by Paul Mendez
“Nah, just someone I know from work.”
“Well, you know what they say, doe ya? Bad associations spoil useful habits!” said Tammy. They had been to a party thrown by friends of theirs from a congregation in West Bromwich, and likely themselves had enjoyed a glass of red. There is nowhere in the Bible that actually says you shouldn’t smoke or drink; it was addiction that was considered the sin, because to use the body for anything other than Jehovah’s salvation constituted the worship of false idols. They took a right at the island. McDonald’s was quiet and about to close. He saw through its windows some of his colleagues assembling drive-thru orders—bleached-blonde Lisa; indie-boy Masood, who wore his cap tipped back; ginger Craig, who once summoned heavily and gobbed right in a customer’s burger after he’d dared to claim he’d been short-changed, forcing the manager to cash up a till at the height of a manic Saturday afternoon. They watched the customer sit at a table and nosh down every last bite. The till had been correct.
Down the road to the left was the landfill site where Graham used to work, but they went straight on, past the new ASDA, and turned left up Carlton Street, by the Cash & Carry where Graham was now employed as a hand at Goods Inward. Jesse had half-planned to go into McDonald’s with Fraser, just to show him off. Why had he freaked out like that when Jesse asked him if he fancied moving in together? Wouldn’t it make sense for them both to get out of unhappy homes? Jesse was dreaming about finally learning to drive, getting their weekly shopping in. Did Fraser find what Jesse had suggested in any way sinister? I’d be like your girlfriend. I’d look after ya, he’d said. That was the one moment of the evening he regretted, like a heavy dash of cinnamon that could be tasted above everything else. He supposed it was the start of a new working week tomorrow; it was late.
The curtain flickered in his parents’ bedroom as the car door shut, the gate whined and Tammy, in her loud Tipton voice, shouted, Love to your mum and dad! He hovered the key miserably about the lock before he finally found the slot. Tammy and Vanessa bipped their horn and drove away. There was light beneath the front room door, and in the kitchen, through the dining room. He tried to be as quiet as possible, toeing off his muddy trainers in the hallway. He climbed the stairs to bed and undressed in the dark. Drunk and stoned, he lay back on his bed and thought of Fraser, of Brother Thomas Woodall in his white work dungarees, and of Graham, downstairs in his white underwear, watching TV.
Chapter 4
SEPTEMBER 19, 2001
Graham had never learned how to be a father to Jesse. For a long time he worked on a landfill site with tattooed men, and once allowed Jesse, then thirteen, to go to work with him in the school holidays. The site kitchen was from Hell, its walls filthy and blackened with dust. Early that morning Graham made Jesse a cup of tea in there, boiled from a kettle crusted in scum. The calendar girl for August was a knickerless redhead with a black lacy bra pulled down under her breasts, black stockings and suspenders, and parted red lips. Jesse drank the tea quick as his mouth could take as the first quavers of daylight started to sound.
“Mornin’, Macca!” A tanned man with receding golden hair side-parted and slickly swept back crunched in along the gritty, muddy floor and stopped still with the stamp of a boot, his eyes popping out of his head. A plume of thick hair puffed out from the cleft of his chest; his nipples stood erect within his vest. He wore his overalls—down which dwelt a searching hand—open to the waist, the arms dangling loose. Jesse, still prisoner to adolescent sleep, wondered how this man could be so jolly.
“Mornin’, Johnny,” said Graham. “Jess, this is Johnny, one o’ the gaffers.”
“Alright, Johnny,” Jesse said.
Johnny stared at Jesse with a wide-eyed, open-mouthed fascination, stooped across the table—the St. Christopher around his neck swinging forth and back—and extended the same hand with which he’d been adjusting his person, warm and tight as a boxing glove.
“This ya missus’s lad?” Johnny said to Graham but all the while looking at Jesse. He stood back with his hands on his hips. Jesse looked at his hand then worried about what Graham might think of him thinking about where it had vicariously been, so he dutifully, though discreetly, wiped it on his trousers.
“Yeh, from before she met me,” Graham replied, without a hint of suspicion.
