Rainbow Milk

by Paul Mendez

  “For nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom, there will be earthquakes in one place after another, there will be food shortages. These are a beginning of pangs of distress.”

  Jesse kept glancing at Fraser Hammond on the front row between his mother and brothers, to see if he was paying attention. It was hard to tell. His head was always down as if in study, yet when the speaker—trying to get Fraser involved more—picked him out to read a verse aloud, Fraser simply shook his head, leaving the speaker to look awkwardly elsewhere. He’d graffitied his Bible with band logos, right across the holy scriptures, and his parents—arty types who’d moved up from South London when Ian Hammond accepted a placement at a Dudley GP surgery—didn’t seem to mind or care. Fraser had revealed to Jesse that he was dyslexic, and had trouble reading, especially out loud. Jesse was flattered that Fraser would share such information with him. Fraser liked to do things with his hands, and found the ideal professional home in the Black Country, working as a fabricator.

  “So what do we learn, from Jesus’s words, to his apostles?” asked Brother Woodall, rhetorically. “If we expect to put a date on God’s coming day of judgement, perhaps we should say, Remember September 1975.”

  Sister Doreen Charles, sitting on an end seat in the middle, her black beehive wig blocking the view of the Brother behind her, nodded her head in agreement then shook her head at the memory. Jesse had heard her story many times, of how she had finally run out on her abusive, non-believing husband, she was so convinced, as most Witnesses then were, of the imminence of Jehovah’s Day of Judgement.

  “We all thought, then, that the world was going to end on that specific date,” said Brother Woodall. “We sold our houses and left our jobs. We thought we were clever, with our mathematics”—Jesse glanced at Fraser’s brother, Duncan, a recent Maths graduate, who was unmoved—“and assumed we could predict when Jehovah God would act. Even before that, we thought that the Great Tribulation began in 1914, with the Great War. Not so. That was just the beginning, of pangs, of distress. The Bible tells us of five situations we’ll face, that will come together to announce we are in the Great Tribulation. The first of those five will be an attack on false religion, as described in Revelation, chapter seventeen.”

  Jesse knew it all already. He didn’t have to listen. He was the darling boy of the congregation. Baptised for three years now, about to become a ministerial servant, halfway to elderdom, at nineteen. He manned the roving mics. Gave important talks from the platform, encouraging and admonishing the congregation, scripturally. Was considered to be a Brother of quite high standing, whilst remaining, almost shockingly, youthful. Brothers and Sisters saw in him the power of Jehovah’s love. They saw in him what a relationship with Jehovah can do for a young man: give him direction, make him satisfied, happy even, with his lot. A suitable wife was being sought for him: a mixed-race girl who had been introduced to him from another congregation, and when she stuck around him, shy and smily in her cream mohair turtleneck, moist little curls hanging from her forehead, he knew what was happening. She was pretty. They got on, but through no fault of hers he felt uncomfortable. He went home and scratched at his body as if he wanted to break out of his own skin. He prayed to Jehovah, but it was no use. He didn’t feel as if he was actually speaking to anyone. His words, as he spoke them in his head, died. He knew that something was wrong, and hoped to God his real truth would not find its way out.

  * * *

  —

  Jesse didn’t know, when he went out to preach from house to house on September 11, 2001, that a different option, a different way of thinking, was waiting for him in the front room of an unassuming Victorian two-up, two-down. It began on a simple Tuesday afternoon, and despite his inexperience, he conducted the field service briefing because Sisters weren’t allowed to if there was a baptised Brother present (in the absence of a senior male, they could ask a prayer, covering their heads). Unprepared, he read 1 Corinthians 7:29–31 for the Sisters—mostly single, childless women in their late twenties who like him had dedicated their lives to the full-time ministry:

  “Moreover, this I say, brothers, the time left is reduced. Henceforth let those who have wives be as those who had none, and also those who weep be as those who do not weep, and those who rejoice be as those who do not rejoice, and those who buy as those not possessing, and those making use of the world as those not using it to the full; for the scene of this world is changing.”

