Dedication
Part 1
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part 1
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Supporters
Copyright
Dear Reader,
The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and ebook wherever books are sold, in shops and online.
This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. At the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.
Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.
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Thank you for your support,
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Founders, Unbound
I was deeply touched by the generosity of friends and strangers who supported this book. The full list of honour is at the back, but there are special shout-outs that I want to make here, to five people who, between them, put up more than half the crowdfunding total.
Guy Weston’s intervention last Christmas was a game-changer. You’re beyond kind and generous, Guy, and even paid for lunch that day. I look forward to our pilgrimage. And special thanks to my fellow travellers Richard and Alison Cundall, to Will Lewis for blind confidence in me, and to Melvyn Marckus, who has generously edited and read more of my writing than is strictly healthy.
I’d also like to thank the Rev’d Charlotte and Bill Bannister-Parker, Richard Bridges, Sarah Macdonald and Sian Kevill of MAKE Productions and Sir Kenneth and Lady Warren for their generosity, variously of wealth, spirit, lunch and Oxford.
Thank you all – I couldn’t have done it without you.
For Marcelle and Eric – you know why
In darkness, and in secret, I crept out,
My house being wrapped in sleep.
– “The Dark Night of the Soul”,
St John of the Cross
We were helping Israel to close its borders, to turn in on itself. As word had spread through the Samarian hills to the east, a pathetic trickle of Palestinians, a fresh generation of refugees, had grown into a crowd more alarming as families sought the security and health services of the Sharon Plain. I heard Hebrew as well as regular Palestinian Arabic.
We were young then, Sarah and me. I think we believed in humanity. How long ago that seems. We’d been co-opted to offer humanitarian support between Bat Hefer and Tulkarm, just by the reservoirs, and provide some order for the crossings of the new fence.
The border guards were a mixture of Magav police and military and were meant to defer to our UNRWA bibs – it stood for the UN’s Relief and Works Agency, but we said it was “Rather Walk Away”. They kept directing families of all ages into a holding pen, a high flat-wired fenced area about the size of an English suburban garden, complete with a shed at the bottom end, where shamefully there was a single chemical latrine, some emergency medical gear, such as stretchers, as well as a metal chest of flares and, we always suspected, mustard gas.
Sarah had started to warn the men as the air grew more still towards evening that the pen was growing too crowded. Sarah was always firmer than me. I may have burnished the image in the intervening years, but I picture her now standing brace-legged in high-waisted khaki trousers, her field phone sticking above her blue bib like a badge of authority, leaning slightly in to a Magav officer on her walking stick and telling him what to do with her question: “Are you going to seal the muster station and order open process?”
I tried to remember what I’d read five years before about crowd-control errors at football stadiums. There were some children pressed up against the fencing with older siblings behind them. But they were only curious, not being crushed. I smiled at them and they stared neutrally back, running the wire between dry lips.
Sarah heard the cry first. She swung round with her eyes to the distance, as if she was looking at the mountains. Then I heard its second, louder version, somewhere between exhalation of fear and an imprecation.
“Shit,” murmured Sarah and ran with her loping gait to the UN jeep.
She unlocked the med box with the bundle of keys at her waist and pulled at the handles of a bag, about the size of a rolled sleeping bag.
“Follow me,” she called, heading for the gate of the pen.
She was dodging bodies and catching shoulders. We made it to the back of the pen, where a woman in a blue silk weave lay, her knees splayed like an open oyster. A boy knelt beside her, too young to be her husband. A brother, perhaps.
How had Sarah known? Maybe she’d seen her arrive earlier. But she always seemed to know things before me.
The ground was wet. It was never wet unless the boys pissed in the holding pens.
“Roll up her robe.”
She was a large woman, hair matted, crying and juddering. She was past caring for her modesty, but the boy looked desperate, frozen. Sarah leaned across and slapped him across the face and barked something huskily in, I thought, Arabic but it sounded strange, more like a Hebrew patois. He lifted her robe back like a tablecloth and I gently pushed him to one side to provide some screen with my back, for some dignity. Up nearer her head, he grasped her hand and held it to his chest.
Sarah moved round, still kneeling, and lay her walking stick across her lap and the woman’s legs over it to either side of her. She cupped her hands, as if in homage. Or prayer. The woman threw her head back, arched her spine and cried again, a primal howl that filled the valley and made the men stare away.
“Oh Christ, she’s delivering,” said Sarah, to herself.
She rolled aside and tore open the Velcro strip of the med bag.
“Nat, get where I was and hold the head – don’t pull, just support.”
I knelt in the ruts her knees had left in the earth.
