The bigger boy stirred, thumping his little friend on the arm. ‘Aw bollocks man, it’s the cloth.’
The titch, snorting, pointed a dirty finger at Gore. Then the two of them lurched from the seats and pushed their way past him, hooting. Gazing after their retreating backs, Gore poked a finger into the clerical collar snug at his throat, running it round to the nape of his neck. Other passengers were watching him with curious eyes. He lowered himself into the warm vacated seat. Moments later, the train shuddered all through its length and set to rolling out of London.
*
In the seats opposite were a young couple, their hands clasped atop the table, making conspicuous her twelve-carat sparkler and silver wedding-band. She was dark-haired and wary-eyed. Her burly husband bulged out of a yellow polo-shirt, his heavy-fringed haircut one his mother might have given him.
The woman leaned over to Gore. ‘Eee but I’m glad you got sat there, Father. Them little beggars …’ She looked to the window, as though it were all too much, then back to Gore, as though she could not let it pass. ‘I’d say it was your dog collar what did it, mind. Where do they get it from?’
Gore only shrugged, as to say it was a mystery. And as three they shared a desultory smile, reassured for the moment by the restoration of the peace, the coincidence of shared values.
Here as always Gore was quietly amused to find people of his own age or older so keen to address him as ‘Father’. True, he wore the clothes of his calling, but it seemed to him a larger issue of persona – something to do with his standing six feet and three inches, or the speckles of silver in his thick black hair, belying his thirty-one years. The frowning cast of his features, too, had always aged him, not to speak of his grave demeanour. The latter, though, was a choice of his, a matter of personal style: Gore had always been of the mind that a good minister of God needed a touch of the actor about him.
He unfolded his newspaper and bit his lip at a front page reporting strife at the annual conference of the Trades Union Congress in Blackpool. BLAIR TO SEVER UNION LINK? Scanning the write-up he gathered that a few coming characters in the Labour Party – to which he had subscribed staunchly since his fourteenth birthday – had been mouthing off about policy at supposedly private dinners. Most likely, Gore assumed, in the hope that their unthinkable thoughts be controversially made public by the journalists in attendance. It was all too clearly the behaviour of a government-in-waiting, growing bumptious in the queue for succession. Amid a list of MPs quoted in defence of their brazen colleagues, Gore searched for, and was unsurprised to find, the name of the man who would be representing him before this day was done – Dr Martin Pallister, Labour member for Tyneside West, newly promoted Opposition Whip for Education and Employment. The man, indeed, for whom his older sister was employed as strategist, spin doctor and all-round major-domo. Susannah had always been a purposeful soul, and in Pallister she seemed to have found a prime focus for her energies. They made a team, sharing the same taste in good dark suits and well-minted phrases. Gore himself had first encountered Pallister more than a decade ago, when they were both scruffy lefties of a sort. Now the MP and his sister had joined the big push to revise Labour’s gospels. That they were clearly effective in same did not allay his view that they were a gilt-edged disgrace.
His meditation was broken by murmurs from behind the outspread paper, and his arm was lightly tapped. It was the husband.
‘I’m gannin’ to the buffet car, Father, can I fetch you back owt?’
‘Oh, well, actually I’d love a tea if it’s no bother.’
Gore’s hand went to his pocket, but the man was shaking his head and clambering out of his seat. His wife smiled. ‘I’m Tina Grieveson, Father, how’d you do?’
‘John Gore. Pleased to meet you.’
‘Aw, likewise I’m sure. Me husband’s Stuart.’
‘A most considerate husband he is too.’
Stuart Grieveson returned bearing three plastic cups, a wad of napkins and a fistful of miniature milks. ‘How far you gannin’ the day then, Father?’
‘Call me John, please. I’m for Newcastle.’ He noted the recognition wrought by his horizontal vowels.
‘Aw, you’re from the north-east then?’
‘I used to be,’ Gore smiled. ‘Been away a good while. But I’m back now. For work.’
‘Aw, really?’ A thoughtful silence. Tina made as to spit something out. ‘And is it – as a vicar then? That you’ll be working?’
Gore gestured down his collared and black-clad frame. ‘No, as a circus clown.’
