The Meeting Point

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by Lucy Caldwell


  She watched the sentry climb out of his hut to take a piss behind the empty villa. He walked bow-legged, as if he had been riding a horse too long. She supposed his legs got terribly cramped, sitting in the little brick box for hour after hour. She wondered what he did to pass the time in the long, lonely hours of the night, other than listen to his Urdu radio stations and read his newspaper by the light of his lamp.

  She stood up. The missionaries were not going to appear. She had a strange longing to see them again; she did not know why. But she could not even tell if they were in or out, because they had no car of their own. She supposed they were out: everyone seemed to have somewhere to be. Everyone but her.

  She went back inside and resumed her Account. She was almost finished, now. Just a few more pages, a few more days, to go.

  7

  Euan was invited to speak at the Sunday morning service. They got there early, left Anna in the crèche and joined the Reverend Day and his wife as they greeted parishioners. Everyone was keen to meet the new Irish deacon and his young wife. Euan, meeting people, shaking hands, sharing jokes, was in his element; and she felt a sudden pang: of love for him, of missing him, of sorrow. His years at Braemore Park had been tough: a lot of introspection and self-study. Ordinands were made to understand and confront their own weaknesses and failings, undergo an intense examination of their faith. There were times, at the rare weekends they had together, when he had collapsed in her arms in tears, had been (she feared) on the verge of some sort of breakdown. He had often considered dropping out. But he had come through, and become stronger for it, both in himself and in his faith. And increasingly, as his confidence and experience grew, Ruth was watching him visibly blossom in his calling. By September, he would be officially ordained, able not just to take services and preach, but to preside over Communion. He would be assigned a small congregation of his own – a rural parish, most likely, or several small churches. And she could see he was ready for it: he was restless in Kirkskeagh, living in the farm cottage and assisting with their own congregation.

  She stood beside him and smiled, shook hands, answered questions about Ireland and about Bahrain. Yes, it is a long way. Oh, very much, so far, everyone is really so friendly.

  St Thomas’s had a healthy-sized congregation and a good mix of people. Rawly shaven young men and fresh-cheeked young women, families with babies, a few with teenage children. About half of them were British expats and the rest were Indian or Filipino: none were Arab. The Indian women were dressed in a shimmer of saris, their husbands in dark suits and gleaming shoes. The Filipinos wore high heels and hats and handbags, button-down shirts and cuff links. Little girls were in party dresses, froths of white frills and sashes, and ribbons in their hair, and many of the little boys were in sailor suits. It was like going back half a century. There was a buzz of anticipation in the air, too, an atmosphere you rarely felt before an ordinary service at home. Anglican congregations were diminishing by the year; or by the week, it sometimes felt. Roman Catholic churches were seeing an increase in numbers, mostly from the Poles and Eastern European immigrants who wanted to attend High Mass, and at the Baptist churches American-style evangelical worship was growing in popularity. She had been to a few evangelical services. She found it all a bit embarrassing, too earnest and flamboyant, the shouting and tears and speaking in tongues. But Euan insisted that church had to be more accessible and he was encouraging young people in Kirkskeagh and Kircubbin to form music groups and play in services. At Christmas there had been a heated debate among the elders about whether or not a boy should be allowed to play his electric guitar. This had infuriated Euan. In his study there was a red and black poster of Jesus in the style of the iconic Che Guevara images, with the slogan: Meek. Mild. As If. He liked to give copies of the poster to his youth group to remind them that Jesus was not a long-suffering wimp in a nightie – that was the phrase he used: ‘wimp in a nightie’ – but a passionate, revolutionary radical. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. If Jesus was alive today, Euan said, He would not have sung soft, gentle songs about sparrows and sunlight. He would have rocked out. Young people needed to know that Christianity was not about suppressing or repressing yourself. It was quite the opposite: it let you express yourself as fully and exuberantly as you possibly could. Euan had also got himself into hot water over his proposals to conduct informal Q&A sessions for non-believers: because he was emphatic that he did not want to hold them in the vicinity of the church.

  ‘Think about it,’ he’d said to her, over a barely touched dinner, ‘these people will be unsure of themselves, awkward, vulnerable and feeling unbelievably exposed. We don’t want to meet in the crypt, or in an anonymous, echoey village hall. Why not meet in the pub, casually, and we can discuss whatever matters might arise over a drink? I’m not saying we get ourselves stocious, far from it. I just think we need to meet people on their own ground. And we need to do it sooner rather than later.’ There were more Muslims, he was fond of saying, than Anglicans in Ireland. More Muslims than Anglicans!