Then I felt a warm, firm hardness fill my palms as the woman shrieked and the boy whimpered. Sarah leaned across her with a syringe and surgical scissors between the fingers of one hand. She tore the antiseptic seal off the blades with her teeth and spat them aside. She said something to the boy again. I caught it in Arabic: “Hold her ankle towards you.” But then she seemed to repeat it in her strange dialect.
He didn’t move. She slapped him again and the message was clear in any language. “Hold it!”
Then, softly, like the sudden mood-swing of a madwoman in an asylum, she ran the ball of her thumb across the forehead of the woman to shift the hair from her eyes and spoke in English.
“It’s all right, my love. You’re going to have a baby.”
The new face appeared sideways in my palm, still in its caul, features squashed and pulled down like a tiny bank robber with a nylon stocking over its head. The blue-grey mass barely filled my hands.
Sarah dealt with the cord like she was wrapping a gift in a shop, but the baby, freed of its caul, didn’t wake. Sarah held it face down in the palm of her hand, and rubbed its back. The head rolled, the mouth opened noiselessly and a little fist twitched. Then, blinking suddenly through rubbery folds, it cried. There was a wave of acclamation in the throng behind us. God was still great, apparently.
The baby was swaddled in bandages and a gauze arm-sling from the med bag and given to the boy to hold on stiff, clumsy forearms. The woman took some minutes to deliver the placenta and get cleaned, then leaned against the hut.
Sarah handed her the bundle with the little dark face.
“Here’s your daughter,” she said. “Every happiness of her.”
The woman smiled and thanked her, the boy grinning. “He has a sister now,” she said.
He also had a fast ticket through the processing station. It would take no more than an hour or so for a UNRWA ambulance to take this fragment of a family down to the Laniado hospital in Netanya. That’s why they smiled too.
Later that evening, Sarah and I sat on a ridge and looked down across the plain towards the coast, drinking tea spiked with vodka from a Thermos and sharing a cigarette. Most of the new arrivals had been processed in threes, even if it broke up families. It was a pointless exercise, because even if they were denied access across this new border point, they’d make it through the urban streets on either side. It was all for show, though it heralded the wall that was to come. The pen beneath us had room for families to sleep now in some safety, even if others arrived in the night.
“Good gig today, Sarah,” I said, out of nothing.
“I wonder where the dad is,” she said after a moment, blowing smoke into the night. “Whether he knows.”
“She’s alive. Pretty sure that’s better than the alternative.”
Sarah didn’t reply.
“Why were you speaking Hebrew to the boy, Sar?”
“It wasn’t really Hebrew,” she said. “It was Aramaic. It’s what they sometimes speak up in the north. They may have come down from Syria originally.”
“There’s another one in the family now. Another mouth to feed. Wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t heard her.”
I could see she was drawing hard on the cigarette. Sarah never gave much away, but I knew when she was close to the edge. She screwed her eyes to see into the dark. I leaned across to take the fag and, in a girly way, started to sing.
He bought me a banana, I made it shake, he brought me home with a bellyache.
It was a hopscotch song from our childhood that we’d corrupted for the primary school girls when it was our turn to look after them. Smoke came from her nostrils like a dragon and she turned and grinned at me, then slapped me across the ear, playfully, not like she hit the boy.
So, Sarah. Sarah the Jew, whom we mocked at school and whom I came to love. Always the cleverest of us. She was always Sarah Curse at school, full name. Funny the things that come to mind when you have too long to think. We’ve always spoken with a quick frankness, as those who have grown up together do, not always really friendly but without the dishonesty of the casual acquaint-ance.
Once, after we’d left school, I told her suddenly that I’d always coveted her name, that it had been so cool, and she confessed that it had been made up, though not by her. It had originally been Cruse; her grandfather had changed the spelling as a refugee in England to make it easy to say, but also because so many of his family had been shipped out of northern Italy by the Nazis to die. They had been from the Savoie border regions of Italy and France. The name was probably a corruption of Crose from the Italian word croce, which means cross. Crozier is probably another corruption.
The awful implication was that forebears of the Jewish Cruse family had probably been baptised French Christians, before reconverting to Judaism in Italy.
I told her that I’d longed to be called Sarah Curse. And we laughed, rather ruefully given the darkness of Sarah’s family history.
But also because my name is Natalie Cross.
And this is my story, not hers. I’m telling it because it keeps me alive. That’s literally true, as you’ll see. This is not just an act of therapy, it’s my life assurance, as a dear lover in Lebanon once told me. A record of crimes against my humanity. Names changed to protect the guilty, but they can and will be named if I come to any more harm and they know that. So that’s why I’m telling this story: it’s my security. So long as it’s told and heard, I’m safe. A testimony, really.
