I Am The Local Atheist

by Warwick Stubbs

Julie patted her abdomen. “I can think of a dozen places better than here south of Auckland.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake! Why does anyone come here? I don’t know. It was just something I did. I had to get out of Auckland and catching the bus just seemed like the right thing to do, okay?” She sat back in her chair. “Fuckin’ Invercargill.” Grabbing another cigarette and lighting it she launched into another tirade. “Do you know that almost a year ago I heard of a guy who was all but kicked out of his church. Y’ know why? Because he burnt a cross in front of his congregation.”

  A lump formed in my throat, but she wasn’t looking at me anymore. Her eyes just seemed to pass right through me without any acknowledgement of who I was, like I had failed her questions.

  “Do any of you know about this?” She looked around.

  Lucas lifted his head. “You did mention it to – ”

  “You don’t count Lucas. We’ve already talked about it. Well, anyone else?”

  Everyone just shrugged their shoulders and mumbled that they hadn’t heard anything. I couldn’t even move my lips to mumble.

  “No, of course you hadn’t, because it barely even made the papers. Man they tried to sweep that one under the carpet real quickly! A little wee column that filled up space was all it got, and then never even heard of again. No wonder no one knows about it.”

  There was a general look from everybody that seemed confused about where she was going with this, but Tina piped up with “yeah, but burning crosses isn’t new to churches. Quite a few do it just to…”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t just any old cross. This guy had burnt a cross with Jesus on it! Jesus spread eagled in his crucifixion going up in flames! Why? Fuck knows! But I’d sure like to find out!”

  There was silence but for the crackling of the wood in the fire. No one had anything to say.

  Callasandra seemed somewhat dumbfounded that no one had been able to keep up with where she was going with this. “My point, is that where is his story? And who’s trying to keep him silent? Does he have more to say that should be heard or is this town only keen on covering up what they can’t deal with?”

  A few mumbles drifted about, but I got the general impression that no one really cared.

  “Well, I for one feel like I’ve been shat on. That’s all!”

  She sat back in the chair and crossed her arms, glaring into the fire.

  Tina shuffled a bit in her chair and said “Yeah, well. That’s what Christian conservatism brings to the world I guess. An unappreciative view of free art, of people being able to speak their minds against an establishment.”

  The talk rambled a bit about how fundamentalism infiltrated even the non-religious sect of society. Lucas didn’t have much to add which I found surprising for someone who was so opinionated. He just sat beside me quietly chewing at a finger nail every now and then. Callasandra meanwhile didn’t even bother adding to the dying conversation. Perhaps she had felt like she had said enough. Either way she just sat there clasping her bottle of vodka and lime and looked into the fire, or occasionally slouching in her chair and looking up at the stars.

  I thought I would be spared having to talk to her for the rest of the night, since she had practically destroyed my suggestion of apologising… but there was one problem that soon came to light when everyone had picked their couch or mattress to sleep on and Tina’s refusal to let anybody sleep directly on the floor meant that there was one bed left and two people to share it.

  Callasandra looked at me with a little disgust. “Shit, I have to sleep with the apologist. At least I know that you’ll be apologising if you step out of line. Right?”

  “You’ve already scared me enough that I can barely talk to you!”

  “Good then. I made the right impression.”

  She walked into the bedroom and didn’t exactly hesitate when it came to taking her clothes off. She left her knickers and an undershirt on and then jumped straight into bed. “Hurry up and turn off the light so that I can get this night over with already.”

  I took my jeans off, leaving my boxer shorts on. The duvet looked real heavy and I didn’t want to boil up under the sheets so I decided to go to bed without a t-shirt on. I turned the light off and got in beside her, but it was a full King-size bed so there ended up being lots of room between us. She had her back to me and her knees bent slightly. I lay on my back and put a hand behind my head. She was still breathing heavily and didn’t sound like she was going to sleep any time soon.

  I couldn’t help but think about what she had said about her art exhibition. How the gallery had practically shunned her and done what they could to not have her showing any more art there. I remember quite vividly being told to make a direct apology to everyone at the next service, but refusing to because I believed, at least then, that I had done nothing wrong.

  “I was there you know.”

  Her voice was muffled by the duvet but I heard it quite clearly. “Is that right?”

  “Yeah. An old friend had invited me. Wanted to catch up. Pretend it was like old times when we used to visit exhibitions together.” I remembered how I felt as Lisa had returned to her new friends, and I had walked up to the paintings on my own. “It was really interesting. I saw the paintings, and half expected them to transport me away, like some great monoli – ”

  “Paintings hang on the wall. You look at them, that’s all they do.”

  “But still. There’s always a sense of wanting to feel something different when looking at a painting, not just the fact that this artist is such a great painter, but also to invoke something out of the ordinary. That’s what I want to see.”

  She removed the duvet so it wasn’t covering her mouth. “Did you? …see something out of the ordinary?”