“Fuck me, he’s a beauty, int he!” Johnny said, slapping the same hand comically across his mouth, in recognition either of the fact that Jesse was a minor in front of whom he shouldn’t curse, or a Jehovah’s Witness as such. “Come out for a day on the soit with ya dad, ’ave ya?” he asked Jesse, as if he was hard of hearing.
Jesse nodded.
“Well, I’m sure ya’ll a’fun, mate. People throw things away all the toim that ya moit dig out and think ya could use.”
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, int it?” Graham smiled.
“How’s he at school? Is he clever, loik? Bet ya’m an arty type, ay ya!”
“I like music,” Jesse said, finally sniffing his hand as he pretended to wipe his nose. It smelled like his own balls but sweeter, and made his eyes lose focus for a second.
There was something strange in how Johnny walked away, looking Graham in the eye, to the corner of the kitchen, scanning all the cups. Jesse had washed the one he’d drunk from, with the West Bromwich Albion FC crest on it, and put it upturned to dry on the side of the sink, which was caked in mud, chips of plaster and brick dust. Johnny picked it up and held it up to the light.
“Someone bin using mar cup?” he said, almost threateningly.
“Oh, is that yours, Johnny?” said Graham. “I dint know. I med tea for Jess in it. Sorry.”
Johnny looked at Graham over his shoulder, then at Jesse, with some degree of what the fuck d’ya think ya doin’! etched on his face; perhaps correcting himself, he smiled, flicked his eyes once more between them, and clearly despite himself, burst out laughing.
“That’s alroit!” he said. “I’ll just wash it!”
There was a soap dispenser drilled into the wall next to the taps above the sink, full of a grainy gel scrub for industrial use; Johnny squirted seven loads one after the other into his cup and began to scrub away furiously at it, all the while grinning, telling Graham with great wide-eyed animation, ducking and diving and surfing through his knees, the story of his journey home in the traffic the night before, through the early aftermath of an accident out of which the driver was being cut as he himself cruised past, the police closing the road and figuring out what to do with the traffic that had nowhere else to go for fear of clotting the vein of an important through-road, ambulance crews arriving to scrape up the mangled body of a—ya know, black—kid twenty yards away from the wreckage, the car presumably having kissed the child dead and swerved off the road and into the side of a building. As he was talking, Jesse was thinking, how could Graham, a Christian, work in a place like this? Johnny was scrubbing his cup as if an alien’s tongue had rimmed it, his forearms and biceps flexing, a dark mark of sweat spreading on the front of his vest, his face remaining as jolly and animated as a ventriloquist’s puppet. Finally, he turned on the hot tap full-blast and scalded off the bitty, gluey soap, drying his now-pink hands down his legs and across the flesh of his backside, flicking on the same abysmal kettle to make himself a cup of tea with two bags—“Ar loik it strung’n black, ar do!” he said—using the dirty teaspoon left casually on the draining board.
“I suppose we’d berra get gooin’,” said Graham, flashing Jesse a look to suggest that Johnny was best left well alone.
Out on the road, truck drivers with thick hairy forearms resting on their window ledges nodded and raised their hands as they drew up next to them at traffic lights, making Jesse wonder whether they would scrub their mugs too, if he’d used them. Graham put the radio on—CeCe Peniston; Wet, Wet, Wet; Radiohead—just as they passed a billboard for a local radio station, featuring a
boombox with Photoshopped speakers meant to resemble a woman’s breasts, with the tagline Always First for the Biggest Hits!
They didn’t talk. Jesse didn’t dare open his mouth.
* * *
—
Now he sat quietly on the settee in the front room. There were three two-seaters. His parents sat together on the one next to the patio doors, where, most non-meeting nights, they would watch TV, but it was off. The fire, though, was on, and Jesse’s mother had stretched her ashy feet out on the rug in front of it. She hadn’t showered or washed her face, and was sitting in her head wrap and nightie, her breasts down in her lap. She would never normally allow herself to be seen by anyone outside immediate family like that, but Jesse didn’t allow himself the thought that she was not in her right mind. The third settee, with its back to the front bay window, was waiting for Brother Frank Grimes, who was coming with another elder to discuss something about Jesse. The little carriage clock on the mantelpiece read two minutes to seven.