So come with me through the places that make me who I am. From the executioner’s block to the dhobi-room, where I try to scrub out the bloody stain on my priestly alb. But it keeps coming back. I offer it all up and sometimes, for a heady, transcendent moment, I am healed, and yet the gash returns, like an ill-sewn seam bursting open, like Lancelot’s ever-wounded side, bleeding for Guinevere, that can’t be healed this side of his king’s forgiveness. And, God knows, I’m the wrong side of forgiveness.
At school, Sarah came into her own. And her own received her not. We were at our comp in a vapid little suburb to the south of London. We thought she’d had something like polio, I reckon, or some sort of congenital muscular-wasting disease. Later, she told me it was Perthes’ disease, a hip-joint thing she’d had surgery for, but was getting better all the time, though she’d get arthritis later in life.
We never asked about it when we were young. We were never told not to talk about her condition, but it was implicit in the form teacher’s introductory injunctions when she joined the class in the middle of the academic year.
“Sarah uses aids to walk and sometimes will spend time in a wheelchair when she needs surgery,” she said, as Sarah sat in the front row, displacing someone to the square window alcove. “So she needs our support. Let’s all make her very welcome.”
I wondered at the time whether that entreaty was a play on words. She had crutches, this girl, but she needed our support too. We were to make her welcome despite that. I wondered even then whether we should have made her welcome because of that. The boys, amounting to around a third of our class, generally did, but they were nicer than us.
Sarah used to form a bulwark in the corridor as girls leaned against the walls, learning to fold our legs and doing the jabby push that accompanied shrieks of faux outrage at the mildest social observation. We had our roles in this girl-gang: the happy frump, the lippy, the hippy, the thoughtful and the dykey, the tarty, the outré and the nerd.
I was the quiet one. Not really shy, not, I think, insecure, but remote and I was comfortable with that. I was looking in on their play. I was the audience to their performance. So I watched the drama unfold.
The young girls at the primary through the fence played a hybrid form of hopscotch and their improvised sing-song carried through windows flung open to expunge the stench of school-dinner vegetables. It was the soundtrack to that time.
I met my boyfriend at the sweetie shop, he bought me ice cream, he bought me cake, he brought me home with a bellyache . . .
Sarah would lean on her crutches, white forearms braced in the horseshoe rings. Her upper body pitched forward like an awkward mannequin. One winter half-term in the sixth form there was a ski-trip – I was the only one other than Sarah who didn’t go, and we were knocking around together a bit by then – and I saw photos of the grown-ups leaning like that on their sticks at the top of the slopes and I wondered why, if they wanted to look athletic, they should also want to look like Sarah.
It was difficult to spot when the mood changed in the girls’ corridor. The microclimate of a gang of girls shifts with imperceptible signals. It’s like the distant curl of a cloud that a mariner might spot, or a fresh breeze to the face, the first indications that a storm is on the way. These are gentle and apparently harmless signs, not seeking to draw attention to themselves, sinister only to those who know what they portend. The dark twist on the horizon was a conversational shift.
I couldn’t have attributed the initiative to any one girl in the pack.
Maybe Tarty said “spaz”. Maybe Outré said something about it “really getting on my tits”. Perhaps it was Sulky: “All she wants is pity.”
But then someone said: “If you bent two of her forward, you’d have a pantomime horse.”
And the troupe came together in a spontaneous caterwaul that was like energy expanding, noxious fumes filling the corridor as if there had been a gas explosion in the science lab and a wall of ignited fuel was rolling towards the fire doors. They howled and rocked as they struck pantomime poses against a torrent of released vocabulary – cripple and hunchback and legless.
Mummy, Mummy, I feel sick, call the doctor, quick, quick, quick.
I watched the smile on Sarah’s face die, like a head relaxing into sleep, as she absorbed that her friends were now laughing delightedly at her and not with her. The illusion of friendship had evaporated in the heat of the tribe’s ridicule and nothing could be the same for Sarah at that school again. I watched from my safe distance.
Doctor, doctor, will I die? Count to five and stay alive . . .
It never occurred to me, as an act of conscious kindness, to reach out in her defence, to stand by her and to try to reclaim the innocent time before our gang had given themselves permission to mock her. The relief of honesty was, in any case, too great for them – they were venting what they really thought and the serpent could never be returned to its basket.
I suppose I felt that it was better for her to know the truth. People are nasty; they hate you. That’s the default position. What we do is cover that up with a sentimental carapace of generosity, whether that comes in the shape of religious example or shared humanity. It’s selfish really – I am kind to you in these circumstances because it makes me feel better.
