The Dark Light

by Julia Bell

  Before he let anyone eat he went round the table and asked everyone to confess their bad thoughts. ‘We need to confess any sinful thoughts that will distract us from our purpose.’

  The men looked at their hands and mumbled confessions about being lazy or tired or slothful. Jonathan said he had been doubting and having dreams about taking drugs again. ‘I have been thinking of leaving, like.’

  Mr Bevins nodded and listened patiently to each one like a good teacher. Then when they were finished and the porridge was definitely cold, he said, ‘Let us pray.’ He pushed the sleeves of his shirt up his arms – he did this a lot, I noticed. Like a kind of tic. ‘Oh Lord, forgive all our sinners. And bless this meal, and bless –’ here he paused and grabbed my hand – ‘our new arrival. The precious flower You brought to us. Help us to lead her to Your light. Help us to live for the Victory.’ I stared at his clasped fingers, they were clean and neat, unlike the others whose hands were roughed and calloused and stained with dirt. Everyone had their eyes closed, apart from the young man sat opposite who was still staring at me. I stuck my tongue out at him, and his glare intensified. He pointed his fingers at his eyes and then at me, to show that he was watching me.

  When Mr Bevins had finished, he took a long time to let go of my hand, running his finger across the shape of the moon tattoo on my thumb. Every nerve in my body tingled.

  ‘You know it is written that if your hand or foot offend you, better to cut it off than be cast into everlasting fire!’ He put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me towards him so I could smell damp clothes and sweat and something else, a strange muddy, chemical odour. ‘She’s come here to learn from us. But also to lead us home! Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘I have been praying all week for your soul. I have seen your arrival in the kingdom of heaven. You are loved and welcome.’

  The emotion came off him like a force field. And that force field wrapped itself around me and made my body tremble. It was strange, but when he was talking he had this way of making me feel like I was special, like I mattered. Like he could see beneath my skin and see what made me tick.

  ‘Thanks,’ I muttered.

  After breakfast he insisted that I go with him to the church. So we could ‘get to know each other better’. I didn’t really want to, but no one protested. Rebekah’s father nodded approvingly.

  He took me past all the huts. They would have been nice when they were new, wood cabins with sloping tin roofs and wooden planked walls. Except now they looked weather-beaten, fixed with bits of driftwood, plastic. I wondered which one was his. I was going to make a call on that phone the minute I got my hands on it.

  ‘I know why you’re here,’ he said, staring at me as if he really could see inside my head. He said I came to him in a vision. The harbinger. The one who foretells.

  ‘You were the one who stood there in the last moments and ushered us home! The good Lord blessed me with a gift. I can see what will happen in the future.’

  ‘No! You’ve got it wrong. I’m not any kind of mystical person!’ I said. I didn’t like the sound of the harbinger.

  ‘I know you’re sceptical right now. Perhaps you’re scared. But for those who walk in the light, there’s nothing to fear. I have nothing but love for you – God’s love, which passes all understanding.’ He smiled and laughed softly. ‘Jesus died for your soul. He would die a million deaths for you! Human love pales into insignificance in comparison.’

  I nodded and prepared myself for the kind of burble Bridget used to give me when she went on about God but then he said, ‘I’m not like the others, Alex, I don’t condemn you. I’m standing here with love, so much love for you.’ And his eyes shone like he was holding back tears. ‘I understand what you’ve been through. I do. You grew up with nothing. No parents to love you. No one you could count on. Everyone here understands that. That’s where we’ve all come from. You’ve done so great to get this far. So, so great.’ He shook his head. ‘What happened back in Essex, it’s totally . . . understandable. You were angry. You were lost.’ I felt suddenly embarrassed. Had Sue the Social Worker been talking about me? ‘I spoke to Pastor Matthews the other day. Everyone back there is praying for you so hard, that you will see the way. The Lord has plans for you. He has kept you safe all this time for a reason and brought you here to be with us.’

  I laughed nervously. It was embarrassing to think that he had been talking about me, everyone passing me around like I was this big problem.

