by Peter Laws
Matt spoke first. ‘Well, I don’t believe in God.’ Some of the birds must have been offended at this because a bunch of them stopped singing completely. ‘Sorry, I just don’t.’
He wanted to add the words not any more, which would have been more accurate, but he clipped himself. He knew these Christian types. He’d been one of them long enough to know that any info of a past faith would be like a sliver of meat. Juicy enough to release the evangelistic dogs.
‘But your job. You teach about religion and the Bible. So how can you not—’
‘There are other religions too. And cults and sects. I teach them as well.’
Seth’s face fell even further at that. ‘You mean you teach people about God but you don’t even believe in him? That … baffles me.’
‘Hey, I’ve got a colleague who teaches contemporary folklore. I found her in her office last Tuesday in front of a pile of open books, with a roll of measuring tape hanging from her teeth. She was comparing news reports, trying to work out the penis length of the Tokoloshe.’
‘The what?’
‘The Tokoloshe. Some South Africans are genuinely terrified of a well-endowed, invisible, midget ghost who supposedly rapes villagers. Oh, and some reports say he’s made of porridge.’
Seth twisted his mouth and pulled back a little.
‘She’s writing a paper on it. But it doesn’t mean she believes the Tokoloshe actually exists.’
‘So why bother …’
‘Because people are real. And society’s real. So if enough people believe Jedi is a real religion, or that the US government are shape-shifting lizards who drink children’s blood, then it matters. It just doesn’t make the belief itself real, with respect.’
Seth finally slipped his hand out of Wren’s.
She seemed to stand up straighter. ‘I’m sorry, Seth, but I’m with Matt on this. I’m not a big believer in God either. I mean I’m open to it, I suppose …’
A flash in Seth’s eyes. A quiver of the nostrils. The sniff of spiritual scalp.
‘… and I totally admire what you choose to believe but I’m just not wired that way.’ She flicked a curl of her red hair out of her eyes. Set her shoulders. ‘If you think that might affect my chance of the contract then I’d rather you know that up front. Because I won’t pretend to be something I’m not just for a job. Bottom line is we’re not the God type. Sorry.’
Seth bit the inside of his mouth and waited for what seemed like an awkward minute.
‘Seth. Are you honestly saying that my wife’s beliefs are going to affect—’
‘Shhhh.’ Seth lifted his hand. ‘Your spiritual lives … such as they are … have no bearing on your job prospects. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t hold that against you. Not these days. But thank you, Wren, for your honesty. I’d say that shows character. And potential.’
‘Well, honesty’s important,’ she said. ‘Even if you’re not religious.’
‘Oh, it’s everything.’ He leant in close. ‘Between us, last week’s architect said he was a born-again Christian but we found out later he was actually a humanist. Can you believe that … a humanist?’
So what did you do Seth? Burn the guy at the stake? Cut out his tongue?
‘It was the lying that was the issue, you understand. The lying.’
Wren gave a solemn nod and Matt could tell she was trying to resist punching the air at her first little victory. Truthful, upright architect, Wren Hunter. Irreligious but honest. Point number one! Seth reached up to his head and tipped an imaginary hat at them. ‘See you at church for the Purging, then. Seven-thirty.’ His eyes were a little sad as he wandered off towards his Land Rover, looking more sluggish than before.
Seth and Ben gave a little wave before they drove off and Matt and Wren waved from the doorway of the idyllic cottage as though it had always been theirs. They were the Shore family now, only way more heathen and less dentally impressive.
‘Well, get me …’ Wren said, finally. ‘I’ve been headhunted. Actually headhunted.’
Matt smiled, but only one side of his mouth went up.
‘So come on, then. Who’s this Chris Kelly? He’s not a Tokoloshe is he?’
‘Not quite.’
She went to speak but then her mobile started to ring. ‘Bugger. It’s my boss. Probably checking I’m in the right county.’ But before she answered she nodded to him to speak. ‘Chris Kelly? Quick answer?’
‘He’s not a Tokoloshe,’ he said. ‘He just thinks I’m going to hell.’
