In winter time, it would be dark even if she got home in time for tea, so there was the ritual of drawing the curtains and switching on the lamp. After this, the ritual of making tea – Matilda had a small set of saucepans, which included two one-litre lidded pots, ideal for casseroles. She would dice the carrot or parsnip, add half a dozen quartered mushrooms or half a sliced leek, slice the meat and sauté these items, then added a handful of wholemeal pasta, two stock cubes and three-quarters of a litre of cold water and cover the pot with the lid. Between thirty and forty minutes later, supper would be ready. The pot could stand for another hour, lid on, before she had to worry about reheating it – enough time to work up an appetite for a hearty stew.
It was always the latter part of the day, the hours of six to midnight, that were the most difficult. If it was a difficult night, she might be tempted to slip out under the cover of darkness to the Co-op to buy more cider. It was best to wait until after ten o’clock, when the Co-op shut, but sometimes the thought of being awake without anaesthetic was too horrible to contemplate and she would crumble, though the chances of being anything but comatose after midnight were slim.
It was at night, then, that she necked four – sometimes eight – cans of cider and smoked thirty to forty cigarettes. Her need for nicotine, caffeine and alcohol was inexhaustible. It was a wonder, Matilda often thought, how she didn’t just burst into flame, spontaneously combust.
The thoughts themselves had lessened in intensity. It was becoming clearer to her now that they would slowly fizzle out rather than disappear outright, though she was still praying for deliverance from them and a miraculous intervention from the Lord – a Word to say that he forgave her absolutely.
Incredibly, she was still praying daily, hourly, minutely, for such a Word. People at church told her there were Words of forgiveness in the Bible, all she had to do was read them and believe them. But it seemed to Matilda that what had happened to her was so unusual and so extreme – likewise, her sin – that she needed an extraordinary Word.
‘You can’t expect Words the whole time,’ Eddie the elder said. ‘It’s why you have the Bible, so that you don’t have to trouble the Lord for Words every time you make a mistake.’
All these prayers for a prophet to come to the church looked like being answered about a year back when a New Zealand preacher came to City Mission: the Reverend McBride even said he was a prophet for today’s church, which guaranteed that Matilda was at both services front and centre. How earnestly she had prayed that he would speak to her, that God would have a Word for her! Yet when he did lay his hand on her and speak, he spoke in terms so cryptic that she strained to get any meaning out of the Words. All she could get from them was the fact that God loved her and sustained her. Afterwards, Mary assured her that God had also said he would heal her but Matilda was forced to admit she was listening out so hard for the message of forgiveness that she missed that bit.
And now it was clear that the Lord had given her all the Words he would give her. Now he expected her to stand on her own two feet after being supported by the church body and carried by his power. How unfair it all was! Matilda thought. Why couldn’t he carry her all the way into the Kingdom?
31
She was often tardy in re-ordering new medications, so there was often a wait for repeat prescriptions. On one occasion, the wait was over a week. It occurred over a summer weekend, late in the season, and Matilda was no longer in a state where she could hop in a taxi and repeat her address, so she stumbled over to her parents’ home and collapsed, dead drunk, on the parental threshold.
A lecture was the very least she could expect but there was a clean nightdress and a bed in which to sleep at the end of it, though there was little sleep to be got. Her clothes a huddle on the floor, Matilda lay in her youngest sister’s bed, listening to the leaky tap that was her mind, while the same paranoid fantasies replayed themselves.
At eleven o’clock in the evening, hunger forced her to go downstairs where, unexpectedly, her mother was still up, watching a DVD of a Bolshoi ballet. On hearing Matilda creep downstairs, Mother called her errant daughter into the living room. On noticing that the nightdress was back-to-front and inside-out, Matilda’s mother said, ‘Is it a metaphor for your life, I wonder?’
Matilda could do nothing but gurn and squirm. Mother, whose no-nonsense approach to life meant that she was not a warm, fuzzy, person, nevertheless asked Matilda if she was hungry.
‘There’s a Mixed Tandoori Grill on the dining room table I don’t fancy. You’d be doing me a favour if you finished it. Your father will only eat it if you don’t.’
So Matilda went to the kitchen to fetch a plastic plate and some cutlery from the drawer and fell with relief on this offering from the gods and devoured, in short order, one chicken breast on the bone, a few chunks of tandoori chicken and lamb and one lamb kofte kebab with salad and chapatti.
Mother stayed up until Matilda was safely upstairs again. Matilda, unable to sleep, merely dozed until she heard her father in the kitchen in the morning, while he made himself a fried egg butty. She took this as a sign she should get up and present herself for breakfast, so she slipped on her tracky bottoms and a clean tee-shirt borrowed from her sister’s collection. She went downstairs to brave it anew but her mother was perfectly sweet, sweeter than Matilda had any cause to hope for. She got a bacon and egg butty out of it.
‘You probably feel better after a good night’s sleep and something to eat.’
Matilda, mouth full of bacon and egg, nodded in agreement. There was no need, she thought, to trouble her mother with the truth.