  The truth was that no, I hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary, in fact I had been transported back in time, back to somewhere I hadn’t wanted to be.

  She took my silence as an affirmation of the negative and mumbled “thought so”.

  She moved herself around a bit trying to kick more of the duvet over her. There was more than enough to cover us both so I let her take as much as she wanted. When she became silent again she asked “how long were you there? …at the art gallery?”

  “Long enough.”

  “Did it please you to see someone being ripped apart like that?”

  “No. I couldn’t stay. Not to watch that… It reminded me too much… of…” I trailed off with “well, I guess you know” thinking it was low enough not to hear, but she turned her head upwards.

  “Know what?”

  I let out a deep sigh. “You wanted to know what that guy’s story was.”

  “That church guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I already know. He burnt a cross. I asked around, got some answers, it all seemed pretty clear. I assume he was speaking his mind.”

  “He was.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “It was me.”

  She didn’t move for a full ten seconds. I heard meowing outside. Possibly Tina had forgotten to let her cat back in. Hard to say for sure.

  “You!?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The apologist? Did you apologise?”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “Good on you, I wouldn’t have either.”

  She rolled onto her back. “So you’re a Christian?”

  I had to think about that for a moment. “Yeah.” But I wasn’t sure. “I think so.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “They were trying to control me.”

  “In relation to…?”

  “I was a youth leader. Taught the kids to think for themselves and make their own decisions based on their faith. They didn’t want that. They wanted rules set down in stone.”

  There was silence. The air between us swelled into an invisible barrier that was somehow crushing me, while she lay there soaking up the discomfort and turning it around in her thoughts.

  “Why would you burn
a symbol of your own saviour?”

  “It’s a piece of wood. Burning the wood doesn’t change anything but the wood and the air surrounding it.”

  “Right.”

  And the life of the person holding the wood. “I think. I think I did the wrong thing.”

  “What you did inspired those pictures.”

  “Doesn’t make it right.”

  “Got me a gallery viewing.”

  “It ruined you.”

  She thought about this for a moment. “No. No, I refuse to believe that. It ruined my chances of another hanging in that gallery. But I have other paintings and other styles that I want to explore, and as an artist I have far more that I want to say. There are other galleries and I have more time up my sleeve. The paintings that you saw were only one aspect of me. That aspect that had discovered something in this town that was trying to be covered up. You of all people then should have known what I was feeling, but you didn’t stick around did you?”

  “No, I couldn’t. And I think that’s why I left – they were lynching you like they lynched me and I couldn’t stand to be reminded of that. I couldn’t stand to be reminded of how unnecessary my own actions had been if this was the shitty outcome of it.”

  “Your actions were so necessary! They showed me how I could feel free to stand up and say what I wanted – not just what the community wanted me to say but what I the individual had to say. I had always felt so stifled in Auckland, not really fitting in at all because it’s so clicky and everyone wants you to be the next big thing and if you’re not then you’re nothing. Auckland isn’t a place where you can grow into what you want to be. It’s just a place where you are. And that’s it.” She was lying on her side now facing me, shadows hiding her face as her hair straggled over her shoulders. “Invercargill gave me a chance to be who I am, to express something that I wanted to express rather than what the world around me expected me to express.”

  I felt like I just couldn’t accept the fact that my actions had benefited someone else while leaving me all alone. “No, no. It went all wrong. It ruined everything.”

  She put a hand on my chest. I don’t think she meant anything by it but I got an erection anyway. “There is nothing to ruin. There is only that which you can experience.”

  I leant towards her and put a hand on her hip. She wasn’t expecting that and looked at me with a vague sense of surprise… which turned to curiosity, and then her hand moved to my side and she pulled her chest over me and put her lips over mine. My arm took her body and held her with ease. Our lips parted, heads angling in opposite directions; and then our open mouths met. Her entire body was warm and so soft that I was more than happy to let her smother me.

  Oh God, I thought. Oh god this feels good!

  By morning she had moved back to where she had first been, with her back to me lying on her side. Sunlight had woken me from a short but peaceful sleep and all I could do was smile thinking about only a few hours ago. I must have lay there for about an hour just listening to Callasandra breathing before I heard some voices outside the room, and then some footsteps come close to the bedroom door. There was a knock and Tina’s voice saying, “I’m coming in” as she opened the door with a grin on her face and looked at me winking.

  “What?”

  “I smell sex.”

  I pointed a finger towards Callasandra. “It was her.”

  An arm flung out from under the duvet and struck me in the chest. “Bastard.”

  Tina asked if we wanted bacon and eggs for breakfast and if we wanted them done a certain way then we’d have to get up and tell the cook ourselves because she wasn’t going to be relaying messages for us.

  “Do you mind if I have a shower first?”

  She smiled cheekily. “I’ll leave a towel in the bathroom for you when you’re ready,” and closed the door as she left.

  Callasandra remained snuggled up in her share of the duvet and made no signs of moving so I got up, grabbed my clothes and made my way to the bathroom.

