by Mat Ridley
“Oh, now you’ve really done it. God won’t stand for your blasphemy or your violence,” she said, somehow, impossibly, missing the hypocrisy of the latter part of this statement. “Your words will be your undoing, and your actions will not go unpunished. Vengeance is mine, saieth the Lord!”
“Ha! What else can God do to me that He hasn’t already done? He’s filled my life with His lies, He’s stolen my husband from me, and to top it all off, He’s sent you to rub my face in it! You’ve got fifteen seconds to get out of here before I start showing you the real meaning of vengeance, you sanctimonious bitch.”
Something in the tone of my mother’s voice must have convinced Geraldine that her vengeance would have to wait—although not for too long, as it happened. She turned and fled towards her car, causing my mother to mutter darkly to herself and look around the kitchen for further ammunition, fifteen seconds or not. The sound of the car door slamming shut brought her search to a hasty end, and she grabbed a saucepan from the worktop and ran outside. Her choice of weapon evoked a fresh feeling of déjà vu—again, beyond that which already came from literally living through my life for a second time—but once more, there was no time for the feeling to take hold; instead, I was forced to stagger out of the house after my mother, a passenger in my own, younger consciousness.
We were just in time to catch Geraldine pulling away from the kerb. As usual for her, the window on the driver’s side of the car had been left open. She rarely closed it, preferring instead to share her love of loud worship music with the rest of the world as she drove around, whether they liked it or not. But that day, she used it instead to issue one last parting shot as she drove off.
“Just you wait! You haven’t heard the last of this!”
My mother’s response was to throw the saucepan after the car, but this time, her aim was not so supernaturally accurate. The saucepan bounced off the tarmac with a hollow clang and stumbled to a forlorn stop in the gutter. The car sped down the road, and I caught one last glimpse of all those hateful, holier-than-thou stickers in the rear windscreen before it rounded the corner. The sound of the engine faded and then, finally, Geraldine was gone.
My mother limped back into the house and immediately set to work bandaging my hand, without saying a word. An uneasy silence descended in the wake of Geraldine’s departure, and I tried to fill the void by asking my mother about what had happened as I started to dress her own wounds, but she was too shaken and exhausted to give anything more than perfunctory answers and wan reassurances.
Even without the insight gained from living through these events for a second time, the younger Dan knew that more was still to come that day, that we were merely experiencing a pause as the rollercoaster crested the top of the next terrifying drop. Sure enough, I had scarcely finished tying a bandage around my mother’s arm when I heard the distant sound of sirens approaching. Another surge of déjà vu swept through me as my dead self remembered the same sound filling the air on the night that Jo and I had died.
The passage of time suddenly accelerated once more, but not so much that I couldn’t again experience first-hand the trauma of the events that followed. The police arrived, piling out of their cars in numbers that suggested they were expecting to find a riot in progress rather than the sorry aftermath that greeted them. One of the officers quickly made his way across the lawn and arrested my mother, charging her with assault, and I knew that Geraldine had been working her black magic; we had not, indeed, heard the last of her and her God. But my mother was too tired to fight anymore. The last look that I saw on her face before she was bundled into the back of a police car was the same one I had seen there too often over the last few weeks: the hungry, wistful look she got whenever her mind started to think only in terms of how many drinks she would need to take away the pain.
I was driven to the police station in a second car, and then taken to an interview room where I was made to repeat my version of events over and over. For years afterwards, I lived with a sense of guilt that perhaps it was something I said that day that sealed my mother’s fate, that some detail I overlooked, or some inconsistency, was responsible for what eventually happened. I know for a fact I wasn’t thinking straight; after all, I had just witnessed my mother and someone who used to be one of her closest friends trying to claw the life out of one another, and all this on top of the recent business of my father’s departure and my mother’s subsequent near-self-destruction. Nobody at the police station seemed to be thinking about that, though; even the so-called ‘child interview specialist’ who talked to me was more interested in using her craft to obtain answers than trying to be sympathetic towards my circumstances.
Eventually, after several hours, my mother was released, and I finally got to give her the hug that both she and I so desperately needed. She did her best to smile for me, but I wasn’t so young that I couldn’t read between the lines that had been etched into her forehead. And just because she had been released, it didn’t mean she was in the clear. The next day, we began to receive a steady stream of visitors, all armed with briefcases and dressed in suits. I didn’t learn of their agenda until much later; the only clue I got was the look of guarded distaste that crossed the face of our first visitor when he observed the collection of empty wine bottles sitting near the bin.
By the time our next group of guests arrived, my mother had removed the bottles, but it was too late: their presence had already been noted, filed and counted against her. Not that I knew that at the time; despite all the visits we received, nothing immediately bad seemed to be happening as a result, and gradually the number of visitors diminished. Those that did still come had apparently lost interest in talking to me, so I went back to riding my bike and trying to make sense of everything that had happened. Life slowly seemed to return to normal, or at least whatever passed for normal in those days. I lulled myself into thinking that maybe things would still turn out alright for us after all.
