by Mat Ridley
“You’re welcome,” I muttered.
“Are you really an agent of God? Like James Bond?”
“Yeah, that’s me,” I inwardly rolled my eyes.
“Wow,” she breathed, her eyes growing even rounder, against all possibility.
I found the silence that followed this exchange unbearably awkward, although Joanna seemed comfortable enough, staring at me and sipping noisily on her chocolate. I mumbled an excuse and made my way over to the others, busying myself with helping to distribute drinks. But now and again I caught Joanna looking at me in that intense way of hers that seemed like it could start a fire; and which, many years later, would.
Chapter 6
I thought that things would calm down after that—that the search for the lost girls was enough excitement to be getting on with—but it turned out I was wrong. I found out just how wrong less than two weeks later when, before we’d even finished eating the last of the Christmas turkey, my father ran off with Julia, the pretty, young curate from our church.
I have no idea how long they had been planning on eloping together. The evening before they left, my mother, father and I had sat together in the living room, joking, laughing, pleasantly sleepy from the day’s festivities, just like normal. Even my father’s offer to go into town the next morning to get some groceries was nothing out of the ordinary. Certainly my mother was only too happy to take him up on it; she had been indulging in a bit of sherry that evening—perfectly normal for the time of year—and was treating us to purposefully awful renditions of some of her favourite Cole Porter songs. But it was clear that when the curtain went down on her show that evening, it would be down for a long time. When we finally turned in for the night, I prayed to God at great length about how thankful I was. I was blessed with a loving family, food, shelter, almost two more weeks of school holiday and a brand new bike with which to enjoy them. Life couldn’t get any better than this, I thought.
Unfortunately, I didn’t realise how right I was.
I remember hearing the door shut when my father went out in the morning, but, being the age I was, there was no way I was going to let that interrupt my lazy holiday sleep patterns, and I quickly drifted back to dreams of riding my bike. I knew that my mother, too, would carry on sleeping for quite some time yet, recovering from the slight hangover that she would have developed. She certainly enjoyed her Christmas cheer, but then why not? She worked so hard the rest of the time, looking after not just my father and me, but seemingly everybody else in the church congregation, too. She deserved a chance to let her hair down. How was I to know that her propensity for the occasional seasonal tipple was in fact the Ghost of Christmas Future? Or, at least, would have been, if she had made it as far as the next Christmas. Hindsight is a beautiful, terrible thing, but here rendered particularly vicious by the fact that, reliving my life as I passed through the valley of the shadow of death, I already knew everything that was going to go wrong. And there was nothing I could do about it.
My dreamy slumber and my dead introspection were both ripped apart by the sound of a primeval wail filling the house. I was awake in an instant, my heart pounding, and I raced down the stairs so quickly that if I’d misjudged a single step, I could very easily have broken my neck and now be reliving a much shorter life. I charged into the kitchen, fully expecting the worst, so I was caught off guard when all I found there was my mother, sitting at the kitchen table, head down, apparently calm. But then she raised her head, and I knew that things were far from okay.
She was already wearing the headscarf that she donned whenever doing housework, so I assume that she had come downstairs hoping to do a little tidying up while the house was still quiet. She had got as far as making herself a cup of coffee, but the note my father had left had ambushed her before she’d had a chance to get any further than that. I didn’t ever get to read the note myself—my mother made sure of that—but whatever it said, it had been enough to completely break her; there’s no other word that accurately describes the way she looked that morning. A stray coil of hair stuck out from underneath her headscarf, like a spring poking out of a damaged clockwork toy, and it whipped to and fro as she rocked back and forth in her chair. To the pace of this terrible metronome, I slowly managed to prise what had happened out of her. And the more I learnt, the angrier I got; not just at my father and Julia for their betrayal, but at the God that had allowed this to happen. The grateful prayers of the night before turned sour in my memory. There I had been, feeling safe and secure under His watchful and apparently loving gaze, when all along He’d had this up His divine sleeve. I was furious.
In the days that followed, my mother did her best to put a brave face on things, but she wasn’t very successful. Whereas before she had been as cheerful a person as you could imagine, always bustling around the house with a song and a smile on her lips, she now drew in on herself. Her smile became brittle, and was swiftly replaced with a melancholy look whenever she thought I wasn’t looking. But then she started doing a lot of other things when she thought I wasn’t looking, too, such as picking apart the clothes my father had left behind, one thread at a time, and reading books with such blunt titles as The Absent God and The Cult of the Church. I wasn’t the only one pissed off at God, it seemed.
And then there was the drinking.
Within twenty-four hours of my father’s departure, my mother discovered a new religion, and before long she was worshipping at the Church of the Distilled Spirit: services every evening from eight o’clock (and often all day at weekends, Hallelujah). I did what I could to prevent it, dutifully tipping bottle after bottle of the stuff down the kitchen sink when she was upstairs sleeping it off, but like the heads on some kind of eighty-proof hydra, more bottles always sprang up to replace their fallen brethren. I tried to talk her out of her self-destructive intentions, but with no success; the only topics of conversation—or, more accurately, sermonising—my mother was interested in were (a) what a bastard my father was, and (b) how God had betrayed her. I found myself agreeing with her on both counts, and in doing so, would often let myself be carried along in the bumpy flow of her vitriolic outpourings rather than try to steer her away from the jagged rocks farther downstream.