  The final few stragglers arrived, the final smiles were exchanged and hands shaken and the service began. After the Collect, the Reverend called upon the Reverend Deacon Armstrong to speak. She felt the eyes of the congregation upon them. They were sitting at the front, and she could feel the gaze, as if it was a weight. She sat up straighter. She felt Euan take a breath and say a quick, silent prayer. Then he stood up, walked to the lectern. He paused before speaking, ran his fingers through his hair. He had spent ten minutes that morning damping it down, and now he was yanking it back into wild tufts. He looked up and out at the congregation, taking in as many of them as possible – that was the technique, that was what you were taught to do – and began to speak. He spoke of his own personal journey to Christ: the moment when, aged fifteen and on a Boys’ Brigade camping trip, he had asked Jesus into his heart. The dismay of his well-to-do parents and the derision of so many ‘friends’ when he started attending church on Sundays and worship groups after school. He spoke of the doubts and fears, the struggles and setbacks, that were an inevitable and necessary part of any Christian’s journey. He spoke of the Mission to Seafarers, the reason he was here in Manama. He recited the Mission’s motto, and the perils that seafarers face: loneliness, danger, separation from loved ones. And then, walking out from behind the lectern and into the aisle he declared that these were problems that faced us all: that in many ways we all were seafarers, trying to navigate stormy waters in tempestuous times, seeking the sanctuary that only God could provide.

  He was a compelling speaker. She could feel the audience listening, swelling, following where he led. But for the first time – the first time ever, and she had heard him speak many times – what he said did not feel real. She could see what he was doing, and how he was doing it: the making of eye contact, the dramatic pauses, the raising and lowering of his voice, the stepping forward into the aisle. All of it was choreographed, meticulously practised. She thought of how, in the early days of his training, he and his fellow students were told to go to comedy nights at the Capital Club and the Ha’penny Bridge, to study the comedians and learn how to hold an audience, how to work an audience, how to pace yourself and how to perform. Ruth had gone along with them, once or twice, and thought they made a comic group themselves, sitting in a pale-faced huddle nursing their pint or their lime-and-sodas, concentrating too hard on the comedians, frantically scribbling down notes between sets and conferring with each other over a particular technique or method of delivery. Euan was among the best of them: he was a natural performer. And it was performing, she suddenly saw, that he was doing. The words were shells; hollow, essentially meaningless. It was how he strung them together, the pace of them, the rhythms. What he said was unimportant: it was the way he said it. He could have been preaching Islam, or the merits of batch-calving: the audience would have listened and believed in exactly the same way. She wondered why this had never occurred to her before.

  When h
e sat down beside her, she whispered, Well done, but she did not look at him. She could feel the heat coming from him, hear how fast his heart was beating. He was fired up, alive. He was someone else, no longer the man she woke up with, no longer the man she prayed with last night (Paul’s journey to Italy, in Acts 27: When neither sun nor stars appeared for many days and the storm continued raging, we finally gave up all hope of being saved; chosen by Euan, of course, as a message to her). Precisely because she knew him so well, knew what he was doing, and how he was doing it, why, he was become almost a stranger.

  The service continued.

  The reading was from chapter 11 of Mark’s gospel, and the sermon was an exposition of the same passage, where Jesus curses the fig tree for not bearing any fruit, even though it is not the season for figs.

  ‘People often worry that Jesus is being petulant, or arbitrary, or cruel,’ the Reverend Day said in his dry, scholarly voice. ‘The tree isn’t being offered any choice as to whether or not it bears fruit, unlike Luke’s parable where the withered fig tree is given a year’s grace. But, you see, if you read Mark’s account in context, then you understand that it is deliberately bookended with the descriptions of Jesus cleansing the Temple …’

  She glanced up at Euan. He was frowning, nodding, fully engaged. She turned her attention back to the Reverend.

  ‘… and so you see,’ he was saying, his voice growing louder as he slipped into declamatory mode, ‘at first you have the appearance of fruitfulness, i.e. the leaves on the tree and the rituals of religion. But up close, there is nothing of sustenance: it is a religion without substance. This lesson is one of the most important lessons in the Gospels about faith. It is a matter of life and death.’

  Again, those words. But, Ruth, it’s far more than a matter of life and death. The pallor of his face and the intensity of his eyes. It had scared her, seeing him like that. Now, he was nodding so vigorously his chair was quivering. She inched her chair away from his, but it still shook with the reverberations.

  For the rest of the service, the Creed and the prayers, the penitence and benediction and receiving of Communion – especially the receiving of Communion – she tried to force her mind to stay focused and reverent. She recited the Lord’s Prayer loudly, matching her voice and her rhythms to Euan’s, feeling her words blend with his, and their words with those of the people around them. Now and for ever, Amen. But she felt like a fraud. She felt, for the first time ever, that the words she was saying were lip-service only; meaningless.

  *

  After the service, there was tea and coffee and baklava: yet more small talk to be made while people milled around praising Euan’s speech. Names and faces jockeying to be closer, to be closest, to be the one who refilled his coffee cup or brought him another tooth-numbing bite of baklava – and they pressed around Ruth, too, as if she was part of him, could reflect the same glory.

  It was a relief to get home. Euan was going back to church after lunch to take the afternoon youth group and to speak again at the evening service. At least, that is what he said. She did not bother to question him: she suddenly realised that she did not care even if he was lying to her.

