by William Boyd
‘Hello, dear,’ she said. ‘Welcome to the rest of your life.’
He noticed that she was wearing a plastic badge on her lapel that said ‘JOHN 17’. She scribbled something with a broad felt-tip pen and handed Adam a small card. In fact it was a cardboard badge, with a securing pin on its back. On the front she had written: ‘JOHN 1603’.
‘You’ll get a proper plastic one like mine the next time you come,’ she said. Adam fastened the badge to his white denim jacket. ‘Take a seat at the very front, John,’ she said, indicating a door behind her.
Adam went through the door as directed and found himself in a large hall-like room with brick walls and an iron-girdered roof with skylights. Rows of simple wooden benches were set out – with padded prayer-stools in front of them – facing a dais with a lectern in the centre. The lectern had a microphone and wires from it led to a couple of loudspeakers on either side. On the wall behind was a richly embroidered, glowing cloth-of-gold banner depicting a stylised sun with long cursive rays emanating from it. There were no crosses to be seen anywhere. Adam took a seat in the front row, as instructed, and sat there patiently, his mind empty, hands clasped together on his knees.
Over the next few minutes a dozen or so other people – mainly men, mainly homeless men, as far as Adam could tell – shuffled quietly in and took their seats. All were wearing ‘John’ badges. The few women, similarly badged, sat at the very back, Adam noticed. He felt and heard his stomach rumble – his hunger was returning. At least it was all remarkably anonymous and discreet: no questions, no names required, no back story, nothing. Just become a member of the Church of John Christ and—
A man slipped in beside him. Adam saw he was wearing a cardboard ‘JOHN 1604’ badge. He had thinning frizzy hair – a small man in his forties with a big head and suffering from a condition Adam knew and recognised that was called, among other names, acropachyderma. The skin on his face was unnaturally coarse and thick, forming heavy, exaggerated creases, like elephant’s skin – hence the condition’s name. It was also known as Audry’s Syndrome, Roy’s Syndrome and, most exotically, Touraine-Solent-Golé Syndrome. Adam knew all about this as his father-in-law – his ex-father-in-law – Brookman Maybury also suffered from acropachyderma. There was no cure but it wasn’t fatal, just unsightly. The most famous acropachydermic was the poet W. H. Auden. The man sitting beside Adam, John 1604, was not as bad as Auden but would run him close, one day. His naso-labial clefts looked an inch deep; four striations, so marked they looked like tribal scars, ran across his forehead, even with his face in repose; odd creases that seemed to have no bearing on any potential facial expression descended vertically from below the swagged flesh bagging beneath his eyes and his mangled chin looked as if it had been mutilated by some childhood accident. He turned and smiled, showing long brown teeth with large even gaps between them. He offered his hand.
‘Hello, mate. Turpin. Vincent Turpin.’
‘Adam.’ They shook hands.
‘You get a decent meal, here, so they tell me, Adam.’
‘Good.’
‘You just have to sit through the service, that’s all.’
Adam was going to say that it didn’t seem too onerous a price to pay but was interrupted by loud rock music blasting out from the two speakers – rock music with shrill, blaring trumpets and other brass and many drums of varying types thumping out a strident, addictively rhythmic dance beat. A man in purple and gold robes came dancing down the central aisle between the benches and a few of the Johns began to clap in time. The man paused in front of the dais and continued dancing for a while, head wobbling, eyes closed. He danced well, Adam thought: a good-looking man with a thick neck and strong features and a boxer’s broken nose. This would be Archbishop Yemi Thompson-Gbeho, patron and founder, he reckoned.
With a wave of his hand Bishop Yemi caused the music to stop and he took his place behind the lectern.
‘Let us pray,’ he said in a deep bass voice and everyone knelt on the cushions in front of them.
The prayer lasted, by Adam’s rough calculation, almost thirty minutes. He ceased to follow it after the opening phrases, letting his mind wander, tuning back in from time to time, growing increasingly aware of Turpin’s effortful breathing beside him – a kind of wheezing and whistling as if his nasal cavities were clogged with dense undergrowth – brambles and tough grass. What Adam heard of the prayer ranged widely through world geo-political events, touching many continents, happy outcomes to the various global crises being devoutly wished for. By the time Bishop Yemi had said, ‘In the name of our Lord, John Christ, amen,’ Adam wondered if his stomach’s borborygmi could be heard at the back of the hall.
