by Tim Parks
But there was nothing he could shout at Thomas about. So, in a way, Thomas didn’t have a relationship with his father, as the others did. Now that he thought about it, Thomas could not remember a single conversation with his father throughout his teens. Nothing. Not a single exchange of any import or intimacy at all. When he had found that verse in the Bible, ‘I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot’, he knew the words were meant for him. His father was a hot man. His balding dome flamed with colour when anger got the better of him. His brother was a cool customer: ‘Temper temper,’ he needled their sister. But Thomas was neither. ‘So then because thou art lukewarm,’ the Good Book said, ‘I will spue thee out of my mouth.’ That was how God felt about it. Mr Lukewarm, Thomas thought. I am Mr Lukewarm.
It was a Saturday evening now and Thomas was alone, sitting at his computer screen. It had been a pleasant enough day – he had gone swimming, shopping, had lunch with a friend. But now he began to feel anxious. Now he began to understand where all this was leading to, these reflections that he had avoided for thirty years. The truth was that although he had talked to a lawyer about divorce, although he had got the documents ready, Thomas still hadn’t quite done the deed. He saw that now. The thought of that final confrontation with his wife, the signing of the documents, pained him. You are marooned, Thomas told himself. Mothballed. For the depression.
He thought again of that rainy Saturday morning when, short of breath and nauseated, his father had led his youngest son in the awesome promise: With this ring … with this ring … I thee wed … I thee wed. First his father’s voice, then his own, as they stood face to face at the bottom of the chancel steps. With my body … with my body … I thee worship … I thee worship. Thinking back now, it seemed to Thomas that it must have been the most intimate moment they had ever known. In the name of the Father … In the name of the Father … and of the Son … and of the Son. How old had Father been that day, the day before he was diagnosed with cancer, the day of the very last ceremony he would ever perform, not knowing it was the last? Fifty-nine. Dad had been fifty-nine. How old was Thomas now? Fifty-eight.
Thomas was electrified. This was what he had come back to his father for. To ask himself what the man’s life had been like in his fifties, when the family melodrama was over and the decisive battle lost. But slowly does it. Put it all in order, Thomas thought, before jumping to conclusions. Go back. Back back back to adolescence.
The most memorable incident that had to do with his father, the most decisive watershed, was the Charismatic Movement. His parents had at first resisted, then succumbed to the excitement. It must have been an evangelical version of the ’68 aberration, the need for upheaval and change. Certainly, there was an American influence. Soon Mother and Father had taken to reading out 2 Corinthians 12 at every opportunity, Saint Paul’s account of the Gifts of the Spirit: there were words of wisdom, gifts of healing, gifts of prophecy. Then, one Sunday morning, the curate raised his arms on the chancel steps and spoke in tongues. It sounded babbled and weird, and the man’s face was ecstatic. This was the Baptism in the Spirit. Needless to say, many parishioners had been disgusted. Then Thomas had heard his father and his mother doing the same thing in their bedroom. Babbling. Then his father had declared in church that he believed in these gifts – it was the Renewal they had all been praying for – and he, too, had spoken in tongues from the chancel steps and raised his arms to heaven in ecstasy when singing a hymn. Thomas couldn’t remember now which hymn. All hymns at the time had seemed painful to him, laden with sad sentiment, with some sticky emotion that held you back. To sing a hymn was to struggle through warm mud, to feel the impossibility of ever growing up and being free.
Very soon the pressure on the children began. They, too, must be baptised in the Spirit. They, too, must speak in tongues. It was never declared overtly, but it was obvious that if you weren’t, if you didn’t, then you couldn’t be part of the inner fellowship, the core family. His sister got there in no time at all. In no time at all, she was babbling away and praising God and talking about the Latter Days. It made school exams seem rather less important. Thomas fudged it, of course. Thomas pretended he was on board, but mostly studied for his O levels. His parents wouldn’t want to stop him studying. Would they? Thomas did try to see if he could speak in tongues – he might even have liked to, had it come naturally. With all the sincerity he could muster, he asked God for guidance and hazarded a few nonsense words; they were not convincing. Meantime, people noticed that he did not raise his hands during the hymns. He couldn’t. All in all, it was getting harder and harder to keep your head down.
