the other direction Haresfield Beacon blocking the view to Gloucester. And through the upriver gap, the Malvern hills breasting up from the plain. A sharp blue sky edging on the horizon to pale grey.
We were standing side by side taking it all in when a strange thing happened.
In a field steeply below us was a man. He was bending over, his hands in the grass. As we watched, he suddenly sprang up, a rabbit grasped in one hand by its back legs. As he rose, he swung the rabbit up into the air, caught its head in his other hand and brought it down, across his raised leg, snapping its neck sharply across his knee. Then he held the rabbit out at arm’s length by the back legs.
The animal gave a number of convulsive kicks that made its body jerk and its loose head flop about. And the man, waiting for the death to end, looked up the hillside, where he saw us watching. He grinned, and raised his empty hand and waved, and when we didn’t wave or move at all, he held the dying rabbit high above his head and shook it at us in triumph, making its head flip-flap again. Then he turned and set off down the field in a bounding kind of run, the rabbit jigging about in his hand, till he reached a gate in the hedge, vaulted over, and disappeared from sight.
For a while neither of us, so stunned, even blinked. Then Julie let out a painful, bitten cry and slumped to the ground, where she sat cross-legged, staring across the valley, stonefaced, but her eyes pleading.