‘She was very convincing. That’s why I joined. I do believe in God, though,’ he said quickly. ‘As in an ultimate creator. You believe in God, obviously. But it’s different for me – I didn’t have any reason to believe in anything until …’
He trailed off.
‘Until?’ asked Guleed.
‘Do you know what the gifts of the Holy Spirit are?’ he asked.
We said no just in case he meant something different, but his explanation of how the Holy Spirit gives gifts to good Christians in order to strengthen the Church – that these were essentially miracles for ordinary people – was pretty much the same as the one Dame Jocasta of the blessed Canary Islands had given us.
So, he said, there had been a lot of talking and discussing aspects of the Bible and the real meaning behind certain passages. I asked him which ones, but he couldn’t remember.
‘I did learn to sleep with my eyes open,’ he said.
I remembered one of my mum’s many new church experiments, from when I was still young enough to drag to services, had been a series of long and exceptionally dull passages read by members of the congregation. There’s something to be said for a professional clergy – especially when they can put some oomph into a sermon. I wished I’d been able to sleep with my eyes open back then, too.
‘I thought it was all nonsense, really,’ said Alastair, ‘until things really happened. And they didn’t start happening until we had the rings. At first I thought it was a placebo thing, you know, to encourage us. Like Dumbo’s magic feather. Things got a bit freaky after that.’
‘Freaky how?’ I asked.
Alastair gave a lopsided shrug.
‘Do you know what glossolalia is?’ he asked.
‘Speaking in tongues,’ said Guleed.
‘That’s the lay term for it, yes,’ said Alastair, and I could see he was a bit miffed that one of us had actually known what the term meant. ‘The idea is that the Holy Spirit gives you a gift to preach the gospel beyond the limitations of your own language. It sounds like gibberish, but if you truly listen it makes sense. That’s the theory, anyway.’
‘And the practice?’ said Guleed.
‘It sounded like Spanish to me,’ said Alastair. ‘Or maybe Portuguese, and once I thought it might be Hebrew or Arabic. I still didn’t understand any of it but that’s what it sounded like.’
‘Who was doing the speaking?’ I asked.
‘All of us,’ said Alastair. ‘At the same time.’
‘Talk me through the process,’ I said. ‘And start with where the rings came from.’
He confirmed that Preston Carmichael had brought them with him one day and handed them out. He’d even made a joke about it being seven rings for seven dwarves. Although Alastair admitted that he hadn’t got the joke until the first Lord of the Rings film came out.
‘We sat in a circle with our new rings on, bowed our heads and Preston led us in prayer,’ said Alastair. ‘Just as he had many times before.’
Only this time it was different – it felt different. When I asked him if he could describe how, Alastair became agitated, waved his hands and expressed frustration and worry.
‘This is going to sound like I’m mad,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Guleed in a firm posh accent. ‘On the contrary, we think you might have the key to the whole mystery.’
‘I felt something flow between us,’ said Alastair. ‘A sort of power.’
‘Can you describe this sensation?’ I asked.
‘Like the shade you get in hot countries like Italy,’ said Alastair, ‘where the landscape is all sunny but you’re sitting on a terrace in the shade with a cold drink. And there was an animal smell, a living animal, and perfume. It smelled like Jackie’s perfume as well. Sort of lemony.’
Nothing like the bell-like silence and the hymnal that I’d sensed around the Angel.
‘Then what happened?’ asked Guleed.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Until later that night. I’m shaken awake by this blonde girl who’s yelling that I’m having a nightmare.’
The blonde girl, whose name Alastair couldn’t remember, had been a hook-up at a party he’d gone to after the prayer meeting. She said he’d been shouting in his sleep. When he asked, ‘Shouting what?’, she’d said that it had sounded like Spanish.
‘Six o’clock the next morning, we’re all in a café opposite the campus talking about what the hell had just happened to us,’ said Alastair.
He couldn’t remember exactly what everyone said. Jackie, he was sure, had said she’d been dreaming in Hebrew. She knew because of the letters. The others had similar tales of waking up shouting, or dreaming in a foreign language.
‘I think we tried to convince ourselves it was a sort of mass hallucination,’ said Alastair. ‘But at the same time we wanted to do it again.’
They’d literally marched over to Preston’s house and demanded he lead another session. He said he’d be delighted, but they’d have to wait until the evening when he was finished at work.
‘We really didn’t want to wait,’ said Alastair. ‘We’d have done it morning, noon and night.’
And probably killed yourself with magic, I thought. And what was left of your brains would have ended up in the Folly’s frighteningly extensive brain collection to serve as an awful warning to future apprentices.
‘Why?’ asked Guleed.
‘It was exciting,’ said Alastair. ‘A revelation. That evening, when we prayed again, I could feel myself being …’ He made grasping motions with his hands. ‘Being filled up with the Holy Spirit. Becoming close to God. I’ve taken some drugs … this was better. Better than alcohol – better than sex, even.’
They held prayer meetings for three more days.
On the first night they found themselves talking to each other in tongues – or, at least, in foreign languages they didn’t speak.
‘And definitely some Latin,’ said Alastair. ‘Which I’d done at school, of course.’
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘And had never really got the hang of it – all those declensions,’ said Alastair. ‘But that evening we sat in the pub afterwards and chatted away – in Latin! Like we’d been speaking it all our lives.’
‘Hard c or soft c?’ I asked.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Did you pronounce it wenee, widee, weeshee,’ I said, ignoring Guleed’s puzzled look, ‘or weekee?’
‘It’s funny you should ask that,’ said Alastair. ‘Somebody else asked me the same question once. Why is it important?’
‘It’s not really that important, but it would be useful to narrow down what flavour of Latin you were speaking,’ I said.
This threw Alastair into confusion and got me a definite bit of side-eye from Guleed – who has picked up some prejudices from Seawoll and Stephanopoulos.
Especially now I had a better and more important question to ask.
‘So who asked the same question?’
‘Some American guy I got talking to at Davos in January,’ he said.
But he couldn’t remember the man’s name, or even what he was doing at the World Economic Forum – although he wasn’t an economist, a journalist or even a friend of will.i.am.’s Nor could he remember what he looked like beyond tanned, fair-haired and middle-aged.
‘Maybe West Coast,’ said Alastair. ‘Had that kind of smoothness.’
He’d asked a lot of bizarre questions about the Bible study group, but Alastair had been more interested in the American’s companion.
‘Very blonde, very fit. Had big blue eyes and cheekbones you could butter your toast with,’ he said. ‘Helga, that was her name – Helga from Sweden.’
‘So what was your answer?’ I asked.