When she turned up to this daytime house group meeting, a strange thing happened. She felt the compulsion to confess her sinful thoughts to all and sundry, regardless of what they thought of her. There were one or two immature Christians who took against her because of what she told them and who were wary of letting her pray for them but this was only to be expected. In any group of Christians, she realised, there were those who were relatively new and inexperienced in the faith.
And so it was, on every Friday afternoon, she made the trek from her flat to the church hall for the house group, with a packet of minty chocolate biscuits – the only kind she liked – in her rucksack, along with a bottle of Maxi Cola, her favourite sugar-free cola drink, for sipping through the meeting, as the constant smoking left her with a permanently dry throat. She found to her surprise that she was one of the few mature Christians in the group – there were one or two others – always relied upon to come up with an insightful answer to a difficult question.
37
Matilda had been attending the daytime home group attached to St Nick’s for a couple of years when one of her mother’s tenants moved out of her flat in the spring of 2009. Mother asked Matilda if she would like to move into the property.
The flat was in the south side of the city, near Mary’s house. The rent was two thirds of what she was paying the housing association and was inclusive of utilities. It was a no-brainer. Matilda moved in as soon as the redecoration and refurbishment were complete. She had recently stopped smoking and was manically chewing nicotine gum. The home group at St Nick’s were praying for her and, thanks to their intercession, Matilda did not revert to smoking through the stress of the move, so her new flat remained unsullied by the smell of cigarettes.
Someone put a card through her letterbox for a social club that met on Thursday afternoons in the Baptist Church in Amen Corner. Matilda thought this an excellent way to make friends in the locality, so went along. The church wasn’t difficult to find. Although she hadn’t felt like going, she forced herself into her fleece and walked, every step straining her nerves.
There were a dozen people there, mostly pensioners, and Matilda was entertained with fair trade coffee and jammy biscuits. There were three on the plate and she ate them all. She talked to an older lady called Karen and to a widow named Val. The meeting ended at four and Matilda walked home in a buoyant mood.
Thereafter, she went to the social club as often as she could, to meet and talk to Karen and Val. She got to know the others, too. It was a bitter winter that year with knife-sharp north winds that sliced through her layers, right to the bone. A late snowfall one Friday presented her with an excuse not to go to the daytime home group at St Nick’s. Instead, she went to a nearby cinema with Val and watched a film.
The flat, though small, was ideal. And, thanks to the money she saved from not smoking, she could afford small treats like tea at the nearby Italian café and afternoons at the cinema with Val and Karen. With the money she had saved – over two hundred pounds a month – she could afford to treat them afterwards to virgin cocktails.
In time, Matilda started to attend services at the Baptist Church in Amen Corner: she went on a Sunday morning if she was up in time but more usually the evening service, which was held in the rear hall. Before she knew it, she had stopped going to St Nick’s and was now taking communion at the Baptist Church. But, inevitably, there were times when she felt too unwell to attend, especially on dark winter nights.
The nights that winter were long and lonely. Matilda would sit listening to the radio, then prepare herself for an evening of writing. It helped kill the time; it kept her occupied; it was anaesthetic for the soul.
Reliving her breakdown and the dark days it engendered still took a lot out of her. She needed the next day off to recover. And then what she wrote so dissatisfied her that it was as likely as not to end up in the bin. She progressed in fits and starts. And though she aimed to write every day, an hour or two was the most she could manage when she did.
Trying to write a coherent narrative of her breakdown was like trying to wrestle with a blancmange. More than once she had abandoned it as unwritable but was always drawn back to it. She would set it aside for a fortnight or longer but, after that, its lack of resolution demanded that she return to it. Once people at church were aware of the narrative’s existence, they would ask how it was progressing. It seemed churlish to abandon it now.
There were other forces at play, too, ones that she was barely conscious of. She needed to finish her breakdown narrative so that she could persuade herself she had put the whole thing behind her and get on with her life. For as long as the breakdown narrative remained incomplete, there was a question mark hanging over her life.
38
It was only after she had been going to her new church for some time that Matilda noticed the changes in now she related to the Lord. She no longer railed at him or accused him of being the very things the obsessive thoughts told her. She remembered how, in those first steps towards recovery, she harangued him unmercifully when the devil got her back up and the smothering sense of guilt that followed.
During a particularly hard and unfruitful time of prayer one day, her mind began to wander and she yawned. Prayer had never been easy for her but, when she became conscious of her mind wandering, she began to pray that the Lord would give her a heart for prayer. It was in the new house group that she began to utter a few prayers. She noticed, too, that she never used formal language when praying to the Lord, such as “Father” or “Lord” but terms of endearment such as “dear Daddy God”. Indeed, the first time she used this phrase she saw a picture of a little girl, whom she took to be herself, sitting on God’s knee, playing with his flowing white beard. This vision silenced her prayer but, after recovering, she shared it with the other members of the group.