Sarah had moved to one side to sit in her wheelchair; I guess to make a quicker and more dignified exit. I think it was that no one offered her a hand as she awkwardly negotiated the transition from sticks to wheels that prompted me to do something. Or it may have been that it was all playing out at excruciating length. Whatever it was, I stepped into the crowd that day and stood beside Sarah’s wheelchair. The braying laughter subsided briefly to accommodate me in the tableau.
“Shut the fuck up,” I said. “You stupid little bitches. She’s worth ten of any of you.”
I had nothing else. I had to get us out of there. I moved behind Sarah and pulled on the handles of the wheelchair. She jerked violently like a crash-test dummy.
“You have to let the brake off,” she said and did so.
The jeering followed us down the corridor. I’ve learned a bit about pushing wheelchairs since, like turning around to go backwards through swing doors, but I knew none of that then. I used Sarah as a battering ram to get outside.
We went down the old driveway beyond the playgrounds and away from the little girls’ songs, me leaning back and slipping on old grit. If I’d let go she’d have ended her run in the stream at the bottom. I sat beside her, behind the groundsman’s sheds, and pulled two cigarettes from what was left of a packet of ten. She held hers ineptly. I think it was her first.
I looked at Sarah not with pity but with contempt.
“You stupid bloody fool, Sar. How could you have thought those girls were your friends?” I said at last. “The truth is that they’re grateful they’re not you. Get real.”
“I don’t think they’re my friends,” she said. I had expected her to be crying. But she was smiling faintly at me through the smoke.
If I’d been older I’d have liked to say, “They despise you for reminding them of what they are – able-bodied but still useless. They can’t take you into their lives as anything other than a burden. That’s the truth, Sarah, and it’s just sad and pathetic for you to delude yourself that they think any better of you for making them feel superior. You’re a cripple and they want to laugh and point.” As it was, I just said, “They hate you.”
“I know,” she said. “But thanks anyway.”
I pushed her back up the hill. On the steep bit, I started to miss my footing on the grit again and to slide backwards. With my head down between the handles of the wheelchair, I began to laugh helplessly. We were immobilised.
“What are you doing?” she said from the front.
“Nothing,” I managed to say. “I’m stuck.”
She pulled the brake on and I helped her out and on to her sticks, and I pushed the empty chair up slowly beside her, watching each of her careful steps.
In truth, I ignored her for a while after that, just as the other girls ignored me, leaving her behind as an amusing but failed emotional experiment. But I remember she often looked tearful and pained at the end of lessons and of the day. It seemed to be her rightful lot, and I tried to shrug it off inside.
We were both outsiders; I see that now. I started to fetch the wheelchair when it was elsewhere. Push her between classes. Help her with her lunch tray.
I imagined she wouldn’t live long – I don’t know why, as her disability wasn’t that great. But even the teachers let that assumption prevail. And far from fading from my mind, she kept recurring, like a persistent musical phrase.
My descent into faith started with a note shoved under my door in a student hall at university. I kept it for a few years. I don’t really know why. Maybe I knew it was an important letter. Maybe I was keeping papers for my biographer.
I can pretty much remember it in its entirety.
Hi dear Nat . . . Don’t leave us. Please don’t leave us. We love you and this is REALLY important, because it’s about the most important thing for all of us . . . YOUR ETERNAL LIFE IN LORD JESUS. You may think you’re just turning your back on us, but really you’re turning your back on HIM. So it’s HIM begging you to come back, not US. So we’re just praying that you will come back to us – and be saved, like us, by His Grace. Pleeease Nat!
In His Love Forever, Noel
It was written on a piece of A4 file paper and had a crucifix drawn quickly as a kind of logo in the top right-hand corner, the hanging figure on it a couple of expertly turned curls.
Jesus Christ. Is that the best you’ve got, I thought, sitting on the edge of my tiny bed in a shared flatlet on The Vale, an Elysian undergraduate estate. I should have screwed it up and binned it straight away, but there was something so exquisitely naff in those hundred or so words that I wanted to keep looking at them. I didn’t know enough about it then, but I do now. The condes-cending conflation of authentic discipleship with their little tribe. The offer of salvation like it was their gift. The pleading and the capital letters. The word “just”.
This was about a month, maybe less, into my first term. I’d gone to Birmingham and Sarah had gone to Oxford. I went to the Freshers’ Festival at the student union, a Victorian U-shape throughout which were stalls and hawkers selling clubs and societies. I wasn’t lonely, because I don’t do that, but I did feel oddly detached, like I was watching everyone else have fun, as if they were putting on a show for me. Less further education than further alienation, really.