  He opened the door to the church. They had built it on the ruins of the old one, with a shingle roof and pinewood walls and wooden chairs laid out in neat rows. At the front was an altar with a white cloth on it and a line of perpetual candles burning. Above that was a lurid painting of Jesus on the cross, his face twisted in the agony of the crucifixion.

  ‘You know when I was a boy, growing up, I was lost, I had no purpose. My mamma, she could see that I was born for the glory but I wouldn’t hear it. She was gifted with visions and voices, but I thought she was crazy. I was angry, a nasty sneak, I lived in sin, like a pig rolls in its own dirt! I went to church but I was so full of filth I could not bear to hear the truth. I would sit in the back carving on the pew with my hunting knife, and making a deal of snoring in the sermons. And then one day, I was out in streets of my hometown, wandering around, looking for trouble, and I came across an old hobo, sat on the sidewalk begging. You know what one of them is?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘An old tramp, of the old school, lives his life travelling from place to place, never settling down. He was blind. Both eyes were like these black holes, made me feel sick to look at them. But he said, “Son, I can see you. I can see your sin like I used to be able to see the sun and the stars and the faces of people. It stinks on you.” He had a cup that he held out for change and I thought, Right, mister, if you can see me so well then see this! And I stole it right out from under his nose. I thought I was so clever! Only a few quarters and dimes, but I thought I had him beat! That stupid old man for calling me dirty and sinful! How dare he! But later that night I was in bed and I couldn’t sleep, I kept tossing and turning, thinking everything over and I thought to myself, He was right. I was a bad person, the kind of person that steals from the poor and helpless, that is full of prideful thoughts when he should be clean and whole!

  ‘The next day I went back to where he had been sat, but there was no sign of him. I asked around the whole town, but no one remembered seeing a blind beggar on the street, it was as if he had never been there at all and I realised then what had happened. It was Jesus himself, come disguised as a hobo! Come in the clothes of a beggar to show me the way! And from that day forward I realized I had seen a miracle! I had been saved! And I gave my life over to Jesus to do with as he willed.’ He stopped talking and stared at me until I had to look away. His eyes were so intense. ‘I can see it in you, you have the same ornery wilfulness. Will you let me pray for you?’ he asked.

  I nodded because I didn’t know what else to do and because his story made me paranoid. What had Ron and Bridget said about me?

  We sat down at the front and he put his hand on my head and squeezed his eyes shut.

  ‘Bless this child, Lord. She’s the one we have been waiting for.’

  Here he paused and then suddenly his voice changed. It was like he was two people at once, both himself and another person with a voice that was deeper, darker. I wanted to laugh, but not because it was funny. It made me nervous.

  ‘Indeed she is. I bless her. Show her how much You understand that she is a lost little girl, how hard it is to grow up so. I love her, she is a child of My heart. We are so full of love, so full of love. We are full of love. Show her that You have led her here for Your divine purpose. She is the one who will open the door. But only when she has been purified. But must she renounce all the sin inside her? She must.

  But she must come to Me of her own free will. But if she does, I will reveal to her the love at t
he centre of everything. This I will show only to her.’

  When he stopped he stood up and shook himself like a wet dog. ‘Did you hear that? The message?’ he said. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I mumbled, though I was suddenly very confused. He seriously thought I had some special mission, some special message to bring them. But I couldn’t see how that was true. I was just me. I wasn’t special. And I didn’t like the idea of being purified. What did that mean? He sounded like he was faking it.

  ‘Here.’ He touched my lip piercing. ‘You’re too precious to be so disfigured. Let’s start by taking that out?’

  I don’t know, maybe on another day I would have told him to fuck off, but he had this way about him, of making it difficult to say no, of drawing you in. I wanted to please him. I guess that was how it started for everyone. So I unclipped the ring and gave it to him.

  ‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘Good girl.’

  And for a moment I thought it might just be possible that I was.