Later that morning, Matilda was walking through the streets of the city centre, near St Nick’s Church. She was going nowhere in particular, carried along by the internal rhythms of her obsessions about the Dark Forces. She bumped into her friends Janis and Johnny.
‘Are you going to church?’ Jan enquired. ‘Why don’t you come with us?’
Jan’s baby was small against her chest, cradled in a sling, though it occurred to her later the baby must have been slightly older than this; a larger baby, then. They walked in file along the narrow pavements until they came to St Nick’s.
It was time for the family service. Matilda sat in the unyielding box pews of the aisle, as she listened to this young slip of a thing, just out of theological college, dressed in magenta blouse, white jeans and boots. In one hand, this young curate held a five-pound cabbage and in the other, a kilo bar of chocolate. She was giving a sermon about Daniel and his friends Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Matilda listened with unfeigned interest, fascinated by this girl-creature in front of her.
At the end of the sermon, whose point was having to eat cabbage rather than chocolate for the sake of the Lord, the curate gave away her kilo bar of chocolate to one of the students and her five-pound cabbage – to Johnny.
Johnny carried the cabbage home. Matilda thought she would have surely gone for the kilo bar of chocolate had she liked the stuff.
‘Do you suppose she was cribbing from her lecture notes on Daniel?’ Johnny asked about the sermon.
‘Probably,’ replied Matilda in a rare moment of lucidity.
She walked with Janis and Johnny back to their city-centre flat. It was the first and second floor of a seventeenth-century house owned by the guildhall. The ground floor was rented out to a small businessman for whom Johnny was designing a business catalogue. Johnny played with the baby while Jan went ahead and cooked lunch, the cabbage with garlic and bacon lardons.
‘That curate,’ said Matilda, ‘is very attractive. I don’t suppose you know her name?’
‘Rachel Something-or-other,’ said Johnny. His mind was on the baby.
It was a coup de foudre. Matilda could think of no-one nicer.
32
Granny died, eventually.
She had been in her long-stay hospit
al for a few years. A nun from her parish church brought her communion every few days but she was vegetating. Her useful days were over. Matilda developed an aversion to old age remembering her granny in the hospital. She wanted to die while she still had all her faculties.
The funeral was arranged to take place at granny’s church, one Matilda had been to many times as a youth. Cousins flew in from around the world. Aunties and uncles congregated. Mother, in charge of the Voisey contingent, took the East Coast mainline up from Fleet. First Class, of course. Matilda chain-smoked on the way up, sipping free coffee while nieces and nephews picked noses and bickered about who was going to sit next to Mad Auntie Mattie. They were met off the train by Matilda’s glamorous youngest sister who had travelled up from London and who worked in the music industry.
They got to granny’s home which was the house belonging to Matilda’s aunt. The house was full of mourners, all dressed in black. Matilda and the nun who brought Granny communion were the only ones dressed in bright colours.
They walked to the chapel. The mourners filled the church. When the coffin was brought in, all the nieces and nephews burst into tears. Matilda dabbed her eyes. There were prayers and bidding prayers. Matilda did not go up for communion. Instead, as a Protestant, she received a blessing from the priest. The coffin was taken out of the church and placed in the hearse.
A bus was provided for the old ladies. It took them an hour to get to the graveside. There was a traffic jam and the sun beat down on the hearse and limousine. When they got to the cemetery, the coffin was carried to the graveside and the priest read out the committal service. Then they all piled into the hearse and into the coach and drove to the restaurant where the wake would be held. It was a Thursday and there was fish on the menu but Matilda had always hated fish and chose the steak option instead.
Matilda ate her steak and chips and met several cousins she had never seen before, especially the Liverpool contingent. Matilda started an argument when she said she wasn’t going to pay for a priest to say a Mass for her Granny’s soul. She said it was too late to start praying now.
At three o’clock, they got back into the hearse and were dropped off at Central Station. They got into the train and walked through to their carriage where they had reserved eight table seats. One of the nieces and nephews was sick and another had a nose bleed. Matilda opened a new packet of cigarettes then she made herself comfortable and slept until Newcastle when the smoked salmon sandwiches were passed around. When they got to Fleet, they stood in the queue for the taxis and Matilda clutched her cans of cider. She necked the whole lot before bedtime.
It was a working day the next day, so Matilda showered and brushed and flossed her teeth. She put on a clean work shirt and pair of trousers, brushed her hair and went to work. She worked the whole day short of sleep and went straight home at the end of the shift without stopping off at the Co-op. She washed down her meds with a mouthful of cola and went straight to bed, sleeping for a whole twelve hours.
33
For Christmas that year, Matilda surprised her family by turning up presentable and sober on Christmas Day at her parents’ but she still had to eat a Brussels sprout with her turkey lunch. All this was forgotten by Boxing Day, when there had been a race to get as drunk as possible and she was nearly run over by a car after stumbling onto the road on leaving the pub. Fortunately, she was saved by the Reverend Rachel of St Nick’s. She remembered her face, drunk though she was, and saw the dog collar on her cerise blouse.
‘You really shouldn’t be drinking this much,’ she remembered Rachel saying as she escorted her home. ‘You can hardly stand. Why don’t you try Jesus instead?’