I didn’t want to go scuba-diving or demonstrate against Thatcher’s cuts, though I did hang around the craft stands, especially the woodwork and carpentry. There were some rubbishly turned finials and I knew I could do better. I took a leaflet.
“Lineker shoots – Jesus saves” said the sign as I walked into the next hall. I didn’t want to talk, but I’d been spotted reading it.
“Hi, fancy taking a shot at Jesus?” The boy held out a plastic football and pointed at a large chipboard hippy with a headband, with his hands out in large gloves. “If you get it past him and into the fishing net – admittedly a mixed metaphor – you get free fish and chips at our next Friday fish night.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “Otherwise it’s 30p.”
“I’m rubbish at football,” I said.
“Yeah, but you’re good at something. We just want to know what it is.” And he threw the ball from hand to hand.
“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked.
“The Christian Union – we put the uni in union.”
He seemed nice enough. “What does a Christian Union do? Make sure vicars get overtime if they pray too much?”
“Indeed,” he said, and smiled. “What’s the leaflet?”
“It’s from the carpentry club,” I said.
“Jesus was a carpenter!” And he held his arms out like the ludicrous icon of his saviour behind him.
“I know,” I said slowly, from under my eyebrows. I can deploy a devilish eyebrow, not least because I have a scar through one of them.
“I’m Noel,” he said.
“The first, I presume,” I said. He just grinned and nodded and looked down at his football boots. “I’m sorry, I bet you get that all the time,” I added quickly.
“First today,” he said. “What do you want to do?”
“What, right now or with the rest of my life?”
“I have the answer to both,” said Noel. “But let’s start with now.”
“I . . . want to find someone who does voluntary work overseas.”
“Where?”
I shrugged. “Ethiopia?”
“WorldMission,” said Noel, throwing the ball to his fellow Striker in Christ. “I’ll give you the phone number. Run by our brothers and sisters.”
“OK,” I said and lingered.
He handed me a flyer. “Come to Fishermen & Chips anyway.”
And I did. It was in some old gymnasium and we were counted, then sang a couple of songs to guitar and piano during which the food magically arrived, wrapped in greaseproof paper in a big cardboard box. I didn’t much care for the singing, and the rocking from side to side wasn’t for me. I suppose I knew then it wouldn’t last. But the fish and chips were good. And it felt a bit like a family and I suppose I wanted that. So I went back on Sunday for more songs and swaying. No one I knew would see me.
It lasted as long as any of those early university things do. I was hanging out on a cheap beer night with a crowd from my course, drinking lager in plastic pints, and wondering where to go on to. I knew Noel and his group were having a party at a little house some of them shared in Selly Oak. There would be food. So we set off with a couple of bottles of wine, about six of us.
It didn’t go well. Noel’s sidekick answered the door. I could go in, but the others weren’t welcome. Odd, because they weren’t even particularly rowdy.
“Why only me?” I asked, genuinely inquisitive.
“You’re one of us.”
“No I’m not. Is Noel there?”
“He’s out the back. You can come in and see him. Just not the others.”
“But these are my friends.”
We bought a Chinese takeaway, went back to The Vale, and sat in one of the common areas, drinking wine out of mugs and eating chip butties when the pork and rice ran out.
“I don’t know how you can stand all that patriarchy stuff, Natty,” said one of the girls when we’d exhausted the “not very Christian” line.
But that was just it, I realised. I had wanted a father figure. I’d had a father, but he didn’t figure.
The note arrived under my door when I didn’t show the following Sunday. And Noel caught me up in the University Square one damp morning.
“Nat, please don’t be lost.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I know where I’m going.”
“You don’t understand – if you commit to Jesus, you’re truly free, not like this wandering journey you’re on. And bring your friends to him.”
“Noel, it’s been real. But no thanks.”
He stopped walking. “Nat, why are you doing this to us?”
“I’m shaking you off my feet.”
I was pleased with that and didn’t turn around. But he tried again. He was doing Mech Eng, which wasn’t far from the History block. He told me that I only knew the Lord a little and needed to know him more. I told him this time that I’d report him to my course leader for harassment. And that was it.
But I reread his note. A kind of rage gathered in my chest. And here’s the thing: I started taking a bus to a Victorian church in Moseley. I started to argue with Father Trevor there, a middleaged priest with a bad haircut, about what we were meant to render to Caesar, if anything, about who the poor were, and we made up a story about what happened next to the woman taken in adultery. They ran a night shelter and I started to help out with a soup kitchen, the first time I’d fed hungry people. But the turbulent little ball of rage that Noel had put at the base of my ribcage never went away. I have it still.
