There was an Irishwoman in the bed next to Matilda’s undergoing a profound existential crisis. A member of the nursing staff sat in a chair by her bed as the patient groaned and moaned and invoked the Saints and Virgin while the seven other patients, Matilda included, tossed and turned in the semi-darkness, trying to sleep as they coughed and murmured to themselves. As moving as the nurse’s devotion was, Matilda could have quite happily strangled the Irishwoman.
As it was, she didn’t get a wink of sleep that night. In the morning, between breakfast and OT, she asked the Ward Manager when she might move back to her room in Ward 1.
‘I’m afraid it won’t be possible,’ the Ward Manager told her briskly. ‘You were in a fight with another patient.’
‘You mean I’m stuck in the dormitory with Paddy Anne?’ Matilda said.
‘Until your discharge,’ The Ward Manager said.
‘I’m a voluntary patient now, aren’t I?’ Matilda asked.
‘As far as I know,’ the Ward Manager said.
‘In that case, I’ll leave now.’
‘I’ll find you a doctor to do your discharge interview,’ the Ward Manager said, not missing a beat.
And that, incredibly enough, was how Matilda left hospital after her second stay. An hour later, she had seen the doctor and packed her bags. Clutching a week’s supply of medication, she walked out of the door towards her one-roomed attic flat, relieved that she wouldn’t have to listen to any more sighing and moaning from her fellow-patients.
26
For a while, Matilda remained upbeat and relatively content. Her duties at work were straightforward and the repetitive actions a respite from the constant churnings of her mind. But she drifted back to the old, evil ways. Oddly enough, her work was unaffected. Having been told that if she did blaspheme the Holy Spirit, she would be left homeless and jobless – she couldn’t even begin to work out the convoluted logic of that one, nonetheless believed it – the maintenance of her job was of the utmost importance, so that she would not touch a drop of alcohol before reporting for duty.
Once at work, she would be kept so busy she would not have time to think about the shakes or the DTs.
As the summer of 1999 progressed, her mood became more despondent. She would turn up at the church café for breakfast – a large bacon baguette with iceberg lettuce and slices of tomato – and tramp the streets, trying to imagine what an eternity in hell would be like, so sure was she that it would be her destination. Gone were all her Words – they no longer applied to her. Rather, she became a fugitive within the city, hunted by an entity named Archon the Great. It had been revealed to her in her cups that her true identity was that of the Antichrist, the Beast of Revelation. But she did not want to be the Beast and constantly sought ways in which she could surrender herself and her vast, demonic army to Christ the Lord.
‘It’s a new one,’ grunted Nigel when they met up for drinks at the weekend. ‘I’ve heard of people claiming to be Jesus but never the devil. Have you got hooves for feet and horns on your head, by any chance?’
‘I have legions of fallen angels at my disposal,’ she would mutter.
‘In that case,’ said Nigel, patting the pockets of his denim jacket, ‘you can send one of them down to the Spar to fetch us a pouch of baccy – I’m all out!’
When she revealed her identity at work, her workmates said, ‘Well, if you’re the devil, you’ll know the winning lottery numbers this Saturday, so do tell us what they are.’
Off the top of her head, she rattled off six numbers, which were noted. By some horrid quiver of serendipity, she got four of them right but her workmates said Satan was obviously a cheapskate who wasn’t interested in building a loyal army of followers.
‘Now if you’d given us all six numbers…’
‘I don’t want you to follow me,’ she said. ‘I want you to follow Christ the Lord.’
By the early autumn, she was back in hospital again, having tried to hang herself with her uniform belt at work, again sectioned, although there was no silver lining this time. She was escorted to Ward 2 and given an admission medical by the hospital doctor and left in a room with a nurse stationed outside. Snivelling, she lay down on the bed and tried to sleep but the light was bothering her and she was too psychotic to get up and switch it off.
For a further six months, she spent the time flitting between the furniture, begging God not to destroy her. She had surrendered her vast, demonic army to him, so what more did he want? There was once more peace in the heavens because of her. But God still allowed her to be tormented day and night with dark and loathsome thoughts.
27
It dawned on Matilda that God was a bit of a _______ and that she could be free provided she spoke the blasphemy out. She would be damned for doing so but at least she would have her old, pre-Christian life back again with its minor pleasures and comforts. Her Christian walk had become a miasma of fear and unremitting terror – it was no contest, really. God could get _______ if he thought she was going to be an obedient little Christian. To give utterance to these thoughts, then, was what to do. Utter them in the plain light of day, not under her breath as she had been accustomed to doing when they got too much.
One day, she went out into the hospital grounds and, harassed and harried by the thoughts, spoke them all out, every single one of them. There was a rush of pleasure – no, not pleasure exactly; more like relief – after the initial relief, however, she felt tired, so went back to the ward.
Matilda felt slyly pleased with herself. It hadn’t been so bad, after all. She had given utterance and in doing so had condemned herself but at least she had her old, pre-Christian life back again. Gone was her hope of heaven, her salvation and her spiritual gifts. Satan would leave her alone now and she could get on with her old life again, working at Royal Mail and meeting Nigel for drinks on Saturday afternoon when she got out of hospital.
