“What do you mean ‘never happened’?” said Penny. “It’s in Scripture.”
“But only according to Matthew. Not the other three. Matthew, you know, the only one that happened to mention-what was else it?-oh yeah, an earthquake on Good Friday. One out of four witnesses recalled a massacre of baby boys and an earthquake. Something wrong somewhere, if you ask me. I think if four people-or even just two should be enough, eh Mum?-if the same people were all at the same massacre and earthquake together, they should agree on what happened. Eh no?”
My mother had put her head into her hands by this time. Her paper hat fell off into her prawn cocktail.
“Sorry, Mother,” I said. “You should have stuck to waving it at me and making me swear on it that I hadn’t been smoking. It was when I read the damn thing that it all started to go so wrong. Reading what you told me was true and trying so hard to not remember the truth that you told me was false. It was a recipe for disaster, really.”
So maybe calling their Bible a damn thing was a tiny little bit blasphemous, actually, I thought as I rang the doorbell. I’d really try to rein it in today. The doorbell playing “How Great Thou Art” didn’t help, and the sight of my mother when she came to answer it made the little devil on my shoulder whisper things in my ear. She was wearing one of her midcalf, brown skirts and a cream shirt with a high, ruffled neck, fawn cardi, no jewelry, no makeup, modest in the sight of the Lord. But her hair was a bright copper red, not a single grey one anywhere. Some of the brightest hairs were kind of springy and coarse the way grey hair grows in, but the colour, well, the colour had to be a gift from God to reward her good life, right? Anything else would be unholy and shameful and not the Brethren way.
“Jess?” she said.
“Mum,” I answered. “I just want to check out something you said to me. What would I not have followed up on? What were you doing to try to help me?”
She stood back to let me in and ushered me towards the living room. She had been sitting knitting with the radio on, a small, pale yellow jersey in a lacy design.
“Sale of work?” I said. “That’s really lovely.” I was determined to try.
“Idle hands,” said my mother. “What are you asking me?”
She sat back down and picked up her needles. There was going to be no offer of tea then. But then she’d not long had one judging by the empty cup and the crumbs in the saucer-one of those squint saucers with a bulge for the biscuit; I had bought it for her for a birthday present and I wish I could say it meant nothing to see her using it.
“On the phone,” I reminded her. “You said you supposed I wouldn’t have followed up on something. Something about not keeping hold of my friends?”
“Oh yes. Someone was here looking for you,” she said. “A rough sort, but a nice enough way with him.”
“When was this?”
“Months back,” said my mother. “Hasn’t he phoned you yet? Maybe he’s shy.”
“Months,” I repeated.
“He came once looking for you and then he came back for some leaflets I said I’d bring him. Came back a third time to talk them over too.”
“Church leaflets?” I said, thinking I’d got it wrong after all.
“So I thought he might be a nice friend for you, appearances aside.”
“Because he’s a long-haired lout,” I guessed. “And he said he knew me.”
“Of course he knows you,” my mother said. “You were at school together. I think, you know, that he liked you then. Carried a wee torch all these years. You could do worse. You could end up alone, Jess.” She heaved a sigh and looked around at her neat living room. Alone like me, she was hinting. But she’d ended up alone because she beat her husband out the door with her Bible. I said nothing. “And just so you know,” she went on, “he knows all about you. So you’ve nothing to fear on that score.”
“Right,” I said. “So. You told him everything, eh?”
“I had to, Jess,” said my mother. “Tell the truth and shame the devil.”
“You told him about the pteronophobia and why I’ve got it.”
“I told him you had mental troubles,” she corrected me. “What you did when you were five.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” I said. It was her version he was expecting. Granny collapsed when she saw the feathers. That’s what he had been waiting for me to say.
“And if God has sent you the miracle of a good-hearted boy who can stomach you after that, you shouldn’t set your face against it.”
I fingered the little place on my cheek where the hole had formed in those long hours.
“There’s nothing there,” my mother said, her voice cold with scorn.
“I know,” I told her. “It faded, years ago.”
“You could still offer yourself to Jesus.” She always said this, like it was good sound practical advice, and she always said it that way too. Like I was borderline even for him, but you never know-he might take me.
“Which one?” I replied. I was right back in my well-worn groove now, all the old favourites. My mother hissed like a serpent. She hated my multiple-Jesus theory. I hadn’t meant it to be offensive. I just reckoned there was two at least. Actually, that was only because I’d had the idea first about Moses and it made a lot of sense there.
“One of the Moseses is all, ‘Get back to Israel, get back to Israel,’ that’s what matters to him, right? And the other one is like, ‘Okay, so the deal is we wander the earth but we stay off the seafood? That’ll do me.’ It’s not the same guy, Mum! And whoever was writing the story must have known it because the only way it hangs together is make him live for five hundred years. It’s worse than Bobby in the shower. It should have got fixed in the edit.”
And as for Jesus? One of them was all poverty and humility and foot-washing and he was great. But the other one was Son of God, get me! I’m eternal, I’m fantastic. It wasn’t the same guy. Couldn’t be.
“It’s just like Winston Churchill and Brangelina,” I said to her. She stuck her needles back in her yellow knitting and folded her arms, ready to fight the good fight of faith. “If you hear a kind of bogus slogan about keeping secrets and eating nettles, you think, ‘oh that was probably Churchill, eh?’ I bet he never said half the stuff he gets the credit for. And if you hear some Hollywood couple’s brought out a line of vegan cupcakes with a flavour named after each of their children and you want to tell someone, you’re going to say it was Brad and Angie, aren’t you? So any old tale about some preacher round about that time, round about that place… you know?”
“Tale?” she said. “Tale? Great is the truth, Jess, and mighty above all things.”
“Finally,” I said. “Something we agree on. Great is the truth, Mother. You’re right there. So this friend of mine. Did you tell him the great mighty truth about what you did when I was five?”
“I?” said my mother. “I protected you. I kept quiet. Never breathed a word.”
“You breathed plenty to me,” I reminded her. “You basically stuck a knitting needle in my ear and scrambled my brains for me.”
“Why do you say such ugly things?”
“Fair enough, I’ll say it pretty. You kept quiet about how I wrecked granny’s quilt and how she came in and saw and was so angry that she had a stroke and died on the floor right in front of me begging me for help and how I did nothing, for no reason at all. For two days.”
“Jess, what is the point of going over it and over it?” she said.
“And how, worst of all, I concocted a crazy story about how I was tied to the bed, and you tied me.”
“I was punishing you for killing my mother! I was following God’s teaching and training you up in his ways. That’s how much I still loved you. After you killed my mother!”
“I was five,” I said. Shouted really. “Even if she had dropped dead over a few fucking feathers, I was five. But she didn’t, Mother. She died when she saw what you had done to me. She died of disgust when she saw what you were. You killed her. Not me. Because it matters what order things happen in. It matters what caused what and what came later.”