  NINE

  REBEKAH

  By the time the women sit for breakfast there’s not much left – a splash of coffee each and a spoonful of porridge. Even Hannah complains, makes some veiled comment about the men being so hungry because of yesterday’s prayers going on all day, which Mary silences with a glare. Everyone looks tired. All the other women are here, Hannah and Margaret and Mrs Bragg and Mrs Webber, Leah Morgan, and Ruth Davis and Esther. Along with me and Mary Protheroe and Naomi in the Solitary, that makes ten women in a community of nearly thirty. Eleven if you count Alex, who Mr Bevins has taken to the church for prayer.

  The talk over the table turns around what there is to do. The crops that need harvesting, the plots that need digging, all the work that has been neglected over Mission Week. Mr Bevins said that it was more important to pray. I don’t know why he was angry with me earlier. I feel a deep chasm of shame opening in my chest. I must be careful to show him how hard I’ve worked, how much I’ve tried to be good while I’ve been away. I look out of the window, to the blue sky, longing to taste the air again, to smell the soft earth. But Mary tells me that I have to look after the twins and make soup for lunch and that Alex can help me until they’ve decided what to do with her.

  ‘You do know why she was suspended from school, don’t you?’ Margaret says conspiratorially, eyes made huge by the thick lenses of her glasses.

  ‘I’m not sure it’s wise to bring that up now,’ says Mary, taking piece of dry bread and cracking it in her hands. ‘We have been praying. We must trust her care to Bevins.’

  ‘The Lord certainly moves in mysterious ways,’ Hannah says. ‘They only found us at the eleventh hour, just as we were packing up.’ She takes a piece of bread and chews on it, then discreetly spits it out. ‘Did no one bake bread all week?’

  ‘No,’ says Mary. ‘Bevins said it was more important to pray.’

  Hannah frowns.

  ‘Bevins had a vision,’ Margaret says. ‘It’s coming soon, Hannah! We’re in the last weeks, Hannah. Weeks.’ Her eyes bulge.

  There’s a small squeeze of fear around my heart. I don’t want to die. I know it won’t be death but a kind of transition, but it will probably hurt, and that scares me.

  ‘To be honest, it’ll be nice to have a normal day, you know?’ Mrs Bragg says, like she hasn’t been listening. ‘There’s so much to do in the garden.’

  Hannah raises her eyebrows and there’s a tension around the room. Something happened while we were gone, but no one is quite saying what.

  Mary leaves me to take care of the twins and I wash up the many dishes from breakfast and put the porridge pot to soak and lay out the vegetables. The twins play at the other end of the table, building figures from dirty modelling clay.

  I don’t know why I have to stay in here. It’s so unfair. Mary couldn’t disappear fast enough into the gardens, and it was me who planted everything in the first place. I take a potato and try to peel it, but it’s soft and spongy and not good for eating. There must be fresh produce still in the ground, so why has no one harvested it?

  Mr Bevins says it’s not godly to ask too many questions. ‘Thinking is sinking,’ he says. The faithful accept without fear or complaint the life the Lord has chosen for them, but now my head fizzes with questions. Like why is Alex here, and why did she have to leave Essex in the first place? I don’t even know where Essex is, or what it’s like there.

  I wonder at her life, at what things she has seen and done. The next Mission Week is a whole year away. A whole year of scraping soft potatoes and looking after the twins, of putting up with Mary and Hannah and all the many, many hours in church listening to Mr Bevins going on and the cold nights of winter. And for the first time in my life, maybe the first time ever, I wonder with a sinking feeling whether I want to be here. But then just as quickly I pray, to push the thought away. This is what Mr Bevins means about trusting the Lord to give us what we truly want. We mustn’t choose for ourselves; we have to wait for what is meant to be revealed.

  Then the twins, bored with the clay, are playing around the kitchen table and they upset a bowl of water, sending it smashing to the ground, breaking into little pieces all over the floor, and I can’t help it but something bad and angry comes escaping out of me and I shout at them.

  ‘Will. You. STOP IT?!’ I grab Peter by the arm and am about to let fly with my hand when I see his face, turned away from me, frightened, and I relent and hold him close instead. His body is trembling. ‘You need to be CALM,’ I say through clenched teeth. ‘Please.’ Guilty now, because I have been angry, lost my temper. And being full of anger will count against me on the Day of Judgement and I’ll never get to go to heaven or see Mother again. And I’m sure I can see her face looking at me, disappointed. I say a prayer for patience and let him go.

