Chapter 7 #2
John had exhausted all his words. He raised his fist to Cal’s face and, knuckles blanching, shook it inches from his nose. It was only the sound of Ella’s slurred footsteps that brought him to his senses again. He was rubbing the anger from his face as she appeared in the hallway.
She was wearing sturdy walking shoes, ugly bullnosed bluchers that had once belonged to his mother. Being a few sizes too big, Ella was forced to stuff them with raw lambswool. They looked comically large.
Cal, feeling jumpy and nervous, tittered a little.
Ella looked from father to son and back again.
Cal tucked his hair behind his ear. He had wet it and made it neat as possible.
Combed back, it grazed his collar and damp with hair gel it had less of the furious colours of bonfire night.
He folded his arms, then, thinking this too confrontational, he unfolded them and let them hang limp by his side, then, thinking this was too passive, he clasped his hands behind his back.
He tested the sharpness of the shears by gently pressing them into his thumb.
“Please,” he said, switching to English.
“I’ll be more of an embarrassment if I start hacking at my hair, now. ” Then he added, “Jesus had long hair.”
Ella was pacing, the rug wrinkling beneath her heavy shoes. “That style does nothing for ye, son. This the hill ye want to die on?”
“You keep your hair short. That’s a real thumb in the eye of St Paul.”
The men had assumed this was a practical concern, or the rejection of vanity, the end of a woman caring what others thought.
But somewhere deep inside, Ella was still an eight-year-old girl.
Her father, who rarely looked in her direction, but who seemed to always have a nice word for her sister, had brushed his fingers over her nape one morning on the way to the cludge.
He had caressed her neck as she was hunched over at the table, and said, “You have a lovely back of neck, you.” A lovely back of neck.
Ella turned her brooch the right way up. “At my age, nobody remembers if I’m a man, a woman, or a cabbage.”
“Be quiet!” John had been watching them bicker, but they had not been watching him grow red in the face.
“Ella. Get in the fucking car, we’ll be late!
” He rounded on Cal again and snapped his fingers and pointed at the rug.
“And you! You who have no respect for me and no fear of God in your heart! You wait here, right fucking here, and pray as hard as you can. Do not think to move!”
Ella hurried out, clutching her unpinned hat to her head as John slammed the door behind them. The house, which had felt too crowded a moment ago, was suddenly silent.
The dogs were circling at his feet, their tails tucked between their legs.
They had understood the threat in his father’s voice but didn’t know which of them was getting the boot.
No matter how his father treated them, they were his loyal, biddable property.
They lay on their bellies to await their kicking.
“Oh, get up! Get up!” Cal roared. He darted upstairs and rummaged in his backpack till he found the Walkman. Then he flew down the stairs again and bolted out the back door. The dogs’ ears were cocked in scandal. They had more sense than to follow him.
If he scrambled along the old postman’s path, he just might make it to church in time.
He listened to the Jesus and Mary Chain as he ran.
His suit was constricting but he used his anger to propel himself onwards.
He laughed like a madman when he thought of all the times he would have given anything to skip church, to sit at home and watch cartoons.
Now all he wanted was to confront his father, to show him that he was no longer his to command.
It would be enough of a protest to sneak into the church and stand at the back.
Enough to have his father lift his eyes and see him standing there.
After thirty minutes or so, he arrived, sweaty and out of breath, at the old church.
The road outside was clogged with cars and anyone hoping to pass on by would be forced to think again.
They were all here, all twenty-six of his neighbours.
He removed his headphones, wound them round the Walkman and stuffed it into his trouser pocket. He slid through the heavy outer door but when he tried to close it quietly, the wind caught it with a slam, and he waited in the antechamber, his toes curling inside his shoes.
Brushing the rain from his suit, he opened the inner door a fraction.
The church had been built to host hundreds but now it was almost empty.
