Only Strange People Go to Church

by Laura Marney

  Buses are pulling up outside the centre. The drivers are opening the back doors and operating the lifts, making ready for the wheelchairs.

  ‘Time to go home,’ says Jane.

  Distracted with thoughts of Dezzie lying on top of her, not like he is now, but with his eyes rolling and his saliva dribbling on to her, Maria gives her stock reply.

  ‘In a minute.’

  ‘But the bus is here!’

  Jane is frightened. Every day she worries that she’ll miss the bus. Some clients, Martin and sometimes Fiona, for instance, don’t want to go home and have to be led persuasively, and sometimes with mild force, on to their bus, but Jane is always keen to get home.

  ‘I want to go home,’ she snivels.

  ‘She wants to go home,’ says Fiona.

  ‘Yes, okay Fiona, calm down, we’ll be going in a minute.’

  ‘Well, give her her anorak then!’

  ‘I want my anorak.’

  ‘She wants her anorak,’ says Fiona.

  ‘Okay, wait here. I’m getting it. And yours too, Fiona Simpson, you’re going home as well.’

  ‘Good,’ says Fiona.

  Maria can’t put it off any longer; she’ll have to tell Bert that Martin and Brian are missing.

  Leaving the girls unattended she runs along the corridor. Unusually, the door to Bert’s office is closed.

  She knocks and rushes in.

  ‘With you in a second!’ Bert calls.

  But it is too late. Maria bursts in to Bert’s office and turns and exits so fast she feels dizzy. She’s made a dreadful, dreadful mistake.

  Bert is kneeling on the floor facing the Virgin Mary-shaped bottle he brought back from Lourdes. His hands are clasped and he’s wearing an expression of frantic supplication, but that’s about all he’s wearing. Down to his vest and underpants, his rest of his clothes are strewn about the office. The skin on his arms and legs seems weird: red and shiny, raw, but she is in and out so fast her impression can be no more than blurry. Blurry and disquieting. Fear makes Maria’s hand fly to her chest. A dreadful mistake, yes, but she must prioritise; Brian and Martin are still missing and she has to do something.

  ‘Maria!’ she suddenly hears someone roar.

  *

  Several hours later Ray gets off a bus that has pulled into Hexton. When he paid the bus driver he became aware, as did the driver, that his hands were covered in dried blood. He makes straight for the public toilets and scrubs the blood from his hands. It’s everywhere, between his fingers, under his nails, encrusted around his wedding ring. He looks at his left hand and pulls off the thick gold band that he has worn every day for fifteen and a half years. He puts it in his shirt pocket, the breast pocket close to his heart, and smiles at his reflection in the mirror. He’s changing.

  When he left the church he walked out along the main road. He only wanted to be moving, he didn’t want to have to think about where he was going so it would have been easier to take the long straight road to Glasgow, but something made him choose the quieter country roads that circle Hexton. He must have circled the town three or four times before he got hungry and tired enough to come back. But he’s had a good think.

  What freaked him out wasn’t the blood and pain and death of the wee rabbit. Well, yes, actually, when he thinks about it, that did freak him out. He thought he’d left all that behind, blood and pain and death have dogged him, but of course, that’s rubbish. He’ll never get away from it. What really freaked him was his own response.

  Since he opened the doors of the church he’s had to take more and more responsibility for the people that come around and the fucking weird things they do. Some of these bozos know not what they do. Nailing a rabbit to a pew? What the fuck was that? How the hell is he supposed to deal with that? He’s only a joiner, not a fucking vet. And why is it his problem? He’s spent hours tramping round the back roads of Hexton when he should have been working on his sideboard.

  When he came to Hexton it was to leave all the shit behind and make a fresh start. Today, with the girls screaming at him and the rabbit bleeding on him, Ray realised that although he’d changed location, he hadn’t moved on. He was still feeling the guilt, still taking the blame. What happened today was that he let the hysteria of a bunch of schoolgirls infect him. That’s all. He shouldn’t read anything into it. He doesn’t have to do that anymore, he’s free to move on. It’s time now. As he heads back to the church he checks his breast pocket for the ring, it’s still there.

  *

  ‘It was that sick nutcase McGraw that did it,’ explains Alice as she cuts the bread.

