How can I be dead? I think. I can still see everyone. When you die you close your eyes and go to sleep, don’t you?
I try in vain to alert them somehow that they are mistaken, I am not dead, but it’s hopeless – I am frozen and cannot let them know I am still with them.
High above us, storm clouds break apart and the tiniest fragment of clear sky shines through. It is the most beautiful blue I have ever seen and my unblinking eyes fix onto it. Without doubt I know I am looking right into heaven itself. The desire to reach for it is agonising but heaven is impossibly far away. The blue sky is only there for a brief moment and then the dark clouds angrily snap closed. In the blink of an eye my loved ones are gone. Everything else vanishes along with them and I am left alone in a new place.
All around me now is darkness and fire.
There is no ground beneath me anymore – I lie suspended on nothingness inside an endless chasm of blackness. The darkness is so thick it presses on me from all sides. It suffocates me. I am still paralysed and hang helplessly in the midst of a bottomless pit. Moving to fill the abyss is a fire unlike any I have ever seen. Not any bonfire of flickering yellow flames, it is an inferno. A red-hot mass that appears to move as one. It is a cloud of fire, dark and red and it spreads out relentlessly to fill all things. The furnace is limitless, beyond measure and I feel as small as a grain of sand in the middle of an ocean of flames. The sight of this fire-cloud brings sharp fear. The sound it makes is worse. The noise is horrifying, a continuous, ear-splitting boom a thousand times louder than any thunder ever heard. I watch the blazing cloud come for me. It has me in its path and nothing can stop it, nor will it stop itself until it devours me.
My heart breaks. Truth strikes me like a hammer blow.
I am dead.
The grave has opened and swallowed me right into hell. I know I will never see my loved ones again. I have utterly wasted my life and now I am condemned to this fiery pit of damnation forever. I will never escape this awful place, never be free and I can blame no one but myself for being there. I want to scream but my mouth is stopped shut. I want to cry but no tears come forth. This is a place full of misery, sorrow and pain—pain I will suffer hopelessly without end. I look straight into the heart of the raging cloud, unable to close my eyes and not look as the swarming mass of dark, red flames moves to consume me. Overwhelmed with dread, I watch the fire as it comes. The only sound is its deafening roar.
I snapped awake.
Distressed, I pulled the bedcovers up to my chin and held them tight. I seldom had nightmares and on the few occasions I did I usually rolled over and went back to sleep after a few minutes. This dream was different. For a long while I lay still, sick with worry, confused and trembling with fear. I was afraid to move even slightly, as if doing so would send me tumbling back into the fiery grave I had laid in moments earlier. Staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, I could not shake the image of the fire-cloud from my mind. The roaring of the inferno still sounded in my ears, refusing to go away and my eyes brimmed with tears. I had never known a dream of such vivid intensity and realism.
I didn’t go running to church and I still doubted the existence of God, although the dream of hellfire stayed with me. The memory burned itself into my brain and was always close by, floating back at unexpected moments. Even after years had passed I could be thinking about something totally unrelated and then there it was – just for a moment once again – the horror of the endless, flaming pit.
I believe God gave me that dream. I believe He showed me hell in a way that my brain could understand it, so that I would do all I could to find Him and avoid it; so I would relentlessly pursue the blue sky of heaven He allowed me to see for one mouth-watering second.
All the while I dreamed about death and hell, far away in Kenya, a Christian family were preparing to start their new life in England. Margaret Apudo and her daughters—Debbie, Becky, Sharon and Esther—were packing their bags and moving several thousand miles across the globe to Oxford and into my life.
Chapter Three : Lost
My end-of-term reports declined steadily over three years at upper school. I was not a particularly troublesome pupil; I had simply grown listless in attitude and lazy with my studies. In my final year at Cheney School, right before exams, most of my teachers were parroting the same line in all the subjects I took: “Peter, you’re a bright boy, but you’re just not applying yourself in the lesson like I know you can. If you would just knuckle down this year, you could achieve some very high marks in the exam.”
Every teacher let me know that my final year was going to be the most crucial in setting me on course for the future, although the future I saw went no further than the last day of term. Other students were making visits to the Careers Officer, getting advice on the steps to take once they were out of school. All I wanted to do was play basketball. I had no interest in anything else. I was a smart young man but I had lost all motivation to excel in my classes and had no idea what I would do with my life once school ended.
I had never been so restless. I was a good English student and for a time I flirted with the idea of becoming a journalist, though the ambition soon faded. I also liked sports and considered coaching or even sports physiotherapy, however these short-lived dreams died a quick death. No matter what new career I contemplated, when I researched what was necessary for me to attain it, all I saw before me were years and years spent in more classrooms. By now I had no appreciation at all for studies and school felt more like a prison to me. All I wanted was to reach the parole date as soon as possible.
Eventually I came back to the idea of being a reporter and upon leaving Cheney School – vowing never to go near the place again – I committed myself to pursuing a career in journalism. My GCSE grades were good enough for me to enrol in a two-year media studies course at the Oxford College of Further Education, known locally at the time as OXPENS and I started in September 1997.
