Paul agreed to see her later that day. At the church office, Matilda related the anguished thoughts and the dark night of her soul. Paul at once assured her that the thought that preceded the attack could have occurred to anyone and the blasphemy about which Jesus had spoken was something entirely different. When she asked what blasphemy against the Holy Spirit was exactly, he admitted he didn’t know, only that it applied to Jesus’ enemies and not his followers.
She left the office elated and reassured, bolstered by a quick prayer-raid. She was sure this was no more than a lightning attack by Satan, of the kind which she would be able to repel in future.
10
Matilda always knew that there would be a defining illness for the Holy Spirit had told her so. Quite what form this would take was not made clear to her. She imagined she was destined for glory, that she would be refined through suffering. She imagined her kidneys giving out or a long-drawn-out heart complaint.
Allied to this were her fantasies of martyrdom, a rich seam that she shamelessly mined, as if she alone were destined for spiritual greatness. She imagined herself being pushed head-first down wells or ejected, bound and gagged, from helicopters hovering low over the seas. Hadn’t David Grey, Matilda’s previous pastor, always said a Christian’s mind should be focused on their death?
Matilda discussed all this with Avril. She let it slip during the church picnic the previous summer. She said, ‘I feel the Lord is preparing me for a martyr’s death.’
Avril bit into her sweetcorn and tuna sandwich, chewed thoughtfully and swallowed.
‘It’s not something we can choose for ourselves,’ she said.
Matilda selected a devilled egg and swallowed it whole.
‘Even so,’ she said, sallying forth on the frothy spumes of desire, ‘I feel sure the Lord has chosen me as one who loves him to the end, whatever that end may be.’
‘Only the Lord knows those on whom he bestows the martyr’s crown,’ said Avril, speaking more warmly now. ‘Martyrdom is a gift of God. A person can’t choose it for themselves.’
But Matilda had elected such a death for herself. She dared to think, that of all God’s children, she alone would be faithful unto death, like the martyrs of old. And yet, when a fiery trial came upon her, like the periods of fear and anxiety – the Satanic attacks – how she prayed to be released, how she begged the Lord to be spared! It was a contradiction in her character that she didn’t know how to reconcile.
Allied to this was her propensity to challenge Satan to a fight. Though one or two wise souls in the church warned her of the dangers in doing so, Matilda felt confident enough to take the devil on in her own strength. Quite often, in her prayer times and after reading her Bible, she would remind Satan of her implacable hatred of him and that, out of everyone he might choose to attack, she alone would remain unassailable. She liked to remind him of her prophecy and remind him that God had spoken from the point of view of eternity; that there was nothing he could do to take away from her salvation.
There was also a fear in her mind, wholly unrelated to this, that she would be sifted and found wanting. Quite where this fear came from, it was impossible to say. Matilda only felt it at times and squirmed in agony as the devil fired his fiery darts into her. She felt that she would become a Satanist; that somehow, if the attacks got too much or if he tried to brainwash her, she would become a follower of his. It was an almost inchoate fear and something she couldn’t well articulate but which she felt whenever the Satanic attacks came upon her. How could it be that she was at once convinced of her own spiritual excellence and at the same time fearful that she would be tried and found wanting? She didn’t know and the experience was frequently an agony for her.
11
The fear Matilda first felt at her code desk returned at irregular intervals, sometimes lasting a night or a whole day. She came to dread these episodes but realised there was nothing she could do to prevent them. These attacks would return at odd moments, usually when she was on her own. When they did, the first thing she wanted to do was go out and buy the biggest bottle of booze she could lay her hands on but instead she chose to sweat it out, without recourse to artificial stimulants.
She tried to pray whenever she was attacked but found her mind crowded with dark and unwholesome thoughts, the kind that made her fear for her sanity; utterly scabrous and blasphemous thoughts when she had to keep her mouth tightly clamped so that none of the filth, the psychic sewage, would escape. She had an attack on Good Friday but recovered enough to feel calm and serene on Easter Sunday.
