Kingdom Come Page 2

  Matilda started to relax a little. She started hanging about with Mandy, one of the single girls at church. Mandy didn’t work and existed off Incapacity Benefit due to her acute pancreatitis. She took morphine for the pain and often had to go to bed to sleep it off during the day. Mandy lived in a two-bedroom maisonette in Townsend Street which she shared with her brother Robert, who was also out of work. After spending the mornings writing, Matilda would often walk around to Townsend Street to cook lunch or tea for Mandy, who often had not much more than half a pint of milk and a couple of pieces of stale bread in her kitchen. A muncher she certainly wasn’t.

  ‘You’ve got to eat regularly,’ Matilda would admonish her, ‘your medication will work better with a hot meal inside you.’

  ‘I ate yesterday,’ Mandy would say.

  ‘You need to eat more than once every two days. Try three times a day.’

  ‘I don’t have the strength.’

  And so, Matilda taught her some simple recipes like smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, hot and sour soup and garlic mushrooms with toasted muffin. For a while it worked: Mandy was eating two or three meals a day. Her cheeks became plump and she lost her haggard look. Every now and then, when finances allowed, Matilda would take Mandy out to dinner at Old Orleans or the Chinese place in Swinegate. For someone who had an eating disorder, Mandy could put away an obscene number of sticky spare ribs.

  At first, Mandy wouldn’t drink. She absolutely wouldn’t touch the stuff. Then she began to order a glass of white with her meals. One became two and two, three. Soon enough they were drinking on the way to going to the pub. Then would come the guilt, followed by penitent sobriety.

  4

  In the summer of 1997, as Matilda was watching the Hong Kong handover ceremonies on her portable black and white TV, a prophet came to the House of the Lord in the form of one Betty Boulder, a diminutive lady from Miami, Florida. The meetings were well-advertised, so the whole church and quite a few others knew that Betty was coming to City Mission.

  The church was packed. Mandy whispered in her ear, ‘People won’t come when it’s wet or windy but they’ll pack the house out for a Word – pathetic, isn’t it?’

  Matilda’s mind had grasped the concept of prophecy but not that of personal prophecy. To her mind, God only spoke when something important was going to happen, like the advent of the Messiah or the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Personal prophecy such as the kind Betty Boulder gave was something new, although not to those who had been at City Mission for any length of time. She knew that all prophecies were taped to check for accuracy but not how Betty operated.

  The first meeting at which Betty spoke was held on a Friday evening, to which Matilda had only agreed to go at the last minute, persuaded by Mandy. The meeting began with Betty calling out a list of names and giving these people a series of prophecies. Matilda felt apprehensive at first – if God spoke to her, would he rebuke her for manifest failings and misdemeanours? She was sure God would only point out her faults and mistakes and dreaded being fingered in front of the congregation.

  After the Sunday morning meeting, she was a little less certain. God, said Betty Boulder, spoke to people for their edification and comfort. And, listening to the prophecies, it was clear that God would only say what was encouraging rather than use the meetings as an opportunity to tear strips off folk. But Matilda had to wait until the end of the last meeting on Sunday evening for her Word.

  It came very suddenly. Betty stopped prophesying about someone else and said into the microphone, ‘Sorry, I should know your name by now, the lady in the red shirt.’

  ‘Matilda,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t quite catch that,’ said Betty Boulder and Kerry, one of the musicians, said, ‘Matilda,’ loud enough for Betty to hear.

  ‘This is my translator up in the corner,’ joked Betty as she bade Matilda to stand up so she could prophesy. She spoke rapidly into her microphone. ‘Daughter, my love is poured out upon you. I desired you, I pursued you, I overtook you, says God…’

  As soon as Betty began to prophesy, Matilda laughed with pleasure.

  ‘I did not make you pink and sweet. I did not make you a peacemaker, says the Lord, and there are some in the House of the Lord whom the Lord makes as peacemakers. Instead I made you as dynamite, as one who has the extended horn and the thick hide of a rhino. If I were to soften you, if I were to sand off all your rough edges, says the Lord, you would have no point of impact.

  ‘At the same time, you’re not going to look around you to see what others are doing before you decide how you’ll respond to me. In the days of praising, you’ll praise. In the days of shaking, you’ll shake. In the days of leaping and shouting, you’ll leap and shout, too, says the Lord…

  ‘There are some things others find shame in that I don’t find shame in, so I’m shaking those old skeletons in the closet because the testimony I have put within you is needed to release others also…’

  Practically the whole church got a Word, except for Mandy, who thought Betty Boulder was giving her dirty looks.

  ‘You got the best Word of the lot,’ Mandy said afterwards.

  ‘I expected an earful from him,’ Matilda said in bubbly good humour as she left the sanctuary. ‘I had no idea he thought so highly of me.’

  ‘He wouldn’t give a bad Word,’ said Mandy.

  The next day, Monday, when Matilda went to work, she was still buzzing. She practically skipped all the way up Poppy Road and through the shortcut to work. She couldn’t wait to tell people at work that the Lord of Hosts, the Mighty One of Israel, Creator of Heaven and Earth, had spoken to her personally in such glowing terms, even though she knew that few, if any, of her workmates would believe it to be the Word of God. Most would think it was a confidence trick, the kind played on those who visited mediums for a “word” from dead relatives. Word was that copies were going to be made of the prophecies at all three of the meetings but it would take at least a week to copy enough tapes for everyone who wanted them.