But just when it felt like a tolerable equilibrium had been reached, the court case began.
Chapter 7
Through her activities within both the local congregation and the wider Church, Geraldine knew a lot of powerful people, including some particularly zealous lawyers. From amongst their ranks she chose to engage the services of Mr Herkenrath, a man whose mere name seemed sufficient to invoke the same kind of fear that that of the Inquisition did hundreds of years earlier. My mother, on the other hand, was a pariah within the community, mainly due to Geraldine spreading the good word. And that, coupled with the fact that most of her money had already been deposited in the Bottle Bank rather than in a more financially secure institution, meant she had to settle for the court-appointed defence lawyer instead.
The battle was over in just three days, and my mother never stood a chance against all the accumulated ammunition of Geraldine and her cohorts. The defence lawyer might just as well have stayed in bed for all the good he did in the face of Mr Herkenrath, and the verdict of the court finally revealed the full, promised wrath of God: my mother was to be sent to jail for twelve weeks, and upon her release, was to be kept under close observation and enrolled in various psychotherapy and rehabilitation programs. I was to be sent to live with my father for the duration of her imprisonment—and based on the tone of the judge’s voice, it was obvious that he considered it unlikely I would go back to living with my mother ever again. It turned out that he was right—but not for the reasons he thought.
The day of the handover arrived all too swiftly. It was the first time I had seen my father for many weeks, but even so, my fury still burned hot. Whenever he caught me glaring at him, he shot me a wan smile, but did he really think that that was all it was going to take to patch things up between us? Not fucking likely. The paperwork being signed may have put me in his care legally speaking, but I was damned if I was going to let him see that as his chance for redemption.
With the completion of the handover, my father drove me back home to pack some things, althoug
h I couldn’t really bring myself to think of it as ‘home’ anymore; the place had lost any such cosy connotations after all that had happened there. He quickly realised that I wasn’t in the mood for talking and kept his own silence—at least, until we pulled up outside the house. As the car drew to a halt, he turned towards me and launched into an obviously prepared speech, saying he could understand how I was upset with him and that he was sure we could work things out, blah, blah, blah; but I got out of the car and slammed the door shut on his words mid-sentence. I was tempted to kick the door for good measure, but felt that cold contempt was a more effective tone to strike than teenage tantrum. Besides, such a kick would most likely have brought him running after me, shouting impotently at my behaviour, and the last thing I wanted was for him to try to follow me into the house. He had no business there anymore.
Once inside the kitchen, I closed the back door and took a deep, quivering breath before sinking to the floor. The tears came at last. I brushed them away angrily, but once started, they proved impossible to stop. The urge to just sneak out of the house and pedal off on my bike was almost overwhelming; but to abandon my mother like that would make me no better than my hateful father. It was the determination to get through things for her sake—plus the fact that if I took too long to pack, my father might come looking for me and see the state I was in—that finally enabled me to get some semblance of control again.
It didn’t take very long to gather my things. Most of the stuff in my room I could easily live without. But there was one other item that I knew I needed to take with me. I had half expected it not to be there, that my mother would have taken it with her or thrown it away, but there it sat in the usual place on her bedside table. It wasn’t anything special, just a simple medallion depicting Saint George fighting the dragon, and it had probably only cost her a couple of quid at a market somewhere. But she had had it for as long as I could remember, and when I was younger, whenever I had been scared about anything, she would solemnly put it around my neck and tell me that Saint George would protect me; and that was all it took to stop me from being scared. Maybe that sounds silly and sentimental, but I was feeling small and afraid right then, and despite my reservations about the religious associations that went with the medallion, the fact that it was precious to my mother and would remind me of her won through. For a few moments, I struggled with the tears again, but the unseen reassurance of my mother’s presence made it easier this time. I slipped the medallion carefully around my neck, making sure that it was prominently displayed, and when I finally got back into the car with my father, it was obvious from the narrowing of his eyes that he had seen it and recognised it, just as I had hoped he would. We drove off in silence.
For the next ten weeks, my mother carried out her sentence, and I carried out mine. My father didn’t offer to take me to see her at any point, and pride forbade me from asking him, however much I wanted to. I made a point of trying to avoid his company whenever possible, although the small size of the house that he and the curate were sharing made it difficult to block them out completely.
The atmosphere in the house was, as you can imagine, strained and unreal. It took me some time to get used to seeing Julia wearing normal clothes rather than the cassock I had always seen her wearing in her former life. But even though she had been ousted from the church, I still thought of her as the curate, and based on the reading material she left lying around the house, it was clear that she still considered herself as being in touch with her faith—or whatever warped version of it she chose to inhabit now that enabled her own selfish desires and absolved her of responsibility for what she and my father had done. I had no idea how these hypocrites could reconcile their behaviour with their self-professed beliefs—and I had no interest in finding out, either. All I cared about was getting the hell out of there.