When she went to church for the morning service, Paul asked her how she was, whether she was still getting the attacks.
‘I had a bad attack the day before yesterday but I feel much better now,’ she told him.
Previous experience had taught her that calm and rest were necessary to recover but she had arranged to have lunch with her parents. She went to phone her mother to tell her she had a migraine and so wouldn’t be turning up.
‘I trust you’re not drunk,’ her mother tut-tutted down the line.
‘Of course I’m not drunk,’ said Matilda. ‘It’s only midday.’
The next day, on Easter Monday, an attack started while Matilda was alone in her room listening to music. She braced herself for the worst and tried praising God but underneath, detected praise for Satan. At first, she was petrified, rooted to the spot in terror, wondering what had happened to her, but she managed to tear herself away and hastened to the phone box at the end of the street to phone Mandy.
‘I’m having blasphemous thoughts,’ she reported.
‘I’ve had those,’ said Mandy. ‘Try not to worry about them.’
‘I try to praise God but, underneath, I’m praising Satan.’
‘It’s not you, it’s Satan. Use your Shield of Faith.’
‘I’m really worried. What if I blaspheme the Holy Spirit?’
Matilda replaced the handset with a sinking heart. She knew the devil was probing her with a long, sharp needle. He had got his claws right into her, judging by the state of her anxiety, which was of the Surround-Sound™ variety. She pushed her way out of the phone box and went to her room to listen to praise music but it was insipid stuff, unable to inspire her. She worried that God would punish her for her sins. She knew he was supposed to be forgiving but she felt only certain condemnation.
The attack was unusually long in duration. She was still being assailed that night as she prayed to the Lord to keep her from the Unforgivable Sin. She thought she had done well to stay off alcohol but her resolve was weakening. When she felt attacked like this, her first and only thought was to get as drunk as possible. She fell asleep in the early hours of the morning, only to be woken an hour later by her alarm.
People at work said she was unusually quiet. She told them she had a migraine. It was a spiritual migraine she was referring to, so it wasn’t a million miles from the truth. While she stood and sorted letters, her mind was riddled with blasphemy and scorn towards Jesus. Matilda worked on autocue, like a robot, wondering what Jesus would have to say about her thoughts on the Day of Judgement.
If she hadn’t been so full of fear, she would have marched down to the Spar and bought the largest bottle of White Lightning she could lay her hands on, she was so stressed. Instead, she chose a relatively restrained bottle of German table wine and took a glass with her cod steak in parsley sauce, peas and spinach noodles. She hadn’t eaten much that day and, if the truth were told, didn’t feel all that hungry now. She only ate because she hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
Matilda tried to relax after supper but her mind was going nineteen to the dozen, with blasphemy, abuse and swearing all rolled into one. She was concerned about her spiritual condition and felt the situation had deteriorated since she phoned Mandy. She spent the night praying in tongues, asking God to spare her further outrage, but
the thoughts persisted, clamouring inside her for release. She wanted to share her trouble with someone else but was scared that if she opened her mouth, all the blasphemy and abuse and swearing would fly out.
Again, sleep evaded her. She drank and smoked but still the hard knot of anxiety held her captive. At two o’clock, when she thought she could take no more, she dressed, walked to the phone box and phoned the emergency doctor. She told him she couldn’t sleep and felt suicidal and depressed. He agreed to see her and she walked the forty-five-minute journey to the centre of town through driving sleet and a gale to the emergency doctors’ surgery.
As soon as she was ushered into the consultation room, she burst into tears.
‘Take your time,’ the doctor said as he handed her a tissue. He was an Ulsterman.
‘I’m having the most dreadfully blasphemous thoughts,’ she said through her tears. ‘They’re awful and I can’t stop them. Swearing and abuse against God and it’s a man’s voice I’m hearing.’
