Join Me

by Danny Wallace

  My phone rang. It was Hanne and I was quick to answer it.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Yeah, are you coming tonight, or what?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘To the Vin Diesel film. Are you coming tonight or what? Because I’m getting sick of you avoiding the question. If you don’t want to come to the premiere, fine, but at least let me know so I can tell Steve whether he’s coming or not.’

  ‘Oh yeah, who’s Steve?’ I asked, then mouthed to Gareth: ‘Girlfriend.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter who Steve is, are you coming or not?’

  ‘I thought you were going to call me last night,’ I said, trying to deflect some of the obvious anger.

  ‘I wanted you to call me. You know. Like you used to? So are you coming?’

  ‘Er . . . no.’

  ‘Jesus, Danny . . .’ Gah! Hanne had just taken the Lord’s name in vain! In front of a vicar! There was no way he’d have heard it, but still, it’s just not done, is it?

  ‘Hanne,’ I said, blushing.

  ‘Where are you? Tell me where you are and why you can’t come. Make it good.’

  ‘Where am I?’

  Well, this was tricky. I wanted to make something up. Some valid-sounding excuse that would have placated Hanne and saved me some strife. But I was standing right next to a vicar. A vicar who would have known I was lying about where I was for precisely the fact that he was there too. You can’t lie in front of a vicar. Not without offending Baby Jesus, and we all know where that leads.

  ‘I am . . . in Inverness.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Inverness. At a castle. Just near Loch Ness.’

  ‘Loch Ness! Why? Who with?’

  I chose to answer the who with, rather than the why.

  ‘A friend of mine.’ I winked at Gareth, letting him know everything was a-okay.

  ‘Which friend?’

  ‘Gareth,’ I said. Gareth smiled at me. I smiled back.

  ‘How long have you known this one?’

  ‘Oh . . . just . . . recently.’

  ‘Another new friend? And what does this one do?’

  ‘He’s . . . a vicar,’ I said. I was trying to say all this as if it was the most normal thing in the world for me to be at a castle in Loch Ness with a vicar I hardly know.

  ‘Danny . . . this is not normal. This is not normal, to be in castles in Loch Ness with vicars you hardly know.’

  I should have tried harder.

  ‘Are you telling me the truth? Where are you really?’

  ‘That’s really where I am. Look, Hanne, take this Steve bloke to the film. If he likes Vin Diesel, so be it. I don’t even know what one is. I’m back tomorrow morning, I’ll come round, we can . . .’

  ‘Tomorrow morning? You’re staying with this vicar in Loch Ness? Jesus, Danny—’

  ‘Hanne, please, try and tone the blasphemy down,’ I said, hanging up and turning my phone off, but not before catching an astounded ‘Wha . . .?’ coming out the other end.

  I could now give my full attention to this most intriguing of joinees. We carried on walking around the castle.

  ‘I’ve not been here since I was a kid,’ said Gareth excitedly. ‘I always used to get taken to castles when I was a kid. Jane’s family had a kind of National Trust membership, so I think she’s visited every bloomin’ castle in Britain . . .’

  We wandered around in some of the heaviest rain known to man, but our spirits weren’t dampened. We explored like kids, marvelling at the dungeons, climbing high up the towers, studying the signs. Each sign told you which room you were standing in, and had a braille translation written underneath, despite the fact that as we were in a ruin and therefore outdoors, these were pretty useless. ‘Oh,’ the blind people would probably say, ‘this room appears to sound exactly the same as all the others.’

  There was one sign, though, that I really felt needed attention. It was by the Dovecot Room, no more than a few stone blocks arranged in a circle, but – crucially – right next to a sheer drop of about twenty feet. The braille translation read ‘The Dovecot Room’ when it clearly should have read ‘Oi! You’re in a lot of fucking danger! Don’t even think about stepping forward! Turn around and get a new guide dog – yours has led you to the very brink of death!’

  ‘Hello, sirs,’ said a man, all of a sudden immediately behind us. He appeared to be some kind of tour guide. Unless he just really, really liked neon jackets.

  ‘Hello,’ said Gareth and me, in perfect unison.