Of course, Jesse knew it was going to be about the drinking and smoking. He expected to be counselled, for the elders to sit and reason with him from the scriptures. He deserved it; he didn’t know what he’d been thinking, as a baptised Brother. He felt awful the next day, groggy and slow, and flat on his back in bed, had to call Sister Doreen Charles—with whom he was scheduled to work on the ministry—to cancel. Sister Doreen Charles doted on him like he was her grandson. She’d never had children of her own and was nearly seventy now. She was steadfast in the ministry and a bit of a handful for the elders. As a Sister, she was supposed to be quiet and acquiescent, but she often challenged them on aspects of how the congregation was run. She thought she had all the answers. An elder, knowing of Jesse’s closeness to her, once asked him to have a word. He said he would, but knew he could do no such thing.
Sister Doreen Charles was her own man. She sang louder than anyone else in the congregation, constantly criticised the elders and often lamented that the one thing she did not like about being a Witness was having to be in subjection to shchupid man. She had been faithful to Jehovah since the sixties, when a black woman and a white woman, working together, knocked on her door and preached about God’s Word, and brought her into a congregation where white and black mixed freely as equals under God. She believed beyond any doubt that when she died she would be resurrected into a new world restored to its paradisiacal glory, and into the body she had when she came from Jamaica in 1954. She had seen off a husband who used to beat her, telling him: If yuh hever lif up hev’n one finger fe touch me hagain, so elp me God, me ha go wait till you sleep han pour ot hoil down your hears’ole dem!
Jesse felt terribly guilty to let her down, but couldn’t go out in that state. Of course, it would be fine, another couple would break up so that an older Sister was not left pacing the mean streets alone. She accused him of working too many hours at McDonald’s, told him to rest and that she hoped he’d feel better soon. She’d been such a comfort to him, through the long and draining, head-banging years of his adolescence. Often working on the ministry together, he’d told her all about how things were at home, how he and his mother didn’t speak to each other, could barely exist in the same room, how he made her feel like he was upsetting her with his mere presence, how he barely spent any time in the house even though she was charging him rent allegedly for his use of the hot water, gas and electric, when actually, she’d more than once turned off the power at the mains when he’d spent longer than five minutes in the shower, leaving him barely able to rinse the shampoo out of his hair in the freezing cold. Sister Doreen Charles told him to be patient and trust in Jehovah. She told him she had never been a friend of his mother’s. The truth always come out, she told him. He always wondered what she meant.
All he wanted to do was sleep and forget. He kept replaying in his mind what he’d said to Fraser. I could be like your girlfriend. I’d look after ya. He bit into his pillow and groaned in frustration. What was he thinking? It was Fraser’s own fault for giving him weed. Jesse sent him a text to say he enjoyed last night, that he was going to buy The Blueprint as soon as it came out and sorry if there was any weirdness. He pressed send before he thought maybe he was reading too much into it and that there was no weirdness to speak of. In any case, Fraser, who normally responded at once to texts, didn’t reply all day. It had now been two days. It was the meeting tomorrow night. He hoped to see him then.
The doorknocker tapped, twice; a ring in the mouth of a lion. It felt like they had been sitting in silence for hours, when really, it had only been a few minutes. Jesse was about to get up when Graham jumped to his feet and said, No, you stay there. The room had begun to smell embarrassingly frowzy, as if his mother, who had not brushed her teeth or said a word all day as far as he was aware, had opened her mouth and breathed into the fire to spread the foul smell.