  The week they had to wait was agonising. Matilda just wanted to plug the earphones into her Walkman and listen to what the Lord had to say about her. Betty had told them they had to pray their prophecies into being and Matilda was chomping at the bit to get praying over each prophecy.

  Seven days later, the tapes were ready to collect. Matilda had only ordered two of the three tapes, the tapes of the Sunday morning and evening meetings, and she raced back to her room in Poppy Road. She jammed the cassette into her Walkman and switched it on. It took a lot of impatient listening to locate her prophecy, one of the last Words to be given.

  Every time she listened to it, she giggled anew. There was something just so funny about being given your own personal Word. The Lord obviously knew her. She now knew he loved her; she might have had her doubts before, when she thought she was going to get an earful for skipping church services or not reading her Bible or for rarely bothering to pray. By accentuating the positive, the Lord had taught her to look at herself in a new light. And she would giggle with delight every time she remembered her Word.

  After listening to the tape a good dozen times, she knew her Word well enough to start transcribing it into her notebook. There was a good deal more than she remembered and she wrote it out in longhand so she would have a fair copy. She typed it up on her computer and printed it out. She made three copies and took them down to the office supply shop in town to get them laminated. She tacked a copy on the bedroom wall and would read through it every morning to remind herself what the Lord really thought about her.

  Now that she had laminated copies of her prophecy, she started praying it into being, as Betty had told them. She was a bit cautious about praying for the skeletons in her closet to be shaken and stirred – it sounded painful and unpleasant. Skeletons in the closet were usually those things people tried to hide – did the Lord me
an her former sex life or something else? Prayer brought little in the way of clarity.

  She listened to her Word nearly every day when she got back from work or before she went to bed at night. She read her Word every day when she got up, before she started the day. Immersed in her prophecy, she could before long recite it whole.

  5

  The job tutoring English and maths did not last long. When it went by the wayside, Matilda knew she had to find another job quickly but this proved easier said than done. The summer of 1997 was spent in the desperate search for work; Matilda got a part-time cleaning job in the offices of a theatre company that paid her the new legal minimum and no more. Furthermore, it was the longest period she had been without gainful employment. She could earn four pounds a week before benefit clawbacks kicked in.

  She had savings, of course, but these were all eaten up in the self-publication of her novel, McLife. She ordered a print run of two hundred copies, the minimum the printer would consider and the maximum she thought she could dispose of. She gave copies to members of her family, friends and admirers. She still had one hundred and fifty-two copies left, so she advertised it at church, where she got rid of a further twenty-two. Unfortunately, someone complained to the pastor about filth being sold in the church and there were questions asked about her status as a believer. One or two of the most outraged wanted her to be publicly disciplined but Paul had to point out that Matilda wasn’t officially a member, only a member of the congregation. The fuss kicked up was so stinky that Paul the pastor agreed to read the book to find out whether it was pornographic or not. He read it and reported that it was not and the fuss died down. But bad feelings lingered. People would ask her why she didn’t write testimonies instead, to which she replied, ‘I want to write my own stories, not other people’s.’

  By this time, it was early autumn and schools had reopened after the summer break. Matilda still had not found meaningful employment and was starting to wonder if she would ever work again. Without savings, she was finding it difficult to manage on thirty-six pounds a week, stocking up on tins of baked beans and lentils. And then she saw the notice in the job centre for mail sorters.

  Each year, around October, the mail depot hired temporary workers in the run-up to Christmas. Matilda had done a bit of mail-sorting the summer she graduated with her BA and remembered the money was good. She was anxious to get the DSS off her back, so applied for the job the day the advertisement was placed in the job centre.

  There was a literacy and numeracy test, which she passed with the maximum score, followed by an interview and three days’ training. The pass rate was sorting five hundred items of mail in twenty minutes with ninety-nine percent accuracy, a test Matilda passed in her second afternoon.

  They asked if she wanted fulltime Christmas working hours off the back of it. This entailed seven days of twelve-hour shifts – tough but survivable – and Matilda said yes, so she found herself working eighty-four hours a week, from six in the morning until six in the evening, making silly money. She worked in Primary, sorting letters, flats and packets for evening dispatch. Sometimes, for a change, they had her sorting business mail into four trays on a shelf above the sorting table.

  Matilda was a fast, accurate, sorter. Some of the lazier postmen felt put out by this and retaliated in various ways. Some refused to speak to her, others traded in rumours. A girl who worked in the kitchen filed a malicious complaint when Matilda complained about her lunch being cold. Another reported her for racism towards a member of staff when she described them as being a “servant of Royal Mail”. Even the lesbians took issue with her, claiming harassment when she said sex outside of marriage was sinful.

  It was stressful to be the one member of staff everyone hated, the scapegoat everyone wanted to blame. Matilda took every case of harassment to the Lord in prayer and to her house group at church. She was working as hard as she could, trying to be as helpful and obliging to all, but it seemed that they all wanted her out. It was a shame because she was making five hundred pounds a week.