  Ray had expected everyone to have gone home by now but Alice and Marianne are still in the kitchen waiting for him when he gets back. Alice heats him a plate of soup and relates the whole story as he sups greedily.

  ‘As a warning, apparently,’ she adds.

  ‘It’s pathetic but I suppose it’s Hexton’s version of waking up with a horse’s head in your bed,’ says Marianne.

  ‘Exactly,’ agrees Alice. ‘Magic Marshall owed him fifty quid and this was his strong-arm tactics. He said he couldn’t break Magic’s fingers because that would interfere with his income.’

  ‘Does Magic make any money from magic shows?’ asks Marianne.

  ‘Not as much as he needs to.’

  ‘But why did he ever go to a moneylender?’

  ‘He didn’t, it was his son, Peter. When the factory shut down, Peter left Hexton and he’s never been back but Magic had to take on the debt. He didn’t want to, but you don’t argue with McGraw.’

  Ray is loath to interrupt this fascinating discussion and he’s really enjoying his soup but he wants to be sure he’s got the story right.

  ‘So: Magic Marshall was paying off his son’s debt, but he didn’t keep up the repayments so the moneylender mutilated his rabbit.’

  ‘As a warning.’

  Ray shakes his head, as do Alice and Marianne.

  ‘I noticed Magic did a vanishing act when his rabbit was being crucified.’

  ‘Well, he’s a senior citizen now,’ says Alice. ‘He’s not fit to take on that big thug. He saw McGraw come in and scooted. Who was to know he’d do that to the poor wee thing?’

  ‘I can’t believe there was a moneylender operating from here.’

  ‘Ray, he’s been in here every other day since the café opened.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Excuse me, you’re the guy that dreamed up the great come one come all philosophy.’

  ‘Well, I tell you, if McGraw or any other moneylender sets foot in this church I’ll fucking…sorry ladies. Well, you let me know if you see any.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s sorted now. McGraw’s been paid off, he’ll not be back,’ says Alice, ladling more soup into Ray’s now empty plate.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Oh,’ says Marianne, smiling, ‘Alice was a bit naughty.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t.’

  Ray and Marianne look at Alice but they don’t say a word.

  ‘I bliddy wasn’t! Look, the kids wanted to make a donation. That’s what people do nowadays, if there’s a tragedy folk are falling over themselves to give money, God knows why but they do. I organised a wee tin in the café, that’s all.’

  ‘And you laid the rabbit out in state and gave him a name.’ adds Marianne.

  ‘Okay, so I gave him a name.’

  ‘What did you call him?’ asks Ray.

  ‘Colin.’

  Colin the Rabbit?’

  ‘Listen, there was fifty-two pounds forty-three pence in that tin! Magic took it round and paid off McGraw.’

  ‘Well, at least the rabbit never died in vain.’

  Ray and Marianne exchange smirks at this.

  ‘Nope,’ agrees Alice, swiping his plate away briskly.

  He knows he’s annoyed Alice off now so as she passes he tries to take her hand but she dodges away. He’ll have to try something else.

  ‘That soup was fantastic, Al
ice, I’m not kidding, I think that was your best yet. What was in it?’

  ‘Och, nothing really, just a rabbit and a handful of veg,’ says Alice.

  Ray is not entirely sure she’s kidding.

  Chapter 46

  Maria turns to see that it is Martin who has roared her name. He’s standing in the doorway, against the flow of clients making their way past him to their buses. He appears to be wearing Dezzie’s T-shirt, his new red one, the one that says ride bikes, drink beer, talk bollocks. Martin’s head is tilted. He plants his feet wide and holds out his arms to Maria, not in a distressed way, the gesture is magnanimous, loving, drunken.‘Maria!’ he bawls again.

  She rushes towards him, fighting her way through clients. She grabs both his arms and looks into his face. Martin is smiling up at her benignly and then burps.

  The burp is so close she can taste it: she’s getting hops and barley, golden ale, smooth dark brown velvet below a creamy head. She’s getting busty barmaid with frothing pint pots of dark sweet beer, saloon bar with darts and doms, sodden beer mats and sticky tables. She getting Hexton Arms. With a definite aftertaste of cheese and onion crisps.

  ‘Ooops!’ Martin giggles. ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘You’re drunk.’

