by A. N. Wilson
He knew that MM was a bullshitter. He bullshitted the rest of them about sex. Talked as if he’d fucked everything that moved. Peter knew – or thought he knew – that this was completely untrue. He knew – or thought he knew – that he had had no sexual experiences with another human being until the school had insisted on his beginning those sessions with Mr Currey. These experiences left him feeling angry, ashamed – bitterly ashamed, at having consented to them – and unclean. He felt literally unclean as well as in pain when the man had finished each time.
Now – he thought that if he took this slowly, he could have the thought without the others interrupting – if MM was wrong about the sex, was it not possible that he was also wrong about the crimes, the murders, the pranks, the cruel practical jokes, the arson …
But this cool, rational, still linear progression of thoughts inside his head, which were as refreshing as the cold wet glass pressing on his face, could not control them all. There was, like, this whole crowd looking through his eyes, each one of them eyeing up one of the fridges in the window. And MM had broken up, like he sometimes did, into two of them – little Aggro-boy who liked stealing and Bullshitter who wanted sexual sadism as part of his kicks.
And Tuli – who was gang leader and could control even Peter himself – could only just control them all and say, Hey, gang! Guys, guys! Cool it there, inside that skull of mine. Have a little patience!
Tuli was wise. He was older than the rest of them – he could think for them all. Time will come, he thought, when that big house in Knightsbridge will all be his. He’d explain to Martina. And she’d smile that surprised baby-doll smile (why didn’t her features move?) and when she knew, she’d say, Tuli, welcome. Welcome, my son!
After all, it was his home. The large gates, the front garden, the hallway with the swanky chairs and pictures like the ones in the National Gallery (which Trevor, with his everlasting desire to improve people, had taken him to see). And the smell of fresh lilies in vases everywhere. And springy carpets which, like, bounced under your Reeboks. And those shiny polished wooden floors. All his, his.
And the Bentley was his, and Martina’s Volvo. And LenMar House, down Bermondsey – that was his, too, and when that fat fucker was good and dead every plate of glass in that building, every iron girder, every tread on the moving staircase, which gleamed like silver as it went up to heaven. Like in the story Mercy read him when he was a little kid, about the angels of God ascending and descending while Jacob slept and dreamed his dreams.
Oh, he’d dreamed dreams all right, Tuli had, since Mercy told him the truth, and he’d seen angels, ‘cause that was what he was himself. You know, like it say in the Bible, there’s good angels and bad angels? There’s one like who say, Holy, holy, holy, round the throne of glory, all that shit, and then there’s the others who say, Let’s have a bit of action, let’s go through this world seeking whom we may devour, man. And they’re both angels.
And you remember in the Bible where it say, Jesus, he was coming round the lake, right, and he found this guy. And everyone said he was like a headcase, a nutter. Everyone ‘cept Jesus. And he came round the shore of the lake to those tombs, it’s like he’s hanging out in Crickleden Cemetery ‘cause there’s nowhere else to run. And he’s cutting himself with stones, and he’s like, in these chains and he’s shouting and swearing. And Jesus says, Who are you, man? And he’s, like, going, ‘My name is Legion, for we are many.’
And Father Vivyan can say those words in Hausa or one of those crazy African languages he knows. Sunana Tuli ne; gama muna dawaja. But Tuli doesn’t want no African crap, man, it was bad enough in junior school being Bahamian when all the other kids were either Jamaican or wanted you to think they was Jamaican. Africa ain’t cool – but that’s not the sort of thought you could expect Father Vivyan to get into his white old nut. Anyways, Jesus, right, he’s going to the guy, right, C’mon outta there, you fuckers – Murderous Moron, yeah both of you, Aggro-boy and Bullshitter, and the Major, and Bertie Wooster – all of you, come the fuck out. And oh, one minute it’s like the inside of your head’s exploding, like with heavy metal. And then you, like, look up at Jesus, man, and the noise stops, and everything goes, like, calm and beautiful. And you’re free, and you’re looking into a pale blue sky and butterflies are winging the mild, blessed air.