‘I’m not a Christian anymore,’ she told visitor and patient alike.
‘Oh dear, why not?’ asked Mary.
‘I’m sure you are,’ said Johnny and Janis.
There was no doubt her mood had lifted because she spoke out the blasphemies. She went back to muttering them so that only she could hear, so as not to offend any believers; just for her own sake, so she would know it. Once the excitement and the catharsis had worn off, there was only boredom and indifference. As the week passed, Matilda began to feel less sure of herself. The thoughts were still there, still causing her distress.
‘I thought they’d go if I spoke them all out but now they’re worse than ever.’
‘Well, the doctor did say it was an extreme obsessive neurosis,’ Mary pointed out. ‘It’s obvious because you think them forbidden that they bother you. Perhaps if you spoke them out quietly, followed by the truth, they wouldn’t bother you so much. If you get a thought telling you Christ if demonic, you can say, “Christ is not demonic, he’s the Holy One,” so it wouldn’t be blasphemy.’
‘I don’t know whether God can forgive me but I’m learning to forgive myself.’
‘I’m sure it’s half the battle,’ Mary said.
28
Matilda went down to the church café every day to get Eddie the elder to pray for her. Whenever she went, she took the opportunity of filling out a pink prayer request and always wrote: “Pray that God will not condemn me for blaspheming the Holy Spirit.” To begin with, she added, “Because I had no choice” but left it off after the first dozen times.
These pink slips had obviously fallen into the hands of Lawrence McBride, the new pastor, because he paid her a visit just after Christmas and explained that, as a believer in Christ, it was impossible for her to blaspheme the Holy Spirit.
‘How do you reckon that?’ she sniffed.
‘The opposite of the Unforgivable Sin is to believe the Holy Spirit’s testimony about Je
sus,’ he explained.
‘But I’ve still blasphemed, spoken words against Jesus and the Holy Spirit,’ Matilda countered. ‘It says in the Bible that anyone who speaks a word against Jesus will be forgiven but anyone who speaks a word against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven.’
‘It depends whether you’re speaking what you believe in your heart to be true or whether you’re just repeating words and phrases like a scratchy record.’
‘I’ve had them so long I already half-believe them.’
‘Do you believe Jesus is demonic?’ he asked her.
‘Of course not!’ she said.
‘What about God?’
‘I don’t think God is an out-and-out demoniac,’ said Matilda. ‘A bit economical with the truth sometimes, maybe.’
‘And do you believe Jesus to be a little economical with the truth?’ he persisted.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said, ‘but, then, everyone knows that Jesus is the goodie and God is the baddie.’
‘I and the Father are one,’ Lawrence quoted, reading from his pocket Bible. ‘It may seem like it but it’s not in fact the case.’
Now that this much had been established, Matilda felt bold enough to press on with certain matters that were close to her heart.
‘Do you think the Lord might have given Satan permission to attack me?’ she asked.
‘Certainly, if it was for a specific reason, like to toughen your defences.’
‘The reason I’m asking,’ she went on, as if crawling over thin ice, ‘is that I might have given Satan a reason to attack me.’
‘If we’re sinning or find ourselves wandering off, the Lord can give Satan permission to attack us,’ Lawrence McBride said, ‘but it’s never to punish us, if that’s what you’re thinking. More to discipline us. Discipline never feels pleasant at the time but ultimately, it’s for our own good.’
‘Well, um,’ said Matilda in a small, girlish, voice, ‘I think I might have done something quite naughty…’
‘And what was that?’ he asked.
‘I used to challenge him to a fight. Not once but several times.’
‘And you found he took you up on your offer?’
‘Yes,’ she said, feeling embarrassed and looking down at her knees.
‘Well, it’s the kind of thing you’re finding out that you only do once.’
‘I did it quite a few times, actually.’
‘It’s never a good idea to challenge Satan to a fight because he’s supernatural and so much more powerful than our natural, physical selves.’
‘I know,’ said Matilda, ‘as I found to my cost. What I can’t understand is why the Lord won’t cut short my sufferings and give me victory.’
‘He will do eventually but what he can’t do is remove the consequences of your actions from you. If this is the consequences of your inviting Satan to a fight, you’ll have to bear with it until the attack ceases, until you’ve learned the full measure of your lesson…’
29
Matilda was finally discharged in April 2000. As she had been evicted from her one room attic flat, she was given a small apartment in a block belonging to a housing association on a new estate near the city centre. It was a very fine flat, with plenty of natural light. Matilda’s parents gave her eight hundred pounds for furniture and carpeting and she begged and borrowed the rest from her narrow circle of acquaintances.
And though she was drinking marginally less these days, she still met Nigel once a week in the Hangman’s Arms, the pub nearest the Mental Health Services Day Centre, where she had been sent after her discharge. Here she smoked and chatted to the other referrals and went out for drinks with Nigel, only Nigel was off the sauce nowadays and drinking orange squash.
‘Guinness might be good for you but not ten pints a day.’