Bishop Yemi eventually requested them to be seated.
‘Welcome, brothers,’ he said, ‘to the Church of John Christ.’ He looked over his small congregation. ‘Who, amongst you, has sinned?’
Glancing round, Adam saw that everyone had put their hands up. He and Turpin promptly, though a little sheepishly, did the same.
‘In the name of John Christ your sins are forgiven,’ Bishop Yemi said and opened what looked like a bible and continued. ‘Our lesson this evening comes from the Great Book of John, Revelation, chapter 13, verse 17.’ He paused, and then his voice grew theatrically deep. ‘No man might buy or sell, save that he had the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.’
After the reading Bishop Yemi used the text to begin a free-associating and apparently improvised sermon. Adam now felt exhaustion creeping up on him and struggled to stay awake. As he drifted in and out of concentration, certain phrases, certain tropes, managed to imprint themselves on his mind.
‘Would you stone your father?’ Bishop Yemi bellowed at them. ‘You say – no. I say – yes, stone your father …’ Then, minutes later, Adam re-focussed to hear: ‘You feel despair, you feel your life is worthless – cry out. CRY OUT! John, John Christ, John, the true Christ, come to my aid. He will come, my brothers …’ Later still: ‘John Christ would bless the European Union – but he would not bless the G8 summit …’ And then, ‘You eat chicken for supper, lovely roast chicken, you clean your teeth. In the morning you find a shred of chicken stuck between two molars and with your tongue – or a toothpick – you work it free. Do you spit it out? No: this is the chicken you chewed and swallowed last night. Why would you spit it out? No. You swallow it. These are the tiny blessings bestowed on us, the brothers of John Christ, like shreds of meat trapped between your teeth, small deliveries of nutrition, spiritual nutrition …’ Then it all went hazy: ‘Mao Tse-tung … Grace Kelly … Shango, God of Lightning … Oliver Cromwell …’ The words became mere sounds, all meaning gone.
The sermon lasted two hours. Darkness clouded, then occluded, the skylights in the gantried roof. Adam was sitting upright, his eyes half open, in a semi-conscious, zoned-out state, hearing the noise of Bishop Yemi’s sonorous baritone, but comprehending nothing, when, all of a sudden, he realised it had stopped, There was silence: his brain re-engaged with the world. Bishop Yemi was staring at him and Turpin.
‘Please stand, John 1603 and John 1604.’
Adam and Turpin rose to their feet as Bishop Yemi left the dais and approached them. He placed the palms of his hands on their foreheads.
‘You are one of us now – we will never turn you away. Welcome to the Church of John Christ.’
There was a sporadic chatter of applause from the rest of the congregation before the rock music boomed out once again and Bishop Yemi danced enthusiastically out of his chapel.
John 17, the woman with no front teeth, took Adam to a room full of piles of clothes, clean but un-ironed, and asked him to help himself. He chose a cornflower-blue shirt and a pin-striped navy-blue suit that didn’t quite match: the pin-stripes on the trousers were wider than those on the jacket. He asked if he might exchange his golf-shoes for some other footwear but John 17 said, regretfully, ‘We don’t do shoes, love.’ Still he was glad to surrender his filthy white shirt �
�� stained with Philip Wang’s blood and his own – his white denim jacket and Mhouse’s beige camouflage cut-off cargo pants. John 17 turned away as he changed – the fit was perfectly acceptable.
‘I suppose you’re hungry,’ John 17 said as Adam refastened his ‘John 1603’ badge to his pin-striped lapel.
‘I am, rather,’ Adam confessed, and he was led down a corridor to the small communal dining room where he picked up a plate and joined the end of the queue of other members of the congregation. They were being served rice and beef stew from pots bubbling over gas jets. Adam loaded his plate with rice and held it out to have the stew ladled over it. He looked up to thank the server and saw that it was Mhouse, wearing a plastic badge that said ‘John 627’.
‘Hello,’ Adam said.
‘Yeah?’
‘You’re Mhouse.’
‘Yeah.’
‘We met. I’m Adam. I was mugged – you took me back to Chelsea …’ He was going to add, and you beat me up with an entrenching tool, but thought better of it.