Matilda tried to speak but was so drunk, she could only manage a feeble, ‘Yes.’
Rachel helped her onto the sofa.
‘Why don’t you come to St Nick’s?’ she asked before Matilda passed out. ‘I’ll buy you a coffee if you do.’
Matilda woke, slumped on the sofa, with a stiff neck and feet that had turned into blocks of ice. She found her way to bed and slept until two in the afternoon. When she woke, she had such a hangover that she turned over and went back to sleep, waking for a second time at five in a darkened, cold, bedroom.
To say she had a hangover was a serious underestimation of the word. It wasn’t that she had a headache (Matilda rarely had headaches as part of a hangover) but the whole room swam when she tried to lift her head. Eventually, she found her way to the kettle and made a mug of coffee. She tried to light a cigarette but ended up retching into the kitchen sink. After a while, with a coffee inside her, she managed not to puke when she lit up. There was some Coke inside the fridge and when she drank that, she felt better.
‘Never again,’ she muttered to herself.
She managed to get the boiler working, had a shower and a slice of toast, followed by another half an hour later, which satisfied her hunger. Bits of the previous evening came back to her – the race to get as drunk as possible, the stumbling along the road and finally the hand of the Reverend Rachel from St Nick’s, who seemed nice enough. And waking up with a crick in her neck and feet like lumps of ice.
She didn’t plan to stop drinking; she just did. Feeling too ill to partake of the amber nectar, she went to the Co-op to buy some Diet Coke. She couldn’t sleep that night without but experienced none of the difficulties associated with cold turkey.
‘I’ll see how long I can last without any alcohol,’ she said to herself as she unscrewed the top of a bottle of Diet Coke.
First one day and then two. Soon two became three and three, four. Before she knew it, she had been off alcohol and stone cold sober for a whole week. It was something to celebrate. Matilda went down to the Co-op to buy four litres of Diet Coke and carried them back to the flat.
That Sunday, she decided to see if the Reverend Rachel would make good her promise. Matilda made coffee and buttered toast for breakfast at midday and ate the rest of the spaghetti bolognaise later. She went out in the afternoon to buy more Diet Coke and more cigarettes. In the evening, she heated up a stew in the microwave and set off for St Nick’s in the frost and sleet.
The service lasted an intolerably long time. It was impossible for Matilda to get into the spirit of worship, despite the familiarity of the music and order of service. Rachel led the service and Matilda learned from the handout that her surname was McKettrick. The service ended at a quarter to nine and Matilda went up to speak to her.
‘I don’t suppose you’ll remember me,’ she began.
‘How could I forget!’ exclaimed Rachel.
‘I came to take you up on your offer of a free coffee.’
They went to a nearby wine bar. As Matilda said she was off alcohol, they ordered a couple of cappuccinos instead.
‘The last time I saw you, you were decidedly the worse for wear,’ said Rachel.
‘I remember,’ said Matilda.
‘You were nearly run down.’
‘Yes, I know, I’d been drinking all day.’
‘Why?’ asked Rachel.
‘It’s a long story,’ Matilda sighed.
‘You should try Jesus.’
‘Jesus is part of the problem.’
This got Rachel’s attention. Savouring the warmth of the wine bar, Matilda told Rachel the whole story, starting with the first of the Satanic attacks. Rachel was a good listener, only interrupting when a point needed to be clarified.
‘So you see,’ said Matilda when she came to the end of the tale, ‘Jesus didn’t do me much good.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ said Rachel. ‘I’m sorry to hear your faith was hobbled by a group of uncaring Christians.’
‘I’ll admit that the people were hardly pleasant,’ said Matilda, ‘but it’s God who should take the blame.’
Rachel slurped her coffee. ‘How so?’
‘He made t
he temptation more than I could bear.’
‘God understands how you feel.’
‘It’s not enough. I need to know he completely and unhesitatingly forgives me.’
‘Why shouldn’t he forgive you?’
‘I spoke not just one but many words against the Godhead.’
‘Your mind was affected.’
‘My mind was affected after I got the thoughts. The thoughts came first.’
‘I don’t see how God would blame you.’
‘I need proof.’
‘Look to the cross.’
‘It’s not enough. I need more.’
‘What more do you need?’ asked Rachel.
‘I need a reason why I went through this to make sense of it all. Otherwise it seems such a careless waste on God’s part.’
‘If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive our sins and cleans us from all unrighteousness,’ said Rachel. ‘Have you tried confessing your sin to God?’
‘Until I was sick of it,’ Matilda said.
‘Then you’re forgiven.’
‘It’s not enough. I need to know why.’
‘You were probably under stress at work.’
‘I admit I was living with a couple of addicts and a couple of Wide Boy Christians but I’m sure it’s not the reason. There has to be something more if I’m not believe God picked on me because he found some fault with me.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rachel. ‘Were you sinning?’
‘No,’ said Matilda.
‘Were you engaged in occult practices?’
‘No, nothing like that,’ Matilda said.
‘There probably wasn’t a reason for it, then. It was probably just a curve ball that life threw at you.’
Kingdom Come Page 10