Sitting at his computer screen now, Thomas saw that Father had embraced this heady charismatic stuff to break a deadlock, to make something happen in his life. He hadn’t been able to go to sea like his own father. He hadn’t become a missionary in exotic lands. It was true that many souls had been won for Jesus, but then they had drifted away again. People blew hot and cold. The May Queen had been abolished, but no doubt she had returned when the reforming vicar had grown too depressed and disheartened to climb the pulpit stairs. There had been the big new challenge in Bristol and he had risen to it; he had done well, the congregation had flourished, but his daughter had failed at school, his older son was an atheist, a smoker, and a womaniser, and his youngest child a mere conformist, a sail-trimmer.
Father had written a book in those years, on the Holy Trinity, but it had not been accepted. Or, rather, it had been accepted, but only by some minor publisher, not the publisher he wanted. It had not made an impression. Exactly what was in the book, Thomas didn’t know. His father hadn’t talked about it, though Thomas was not so stupid, even in his mid-teens, that you couldn’t talk to him about a book. So if Father hadn’t talked about his book on the Holy Trinity it was because he was scared of exposing his ideas to his son’s scepticism. Or maybe he didn’t want to push this lukewarm lad into a position where he would have to declare himself. Either way, they hadn’t spoken about it. They hadn’t spoken about anything. Then suddenly this mad wave of enthusiasm was flowing through the Church; there was talk of healing and the spiritual power to transform the world. Frustrated, Thomas’s father had gone for it.
To prove the worth of a weapon you must use it. For six months, a year, the tension in the family soared. They all became more and more themselves. Violently, dangerously themselves. His father prayed and prophesied. His sister was a shrill echo. His brother made fun, hissing and sniggering like a demon. His mother wept; this unkindness would bring her down with grey hairs to her grave. In response, Thomas was intensely well behaved. He hid in his good behaviour. In his room, he hung posters of football teams and tinkered with old valve radios. If he could have become invisible, he would. From downstairs came the sound of his sister banging out ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ on the piano. Very soon things would come to a head.
In his small flat, Thomas had put on the kettle for tea. Now he changed his mind and poured himself a beer. He honestly couldn’t recall the details, exactly how or why it had happened, but one evening, in the lounge, around midnight, they exorcised his brother. Thomas was fifteen. His brother had come home late. Perhaps smelling of dope or drink. From his bedroom, Thomas heard shouting and started to come downstairs. The lounge door was closed. A pale-green door. From behind it came shouts and the chants of prayers, the piano, a hymn. ‘Yes, Lord, yes!’ And his brother was shouting, too. ‘Leave me alone! Get your hands off me! You’re all fucking crazy!’
Thomas stood on the stairs, looking at the pale-green paint on the door, listening. All the members of his family were in there. His father, his mother, his sister, his brother. The curate, too, by the sound of it. The loathsome curate with his ecstatic babble. They were all there, behind that door in that room, where a real drama was taking place. The drama between people who are hot and people who are cold.
Thomas was outside.
Thomas had not rushed down the last steps, burst into the room,
and yelled at them to stop this nonsense.
Thomas was young. He was afraid. He was excluded. He was not really on anyone’s side. He didn’t want to be like his parents, but he didn’t like the way his brother provoked them. ‘Because thou art lukewarm, I will spue thee out of my mouth.’
Was this, Thomas wondered, why he was on his own now, forty and more years later, on a Saturday night, bivouacked on a metaphorical mountainside, with no one beside him? Because he was lukewarm? And if it was, was that really a problem? Thomas rather liked his Liverpool flat, didn’t he, and his quiet cold evenings?
When the exorcism had failed, when Thomas’s brother wasn’t exorcised or broken but continued to be who he had always been, when the desired transformation did not take place and life returned, if not to normal, then certainly to monotony and flatness, as when a flood withdraws after the tempest, what had his father’s life been like then? How had he been able to go on, to traverse day by day the grim domestic mudscape that was left? The nine sad mothballed years before the cancer choked him?