  The rest of the morning panned out like nothing had happened that night. Callasandra talked and joked but made no signs of acknowledging what had happened between us; neither the sex, nor the conversation. I was a bit disappointed even though I hadn’t really expected anything. I resolved to just be glad that my dry spell was over.

  Part IX

  – Response –

  I felt tired and lay down in my room, staring at the poster of Ecclesiastic Seal on my ceiling – good solid Christian band… with only one good song. Yet that one song had reaped so many benefits for the band. And probably those who believed in them as well.

  I found it difficult to believe that one little article in a newspaper had inspired someone to paint a whole bunch of pictures. The ratio of inspiration against story seemed completely lopsided to me. I had read that article and it was so biased that it could hardly be taken seriously. “Christian boy burns cross in front of congregation in defiance of his elders. ‘The young man has been asked to leave the church due to his beliefs no longer reflecting the moral compass of Jesus’ example,’ said one of the elders who had wrestled the boy to the ground in fear of the fire burning the entire church down. When asked what the motivation was for the boy burning the cross, the elder replied that drugs had led him down a path of disillusionment, culminating in egocentricity.”

  Egocentricity. Big word from a man who did so little.

  Drugs. It was so easy to point the finger at a big-bad-monster if it was going to make your side of the story look so much better:

  “You leave me with no option but to take the youth group out of your hands, David. I wish I could say I’m sorry, but I feel that you have brought this on yourself.”

  I had brought this on? Hardly.

  I had never encouraged drug use while leading the Youth Group. I had only encouraged faith and being fully aware of the consequences of actions, while providing the support needed for those who needed it.

  “We have tolerated your help for long enough now knowing you indulge in illegal substances, but this – this is too much.”

  “What’s that supposed to me?”

  “We know David. We know who you are seeing and the status of that relationship, and it has to cease right now! It does not look good, and neither is it appropriate.”

  “What, so I’m not allowed to love another person?”

  “This isn’t about love David. This is about you taking responsibility for your actions. The sheer fact that you indulge in illegal substances makes you a hazard to this church and that endangers the youth that you are supposed to be looking after.”

  “A hazard! Come on man, alcohol helps kill ninety-nine point nine percent more people than marijuana does.”

  “It’s not about the facts, David, it’s about the message you send to the youth.”

  “The youth have never been in danger with me because I have never encouraged drug use, never been stoned around them, and nor do I ever get stoned here at church because I respect my Lord too much, and respect His house of worship. It’s my own private world that endangers no one but myself. You must understand that.”

  He sighed, audibly. “You’re too loose David, too vague in your application of Christian morals to life today. Knowing what I know now only adds to that – you’re hardly an appropriate role model.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “These kids need more than just positive rhetoric. They also need guidance that keeps them on the right path, someone they can look up to and say ‘I want to be like him’ and mean it!”

  “Oh, and you’re that person?”

  “Maybe I’m not David, but I thought that you could have been, or at least were.”

  “I have been nothing but specific in showing full understanding and appreciation of their circumstances.”

  “These circumstances occur because they don’t have a set of rules guiding them through their experiences. How can they avoid these circumstances without those rules set in place?”
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  “It’s not as simple as that. Teenagers need to know compassion and understanding…”

  “Oh, please David! You are just making excuses now. Give them rules so they can avoid situations that don’t compromise their Christian integrity. Simple as that.”

  “You’re being naïve, sir.”

  The frustration and concern on his face dropped away and was replaced by cold fury. He raised himself off his seat. Though he wasn’t much taller than me, he was wider and stockier and he could probably beat me in a fight just by sitting on me.

  “A man forty years your senior is not naïve, boy! You have a lot to learn about life, and your Christian ethics at this stage are highly questionable. Forget about Youth Group, they are not your concern anymore. Get out of my office!”

  I hated the church so much.

  I was beginning to feel wound up and the thought of Callasandra chilling the air between us caused me to feel resentful about what had happened. I rolled onto my side and reached over to the side table where the pencil case I had made in Intermediate wood-working class sat with faded felt doodlings all over it. The lid slid back easily and my fingers reached in for the plastic bag inside.

  There was nothing there. I sat up and pulled the lid right off and stared into an empty box. Shit.

  I walked to the closet to check my secret stash in the corner but as I uncovered the loose piece of floor boarding, I realised that I had ransacked this stash ages ago when I had first started working again – this was the pot that should have been in my pencil case. Damn. What the hell was going on here? Think!

  I had a drag before I left yesterday, but I remember putting the rest of it back in the bag and shutting the lid. I remember that. Or had that been some other day’s memory? Shit.

  I needed a clue.

  Tinsdale was walking past my door.

  “Hey!”

  “Yeah?” He stepped into my room.

  “Was I smoking pot yesterday when you told me about the guys coming over?”

  “Yeah. I think so. I smelt it. You were putting it back in y’ pencil case.”

  Done. “It’s gone missing.”