‘My cider keeps me sane.’
She was given a date to start work but, once she returned, felt dissatisfied. What had once been a distraction had now become a chore and a dull one at that, something that came between herself and her cider.
As dissatisfaction with her work grew, she began to look for other means of distraction. There was her Bible, which she had now read from cover to cover twice, and various books on theology and she formed the idea that it might be a good idea to study theology at Bible College. She looked at various catalogues and prospectuses but the cost of a second BA was prohibitive. There was the school attached to the Fundamentalist Chapel but this was so narrow as to be a travesty of an education, which left, basically, All Saints, her alma mater, which offered a part-time BA Honours in theology.
In the end, she enrolled at All Saints in readiness for September and arranged to start part-time at work in August. She had saved, through being in hospital and then at the Mental Health Services Day Centre, a few thousand pounds and bought the entire first year theology reading list, all twenty books of it, and read them over the summer. But she found the course hard-going, especially since her consultant had increased her dose of risperidone to ten mg a day, which left her tired and lethargic after a busy day at work.
She matriculated in September and it was a disaster from Day One. She could scarcely get out of bed in time for a nine o’clock start, let alone be alert and take notes. The afternoon courses weren’t so bad and she enjoyed these but her mind was still too fractured to take in information and process it. There never seemed to be enough books in the library and she had spent her year’s allowance on books already, so couldn’t buy any more. Within the first six or seven weeks of the academic year, she had already fallen behind with her work and it became clear that studying theology had been a mistake.
By the end of the first year, she had become a first-year dropout with the idea for her second book. She would write about her breakdown and its aftermath, she decided, but recalling those first, difficult, days left her feeling seriously depressed. She could not settle on a chronological narrative with her diminished powers of concentration, so she wrote in fragments, on refill paper with a black Pilot pen. These fragments would go into a file she had bought from Stationery Box for the express purpose of containing the neatly-written pages of her magnum opus.
30
After the GP had signed her off for eight weeks, Matilda thought she had better do something about the drinking now that she was doing it 24/7.
The day began sometime towards midday when she resurfaced from vivid Seroxat dreams, her tongue thick and furry from the night before and the back of her throat blasted by chain-smoking. She kept a bottle of Diet Coke by her bed for this very reason. Her first act of the day was unscrewing the top and taking a deep draught. Her second was invariably belching and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
Cooking was a pain. Time spent slaving over a hot stove was time that could be spent smoking the first of her sixty-a-day or sipping Diet Coke from a can. But she had to eat, so she would shove two slices of wholemeal bread into the toaster and depress the lever. While the bread toasted, she would fetch the pack of pate from the fridge and a knife from the cutlery drawer. She would then fill the kettle with water and switch it on, fetch down a mug, pour a sachet of Souper Mug tomato and vegetables soup with croutons into it, fill it with boiling water and stir. By which time her toast was done and she would spread both slices thinly with pate, give her soup another stir – with a fork – then top it up with cold water and stir for a third and final time.
The eating of breakfast resembled the life of the Pre-Modern man – nasty, brutish and short. Matilda didn’t just eat – she gobbled and guldered and snorted, made a veritable cacophony of farmyard noises. Awful Auntie had pulled her up short once or twice about her table manners the last time Matilda visited.
It was always a struggle to occupy herself in the time between brunch and tea. Her nerves were just too frazzled to take in anything by way of books or rea
ding except the Bible, two chapters of which she read a day. Most of it went in without it engaging either her brain or her emotions. She would rather have read something else – it was just words on a page, without meaning or context. There was television but a few days after Matilda was released from Fairview, there had been a documentary about Armageddon and she was so appalled by what she saw and heard that she put her foot through the screen, causing the cathode ray tube in her small black and white portable TV to explode.
To kill time, she would put on her denim jacket and go for a walk. There were groceries that were needed, bills to be paid and cafés to visit. Work was a drag but at least it kept you busy and limited your ability to get bladdered. It taught you to value the drinking time you had left. Not working was far worse because the days sagged and bulged around the middle of the afternoon. With her diminished ability to enjoy her life, Matilda’s options were limited. It was either the church or the pub.
In the afternoon, she would go down to the church café and speak to Eddie the elder. Eddie – in his day job – ran the café kitchen and by three o’clock, Matilda was always ready for her next meal, to wit: a large, crispy bacon baguette with two or three leaves of iceberg lettuce and tomato. Across the road from the church was the market, so Matilda could nip across at the end of the day and buy some fresh vegetables – a couple of carrots and courgettes, a parsnip or two and a pound of mushrooms. If she were feeling flush, she might stretch to a leek or a red pepper. Bread and wholemeal pasta she bought at the local Co-op, along with split peas and lentils, pearl barley and stir-fry noodles. She would put the groceries in her rucksack, over her purse.
If the weather was particularly inclement or if she felt tired, Matilda might be persuaded to forego the pleasure of carousing in the pub and catch the bus home. The bus service was reliable until eight o’clock at night and was relied on to deposit her in front of the Co-op. From there to her front door was only a short walk.
Kingdom Come Page 9
