The Book of Daniel (8 page)

Sloshing around in between the drinks, the same questions came from my mother—and as they went unanswered, her former love for the Lord turned to hate. Seeing her suffer so, I ran alongside her as she journeyed away from God. Not once did I look back over my shoulder, and that wasn’t because I was afraid of being turned into a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife in the old Bible story. It was out of disgust.

Of course, ours wasn’t the first family to fall apart due to infidelity, and it’s true what the cliché says about time being a great healer; despite all that I’ve just said, after only three weeks there were already a few signs of normal life beginning to show through again. However, as with most injuries, healing could only proceed if the wound was left in peace, and that was apparently not on the cards for my mother and me. Just when I began to hope that the worst was over, and that perhaps I wouldn’t need to pour any more whiskey down the sink, Geraldine came back into our lives.

In former times—and they already seemed so long ago that it was perfectly natural to refer to them as such—Geraldine was my mother’s best friend in the church. They were like some kind of unstoppable Christian wrestling tag team: ‘The Holy Avengers’ maybe, or ‘Righteous Justice’. My mother was the organiser of the partnership, content to roll up her sleeves and methodically wear problems down one task at a time, whilst Geraldine was the talker, more likely to be strutting around the ring and yelling her opponents into submission. If there was a course, book or recording on a subject, Geraldine had done it, read it or heard it. Or written it; just the previous year she had published her second book on prayer and marriage.

To be honest, I’m surprised she left us in peace for as long as she did.

I had spent most of the day riding my new bike aimlessly around the neighbourhood. Even though I knew by then that the gift had been mainly my father’s idea, and that its primary purpose was probably to soothe his conscience rather than give me pleasure, I loved it. If you’d asked me four weeks earlier which I would rather have, a bike or a father, I would have laughed, but a lot had changed in that month. Hurtling along the quiet backstreets on my bike was the one place now where I could take refuge from the tangled knot that life at home had become, where the feel of the icy wind on my face and the sound of my tires chewing on the tarmac helped me temporarily forget how quickly I was being forced to grow up. But despite the allure of forgetting everything, I was taking my new responsibilities seriously, and I made sure to pop back home regularly during the day to check up on my mother. Often I would find her sleeping, or simultaneously drinking in one of her books and one of her bottles, but for the last couple of days, I had found her pottering around the house, just like old times; like I said, things had started to improve.

But that particular afternoon, I came back to a war zone.

The first sign that something was wrong was the sight of Geraldine’s car parked outside our house. I knew it was hers. The plethora of militantly evangelistic stickers shouting out of the car’s rear windscreen was unmistakable, and the sight of them set alarm bells ringing. Based on my mother’s reading and attitude of late, I knew that any exposure to Geraldine and her world was unlikely to have a harmonious outcome, and the sudden crash and yells coming from inside the house confirmed my fears. I came to a slippery halt outside the house, threw the bike to one side, and rushed inside, a call to my mother already on my lips.

The call stuck before it got any further than that. I felt, rather than heard, the crunch of something under my shoes as I came into the kitchen, but the source was obvious without needing to look down: broken crockery and glass covered every available surface, sparkling in the afternoon sunlight like the aftermath of a jewellery shop robbery. I looked around at what remained of our kitchen, taking it all in: the overturned chairs; the huge dent in the fridge door; the long red smear on the doorframe that led through to the hallway. I didn’t want to think too carefully about what that red smear could be, but seeing as no-one in our house liked ketchup, there was really only one possibility. Blood. But whose? My mind, still in the thrall of its damned religious upbringing, dutifully conjured up an image of lambs’ blood being smeared on doorposts at the first Passover, protecting the inhabitants of the house from the wrath of God. Based on the state of our kitchen, it seemed that human blood was not nearly as effective.

Such was my shock at the sight in front of me that I remained rooted to the spot, temporarily forgetting the cry that had brought me running in the first place. It took a second cry to galvanise me into action once again. As with the blood stain, I couldn’t tell whether it came from my mother or from Geraldine, but whoever it belonged to, its strength and tone suggested that whatever was taking place between the two of them was far from over—and only likely to get worse if left to run its course. I darted across the kitchen towards the blood-smeared doorframe, my own cry now bursting free.

