Love Story 2

I wasn’t fully Baptised in the Spirit. Which to some church members meant I wasn’t baptised. Our prayer leader, Colin, spoke in tongues. So I was told. He was a small bald man that inhabited a greyish suit and wore a hat that on other church leaders might have looked ridiculous. He whispered instructions about dangers we—the young—might face in life and his halitosis wasn’t one of them, because nobody else seemed to notice. I wondered if it was a sign, I was stinking up the church, worrying overmuch about smelling my own ever decaying soul.  

He told me, for example, how to properly boil a kettle. As if I hadn’t done it five trillion times at home. We’d been brought up to drink tea in that Irish way with so much sugar it’d left  the sugar bowl looking like Antarctica in summer melt denuded of snow, but that was only a stopgap  that we’d have to make do with it until we started guzzling Guinness and booze. But he explained in greater detail I was wrong, because I thought I knew what I was doing, which made making tea as dangerous at the Towering Inferno, because I’d got into the habit of not thinking and just doing.

I’d kinda drifted off inside my head, while nodding at the expected revelations. Only Paul Newman could save us from a kettle fire. Say and two or three helicopters.

‘Yes,’ I admitted at one point. ‘I do know how to call 999. I don’t need to write it down. I’ll remember the numbers.’

Everything was a prayer. To thank God for my ungraciousness and for sweet tea. God knew what to expect. All I has to do was ask. To thank him for reminding me of the dangers of an unplugged kettle. God didn’t need to do small talk. Or in his infinite wisdom, need to ask, how I was doing? He’d already marked me down as a loser. No miracles required.

I hesitated to call Colin boring. After all, I was still on my provisional license. I’d done a lot of witnessing, getting my card stamped with people that had nothing. No soap. No clean clothes. And they stank as if they pulled the plug out of their arsehole and wiped it on my nose. One family I remember had no eyebrows. The mother coloured hers in brownish and always looked surprised to see us. They had a house in Jellicoe Street. The area had a bad reputation. They kept themselves to themselves. Their neighbours kept it that way. They’d painted various colourful slogans on the walls to encourage them to leave.

My initial pride at churchgoing outside church had been tested with a nine-hour prayer session. The eyeless daughter had blonde hair and pink eyes. She sneered and whispered to me that I was ‘a poofy poof poof’.

Colin was hard-core in the tent-mission world. If Dougie, another dedicated pastor,  could do fourteen hours of straight prayer, Colin could do fifteen. I had to opt out, telling him and the Lord that my mum would be waiting for me and it was time for my bed. The wee girl felt my bum on the way out.

‘Yeh could be my boyfriend,’ she held the door and stared beyond me.

With no eyebrows it was difficult to tell if she was being ironic.

‘I couldnae cause I’m too auld.’

‘Yeh better,’ she said, ‘or I’ll tell them yer touching me.’

I knew how dangerous kettles were but I’d no answers for that. I could hear Colin droning on in the living room. I couldn’t ask him or the Lord because they were too busy.

‘Well,’ she stroked the side of my jacket.

I ran away. Her eyesight was terrible.  She couldn’t see beyond the rhododendron that blocked off much of the path, but she could hear my feet battering down on the uneven mossy slabs and it wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d jumped on a broom and followed. Colin told me the family were possessed, so we had to be on our guard. Her twin sister was worse, but we didn’t get to meet her. Thank God she was in some government institution where they couldn’t do anything with her.

I fell asleep in the bath at home, stripping off all my clothes and telling Mum I was worried about fleas. She slapped my hard on the head as if it was my fault.

‘Fleas,’ she said. ‘That’s all we need. You need to buck yourself up and get a life’

I took this as a sign from God that it was all I indeed needed. No more non-giggling floozies with no eyelashes.

God made it easy for me. I met Val at the bus stop on Duntocher Road. Call it coincidence. But she was crying. Her boyfriend had dumped her. He said she was too fat, even for a fat cow. This had knocked her confidence. That and being pregnant at thirteen. She didn’t know how to tell her mum.

The Spirit took me in hand and I took her hand and fell to my knees. I wouldn’t let go, even when the bus came and all the passengers goggled out the window.

The driver opened the doors and twisted his head to glare at us. ‘Whit’s he daeing,’ he asked. ‘Yeh on or aff the bus?’

Val’s face glowed. She looked almost happy to be dumped by a psychopathic boyfriend, but she didn’t tell him I was praying for the salvation of her eternal soul.

‘He’s proposing,’ she smirked at him and shrugged. ‘He’s always loved me.’

‘Och, that’s nice,’ said a wee woman in a raincoat in the seat facing the driver. ‘But ur they no a wee bit young?’  And with a head nod, she passed the message up the bus. Even the driver smiled and tooted his horn when he left. Passengers beat the window and smiled out at us like a benediction.