A year after the exorcism, Thomas had gone on a last holiday with his parents, to Deal on the south coast. This was where his father and mother had spent their honeymoon. They even got the same room in the same hotel, right on the seafront. But there wasn’t much joy now. Thomas felt too old to holiday with his parents. His brother and sister were elsewhere. His parents seemed deflated, directionless, particularly his mother. They were going through the motions. They were trying to revive something. Father gritted his teeth. He suggested that he and Thomas rise early and take a swim before breakfast. It would be bracing. Thomas would have preferred to sleep late but didn’t want to disappoint.
So they got up at seven, put on their costumes, crossed the road to the sea, laid their towels on the pebbles and waded in. The days it rained, they put the towels in plastic bags. The sea was grey. Thomas could still see his father’s body, bird-like but paunchy. His skin was dead white, his old red swimming trunks baggy and slack. When the waves came up to his thighs, he would stop for a while, moving his hands back and forth in the cold water, crouching a little after a wave passed to keep his wrists covered, standing on tiptoe when the next wave rose, to keep it off his crotch. ‘Wonderful air,’ he shouted to Thomas. ‘So fresh.’ He made a theatre of puffing out his chest and breathing deeply and when finally he ducked his head into the water he would come up spluttering and protesting and flapping his arms. It was the theatre of someone trying to turn greyness into fun, trying to find a reason to rejoice. Thomas was aware now that he hadn’t been much help to his father. He’d launched into the first big wave and swum steadily out to sea. When he’d stopped and turned, treading water, the Reverend Paige had been a small bald figure in a vast expanse of grey.
The years after that yielded nothing. Father started using aftershave and wearing coloured shirts, even silk cravats. He looked quite the dandy. For Christmas, one gave him bath salts or body lotion. After lunch, he snoozed in an armchair, his trousers loosened. At dinner, he was as impatient as ever. He scraped the custard off his plate and hurried off to his sermons. That was the one time when he really came alive: preaching, persuading, seducing even, in his robes, from the pulpit. To Thomas’s brother, years on, Father had apologised. So his brother said. An awkward, hurried apology about the ‘too much religion we drummed into you’. And once, when Thomas came home late and was in the kitchen drinking coffee, his father had come down to pick at beef bones in the fridge and, with his mouth full, muttered, ‘I suppose it has been all right, in the end, this monogamous life.’ Had that been an invitation to talk?
Thomas drank another beer and emptied a pack of nuts into a dish. He closed the document on his computer screen. What sort of life could his father have lived if he had openly declared that he no longer believed, no longer wanted to preach, no longer wanted his marriage? It was unthinkable. Mother would have been destroyed. His sister, and perhaps his brother, too, in a way. Thomas went back in his mind to those morning swims at Deal. Now that he thought about it, there had been a kind of melancholy father-and-son intimacy about them. He remembered the pebbles being dark with dew, their slippery hardness when he took his plastic sandals off a couple of yards from the water. Dad put his glasses in his sandals, so as to be sure where they were. ‘What can you see without them?’ Thomas asked. ‘The sea,’ Father said, laughing. ‘The sky.’ After a warm bed, the water was icy about your ankles. The breeze was chill. The pebbles were painful underfoot. Father began his spluttering routine, then his slow, blind breaststroke. Thomas put his head down and dived. He swam strongly, out towards the dark horizon. Stroke after stroke. A powerful freestyle. He was showing off, of course, declaring the vigour and victory of youth. Yet it had been a pleasure to have his father there, in the water behind him, between him and the shore. He had felt protected somehow. He remembered that.
Now Thomas has swum out too far and he stops and turns. He treads water, looking back at the gloomy coast, the long sweep of quaint, decaying facades, the pale clouds. The sea is all around, a slow grey swell moved from deep beneath. Dimly, he hears his father’s voice. ‘Tommy! Tommy!’ Where is he? There. A wave rises and his father’s head with it. A small white dot. I can see him, Thomas thinks, but with his poor eyesight he can’t see me. ‘Tommy! Hey, Tommeee!’ He’s worried for me, Thomas realises. He’s worried that I’ve gone too far and may never make it back.