Initially college was a breath of fresh air. It was a relief to be free of drab school uniforms and being able to call my teachers by their first name, as opposed to “Sir” or “Miss”, gave me a great feeling of acceptance as a grown-up. There was a sense of leaving childhood behind and making genuine strides towards adulthood.
There were around forty of us taking the media course, divided into two classes. Even though we were all strangers to one another, friendships were born right away and we shared some great moments together. However, only two months in, the novelty of college had already worn thin and I realised my heart wasn’t actually in media and journalism at all.
One thing about college that contributed to the problem was that the timetable was so much more flexible than at school. Unlike my days at Cheney, I wasn’t shut inside the grounds from 9am to 3pm. With all the free periods, plus a constant stream of people going in and out of the front gate, it was only a matter of time before I started skipping lessons. Some afternoons I would leave the campus during the lunch break and simply not bother to go back. Instead I spent the afternoon in the nearby city centre, watching a movie at the cinema or browsing the shops. There were no real repercussions for my absences either. It seemed like the attitude of the teachers at OXPENS was to leave it entirely up to me to take my studies seriously.
As a compulsory extra to the media course, there was a photography class every Friday afternoon. I didn’t even own a camera and sat bored to tears through the first lesson in September, only half listening to the tutor. When I walked out of the classroom that day I made a decision not to go back and my face was never seen again in the Friday photography class.
My weekend started a little earlier than everyone else’s.
Christmas came and went and by the New Year I was skipping college about as much as I was attending. When I was present, I was as miserable as could be. I paid little attention to the teachers and I barely spoke a word to the other students anymore. Painfully, I tried to carry on as long as I could but finally admitted defeat and knew that I had to lea
ve OXPENS permanently. One evening at home, I very cautiously explained to my mother my decision to quit the media course. I was quick to tell her that I would get a job and start earning money as soon as I could and then I braced myself for a serious parental lecture – but it never came. I think perhaps Mum detected a sincere disappointment in my voice and sensed my regret as I spoke to her. She told me she supported my decision, but urged me to find work quickly and keep thinking seriously about other career options.
On Thursday of the same week, before afternoon classes, I pulled my main tutor aside – a kind, softly spoken woman named Fiona – and told her the next day would be my last at the college. With sad eyes, Fiona told me she was upset to hear that I was quitting, but also assured me I would always be welcome back in the future should I ever change my mind. Fiona encouraged me to never give up searching for the thing in my life that would make me happy. As the lesson drew to a close, my classmates were stunned when I announced that I would not be returning the following week. It was no surprise when they tried to make me change my mind; however, I explained there was simply no way I could remain on the course any longer.
Making my way out of the front gates for the last time, I didn’t even stop to look back but kept right on going. It was January 1998, I had been at OXPENS for only four months and now I was officially a drop out.
My first job came in the form of stacking shelves at the nearby Somerfield supermarket. I hated it. Sarcastically, I referred to myself as a “Stock Replacement Technician.” I loathed climbing out of bed at 5am and leaving home before dawn to spend six hours filling shelves with endless bread and cakes and loading giant refrigerators with gallons of milk, yoghurts and cheeses. By lunchtime I was on my way home, only to return in the evening to work a few more hours on the busy delicatessen counter. I had no intention of working at Somerfield for long – only until it became clear to me what direction I wanted to take academically. As things turned out, my first employment would be even shorter than I expected.
Within weeks of starting the job a fellow stock replacement technician taught me various ways to steal the very goods we were meant to be filling the shelves with. Before long I was frequently leaving the supermarket with hidden grocery items carried about my person, either in my pockets or in my bag. This thieving went undetected for a month, until one evening at closing time when I was stopped at the door by the head of security, a huge body builder named Andy. When the man-mountain told me he was making routine security checks, suddenly my cheeks flashed hot because I knew there were stolen store goods in the backpack slung over my shoulder. Without time to think, I blurted out an excuse – something about forgetting my wallet – and hurried back into the building before Andy could say a word. I must have looked as guilty as sin, racing back upstairs to dump the goods – dairy items – into a bin before returning, coolly, to submit to the giant’s search. When it seemed I had passed Andy’s examination I walked home with fingers crossed that I had gotten away with it. However, as I robotically re-stocked shelves the next morning, the call came summoning me to the manager’s office. Caught.
I was suspended on the spot, while the supermarket “launched an investigation” (inwardly, I laughed at how they made my crime sound like The Great Train Robbery or something). A few days later the telephone call came for me to visit the manager again.
The store manager was a pale, bald-headed man named Mr Harding who, it seemed to me, approached his job with such intense seriousness you would think that he was running an entire country and not a Somerfield supermarket. A middle-aged woman I had never met was with Harding in the office when I entered and she was introduced as an external employee who had conducted the investigation. Sitting across the desk from the two of them, the scene resembled a police interrogation. Like all good criminals I had my lies ready. My suspension had given me more than enough time to invent a story and I was all set to spin it. When it was my turn to speak I gave them everything: sob stories, excuses, lies – the full works. They had more than enough evidence against me to get rid of me there and then – and at one point laid that very evidence on the table in front of me – but, incredibly, by the time our meeting ended and I walked out of the door I had not only avoided prosecution, but had the assurance I could return to work the following week.