  ‘Hate you,’ he says, aiming a kick at me. Then he runs away to the other side of the room and stands by the door as if he means to run out of it, which he knows he is not allowed to do.

  ‘Well, that’s as may be, but you’ll hate me even more if there is nothing to eat tonight. Why won’t you LISTEN?’

  And my hand raises again, but this time someone grabs it and I turn round and Alex is standing right behind me. ‘Don’t hit him,’ she says gently.

  But that just makes it worse, because now she’s seen me like this, like the kind of person who gets mad at children and loses her temper and goes to strike them.

  ‘Get off me!’ I shout, and Paul starts to wail, and then I turn and see Mr Bevins. I didn’t even hear him come in.

  His eyes are light blue, almost transparent; and they give him the expression of someone who is looking far beyond us into a world no one else can see. Hannah compares his looks to classical paintings, though I haven’t seen many so I can’t say I know what she means. All I know is that we must tend to him, as a precious gift. He is the one who brings us the word of God.

  He takes a step forward and stands over the table, picking up one of the boys’ clay figures.

  ‘What are you making?’ he asks softly, in his deep American accent.

  ‘The fiery furnace,’ I say. Peter holds up a piece of red clay that he’s fashioned to look like flames.

  ‘Very good,’ he says, rubbing his hand through Peter’s hair but staring at me. ‘And do you know who went into the fiery furnace?’

  ‘Shadrach, Meshach and A-bed-we-go,’ the twins say together. The name is really Abednego, but we say this sometimes on the way up to bed, because I remember that’s what Mother used to say to me as we counted the slow steps upstairs when I was little.

  ‘Who were thrown into a fiery furnace but they did not get burned,’ I say.

  ‘That’s right! Obedient servants of God! Refusing to bow down to a golden idol. Even on pain of death in the fiery furnace! Even though King Nebuchadnezzar commanded that the furnace be made seven times hotter! Hotter and hotter and yet they weren’t burned up! Isn’t God awesome?!’

  He comes over to me and
grabs me by the arm and pulls me towards the stove. He takes my hand and holds it over the coals. ‘Imagine!’ Heat starts to sting my palm. ‘And still they were not burned! They felt the flames as a cool breeze! Because they were obedient! Because they bore witness! Because they lived for the Victory!’ He releases my hand and I pull it away from the fire, rubbing my thumb across my palm where it stings. He comes closer, sniffing the air. ‘I can smell it on you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sin.’

  He stands right in front of me. He looks down at me, then pulls me towards him. Slowly and deliberately. So that eventually my face is against his chest and I can smell the damp wool of his waistcoat and feel every bony angle of his body, the jut of his hips. I freeze. I must make a murmur because he says, ‘Hush now.’ Then he’s pressing my head against his chest. ‘Live for the Victory, Rebekah, live for the Victory. You are spiritually exhausted.’ He holds me for a really long time, stroking my headscarf, saying a prayer over my head until I think I’m going to suffocate.

  ‘Amen!’ He pushes me away from him. ‘Tonight we will pray over you.’

  There’s an edge to his voice that makes me sure I’ve done something wrong.

  ‘It’s so easy for your mind to be polluted. Thinking is sinking, Rebekah; remember that.’

  I know this is all because I allowed my thoughts to wander. For allowing myself to think about leaving. Mr Bevins is sensitive to these things. He can see sin where most would not. Tears sting my eyes, and before I know it I’m sobbing and asking for forgiveness and he is patting me on the head like I am Job, Micah’s sheepdog.

  ‘Enough now.’ As he steps away from me his foot scrapes against a shard of broken bowl. ‘Clear this up.’ And he walks off. Between his fingers one of the pieces of clay that the boys have shaped into a flame.

  Alex bends down and helps me to pick up the pieces of the bowl. ‘You OK?’ she asks.

  I shrug. I think it’s probably better not to speak to her too much; it’s just getting me into trouble. ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’