The discovery of the Daddyhood of God led her once more to envision herself resting at Jesus’ feet but with the following difference: now she imagined that, as she laid her head on her pillow at the end of the day, she was now laying it down on Jesus’ nail-scarred feet and that the precious blood was seeping through her hair, her skin and skull to cleanse the obsessive thoughts and sanctify her mind, heart and soul.
And this led her to remember something she had always known but which had been buried under the accumulation of years of church-going and scripture-reading: that all her sin – past, present and future – had been nailed to the cross when she became a Christian and that she stood presently at the door of eternity with Jesus declaring, ‘Forgiven!’ There was nothing the devil could do to detract from this, even though he had stolen her joy in the Lord. This led to renewed prayer-requests to be found only in him and in him alone. And, instead of imploring the Lord to make her perfect like the Lord Jesus, she now prayed for a double gifting of love so that she could love him with all her heart, soul, mind and strength and love her neighbour as herself – in short, she prayed for the ability to love with all her meagre resources, not forgetting, of course, that Love covers a multitude of sins.
And, as she drew closer to the Lord in adoration and prayer, she discovered something about herself that she had suspected for a long time; that she was a base sinner. So thoroughly dirty and impure was she that when she approached the Throne of Mercy, she could only beat her breast, hang her head in shame and, like the publican in the parable, say, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord – a sinner.’
The journey consisted of hundreds of little steps in obedience. The first of these was for her to declare the forty-pound-a-week allowance she got from her parents to the Department for Work and Pensions. Instead, he encouraged her to save it and to devote part of it to missionary endeavour. The second thing he told her was to save part of her pension and start tithing. When she obeyed, the Lord got specific. The end pages of her Bible began to fill with messages from the Lord – “Run in such a way as to win the prize” and “Persist in p
rayer” and, more worryingly, “Your teeth will fall out”.
Finally, there was the Lord’s presence in her life. The very worst thing she could think of was being cut off from him and, though heaven was too mind-blowing to think about except in the most general sense – she knew she wanted, more than anything, to spend eternity in his company, basking in his approval. Her salvation was precious and she vowed – more than once – to do everything possible to ensure she got in through the Narrow Gate, even if it was the Lord who helped her squeeze through in the end.
39
Matilda’s leisured life continued. But just when she was becoming accustomed to it, tragedy struck. An aggressive tumour was found in Mother. There was no warning, no foreshadowing. One minute, Mother was in the pink; the next, on the cancer ward, pale against the white pillows. It was too late for chemotherapy, too late for experimental medicines. Worst of all, Mother went to the grave unsaved.
Though the Lord had prepared Matilda for this, Mother’s death was still a shock. Matilda had been praying for a miracle; a deathbed conversion at the very least.
The first thing Matilda did when she got back from the hospital was buy herself alcohol. She got monstrously drunk and started blubbing like a baby. She fell asleep on the sofa, overcome with drink and emotion. She slept until the evening. It was dark when she woke. She got up, switched on the lamp and drew the curtains.
The phone started to ring. Bracing herself, Matilda picked it up and put it to her ear.
‘It’s me,’ said her father. ‘I had a horrid feeling you’d be drinking alone.’
‘I was sleeping.’
‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘The undertakers are coming tomorrow to discuss the funeral arrangements. Your input would be greatly appreciated.’
In fact, Matilda only just made the meeting. Mother hadn’t seen the inside of a church for twenty-plus years, so finding a priest to send her off was difficult. Neither could they agree on hymns to be sung at the crematorium. In the end, they decided to go for Amazing Grace and The Lord’s My Shepherd. Matilda wondered if her family knew any others.
It was raining when Matilda got in the taxi to take her home. She stopped off at the nearest convenience store for a bottle of Lambrusco. She did serious damage to the bottle then fell asleep. She woke to the sound of the telephone ringing. She couldn’t be bothered to answer it and let it ring out. She felt guilty, then 1471’d the number. It was her youngest sister’s mobile.
‘We must go shopping before the funeral,’ her sister said, ‘so you’ve got something decent to wear.’
The funeral was set for Thursday morning, the crematorium booked. Matilda turned up in her funeral outfit with her hair washed and combed and with a touch of eye-shadow. The guests arrived in twos and threes and the grandchildren were on display, all six of them.
Matilda only broke down when the coffin was brought in. They sang Amazing Grace with such mournfulness that it sounded like a dirge. The hospital chaplain put in a good word for Mother and even managed to work in a pitch for Jesus, which commended him to Matilda no end. They sang The Lord’s My Shepherd and then filed out to admire the flowers while the mourners chatted and dispersed.
The funeral collation was held in a restaurant in town. There was a buffet for one hundred and the drinks flowed. Matilda, who was doped up to the eyeballs, stuck to Diet Coke, but everyone else got roaring drunk.
After lunch, Matilda left the meal and went to the social club. All the usual suspects were there. She had brought the Order of Service and sat and talked about her childhood with Karen and Val.
