The Book of Daniel (7 page)

I was just about to wade after the others to catch up when I heard a quiet thump. My first thought was that it was merely a lump of snow falling to the ground, shaken from the trees by a startled animal, but the faint, muffled moan that followed it didn’t sound much like snow to me. I tried to force my teeth to hold still long enough for me to pinpoint the direction from which the sound had come, assuming I hadn’t just imagined it. Every second I stood still, I could see the lights ahead of me getting fainter, and it took all of my willpower not to hurry ahead towards them.

I craned my neck around, searching for the source of the noise, when suddenly I noticed a nearby fir tree that was taller than the others. My heart thudded in my chest as I remembered the tree from my dream. I traced the beam of my torch from the top of the tree down to its base, and to the snowdrift piled up against it. For a moment, I stood there, pointing the torch at the snowdrift, perhaps expecting it to move, or to melt; then I rushed over to it—as quickly as I could through my fatigue and the snow—set the torch down carefully on the ground, and started to dig, flinging the snow over my shoulder.

“Hey! Over here!” I yelled, pausing in my excavations for a moment to try to summon help. For one terrible moment, there was no response, and I feared that I, too, had become lost. Then flashes of torchlight and the steady sounds of people striding towards me through the snow cut across the desolation. I exhaled.

“Dan! Danny, where are you?”

“Over here! I think I’ve found them!”

The glow of humanity grew stronger, and soon the other people in my group had gathered around. At the back, the policeman in charge radioed back to base camp that I had been found. He looked pissed off. My mother engulfed me, then pushed me away, holding me at arm’s length.

“Danny, you shouldn’t have run off like that! For a moment there, we thought we’d lost you, too!”

“I’m alright, Mum. I think I’ve found them! They’re under this snow somewhere.”

I wasn’t so young as to miss the doubtful glances that passed around the group. The policeman stepped forward.

“Son, if they were under that lot, they’d have died of hypothermia or suffocation by now. Come on, let’s keep moving.”

“You don’t understand. They’re under there. I know it. God told me.”

Although I’d only mumbled the last three words, the night air was still enough to carry them. More glances were exchanged, but most of the people in the group were from church, and this time the glances were of a more excited variety. Several people stepped forward, getting ready to expand upon my modest excavations. But the policeman held up his hands, adamant.

“Look, we already searched this grid earlier. We have to get over to the next one. If we don’t find anything there,
then
we’ll come back and start searching the other grids again, but we have to do it systematically. We can’t afford to waste any time. Those girls could be dying out there. I need concrete evidence, not visions, and especially not from someone who just wandered off into the night and almost started a second manhunt.”

Over the babble of protests that followed, another fragile moan suddenly drifted into the air, unmistakably originating from the snowdrift, and the argument was settled immediately. The policeman shot me a look—half wonder, half resentment—and radioed the base camp again, but the sound of his voice was buried beneath a rush of excitement. Everybody set upon the snowdrift, all traces of tiredness suddenly gone. The snow was light and powdery, and although our breath was soon coming in icy, ragged gasps, we quickly carved out a passage towards the tree. Somehow, I managed to find my way to the front of the scrabbling hands, and just as I did so, the snow was suddenly gone, giving way into a natural, insulating cavity that had been formed between the lowest branches of the tree and the ground. And there, huddled together in a pile close to the tree’s trunk, were the missing girls. The grey shade of their skin contrasted horribly with the assorted rainbow colours of their winter clothes, and for a moment it was impossible to tell if they were dead or only had their eyes closed.

At the first gasp of discovery, the eyes of one of the girls flickered open. She was quite a lot smaller than the other three, but even through the frost that speckled it, I could see a determined set to her face that suggested she could easily take care of herself—a trait which became very obvious in later years. “Precious,” her red woolly hat proclaimed in a flowing script. At the time I thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever seen, but sixteen years later I wouldn’t be able to think of a more perfect word for her. Jo.