As the days immediately after my father’s departure dragged by, I grew increasingly bitter, and increasingly worried for my mother. I was terrified that I was going to come down to breakfast one morning to find her drowned in her own vomit, but instead of prayers of gratitude when I found she was okay, all I could find in my heart was hate towards God. Where was His mercy now, when my mother needed Him most? Why had He chosen to punish her like this after all she had done in His service?
Sloshing around in between the drinks, the same questions came from my mother—and as they went unanswered, her former love for the Lord turned to hate. Seeing her suffer so, I ran alongside her as she journeyed away from God. Not once did I look back over my shoulder, and that wasn’t because I was afraid of being turned into a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife in the old Bible story. It was out of disgust.
Of course, ours wasn’t the first family to fall apart due to infidelity, and it’s true what the cliché says about time being a great healer; despite all that I’ve just said, after only three weeks there were already a few signs of normal life beginning to show through again. However, as with most injuries, healing could only proceed if the wound was left in peace, and that was apparently not on the cards for my mother and me. Just when I began to hope that the worst was over, and that perhaps I wouldn’t need to pour any more whiskey down the sink, Geraldine came back into our lives.
In former times—and they already seemed so long ago that it was perfectly natural to refer to them as such—Geraldine was my mother’s best friend in the church. They were like some kind of unstoppable Christian wrestling tag team: ‘The Holy Avengers’ maybe, or ‘Righteous Justice’. My mother was the organiser of the partnership, content to roll up her sleeves and methodically wear problems down one task
at a time, whilst Geraldine was the talker, more likely to be strutting around the ring and yelling her opponents into submission. If there was a course, book or recording on a subject, Geraldine had done it, read it or heard it. Or written it; just the previous year she had published her second book on prayer and marriage.
To be honest, I’m surprised she left us in peace for as long as she did.
I had spent most of the day riding my new bike aimlessly around the neighbourhood. Even though I knew by then that the gift had been mainly my father’s idea, and that its primary purpose was probably to soothe his conscience rather than give me pleasure, I loved it. If you’d asked me four weeks earlier which I would rather have, a bike or a father, I would have laughed, but a lot had changed in that month. Hurtling along the quiet backstreets on my bike was the one place now where I could take refuge from the tangled knot that life at home had become, where the feel of the icy wind on my face and the sound of my tires chewing on the tarmac helped me temporarily forget how quickly I was being forced to grow up. But despite the allure of forgetting everything, I was taking my new responsibilities seriously, and I made sure to pop back home regularly during the day to check up on my mother. Often I would find her sleeping, or simultaneously drinking in one of her books and one of her bottles, but for the last couple of days, I had found her pottering around the house, just like old times; like I said, things had started to improve.
But that particular afternoon, I came back to a war zone.
The first sign that something was wrong was the sight of Geraldine’s car parked outside our house. I knew it was hers. The plethora of militantly evangelistic stickers shouting out of the car’s rear windscreen was unmistakable, and the sight of them set alarm bells ringing. Based on my mother’s reading and attitude of late, I knew that any exposure to Geraldine and her world was unlikely to have a harmonious outcome, and the sudden crash and yells coming from inside the house confirmed my fears. I came to a slippery halt outside the house, threw the bike to one side, and rushed inside, a call to my mother already on my lips.
The call stuck before it got any further than that. I felt, rather than heard, the crunch of something under my shoes as I came into the kitchen, but the source was obvious without needing to look down: broken crockery and glass covered every available surface, sparkling in the afternoon sunlight like the aftermath of a jewellery shop robbery. I looked around at what remained of our kitchen, taking it all in: the overturned chairs; the huge dent in the fridge door; the long red smear on the doorframe that led through to the hallway. I didn’t want to think too carefully about what that red smear could be, but seeing as no-one in our house liked ketchup, there was really only one possibility. Blood. But whose? My mind, still in the thrall of its damned religious upbringing, dutifully conjured up an image of lambs’ blood being smeared on doorposts at the first Passover, protecting the inhabitants of the house from the wrath of God. Based on the state of our kitchen, it seemed that human blood was not nearly as effective.
Such was my shock at the sight in front of me that I remained rooted to the spot, temporarily forgetting the cry that had brought me running in the first place. It took a second cry to galvanise me into action once again. As with the blood stain, I couldn’t tell whether it came from my mother or from Geraldine, but whoever it belonged to, its strength and tone suggested that whatever was taking place between the two of them was far from over—and only likely to get worse if left to run its course. I darted across the kitchen towards the blood-smeared doorframe, my own cry now bursting free.
“Mum! Mum! Are you alright? What—”
The rest of my question was cut off as someone suddenly came flying through the doorway, knocking me to the floor. My hand was ground down against the broken glass, but I barely felt the pain. My mind was too focussed on the cry that now emerged from the body lying on top of me, and on the sickening realisation that that cry was my mother’s. I remembered the last time I’d heard her cry like that, just weeks earlier, on the day that my father had left us. But this was far worse, and was accompanied by a desperate thrashing as she tried to regain her feet, oblivious in her panic that she had landed on her own son.
