‘I’ve been feeling tempted to drink,’ she told him. ‘I’m so lonely I feel that if I’m going to be miserable, I’d much rather be miserable and drunk.’
‘Drunkenness is a great sin,’ Alwyn said.
‘I have only chance conversations with workmates,’ she continued, ‘and then I go back home and stare at the four walls. Sometimes I write and sometimes I listen to music but it’s no substitute for company.’
‘You have to pray against the temptation,’ Alwyn urged. ‘To him who overcomes will be given the crown of life.’
‘It doesn’t help that I share a house with an alcoholic,’ she explained. ‘He’s my only company and he buys cider for a pound a pop. I’m tempted to join him I’m that desperate.’
‘I hear what you’re saying.’
‘What I need is company,’ she said at last. ‘If I knew that being a Christian was this wretched, I’d never have become one.’
‘Why don’t you talk to people after the service?’ Alwyn asked, barely bothering to hide his irritation.
‘They turn their backs on me.’
‘Who does?’ said Alwyn in an exasperated tone.
‘Zeke Darbyshire.’
The talk resolved nothing. Matilda was just as lonely afterwards as she had been before. She reckoned she had only three friends: Mandy and Johnny and Janis from her Avenue Terrace house-sharing days. There was her family but it wasn’t the same. She craved warmth and fellowship. What she got instead was loneliness, isolation and boredom.
She felt herself sink deeper into despondency. Although she washed her work shirts every time she wore them, she had stopped ironing them. Her uniform went straight off the washing line and onto her back. She no longer polished her work shoes, the uniform issue of Doc Martens that came with the trousers and shirts. She felt tired the whole time and started missing meals, snacking instead off toasted sandwiches and bags of crisps. She bought bottles of wine now; not every day because she made sure she didn’t buy alcohol two days in succession but the days without seemed longer, deader, somehow.
She would go to Stuart’s room with her bottle and they would talk about football and God. Stuart was an atheist, which was a pity because he would have made a fine Christian. He was depressed because he was on the dole and had no money, though Matilda would urge him to get a part-time job, something – anything – to break his dependence on the bottle. Stuart said no painting and decorating firm would hire him without transport and Matilda suspected this was true. He would get a job when he got his license back and if he blew it a third and final time, he would spend the rest of his working life on the dole. He drank two large plastic bottles of cider and ate once a day, so he could afford to keep his habit going.
One Sunday, there was a sermon on unforgivable sins, based on Hebrews chapter ten. Matilda knew about the Unforgivable Sin but when Alwyn said there were unforgivable sins as well – which could be anything and everything – Matilda sat upright and took notice. She thought of her tippling, which she was careful to hide from the church body. As sinful as she knew it to be, she could not tear herself away from the neck of a bottle.
And now she had wilful sin to worry about, when you know something is wrong – like drinking, for instance – but do it anyway. She wondered if she had crossed the invisible line of wilful and persistent sin and worried about her salvation; she needed the comfort of alcohol to get her through a long and lonely evening with no-one but Stuart for company.
She would get down on her knees over this one. But no matter how much she prayed and begged the Lord to heal her, she always bought booze on the way home from work; her resolve always crumbled whenever she passed the Spar. The lure of alcohol was too strong. She realised that once she caved in and bought some, it would be more difficult to resist the next time and so it was, a vicious circle of desire and purchase, remorse and repentance.
And Satan would attack her for it, sending paroxysms of anxiety whenever she contemplated the bottle or her salvation, if it was still intact. For a period of an hour or two, he would assail her with waves of anxiety and condemnation, which was pure torment because it was all in the mind. Alwyn only told her to stop drinking and join Alcoholics Anonymous, like Mandy. The more Satan attacked her, the more she sought refuge in alcohol and cigarettes, which she had started smoking again.
7
The house at Poppy Road went from bad to worse.