  Martin seems to think hard about this and then, as if remembering his lines, he begins to declaim:

  ‘I, madam, may be drunk, but you are…’

  He looks at Maria, squinting and tilting, and then he throws his arms wide again.

  ‘I think you’re lovely!’

  Martin makes a lunge for Maria’s breasts but he’s slow off the mark and she easily sidesteps him.

  ‘Where are Brian and Dezzie?’

  ‘They’re here!’ says Martin, pointing back towards the centre.

  Maria turns and sees Brian’s wheelchair emerging from the gents’ toilets. It seems to be jammed in the doorway. Dezzie is pushing it from behind, none too gently, and Brian is laughing so hard he’s in danger of falling out of the chair.

  ‘I want a word with you,’ says Maria to them both, but this only makes Brian laugh harder.

  ‘I’m really sorry we’re late, Maria, we just lost track,’ says Dezzie.

  He has his head hung and his eyes coy. He obviously thinks that because he’s gorgeous Maria will let him get away with this. Not bloody likely.

  ‘I’m putting the girls on their buses. Wait for me in Arts and Crafts,’ she barks.

  Maria strong-arms the somewhat bewildered Fiona and Jane on to their respective buses with such urgency that they don’t have time to complain.

  Bert, now fully clothed, has taken up his usual post by the buses. Every day he checks the clients on to the buses and waves them off. This is not the wild-eyed Bert of a few minutes ago, this is the kind, professional and dependable Bert that Maria has, until a few moments ago, always known. Maria is shocked to realise that that no matter how long you work with someone, no matter how closely, you never truly know them.

  He nods companionably to Maria as she passes and gives no hint of anything being amiss. Perhaps she misconstrued the situation or even imagined it.

  ‘Just the two coats today, Susan?’ Bert says to an extremely well wrapped-up client as he helps her into the bus. He’s always full of cheeky banter at this time of day, all the staff are. Relieved to be waving them off home, they affectionately mock their clients’ amusing little foibles. But Maria is not amused.

  It is not until she walks back into the Arts and Crafts room that she notices that all three boys are wearing identical bikes, beer and bollocks T-shirts. She chooses to ignore this and concentrate on more important matters, beginning with interrogating Dezzie.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing getting my clients drunk?’

  ‘Who’s drunk?’

  Dezzie gives a light laugh but as a more defensive tone creeps into his voice Maria can tell he’s uncomfortable being called to account.

  ‘We had two pints.’

  ‘And crisps,’ adds Martin helpfully.

  ‘We could see that we weren’t needed in the church so we made a sharp exit…’

  With hand gestures and a descriptive whistle Martin demonstrates their sharp exit.

  ‘The lads wanted a T-shirt, so we went shopping. After that we…’

  Maria is furious. She has easily spotted a flaw in his story.

  ‘You went shopping? How the hell did you manage that, then? I know for a fact that these two don’t have any money on them, I sorted out their money this morning.’

  Dezzie hangs his head, embarrassed. She’s caught him out.

  ‘Present,’ says Brian, plucking with weak fingers at his T-shirt.

  ‘You’ve not to tell!’ Martin shouts at Brian. ‘You were told, it’s a secret!’ ‘I had money,’ says Dezzie.

  ‘You paid for them?’

  ‘Lads club secret!’ shouts Martin, annoyed that the secret is no longer exclusive to the lads club.

  Dezzie shrugs.

  ‘They weren’t expensive.’

  ‘We were feeling a bit thirsty…’ interjects Martin.

  Maria puts her hand up to stop him.

  ‘Thanks Martin, but I’m speaking to Dezzie at the moment. It’s important that I find out exactly what happened.’

  ‘Hexton Arms,’ says Dezzie, ‘two pints.’

  ‘Two pints of lager,’ says Martin, counting it off on his fingers, ‘two pints of beer and two pints of, what d’you call that other stuff, Dezzie?’

  ‘He’s kidding,’ says Dezzie, ‘two pints, total.’

  ‘Because of the soup,’ says Martin.

  Despite Maria’s rebuke Martin has continued to explain himself. They are both speaking at the same time and she’s confused.

  ‘Martin, what are you talking about, pet?’

  ‘The soup. Fiona was right. It was far too salty. That’s why we were gasping for a drink.’