  While Anna had her nap, she lay in the dim bedroom with a cold towel over her eyes. There was an aching, throbbing behind her temples, a buzzing in her head. But she could not sleep. She got up after only ten minutes, and busied herself baking barmbrack for the neighbours, in return for their gifts of food. It was the wrong time of year for barmbrack. Her mother made it every Hallowe’en, baking trinkets inside it. A dried pea, a twig, a silver coin, all wrapped in foil. Finding the coin meant riches for the forthcoming year but the stick meant marital dispute and the dried pea, bad luck in love. It was an occasion of much hilarity, sitting around the kitchen table with her father and the farmhands while her mother cut the still-warm loaf and handed around the slices. She always got a silver coin, as did the farmhands. Her father always ended up with the twig and no one ever found the dried pea. They joked that it was in the crust given to Trooper, the Border collie, or later her pup, Rosie.

  Anna sat in the high chair and played with a handful of raisins while Ruth warmed the milk and measured out the yeast and sugar, sifted the spices and weighed the tea-soaked fruit. They had gone shopping, yesterday, to one of the big malls, to buy everything she needed. The mall was massive, big beyond imagining. It looked from the outside like a fairy-tale Oriental palace, its rose-blush façade decorated with midnight-blue tiles and painted stars, its dome made of thousands of sheets of curved glass. Inside, the escalators were flanked by forty-foot palms. There were more shops, in that single mall, than in the whole of Belfast – the whole of Northern Ireland, probably. After they had wandered round, and stocked up on groceries, they sat in the forecourt of Starbucks and had cappuccinos and muffins. It was evidently the place to be seen. It was packed with people, mainly Arabs, and there were signs up everywhere saying that each coffee bought you twenty minutes’ sitting time, after which you had to buy another or go. It was strange watching dignified-looking men in headdresses and white robes slurping iced coffees through straws. And the women did not eat or drink at all – they couldn’t, without taking their veils off, and many of them had grilles of mesh over their eyes, so even their eyes and foreheads were covered up. Instead they sat silently waiting for their menfolk to eat and drink, or feeding their children. It had made Ruth feel uneasy: she had been glad when their twenty minutes were up and they left.

  Her mother’s recipe was complicated, calling for lots of kneading and mixing, beating and sifting, waiting and testing. On a farm, the day revolved around mealtimes. Ruth’s mother was constantly at the Aga, making cooked breakfasts for Ruth’s father and the farmhands after morning milking, a hot dinner for whoever happened to be there at midday, soda bread or scones for tea, then supper for the three of them, cakes and a tureen of soup on standby for the vet or the neighbours or whoever else might drop by. But although Ruth had frequently been conscripted into chopping or mixing or stirring, she never particularly took to it. She was not a natural baker, like her mother; her dough was sticky and her loaves leaden, her stew too watery or not salty enough. No matter how many times she did it, she could never remember offhand the ratio of eggs to sugar to flour in a Victoria sponge, or whether you used baking soda with buttermilk, or baking powder. She was much happier outside, with her father, walking the cattle out to pasture, or bringing them in during the warmer months for milking; forking silage into their food troughs during winter, even scraping and hosing down the loafing area. She knew the signs of milk fever and of bloat, she knew how to check a field for excess clover. Once, she had helped her father save a heifer’s life by piercing her side and rumen with a screwdriver, a sort of makeshift trochar and cannula, for fear the animal would die before the vet could get there or a stomach tube could take effect. That had been frightening: the bellowing animal, terrified, snorting foam from its nose and rolling its eyes, its stomachs swollen to four or five times their usual size. She had had to help steady it while her father raised his arm and stabbed, with as much force as he could, to break through the tough hide and into the rumen wall and release the built-up gas, which came out in a rush, with blood, and the animal screaming. But she had not flinched. Just as she did not flinch when rabbits had to be shot, or young male calves put down, or else sold for veal. She should have been born a boy, her father sometimes joked, and then she could have inherited the farm from him. And she had considered it, anyhow: it had been at the back of her mind when she started her degree at agricultural college. But by then there was Euan. And besides, it was not an easy job, running a farm. It was lonely, hard, back-breaking work. Perhaps, even if it had been a real option, she would have decided against it, anyway.

  She made three batches of barmbrack, six oblong, slightly lumpy loaves. While the last pair were cooling in their tins she showered and dressed in fresh clothes, washed Anna’s face and tied a ribbon in her hair. They set off for the neighbours�
�. The first villa in the compound, to the right of hers, was empty. The third was occupied (Trudy had told her) by a middle-aged Englishman. She knocked, but there was no answer. The fourth was Trudy’s: but there was no answer from her, either. Across from Trudy’s, past the run-down swimming pool and tennis court, was Anjali’s villa, with the blowsy roses. A man answered the door, thin-faced with a balding head and thick grey moustache. He must be Anjali’s father, was Ruth’s immediate thought, but then he introduced himself as Maarlen, her husband. Anjali appeared, wearing turquoise salwar kameez and a shimmering golden scarf. She was plaiting her hair as she walked, her fingers moving fast. The rope of hair hung thick and fat almost to her waist. When she greeted them, Ruth noticed a neat bump under her tunic. Anjali cast her eyes downward, modest.

 

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