Stuart eked out a smile that persuaded his wife to follow suit. Gore felt they were all suitably at ease, and so grew expansive. ‘No, that’s right. What I’m doing, I’m going up to what they call plant a church.’
‘“Plant”, you say?’ asked Tina.
‘You mean start it from scratch, aye?’ said Stuart. ‘Build it out of nowt?’
Gore nodded, gratified by this speed of uptake, for he had been braced to deliver a longer explanation. ‘That’s right. It’s funny, I’ll be giving services in a local school to start with. Until we find out whether I can pull a crowd. The Church has its doubts, to be honest. But it’s the fashion right now, you see. Not new churches, as such, more like new sorts of churches.’
‘Where’ll you have yours then?’ Stuart asked. ‘What bit of Newcastle?’
‘Out west. Hoxheath?’
Stuart let out a low whistle. ‘Dear me. What they call inner-city preaching, eh?’
Again Gore sensed a familiarity of terms. ‘Are you churchgoers yourselves?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Tina. ‘It’s Gosforth where we are in Newcastle, we belong to a nice big congregation.’
‘That’ll be a blessing.’
‘Oh it is. We have quite a brilliant young vicar, I must say, fella by the name of Simon Barlow. He’s your age, probably. You don’t know of him by any chance?’
Gore forced a smile while nodding into the brim of his tea, though it was as if he had just swallowed rat poison. These two were Anglicans, then – his own people – but of a markedly different stripe. Barlow had been his contemporary at Grey Theological College, and ‘brilliant’ was a wildly naive assessment. He knew too that any church where Barlow declaimed from the pulpit was bound to be evangelical by nature, its pews filled by solid suburban couples whose lives nonetheless had seemed listless and grey until the day they met a guy called Jesus.
‘Hoxheath, but, good lord,’ exclaimed Tina. ‘You’ll not be short of souls to save round there. Them little charvers what were in your seat? Plenty more of that sort in Hoxheath.’
He was familiar with such reactions, thought them snobbish, the knee-jerk of those who imagined an afterlife populated solely by their own ‘sort’. Rather than cavil, he resorted to a stock tactic – smiling gently to himself, stirring his tea, meaning his silence to intimidate.
Stuart, though, was made of impervious material. ‘So how in hell did you get lumbered wi’ this job? I mean to say – you must’ve done summat awful to get sent to Hoxheath.’ And he chuckled.
‘Well.’ Gore set down his plastic spoon. ‘I was serving my title, as we say, down in Dorset, quite happily really. Then the Bishop of Newcastle came to me and said he had a plan for Hoxheath – for a few estates that weren’t getting reached by the older churches. He needed a man, so he asked me if I’d take it on. I didn’t think twice, really. I mean, I took it as a privilege. A duty, if you like.’ This seemed to chase the condescending smiles from the faces opposite, so Gore ventured a sharper angle. ‘It’s a challenge, of course, I know. But that’s what life’s made of, isn’t it? We can’t run from it, we in the Church. We have to be out in the world. Among the people.’
‘Aye, right enough,’ offered Stuart, after a moment or two.
‘Anyhow – it’s just the world of work these days, isn’t it? You go where you get sent, wherever you’re told to. I was told to plant a church.’
And Gore shrugged, as to s
ay that was the size of it. Still, just the simple stating of his mission – I was told to plant a church – resonated at his core. He would never phrase it so for the layman – much too pompous to be let away with – but these were the times when he believed he was about the work his Father intended.
Pleasantry had receded, silence settled. Gore withdrew his pen and notebook from his coat, and started to embroider some jottings he had made toward a sermon drawing on St John’s account of the Good Samaritan. ‘If any man hath this world’s goods, and seeth his brother hath need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion against him – how dwelleth the love of God in him?’
Such a well-minted entreaty, the quintessence of his tradition – the stripe running up his own spine. Mother religion, ‘the heart of a heartless world’. And yet with what ease did a well-wrought phrase become a platitude. What should be the segue? He scribbled quickly. ‘As fellow Christians we are commanded to love our fellow man as ourselves. But it’s not easy. We have all faced a stranger in need and said, “Not today friend, I have troubles of my own …”’
No, he thought, setting down the notebook. Not easy, by no means. Easy to say, for sure. Easy to say ‘You must love’. Easier still to say ‘But it’s not easy’. All talk came easily. Anything worth doing was onerous. ‘He that will eat the kernel must first crack the nut.’ The point was to do it. Also to succeed in it? Gore was unhappily conscious that for large swathes of his life he had sat on plastic chairs in small aggrieved groups, listening to just this kind of pained debate – from Labour Party branch meetings to parish church councils and back again.