She gingerly detached herself from the bundle of brightly coloured misery under the tree and began to crawl forwards, her eyes fixed on mine, cloudy with weakness yet at the same time bright with amazement. And oh so blue. Behind me, I heard someone calling for blankets and the crackle of radio chatter, but I was oblivious.

“God?” she asked, with starry eyes.

“Um, no. I’m Dan,” I said, not quite knowing how to respond. Some crazy part of me had expected to find a sheep under the tree, not a girl. Nevertheless, I made sure to keep my torch—the closest thing I had to a shepherd’s staff—out of her reach. Just in case.

“Oh.”

I wasn’t quite ready for that. With my thirteen-year-old sense of pride, I was hoping for a little more gratitude and a little less disappointment. “We’re here to rescue you,” I said, trying to regain some of my poise.

“I was praying for God to save us. I thought you were Him, but I remember now; He didn’t say He would come Himself. He told me that He was going to send someone else to save us instead.”

“And so He has, Sweetheart, so He has,” said Mr Wright, the church organist, ruffling my hair and then reaching past me to haul Joanna out of the shelter and into a blanket. “Dan here is an agent of God’s will, sent by the Lord to find you, just as you said. Praise Him for His mercy!” You could practically hear the capitalisation of the divine pronouns in his voice.

The adults took over, recovering the other bewildered girls from what had almost been their tomb and plying them with hot chocolate from the thermos flasks we had with us. Feeling superfluous, I drifted away from the hubbub, kicking my way through the snow. I reflected on what Mr Wright had said. Although the girls were safe, any good feelings I had about that were spoilt by the impression that I had been manipulated into finding them like some kind of divine puppet; and that now, having served my purpose, I had been discarded and forgotten, while God got all the credit. It wasn’t only disappointment that gnawed at me, though; part of me was also still expecting the rest of my dream to come true, for the punishment to be meted out that being turned into a sheep symbolised… especially given the blasphemously ungrateful thoughts now running through my head. I should have been rejoicing in God’s mercy, just like Mr Wright had said, but instead found myself filled with doubts and fears, questioning the faith that had been a constant part of my life throughout my upbringing.

As I was brooding over these things, Joanna broke free of the crowd and shuffled over towards me, swaddled in blankets. With her precious red hat on top, she looked like a matchstick. Dark brown imprints from the mug of chocolate she was sipping gave her mouth a smile, but underneath, she looked solemn. “Thank you, Dan.”

“You’re welcome,” I muttered.

“Are you really an agent of God? Like James Bond?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” I inwardly rolled my eyes.

“Wow,” she breathed, her eyes growing even rounder, against all possibility.

I found the silence that followed this exchange unbearably awkward, although Joanna seemed comfortable enough, staring at me and sipping noisily on her chocolate. I mumbled an excuse and made my way over to the others, busying myself with helping to distribute drinks. But now and again I caught Joanna looking at me in that intense way of hers that seemed like it could start a fire; and which, many years later, would.

Chapter 6

I
thought that things would calm down after that—that the search for the lost girls was enough excitement to be getting on with—but it turned out I was wrong. I found out just how wrong less than two weeks later when, before we’d even finished eating the last of the Christmas turkey, my father ran off with Julia, the pretty, young curate from our church.

I have no idea how long they had been planning on eloping together. The evening before they left, my mother, father and I had sat together in the living room, joking, laughing, pleasantly sleepy from the day’s festivities, just like normal. Even my father’s offer to go into town the next morning to get some groceries was nothing out of the ordinary. Certainly my mother was only too happy to take him up on it; she had been indulging in a bit of sherry that evening—perfectly normal for the time of year—and was treating us to purposefully awful renditions of some of her favourite Cole Porter songs. But it was clear that when the curtain went down on her show that evening, it would be down for a long time. When we finally turned in for the night, I prayed to God at great length about how thankful I was. I was blessed with a loving family, food, shelter, almost two more weeks of school holiday and a brand new bike with which to enjoy them. Life couldn’t get any better than this, I thought.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realise how right I was.

