by Neil Cross
Only after all that did Mum and Derek take part in their second secret marriage ceremony, so different from the first. The symbolism of it was never explained to them, or to anyone else. When the ceremony was finished, they just bought some holy underwear and came home on the coach.
Mum hadn’t joined the church to reflect on theological allegory, and she found the endowment ceremony disturbing. She put it to the back of her mind and laughed at the silly undergarments that God from that day forth required her to wear.
But Derek understood. That afternoon in the temple, he promised never to reveal its secrets, on pain of his throat being cut from ear to ear and his tongue torn out by the roots. And he never did.
Derek understood secrets. He understood why they must be kept. And he knew there was more to come, because secrets beget secrets. That was the way of things.
21
Romco didn’t last. Locals came out of curiosity, bought some odds and ends, then left and didn’t come back. Soon Derek was spending all day at the counter, waiting for business that never arrived.
When he closed the doors, ending another dream of empire, he blamed the customers and walked immediately into another job. He always did. He took the position of deputy-manager at an immense cash and carry, a warehouse that supplied shops and businesses. I was proud when I saw him in this sweeping hangar, to think him in charge of it. He was proud, too.
He sold the Armoured Tank, replacing it with a green Skoda.
I said, ‘Why did you sell it?’
He twirled the jangling car-keys round his index finger. ‘Because we’re going to need a car.’
‘Why?’
He grinned. ‘Because we’re about to move house.’
Long before, the Duff Street tenements had been scheduled for demolition. Nobody else wanted to live there, which is how Mum and Derek moved so quickly to the top of the council waiting list. After spending a year together in a bed and breakfast, the flat at 30 Duff Street hadn’t looked too bad and they were pleased to accept a tenancy. But now it was time for the building to be demolished.
I said, ‘What about school?’
Derek said, ‘You’ll be staying at Dalry for the time being.’
I relaxed.
I said, ‘Where’s the new flat?’
‘House,’ he said. ‘We’re moving to a house.’
‘Where?’
I was excited.
He smiled. ‘Wait and see.’
So we went downstairs and got in the green Skoda, and he drove us there.
Even on a large-scale map, Tarbrax was a tiny village, little more than a cluster of mouse droppings. It was about 20 miles west of Edinburgh. We got there by driving along the A17 which, Derek told me, was known as the lang wang. (It meant long bootlace, not long penis.) Then we turned off the A17 and onto a wandering, rose-pink road that ran between fields of sheep and cattle. After a mile or two, we turned right.
Tarbrax was white, terraced cottages assembled round a village green. It had no shop; just a pub called the Lazy Y, where plaid-shirted truckers and farmers went on Saturday night, to hear people singing songs recorded by Gentleman Jim Reeves and Tammy Wynette. The nearest shop was seven miles away, in West Calder.
Our new house was a whitewashed cottage on the corner of Crosswood Terrace. The front door opened onto a gravel track. Stepping across it, you entered a small, fenced garden which gave onto a wild pitch of long, wet grass, from which poked the crooks of an old shed and the curves of an even older caravan.
‘A quarter-acre,’ said Derek, surveying it. ‘I thought we’d get some chickens. Fresh eggs in the morning.’
I ignored him. I hoped he’d forget about the chickens.
I scanned the horizon and pointed. I said, ‘What’s that?’
From the earth at the edge of the village, a great bite had been taken. Behind this ragged scoop receded a mountain-sized wedge. It was the highest thing for many miles, a monolith. The area of desolation dwarfed Tarbrax.
‘That’s the bing,’ said Derek. ‘This used to be a mining area. The bing is all the stuff they dug up.’
Oil shale had been mined and heated to extract paraffin oil. The spent shale, red from the burning, was swept into just such bings. They were larger than those that attended coal mines. Vegetation did not grow on them.
I said, ‘Am I allowed to play on it?’
‘I expect so.’
‘Can I walk the dog there?’
‘The dog will love it here.’