First there was Darren, the smacked-up new housemate. Darren wasn’t too bad by himself but his mate Nikki was too much: ugly without silliness, she was built like a brick outhouse and had a mouth to match. Suspecting the other housemates would not let her move in, Nikki went straight to the landlord and asked if she could move into the spare bedroom upstairs. She then went to Darryl, counted out one hundred and sixty pounds in rent-money and moved in that day.
It didn’t take long for things to go awry. First it was money owing on bills, then it was their druggy friends coming around at all hours, giving Matilda lip, Matilda whose only offence was to ask what church Darren went to. For some reason she couldn’t grasp, Matilda drew Nikki’s ire.
Before long, Nikki was threatening to knock Matilda sideways. She would have done it, too, if Darren hadn’t pulled her out of the hallway into his room. Nikki wasn’t merely aggressive; she was a ball of malevolence, taking delight in doing evil to others. For a couple of weeks, Matilda watched her closely to see if there was some good in her before she concluded there wasn’t, that Nikki was rotten to the core.
It wasn’t long before the druggy friends were kipping on the floor of their rooms. Neither Nikki nor Darren were paying their fiver a week for gas and electricity but their druggy friends were using the hot water and the cooker and the washing machine and a steady stream were coming to Darren’s room to listen to his stereo at night and share the massive spliffs that he rolled. Since both Wee Tam and Matilda had to be up early for work, tempers became frayed. Tins of food went missing from kitchen cupboards and pints of milk disappeared from the fridge but, worst of all, was the constant mess in the kitchen. Darren, Nikki and their friends not only used up all their pots and crockery but everyone else’s, too.
After several weeks of this, it was clear that their Christian home was now being used as a bordello cum clubhouse cum smack-smoking den. There were five people living in Number 114 but only two – Matilda and Wee Tam – were paying any bills. Added to this was the constant stream of abuse from Nikki to Matilda.
Matilda resorted to fisticuffs on a couple of occasions. It was nothing she couldn’t handle after seven years of boarding school but, all the same, she slipped into JJB Sports to buy a hockey stick for protection, which she kept in the back of her wardrobe. She had every intention of using it if Nikki walloped her again.
One day Matilda came back from work to find the kitchen door wide open. She hurriedly closed it, annoyed at this latest act of carelessness. Later that evening, Nikki made a song-and-dance about being burgled. Matilda, not particularly convinced, drawled, ‘Yeah, well, what do you expect if you leave the kitchen door wide open?’
The next day, Wee Tam told her his bike had been nicked. It was clear who he thought was responsible. His response when he came back from work was to break every plate and mug in the kitchen.
A few days later, Matilda saw Nikki’s obscene mug sitting on the work surface, one of the few items of crockery to escape Wee Tam’s Meissennacht of the soul, the one with a piece of male anatomy sticking up from the base. The thing was taunting Matilda with its existence, so she rushed out into the yard and threw it down onto the concrete. It broke with a satisfying shatter. Matilda left the pieces lying on the ground and retreated into her room.
A few seconds later, there was a pounding on her bedroom door. She opened it slowly, hockey stick in hand, to find an irate Nikki. In her hand, Nikki had a disposable lighter, which, in the altercation that f
ollowed, she ignited and made as if to burn Matilda’s cheek. Matilda, however, poked her in the gut with the hockey stick.
‘Don’t start what you can’t finish!’ she said.
She chased Nikki into the box room, brandishing the hockey stick. Nikki shut and locked the door.
‘And stay there!’ cried Matilda.
That night, fearing reprisals, Matilda slept on Mandy’s sofa. She had to be persuaded to go back to Poppy Road, envisaging a broken face and mangled limbs. But she went back and Nikki was nowhere to be seen, leaving Darren stranded in his room, high on smack. In fact, Nikki stayed away for a whole week and, by the time that week had passed, Matilda swore she stood a foot taller.