  They must have been wondering where he was going, but it all made sense by the end. They were an odd number, so the Sisters paired off and Jesse worked alone, one of those estates of terraced houses whose front doors opened into a staircase and sitting room. The first he knocked on was answered abruptly by a skinny young man, topless in jogging bottoms and with a face like he’d just seen something life-changing. Jesse was about to go straight into his spiel with the current issues of the Watchtower (Can Anything Really Unite People?) and Awake! (Depression—A Generation at Risk) when the young man interrupted him to say back into the house, It’s just a Jova, then turned to Jesse and said, You int sin the news av ya, mate! A plane’s crashed into a skyscraper in New York!

  The young man left his front door open and went back to his seat next to a stubbly South Asian man in a polo shirt with the collar up, sitting awestruck in his slippers on the edge of a sofa, smoking what smelt immediately like a spliff and drinking a mug of tea, so Jesse, hesitantly, stepped in, closed the door and crossed in front of them to sit in the matching armchair. True enough, a cloud of grey smoke poured out from a great crater near the top of a New York skyscraper, as if from the mouth of an active volcano, obscuring the crown of its identical twin, a gruesome sight against the pure blue sky. Joypads, DVD video games and their cases were strewn across the floor in front of the TV.

  “What’s actually ’appened?” said Jesse.

  “They doe know, yet,” said the South Asian man, through his cigarette smoke. “We just turned on the telly to play a game, then the…”

  “The announcer,” said the skinny man.

  “Yeah, the announcer said we’re gonna interrupt the programming schedule…”

  “To bring a special news report,” said the skinny man, trembling with nervous energy.

  Jesse’s heart thumped as if he had been caught stealing. He had always imagined, that when the Great Tribulation began with the global banning, by the United Nations, of all false religion—executing Jehovah’s will—it would be announced, like this, by a news report interrupting the regular scheduling. The Asian man passed his spliff to the skinny man, who dragged on it desperately as they both stared at the screen in widening horror. A camera at ground level, watching the building on fire, immediately switched its gaze up to the sky. A man screamed Oh shit! as another plane careered stupidly over their heads and smacked right into the second tower with the sound of an empty can being crushed underfoot. The whole world gasped at once, and then for a tiny, frozen moment there was utter silence, as air rushed into the cavity of the building before a fireball boomed out from the wound.

  “Fuck! Fuck! Fuckin’ hell, man! What the fuck’s gooin’ on!”

  The skinny man sprang up from his seat, ash flying everywhere, his dick lolloping around in his joggers.

  “We are awaiting confirmation from the White House that the American government is now treating this incident as a coordinated attack,” said the reporter.

  “Hundreds of people am dying, Carl, right there,” said the Asian man, as the skinny man backed onto his seat in shock.

  * * *

  —

  “Jesus foretold,” Brother Woodall reasoned, “that the broad attacks, by the United Nations, on false religion, will not go so far as to destroy our true religion. What, then, does Jesus tell us we should do? Let’s turn to Matthew, chapter twenty-five, verse thirteen. One of the shortest verses in the Bible. Brother Jesse McCarthy, would
you like to read that out for us?”

  Jesse was suddenly nervous. He had a hard-on. The soft, loving tone with which Brother Woodall said his name didn’t help. An attendant, with a roving mic, hung it in front of Jesse’s face. Jesse kept his Bible on his lap.

  “Keep on the watch, therefore,’ he read, “because you know neither the day nor the hour.”

  * * *

  —

  Jesse stayed with Carl and Abdul as long as he could without being feared missing, all three transfixed by the news—and he left them a copy of Awake!, which at least offered more practical answers to life’s questions than the dogmatic Watchtower. He drank their tea and breathed in their weed smoke, dreamed of being forced to suck their dicks. They shook their heads and thought silently of those who had lost their lives, even as they watched their bodies burn. Armageddon was coming, someday, but if he’d been on that plane or in that building he would already be dead. What kind of God lets people die so horribly? He was shocked at himself, at that thought, but more than anything, confused by something he’d never previously questioned.