SEVENTEEN
London goes to sleep early, and in bad weather – it had been bad weather for months – Londoners keep indoors. By ten o’clock, even the West End was deserted, its shopping streets empty of traffic. Outside the nightclubs in Soho a few determined revellers lined up, as festive in appearance as a dole queue. A handful of foreign visitors trickled from the theatres in Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road. But the population’s capital was indoors, watching television or preparing for bed. All the way from Buckingham Palace, where the Queen was having a disturbing telephone conversation with the President of South Africa about the crisis in Zinariya, across Horse Guards Parade and Downing Street, where the Prime Minister was reading the Bible, across Westminster Bridge, and down the rain-swept windy river that rippled like shaken ink in the night, the thoroughfares were almost empty. Those still walking the pavements or waiting at bus stops seemed like wayfarers in the Deluge who had failed to talk Noah into letting them board the Ark. Desolation, alienation and darkness settled over a city which might be preparing not merely for night time but obliteration.
Where the suburban sprawls of south London began, the air of absolute desertion outside was complete, though tower blocks and, in streets lined with trees, upstairs windows still burned their electric bulbs. Five miles south, and west, of the Queen and Buckingham Palace and Westminster lay the unplanned ugliness and sprawl of Crickleden. Go past the deserted clock tower at the end of the High Road, walk as if you are going to Crickleden Junction and you will come to a huge Calvary, the white, tortured figure of the crucified Christ disturbingly realistic in the neon street-lit glare; and beside it, a noticeboard which reads SHRINE OF OUR LADY OF CRICKLEDEN. And behind it, looming up into the rain and the blackened sky, is the huge barn-like church. Beside the church is the large Edwardian rectory, built of blackened stock bricks. It is connected to the church by a brick cloister. In the drive are several camper-vans and caravans. We shall wait until it is light before we try to make out what these are doing here, and who is living there. The rectory and its grounds now have a floating population of about thirty, sometimes more. The front door of the house is always open. There are two public rooms downstairs – a large dining room and a sitting room. These are both deserted. One of the rules of the house is that the Greater Silence is kept: that is, after the night prayers have been said, there should be silence. Given the mixed population, this silence is never total. From different corners of the large house there are varieties of human sound: murmured conversations in Hausa, Kanga or other African languages – or in Albanian, Polish, Czech. Snatches of boozy song come from other quarters, interrupted by the occasional ‘Shut up in there!’ But if the silence is not complete, there is, as it were, a blanket over the house. It is subdued.
In the large bedroom on the first floor – what would have been the master bedroom when it was a ‘normal’ house – Father Vivyan Chell was sitting alone in the darkness. He had discarded the monkish habit which he had worn to the demonstration at LenMar House. In his early days as a monk in Africa, he had always worn the cassock and scapular of his order. Now, except when on public display – and he had gone to the offices of The Daily Legion as a representative of the Church, so wore his uniform – he had rather dispensed with the fancy-dress side of religion. He usually wore black, but the clothes were taken from jumble sales. Those who wear soft raiment dwell in kings’ houses. Beneath his ragged black jumper, his shoulders and elbows made sculpted twigs. His long hands lay on the black corduroy knees of his jeans. The light from a street lamp, the only light in the room, fell on his bony knuckles and the high veins on the back of his hands. Anyone who saw him
in the shadows might have mistaken him for a jagged statue made of hard wood. His hair, cut quite short, was brushed straight back from the brow. He was very thin, so the shape of his skull was discernible beneath the skin. His large nose and ears gave him the appearance of some primitive mask.
He sat with patient hands outspread, waiting for God, as he had been waiting for forty years. During one period of his life, as a young army officer at the time of the civil war in Lugardia, he had known God’s presence. When the campaign began and he was sent to Lugardia with his regiment, Chell had assumed that an army career stretched ahead, as it had done for so many of his relations. An uncle and one of his grandfathers had both been, like himself, Coldstreamers.
