by Mark O'Flynn
WHITE LIGHT
1.
I never received a Christmas present in my life until I met Troy Cole. Nor a birthday present for that matter but it’s Christmas that really irks me. My mum believed in Jehovah. Christmas was for Satan worshippers. Last year, she used to twitch and jump all over the floor of the Hall, the armpits of her dress wet, while I sat on the hard, straight-backed chairs nursing her handbag. They said she was a little bit too fervent, because Witnesses don’t twitch. In the end we tried to run away, but they tracked us down and hauled us back into the arms of Jehovah.
2.
Troy didn’t believe in Jehovah, although he pretended he did. I was eighteen when Troy gave me my first Christmas present. It was a necklace. I loved it. When he placed it around my throat and did up the clasp with his cool fingers I felt a shiver of white light fizz through me. Later he gave me rings and bracelets and left little doodads all over my room—ribbons and small soft toys with big eyes holding signs that said I love you. I had to hide them in a cardboard box in the bottom of my cupboard in case someone from the Company saw them and decided they represented too much worldly involvement.
Troy had nowhere to live. He slept in bus shelters. That’s where we met. I was catching a bus to Toongabbie and he was just waking up. He asked if I had an orange, and luckily I did. He sucked the juice from the pith and showed me what was in his backpack. It was a DVD player. There had never been one in our house before. Then I thought, it’s only a bit of tin, what’s so evil about that? So I touched it.
After a while Mum let him move in. She wanted me to meet people. Even if they were pagan. She saw straight away how much we loved each other. She never claimed to be the most devout Jehovah’s Witness but she tried. She was never the best sort of Shaker either. Just as she was never the best sort of Scientologist or Plymouth Brethren.
3.
For someone who slept in bus shelters, Troy always seemed to have plenty of money. And a high turnover of electrical goods. He bought us things. He replaced our old broken-down vacuum cleaner with a new supersonic one. He paid off Mum’s car, a sporty blue Mazda and brought home a plasma screen TV. We would sit around with our feet on the coffee table watching the game shows. He bought champagne and we giggled as we drank it.
‘This is the life,’ Mum would say, guiltily.
‘You bet, girls,’ said Troy with a big burp.
I would feel happy for being treated like an adult, and Mum would feel happy for being made to feel younger than she actually was. Then, inevitably, she would grow restless, as if the eye of God were glaring at her.
‘Can’t sit around all day. Idle hands and all that. This is not the truth that leads to eternal life.’ She would leave Troy and me on the couch with the indentations of her bones between us.
4.
At the Kingdom Hall, the Pioneer took Mum aside and I overheard him ask,‘What does he do, this boyfriend?’
(You can never keep a secret from the Witnesses.)
‘He works nights,’ said Mum.
‘Doing what?’
‘Oh, a little of this and a little of that.’
‘Is he a Catholic?’
‘No, no, nothing of the sort. He’s very independent.’
‘Satan is the invisible ruler of the world, Elaine.’
‘I know, I know. Terrible people.’
‘Sharon is at an impressionable age.’
‘Sharon is a good girl.’
‘Without a father to guide and instruct her.’
‘I can’t help that.’
‘You know, as Millennial Dawnists, we cannot condone divorce.’
‘I’m not divorced. Just abandoned. And I’ll remind you that Pastor Russell was also separated from his wife.’
‘That’s enough, Elaine. Leave theocracy to the men.’
Outside in the car park, the Pioneer stared at me across the asphalt. I felt his eyes bore through my clothes and into my heart. Perhaps he knew about the champagne. Then he hopped into his old BMW and drove away, making signs in the air as he went. I asked myself, why had life been so boring until I met Troy?
5.
Troy let me feel his muscles. He paid all our bills. We could hardly kick him out to go back to the bus shelters. He bought me fancy chocolates with liqueur in the middle. And he bought me knick-knacks from stalls at the Royal Easter Show and Luna Park. On the rides, we pressed together going round sharp corners. It’s true I left school when I was young but then so did Pastor Russell, founder of the Witnesses.
When I asked Troy where he went at nights he replied, ‘Out and about.’
When I asked him what he did when he went out and about he replied, ‘A little of this, a little of that.’
I thought, I should be taking offence at this tone, I should slap him, like a modern girl. I worried that I was going out with an agent of Satan, because at the Last Judgment, we were told, the wicked will be annihilated and I would not like to see that.
‘Why do you have to go out again?’ I asked one night as he was getting ready. ‘Don’t you want to be with me?’
‘’Course I do, Shazza.’
‘I don’t want you to get annihilated.’
‘I’ll be careful.’
‘That’s not what I mean.’
‘You know how much I love ya, Shaz. But your mum’s driving me crazy. She’s off her nut. She’s always complaining about how buggered she is, but she works her ring off doing the vacuuming. She should learn to put her feet up.’
It was true. Mum was always cleaning the house in case the Pioneer or some of the other senior Witnesses of the Company came for a Home Visit. I thought all mothers did that.
‘You could help her,’ I said.
Troy made a vomiting noise.
‘You could cook.’
‘I don’t cook. I’ve got things to do.’
‘What things?’
‘Business.’
I loved it when Troy called me Shazza. It made me feel like a real person. But it was that word business—part of the triumvirate of evil I worried about.
6.
Troy asked Mum if he could borrow her car, the one he had paid off. Well, she could hardly say no. He didn’t come back till three in the morning and woke me up by sliding naked into bed beside me. I didn’t mind. It was like a Christmas present that was all my own.
