I Am The Local Atheist

by Warwick Stubbs

  “You know I hate symbols.”

  “I know, but that’s no reason to destroy them. You grew up with these symbols always in your face and for some reason you saw through them and pitted yourself against them. But that’s not what they were for me. That cross you burnt was my salvation – the very one that you burnt – it was the one you yourself took me to and showed me the light of Jesus through. Or have you forgotten that?”

  I had. I had forgotten it. It hadn’t even crossed my mind. I thought I was picking a cross at random, that one on the prayer table next to the candles, soaking our dear crucified Jesus in gasoline before I was due to walk up on to the alter to say my reading from Jeremiah 29:

  This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” Yes, this is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: “Do not let the prophets and diviners among you deceive you. Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have. They are prophesying lies to you in my name. I have not sent them,” declares the LORD.

  But I didn’t bother finishing it. I was too angry. I raised my head and looked out at the congregation. “I have been asked to cease working in the name of God by hypocrites, I have been asked by mere people to give up what was graciously given to me by our Lord God; I have been asked to stop living my life…”

  Had I continued reading, I may have changed my mind:

  “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart…”

  Lisa said: “There are people in this town who see you as a symbol of hate and deviltry, but you don’t see them heading out to lynch you. They accept you as a part of this town whether or not they like what you did.”

  “Yet they were so quick to throw me out of the church because of it.”

  She looked back down at her fingers.

  I still felt anger towards her. “And you were so quick to desert me like everyone else.”

  “They forbade me to see you, and y’ know it wasn’t so much that, because I left that church and joined City Light soon afterwards. It was just that I had become a part of a family that I had never been a part of before. I wanted that so much more.”

  I could understand that. I didn’t want to, but I had to. That’s how so many non-Christians became Christians – by seeing something in religion that they had never had anywhere else. It was the light that had been absent from the rest of their life. That’s what it had always been for Lisa. I guess I could only say that I had taken it for granted for so long, in the belief that it had always been there and always would be.

  …even when I thought it had deserted me.

  “It seems so strange that you never told me, that you had kept it a secret from me. Well, from everyone by the sounds of it.”

  “Almost everyone.”

  She raised her eyebrows. I couldn’t believe that she hadn’t already figured it out.

  “Remember how you said that Anna MacPherson was Serene’s Elder at Church?”

  “Yeah.” I surprised look hit her face. “Ohhhh…”

  “Right. Serene confessed everything to that old witch, and then she told Rickerton. He told me to stop seeing her because it was inappropriate and cast shame on the image of the church. I told him to go get screwed. My flatmates knew as well, but I had nothing to fear from them knowing. They didn’t care.” I looked past her suddenly. “If it wasn’t for Tinsdale, I might have gone a lot longer without… finding out.”

  I didn’t know anything that day, hadn’t overheard anyone talking about it; I knew nothing as I drifted about town in the drizzle, hood over my head, cap covering my eyes. It wasn’t until I arrived back at the flat that I found out.

  Tinsdale was sitting on the couch. He looked at me nervously. He held a cellphone in his hand.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  A newspaper sat on the coffee table. He reached over and pushed it towards me. I sat down looking at the page it was open to.

  The words almost blurred as I read them. “…Invercargill girl… late last night… fell into the cars below… A witness … ‘poor girl, wasn’t pushed, didn’t lose her footing … jumped, just like that’…” I found it hard to swallow past the sickening feeling rising in my stomach.

  “Who was it?” I asked, but I knew.

  Tinsdale closed his cellphone lid. “Apparently it was Serene.”

  It was raining outside. The walls were closing in. I stood up and walked out the back door and down the footpath as the rain cascaded over me, drenching me. I fell to my knees but crawled some more to the nearest tree, reaching out for the low lying branches. There my stomach heaved and wrenched as breakfast and lunch vaulted up my throat and spewed out of my mouth. I clung tight, smashed my head against wet bark. I pulled my weight against the branches trying to rip them out of their knotted sockets. Pain bled across my face, my stomach ached as I kept dry reaching and hurling myself against the tree.

  She was dead. It couldn’t be.

  I stood up expecting to find somebody to hold onto, but there was only empty air and falling rain too insubstantial to catch. My knees buckled but I remained standing, crooked like an invalid. I insulted the sky, “How dare you! How dare you!” but really I was insulting God. I yelled so loud my throat ripped the ‘you’ out as a scream – “HOW DARE YOU!” My legs could no longer hold me up and I fell onto my side, face buried in green grass as the rain tortured me with every last drop that fell from its bitter clouds.

  “Look, David, I need to go.” Lisa was avoiding eye contact with me.

  “Why?”

  “I think you need some time alone.” She started putting her notes and books back into her carry bag.