Then had come the bloodiest phase of the war, during which his platoon had run into some heavy fighting. Before that, he had never been a man of prayer. When he emerged from the anaesthetic in that field hospital, he had heard the voice of God. He had not heard actual words, but his awareness of the Presence was calm, certain, quite unambiguous. Perhaps it was easier to be aware of Him in Africa. In the thirty years he spent on the continent, he had often come to think so.
The hospital was some way from the fighting. A few days after he recovered consciousness, Chell had been looking out across Lake Alexandra, where a few rhinoceroses lazily wallowed, and where ibises swooped over the steel of the water’s surface. The evening sky was a vivid orange. No words had needed to be said, but in that moment he had known the Presence. When he had insisted, against his doctor’s advice, on rejoining his platoon, Chell was aware of God within him day and night for several days. All his previous life now seemed like a dream, a preparation for his new state of awakening.
The intensity of the experiences, perhaps heightened by adrenalin, pain, morphine, and then by more adrenalin when he was fighting – he won the Military Cross – never returned. He did not know it at the time, but he was to be required to ‘bank’ this deep serious experience and draw upon it for the rest of his life. Much later, when he had become a priest, he read that Saint Teresa of Avila never had any consolations in prayer, never had a sense of God’s presence given to her when she prayed. The rest of his life, the long years in the dusty slums of Louisetown, was to be a daily living out of the incarnational theology which the Holy Redeemer monks had made him read when he joined their order. The years of his novitiate – at the mother-house of Kelvedone on the North Sea coast – had been cold, emotionally unsatisfying, boring. But he had been obedient. As he saw it, he had joined up and was under orders. He had left one regiment, the Coldstream Guards, and joined a new one, the Community of the Holy Redeemer.
It had been a huge relief when, after his ordination to the diaconate, he had been sent back to Africa. He had been there a lifetime, and Africa became his life.
Then, after nearly forty years in his beloved Zinariya, he had been called back to England. The Bishop had written to him and offered him the parish of St Mary’s Crickleden, a ‘problem’ parish in many ways, with much poverty and many differing ethnie groups. He had not thought much about it. He was past sixty years of age when the Bishop’s letter arrived from England. His life had been punctuated by sudden decisions, by commitments which it sometimes took years to unravel or comprehend. He knew that most men who reached his age were beginning to think about retirement. He mysteriously felt inside him a powerful hunch that he had some great job to do in England. He took this hunch, this feeling, to be the closest thing he was ever going to feel of God’s voice – will – what was the right metaphor? Was it his own sinfulness which made God seem silent? Or was he so in tune with God’s will that he did not need to have ‘revelations’ any more? Anyway, the matter was settled for him when the Superior of his order not only agreed to his coming back to England but said that the appointment of an African to the post of parish priest in Louisetown was long overdue. So – he came home, and for the last two and a half years he had been in this house in Crickleden.
The move into the sprawling house in the south London suburb had been easy since Vivyan Chell had few possessions. He had unscrewed the locks and bolts on his doors within hours of arrival. For the first few weeks, he had lived with packing cases and a deckchair. Except for the years of his novitiate in the monastery, he had not slept in a bed since the Call. Part of his vocation from the beginning was to follow Christ in a path of dispossession. Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have their nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head. Gradually, he accumulated enough sleeping bags and mattresses to accommodate the itinerant, floating population of the house. (The local authority were happy to make use of him and there were sometimes young families living rough in the house, either asylum seekers, or simply those whose lives had fallen into chaos – an easy thing to happen when no money was available.) Usually about twenty people slept in the house.
Now, as he sat alone in the darkness with hands outstretched, he prayed for them all.
‘My time is in thy hand; deliver me from the hand of mine enemies … Shew thy servant the light of thy countenance …’ Sometimes he prayed silently, sometimes he used words from the Psalms, in English, or in one of the African languages in which he was fluent.
Raina yana jin kishin Allah, Allah mai-rai.
The darkness was conducive to prayer, and to those rambling semi-coherent thoughts which sometimes were his nearest substitute for prayer. He bathed in the dark, wrapping its silence and shadows around himself like his shabby black clothes. Sometimes he dozed. Since army days, he had learnt to survive on cat naps, and he always felt sleep-deprived.