No sooner had I gone back to stacking shelves though I was stealing again. In order to clear stock about to pass its sell-by date, a large, coloured, REDUCED TO CLEAR sticker, with a much lower price, was placed on each particular item. For the next two months I regularly fixed these stickers onto perfectly good foods and drinks, before buying the goodies – all well in date – at a vastly discounted rate, sometimes more than 70% off the normal retail price.
That was until one Monday evening when, as I loaded a hoard of cut-price snacks into a carrier bag at the checkout, the deputy store manager – yet another Andrew – suddenly materialised over my shoulder and asked to look at my purchases. He must have had his eyes on me the whole time because he immediately began peeling the “reduced” stickers back to reveal the real sell-by dates, still far-off, underneath.
Andrew looked at me with unblinking eyes and said, calmly, “Pete, I’m afraid I’m going to have to suspend you while we launch an investigation.”
Once again I found myself back in the hot seat in Mr Harding’s office. They didn’t even bother to call in the other lady this time. The game was well and truly up for me now. There was no need to waste time concocting any more fairy tales either; my guilt was clear. No amount of fast-talking would get me off the hook and I knew it.
“Have you got anything to say for yourself?” Harding asked, leaning back in his chair. I shrugged my shoulders as though uninterested. “Nah, it is what it is, Boss. You caught me and that’s it.” I had no remorse for my wrongdoing, only regret at being found out. In fact I felt no emotion of any kind, having slid so far down into indolent apathy, I cared for nothing anymore.
“Well, I’m sure you realise that I’ve got no choice but to dismiss you.” I remained silent, only nodding my head slightly. The manager leaned forward across the desk until he looked me right in the eyeballs. “Really, I should call the police and involve them in this matter, but I’m not going to, Peter.”
Whatever surprise or relief those words made me feel was short-lived. Harding spent the next ten minutes explaining that he had decided not to bring in the authorities because he saw me as a young man who had no idea what he wanted out of life. I was no real criminal, he informed me bluntly, I was a pretender playing the part of one because, in reality, I didn’t know who or what I was.
As the manager continued, I felt hot and strangely uncomfortable in my chair. My mask – the façade I wore to hide myself from people – had been ripped away. The solid wall of indifference I had constructed around me, to screen me from the disappointing world, had been pulled down and now I felt exposed, as though some private piece of my being was suddenly on show. This man didn’t even really know me, yet, at that moment, it was as if he could see right through me. Harding’s words cut too close to the bone and I didn’t like it one bit. I had hardly been looking forward to the meeting, but the more Harding talked, the more I wanted to get out of that man’s office, fast.
Finally, the manager finished his speech, telling me again, “I’m not going to involve the police. I’m hoping that dismissing you will be enough to snap you out of this attitude of yours, and that you’ll go away from here and have a real think about your life.”
I couldn’t even look up at him, gazing only at the array of stationary and paperwork spread out on his desk. I felt the man’s stare boring a hole into my head like a laser. “My guess, Peter, is that you don’t really want to be going down this road you’re on.”
I said nothing.
Five minutes later I walked out the front door of the supermarket and moved sluggishly down the street. As with OXPENS, I didn’t look behind me. It would be at least five years before I went near that Somerfield
again – a new, born again man, changed by faith in Jesus Christ.
I never saw Harding again.
As I walked aimlessly, going nowhere in particular and concerned only with putting as much distance as possible between myself and my former workplace, the store manager’s voice echoed in my ears, as if he were keeping pace right alongside me, still lecturing:
“My guess, Peter, is that you don’t really want to be going down this road you’re on.”
Harding’s speech had echoes of Cheney, where the teachers incessantly reminded me of my potential and how, if only I would make an effort to focus, I could achieve anything I wanted. However Harding had been able to recognize a truth about me that I had not yet fully admitted myself: I was completely and utterly lost.
I slow-marched away from Somerfield and the harsh reality hit home. I suddenly realised something profoundly saddening: I had no hope at all. No matter what qualifications I studied for, or what kind of job I eventually did, it was pointless because there was no reward for me at the end. More than ever I was certain that my inner fear about the futility of being was true. I wanted so much more out of life but I had reached the conclusion that I was looking for a treasure that could never be found because it didn’t exist.
I walked on, inwardly cold and alone. A deep, depressing darkness entered my heart and the emptiness of my soul echoed so loud it thundered in time with each footstep along the road.
Chapter Four : Heathen
In the summer of the year 2000 I went to Oxford University. Oxford is one of the most celebrated learning institutions in the world, having been a standard of academic excellence for centuries. Year by year the city’s streets are filled at graduation time with bright young men and women from around the globe, dressed in their caps and gowns – worn as a badge of honour and testimony to their scholarly brilliance. However I wasn’t at Oxford University to study; I was washing dishes in their kitchen. I didn’t wear any cap and gown of honour, just a dirty old apron.
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