  ‘We’ll be closing up in ten minutes,’ said the man.

  ‘Okay,’ we said.

  ‘Where are you two from?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m a priest over there at Inverness Cathedral,’ said Gareth.

  ‘Ah-huh,’ said the man.

  ‘And I’m a Satanist,’ I said. ‘And we’re just having a discussion, just thrashing a few things out.’

  ‘Ah-huh,’ said the man. ‘And how long are you in Inverness for?’

  Gareth and I looked at each other. It seems that priests and Satanists are quite the common thing at Urquhart Castle.

  ‘Well . . . I live here,’ said Gareth. ‘What with me being a priest at the Cathedral and all.’

  ‘And I’m from Hades,’ I tried. ‘It’s near Swindon?’

  ‘Oh, ah-huh,’ said the man, nodding, as if he knew the place. ‘And you, sir, did you say you lived here?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gareth, ‘I’m one of the priests at Inverness Cathedral.’

  ‘Oh, you’re a priest? In Inverness?’

  ‘Um . . . yes. At the cathedral.’

  ‘Oh, the cathedral? Inverness Cathedral?’

  Gareth hesitated, as if he were being tested.

  ‘Er, yes. Inverness Cathedral. I’m a priest there. I’m a priest at Inverness Cathedral.’

  ‘Ah-huh,’ said the man, now looking at his watch. ‘Well, we’ll be closing up in ten minutes, gentlemen, have a good day, now . . .’

  * * *

  The Reverend Gareth J. M. Saunders, as I have already told you, is thirty years old. He’s been married for three of them to Jane, a ‘drunken alcohol counsellor’.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A drug and alcohol counsellor.’

  ‘Oh. I thought you said “a drunken alcohol counsellor”.’

  It was lucky he hadn’t, and luckier still that she wasn’t. I imagine if she was, most of her advice would have been ‘Oh, sod it, just have another drink . . .’

  ‘It’s very nice of you to let me stay the night,’ I said. And it was. Gareth and I were virtual strangers, but he’d more or less insisted I make use of his spare room and the futon therein.

  ‘Both Jane and I come from homes where our parents always had folks to stay,’ he said. ‘Or for tea, or coffee, or whatever. My mum never used to lock the front door, so we’d often come home to find that friends had invited themselves in, and were making tea and toast in the kitchen, or were watching TV while they waited for a bus. So it’s no bother . . .’

  Gareth made some tomato soup and we sat in his living room listening to sheets of rain batter the windows. It was cold and dark outside, but we had soup, and bread, so all was well with the world. Gareth took his dog collar off, and it prompted the inevitable.

  ‘So . . . when did you decide to become a vicar?’ I asked.

  Gareth thought about it.

  ‘I suppose it was when I was 9. I didn’t know any better. I’d always wanted to be a doctor, but then one day I decided I wanted to be a minister. My mum was a nurse who worked with old people and a lot of them died. Not because of my mum, I’d like to point out. But that possibly gave me a sense of what it was to comfort people, and certainly since my dad died, there was a recognition that even when he was at his most ill, he was still a whole human being. It was just a different aspect of being a person. And I remember coming home, and telling my mum over lunch that I didn’t want to be a doctor any more. I wanted to be a minister. Because I wanted to heal the whole person.’
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br />   ‘You were a very wise nine-year-old,’ I said.

  ‘I haven’t said anything wise since,’ said Gareth, and I laughed.

  Gareth’s dad died in 1998, from kidney failure. ‘But he had Alzheimer’s Disease, too. He often used to queue at the fridge, waiting for the next train.’

  Gareth smiled.

  ‘But watching my dad as he was ill had a lot to do with what I am today, I suppose.’

  As did Gareth’s choice in music. Because Gareth – probably like your local vicar – is a massive heavy metal fan.

  ‘It was a way of dealing with things,’ he said. He picked up his guitar from the corner of the room and began to play. ‘Now, this is Metallica’s “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)”.’ I didn’t recognise the tune, but then that’s because I like normal music. But Gareth played confidently, and well, and in his hands it sounded good.