“Mum! Mum! Are you alright? What—”

The rest of my question was cut off as someone suddenly came flying through the doorway, knocking me to the floor. My hand was ground down against the broken glass, but I barely felt the pain. My mind was too focussed on the cry that now emerged from the body lying on top of me, and on the sickening realisation that that cry was my mother’s. I remembered the last time I’d heard her cry like that, just weeks earlier, on the day that my father had left us. But this was far worse, and was accompanied by a desperate thrashing as she tried to regain her feet, oblivious in her panic that she had landed on her own son.

She managed to stagger upright again just as her opponent strode into the kitchen. I learnt later that the fight had begun when Geraldine had burst into our house unannounced and started unleashing all the ‘advice’ she’d been building up over the last few weeks at my mother—a litany of accusations that encompassed everything from her failure as a good Christian wife to prevent her husband from corrupting a member of the clergy, to the evils of not attending church anymore. My mother, understandably, did not warm to her visitor, especially when her increasingly desperate requests for Geraldine to leave were repeatedly ignored. The last straw came when Geraldine grabbed my mother’s arm and tried to drag her down onto her knees to pray for forgiveness. At that point, my mother could no longer contain her revulsion and snapped, pushing Geraldine away hard enough to knock her to the ground and tear her dress. Instead of turning the other cheek, Geraldine decided that she wanted to claim an eye for an eye, and from then on, things escalated the same way they do in all holy wars. By the time my mother was flung into the kitchen that day, they had been trading blows for the better part of fifteen minutes.

My mother was clearly exhausted, and the stream of blood running down her arm and dripping from the ends of her fingers cleared up the question of whose blood it was on the doorframe. For her part, with her wild hair and matching eyes, Geraldine’s appearance was exactly as I had always imagined Samson’s to be as he had battled against the Philistines; and I expect that wasn’t too far off from how she pictured herself right then, either. “Come on, you heathen,” she bellowed as she stormed into the kitchen, her fists up like a street brawler. “I’m not finished with you yet! I’ll beat the Devil out of you! I’ll…”

She trailed off as the two of them suddenly noticed me lying on the floor amongst the broken glass. I could see my mother trying to make sense of my sudden appearance there; Geraldine was far quicker to respond, and started to inch her way slowly towards the back door. All her bluster had disappeared in an instant. She knew what was going to happen next, and was already hoping to get the fuck out of Dodge before it did. But then two things happened that ruined her chances of escape.

The first was that my mother noticed the cut on the palm of my hand. For a moment, the look of confusion cleared from her eyes, replaced by the maternal concern I had seen there a hundred times before in response to other boyhood scrapes and scuffs.

“Oh, Danny,” she said. She always called me that when I was ill or hurt. “Look at you! You’ve cut your hand. Here, let me—”

Then the second thing happened that sealed Geraldine’s fate (and, for that matter, everyone else’s). As my mother’s agitation increased, so too did the pace of Geraldine’s retreat towards the back door, and, unfortunately for her, she accidentally kicked several shards of glass across the tiled floor as she moved.

The sound reminded my dead consciousness, watching these events unfurling again, of the trick I had used to try to help Jo and me escape from Sam; but before the thought could take hold, my focus was shifted back to this earlier disaster, in another kitchen. The instant the glass had sounded, my mother’s head snapped up, focussing a hot, furious glare on Geraldine. With a roar, she suddenly transformed into a lioness seeking revenge for the injury that had been inflicted on her cub.

“What have you done to him, you crazy bitch? Come here! I’m going to…”

I called out to her to let it go—it was obvious that there could be no happy ending if this continued to escalate—but she might just as well have been deaf; or maybe she misinterpreted the fear in my voice as pain, in which case all I did was make things worse. With a wordless yell, she lunged across the kitchen towards her foe. Geraldine abandoned any semblance of stealth, and with a piggy squeal, turned and fled full-tilt from the house. If she had been a truck going down a bumpy road, then words bounced out of her like potatoes falling off the back.