At four o’clock, she returned to the parental home. It was a cold, cheerless spring day and she shivered as she stepped over the threshold. She found various relatives and friends of Mother in varying states of inebriation. She got a diet cola drink from the fridge and cleared a space at the table to talk to her two nieces. Their parents were “resting” upstairs. Matilda apologised fulsomely for not having sent birthday cards and Christmas presents and explained that she really was barking mad.
‘We don’t think you’re barking mad, Aunt Matilda,’ said the elder girl, ‘but, then, the whole family is out to lunch.’
Matilda gave them a tenner each.
By the time their parents and diverse aunties and uncles had roused themselves, Matilda was in the back of a taxi on the way home.
A few days after the funeral, her father presented her with a cheque for eleven thousand pounds. Matilda stared at it.
‘What’s this for?’ she asked. It was too early for a division of the spoils.
‘It’s the money you gave your mother when you left your last job,’ her father said. ‘I thought you’d better have it while it was still worth something.’
Indeed. With low interest rates and galloping inflation, Matilda’s little nest egg was dwindling daily in value. She paid the cheque into her savings account the next day.
40
A few days after the funeral, Matilda met her youngest sister in town for lunch. They went to a trendy bistro where they shared a bacon, avocado and spinach salad.
‘What are you going to do with the money dad’s given you?’ her sister asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Matilda, who had given the subject little thought. ‘Spend some and save the rest, I guess.’
‘You could publish your novel.’
Matilda recoiled at the suggestion.
‘You mean, self-publish a second time? It’s expensive.’
‘All you need is a printer and someone to do the layout,’ her youngest sister said. ‘It shouldn’t come to any more than a couple of thousand.’
‘It’s still too expensive.’
‘It’s got to that stage, though,’ said her sister, pouring herself another glass of wine. ‘It’s all very well spending your time squirrelled away in your flat writing but there comes a time when you’ve got to have something to show for it.’
Matilda could see her point. Writing year in, year out, with nothing to show for it was stretching credulity to breaking point.
When she got home, she dug out her back-issues of Mslexia and got the addresses of book-producers. She looked them up on the net (a present to herself now that she had stopped smoking) and got a few quotes. She wanted a print run of two hundred, the least the printer would agree to, and editing services. She wrote the jacket blurb herself, then emailed it to the marketing manager.
A font and a layout were chosen. The first proofs arrived a few days later in a heavy envelope. Matilda got to work with a red Biro.
She worked through the general election, correcting the first proofs while listening to news reports of negotiations between the three main political parties. The speculation went on until at last the Liberal Democrats threw their lot in with the Tories. There was a lot of talk about action on debt and Matilda was fearful lest cuts in the welfare budget reduce her fortnightly stipend further.
A cold spring gave way to an indifferent summer. The numbers at the social club had been dwindling for some time. Now there were only three or four regulars. Val, who had been unemployed for some time, got a job in a fish and chip shop and now could no longer attend the Thursday afternoon meeting. Her days off were Mondays and Sundays. And the social club, while being helpful, did not stop Matilda feeling lonely from Friday to Wednesday. There were discussions in the church diaconate about the club’s future; its existence was uncertain.
Over the summer months, Matilda corrected the second and third set of proofs for her novel. She chose an eye-catching illustration and the company designer got to work on it, producing a bold cover.
In October, her novel finally rolled off the press. There was a sweetness, a sense of pride, in holding the first, still-warm copy as it came off the press. It more than compensated for any of the frustrations experienced as she prepared the novel for publicatio
n.
41
Matilda’s youngest sister phoned every now and then just to see how she was. In fact, it was she who suggested Matilda ought to join the local writers’ group. Indeed, she had found such a group on the net.
But Matilda wasn’t so sure. She had visions of these writers gassing away all hours of the day and night while their novels and poems lay neglected.
Eventually her youngest sister talked her round to the idea. This local writers’ group, it transpired, met in a nearby pub on the first Tuesday of each month. Their website stated that the meetings of odd months were given over to manuscripts, the even months to talks and lectures by experts in their field. The last meeting of the year was the annual Christmas dinner. Matilda decided to go along with forty pounds she had saved up.
She went to this pub, known for its real ales and guest beers. There was nothing she fancied on tap, so she went to the bar and ordered a glass of Diet Coke. It was dear but, then, she hadn’t been in a pub since October 2006.
She took a seat and waited. Finally, Nigel showed up. He was a little plumper than before and his hair had grown but otherwise, he was well.
Nigel clocked her straight away and said, ‘Are you here for the writers’ group?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Can you tell? And you?’
‘It started as therapy and, to cut a long story short, here I am with a contract to write a book from Blue Moon,’ he said as he sipped his Diet Coke.
‘You’re writing a novel?’ she asked, dumbfounded.
The news certainly took the wind out of her sails.
‘It’s not my first, by any stretch of the imagination,’ said Nigel. ‘I go under the name of Fi-fi la Motte for romance and Brian McGuinness for science fiction and fantasy.’
He took a seat beside her.
Kingdom Come Page 12
