*
Next door, Marcus was already floundering. Everyone had been introduced. Each in turn spoke a few words about their lives, what they hoped to get from the Course. It was time for Marcus to address them. David stood in the shadows at the entrance to the room, watching. Abby’s mind had gone blank. She sat berating herself for her silence, biting down on her lower lip. Finally, knowing that David was depending on him, Marcus began to speak.
‘I encourage you not to look at The Way of the Pilgrim quite yet. Just keep it at home and spend your time between now and next week’s session thinking about the emotions that you have experienced tonight.’ Marcus was always worried that the overtly religious nature of David’s book would put some people off. He found it disconcerting that the Course insisted on marketing itself as a forum for philosophical enquiry when it was so clearly focused on pushing a fairly narrow form of evangelical Christianity. He found it stranger still that no one seemed to mind. The religious nature of the Course accelerated swiftly after the initial session, but very few members stopped coming. Perhaps David was right, that people just needed an excuse to embrace it all. The Course provided that excuse.
‘I think I should make one thing clear from the start, though,’ Marcus continued. ‘The Course has been the most positive force in my life over the years I’ve been a member. Abby and I have had some difficult times and I really don’t know what we would have done without the Course to support us. I mean, I look at young people struggling to carve out an existence in London and I just wish I could persuade them all to come along. You don’t just come here to talk about the big questions. You also find yourself at the centre of a really vibrant social scene. We have dinner at each other’s houses, we go to each other’s weddings, we are godparents to each other’s children. I really haven’t kept in touch with that many of my friends from before the Course. I haven’t needed to. The people you will meet here will be your friends for life.’
Marcus saw the priest smile at him before ducking further into the shadows. He bridled against the group that had been chosen for him and Abby. He knew that they were seen as a safe pair of hands, comfortingly conforming to the priest’s vision of a Course couple. He was certain that Mouse and Lee would get a more interesting group and he felt suddenly exhausted, astonished that life had moved so swiftly, so certainly to this point, where he was sitting in a damp room trying to convince people to accept a God the certainty of whose existence only flickered at the edge of his vision, disappearing if he stared at it straight on. The older man — whose name was Neil — moved his chair forward with a scraping sound that made everyone stop and turn to look at him.
‘Could I ask a question? About the sermon tonight. . if one calls it a sermon?’ He was perhaps fifty and what hair he had left clung perilously to his scalp above his ears; the top of his head was entirely bald. His skin was tight and tanned and seemed to constrain his jutting cheekbones with difficulty. He spoke in a sharp voice; a voice of boardrooms and corporate retreats. Marcus could see the silk lining of his suit shimmering. ‘I wondered if anyone else prayed when David asked us to be silent? I wasn’t expecting to, but I found myself praying, and it was an extraordinary experience. I haven’t prayed since school.’
There was a pause and then one of the blonde girls hesitantly raised her hand. ‘I did. I remember my mother used to pray with me when I was a child. She is very religious and I remembered one of the prayers and I said it, and I was mainly saying it for her.’
Slowly the scales of shyness began to drop away, and Abby and Marcus answered questions in voices that echoed the quiet humility of the blonde girl. Calm descended upon the room.
*
Lee found the twins extraordinary. They didn’t finish each other’s sentences so much as perform a canon, with one talking over the other, slightly ahead or behind. They blinked their large eyes at the room and reminded her of stage-school children with their bouncing enthusiasm and lisps. Lee could see that even Mouse was rather taken aback. She smiled in encouragement as they held forth.
‘And Daddy used to take us to church on Sundays when Mummy was ill. .’
‘When Mummy was ill the whole house was silent, like a church. We used to pray for Mummy to get better. .’
‘And when Mummy didn’t get better, in fact when she died, we made a pact, didn’t we, Alice. .’
‘Yes, a pact, Ele.’
‘That we wouldn’t believe in God. We’d stop praying and we’d live raucous lives. And we did. .’
‘We lived astonishing lives.’
‘But we feel it is time to come back to the church now.’
Lee cleared her throat and the group turned to face her.
‘I think that’s very important,’ she said, leaning forward, her thin shoulders hunched, her face very serious. ‘The idea that you can come back to the church. I know I’ve done some bad things in the past; I was a tearaway as a teenager and I disappointed a lot of the people around me. But what you learn is that this church is very forgiving. It doesn’t matter how far you’ve gone, you can be saved. I find that idea incredibly comforting. It reminds me of that line in Catherine of Siena that says “God’s forgiveness to all, to any thought or act, is more certain than our own being”. It’s a religion that recognises that we are fallible, a religion founded on forgiveness.’
Mouse smiled at her.
‘Lee is the brains of this operation. Go to her if you have any deep questions. Come to me if you want to know where the nearest drink is. Now, maybe I should say a few words about next week’s session. .’
The clock, which reminded Lee of the clock that she had watched as she sat her finals at university, a clock whose hands moved in mysterious leaps, jumped on towards nine and then David came in and thanked them and they were all out in the balmy night. The church’s lights were still on and they threw out a soft glow into the courtyard where the new members stood with their Course leaders, suddenly unwilling to leave the place and each other.
‘Does anyone want to come to the pub?’ Mouse lit a cigarette and took a long drag, blowing the smoke up so that it was caught in the light thrown from the church, a blue haze dissolving slowly into the night.
Four
Abby stared into her lemonade. The glass was old and chipped; fissures that would one day destroy it ran like veins under the surface. When Mouse banged his hand on the table to emphasise a point, the bubbles in her lemonade shuddered, some were dislodged from the side of the glass and went shooting upwards. She watched the tiny explosions as they leapt free of the liquid. She centred the glass on the beer mat, squared the beer mat to the table.
Abby’s stomach hurt. She kept telling herself it was her stomach. As fear fluttered through her mind she tried to convince herself that the pain was higher up, further back, tried to make herself burp as if that would somehow prove something. She thought back to the meal in the church, the pools of grease that shone iridescent in the spaghetti sauce, the starchy stickiness of the pasta.
Neil — the only one from her discussion group who had come to the pub — sat opposite her. They were both quiet, listening to the chatter further down the table. Neil was drinking a glass of white wine. She could hear an edge in Marcus’s voice that told her that he had passed from merriment into drunkenness. The twins had bought shots of tequila. She had handed hers to Marcus. She watched the lights of a fruit machine dance up and down Marcus’s white shirt, saw his hands move as he spoke. He threw himself back laughing, almost toppled from his stool. Now all she wanted was to lie in bed with a hot-water bottle on her stomach and Marcus, sober, asleep beside her.