As for his sermon – no doubt it needed work, but he sensed it would repay the effort.
*
Oh river city, industrial seat, Victorian marvel of Newcastle …
If no one else in the carriage seemed greatly fussed, still Gore felt a fond sentiment kindling in his chest as their train trundled onto the King Edward Bridge across the River Tyne. The sky outside was overcast but daubed with patches of serene blue, a pale sun straining to burn through tufted clouds. He craned his neck in search of the best vantage from the window. To his right, stalwartly arrayed down the river’s gentle bend, were four other crossings – their fulcrum the great radial green steel arch of the Tyne Bridge, a sight that filled Gore with boyish delight.
The general view he considered only a little tarnished by the faceless candy-coloured uniformity of offices and apartment blocks that seemed to have sprouted in clusters down the riverside toward the Crown Court – itself a blank, brute mica-pillared parody of classical form. Long gone were the derricks and trolleys and giant cranes, the colossal black trappings of heavy industry that formed the river landscape in picture-books Gore had pored over as a boy. But the banks of Gateshead now behind them were like one big building site – mounds of tilled earth, lying in wait for some forthcoming venture of labour and capital.
The train swung right toward Central Station, a shed of iron and glass looming up ahead, and then they were trundling under its high arched portico. Gore was quick on his feet and to the luggage rack, taking up his chattels and disembarking into the hubbub of the afternoon, shafts of sky-light falling on the tiled concourse, its burger shacks, sports bars and ticket hutches. He had not to go far before sighting his promised welcome party: it could only be Mr Jack Ridley holding up a white card with carefully etched letters in black felt-tip, ‘REV. JOHN GORE’. Ridley stood stock-still amid the bustling commuters, as if he had been rooted there dourly for years while the old Victorian station was slowly remodelled around his ears. A stocky man of medium height, probably in his late fifties, he wore corduroy trousers and Hush Puppies, an olive-green car-coat and a flat cap, some scant reddish hair curling out from under it. Though there was an affable aspect to his squashed nose and chubby cheeks, he was unsmiling, and something in his even, assessing gaze was flint-like – if not obsidian – as Gore drew near.
‘Jack? I’m John.’
Gore’s glad hand received a cursory clasp. ‘How do then, Reverend.’
‘You’ll call me John, I hope.’
‘Shall we’s gan? I’m parked a canny way off.’
Ridley had wrested one of Gore’s bags from his hand, wheeled and set off before Gore could quarrel. Indeed he sensed already that there would be little arguing with this man – either that, or a great deal.
*
‘How long have you been active in the parish, Jack?’
Ridley, now in bifocals, was peering through his windshield with displeasure at a lady motorist reluctant to nose out onto the roundabout. ‘Helpin’ out, you mean? Whey, since we started gannin’ to St Mark’s up in Fenham, me and the wife – before I was retired, even. Before the new vicar started and all. I’ll always help, but, where I can. If I’m asked to. I’m still at it, any road.’
Ridley refocused his riled attention on the traffic. Gore took a moment to decide where he might start decoding. ‘The new vicar being Bob Spikings? My mentor-to-be?’
‘Aw aye. He’s alright, is Spikings. Not the worst.’
‘And you’re not working any more yourself?’
‘Oh I’ve never stopped workin’, me. No fear. They laid us off, but, back in – must have been nineteen-eighty-six? When they shut down the County Council, y’knaa? Tyne and Wear. On the orders of bloody Thatcher.’
This last was virtually expectorated. Gore weighed his options before opening the next front. ‘What kind of work did you do for the Council?’
‘What I’ve always done. “Technical services” they called it. I’d been a carpenter and joiner, had me certificate in electrics. So if they’d problems in the housing I’d gan out and fix ’em. If they could be fixed, mind you, cos you’d see some bloody shambolic things, I can tell you.’
‘And so – you’re working freelance now, is that it?’