‘You sure?’
‘You lent me some clothes. You found me at the Shaftesbury Estate. Remember? It was you who told me to come here.’
‘Did I? This is my church …’ She looked at him, head cocked, as if trying to place him, somehow. ‘Oh, yeah … I remember. You finished with them clothes?’
‘John 17 has the trousers – but I still have the flip-flops.’
‘No prob. I wouldn’t mind the flip-flops back.’
‘I’ll bring them to you.’
‘Cool.’
He smiled at her and then helped himself to several slices of white bread and went to look for a place to sit. The room contained half a dozen Formica-ed tables with four seats set around them, like a small workman’s café. Turpin was sitting at a table with two other men, the seat beside him empty, so it seemed logical for Adam to join his fellow convert.
‘Wha-hey, city gent,’ Turpin said, admiring Adam’s new clothes, as Adam slipped into the seat beside him. Then Turpin said to the other two men, ‘This is Adam.’
‘Hi. I Vladimir,’ the first man introduced himself. He had a perfectly shaven head – a gleaming oiled dome – and a small neat goatee. His eyes were darkly shadowed, he looked terminally exhausted. He extended his hand and Adam shook it.
‘Gavin Thrale,’ the other man said, in a middle-class accent, raising his hand – not offering it for shaking. He was an older man, in his fifties, perhaps, also bearded, but heavily, with an old salt’s full grey shag, and had a long lock of matching grey hair swept across his forehead and tucked behind his ear like a schoolboy. He had said ‘Gavin Thrale’ with a subtle inflection in his voice that implied that it was a name that Adam might possibly recognise, though he would prefer to remain incognito.
The four men ate their beef stew in silent concentration. Turpin ate like a porker at the trough, slurping, chewing with his mouth open, making small grunting sounds of pleasure as he swallowed. If Adam hadn’t been so hungry he might have found it nauseating, but he shut his ears and concentrated, filling his belly with his first proper meal in two weeks.
Turpin finished first and pushed his plate to one side, expelling a soft belching whoosh of air.
‘What’re you doing in a place like this, Adam?’ he asked, picking at his widely spaced teeth with a fingernail.
Adam had prepared himself for this question. ‘I’ve had a series of nervous breakdowns,’ he said, unemotionally. ‘My life sort of fell apart. I’m trying to put it back together.’
‘My wife chucked me out,’ Turpin volunteered. ‘The Birmingham wife. Turned very nasty. Got to lay low for a while, you know. Very angry and unhappy woman. Out for my blood, I’m sorry to say.’
‘Hell hath no fury,’ Gavin Thrale said.
‘Sorry?’ Turpin said.
‘What you do to her?’ Vladimir asked.
‘Not so much to her, exactly,’ Turpin said, unperturbed by the question. ‘More a “family” matter – very delicate – other members of the family were concerned.’ He went no further.
‘I come to England, come to London for heart surgery,’ Vladimir said, unprompted. ‘In my village they collecting money for one year, send me for London to fixing my heart.’ He smiled engagingly. ‘I never be in big city like this. Too many temptings.’
‘Temptations,’ Thrale corrected.
‘What happened?’ Turpin asked.
‘I come here. I go to hospital. Suddenly I feeling OK, you know? So I check out.’ Vladimir shrugged. ‘I have problem with heart valve – it fix himself, I think.’
‘What about you, Gavin?’ Turpin asked.
‘None of your business,’ Thrale said, stood up and left.
It became clear, once the congregation of the Church of John Christ had finished their meal, that there was to be no lingering. Mhouse and John 17 began to put chairs on tables and another John started mopping the linoleum floor.
As Adam, Turpin and Vladimir left the church they were bade farewell by Bishop Yemi himself. He shook their hands, then gave them a hug.
‘See you tomorrow, guys,’ he said. ‘Tell your friends – six o’clock, seven days a week.’
Vladimir drew Adam aside. ‘You like monkey?’
‘Monkey? What’s that?’
‘Knack. Maybe you say “beak”? We call it monkey.’
‘I’ve never tried it.’
‘You come with me we go smoke monkey. You have money?’
‘No.’
Vladimir shrugged and smiled, clearly disappointed. He seemed an almost innocent soul. ‘I like monkey too much,’ he said and wandered off, leaving Adam with Turpin.