  ‘Salt. Poisoning. We. Intend. To. Sue.’ confirms Brian.

  This reminder of the debacle over the soup only makes Maria angrier.

  ‘Is that the best excuse you can come up with? The soup was salty so you took it upon yourself to take them to the pub and fill them with drink? These are my clients!’

  Maria is shouting.

  ‘Clients. Not. Your. Fucking. Pets. We. Are. Adults.’ says Brian.

  This is the first time Brian has ever spoken like this; he’s thrown strops but he’s never been so confrontational with Maria. There is no reply she can make to this.

  The lads, despite their matching talk bollocks T-shirts, are strangely silent.

  ‘You don’t own us,’ says Martin eventually, in a quiet but audible mumble.

  Maria is shocked by this spreading insurgence. This has never happened in Blue Group before.

  ‘Martin, just be quiet please, till we sort this out.’

  ‘We can do what we like,’ Martin says in his ‘no fair’ huffy voice.

  There is another heavy silence.

  ‘It’s true, honestly, Maria. They were thirsty,’ says Dezzie gently. ‘Martin suggested we go to the pub and get a drink. I didn’t see the harm. I wasn’t forcing anyone; I wasn’t pouring it down their throats.’

  Maria is thinking about this and so is Dezzie apparently because they both begin to speak at the same time.

  ‘Well, how did Brian manage to…?’

  ‘Okay, okay, I did pour it down his throat, I mean, no, I didn’t, I held it to his lips.’

  Brian is nodding his heavy head as fast as he is able, fervently supporting what Dezzie is saying while angrily stabbing a crooked finger at the Dynavox. Brian is operating a double standard here. He hates eating and drinking in public but he let Dezzie hold a pint glass to his lips.

  ‘We. Are. Service. Users. You. Provide. Service. Serve. Us.’

  ‘Brian swallowed,’ explains Dezzie somewhat needlessly. ‘He wanted to. Martin and Brian are over eighteen.’

  ‘Yes, but you can’t just give them pints,’ Maria complains,
‘they’re not used to drink.’

  Dezzie seems exasperated and worn out with the arguing.

  ‘Well, how the hell are they ever going to get used to it if they’re not allowed to go for a pint?’

  ‘Not. Pets. Or. Prisoners.’

  Maria rushes to put her arms around Brian.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She feels ashamed and tears spring to her eyes. She doesn’t want them to hate her. Perhaps the reason she’s so angry is that she’s jealous of the loyalty Martin and Brian have shown Dezzie.

  ‘Don’t. Cry. You. Can. Borrow. My. Tee. Shirt.’

  Maria laughs. Brian doesn’t hate her. Neither does Martin or Dezzie, who also laugh. And they did seem to have a good time. And they are back in time for the buses, just.

  ‘Did you have a good time?’

  Martin says yes, Brian says splendid.

  ‘And you want to go to the pub again?’

  Brian nods. Martin thinks it over.

  ‘Yes, but not every day. There’s no need to go every day.’

  As the anger drains from Maria she’s left with a cold unease. That was a professional dispute, wasn’t it? Not personal. She was angry with Dezzie her colleague, not Dezzie her boyfriend. It was important that they resolve it, but it shouldn’t creep into their personal life. She hopes Dezzie will see things the same way. She hopes she’s still his girlfriend. And it was sweet of him to buy their T-shirts and all those pints; it must have cost him a fortune.

  ‘And we’ve kept the best to last. This one’s for you, Maria. Check this out; we got a T-shirt for Mike,’ says Dezzie, pulling open a poly bag.

  ‘For Mike?’

  Dezzie has bought a T-shirt – not for her – but for Mike? Maria is horrified. By his own admission, Dezzie barely knows Mike. He only ever met him once, at his interview. When Maria moans about how unfair Mike is, Dezzie’s always sympathetic. She thought he was on her side. Buying Mike a T-shirt, making him one of the boys’ gang, this is the ultimate act of disloyalty.

  ‘It’s not the same as ours,’ says Martin, flapping his arms; sensitive to her dismay.

  As Dezzie is smoothing the T-shirt out, the three of them are giggling. It’s a nice one, one that she would have appreciated herself, a pale yellow colour, very retro, very seventies. It says in bubbly lettering,