Kingdom Come Read online

  KINGDOM COME

  A Semi-Autobiographical Novel

  By

  virginia wEIR

  Copyright © 2017 Virginia Weir

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright C 1973, 1978, 1984 by the International Bible Society.Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Limited. All rights reserved.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador

  9 Priory Business Park,

  Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

  Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

  Tel: 0116 279 2299

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  Twitter: @matadorbooks

  ISBN 978 1788030 731

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  This novel is dedicated to the Spirit of

  the Sovereign Lord, my inspiration.

  ‘If I knew that being a Christian was this wretched, I’d never have become one.’

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  1

  Even as she plodded towards an unspectacular 2:2, Matilda’s eye was always on the main chance. She wanted to write but of course a writer’s life is a poor one, so it made sense to train as something else. Liking the idea of short working days and long holidays, Matilda put herself down for teacher training.

  Naturally, her relatives were appalled and tried to talk her out of it. Matilda, however, went ahead and snow-ploughed her way through a PGCE in Secondary Education.

  She could find only bitty part-time jobs so, the ink on her teaching certificate scarcely dry, she took a month-long TEFLA Certificate course and flew out to Hong Kong. There she got a job as a schoolmarm in a local secondary school, teaching History and English to the children of taxi-drivers and waitresses. Sister Cynthia, the school Principal, patrolled the corridors in crepe-soled shoes to ensure that English, not Cantonese, was the language of instruction. In fact, the only Cantonese Matilda learned were obscenities and curse words culled from her boyfriend’s pillow.

  In those days, she was staying in some ghastly white memsahib private club and institute known as the Virgins’ Retreat and in the sultry summer of 1992, while the she-dragon in charge was on “vac”, Matilda happily drank her way through a bottle of Beaujolais a day. When the she-dragon returned and the girls’ chits were examined, the predilection came to light and, after a stiff talking-to, the she-dragon forbade the club servants to serve her any more alcohol. Matilda was reduced to sloping out at supper time to the bars and clubs of Lan Kwai Fong for her daily ration of liquor.

  On the first of September – the day the schools returned after the summer break – one of the Virgins returned from an extended holiday in the Philippines where she had married her (male) tour guide. This girl stopped only long enough to move her things out of the Virgins’ Retreat and invite a few of the other girls – Matilda included – to the Kowloon-side serviced apartment of a friend for drinks.

  A glorious time of it was had by all and they returned just before the Virgins’ Retreat shut its doors at midnight, Matilda singing rugby songs of inane filthiness. The racket woke the she-dragon, who came down in silk dressing-gown and fluffy Minnie Mouse slippers just as Helen and Toni were carrying an almost-insensible Matilda over the threshold. Matilda was so drunk she spewed all over the potted yucca plant in the entrance vestibule and passed out. There was nothing for it but for the she-dragon to call an ambulance and have Matilda carted off to the Queen Mary Hospital. She only regained consciousness on a camp bed in the corridor in one of the women’s medical wards on the ground floor at a quarter to six in the morning. After ascertaining that she could walk, Matilda repaired to the ward bathroom to check that she still had all her teeth and that nothing was blackened or bruised.

  The only memory she had of the evening was of coming-to in the back of the ambulance as it drove up the Peak and the few minutes thereafter as Sandy the Evangelical Christian took her though the Jesus Prayer before she sank back into unconsciousness. She had become a Christian.

  Matilda walked out of the hospital that day – a little unsteadily, to be sure – and into the back of a taxi. At the Virgins’ Retreat, the she-dragon awaited. Matilda was whisked into the office as soon as she stepped into the lounge. Thunder and lightning followed. The upshot of that interview was that Matilda was expelled in disgrace.

  Undeterred, she found lodgings with the mother of one of the teachers at the school. Sister Cynthia arranged for Matilda to teach evening classes to adults at the University of Hong Kong shortly afterwards – the idea was that an evening job would keep her out of the bars and clubs. As a ploy, it had only limited success – Matilda waited until after the evening classes were over before she attacked the bar in the Kowloon branch of Dan Ryan’s. It wasn’t until the New Year of 1993 that she gave the alcohol up completely, without so much as a backward glance. It was a miracle.

  After two years of teaching school, Matilda got a teaching job at the British Council. It was wonderful, especially after teaching teenagers. By this time, she had become a charismatic Christian and was going to church in Cheung Sha Wan, where she was baptised and where she began to pray in tongues. She spent the summer looking after recovering addicts. It was there she got the idea for her first novel, sketched out on the back of a tax return, and she duly returned to the UK.