“Satan… be gone from… this… woman! Lord… give me strength… to cast… the Devil out!”

“I’ll fucking cast
you
out!” my mother yelled as she chased Geraldine across the kitchen. “I told you I didn’t want your kind of help, but you just wouldn’t fucking take ‘no’ for an answer. And now look what you’ve done!”

“I didn’t… touch him,” wailed Geraldine over her shoulder.

“Oh, and I suppose that great big cut on his hand just appeared there spontaneously, did it, like fucking stigmata? You self-righteous cow! Always poking your damned nose in where it’s not welcome, always looking for opportunities to strengthen your own high opinion of yourself with your so-called ‘help’, but never willing to take any real fucking responsibility for your actions. Just like your damned God; always expecting things to go His way, always expecting us to do what we’re told, but as soon as the shit really hits the fan, He doesn’t want to know. Why don’t you just take your God,” said my mother, grabbing a small potted cactus from the kitchen windowsill, “and
fuck off
!”

My mother underlined the last of her words by hurling the cactus after Geraldine. Ordinarily, such a wild throw would have missed by a mile, but we were clearly fated to have our lives destroyed completely that day, and so of course it hit Geraldine square on the back of her head instead. She pitched forward, mid-stride, and sprawled to the ground in a shower of cactus and sand. My mother’s hands flew up to her mouth, but whether that was from shock at what she had done, or because she was trying to hide a smile, I never found out. If it was the latter, then Geraldine’s words as she got shakily to her feet would have wiped it away fairly quickly.

“Oh, now you’ve
really
done it. God won’t stand for your blasphemy or your violence,” she said, somehow, impossibly, missing the hypocrisy of the latter part of this statement. “Your words will be your undoing, and your actions will not go unpunished. Vengeance is mine, saieth the Lord!”

“Ha! What else can God do to me that He hasn’t already done? He’s filled my life with His lies, He’s stolen my husband from me, and to top it all off, He’s sent you to rub my face in it! You’ve got fifteen seconds to get out of here before I start showing you the real meaning of vengeance, you sanctimonious bitch.”

Something in the tone of my mother’s voice must have convinced Geraldine that her vengeance would have to wait—although not for too long, as it happened. She turned and fled towards her car, causing my mother to mutter darkly to herself and look around the kitchen for further ammunition, fifteen seconds or not. The sound of the car door slamming shut brought her search to a hasty end, and she grabbed a saucepan from the worktop and ran outside. Her choice of weapon evoked a fresh feeling of déjà vu—again, beyond that which already came from literally living through my life for a second time—but once more, there was no time for the feeling to take hold; instead, I was forced to stagger out of the house after my mother, a passenger in my own, younger consciousness.

We were just in time to catch Geraldine pulling away from the kerb. As usual for her, the window on the driver’s side of the car had been left open. She rarely closed it, preferring instead to share her love of loud worship music with the rest of the world as she drove around, whether they liked it or not. But that day, she used it instead to issue one last parting shot as she drove off.

“Just you wait! You haven’t heard the last of this!”

My mother’s response was to throw the saucepan after the car, but this time, her aim was not so supernaturally accurate. The saucepan bounced off the tarmac with a hollow clang and stumbled to a forlorn stop in the gutter. The car sped down the road, and I caught one last glimpse of all those hateful, holier-than-thou stickers in the rear windscreen before it rounded the corner. The sound of the engine faded and then, finally, Geraldine was gone.

My mother limped back into the house and immediately set to work bandaging my hand, without saying a word. An uneasy silence descended in the wake of Geraldine’s departure, and I tried to fill the void by asking my mother about what had happened as I started to dress her own wounds, but she was too shaken and exhausted to give anything more than perfunctory answers and wan reassurances.

Even without the insight gained from living through these events for a second time, the younger Dan knew that more was still to come that day, that we were merely experiencing a pause as the rollercoaster crested the top of the next terrifying drop. Sure enough, I had scarcely finished tying a bandage around my mother’s arm when I heard the distant sound of sirens approaching. Another surge of déjà vu swept through me as my dead self remembered the same sound filling the air on the night that Jo and I had died.