Authors: Maggie Gee
‘It isn’t true. Jesus saved my life.’
There was a long silence; she could see he was sorry. When he spoke again, he had changed the subject. ‘I just get vex when I think about Winston.’
She knew what he’d said was partly true. It was black people who read the Bible on the tube, black people, mostly, who drove the cars with ‘Jesus Saves’ stickers on the windows.
They need the Kingdom more, she thought, because they don’t have enough on this earth.
She turned to Elroy without thinking about it, looked at the sun on his handsome face, severe and sculpted, not an ounce of soft flesh, and rested her head against his shoulder. ‘You’re a king to me, Elroy.’
‘And you’re my baby.’
And when they got home they made love again, with a blind concentration and hurry, then, as if death were stalking them, and time was short, but after they were finished they fell asleep, and woke an hour later in a panic race to fling their clothes on and drive to the Temple.
Two churches in one day. Can’t do better than that. Perhaps I’ll be forgiven for two men in one night –
They always met Elroy’s family at the Temple. They glanced quickly into the nave of the church, packed with people, as it was every Sunday, but no one was looking round for them, and Elroy’s mother always did, glasses glinting, a deep frown in her forehead under tight grey-black coils of plaits, not relaxing until all her offspring were there.
‘Must be upstairs, then,’ Elroy said. On the stairs she felt his hand patting her buttocks.
The gallery was like the circle of a theatre. The warmth hit you first, a surprising warmth when the Temple itself was high and stone-built. It was the warmth of hundreds of bodies, the majority black, but a true mixture, brown, pink, olive, yellow, old and young, Chinese, Japanese, even a few Indian faces. The whites who were there did not look rich, wearing anoraks or faded coats, the women with gleaming un-made-up faces, a striking contrast to the chic and gloss of the young black women in the congregation. More women than men. Always more women. Perhaps they came to pray for the men. Or to pray for deliverance from the men?
Electric organ played softly in the background, sweet, faintly mournful, modern. And the sadness rose in Shirley again, she saw her father’s small face on the pillow … Shaking herself free, she looked round for Elroy’s family. Beside two empty spaces she suddenly saw Sophie, waving her arms, beaming, mouthing, her arms and legs always remarkably thin besides her bulky, comfortable body, Elroy’s mother who had come over in the fifties to be a nurse, but ended up a cleaner. Almost from the start she had welcomed Shirley.
‘Elroy! Come on! We waitin’ for you.’
Winston wasn’t there; that’s what Shirley noticed first. The sisters were there, Viola and Delorice, Delorice clamped to her exquisitely dressed baby, a little girl in layers of ribboned peach frills, and Viola who managed the boutique in Kilburn, in a tight, waisted black suit and high lacquered hair glued flat to her head in sharp strands and kiss-curls. Delorice, the youngest, was rather shy, jobless since she had a screaming row with Viola because she brought the baby to work with her. Sophie had told the whole story to Elroy, gasping with laughter – ‘Your sistas killin’ me, Elroy! Viola get so miserable sometime, she done shout at Delorice dat she no havin’ no stinky doo-doo in she shop …’ Now the two sisters were devoted again but Viola wouldn’t have her back in the shop. And Viola, as Shirley knew only too well, was in the process of divorcing a white man, a college lecturer. He had seemed adoring until they were married, ‘the perfect man’, as Viola said, but soon became unfaithful, then abusive, and finally horribly violent. ‘He just a little dog,’ Viola had told Shirley, rubbing her face in all the details, making her suffer because she was white too.
She still wasn’t used to Viola and Delorice, their edge of resentment, their sass, their chill, the suspicion in their eyes when they looked at her, so different from the warmth of her African friends.
But Africans
were
different, as Kojo had explained in the long-ago days when Shirley knew nothing. Africa was very big and very old, and in some ways white people had barely touched it. Things were very different for Caribbeans. Was it surprising if they hadn’t forgotten?
‘Shirley, darlin’,’ said Sophie, hugging her briskly with one thin black arm. ‘We miss you las week, dear. Come sit by me. Go
way,
Elroy, you too big to be kissin’ your mummy that way,’ laughing, showing two gold teeth, one of which Elroy had recently paid for.