When Nikki decided to return, Matilda was lounging in the kitchen doorway, arms folded. She heard a sharp click as the key was inserted into the back gate. A few seconds later, the gate opened with a shove. Nikki tried to look nonchalant as she wheeled her motor scooter into the back yard, even though they both knew the power dynamic in the house had changed forever as the result of Matilda’s rebellion.
Neither Darren nor Nikki were fated to stay there for very much longer. The landlord – fed up with the complaints and the lack of cash – came one Friday evening while they were out boozing and changed the locks on the doors. He and Wee Tam then went into Darren’s and Nikki’s rooms and bundled all their clothes and possessions into black plastic refuse sacks and dumped them out in the yard. When Matilda returned from work, the eviction was already an accomplished fact. She went out straight away to buy a bottle of wine to celebrate.
The next afternoon, Matilda returned from overtime to find the kitchen ship-shape, with Wee Tam mopping the kitchen floor. She felt so grateful she took a bundle of notes out of her pocket and gave them to Wee Tam to put on the key meter.
‘Thanks,’ said Wee Tam, ‘we’re getting a bit low.’
‘I’m glad they’ve gone,’ said Matilda. ‘They’ll have to freeload off someone else from now on.’
‘It’s good to get the house back again,’ Wee Tam said as he stopped to rinse out the mop under the hot water tap. ‘No more mess or noise.’
That night, as she lay in bed in her darkened single room overlooking the rear yard, Matilda realised she could hear the burble of the television from Wee Tam’s room, a sound she hadn’t been able to hear since Darren moved in. And when Wee Tam switched it off and got into bed, the silence echoed.
The next day Wee Tam told her that Darren and Nikki had showed up with a parcel of friends and lowlifes – they still had the key to the back gate. Wee Tam was in the kitchen at the time and they hammered on the kitchen door, trying their best to look hard.
Refusing to be intimidated, this pint-sized Glaswegian stood his ground by the kitchen door, nodding to the soft wee poofs they had brought around while Darren was letting off the expletives and Nikki did her best to look vicious. Wee Tam stood there, not batting an eyelid, taking it all in his stride, while Darren and Nikki strutted their stuff and their soft, posy, English pals blustered and postured. Realising they were not having the intended effect, Nikki asked if he could return the space-heater that was still in her room. Rather than argue the toss with her, Wee Tam shut and locked the door so they couldn’t get in and went to retrieve the space-heater. He then stood there and eyeballed them as they filed out of the back gate, never to darken his doorstep again.
8
As for Matilda’s other two housemates, Wee Tam was alright but Darryl was a pain. A decorator by trade, he had been paid several thousand pounds to paint his church hall. He hired Wilf, one of the transitory housemates, at the agreed rate of four pounds an hour. But something went wrong and Wilf did not cut the mustard as a decorator and was only paid two pounds an hour for three days’ work. Darryl, who got Stuart to finish off the work for nothing, was pocketing the rest of the cash himself.
All of this would have been par for the course had Darryl not tried to muscle in on Matilda’s life. He started asking her why she did not obey him. Seriously, he was that kind of bloke: the kind who only felt good about himself when surrounded by obedient and uncritical womenfolk. She knew that he was not submitted to the Lord, that he had one foot in the church, the other in the world. So it really bothered her that he would come out with things like, ‘The Lord showed me that you’re not submitted to my authority.’
Matilda fixed him with a stare.
‘I’ll submit to your authority when I see you submit to the Lord,’ she told him.
‘I am submitted to the Lord, all the way,’ Darryl answered. ‘The Lord wants you to obey me in all things.’
‘In all things, huh?’ said Matilda.
Darryl drew himself up to his full height and said, ‘I’m the leader of this house. God left me in charge. As long as you’re in this house, you have to submit to my authority.’