He said it like it really mattered to him, like he wanted the dog to be happy, and in that moment it was true.
After exploring the house, we walked through the wet quarter-acre, soaking our trousers to the knees. Then the sun began to set and we drove back to Edinburgh. It took a while. The lang wang undulated through commercial pine forests. We drove for miles in tree-lined darkness. An oncoming car was a blue glow on the crest of an approaching hill, then a white rush of headlights. Then there was darkness again, the trees to the side, the night sky above.
We moved house that weekend. People from the church came to help us load the hired van. David Chapple drove it for us.
Mum, Derek and I went in the Skoda. The dog sat in the back with me. We didn’t take the cat: a few days before, Derek had kicked her out for shitting in the hallway. He picked her up and kicked her through the door like a rugby ball. I saw her on the street once–I thought it was her–and tried to lure her home. But she ignored me and walked regally by.
I looked at the graffiti that said Neil Go Home, and then we drove past it: Mum, Derek, me and the dog.
The cottage on Crosswood Terrace was small and it smelled of gas, undercut with coal and mildew. I slept on a camp-bed in Mum and Derek’s bedroom. There was no bath. A shower room had been added in the 1960s, a small extension off the kitchen. It was cold getting in and even colder getting out, especially when there was snow outside.
Mum couldn’t drive a car and didn’t want to learn. But there were no buses to Tarbrax, so in the morning she went into Edinburgh with Derek and me. She got to work several hours before her shift officially began–so, because she had nowhere else to go, she began to work full-time hours for part-time pay. She said she had no choice, but didn’t look for another job. She was just accustomed to working at St Cuthbert’s.
In the morning, we drove through the pine forests, twenty miles east, into Edinburgh and the sunrise. Our route took us right past Dalry School, but much too early. Nobody was there yet, not even the teachers, so I stayed in the car until we got to St Cuthbert’s. Mum and I sat in the basement while everyone had their early morning cup of tea. Then it was time to catch the bus to school. It took another half-hour.
After school, I bussed it back to St Cuthbert’s and waited in the basement until Mum finished work. Then we caught another bus, this time to the cash and carry. We sat in Derek’s car, waiting until all the customers had gone and he appeared in his camel coat and his string-backed driving gloves. He got in and said hello, then drove us twenty miles back home again.
Sometimes on a Wednesday afternoon, Mum and I went to visit Rhona, who’d left St Cuthbert’s when her husband bought into a funeral director’s. Now they lived in a very floral flat, directly above it.
She told me about the bodies. She liked having them there; they felt like friends.
She said, ‘It’s my job to make them feel at home while they’re with us.’
Sometimes, when she went downstairs, she might find one of them sitting up in an open coffin. It had been quite upsetting at first, she said, and she’d dreaded going down there in the morning.
(‘Dreaded it,’ she said, with a delighted grin.)
But there was nothing to be scared of. Nowadays she chatted to them all quite happily, sitting up or not. They were only bodies.
I thought of them, downstairs, dead, as I ate my cake.
We began attending church in Livingstone. It was the nearest city, a gaunt concrete new town, built in the 19
60s to ease Edinburgh’s overcrowding.
The first time Derek drove us there, he got lost. Between his teeth, he hissed, ‘The bloody road signs are all wrong. They don’t make sense.’
I saw landmarks–pubs, shops, parks–pass us for the second, third and fourth time.
He said, ‘It’s a joke. It’s a bloody joke.’
Mum and I sat, rigid-faced and avoiding eye-contact, trying not to laugh.
Eventually we found the place. Because the Livingstone branch didn’t have a building of its own, they held their services in a hired school hall. The school was empty because it was Sunday.
Derek parked the car and we hurried inside. It was strange, walking through the school. The same smell of floor polish and faded body odour, but nobody in it.
Perhaps forty people were gathered in the echoing room, listening to the bishop. As we entered, very late, he interrupted himself. He said, ‘Ah, Brother and Sister Cross.’