She managed to stagger upright again just as her opponent strode into the kitchen. I learnt later that the fight had begun when Geraldine had burst into our house unannounced and started unleashing all the ‘advice’ she’d been building up over the last few weeks at my mother—a litany of accusations that encompassed everything from her failure as a good Christian wife to prevent her husband from corrupting a member of the clergy, to the evils of not attending church anymore. My mother, understandably, did not warm to her visitor, especially when her increasingly desperate requests for Geraldine to leave were repeatedly ignored. The last straw came when Geraldine grabbed my mother’s arm and tried to drag her down onto her knees to pray for forgiveness. At that point, my mother could no longer contain her revulsion and snapped, pushing Geraldine away hard enough to knock her to the ground and tear her dress. Instead of turning the other cheek, Geraldine decided that she wanted to claim an eye for an eye, and from then on, things escalated the same way they do in all holy wars. By the time my mother was flung into the kitchen that day, they had been trading blows for the better part of fifteen minutes.
My mother was clearly exhausted, and the stream of blood running down her arm and dripping from the ends of her fingers cleared up the question of whose blood it was on the doorframe. For her part, with her wild hair and matching eyes, Geraldine’s appearance was exactly as I had always imagined Samson’s to be as he had battled against the Philistines; and I expect that wasn’t too far off from how she pictured herself right then, either. “Come on, you heathen,” she bellowed as she stormed into the kitchen, her fists up like a street brawler. “I’m not finished with you yet! I’ll beat the Devil out of you! I’ll…”
She trailed off as the two of them suddenly noticed me lying on the floor amongst the broken glass. I could see my mother trying to make sense of my sudden appearance there; Geraldine was far quicker to respond, and started to inch her way slowly towards the back door. All her bluster had disappeared in an instant. She knew what was going to happen next, and was already hoping to get the fuck out of Dodge before it did. But then two things happened that ruined her chances of escape.
The first was that my mother noticed the cut on the palm of my hand. For a moment, the look of confusion cleared from her eyes, replaced by the maternal concern I had seen there a hundred times before in response to other boyhood scrapes and scuffs.
“Oh, Danny,” she said. She always called me that when I was ill or hurt. “Look at you! You’ve cut your hand. Here, let me—”
Then the second thing happened that sealed Geraldine’s fate (and, for that matter, everyone else’s). As my mother’s agitation increased, so too did the pace of Geraldine’s retreat towards the back door, and, unfortunately for her, she accidentally kicked several shards of glass across the tiled floor as she moved.
The sound reminded my dead consciousness, watching these events unfurling again, of the trick I had used to try to help Jo and me escape from Sam; but before the thought could take hold, my focus was shifted back to this earlier disaster, in another kitchen. The instant the glass had sounded, my mother’s head snapped up, focussing a hot, furious glare on Geraldine. With a roar, she suddenly transformed into a lioness seeking revenge for the injury that had been inflicted on her cub.
“What have you done to him, you crazy bitch? Come here! I’m going to…”
I called out to her to let it go—it was obvious that there could be no happy ending if this continued to escalate—but she might just as well have been deaf; or maybe she misinterpreted the fear in my voice as pain, in which case all I did was make things worse. With a wordless yell, she lunged across the kitchen towards her foe. Geraldine abandoned any semblance of stealth, and with a piggy squeal, turned and fled full-tilt from the house. If she had been a truck going down a bump
y road, then words bounced out of her like potatoes falling off the back.
“Satan… be gone from… this… woman! Lord… give me strength… to cast… the Devil out!”
“I’ll fucking cast you out!” my mother yelled as she chased Geraldine across the kitchen. “I told you I didn’t want your kind of help, but you just wouldn’t fucking take ‘no’ for an answer. And now look what you’ve done!”
“I didn’t… touch him,” wailed Geraldine over her shoulder.
“Oh, and I suppose that great big cut on his hand just appeared there spontaneously, did it, like fucking stigmata? You self-righteous cow! Always poking your damned nose in where it’s not welcome, always looking for opportunities to strengthen your own high opinion of yourself with your so-called ‘help’, but never willing to take any real fucking responsibility for your actions. Just like your damned God; always expecting things to go His way, always expecting us to do what we’re told, but as soon as the shit really hits the fan, He doesn’t want to know. Why don’t you just take your God,” said my mother, grabbing a small potted cactus from the kitchen windowsill, “and fuck off!”
My mother underlined the last of her words by hurling the cactus after Geraldine. Ordinarily, such a wild throw would have missed by a mile, but we were clearly fated to have our lives destroyed completely that day, and so of course it hit Geraldine square on the back of her head instead. She pitched forward, mid-stride, and sprawled to the ground in a shower of cactus and sand. My mother’s hands flew up to her mouth, but whether that was from shock at what she had done, or because she was trying to hide a smile, I never found out. If it was the latter, then Geraldine’s words as she got shakily to her feet would have wiped it away fairly quickly.