On the stage below, spot-lit, smiling, looking round the church with a contented air, were the usual group, the Reverend Lack in his ‘casual smart’ blue foam-backed blazer and knife-creased flannels, and on the chairs behind him, two other white men of around the same age, in safari suits worn over careful shirt and tie, plus Leah, a handsome middle-aged black woman, whose role in the service was mostly smiling, and praying, arms upraised, with statuesque dignity. On her right were the singers and musicians with their mikes, the sax glinting like a golden treble clef.
And then the Reverend Lack welcomed them, and the music came up, and the singing rose, and the half-dozen television monitors dotted around the church flickered into life, deep indigo, and upon them the words of the gospel songs began to lift them and move them together, as people started swaying, as people started clapping and smiling at each other, as a young mixed-race woman to one side started dancing, rhythmically, sensually, without the self-absorption of sex, her head held high, her face shining, smiling, her hands held up in celebration, and then at least half the congregation were dancing, and Shirley began to move as well, her hips loosening, slowly, and her stiff white shoulders, and Sophie’s hand was tucked through her arm, she was at least five inches smaller than Shirley but when Sophie danced she bobbed up to her nose, singing in a pure, slightly cracked soprano, smiling and looking round in approval at what was happening elsewhere in the church, perhaps also to receive the approval of others, for church, Elroy said, was where she was happiest, where she felt accepted in this country at last. (But the Church of England hadn’t made her welcome, the church she had hoped would be her home. A hurt from fifty years ago, never forgotten.)
This singing, this dancing always touched Shirley deeply, the feeling that they were all together in a perfectly simple, bodily way, all of them equal in God and the music, jackets and coats coming off as they moved –
Let them praise His name with dancing, for the Lord takes delight in His people.
Hard to believe, in that ringing temple, that black and white people feared each other.
They sang the refrains again and again, but they weren’t like the choruses they sang at St John’s, a rigid tag after every verse. Here they sang words again because they were moved to, they sang them again to go with the feeling,
Let His grace … fall … here, Let His grace … fall
…
here
, and as they sang, she could feel grace falling, she felt grace fall upon her heart, upon her hands, which she lifted to the sky, upon her hopes, upon all their futures. Death would pass; it would pass away, and hatred, and prejudice, all pass away, for those who hated must surely get tired, lay down their heavy burden and rest,
For today … is the day … of the Latter Rain …
Viola’s hands were lifted as she danced, such elegant hands with glossy red nails and the rings her departing husband had given her, leaning towards the platform below, and she flashed a sudden smile across at Shirley, as if she saw what they were doing was absurd but wasn’t it also something fine?
Shirley didn’t like the Reverend Lack, for all his thick hair and easy smile. He was British, born in Kenya, as he often reminded them, probably the son of missionaries, but his inflections were American, and his style of preaching seemed learned, not natural. He won their attention with rhetorical tricks, with sudden dramatic raisings of his voice, with appeals to the congregation for assent and approval – ‘Amen, brothers?’ (though most of them were sisters) ‘Amen, brothers?’ until they gave him back an ‘Amen’, appeals that sometimes seemed unconfident but sometimes almost bullying, especially as he primed them for the offertory song, telling them God would bless the givers tenfold, practically promising their money back. It didn’t seem right to pressure them so much, when so many of the congregation were poor, but the bag came round, a capacious bag, and Shirley slipped in a note, and tried not to think how much Elroy was giving.
Then the Reverend Lack continued. He had been given a word. ‘Brothers, I have been given a word …’ He was often given words, and would shout his words at the congregation, suddenly, emphatically, yelling them into the microphone, disconnected words he used like bullets, ‘Order’ was one, ‘Order, ORDER,’ and ‘Revival’ was another, ‘Revival, REVIVAL,’ and he was saying Britain was ripe for revival, that revivals were beginning everywhere, that together they could carry the word across the land, but the words fell like shotgun pellets on her ears, she was still very tired from the night before, and her mind strayed away to Thomas and Elroy,
Order
, ORDER,
revival
, REVIVAL …
Then a police siren howling in the street outside brought her up with a start, completely awake, cold sweat on her forehead and her palms.