12
The upshot of it all was that she was admitted to Fairview Hospital, the local psychiatric unit. The emergency doctor made her sit in the waiting area until the ambulance came. It was a real emergency ambulance, too, with blue flashing lights. A paramedic helped Matilda into the back and she sat on the stretcher as it drove the block and a half to Fairview. When they got to the hospital, the ambulance parked in the courtyard where the new patients were received and the paramedic escorted her to Ward 3, the emergency admissions ward, where he handed her over to a nurse, along with her details. It was dark but she could see the high Victorian ceilings and the flaking, nicotine-stained paintwork.
Matilda asked, ‘Can I have a cigarette and something to drink? I’m parched.’
They led her to the Smoke Room and told her that the Senior House Officer would be down shortly to assess her. She smoked a cigarette and drank lukewarm coffee. Her mind still racing, she was convinced that she was somehow beyond forgiveness. On the way to the ward dining room, where the admission assessment was to be held, she glanced up at the clock on the wall and saw that it was a quarter to four.
The assessment lasted an hour or so, during which it was established that her full name was Matilda Louise Voisey, that she was thirty-one years old, a single female of white British descent and residing at 114 Poppy Road, employed at the Royal Mail sorting depot and a recovering alcoholic. It was further established that the thoughts she was having were her own and not auditory hallucinations; that she was not seeing things that weren’t there (visual hallucinations); neither did she believe herself to be in any physical danger. Once these salient facts were established, the Senior House Officer began to take a full psychiatric history.
When the interview was over, Matilda was admitted for a period of observation and was led away to a large side room with a single bed in it.
‘You’ll be seeing Dr Ransom in the morning,’ said the nurse.
‘Is he a Christian?’ asked Matilda. For some reason, this was of importance. ‘I only talk to Christian doctors.’
‘I should think so,’ said the nurse. ‘He’s a good man and a family man.’
Having no pyjamas, Matilda merely kicked off her shoes and climbed in between the frigid sheets. The nurse switched off the light and closed the door. Alone in the darkened room, Matilda wondered if the Lord would ever forgive her for placing herself in the hands of secular psychiatrists.
Try as she might, Matilda could not get to sleep. The heating was defective and the room was freezing. She shivered under the blankets, even though she was fully-clothed. She persuaded the nurses to give her an extra blanket but still no rest came, so she lay awake and wondered if this was it, if this meant that she was truly hell-fodder for the rest of eternity. And, for that moment, she hated God, hated him with a passion, even though she was aware that she shouldn’t be thinking these thoughts and that God the Judge would get her for it sooner or later.
In the morning, after three or four cups of full-strength coffee and ten cigarettes, Matilda made three phone calls. The first was to work to tell them she was in hospital; the second was to Mandy, to tell her she was sequestered in the local nuthouse and the third was to Paul asking him to come and visit her.
After breakfast, she started pacing the corridor to work off her nervousness. She had never been on a psychiatric ward before and the setting struck her as utterly prosaic. No-one was ranting or drooling and everyone seemed to congregate in the Smoke Room, puffing neurotically away. She decided to join them.
‘Are you new?’ a girl called Lizzie asked.
‘I’m not really ill,’ said Matilda.
‘What are you doing here, then?’ Lizzie asked.
‘I’m only here because I’m under attack from Satan.’
‘You’re nuts – Satan doesn’t exist.’
‘He’s real, alright – realer than the walls and the floor and the ceiling.’
‘You must be imagining things.’
‘And you?’
‘Drying out.’
‘I used to be an alcoholic.’
‘Aren’t you still one?’ Lizzie asked.
‘No,’ said Matilda, more forcefully than she should.
‘Once you’re an alcoholic, you’re always an alcoholic.’
‘I disagree. I’m not an alcoholic anymore.’
‘How come?’
‘Jesus healed me.’
‘Get away!’ Lizzie snorted.
‘I’m serious. I was an inch within dying.’
‘How did Jesus cure you, then?’