‘Where you headed, Adam?’
‘Chelsea.’
‘Great. I’m headed for Wandsworth. Got a wife up there I haven’t seen for a year or two. Might put me up for the night.’
Turpin had some money and offered to lend Adam the bus fare to Chelsea – ‘Now that we’re brothers in John Christ, eh?’ – an offer Adam accepted, promising to pay him back as soon as he could.
On the bus, Turpin, still exhaling soft gusts of beef-laden air from his gut, and every now and then pounding his breast-bone as if something were stuck there, said, ‘What do you make of this John Christ story, then?’
‘Pure mumbo-jumbo,’ Adam said. ‘It’s all nonsense – this god, that god. Complete rubbish.’
‘No, no. Hang on,’ Turpin said, frowning, the deep pachy-dermous creases on his brow folding into an unnatural wave effect. ‘You got to give credit to—’
He stopped, interrupted by the arrival on board of a fat harassed woman and a plump, placid child, a girl, carrying a balloon and eating a chocolate bar. Turpin pressed his elbow into Adam’s side.
‘Hello, hello. That’s a nice little chicken,’ Turpin said, admiringly. ‘Very nice. You married, Adam?’
‘I was. I’m divorced.’
‘Kiddies?’
‘No.’
‘I love little kiddies,’ Turpin said. ‘You know, “proof of heaven”, as they say … I’ve had a lot of kids myself, nine or ten. Eleven. I like little boys, little chaps, but I’m a little-girl man at heart. Sweet little darlings. What about you, Adam? Boys or girls?’
‘I haven’t really thought about it.’
‘Girls for me, all the way. But after the age of ten it all changes,’ Turpin said, ruefully, almost bitterly. ‘Goes to the bad. Not the same. Nah.’
Adam looked out at the street as the bus pulled up at a traffic light. A policeman stood there, looking directly at him. Adam smiled, vaguely, confidently anonymous.
‘Yeah, but listen: John Christ,’ Turpin said, returning to his original argument. ‘What if Bishop Yemi’s right and John, disciple John, is the real Christ and like Jesus was the fall guy … The patsy. Like it was a cover-up.’
‘I think I must have missed that bit.’
‘The point being that the Romans think they’ve got the real guy – Jesus – but John, the true Christ, goes off sco
t-free. Clears off to Patmos, lives to be a hundred and writes Revelation. On his own Greek island.’
‘It’s all nonsense, I told you, raving nonsense.’
‘Hold on, hold on. They were like freedom fighters, a cell. The guy they crucify – Jesus – isn’t the real leader. It’s John.’
‘Why not sacrifice a goat to the sun-god Ra?’
‘Say again? No, I mean – I think Bishop Yemi may be on to something, here. Makes a kind of sense.’
Turpin was still expatiating on the possibilities of this clever hoax when they both left the bus at Sloane Square and walked down to the river. They paused at Chelsea Bridge, leaning on the parapet, looking out at the ebb tide, the black flowing water lit by the hundreds of light bulbs positioned on the bridge’s superstructure and suspension cables.
‘Got a smoke?’ Turpin asked.
‘Sorry, no.’
‘I’ll cadge a smoke off of someone. You get off to your bed, Adam. See you tomorrow, mate.’
Adam said goodnight and wandered off, not particularly wanting Turpin to see where he dossed down, so he crossed to the other side of the Embankment, opposite the triangle, and dawdled along the railings of the Royal Hospital, glancing back to see Turpin accosting passers-by. When he eventually cadged a cigarette and lit up and began to cross the bridge towards the Battersea shore, Adam scurried across the road and climbed over the fence, secure in the knowledge that Turpin hadn’t seen him.
In his small clearing Adam hung his new jacket and trousers carefully on a branch and removed his clean, un-ironed shirt, before sliding into his sleeping bag. He lay there, snug under his bush, feeling strangely confident. He hadn’t enjoyed such a sensation of unremarkable but genuine ease and pleasantness since the murder. He wasn’t hungry, he realised, that was what was different, and now he had a place he could go to for hearty, sustaining food where no one was curious about him and no questions were asked. Everything was going to change, he felt sure: he had seen the way forward. His begging life was about to begin.