  “A year and a half isn’t long enough?”

  That stopped her.

  “It’s not because of anything you’ve done David, please understand that. It’s just all quite overwhelming to find out all of this all at once.” She stood up but paused for a moment. “It’s also because you remind me of a past that I don’t want to be reminded of anymore. I have to let that part of me go.”

  I was shocked. “Well how the hell do you think I feel now that you’ve brought all this shit up about my past?”

  “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know that you were that close to Serene.”

  “I told you I didn’t know anything but you just kept pushing.” I felt myself trembling. I really didn’t want to lose another friend. “You can’t just come back into my life, stir shit up and then disappear.”

  “It wasn’t my intention to stir shit up David. And I certainly had no intention of hurting you. Perhaps I just need time to think about this all. It’s quite a shock to me David. All that time I knew you and you were with Serene.”

  “It was long after what happened with you.”

  “I know, I don’t mean that. I was over that straight after it happened…”

  That hurt, but it was a fair comment. My intentions hadn’t exactly been honourable and she had never felt that way about me anyway.

  “I just mean that everything you’ve told me has brought up a lot of questions for me, and I need to think about it, that’s all.”

  She looked confused, but it didn’t scare me. She raised a hand to the cross around her neck, held it tight and gave me a strained smile. “I’ll give you a call over the next two weeks. We can get together and watch some
movies.”

  I didn’t care. “Sure. That sounds great.”

  She turned and walked out.

  I sat in the chair looking out the window as birds bounced from tree to tree, branch to branch, in the unkempt backyard. The sky was blue, not pink; the grass was green, not purple. Nothing mattered anymore. I felt the same way I did several months ago just before I had started working, like I didn’t care about anything. It was like I had gone through an entire experience without changing for the better, or for the worse. The pain that I had been hiding from had been dredged up from its darkest hiding place and laid out in front of me to bear witness to, but now that same pain had turned into a memory. A memory of where it all began.

  She lay in my arms, head against my chest, fingers doodling over my abdomen; I knew that her parents had been pressuring her to stop seeing me, I knew because she told me out of share defiance… but they finalised it by threatening to never allow her inside the house again if she didn’t come back.

  “Not a very Christian thing for them to do,” I said. It reeked of desperation though. They were losing their grip on their daughter and had to do something, anything to get her back, even if it meant taking a gamble.

  “I know, but they think you’re evil.”

  “Cellphones are evil.”

  She punched me in the side.

  I laughed. “You can stay with me. It’ll be alright.”

  There was a long pause as she scratched my chest with her fingernails. “I want to, but I can’t. They’re my parents.”

  So I knew that it was coming, I knew that without her I would be alone, but it had to happen… she couldn’t defy her own parent’s at someone else’s expense, it just wasn’t in her to do that.

  “I love you Serene.”

  “Don’t say that” she whispered.

  “I’ve never felt this way before.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I felt the edges of her lips move across my skin as she spoke, “I love you too but,” her breath sliding down my side, long black hair sliding over my shoulder, her face full of pain, “I can’t see you anymore.” Tears fell from her eyes, her nose snivelled. “I can’t, I just can’t. I’m so sorry.” She seemed so hopeless, like she had given up completely.

  I held on tight, my right arm at her waist afraid to let go. I felt my body begin to tremble. I knew that without her I would be alone but I couldn’t stop her. Her hand reached down to mine, gently gripped it and moved it aside. She propped herself up on an elbow and looked at me, but I looked away not being able to stand seeing the mess of tears on her beautiful face. There was nothing else that could be done or said, so she threw the duvet off her and headed for the door. She left without looking back. Her warmth was gone and the cold air was creeping all over my torso, but all I could do was stare at the ceiling. Stare and stare as though there was an escape there, as though some blinding flash of light was going to blow me out of the oblivion I was about to go through, but there wasn’t. No light, no escape; just darkness and the sudden realisation that loneliness had come to stay.

  Chapter 7:

  An Aversion to Light

  Part I

  “It’s so cold in this house.”

  Lucas wasn’t wrong about that. It didn’t help that the wood that I had been poking and prodding in the fire place for the last half hour hadn’t sparked any flames. I stared at the logs blackened on top but glowing underneath. It was useless. The wood was too wet. The owner had stacked the wood behind the house with only one wall as protection from the South-Westerlies that blew in across the ocean. The side that wasn’t protected was left out in the open. It was stupid. The weather in Invercargill came from all directions and took pity on no one; leaving your firewood uncovered was just asking for it.

  All the smoke in the room that Lucas had been blowing out of his mouth was mixing uncompromisingly with the smoke from the fire place every time I jabbed it. I was adamant it was going to start swallowing us if Lucas didn’t put his cigarette out, but he just shrugged his shoulders whenever I mentioned it.