She looked at him, both confused and sympathetic. ‘Oh.’
‘You better answer that,’ Matt said, nodding at the throbbing phone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Matt’s mum. She was called Elizabeth Jane Hunter. For as long as he could remember she’d been ‘religious’. Not in a scary turn or burn way but in a, wow-isn’t-Jesus-great way. She literally said those words throughout his childhood.
– How crunchy are these Shreddies? Isn’t Jesus great?
– Look at the thunder, Matt, out on the sea. Isn’t Jesus powerful?
– So your dad was a womanising monster who left us when you were ten, but wow, Matty-boy, isn’t Jesus faithful?
They lived in a tiny village called Dunwich on the Suffolk coast, just him, his mum and his big sister, Linda. Mum wanted way more kids than two, but she had what she described as an ‘uncooperative womb’. Dunwich was an odd little place to grow up. It used to be a major, bustling seaport but since the fourteenth century the hungry sea had swallowed it up. Most of the old town was drowned and never surfaced again. He sometimes thought of it as the pound-shop version of Atlantis.
All that was left above ground was a pub, a beach, a few houses and a wildly expensive fish-and-chip cafe that also sold buckets and spades. It was hardly a thrilling place to grow up. No wonder he became a sci-fi geek, and no wonder mum turned to God.
And boy did she turn. She believed the Bible. All of it. Childlike faith, she said, that’s what people need. She threw herself into scripture like it was a swimming pool full of her very best friends.
Such constant spiritual sugar started to make him feel a little sick eventually, but he loved the woman so much that he never felt like questioning her. Maybe he figured she’d been mocked enough for her faith already by that barely remembered letch of a dad who smelt, he recalled, of Fruit Polo Mints and pilchards. Quite the aroma-combo.
Barnabas (what a name!) Hunter walked out on them one morning when Matt was ten and Linda was twelve. The final argument happened in the kitchen in hushed, secretive tones while Matt watched Ren and Stimpy on the lounge TV, wondering why it was making him cry. Linda kept telling him to get a grip and grow up – which was a bit rich, since her eyes were brimming too. They took themselves to bed that night and the next morning Mum announced they were a single-parent family and let them both eat cake for breakfast. She tried to make it sound like an adventure the three of them were embarking on. Kept using the word ‘team’ a lot. But her cheeks were hollow and she kept stopping at the fridge to pause and breathe, before spinning back round all smiles: Let’s all sleep in the lounge tonight!
Sometimes he liked to think that his dad had just wandered out into the Dunwich sea and joined all the other soulless ghosts. That even now he was wandering in and out of empty, mossy houses, bored and cold and submerged for ever and ever, Amen.
Linda was into church, mainly because she fancied one of the older boys who played drums and wanted to be a missionary. By the time he was thirteen, though, his mother had spotted Matt’s ‘lack of enthusiasm’ (as she so diplomatically put it) for God. She started taking him to a Christian youth group over in Bury St Edmunds.
To his genuine surprise – shock, actually – the place turned out to contain the most fun group of people he’d ever met. There were even a few fellow geeks who suggested they have a marathon of every Planet of the Apes movie ever made. An odd catalyst for life change perhaps, but an undeniable moment. And when he was fourteen
that youth group had either worn him down or he’d become convinced that God might actually exist. In all honesty he couldn’t decide which, so he assumed it was both.
He went to a youth concert they’d organised at the church with smoke machines and laser lights. Some bizarre Christian rap band called Boo-Ya were onstage, changing the lyrics of N.W.A. and Ice-T songs to tell Bible stories instead. It was hideous but sort of fun if you didn’t know any better. Which most of them didn’t.
At the end the lead rapper invited people to stand by the stage and pray some words that apparently ‘made you a Christian’. Matt could hardly even remember getting out of his seat, only that he was suddenly down at the front, digging his nails into the chipped wooden lip of the stage and breathing faster.