The space was simple and unadorned. The interior was clad in smooth white plaster and the roof was lined in blonde fir wood, which bowed gracefully upwards like the hull of a capsized boat.
Each joint dovetailed seamlessly into the next, and the craftsmen had bent the wood in several directions at once to make an elegant curve. There was such devotion in the work.
The pews were intentionally uncomfortable.
Hard oak made for a simple seat, and another thinner plank hovered as a spindly backrest. It was understood that only the most infirm should use the backrests as support, while the others, for fear of breaking the old benches, would have to do with the strength of their faith.
As a boy, Cal often received a finger in the ribs, a sharp rebuke reminding him to remain upright in the house of the Lord.
He slipped into the church and waited in the shadows.
The minister was bellowing in Gaelic and the sparse congregation was rapt.
Reverend Rose had a wavering voice. It had a lamenting, imploring quality to it and when he preached it echoed off the bare ceiling and Cal could believe the Word was carried by an army of beseeching angels.
“We know that King Herod had no fear of God in his heart. The wicked, the truly, outwardly wicked, have no reverence for his commandments – that is clear. But you do not have to be outwardly wicked to have no respect for our Lord. You flatter yourselves that you are upright people in the eyes of God. But as I look at you now, Oh! I know there is something wrong, something missing. And that is FEAR.” Perhaps he was met with a sea of searching faces because he became louder still.
“If you are an unconverted sinner, you might believe you live a good, reasonable life. But you do not want the Godly people in your life to say there is no fear of God in your heart. If you have no fear then you are deceiving yourself. And the searchlight of scripture will illuminate your lies.” The minister rapped a final time on the pulpit.
“Sinner! Do you hear me?” He looked up. Right at Cal.
“Then may the Lord bless His Word to us. Amen.”
Before the minister could address Cal, John, who was waiting at the smaller, secondary pulpit, stepped forwards on cue, ready to lead the congregation in the psalm singing.
John was always the first to raise his voice to God and his tone was so commanding he could shake the most preoccupied from their worries or wanderings.
Cal watched him closely. He was luminous in the unfiltered daylight. The cavernous space diminished him none.
“Psalm 13. To the tune of Walsall,” he said. Then he began to sing: “How long, Lord? Will you forget me for ever?”
Their singing was unaccompanied by any instrument.
Their bare devotion would be enough. The congregation knew the psalm by heart and they rejoined, not as one, but as twenty-six individuals, their voices strong, staunch, in their pleas to the Lord.
Their lament swelled until they made a rolling ocean of adoration.
The biblical Gaelic was archaic and with no music to guide them, the melody was loosely adhered to and each worshipper fulminated and burst like a raincloud, all interpreting the cadence, feeling it deeply, profoundly.
Though the flock was much reduced, their voices still shook the heavens. There was no timidity, no half-hearted mumblings, and the space swelled with the bass of the dark-suited men as though they were bellowing across the limitless distance, begging to be heard.
Cal waited in the shadows. He listened to the belief in their voices and wondered where his own had gone. It was never about hair, or denims, or pop music. If he didn’t stand his ground then John would scrape at him like the tide until Cal became a shoreline he no longer recognised.
He took a step forwards, thinking he would use the singing as cover as he slid into the last pew.
His eyes were on the flagstones, but he felt his father glaring now.
John did not stop his singing but he was staring out over the faithful with a pleading look in his eyes.
He shook his head imperceptibly. Please, he seemed to be saying, please John-Calum. Please.
All the senior church men sat at the front with their families.
Behind them were the Converted, a smattering of those who had gone forward and declared their belief in Jesus.
Behind them sat the Unsaved. Only the minister’s wife was allowed to sit at the very back.
She was a small, nervous woman, who perched on a large burgundy cushion like a storybook mouse.
It was a vantage point from which she could observe the congregation and report back to her husband any signs of spiritual disquiet.
After the service, she would take him aside and fill him in like a clairvoyant’s accomplice.