  ‘I hope this is more than a temporary job, Lord,’ she prayed.

  Every day she got up feeling tired and drained and listening to her prophecy was the only thing that could revive her. She breakfasted, showered and went to work under leaden skies. She sorted letters, flats and packets into alts for twelve hours a day, walked home, ate supper and went to bed.

  Finally, on Christmas Eve, they were released at four in the afternoon. Matilda repaired straight to the local pub for a pint of cider and black. Never had she so enjoyed her tipple. She drank copiously, then went home and slept for eight hours and woke up at six thirty in the morning. She got up, made herself coffee and toast and signed the twenty-pound book tokens she had bought for her family and put them into the envelopes.

  Christmas Day was spent sleeping on the sofa at her parents’ home. She didn’t even get the chance to eat. Her mother woke her at six to say a taxi was on its way. When she got home, she felt fully rested. She thought the afterburn of Christmas was the perfect time to start work on her new story.

  And then on Monday it was back to work again. There was a lot of mail that hadn’t made the Christmas deadline so, of course, they had to clear the backlog.

  Many of the Christmas temps were taken on that year, Matilda included, in part-time and fulltime positions. The mail depot had won a couple of large mail-sorting contracts and the management needed the staff to sort the mail. It meant that Matilda was assured of a job, if only she could keep her nose clean.

  It was good to be earning again, good to be drawing a weekly wage. Even without the silly amounts of overtime she had worked at Christmas, she was earning good money, enough to pay her forty pounds a week rent and five pounds in utilities.

  Every Thursday, when she received her payslip through the post, she would make a note of her earnings in her prayer diary and every Sunday she wrote out a cheque for the amount rounded up to the nearest full pound. The cheque she would take to church with her and deposit in the collection bag as it passed.

  Now that she was working again, Saturday evenings were usually spent with Mandy, either eating an Indian takeaway or going to favourite haunts. They would order a three-course meal, then return to Mandy’s to watch television, first The Bill and then Casualty. Matilda would take a taxi back home towards midnight.

  If Saturday nights were reserved for Mandy, Sunday to Friday nights were reserved for writing. It took an hour to get home and make a snack on a weekday night, by which time it was half past ten before Matilda could do any writing. She usually wrote for an hour to an hour and a half before going to bed.

  Allowing for eight hours’ kip, it was often nine o’clock before she got up and another hour before she could make breakfast, make her pack-up and make a mug of coffee, a prerequisite for two hours at her desk. It was her habit to forge ahead with a paragraph or a page in the morning and refine it over an eight-hour shift, leaving only the redrafting in the evening. It was a crude but effective method of writing.

  She wasn’t the only writer at the mail depot. She met one or two others during her time there, including another science fiction writer, a young graduate researching body armour for a novel about a fifteenth-century knight time-warped into the twenty-first century. Matilda’s own efforts seemed dull by comparison. There were a few graduates in the depot, she discovered. Even among those who had no degree, the depot had its share of intelligent and articulate staff.

  And now that she had her feet under the table, it made sense to improve her skill set. To this end, Matilda put herself down for coding training when the next course ran. Coding training took place in the training room under the eye of an experienced PHG tutor. After four days in the classroom, she aced the test and transferred to the code desks on the last day of training, streets ahead of the others in the class. There was such a thing, colleagues felt, as being too accomplished, as shini
ng too brightly.

  6

  And then, after Christmas, the saggy, soggy boredom of the addict turned to Evangelicalism. Matilda had taken to Jesus as enthusiastically as she had taken to the bottle. She owned three Bibles and one concordance and prayed that the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses would call at her door. But they left tongue-tied and embarrassed at her expositions of the gospel. They always promised to return with an elder but never did. What she craved, though, was human warmth, a meeting of minds and the sense of security that came from belonging. There was very little stimulation at City Mission, where intelligence and learning were seen as marks of worldliness.

  She wanted to write another novel but judged herself too close to the first, so concentrated on shorter fiction. She bought a mini hi-fi with the money she earned over Christmas and sat in her room listening to Deep Blue Something sing Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  The Toronto Blessing had come to town, splitting congregations into two unequal parts; the smaller part who said it was God’s work in the Latter Days and the larger part who agreed to differ. Matilda’s previous pastor, the Reverend David Grey, went to Toronto Airport Church to experience this blessing for himself. Matilda herself was sceptical, though kept her thoughts to herself unless she was sure she was in like-minded company. There was Avril, who thought the Toronto Blessing was the ultimate in self-blessing: ‘Bless me! Bless ME!!’ she would cry whenever anyone mentioned it.

  January brought no improvement in Matilda’s feelings. There followed a succession of days that felt as cold and flat as the air she breathed. She wondered if she was missing something because she rarely laughed. She spent most of the time in her room listening to music. It was a chore to go to church when it was so chilly outside and Matilda began to skip services. Not often but once or twice, when Paul the pastor wasn’t preaching. Even listening to her prophecy tape failed to lift her spirits. Feeling at a loss, she booked an appointment with Alwyn the assistant pastor.