Later that night, when they shut the doors and kicked everyone out, he remembered sitting on Dunwich beach, watching the moon over the water. It was hanging behind black clouds, which glowed at the edges, sweeping by faster than he’d ever seen in his life. He pictured the universe ticking like a clock and him ticking in time with it. It felt pretty epic, actually.
A few weeks later the youth group went on a church holiday to Sizewell Hall, a big old manor house by the sea. It sat in the shadow of the nuclear reactor, Sizewell B, which had a huge white golf ball-shaped building in it like something out of Logan’s Run. That was the weekend that the youth minister baptised Matt in the sea, along with twelve of his friends. Matt’s mum stood on the pebble beach shivering in the cold, holding a towel for him, weeping with undiluted joy.
And he’d wept too. There was something so emotionally intense about getting dunked in that water and coming up to rounds of applause.
That’s how he liked to remember her.
Clapping her hands together, tears of delight running down her cheeks. Slipping and laughing across the pebbles toward him and swooping the towel around him like a big old eagle’s wing. Kissing his forehead and drying his hair.
That was his preferred image. And whenever his mind forced him to remember, as it often tried to do, of the last time he saw her, hair full of blood and sticking to her dining room table, he’d flip a switch in his head and she’d be on that beach again, the fresh wind of the North Sea blowing her hair dry and free.
As he, Lucy and Amelia started to wander through the veiny woods around the cottage, he could vaguely see his mum out there in the forest, tucked between the trees. Still calling to him as they wandered by.
‘Mama neeeeed,’ she said. ‘Mama neeeeeed.’
The sound of his phone went off and fizzled her image into the nothingness, so he gladly went to grab it from his pocket. As usual, Lucy groaned in disgust at his choice in ringtone – the cave music from Super Mario. He could hardly blame her for her disdain. Having that was over-the-edge nerdy. Almost as much as the Donkey Kong Jr. arcade cabinet he kept in his office at home.
1 new email.
No subject.
He glanced back at the cottage through the warped ribcage of trees. He could just about see Wren up on the bedroom balcony (yes, it had one) still in the midst of the pep talk from her boss Mason, who had seemingly eluded a stroke for another day. She had her forehead pressed to a wooden beam, phone stuck to her ear. Listening and trying not to groan.
So he shrugged and tapped on the screen.
There wasn’t much to the email, just a single blue link. He clicked it and saw a little JPEG picture flick up. A young girl. Fifteen, maybe. It was a head and shoulders shot, face tilted at an awkward angle, smiling but only with the mouth. She was kind of gaunt-looking or just sucking in her cheeks for the cheekbone model effect. Why did girls do that? Her eyes weren’t focused on the lens, but at something beyond it.
And at the bottom of the picture a single word in bold white letters.
Where?
He started to chew the inside of his mouth. The message had been automatically forwarded from his public email address at the college.
‘What is it?’ Amelia said, looking over.
‘Dunno. Probably some Internet meme from a student.’ They’d often send him links to funny stuff. Dinosaurs pondering the meaning of life. Jesus pointing at an old lady slipping on ice and killing himself laughing. The sort of stuff that shouldn’t be funny, but just was. The glum little girl in the photograph looked up and out of the phone at him all forlorn. She was like those kids you’d see in the sad bits of Comic Relief. The ones you fast forward and feel guilty about afterwards.
He showed it to Amelia.
Picture: sad girl’s face. Word: where?
‘That’s lame,’ she said. ‘What’s so funny about that?’
He had no idea.
It was official, then. Oldie Matt Hunter was no longer ‘down with the kids’ because this went completely over his head. He pointed at the picture, ‘Ha ha, hilarious!’ Then he dropped the phone back in his pocket. Wren was still on the balcony, stuck to hers.
‘So what now?’ Amelia said.
He winked at her. ‘Now we climb a tree.’
CHAPTER NINE
Nicola Knox’s mum gulped back a desperate breath, staring at the kitchen cupboard above the fridge. Glaring at it. It was the one place in the house that she hadn’t fully explored yet.