At the end of that first term, I switched to joint-honours in History and Theology. At the end of the year I dropped the History. I called Sarah in Oxford and visited her a couple of times in her beautiful college and then in a town house she shared, with not too many stairs. It was easier for me to visit her, but she was improving and came to Birmingham once, where she seemed an anomaly, just not part of my life there.
I also called WorldMission on the number Noel had given me and spoke to a nice woman called Sally.
“You’re a Christian organisation, aren’t you?” I said, not disguising the accusation in my tone.
“Yes, we are,” said Sally. “Our mission is based on the principles of Christian faith. But our volunteers are forbidden from evangelising in the field, unless someone asks. And they do ask.”
“I’ll only come if I can bring my friend,” I said. “She walks with crutches and isn’t a Christian.”
I got the forms to fill out and that’s how Sarah and I started, with an internship of about thirty of us that long first summer holiday, doing mainly backline logistics stuff in Ethiopia. I think they took Sarah because she’d already developed a bit of a reputation with the UN network through the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford. Anyway, she spoke to Sally herself and her forms looked bloody good.
We were always pros from the start, Sarah and me. No bleeding hearts. No charity. No celebrities. Those were the rules. It was a good bunch, that first gig. I remember on the way back coming across a load of Live Aid trucks up to their axles in sand, remnants of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, which seemed a very long way away to the north and west. Wrong supplies, wrong place. A load of us started rocking with our muslin scarves held high between our hands, in a pastiche not just of the song but of the whole rock-festival philanthropy sketch.
“Feed our eee-gos,” we sang happily. “Let them know we’re rich and famous . . .”
The drivers smiled behind their aviator shades. The anthem had been everywhere, but not in the desert.
I think Sarah and I knew that we became aidies because we had to. There was no choice. We used to tell people we did it for a laugh and watch their faces freeze. And when we cried, we cried together, but never emotionally, more as catharsis. I certainly started to feel that I was at home out there and that it was Britain that felt foreign when I got back.
When I came back that first time, I gave talks to the church and argued some more with Father Trevor about why Samaritans were thought to be bad and who exactly our wealth enriched. I fell in with a campaign for women’s ordination. I was aware that I was being gently held up by the congregation. No, offered up.
So it was natural to do a post-grad course to be a deacon. I liked that there had never been such a word in Greek as “deaconess” in the early Church. Just deacons. Men and women. And when women were ordained priests in the Church of England, I was sent to a ghastly selection conference for that too.
First, there were a load of interviews with the Diocesan Director of Ordinands. He was a thin man with a ponytail who asked me why I thought I wanted to be ordained into the priesthood of the Church of England. I said I wasn’t sure I wanted to be, but I thought I was called to be. That seemed to be the right answer.
I was never very sure what a vocation felt like. It was a kind of giving in to drift. Perhaps the truth was that I’d never felt a sense of calling, though of course I didn’t give that impression at my examination in Ely, the three days when I had to jump through the spiritual hoops that were held obligingly in front of me by earnest but actually quite uninterested church people, whose job it was to recommend ordinands for priestly training.
There had been underfed men and over-fat women who had spoken of their moments of epiphany in college chapels or on Derbyshire ridges, or of an incessant celestial nagging that had told them that this single-storey motel in East Anglia that smelt of stale pastry was “where God wants me to be”.
I knew none of that. All I knew was that I’d spent more time in famine zones than most people of my age. Sarah and I had been to east Africa four times by then, Sudan as well as Ethiopia, and had graduated from being backline flunkies to distribution and medical support at the sharp end, leaving WorldMission behind us as Sarah became more involved with UNHCR – the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
The politics that caused the suffering we witnessed out there made us both mad. A faith in something bigger helped me with that, but Sarah didn’t need it. I may not have bothered to identify it much at the time – too busy, I suppose – but I needed the one simple voice that spoke of a hope of freedom and the ludicrous notion that the loose components of a wasted human being in my arms in the scrub, the genderless child who had already vacated its place in the human order to become meat for flies, was as worthy of the existence it was being denied as the hordes outside our coffee-shop windows in London, as entitled to the stroke of the back of its mother’s fingers as them, as much of an agent of world change as the banks and the law firms and the churches.
Anyway, I constructed a case for my ordained ministry from that insight. I made one of my male examiners weep, while I stayed resolutely dry-eyed. He revolted me. How dare you cry over the starving, you worm, you pathetic sentimentalist, sitting in an over-heated meeting room on the outskirts of a provincial cathedral town. I bet you give your children’s clothes to Oxfam and make up a shoe box of bewildering northern-hemispherical gifts at your parish Cristingle service and then go and play six-a-side with the youths that you wish you were still among, preparing them for the secular lives that you didn’t dare to try. Instead, thin man in casual wear, you sit in front of me in a chair for old folks while indulging your feminine side, reaching for the carton of tissues that were meant for me, as I spare you no morbid detail of how a child under five in southern Sudan could not even know that they had a right to life.