  He found the Sisters—who themselves had all been invited in by householders to watch the events unfold—similarly shock-faced in the next street, but still almost felt he had to lie when they asked him where he’d been and prayed they couldn’t smell anything on him. I was invited in by a couple, he said. Nice people, but I don’t think we should call on ’em again. Abdul had described how members of his family had threatened to kill him. He and Carl lived far enough away from their childhood homes to feel safe but not so as to become isolated. They lived together in that little house as a couple. Two men. They ran a window-cleaning business together and had finished for the day. Various sexual configurations went through Jesse’s mind. They were both masculine; he thought he might be able to understand it better if one of them was like a girl, but these two—men—lived together. They seemed so free. They spent afternoons in their slippers and jogging bottoms, playing computer games, drinking tea and smoking weed. They had a kitchen and a garden, and upstairs, probably two bedrooms—plenty of privacy—and a bathroom. Jesse used their downstairs toilet and thought to himself, I’m having a wee in the house of two men who live together like man and wife. Lived together. Two men. In such a cute little house with a red door, one sash window at the bottom and one at the top. All they needed. Carl was a skinny white man, like the skinny white boys Jesse went to school with who said racist things to South Asian men like Abdul, calling them dirty fuckin’ Pakis, but now, this skinny white man, and this South Asian man, probably in their mid-twenties, had found love, with each other. It was the first time Jesse had ever met a gay couple, and he didn’t run away from them in disgust. Perhaps he would’ve done if they had not experienced together, he and them, the unfolding of such a cataclysmic event.

  The way Carl and Abdul looked at each other, the way they held hands, Jesse found electrifying. They sat next to each other, watching something far more destructive to the world than their love. He left with a foretaste of Armageddon, and wondered whom he would want to experience it with. These are a beginning of pangs of distress.

  * * *

  —

  “Did Jehovah God intervene,” Brother Woodall concluded, “to bring things to a conclusion, after the Great War and Spanish flu killed twenty-five million people, between 1914 and 1919? Did Jehovah God intervene, to bring things to a conclusion, after World War Two, and the Holocaust, killed an estimated seventy-five million people across the world? Will Jehovah God intervene, because three thousand people just died in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia? We cannot say no, but nor can we say yes, because the time Jehovah God will act is known only to Him, and all we can do is keep our faith, go out there on the ministry, and comfort those who need the support only we, as God’s servants, and His voice on the Earth, can give. It could happen tomorrow, it could happen in a hundred years. In the meantime, mankind will continue to do what mankind has constantly done since it broke away from God’s favour, and that is, to divide itself into tribes, and go to war.”

  Chapter 3

  SEPTEMBER 16, 2001

  All the pubs in Great Bridge were closed, so Jesse and Fraser met outside the off-licence on Whitehall Road, Jesse in his best going-out clothes—a pair of corduroys, a grey bomber jacket, black polo shirt and Adidas Sambas. Fraser was wearing his Rockports, a Barbour waxed jacket zipped up to the top, with the cuff of a blue gingham shirt just visible over his watch.

  “What do you drink?” he said, to the window of the beer fridge.

  “Same as you, I suppose.” Jesse, at nineteen, had still not quite acquired the taste for lager, but Graham drank Foster’s, so Jesse was glad when Fraser picked out a six-pack. He put his hand in his pocket.

  “Don’t worry, they’re on me,” Fraser grinned, taking out his Visa.

  “You have any ID?” said the young Indian guy serving.

  Fraser, twenty, got out his driving licence and asked for a pack of ten B&H Silver.

  “Fags?” Jesse said, looking round to see if anyone else in the shop might recognise them.

  Fraser winked at Jesse over his shoulder. It was a chilly, damp night, and as soon as they were out on the street, Fraser unwrapped the cellophane. A gassy smell entered Jesse’s nostrils. With smoke rising from the cigarette on his lip, Fraser put one in Jesse’s mouth and lit it, sheltering the flame from the wind. “Take it down gently,” he said, assuming Jesse had never smoked before. He sprang back and laughed as Jesse coughed and spluttered till tears came to his eyes.