She straightened her shorts, pushed her thick toes down, then reached up to open the doors. It was the cupboard they kept the cereal in. Oh, and biscuits when she bought them, which was now every other week since she’d started cutting down. She rummaged around to see if it was in there, even though she knew it wouldn’t be.
A cereal box suddenly toppled forward from her scampering hand. She brought up the other but it was too late. Tesco Rice Krispies showered onto the lino, sounding like radio static. Her lips pressed together, very tight. Enough to turn them purple, then flesh-tone. She thumped her forehead against the cold white of the fridge and stared down her cheeks at the floor. Cereal swarmed around her bare feet, like ancient, long dead ants.
‘Janet?’ her boyfriend Ray called through. ‘Have you checked down the sofa yet?’
‘Three times.’ She tried to keep her tears back.
‘What about the garden? Could it have slipped out—’
‘I’m not bloody thick. I’ve checked everywhere in the garden.’
He didn’t say anything to that.
Problem was that in actuality she was bloody thick. That maybe she’d dropped her phone when she was out shopping or something, probably the other day when she leant over that freezer compartment in Farmfoods to grab the only double pepperoni pizza that was left. She joked with the shelf-stacker that she almost fell in. Maybe the phone had silently slipped out of her pocket and was there right now, trapped, useless and buggered in a block of ice.
Ordinarily she wouldn’t be bothered, because she hated mobile phones anyway. She never used it. What was wrong with speaking face-to-face?
But ever since her daughter Nicola hadn’t come home, she’d been hunting it down because she had to find out. Maybe, she’d find a message telling her that she had finally done what Janet dreaded.
She trudged across the crunching sea of Krispies, dragging little shards that stuck and dug into the bare skin of her chubby feet. She knew that when she saw Ray she’d sink to her knees and cry like a loon because it was as plain as day that she’d killed her own daughter.
Nicola’s anorexia (with generous helpings of bulimia) was the start of it. Janet’s constant sniping comments about her daughter’s weight had gradually wound themselves around Nicola’s brain like a python. Janet had probably known deep down how psychologically dangerous it was to harp on about weight to someone who shared her podgy genes. But her daughter being fat seemed like a worse problem back then. Things had had to be said.
Then the vomiting started, followed by the outright refusal to eat. And running like a constant seam through it all was the self-harming. The slits, Nicola called them.
Janet shuddered.
A social worker once spoke to her off the record, when Jan
et was in despair. In hushed tones in a hospital car park she’d said that simply outlawing the cutting probably wouldn’t work. Better to make it safe, at least. So Janet, in a now almost incomprehensible move, had shown her daughter how to disinfect and cauterise a razor with a flame. Just in case Nicola chose the slits again. ‘And remember I don’t want you to ever actually do this, love,’ she’d said.
My God, Janet thought as she heaved her heavy, trembling body towards the living room. I taught my own daughter to kill herself. When Nicola left the house the day before yesterday, she’d even smelt depressed. Distant.
She’d taken a little bag.
Oh, Jesus.
Ray was on his knees with his huge arse pushing his Primark jeans towards her. His arm was buried deep inside the sofa.
‘You deaf bastard,’ she said, relishing the chance to direct her self-loathing at someone else. ‘I told you I looked in there three times.’
‘Shush a minute,’ he said, rummaging around.
‘You fat, deaf bastard.’ She stomped over to him ready to slap her hands across the thin polyester shirt on his back, mainly so he would turn around. Then she would crash her hand against his face again and again so that he might finally stop being so good and patient and understanding and he’d finally bite. Maybe he’d be a real boyfriend for a change and push her to the floor. Crack the back of his hand across her mouth like the terrible, toxic mother she was.
‘’Ang on,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something.’
She blinked some of the tears away.
‘There’s something in here. Keeps slipping out of my fingers.’
‘There can’t be, I checked.’
‘Did you ever lose a remote in here?’
‘No.’
‘There’s a rip in the fabric. I opened it up a bit and got my hand in the frame. Give me a second.’ His face grew steadily more pink the more he strained. There was a minute of wheezing then, ‘Got ya!’