  Her plan was to do an MA in English-language teaching at All Saints University in Fleet, where her parents had retired. At the last minute, however, she changed her mind and decided to follow her heart and do an MA in Writing instead. She enrolled in September, the day after she signed the lease for a studio flat in Goodramgate, equidistant from the campus and from her parents’ Victorian terraced house.

  2

  What a glorious, happy time she had of it, studying for her MA in Writing! Whereas her undergraduate days were spent fending off depression and sex-starved Freshers, now they were spent taking classes in The Modern Novel and in British Writing Since 1945 and knocking her novel into some semblance of shape. It was only a short walk from her Goodramgate
flat to the All Saints campus. She joined a small charismatic fellowship known as City Mission and went to both morning and evening services on Sundays and to the house group on a Thursday evening.

  This last was a group of Christians who met once a week to study the Bible and to pray together. The house group she joined was one specially for students and she got to know the other young people in the church.

  Not too long after she started at All Saints, her Catholic grandmother had a stroke which meant she required more nursing care than her aunt could provide and was moved into a residential hospital. Matilda took the train up to Glasgow to visit her in the three-week break at Christmas and again in February when the first semester was over. Granny had a room of her own and Matilda went up with a rucksack full of goodies from the Christian bookshop in town.

  But Granny proved impervious to the Good News. She interrupted Matilda’s rhapsody on City Mission to ask, ‘And what’s wrong with your own church?’

  ‘City Mission is my church, Granny,’ Matilda replied.

  ‘I meant the Catholic Church,’ said Granny.

  ‘I would’ve gone to the Catholic Church if they told me I was a sinner in need of saving,’ Matilda said.

  ‘Why didn’t you, then?’

  ‘They didn’t tell me I was a sinner. City Mission does.’

  It sorrowed her that Granny was proving as indifferent to the blandishments of the gospel as her parents and sisters. Never much of a prayer-warrior, Matilda would get down on her knees and pray for the salvation of her family. City Mission had all sorts of tips when it came to witnessing to families but these were useless in Matilda’s case, as their radars were so finely-attuned to God-talk that they would reject whatever she had to say whenever the conversation came remotely near the subjects of Jesus or eternal life.

  Matilda returned to Fleet on the night mail train. She washed at the station rest room and walked into town, towards All Saints.

  ‘No rest for t’wicked,’ she murmured as she went to the campus library.

  It so happened that Thursday night when they were discussing a portion of scripture, a reference was made to the Unforgivable Sin. Hearing about the Unforgivable Sin is almost a rite of passage in fundamentalist churches. As soon as she heard the phrase “unforgivable sin”, Matilda felt white-hot pinpricks all over her flesh.

  ‘Surely not,’ she said. ‘There’s no unforgivable sin.’

  ‘It’s in the Bible,’ said Avril, another postgraduate.

  ‘Where?’ she asked but Avril had already been side-tracked by another conversation.

  The idea that there might be a sin so horrid that it could not be atoned for filled Matilda with horror. If there was an unforgivable sin, then it stood to reason, in Matilda’s mind, that several facts claimed about the Christian religion could not be true. If, for example, there remained a sin which put a person beyond redemption, then it could not follow that Jesus’ death on the cross was a propitiation for all sin. Furthermore, Jesus could not take the credit for salvation alone, since a person’s salvation obviously depended upon their not committing the unforgivable sin. And so on. In fact, the more Matilda thought about it, the more her faith was in danger of becoming a ball of wool whose thread was being yanked so often and so hard it threatened to unravel completely.

  The first thing to do was vouchsafe the facts. Matilda took her New International Version Bible and searched it for mention of this mysteriously unforgivable sin. She found a reference to it in Matthew chapter 12, verses 22 – 32:

  They bought him a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute and Jesus healed him so that he could both talk and see. All the people were astonished and said, “Could this be the Son of David?”

  But when the Pharisees heard this, they said, “It is only by Beelzebub, the prince of demons, that this fellow drives out demons.”

  Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand. If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand? And if I drive out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your people drive them out? So, then, they will be your judges. But if I drive out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.

  “Or again, how can anyone enter a strongman’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man? Then he can rob his house.

  “He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters. And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men but the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or the age to come…”

  As soon as Matilda read this passage, she was flooded with relief. She hadn’t said the Holy Spirit or Jesus was demonic; no, nothing like that. She hadn’t committed this vile and unforgivable sin. It was a warning against Jesus’ enemies.