  ‘I’ll introduce you to a few things,’ he said, putting his guitar back down and sliding a CD into his stereo. ‘This is Voivod. They’re French-speaking Canadians. They’re very . . . passionate.’

  Gareth pressed play. If this was his idea of passion then I’m very surprised he’s still married. It was loud, it was confusing, it was all guitar screams and near-hysterical shouting.

  ‘What’s the name of this track?’ I yelled.

  ‘“Cockroaches”. In a minute I’ll play you “Too Scared To Scream”.’

  I had a feeling I would be.

  Gareth was headbanging now. He picked up his guitar again and I noticed there were two more behind him.

  ‘How many guitars have you got?’

  ‘Eight,’ he said, still headbanging to the terrifying sound of Voivod. ‘This acoustic was my first, then I got that one secondhand, then I moved to London and bought the Strat. Then I was working in a textile mill in Selkirk and bought myself the CC157, with ballback. It’s electro-acoustic, steel strings.’

  I nodded approvingly.

  ‘Then I needed some extra stuff so when I was working in Bermondsey I bought this, the GC80; haggled that down from £540 to £380 . . .’

  ‘Nice one,’ I said, not really knowing what I was on about.

  ‘Then I bought the FX pedal. I’d wanted an RP10 but I settled for the RP6, that’s fine, does the job. So I could get rid of my distortion pedal after that, obviously . . .’

  ‘Yeah, obviously, yeah,’ I said, feeling exactly as I do when a car mechanic tells me I need to replace my juju-wings with some steel twats.

  ‘So my brother got me that Rockwood bi-honer over there because he’d got a new Yamaha, and then I married Jane and I got two more.’

  ‘So . . . eight, then.’

  ‘Yes, eight, yes. Oh, wow, look at that . . .’

  Gareth had noticed the time. We’d been so busy messing about that we’d lost track of it. In twenty minutes Gareth was due to take the evening Eucharist Service at the cathedral. He switched the stereo off and sprang into action.

  ‘We’d better go,’ he said, finding his shoes and trying to find the keys to the cathedral. Inevitably, they were attached to a scratched plastic Metallica keyring.

  It was still raining heavily as we jumped into the car. And I mean heavily. We turned on the radio to hear the rain described as ‘torrential’ and the winds described as ‘storm force’. Rivers had reached bursting point, and severe flood warnings had been issued. Had I travelled by train, I wouldn’t have even made it into Scotland, let alone the far north of Scotland.

  Just then my mobile rang. It was my mum. She was ringing to tell me it was quite stormy where I was. I thanked her for the information and told her I’d look out for it. She sounded pleased to have been of help and we said goodbye.

  And then Gareth uttered a sentence I had never heard before, and dare say I will probably never hear again.

  ‘Shit! I forgot my dog collar!’

  Truly, he is the face of the modern clergy.

  ‘Shall we go back and get it?’ I asked.

  ‘Too late now. I’ll have to try and find one in the cathedral . . .’

  We arrived, and ran from the car into the cathedral doorway to negotiate the locks in the downpour. Once in, Gareth opened the main door for the only person who’d turned up for the Eucharist. A friendly, elderly lady by the name of Cynthia.

  Cynthia busied herself at her pew, and Gareth pointed out a statue of the cathedral’s founder, Robert Eden, before sneakily attaching a Join Me sticker to its lapel. Moments later a man in a hat, who’d just popped in, noticed it and said, ‘Now, who’s done that? Why would people do such things?’ Gareth put on a concerned, vicar’s face, and said, ‘I don’t know, it’s terrible, isn’t it?’ and reached up as if to take it down. The man turned away, satisfied, and Gareth simply smoothed the edges of the sticker down.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘Now . . . I’d better get ready . . .’

  I smiled as I watched Gareth walk backstage to prepare for his gig, and looked to where the sticker was. I started to wonder what his congregation must think of his involvement in Join Me. It had been something others had remarked on with some amusement . . . the fact that, as a vicar, he was already pretty much attached to quite a big club. What did his parishioners think? I noticed Cynthia looking over to me. Maybe I’d ask her later. But Gareth was coming back now, with the communion wine and bread.