The congregated heads turned and cast the Mormon smile, a welcome touched with ruefulness, feeling for our embarrassment.
Derek returned his most sincere beam. In it I could see all the horror for being an object of their pity.
When the meeting ended we drove home in silence.
22
Our terrace of cottages backed onto another, which faced the village green. The cottage that opposed ours, a mirror image, was vacant. So, to solve the problem with the number of bedrooms, Derek rented it.
The other cottage was decorated in faded browns and oranges, like a box of chocolates left too long in a newsagent’s window. It smelled of cold paint and damp. In the corner of the living room was a narrow walk-in cupboard. Derek knocked through the wall of it with a lump-hammer–so you stepped into a cupboard in one house and emerged in another. There was some magic to that.
Yvonne moved in with us. She had her own room in the other cottage, what would have been the bedroom. There were sheepskin rugs, a sofa, a portable TV on a low table. Her guitars were propped against the wall, next to her Abba and John Denver albums. She didn’t mind me going in there to watch Top of the Pops and Dallas. (I preferred to watch Dallas alone.)
We shared the living room as a bedroom. I slept in a single bed in one corner, the wall covered in posters. She had a double bed in the other corner. She wore stripy cotton pyjamas and several layers of thick socks. When it was really cold, she wore a bobble hat.
At first, she motored to work on a 50cc motorcycle. Mum, Derek and I left first, but sometimes Yvonne caught up with us on the outskirts of Edinburgh, and it was good to watch her buzz through the traffic on the straining bike. But, following a near-collision on an icy junction, she sold it and bought a car. It was another Skoda, the colour of Caramac.
Because she was a school secretary, she started work later and finished earlier than Derek, so–now she had a car–Mum and I went with her in the mornings instead. In the afternoon, we waited in her car until she walked up, in her work clothes, and said hello. She and Mum were always pleased to see each other. Yvonne made Mum laugh. Sometimes they laughed all the way home.
In February 1981, shortly after I turned twelve, I was ordained into the Aaronic priesthood. My duties were to demonstrate obedience and to provide practical assistance in all matters pertaining to the running of the church. It was also my role to pass the sacrament. My companions in this task were two boys called Michael and Adi.
But I had become bored by the church. Getting up early on Sunday and putting on my smart clothes and driving to Livingstone, then listening to all those identical testimonies had become passionless and routine.
During the week, we no longer attended church activities; we got home too late. Our family prayers, intoned dutifully every evening, had lost their initial intensity, the wonder and fervour of speaking directly to God. Being a Mormon had become something I did on Sundays, out of habit.
Nominating me to pray, Derek said: ‘Now, Neil. This is not a criticism. But I was wondering if tonight you might vary what you say, just a little?’
I was angry. Everyone–including Derek–said the same prayer every time they were nominated. There was only so much you could say: Thank you for this, thank you for that, thank you for a loving family, thank you for the revelation of Joseph Smith and the sacrifice of your Beloved Son, we pray for a safe night’s sleep. (Mum always hoped aloud that we might sleep fitfully. I never had the heart to tell her what it meant.)
I said, ‘No. I’m not doing it.’
‘Fine,’ said Derek.
He said it with grim forbearance, as if he’d been expecting as much. He asked Yvonne instead. She glanced at me, then bowed her head and began to pray.
Neither Derek nor Mum had noticed what had become plain to at least one member of Livingstone’s bishopric. In my bedroom, not particularly hidden, was the letter he’d written me:
Dear Neil
I saw you in church today, before any of the meetings started, and I saw you were extremely unhappy…Times can get hard within the church Neil, but you must hold on to the iron rod because that is just Satan trying you and Satan is a real person, as real as you and I, and his power is strong enough to lower even the most holy and humble person to the ground. To fight back at Satan you must be more than humble, more than spiritual; you, Neil, must be superhumble, superspiritual and superprayerful.