Strange as it might sound after what I’ve already said about my dwindling faith, I even took to praying again. At first it was little more than a barely silent rant against God for all that He had done to us, or at least allowed to happen; but once the main energy of my anger had been spent, old habits that weren’t completely dead took over. I found myself trying to reason with Him, or looking for His purpose amongst the chaos. But most of all I found myself pleading with Him to show mercy to my mother, especially in view of her whole-hearted rejection of Him. I tried to remember what it felt like to love Him, to go back to that time, only a few short months ago, when I had been so close to God that He had even sent me the dream that had helped me to rescue Jo and her friends. But however much I tried, I always felt as if I were shouting into a dark, empty well, with nothing but my own echoes answering back. It wasn’t until ten days before my mother was due to be released that I finally got an answer to my prayers—although it was an answer that actually decided me once and for all that God was nothing more than an unfeeling bastard.
The news came with a timid but persistent knocking at the door to my room. Figuring that it was one of my captors, I did nothing to conceal my impatience.
“Sod off! I’m busy!”
Instead of sodding off, my visitor instead took this as their cue to open the door. A policeman entered the room, and at first I thought he had come to talk about the details of my mother’s release. My heart soared at the thought, but before I could apologise for my rudeness, I then saw the long look on his face, and the way that his eyes flitted nervously around the room. My heartbeat continued to rise, but now for different reasons. This was no angel of glad tidings, only another prophet of doom. With the blood pounding in my ears, I listened as he muttered a few awkward, one-sided pleasantries before finally delivering his real message: that my mother was dead. He mentioned something about suicide, and that by the time they had found her it was too late; but to be honest, once the core of his message had struck home, most of the rest of his words were just meaningless sounds.
I sat there numbly, letting the policeman’s voice wash over me. He looked thoroughly uncomfortable, and the version of me that was journeying through my life for the second time felt sorry for this poor man and his unenviable job. The younger me was less understanding; suddenly the full weight of my mother’s death came crashing in through my shock, and my mind just crumbled beneath its power. With an animal cry, I clawed my way past the policeman, knocking him to the ground, frantically trying to escape from the walls that seemed to be closing in around me. I ignored the cries of protest and concern coming from behind me, already distant, and ran from the house.
For three days I wandered the streets, desperately trying to get away from all the wretched thoughts that stabbed into my mind. When exhaustion finally led me to curl up in a bolthole somewhere and sleep, my dreams quickly turned to nightmares, and I was constantly haunted by thoughts of ending my own life, too, to end the misery and be reunited with my mother once again. The warm metallic feeling of her Saint George’s medallion against my chest stopped me from pursuing that dark thought any further. Even though she herself had succumbed to the pressures that God and His followers had brought to bear upon her, the words of reassurance that she used to say whenever she put the medallion around my neck still had the power to calm me. Over the course of those three days, I slowly came to terms with my initial feelings over my loss and resolved that, like the man on my mother’s medallion—my medallion—I would fight. Even if it would not die easily, the dragon of despair would not prevail.
By the time the police tracked me down, I was too hungry and exhausted to resist. I was so emotionally drained that even when it became clear that, because of my mother’s death, I would be put into permanent care with my father, my anger could barely manage a twitch. It was only when I saw him face to face again that I exploded into life, flinging myself at him in a whirlwind of flailing limbs. The two policemen who had escorted me back to the house eventually managed to drag me off of him, but not before I’d had a chance to communicate my full hatred and disgust towards this traitor and all that he stood for.
> Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t sustain such rage indefinitely. For the first few weeks after my mother’s death, the urge to tear into my father or his partner every time I encountered them was almost overwhelming, but I gradually learnt to control my anger, and contented myself instead with either ignoring them (if I felt particularly kind) or making their lives miserable by getting into all kinds of trouble and making sure the trail led clearly back to their door. Over the next few years, this simmering hostility synergised with the natural urge for mischief and danger that afflicts all teenage boys, and by the time I reached sixteen, it was clear that both my father and I had had more than enough of each other.
And it wasn’t just limited to our dysfunctional little family unit either. I found it difficult to form any kind of meaningful relationship with my peers, too, not just because of their insensitivity to the joyless circumstances of my forced incarceration with ‘that dirty old man and his religious tart’, but also because I had absolutely nothing in common with any of them. I found myself drifting further and further off the rails as I seized upon any opportunity to escape from what my life had become, until one day, not long after my sixteenth birthday, I stumbled upon the perfect solution.
I had been hanging around town, idly looking for trouble as usual, when an advert in the window of the local Army recruitment office suddenly caught my eye. I had never paid the office any attention before, but the words on the advert—‘brothers in arms’—together with the photo of a team of soldiers rushing forwards in a single line, struck a powerful chord in me. What if the implied promises of this poster were true? What if the Army could provide me with the friendships and support that I had been missing for so long, or maybe even eventually come to replace the family life I had lost? My head was instantly filled with wistful images of camaraderie, adventure and freedom, and before I knew what I was doing, I had pushed my way into the office and picked up a recruitment pack.