I was asked again about why I thought priesthood was for me by a woman examiner who seemed more preoccupied with whether the male applicants were gay. This time I said: “Because I’ve touched the hem of his cloak and I’m healed.” Which I thought, at the time, was true. And maybe it was.
Anyway, it worked. They recommended me for training.
I used that examiner to get what I wanted, of course, to be a signed-up rep of the only truly durable world movement in history that was available to a Western white woman, founded by a strange figure who had stood by these nameless and worthless creatures and told them they were whole human beings. They presumed I loved Jesus of Nazareth, as they signed my paperwork for my Diocesan Director of Ordinands. But I was prepared to use Him too – though, of course, we are required to talk about that the other way around – by standing in his number against the pointless little games played out by political scientists and bankers in bunkers and marketing men and aid workers and moist little volunteers in easy chairs in malodorous conference centres, all of whom in their busy little ways starve babies to death, or at least let them die.
And so I had a career. I was employed by the Church of England, but my ministry was in foreign aid. I became something of a poster girl, I suppose, for women priests without a proper job. And I liked that too. It was who I was and who I still am.
Years later, Sarah and I met in one of the City chaps’ wine bars in Paternoster Square, dark inside, but pleasant enough outside under the awning when it wasn’t too cold, close to one of the autumn’s first-lit gas burners. She was scooping hot Camembert on to toasted focaccia while I toyed with an anchovy salad.
We’d laughed about how we’d graduated from the Kentish Town greasy-spoon we used at the agency to a place that sold Petit Chablis for twenty-three quid, which, to be fair, only Sarah could afford.
I remember watching as she looked at her prematurely wrinkled fingers and swollen knuckles. Her nails were good, I noticed, not dirty and cracked as they’d been when she’d been in the field.
I’d just asked her a difficult question. If the Nobel-aspirant Russian oligarch she was working for now was so keen on finding a solution to Palestine, why was he using American dollars?
“It’s just the international currency.”
“How many of them?”
She looked at me for emphasis. “About a billion.”
It was the first time I thought she might like money and it shamed me.
“Is that a thousand million or a million million?”
“Does it matter?”
She popped a lump of bread and molten cheese in her mouth and sucked her finger. We were girls again and it was fun.
“I don’t do money, Sar, you know that,” I said. “It sounds like a job for suits. It’ll be one of those ghastly gigs with name badges. Davos with matzoh balls.”
“It needs to be done.”
“Does it? I mean, does it really? What difference can money make when people hate each other?”
“They can hate each other in more comfort. They can hate each other as social equals. Money makes people forget they hate each other anyway. They can despise each other’s garden furniture instead.”
“So your man’s an economic engineer.”
I looked out across the dazzling lake of new paving stones towards the Temple Gate.
“Engineering’s part of it.”
“I think we want people to stay poor. Keeps us in a job.”
“The Church or Aid?” asked Sarah. She was always so easy to talk to. “The poor are always with us.”
There was a pause as she tore off some softer bread from the basket and wiped her bowl with it. A young Baltic waiter came and poured more wine.
“I really want you to come to Jerusalem, Nat,” she said. “We get to be peace envoys. With the Centre’s money. And I’ll be there. What’s not to like?”
I was silent, as if considering it.
“Ade and I are finished,” I said. She was looking at me and chewing at half speed, so I paused for dramatic effect. “I mean Adrian.”
And we laughed out the tension of the moment.
“He bonked who?” she asked, after I’d given her the highlights.
“I don’t know. Someone from the office.”
“Don’t you want to know?”
“What difference would it make?”
“Then it’s settled.”
“What is?”
“You have to come to Jerusalem. An away-break to save the world.”
When I think of my own investment of trust and self-deception in my marriage, I often recall Sarah and her dark epiphany back at school, that she was physically disabled and despised for it, which marked the end of the denial of her little truth. In my case, I pretended my life with Adrian was something that a little honesty would have immediately shown that it wasn’t.
Adrian had been part of a tribe too. He was part of a warrior class set against world poverty and deprivation, coordinating and sometimes leading a private army of the irrational from the proud Western democracies to attack the wicked insurgencies of famine and drought in our former colonies. We were underpaid mercenaries, I know now, not so much working towards heavenly reward but for our daily bread. We were offending a system that depended for its riches on the desolation of Africa. We were a disruption to the natural order – as Sarah was – and I came to depend on Adrian’s living witness to our alternatives.