You are 12 years old, Neil, a deacon. You are maturing and growing into a man. Many people mature before others on the road to maturity. Your attitude to others will change dramatically. Your voice breaks, a moustache and facial hair grows. This is natural but it does affect your attitude because you are at the age of questioning, wondering, and sometimes you become unsure of things.
God bless you, Neil, I am proud of you.
In one way, the letter was right; the age of questioning was upon me. But in most ways, it was wrong. As it turned out, what I had come ever more strongly to suspect about the value of Mormon worship was accurate.
Although it claimed to be the direct, revealed word of God, The Book of Mormon contained a number of similarities to a novel called View of the Hebrews,1 whose successful publication preceded it by some years. And–perhaps even more surprisingly–it contained a number of errors. In The Book of Mormon, the reader will find the Nephites and the Lamanites familiar not only with horses, but with elephants, cattle, sheep, wheat, barley, steel, wheeled vehicles, shipbuilding, sails and coins. None of these things existed in early America. Not even the Spanish thought to take elephants along with them.
The massacred Nephites and the genocidal Lamanites left nothing behind them: no evidence of their extensive agriculture, not a single brick of their once-great cities. There were no human remains left on the murderous field of Cumorah, where so many millions were violently slain. All there was, was a golden book. And soon enough, even that was taken into the custody of an angel.
Joseph Smith was a fraud, and not even a very good one.
Years before he dreamed up the golden plates, his mother recalled that young Joe took innocent delight in describing ‘the ancient inhabitants of this continent, their dress, mode of travelling, and their animals upon which they rode; their cities, their buildings, with every particular; their mode of warfare; and also their religious worship. This he would do with as much ease, seemingly as if he had spend his whole life with them.’2
As a young man, Joe employed himself as a hunter-for-hire of lost Indian gold. Although this adventure has the wholesome ring of Tom Sawyer about it, such money-digging was illegal and Joe was convicted in court in Bainbridge, New York, of being ‘a disorderly person and an impostor.’ He was convicted in 1826: that’s fully eight years after he later claimed to have met God and Jesus in the secluded copse. But the vividness of Joe’s exploits would never be dulled by consistency. Even his accounts of the First Vision beam with cheerful incongruity.
Sometimes, he was fourteen when he met God, sometimes sixteen. Sometimes he was seventeen. And sometimes, it wasn’t even God that he
met.3
Only one First Vision account survives in Joe’s own handwriting. There are six pages of it, dated to about 1830. Known as ‘Joseph’s Strange Account’, it was never finished, and it was kept from public examination for more than a hundred years.4 In the ‘Strange Account’, having arrived at the grim conclusion that ‘there was no society or denomination that built upon the Gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament’5, Joe goes for a walk in the woods where, to his surprise, he meets Jesus Christ. If God was there too, Joe neglects to mention it. It was only later, in 1842, that he thought to add the detail of Elohim’s presence, floating several feet above the ground in a pillar of light. Later still, and perhaps not incidentally, Joe remembered that God had blue eyes.
One afternoon, on my way to St Cuthbert’s, I saw Derek. His car had broken down on the corner of Nicholson Street. It was the beginning of the rush hour and other cars had backed up behind it. They beeped their horns and tried to creep round, into the oncoming traffic. There was a bad-tempered knot of them. Derek stalked around the Skoda as if about to kick it.
I wondered what he was doing there. He was supposed to be at work.
I didn’t offer to help, because he didn’t like to be patronized. So I hurried to St Cuthbert’s. Mum was on the check-out, but the shop was empty of customers. Rab and Mike were stacking shelves, pausing to furtively chuck bits of packaging at one another.
Bob Cruickshank took Mum’s place. She put on her coat and followed me. But when we got to the corner, Derek had gone. The traffic was flowing freely again. Mum looked at the place where his car had been. Then she looked at me.
Later, Yvonne drove us home and Mum made the tea. Derek came home to eat, which was becoming unusual. He couldn’t always be home in the evening, especially if he had to supervise the cashing up.
He charged Yvonne with saying grace–she was best at it–then we ate our tea. We were watching TV.