‘He just did. Like that. It was a miracle.’
‘You smoke, though. Pity he couldn’t have healed you of that!’ scoffed Lizzie who had a large joint-like cigarette in her hand that she had just rolled.
‘Stop bothering Matilda, Lizzie,’ said the nurse.
‘She’s not bothering me,’ said Matilda as she paused to suck on her cigarette. ‘I’m witnessing to her.’
‘I reckon Christians are delusional,’ Lizzie went on. ‘Who needs schizophrenia when you’ve got Satan sticking his pitchfork into your arse all day long?’
‘Jesus loves you,’ said Matilda. ‘He wants you to repent and start a new life in him.’
It was impossible to say where this desire to witness came from. Matilda was too well-conditioned to disobey it.
‘He can’t be up to much if you’re a Christian and you’re in here,’ said Lizzie.
‘It’s only because I’m under attack.’
‘I’m under attack,’ quipped Lizzie. ‘It’s called sobriety.’
‘Jesus can offer you something better.’
‘I prefer communion wine,’ said Lizzie as she lit her enormous cigarette. She took one of two puffs and continued. ‘When they made us do church cleaning at school, I used to drink the communion wine. Sister Mary Gabriel expelled me the last time – called it wilful sacrilege, she did.’
‘A lapsed Catholic, are you?’
‘Wilfully, deliberately, ex-Catholic. I use my rosary as a necklace, look.’
Lizzie tugged at her collar and, sure enough, Matilda saw a string of rosary beads.
After lunch, Matilda resumed her corridor-pacing to calm her nerves, then was persuaded to have another cigarette and cup of coffee, so she made a cup of coffee and took it into the Smoke Room. She ended up having more cups of coffee and more cigarettes than she could shake a stick at. Her butts lay heaped in a glass ashtray which, if it were a church, would boast an above-average congregation. Her mind, she found, was making odd parallels.
Lizzie called out to her from the opposite chair. ‘Do you wear magic underwear, then, if you’re charismatic?’
‘No, that’s Mormons, not charismatics,’ said a shaven-headed man called Nigel. He was slim and dark-eyed and Matilda smiled at him in
shy liking. Then she remembered her troubles and groaned once more.
‘I was hoping you’d show me,’ said a disappointed Lizzie.
‘Roll us a cigarette, Jezzie,’ said Nigel, whereupon Lizzie started rolling a spliff-sized cigarette for Nigel.
‘You told me your name was Lizzie,’ Matilda said.
‘So it is but Jezzie’s short for Jezebel,’ Nigel explained. ‘I call her that because she’s such a notorious sinner.’
Lizzie laughed and licked the edges of the cigarette paper with a darting tongue.
Matilda lost interest, went out into the corridor and started pacing again. From the window, she caught sight of Paul’s portly frame and she heard his footsteps on the pavement outside. She raced to her room and sat down on the bed, expecting him at any moment.
‘You finally came,’ she said when he entered the room.
‘How are you getting on?’ Paul asked as he leaned on his walking stick.
‘I’ve been finding it really tough. Last night was particularly rough.’
‘Still being attacked?’ he asked.
‘I’ve had blasphemous thoughts and swearing in my head since Easter Monday,’ Matilda reported as Paul eased himself into the chair opposite the bed. ‘I couldn’t take any more, so I phoned the emergency GP and ended up in here.’
‘Well,’ said Paul, leaning his stick against the arm of the chair, ‘if you are mentally ill – and I’m not saying you are – you’re in the right place.’
‘I was worried that God might not be able to forgive me,’ she began. ‘Because of my drinking and the blasphemy and the abuse inside my head. Only today I thought I hated him and that he would punish me for it.’
‘Why would you worry if God could forgive you?’
‘Because of my drinking. I’m worried it’s a wilful, deliberate and persistent sin.’
‘But you’ve repented after each episode, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘It’s not wilful or persistent, it’s more like intermittent.’
Kingdom Come Page 4