‘“Freelance”?’ The scowl endured. ‘I s’pose. I’d a tool shop for a bit, but I got sick to the back teeth of little buggers breaking in. I wasn’t making any money but the locksmith and the glazier got a wad out of us.’ He gave his car horn a testy smack. ‘And even then, y’knaa, I’d get neighbours coming round, some problem they’d want looking at. And what with me at the church so regular, I’d only be having me bit tea and biscuits after the service and Spikings’d bring owa some owld biddy. “Have you met wor Jack? Aw he’ll sort you out …”’
Gore was not at all certain he would have actively sought the help of such a dyspeptic individual as this man seemed. Not that he was the type who would take a penny in return, that much was clear. Nevertheless, Gore did somehow suspect that for any favour Jack Ridley might grant, one would never quite stop paying.
‘Well, I want you to know, Jack, I couldn’t be more grateful to you. For agreeing to help me out like you’re doing, with the starting up and so on.’
‘Never you mind, son,’ Ridley grunted. ‘It’ll not amount to much.’
They paused for traffic lights at Marlborough Crescent, Gore peering out at a sprawling construction site bounded by tall wire fences and boards proclaiming multiple sources of public money. Drizzling rain speckled the windshield. Ridley rummaged in his dashboard and produced a tin of mints which he flipped open with one thumb and offered to his passenger.
‘You’re on your tod, right? Nee wife or bairns?’
‘Thas’ right,’ said Gore, settling a mint on his tongue.
‘Huh. You’re on the young side, I’d say. For the job you’ve got here.’
‘I think,’ Gore ventured, ‘the Church believes that planting is a job best suited to the younger minister. In terms of the physical effort.’
Ridley looked askance. ‘Whey, I wouldn’t have this job of yours for the world. And I’m still in canny nick. Nah.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s nowt to look at, Hoxheath. Oakwell Estate’s not bad, the one where they’ve put you. They wanted to, mind. Some of them holes? Crossman Estate? Dear me how. I mean, look at that bliddy great tower block there.’
Gore
followed Ridley’s jabbing finger out of the window. That – he granted inwardly – is one fuck-off big high-rise.
‘There’s folk older than me stuck up there. You can’t tell me that’s right.’
Gore had the unhappy sense of being a coerced party to an argument. He wished to rebut, but held his tongue. The plain fact was that he had accepted this job with alacrity, yet without requesting a preliminary tour of his catchment area. Newcastle, he had reasoned, was where he was from – or near enough, at any rate.
They had broached the west of town. Rain lay in puddles for the dispiriting drive down the main Hoxheath Road – one darkened civic building, a succession of shabby commercial facades, takeaways and bookmakers, off-sales and newsagents. PUB KICKING: LATEST read a fly-poster on a sandwich board. A bus shelter looked to have been assailed with a sledgehammer. Turning off the main drag, Ridley drove past a gated industrial-heating factory, the surrounding grass evenly coated with fast-food litter and leavings. A lone telephone exchange box was adorned with a red-paint graffito: CRESSA CHOKES ON COCKS.
Gore turned his gaze back to the road, just in time to see a dark shape weave into view twenty feet shy of the car bonnet.
Ridley’s foot went to the floor, he and Gore lurching forward, Gore’s stomach turning over. Ridley hammered on his steering wheel in anger as a hooded boy, maybe twelve years old, scampered back to the safety of the pavement. Gathered there were others of his kind – a pack of them, in identical casual clobber. One cheerily clapped his pal on the back. Ridley thumped his car horn, three sharp blares. The tallest of the boys swivelled and issued a boldly defined middle-finger rebuke.
Moments later, the Fiesta pulled up into a row of parking spaces by a built-up wall and a fenced pathway into the Oakwell Estate. As Ridley locked up and checked each of his doors, Gore surveyed the dense cluster of low-rise properties, cheek-by-jowl, identikit in their yellow-brick construction and red-tiled roofs. The system of layout was immediately apparent – the small houses arranged in set squares, criss-crossed by long narrow alleys, orderly as a sheet of graph paper, though the alleys proposed a touch of menace. The last of the afternoon sun was a blessing for the moment, but Gore had begun to wonder about the level of lamplight after dark.
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