It was too tedious to argue the toss back and forth with him: ‘God showed me this,’ or ‘The Lord showed me that.’ The man was an idiot. He was not above telling Matilda to lend her a tenner from her giro which he would immediately assure he had repaid her when they both knew he had not. It struck her as odd that someone who had been paid several thousand pounds should want to borrow ten pounds for petrol for his van until it dawned on her that he had given the whole lot to the church.
‘Why did you do that?’ she asked him. It seemed a particularly silly thing to do as he did not have any other kind of work.
‘There’s a spiritual law in operation,’ he told her. ‘You give money to the Lord and he will repay you, ten times the amount.’
‘What spiritual law is that?’ she wanted to know.
‘It’s in the Bible,’ he assured her. ‘I could look it up for you.’
‘The Lord only asks for ten percent of your money.’
‘I want to earn forty thousand pounds this year, so I gave him four thousand.’
‘I don’t understand the logic of that,’ she said.
‘Can’t you?’ Darryl said. ‘It’s like this: I want to earn forty thousand, so I gave the Lord four thousand.’
How could anyone be so dumb? She wondered.
The blow-up, when it came, came when it was clear that Darryl wasn’t paying five pounds a week for his utilities. Darryl, who had the only gas fire in the house in his room, claimed that he was exempt from this charge as he was leader of the house. The result of this was that it cost Wee Tam and Matilda more than five pounds a week in bills. Matilda, who was having to fork up out of her wages, was livid, particularly when she had no heating of her own in her room and had to rely on an unreliable space-heater.
She went to the landlord to ask him to intercede. He came down to see Darryl but spoke to Wee Tam first, who only confirmed that Darryl wasn’t paying anything towards the bills.
The landlord then went to see Darryl. She could hear him blustering, ‘But she’s a dyke, don’t you see?’ through the walls of the house.
Presumably, any woman in Darryl’s eyes who insisted on equal treatment in the house had to be a man-hating dyke.
From there, events spiralled out of control. The landlord made Darryl pay up and he was furious. He took it out on her, forbidding her variously to use the cooker, the fridge or the bathroom (even though he was using her toilet paper). When it became too stressful, too wearying, she went to see his pastor to put her side of the story and to see if his excesses couldn’t be reined in. The pastor had obviously been primed. He insisted that Matilda was at least half to blame. At least.
Whatever, Matilda said.
The situation was sorted out – eventually – but not without Matilda thinking that the pastor of River of Life Church had been taken in by bogus shows of humility.
9
Though there had been spats and disagreements in the shared house before, the tipping point came one night after she had a quarrel with Wee Tam about the
TV license. He had proposed a three-way split when there were four people in the house, when both Darryl and Stuart were out of work. Darryl was excused payment but Stuart not and Matilda thought this was unfair – either everybody paid or nobody did. Wee Tam’s collusion with Darryl’s non-payment irritated her and she said so. She stuck to her guns and paid a quarter and Wee Tam was angry with her.
Later that same evening, Matilda was sitting at her code desk, typing postcodes onto letters when a powerful notion overtook her. It told her that she had blasphemed the Holy Spirit and she knew exactly how: she recalled, how, when she was angry about something, she had cursed God and the faith by thinking God was evil and Christianity a load of evil rubbish. Having recalled the sin, she repented but the spirit of despair that gripped her told her it was too late, that she could never be forgiven.
Surely not, she tried to reason, the very fact that she was repenting – but no: the fear that plagued her would admit no excuses. She was finished. Finito.
Matilda was in agony. The idea that the Lord had washed his hands of her, that she was mere hell-fodder, was too much to bear. How the tears flowed! She crept home at the end of her shift. She was off the booze and fags, so she had to sweat it out without recourse to chemical relief. Her dismay was such that calling on the Lord for mercy only intensified the anxiety she felt. It was pointless listening to her Word because this sort of anxiety could only be shifted by the laying on of hands in prayer. She passed the night tossing and turning in sweat-stained sheets before going down to the phone box to call the church office.
Kingdom Come Page 3