Brother Frank Grimes and Brother Thomas Woodall walked in—Jesse was desperate to remain, in Brother Woodall’s eyes at least, whiter than white—making quiet greetings that finally elicited an audible response from his mother, the heels of their polished Oxford shoes sounding funereal on the wooden floor. Jesse’s sisters, he could hear, had assembled at the top of the stairs. The elders didn’t offer their hands to him, as they normally would, and he didn’t get up. They barely even looked at him, just pulled up the fronts of their trousers near the pockets and lowered themselves down. Jesse’s eyes immediately dropped down to their crotches before he could think to not look. Brother Woodall looked gravely at his stripy new tie while Brother Grimes, owner of a stationery firm, his expensive-looking suit reflecting his relative wealth, began, after a brief solemn prayer, addressing Jesse’s parents:
“We asked you if we could come round this evening to discuss some matters you’ve brought to our attention about your son Jesse. Shall I just outline what we know so far?” Jesse felt as if he was being spoken about like a failing pupil at parents’ evening. “On Monday night, Brother Thomas Woodall received a phone call from yourself, Graham, to express concern about certain behaviours you believe your son might be engaging in, that would be in danger of compromising his faith, you felt, if allowed to continue unchecked. I understand you, Val, received a phone call on Monday afternoon from Sister Tammy Winstanley from our neighbouring congregation, to ask if Jesse was okay, because she found him staggering up Great Bridge on Sunday evening in a state, she suspected, of inebriation, and when they offered him a lift and got him into their car, they said that the smell of cigarettes and marijuana coming from his person was overpowering, and that it was difficult to hold him down to a coherent conversation. They drove him home, and it was once he was in and upstairs that you, Brother Graham McCarthy, still awake watching TV, opened your living room door and smelled the same kind of smell. When you got home from work the next day, Val told you, Graham, about the telephone conversation she’d had with Sister Winstanley, and that was when you felt that the situation was no longer one that should be dealt with in the home but by your elders. We appreciate and agree with your assessment. We’re here, of course, to serve our congregation’s needs in such a way, so Brother Woodall and I would like to commend you on your decision. Does that tally with what you know so far, Graham and Val?”
Jesse’s parents nodded their heads. Graham voiced a small yes.
“Jesse,” Brother Grimes continued. “You have been a credit to this congregation. The youngsters look up to you and older members find your youthful enthusiasm refreshing. You know your Bible, and publicly made a stand, when you finished school, to eschew further education for the sake of dedicating your life to the full-time ministry, making everyone proud, as you’ve continued to do until now. I’m pretty sure you know, though, without turning to your Bible, what 1 Corinthians 15:33 says.”
“Do not be misled. Bad associations spoil useful habits,” said Jesse, nervously, wary of the praise he was receiving.
“That’s of course corre
ct. Your Bible knowledge is exemplary.” Brother Grimes licked his lips and changed his tone. “Can you tell us what your movements were on Sunday, September 16? I mean, in the evening, after the meeting?”
Jesse took a deep breath. He had no idea what he was going to say. He spoke as he would from the rostrum, in one of his Bible readings:
“I went out with a friend, someone I work with, who’d told me he’d been having problems at home. I think he’s really struggling, and knew that as a Witness I’d be able to give him counsel.” He saw here an opportunity to found his actions scripturally, using the hand gestures, pausing, facial expressions and modulation he’d been taught to use in the Witnesses’ Theocratic Ministry School. “The apostle Paul tells us to be all things to all people, so I thought it’d be best to speak to him on his own terms, as Matthew chapter seven, is it verse twelve? says—All things you want men to do to you, you also must likewise do to them. So we just had a few beers, and he told me if I wanted him to listen to me I had to listen to him, and that meant enjoying what he was enjoying, as in, a cigarette, and a spliff.”
“And where did this take place?” Brother Grimes asked. Brother Woodall was still silent, serious, listening.
“Well, we couldn’t go to his house, cos that’s the source of his problems, so, there’s these derelict flats on Whitehall Road which we just chanced upon, ’n we just went in there.”
“And that’s where you went?”
“Yeh.” The only other sound in the room was the occasional gust of wind scuttling down through the fire grille.
“It was a pretty chilly and miserable night, Sunday. Were you okay?”
“Yeah, it was fine.”
“Booze kept you warm. What were you drinking?”
“Just Foster’s.”
“Where did you get them from?”
“Just the off-licence on Whitehall Road.”