  I’d never been to a church service like this before, never broken the bread and drunk the wine, and certainly never read out loud from the Bible in front of others. But it would have been rude not to have joined in, and Joinee Saunders was someone I was fast becoming firm friends with. I took my place on the other side of Cynthia, and the three of us began the service.

  Gareth’s voice immediately softened as he began to read. I wasn’t sure what part of the Bible he was reading from, but it was about friendship, and it struck a chord. One passage in particular . . .

  Pleasant speech multiplies friends

  And a gracious tongue multiplies courtesy

  Let those who are friendly with you be many

  But let your advisers be one in a thousand

  Gareth was right. Not that he’d made it up himself, but I figured if anyone in the room believed it, it was probably him.

  Gareth left to get changed into his fancy cassock, and in the meantime we were joined by another lady, late and damp thanks to the fierce rain, and she sat at the pew in front of me, her head bowed. Gareth returned and continued the service.

  But then the woman in front of me stood up, very quickly. I looked at her as she turned towards me, and fixed me with an icy stare. It was like she thought I’d touched her arse, or something. I was very uncomfortable, and just stared back at her, with wide eyes. She held her hand out to me.

  ‘Peace be with you,’ she said.

  I shook her hand, but I’d misheard her.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said. The woman wrinkled her nose at me.

  ‘No . . . peace be with you,’ she said again.

  ‘Peace be with you,’ said Gareth, suddenly there, taking her hand, rescuing me. ‘It’s something we say,’ he whispered. ‘Only say it if you want to.’

  Two visiting American men arrived – Will and Scott – and took a pew. Gareth welcomed them and I shook their hands, saying ‘peace be with you,’ like I’d been saying it all my life.

  ‘Peace be with you,’ they both said back. To be honest, if it was peace we wanted, we wouldn’t get it by going on about it all the time, but it was quite pleasant nevertheless.

  Gareth continued the service, and before too long we were all kneeling, eating our bread and supping our wine. And then it was over.

  * * *

  ‘What did you think?’ asked Gareth.

  ‘Good gig,’ I said. ‘I liked the wine. Didn’t think much of the sandwiches.’

  ‘We need a new caterer,’ he said. ‘Hey, Cynthia. Come and meet Danny. He’s the guy that founded Join Me.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Cynthia, ‘yes, I did wonder whether that was you. Gareth has
talked about you. About halfway through the service I did wonder whether that was you.’

  ‘When you should have been focusing on Jesus?’ said Gareth, mock-sternly.

  Cynthia looked ashamed but then laughed.

  ‘How many people have joined you?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s just me and Gareth,’ I joked. She didn’t seem to think it was a joke.

  ‘Well, the best of luck with it, both of you.’

  Cynthia wandered off and Gareth started to get changed. We were alone in the cathedral and suddenly it seemed okay to talk at a normal volume. I’d only just noticed it, but apart from during the service, people didn’t feel comfortable if they weren’t whispering in this place.

  ‘It’s ridiculous, that,’ said Gareth. ‘People get annoyed with me for just chatting in here. But it’s just a building. We should be able to use it as one.’

  He then took a big deep breath and shouted: ‘KNOB!’

  It echoed around the great walls, and I was dumbstruck.

  ‘See? Who did that hurt?’

  He raised his voice again.

  ‘Knob knob knob knob knob!’

  It was then that we heard footsteps somewhere in the main hall and the front door of the cathedral bang shut.

  ‘I hope that was Deaf Benny,’ said Gareth.

  Whoever Deaf Benny was, I hoped that one day I’d get to meet him.

  ‘You know what you were saying, in the service, about letting your advisers be one in 1000?’ I said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, I’d like you to be one of my advisers.’

  ‘How many do you have?’

  ‘Well, there’s this one bloke called Dennis. He owns the moon. But I’d like to know how you think Join Me should progress. In a kind of non-religious way, I mean. We’re making old men happy, but . . . you know . . . what’s the future of Join Me?’

  Gareth scratched his head.

  ‘This is something I’ve thought about. Y’see, the whole thing about the Church is that it spreads best through personal contact. You’re far more likely to respond to a person than you are a theory. So you should up the personal contact to get people to join you.’