BLISSFUL BRUSH
SMS HSBC, 28-07-2012 11:27:44 debit card purchase £22.85 from Asda Pendlebury Supermarket, 604-612 Bolton Road, Pendlebury, M27 4ET.
SMS HSBC, 28-07-2012 20:51:08 debit card purchase £53.85 from Cross Keys, 13 Earle Street, Liverpool, Merseyside L3 9NS.
For about a year after Thomas left home he and Mary continued to draw from the same bank account. So whenever either of them used their debit card, or made an online payment, both received, as of old, a message from the bank. This was, in turns, distracting, poignant, irritating, worrying. Thomas saw the extent of Mary’s veterinary expenses, and her weekend travelling. Mary wondered who Thomas could be taking to the restaurant. She was also perplexed when he made a large payment to a do-it-yourself chain in Newcastle. Thomas figured that Mary spent far more than he had ever realised on petrol.
But of course, if he hadn’t realised, it was because he had barely glanced at these text messages when they were together. Only since the separation had they begun to taken on a certain interest. But it was the same for Mary. Why, she asked herself, was she wondering who he was seeing now, when she had always left him criminally free when they were together?
SMS HSBC, 12-08-2012 13:15:42 your account has been debited £315 for a direct funds transfer made on 11-08-2012.
With purchases, you could see where they were made. With cash machine withdrawals there was the address of the machine. But electronic funds transfers came with no info aside from the amount transferred. Was Mary making unwise loans to her younger sister? Thomas wondered when £3,000 went somewhere in September. £3,000! Mary thought she might contact Thomas over a transfer of £5,000 just before Christmas. She imagined the money had been sent to their daughter, who was putting down a deposit on a house, but if you can’t contact your husband when he has just wiped five grand off your current account, when can you contact him? Has he moved house? she was asking herself mid-January, when the usual SMS indicating his rent payment did not turn up. Then he paid a week late. He was forgetful. He has forgotten me entirely, Mary thought. She thought she might make a huge transfer somewhere, perhaps to the account she had recently opened for herself with another bank, just to see how he reacted to the mystery. Shake him up. But in the end she wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. She would never give him a chance to say she had been anything less than scrupulously honest with the money.
Thomas meantime asked himself if she would figure his supermarket expenses must be for two. He felt vulnerable and stupidly guilty. When he saw she had withdrawn money in Glasgow he wondered if perhaps her moth
er was ill. Or could she be thinking of moving back to Scotland? But what if there were fraudulent use of the card during this period? No one would know, would they? Each of them would think it was something the other had spent.
Sometimes Thomas paid in cash to prevent her seeing how much he was spending at the Cross Keys these days, or perhaps to forestall any unwise decision on her part to drop by and see him there. Mary used the card even for the smallest expenditure, knowing that every purchase would remind him of her existence and his desertion.
At last the day came when the separation was legally settled and the account closed. Two last text messages arrived announcing transfers of equal amounts to separate accounts. This time there was no need to check why the payments were made or to whom. Afterwards, Thomas could hardly believe he could use his new debit card without Mary knowing. Or that she could go to the supermarket without his knowing. Only now did he appreciate what a strange, twilight comfort it had been to know that his wife of thirty years had just blown two hundred quid at the Blissful Brush Pet Grooming Parlour.
GRANDPARENTHOOD
This was supposed to be a trial return. They would see if it was possible, or desirable, to live together again. So, getting out of the car, Thomas was surprised to hear children’s laughter coming from the garden. That took him back. Even more surprising, the children were Chinese. A boy of four perhaps, a girl of seven or eight. At the gate he stopped and looked. One of the things he had wondered in his year and more of absence was how Mary would manage the garden without him. The garden had been his territory. No one had wanted to help. Everyone protested their ignorance of plants and mowers and garden tools. All those years making the place beautiful would go to waste. But no. The Chinese children were rolling around happily on a neatly cut lawn; they had broken off a couple of irises, but there were plenty more nodding gently in the perfumed sunshine. Ricky, the cocker spaniel, lay panting in the shade. The hedges were trimmed, more or less. It was an idyllic scene.