  Her relief was short-lived. The more she thought about it, the more her salvation depended on her not saying that Jesus was demon-possessed. While it was unlikely that she would ever say something so vile consciously, the idea that she might say or might have said it unconsciously took hold. How could she be sure, this side of eternity? All she had to go on was the information in the New Testament. If you said Jesus was the devil, you were risotto – eternally. God would never forgive you.

  Unfortunately, all that happened was that Matilda was sometimes tempted to say so. The first time this happened, Matilda was troubled by the nagging doubt that, while she may not have committed a sin exactly, she might have encouraged the Wicked One to torment her by the fear the thought excited. She asked for the Lord to cleanse her mind with the blood of Jesus after this.

  Then came the fear that she would inadvertently curse the work of the Holy Spirit. Again, the details of how this sin would be accomplished were vague but Matilda imagined she might come out with the remark that Jesus or the Holy Spirit did the devil’s work. And when this fear worked itself to the surface of her consciousness, Matilda began to pray that the Lord would keep her from unconscious sin. She figured if she prayed this, the desire to commit conscious sin would take care of itself.

  Her words must have betrayed her because Grenville, the dishy West Indian deacon, took her aside and explained something of the nature of unconscious sin. He told her to read the first letter of John and, when she did, she found a shred of comfort.

  The idea that the blood of Jesus was enough to purify not only her own sin but the sin of the whole world was not new to her but she had not grasped its full import before. While this did not overcome the fear she had regarding this sin, it afforded her valuable respite, precious time in which she could take her gratitude to the foot of the cross and there let it rest. Thereafter, whenever she felt herself assailed by doubt and despair, she pictured herself resting at Jesus’ feet and would relax with this picture in mind.

  But there were so many unanswered questions about the Unforgivable Sin that Matilda didn’t know where to begin. If, for example, it was unforgivable to say that Jesus was evil, what would happen to her if she were forced to think such a thought repeatedly? She wondered about this because she caught herself, every now and then, thinking that Jesus or the Holy Spirit was evil. While she knew that God would forgive her if she confessed these thoughts – they were not volitional – she dreaded to think what might become of her if she was to lose control and think them deliberately.

  Instead of being assuaged, the fear this sin provoked only intensified. Matilda would be doing perfectly ordinary things like buying underwear in M&S when an overwhelming fear of committing this sin would paralyse her. She would have to abandon her basket full of bras and knickers and flee to the safety of her room, where she would prostrate herself
and beg God’s forgiveness until the episode passed.

  Only it didn’t because she was left with a fear that she was somehow slipping through God’s fingers and that she was somehow fated to commit this monstrous sin. It wasn’t something she could easily share with other members of the church – many had a distinctly hazy idea of what constituted the Unforgivable Sin, some thinking it had to do with denying the existence of the Holy Spirit, which begged – in Matilda’s mind, at least – how her pre-conversion disbelief could ever be forgiven.

  3

  Her year at All Saints was quickly up; all too soon she had to move out of her small flat and into a house in Poppy Road in a dismal street of low-income terraced housing, shared with two Christians from the River of Life Church in Amen Corner. She needed a job and found one working evenings at the Tech teaching literacy and numeracy skills three nights a week. She was still writing her novel and had hit upon the ingenious title of. A person in a low-paid, flexitime job didn’t just have a McJob; they had a McLife.

  She spent the run-up to Christmas typing and retyping her novel. One of her parents’ more useful notions had been to get her to take a secretarial diploma on graduation. Matilda never got a secretarial job but found the touch-typing invaluable for academic papers and novel-writing. Her single room in Poppy Road had been unfurnished except for the chest of drawers and bed; Matilda found the wherewithal to buy a desk and chair and shelves for her small collection of novels. She worked on her novel during the day and worked at the Tech at night.

  Her novel, once checked for typos and errors of fact, was printed out, sandwiched between black card and submitted. She was pleased with it. The tutors were, too. They praised its cleverness and her adroit characterisation of the low-paid, flexitime workforce that staffed the supermarkets and fast-food outlets of modern Britain. But her attempts to get it published were met with repeated failure. Editors liked her style but the novel was too avowedly Evangelical for the commercial fiction market and she did not feel like tampering with its Christian message. She tried the Christian publishing houses but they recoiled at her presentation of a lesbian character.