  The council estate up the road was awaiting demolition, and the empty block next to the library, lackadaisically fenced off, appeared the perfect hideout. Fraser squeezed through a gap and made space enough for Jesse. They scaled the debris of crumbling breezeblocks, sheets of plaster and abandoned furniture, climbed two flights of damp stairs over broken glass and joints of weather-rotten window-surround, and found a room, lit by a streetlamp, stripped back all the way to the brick, with the front wall of the building missing, facing Great Bridge. In the middle there were two piles of breezeblocks, arranged, as if just for them, to resemble sofas at right angles to each other in a sitting room. They each sat down on a pile and cracked open a can.

  “Have you heard The Blueprint yet?” Fraser said. “Jay-Z’s new album. It’s only out in America so far, but I just ripped it off Napster.”

  “You ripped it off wha?”

  “Napster,” he said, as if Jesse was years behind the times. “It’s an online file sharing website, so people in like America or wherever upload tracks or albums as MP3s to Napster, which you can then download anywhere in the world. You can burn them to CD if you want.”

  Jesse didn’t understand any of it. “That’s cool,” he said. “I wish I ’ad a computer.”

  “You can just come round mine and download anything you want,” Fraser said, as he blew smoke rings. “It’s a sweet shop.”

  Why aren’t we at yours now? Jesse thought. “Cool. So is it good?” he asked.

  “It’s wicked. I’ve been listening to it over and over. You wanna hear some?”

  “Goo on then.” Fraser presented his Discman from one of the very practical large outer pockets of his Barbour, and unwound the earbuds, handing Jesse one. The music started straight away. Jesse was into glitchy electronic pop-R&B produced by Timbaland and the Neptunes. He was building quite the collection of singles, cheaper than albums and more immediate. Albums were for grown-ups; maybe it was time for him to come of age. Fraser was an albums man. Jesse felt pretty cool, sitting in a dark, wet, derelict room drinking a can of Foster’s and taking an earbud to listen to a new Jay-Z album that wasn’t even out yet. It still stung him, though, every time he heard a rapper swear.

  “This runnin’ this rap-ish tune’s good,” he said, nevertheless.

  He knew he could steal a march on the ruder boys at McDonald’s if he
had a copy of this before them and could learn some of the lyrics. His mother had never allowed him to listen to rap, so he’d been blocked all his life from hearing black men talk about the world on their own terms. White boys, who considered themselves to know more than he did about “the struggle,” made fun of him. He remembered the first time he’d ever heard the word nigger on record, listening to the Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die with the three Hammond brothers in Fraser’s bedroom, hearing them pronounce every word of the lyrics without missing a syllable, getting rowdy with their gun fingers: I’ve been robbin’ muthafuckers since the slaaaave ships!

  Fraser drained the last of his first can and threw it in the corner with a tinny echo, cracking open his second, the strong middle finger of his right hand keeping his earbud pressed into his ear. Jesse imagined sucking that middle finger, the trimmed nail scraping down his tongue. A wise man told me don’t argue with fools, cos people from a distance can’t tell who’s who. Must remember that, Jesse thought. Fraser just nodded his head to the music, listening hard to the lyrics. The pop single Jesse already knew well came on next.

  “Izzo’s a tune,” he said. The samples generally, so far, had impressed him. This track made use of “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5. It reminded him of his childhood, when his mother used to play her vinyl loud in the front room when other Witness couples came round for dinner, all her soul classics like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Roberta Flack. She’d recently given it all away in boxes to a Brother—indeed, a brother—from another congregation. She’d stopped listening to them years ago, buying only CDs now. “Wha, Jay-Z used to sell drugs? Crack? Int he gonna be arrested, mekkin’ that confession on record?”

  “Dunno.” Fraser lit another cigarette, then offered Jesse one, which, against himself, he took. Here he was, smoking and drinking, the very acts he’d so long looked down on others for defiling their bodies with. He was enjoying the music, but craved Timbaland beats. He still hadn’t quite got over Aaliyah’s death, just a few weeks before, and was secretly slightly disappointed by her last album. The sound was great but wasn’t Timbaland enough. He’d wanted a whole album of “Are You That Somebody?”—impossible-to-dance-to machine-gun beats that dropped when they wanted to, surprising with their placement; baby-crying and teeth-grinding samples. Her self-titled album was slicker, more soulful, more emotional, more grown-up.