I remember hearing the door shut when my father went out in the morning, but, being the age I was, there was no way I was going to let that interrupt my lazy holiday sleep patterns, and I quickly drifted back to dreams of riding my bike. I knew that my mother, too, would carry on sleeping for quite some time yet, recovering from the slight hangover that she would have developed. She certainly enjoyed her Christmas cheer, but then why not? She worked so hard the rest of the time, looking after not just my father and me, but seemingly everybody else in the church congregation, too. She deserved a chance to let her hair down. How was I to know that her propensity for the occasional seasonal tipple was in fact the Ghost of Christmas Future? Or, at least, would have been, if she had made it as far as the next Christmas. Hindsight is a beautiful, terrible thing, but here rendered particularly vicious by the fact that, reliving my life as I passed through the valley of the shadow of death, I already
knew
everything that was going to go wrong. And there was nothing I could do about it.

My dreamy slumber and my dead introspection were both ripped apart by the sound of a primeval wail filling the house. I was awake in an instant, my heart pounding, and I raced down the stairs so quickly that if I’d misjudged a single step, I could very easily have broken my neck and now be reliving a much shorter life. I charged into the kitchen, fully expecting the worst, so I was caught off guard when all I found there was my mother, sitting at the kitchen table, head down, apparently calm. But then she raised her head, and I knew that things were far from okay.

She was already wearing the headscarf that she donned whenever doing housework, so I assume that she had come downstairs hoping to do a little tidying up while the house was still quiet. She had got as far as making herself a cup of coffee, but the note my father had left had ambushed her before she’d had a chance to get any further than that. I didn’t ever get to read the note myself—my mother made sure of that—but whatever it said, it had been enough to completely
break
her; there’s no other word that accurately describes the way she looked that morning. A stray coil of hair stuck out from underneath her headscarf, like a spring poking out of a damaged clockwork toy, and it whipped to and fro as she rocked back and forth in her chair. To the pace of this terrible metronome, I slowly managed to prise what had happened out of her. And the more I learnt, the angrier I got; not just at my father and Julia for their betrayal, but at the God that had allowed this to happen. The grateful prayers of the night before turned sour in my memory. There I had been, feeling safe and secure under His watchful and apparently loving gaze, when all along He’d had
this
up His divine sleeve. I was furious.

In the days that followed, my mother did her best to put a brave face on things, but she wasn’t very successful. Whereas before she had been as cheerful a person as you could imagine, always bustling around the house with a song and a smile on her lips, she now drew in on herself. Her smile became brittle, and was swiftly replaced with a melancholy look whenever she thought I wasn’t looking. But then she started doing a lot of other things when she thought I wasn’t looking, too, such as picking apart the clothes my father had left behind, one thread at a time, and reading books with such blunt titles as
The Absent God
and
The Cult of the Church
. I wasn’t the only one pissed off at God, it seemed.

And then there was the drinking.

Within twenty-four hours of my father’s departure, my mother discovered a new religion, and before long she was worshipping at the Church of the Distilled Spirit: services every evening from eight o’clock (and often all day at weekends, Hallelujah). I did what I could to prevent it, dutifully tipping bottle after bottle of the stuff down the kitchen sink when she was upstairs sleeping it off, but like the heads on some kind of eighty-proof hydra, more bottles always sprang up to replace their fallen brethren. I tried to talk her out of her self-destructive intentions, but with no success; the only topics of conversation—or, more accurately, sermonising—my mother was interested in were (a) what a bastard my father was, and (b) how God had betrayed her. I found myself agreeing with her on both counts, and in doing so, would often let myself be carried along in the bumpy flow of her vitriolic outpourings rather than try to steer her away from the jagged rocks farther downstream.

As the days immediately after my father’s departure dragged by, I grew increasingly bitter, and increasingly worried for my mother. I was terrified that I was going to come down to breakfast one morning to find her drowned in her own vomit, but instead of prayers of gratitude when I found she was okay, all I could find in my heart was hate towards God. Where was His mercy now, when my mother needed Him most? Why had He chosen to punish her like this after all she had done in His service?