He prayed for Lennox Mark. The encounter with the tycoon had taken Father Vivyan by surprise. He had agreed to take part in the demonstration at LenMar House, wearing his black monastic robes, in order to draw attention to the cause in which he passionately believed. He had not hoped to meet Lennie himself, and now, with l’esprit d’escalier the older man felt he had bungled their interview. He wished he had confronted Lennie with more statistics, and he wished he had made a more direct appeal to the boy Lennie, who must have been cowering somewhere inside that rich businessman, and reminded him of his youthful hunger to follow Christ. If Lennie were to turn again … if he were to put pressure, through his newspapers, through personal contact, on the politicians … there might be the chance of a peaceful solution in Zinariya.
Father Vivyan was realistic enough to know how unlikely it was. Three of the house guests for whom he prayed were boys who had run away from Bindiga’s tyranny. Two had escaped the lives of slaves on a cocoa farm where they had been badly beaten. You could see the welts in their shoulders and backs. They had joined the rebel forces in the northern mountains and had been fighting against General Bindiga’s army. Chell knew the exact terrain; as a British soldier, he had fought there himself forty years before. Their stories of unforgettable horror, their courage, were awe-inspiring. Another Zinariyan boy, Akule, also in the house, had come from Chell’s former parish in Mararraba. The African monks had spirited him out of the parish just in time, and he was now doing a course in computer technology at a former poly called the University of South Crickleden. This boy had been part of the Happy Band and he had helped to found a similar youth club in Crickleden, with Father Vivyan’s help. The authorities in Zinariya had claimed that he had been manufacturing the explosives detonated in the Kanni-Karkara copper mines, which had destroyed so many lives since they were first opened in the 1880s by Lennox Mark’s great-grandfather.
Lennox’s newspapers, in so far as they allowed their ill-informed English readers to know anything about West Africa, had represented the Happy Band as dangerous anarchists. Bindiga had no alternative but to crush these people – that was the line spun by The Daily Legion – just as it had been the duty of the British Army to fight the Irish terrorists.
Things were much less clear cut to Father Vivyan’s mind. He did not regret giving those boys training in basic survival skills while he had been a parish priest in Africa. (Well, what di
d he imagine they were doing? Playing table tennis?) In 1940 Churchill started the Home Guard in Britain. Nowadays, in the minds of many, it was almost a joke. At the time, it had been seen as necessary to national survival that young boys, and old men, should learn how to shoot people, how to blow up railways, how to render telephone lines and electricity supplies useless.
There was a vital war to win in Zinariya against Injustice. Father Vivyan Chell worshipped a Soldier Christ who came to bring not peace but a sword. It was for this priest a simple blasphemy to claim to worship the Incarnate Christ, but to hinder the coming of His Kingdom by supporting wickedness and selfishness.
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was an hungered and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in.
Vivyan Chell believed that the human race was judged by these words. In forty years, the only God whom he could see or hear – after the first mystic certainty of the Call – was in the eyes of the hungry and in the crying of the poor. The copper mines in southern Zinariya were responsible for forty per cent of the country’s wealth, but that wealth never reached the workers in the mines, whose lives were ruined by the conditions underground. Was it any wonder that boys like Akule, now asleep upstairs in a sleeping bag, wanted these mines blasted out of existence? If that meant killing a few of his fellow-workers, these numbers were only a tiny percentage of those enslaved, first by the Mark family, then by WAMO over the decades. Zinariya could never be a rich country. Perhaps it did not want to be. If every man, woman and child returned to simple farming, would that be such a bad thing? Such an outcome might result if the mines were destroyed. Those workers who had been killed would go straight to God. If the mines were closed, foreign investment could be withdrawn. ‘Investment’, as Chell had learnt very early, was colonialism under another name. Who but international capitalists wanted to teach a Zinariyan woman to feed her baby with powdered milk; or her farming family to rely on artificial fertilizers which systematically killed crops from year to year; or her children to become addicts of Coca-Cola?