  I poked and prodded a couple more times before giving up. It was easier to just sit in front of the fireplace and stare at it rather than make any real effort to fix it. Lucas was perched on the cushioned sill of the bay window staring up at the clouds outside as they pelted rain down on the streets beyond.

  It was past three o’clock and I expected the kids that lived here to be returning soon. I had never been a fan of kids – teenagers I could understand, kids were just plain sly (though I admired them for that) – and I wanted to be out of the house by the time they got back. “When do the children get sent home from school?”

  “About three-thirty. I think it’s a bit later today. Lucy picks them up after their dance classes.”

  “What’s it like living with kids?”

  “It’s alright. Some nights Stacey will not stop crying, and that kinda pisses me off. But I like it here. When I’m not working I get the place all to myself; I hardly see the lodger in the loft, Lucy works fulltime and the kids are always at school.”

  I picked up the poker again and jabbed at the dying embers. “How’s Christie?”

  “Not sure. She hasn’t been returning my calls. At least, not after the last phone conversation we had.”

  “What happened?”

  “I said to her: ‘I know that you’re busy.’ And she said ‘Do you?’ as if just talking to her was taking up her time. So I said ‘I know that you care about this shit.’ But that didn’t go down too well, and it wasn’t really what I meant, but I think she thought that I was saying that it was all shit. But she should know that that’s not what I mean.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Just say what you mean then. You got to.”

  “Right. She just made excuses about all the stuff that she’s planning for Invercargill to set up and get going to help the youth and so forth.”

  “What was your reply?”

  “I made a smart comment about her having her finger on the pulse of Invercargill.”

  “How’d she take that?”

  “With silence. I said ‘it’s alright – you got your eyes everywhere, but…’ I trailed off. I wasn’t sure where I was going with that, but you can guess. And then she gave me the answer that I expected: ‘I can’t be distracted from the work that the Lord has sent me to do’. So I said ‘I’m just saying that it hurts all the time when you don’t return my calls.”

  “Well if she’s busy she’s busy and I guess there’s not much you can do about it.”

  “I said to her: ‘So you haven’t got the time to even have lunch with me?’” He opened the window slightly and threw the last of his cigarette into the bushes, closed the window again and sat in silence for a moment. “Yeah, I know. I just remember how it was with us, that’s all. She’s so much fun.” He pulled his legs up and lit another cigarette. “It’s so cold in this house.”

  “Say it again. It might make you feel better.”

  “It’s so cold in this house.”

  “She won’t change for you y’ know?”

  “And I ain’t changing for her. I know how she feels but I can’t be what she wants me to be.”

  “All you have to do is show her that you care.”

  “Easy for you to say – you haven’t got anyone pining all over you.”

  Thanks for reminding me. “Do you think about her much?”

  “I haven’t been able to sleep.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, that’s more because I’m not eating; and if I can’t eat I can’t sleep; and if I can’t sleep I can’t… well.”

  “Dream.”

  “Yeah, but I do enough of that while I’m awake now that she’s always on my mind. I feel like I’m going crazy.”

  “People go crazy when they don’t pass through that dreaming stage of sleep.”

  “Well, it’d be just as crazy to get messed up with her if her religious views were always coming between us.”

  �
�It’s not like she’s going to be trying to poison you.”

  “Yeah, well I’m not the one drinking the poison, am I?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Callasandra told me that you’re a Christian.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that. It concerned me how this conversation might pan out. “So?”

  “It must have been weird hiding that for all this time you’ve known me.”

  “No weirder than you never saying that you’re an atheist.”

  “I’ve never stated that I’m an ‘atheist’ only that I was no Christian and had issues with Christianity. I made you aware right from the start where I stood with these issues, but you kept quiet.”

  “I guess I didn’t want to be judged for what I believe in.”

  “I judge all my friends regardless of what they believe in, but I don’t hold those judgements against them. They’re my friends because I accept them despite what they believe, or what my opinions are with regards to what they believe, and they accept me likewise.”

  “Well, now that you know I’m a Christian, should it make any difference?”

  “No, but I guess I’m just annoyed because I felt like I was talking to someone who was sympathetic to how I felt, not someone who couldn’t speak up for what they truly felt.”

  “I spoke up once and it didn’t do me any good.”

  “Speaking up always does good, even if you don’t get to say everything about how you feel; at least your opinion is heard and later conversations can hopefully build on that.”

  Nothing he said gave me any sense of vindication. “Yeah, whatever. Speaking up only works if people are willing to hear you out and I wasn’t in any position to be listened to. Anyone faced with that is going to find it hard to swallow.”

  Lucas shrugged. “One poison is as good as the other.”

  “You really think Christianity is a poison?”

  “Honestly?”