7.
Mum said that if he wanted to borrow her car three or four nights a week, then the deal was he would have to come to the Company with us to hear the sermonettes. The car was, after all, registered in her name. Troy squirmed a bit, but after making a phone call, finally agreed. I was happy because if the Last Judgment suddenly struck he would not be annihilated and we could sit beside each other and let our thighs touch as the prayers kind of washed around us.
8.
There were strange phone calls in the middle of the night. Messages for Troy from someone who called himself Max, who said things like ‘The proof of the pudding is in the tank.’ And ‘Fine feathers make fine feather dusters.’
I was to relay these messages exactly and not mix them up. In fact, the first time, he gripped my arm and made me recite the message exactly. I soon learned to race to the phone before Mum should take it into her head and answer it. Troy said I was a good message-taker.
9.
At the Kingdom Hall, the District Servants and Pioneers surrounded Troy, welcoming him into the Company. They asked all about his past and his conversion. When did he see the light? Troy held my hand, patting it like a fish, saying we were soon going to be married. That sentence made my innards go all soft and gooey. The District Servants, the Pioneers and other young men looked at each other and mumbled... You mean we weren’t even married and yet we were cohabiting under the same roof? What would be next, fishing? Gambling? Abortion?
‘It d
oes not look seemly, Elaine, to have an unmarried man cohabiting under the same roof as your daughter,’ said the Pioneer, paraphrasing something from the Book of Revelations.
Before Mum could get a word in, Troy wisecracked, ‘Get off your hobby horse, mate, I’m going to make an honest woman of her. And what a woman!’
No one laughed.
‘I hope you don’t mean me, Troy,’ said Mum. She giggled nervously.
‘It’s not like I’m asking her to have a blood transfusion, for Christ’s sake,’ said Troy.
I could see the looks of annihilation registering in their eyes. Several job offers were forthcoming from the men of the Company but Troy, he said he already had a job. ‘Thanks all the same, chaps.’ And if they needed any cheap electricals, then he was their man.
10.
One day, I came home from the blind and curtain shop where I worked as a receptionist and found Mum vacuuming the carpet like a whirling dervish. The furniture had been thrust aside all higgledy-piggledy, the new vacuum cleaner hot to the touch.
‘Are we having a Home Visit?’
Her eyes looked pinned back in her head, her hair flung upwards as if she’d been riding a motorcycle.
‘Hello, darling,’ she said. ‘No, we’re not. I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling really energised and alive today.’
‘That’s good.’
‘I feel like I’ve been touched by the Spirit. All around me is white light.’
I unlocked the lock Troy had installed on our door. Troy was lying on the bed laughing his head off.
‘She’s vacuumed the same bit of carpet ten times.’
‘What have you done?’
He kicked the cushions aside.
‘I put some gas in her coffee.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘A bit of go-ey. Some gas. You know—amphetamines. You want some?’
I was horrified.
‘You have to go and tell her.’
‘Let’s wait until she’s finished.’
‘No.’
‘Go on.’
‘No.’
I made him go and explain or I wouldn’t sleep with him that night. Or maybe ever, I was that serious. I crept down the hall and listened at the door while he sat Mum down, gazing into her shrunken pupils and explained. It was quite complicated. When she twigged, Mum fell to her knees in shock and started praying loudly from Hebrews 11 and 12.
‘Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season.’
‘It’s all right, Elaine,’ said Troy, calming her. ‘It’s okay. You feel all right, don’t you?’
‘I’m tainted,’ she wailed.
Troy thought about this.
‘But it’s a nice feeling, isn’t it? Taintedness. I haven’t heard you humming like that in ages.’
Mum had to think about this.
‘Yes… I suppose.’
‘Then if you limit yourself to every three or four days, you’ll be fine.’
‘Fine?’
‘You’ll be tip-top. No worries.’
‘I… yes… I… Can you get some more?’
‘I’ll get you the best.’
‘I… I’ve never enjoyed myself so much.’
When eventually Troy came to bed, I said, ‘That wasn’t quite what I had in mind. I thought you’d be more… penitent.’
‘I told you I’m not a Catholic.’
‘I wonder what you really are, Troy Cole.’
‘I’m the man of your dreams, babe. Get your gear off.’
11.
I guess that’s where Mum’s moral corruption began, unless you count all the gifts she received and accepted and her letting him sleep under our roof in the first place.
As I said, she wasn’t a very good Witness. The bills got paid and we all had a great time in front of the plasma TV. Troy made us cocktails. But he was a bit erratic. Sometimes, if anything came on that he disapproved of, he would slam the TV off and send us to our rooms. It was kind of like he was running the house.
One week, I was so tired from working in the blind and curtain shop that I didn’t go to The Kingdom Hall. Troy went instead. Later, he told me he received five job offers. The next day, three of the elders, all of them Pioneers, called around to the house to make sure I had not lapsed or drifted or whatever the phrase is. You couldn’t drift very far, even if you wanted to, with them keeping tabs on everyone.
‘I’m just tired, that’s all,’ I said.
‘You want to be part of the 144, don’t you, Sharon?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Because if you lapse, we don’t need to remind you, when Armageddon comes Jesus will simply cast you down with the rest.’
‘I don’t want to lapse.’
‘Like a puff of smoke, the wicked shall cease to exist.’
‘I’m not wicked.’
‘In the Second Advent, for those who are wicked, death will mean total, absolute extinction. Do you know what that means?’
‘I’ve got an idea.’