It was death she thought of then, and disorder. Sudden, brutal. The thief in the night. What if her father had died last night? (Was it right between them? Had they made it right? His last words were ‘You’re a good girl, Shirley.’ Dad, she thought. I wish I had said – ‘It’s all right, Dad. It’s all right, now. I know you tried. The rest doesn’t matter.’
When it gets to the end, the rest doesn’t matter
. She hadn’t said it; she said it now, her lips moving slightly, talking to him, sending a message to her earthly father, because time seemed short, everything felt fragile.) What if that screaming police car had killed her? – Where were the police cars rushing off to?
Sophie was sitting, deaf to the sermon, writing requests for prayers on the green cards supplied for the purpose. She always completed at least a dozen cards, which sometimes seemed faintly comic to Shirley, as Sophie sat through the sermon oblivious, frowning with concentration as she wrote, putting on and then removing her glasses. It was as if she was determined to get value from the church, and the value, to her, was the prayers and the singing and the feeling that here at least she was at home. She had left her old home so long ago, and Britain hadn’t given her what it had promised, but she kept on writing in her spidery hand; here she was at home again, here she was happy. Every Sunday she was welcomed, respected.
Now Elroy was whispering to his mother. ‘Why Winston not here again?’
‘I jus callin’ Winston name to the Lord. He not come home again las night. I tink he got himself a girlfriend at las, now we have to pray she a good gyal, Elroy …’
‘That boy deserve some licks for not letting you know.’
‘You watch your mouth in church, Elroy King.’
The sermon continued, now louder, now softer, its peaks as deafening as Shirley’s memories of Alfred shouting when she was little. The Reverend Lack leaned forward and thundered, ‘For we have to be ready to fight, brothers and sisters. We shall have to fight for the souls of the people. Great times are coming, wonderful times, times of renewal, times of revival … We shall see again the glory days of the Welsh Revival of the 1920s. All of us will have to stand up and be counted. Then it will not be enough to drink, to come and drink of the waters of life. Every one of us will have to go forth. There will be a new Battle of Britain, brothers and sisters. A Battle of Britain. And we are His Army. This is the word I am given today. Amen? Amen
…
I give you a new Battle of Britain …’
He was flying at last, no longer awkward, alight with the fire of divine anger, eyes blazing, waving his hand, pointing his finger in a way she didn’t like, reminding her of something from history – was it a picture of God the Father, pointing? An old-fashioned picture from her childhood Bible? On all the six monitors his image flashed, flaming down on them, arm raised, shouting, and everyone stared at him, transfixed, more than a thousand people listening, gripped – suddenly she realized why she didn’t like it. It was from the past, but long before her childhood, something from history, unspeakable, and she felt ashamed for even thinking it, but his arm on the monitors rose and fell, his voice roared on, hypnotic, dramatic – He wasn’t a priest, he was the German Fuhrer, and they were the crowd at one of his rallies, she had seen a film of it only last week. Then she shook herself out of the illusion, blinked, and he was just a man again, the Reverend Lack in his foam-backed jacket, trying too hard to lift his audience.
She looked sideways at Elroy, but Elroy was listening with puzzled respect, nodding his head.
Did people really want battles, and wars? Shirley had had enough of them. Who would we be fighting? Atheists? Muslims? Men believed in battle, women did not (but a glimpse of Viola leaning forward in her seat, eyes gleaming, fists clenched, nodding and smiling, told Shirley she was wrong. Viola couldn’t wait.)
The Reverend Lack was drawing to a close. Now there would be prayers, with the organ playing softly, everyone standing, hands raised to God, and the church officials would come among them and pray with those whom the spirit moved.
Shirley still found the behaviour of the congregation during the closing prayers astonishing. Some laughed hysterically, raising their eyes, clutching themselves, others were weeping, some sitting on the floor, some half-supported in the arms of officials, some shaking uncontrollably and moaning, but down at the front they were falling, crumpling, toppling as if they had been struck by lightning at the instant the hands of the ministers touched them.
Now the Reverend Lack asked the whole second row of the congregation to come on stage and receive a blessing. They came, and he touched them, one by one, and they fell like playing cards, falling in order, and lay there pole-axed while prayers and music continued around them.