None of this gang culture meant anything, of course. But while it lasted I was happy to believe that I was part of the gang, that it contained me. Actually, my commitment was built on contempt, just as those schoolgirls’ was, but I’d never have admitted that so long as I was captivated by the power I exercised over Adrian’s relative inferiority.
When I caught Adrian bonking his assistant director of probation – on the job, as I believe the boys call it – I was surprised by two of my reactions. First, I recoiled from the scene not in horror or hurt, but – now get this – because I felt I had intruded on their privacy. It was allegedly my house, our home, but my instinctive reaction was that I had violated their intimate space. I’ve dwelt on that feeling since, even cherished it.
The curtains in the big front drawing room were closed. Nothing unusual in that. Adrian would have been watching some dismal sports channel into the small hours and may have gone up to bed at about two, with a glass of skimmed milk, and then left for work, after a run, without touching this front room, an empty can at the foot of the sofa like an abandoned sentry box. So it was in that familiar morning half-light that I saw the two figures through the hallway arch, struggling out from behind the sofa. I seem to recall that my first thought was that we had repairmen, then rejected that, since the curtains were drawn. Then burglars, but as my eyes adjusted and I held the front door to facilitate an escape, it was clear she had a white, scalloped blouse, open with bra in place, and was scrabbling for the discarded shrink-wrap of tights and tangled pants. He was lurching out on the opposite side, rather comically yanking up the charity-shop trousers I’d given him for his birthday.
Her touching desperation to retrieve her underwear left her leaning over the back of the sofa, and it was clear, in that forensic snapshot, that this was how their sex act was being performed. It didn’t take long for me to assess the scene – what, four to eight seconds? – but I know now, knew then, that it wasn’t revulsion and hurt that made me spurn this vision and propelled me to the other side of my own front door and into the cobbled enclave outside. And maybe I’m even wrong too about their privacy, maybe it wasn’t my good manners, a well-bred sense that I was witness to an intimacy that was not my own. Perhaps it was the simple pathos of the event, the pantomime routine, a silent movie, or perhaps the mannered attempts of a French-farce pair of lovers to retain dignity through reclaimed clothing. No, it was pity that drove me away, like turning away from a humiliated child.
I was surprised also at the lack of shock. I suppose it would have been right to have been shocked. But, walking back purposefully to St Paul’s, I found I was smiling at my liberation, for I knew in that moment that my life was changing into a journey without Adrian in it. He had, strangely and unintentionally, taken the initiative himself and our life together which had started and, in a way, ended in adventure, with a protracted period of mundanity in the middle, was drawing to its close. Our love-making had grown routine, but in truth had always been indolent, invariably in bed once we had acquired one, as though sex was something for the poorly. ‘Sex’ makes it sound hot and dirty and that hardly works if it’s a duty performed, a grunting act of prone service, a household chore that we shared like a modern couple should. Little wonder that they call it missionary; I might as well have been offering him sanitation and scripture.
Our life as a couple had started in excitement, but that was all about the work we did. We sparked off on saving the world, not on each other. Any attempts on either part at an awakening of spontaneous passion, in a hotel bathroom attached to a conference centre where we weren’t staying over, say, or in a warm gazebo on a summer’s evening at a diocesan retreat, had left him feeling vulnerable and me bored, tugging on the short length of rope that was our marriage.
Yet, here he had been, in his shirt tails, taking a dumpy colleague with hip cellulite – I don’t know if she was really the deputy director of probation, I made that up – doggy-style on our soft furnishings. So, surprised, yes, but not shocked. It occurred to me, astonishingly, that it must have been his idea. I made for a chain coffee shop in Paternoster Square, which I knew staff didn’t use because there had once been a dispute over the authenticity of its Fairtrade coffee. I thought of sitting outside and smoking, but decided against it in case I was spotted by passers-by and I didn’t want to engage just now.
I’d returned a day early from a conference in Cambridge on women’s ministry in Muslim countries, which we’d abandoned when the final keynote speaker had phoned in sick, and I’d jumped a fast train and made straight to the house. No one knew that I was here. Except, now, Adrian and his tea lady, or whoever she was. I sat for about half an hour, drank a cappuccino with an extra shot and pretended to read the paper I’d had on the train, to attract no attention.
It wasn’t long after eleven when I’d arrived at the house. Adrian sometimes took an early lunch to go to the municipal gym when it was less crowded, but this was mid-morning, for goodness’ sake. I guessed that they’d both slid out for their tryst, perhaps attending a cancelled work meeting somewhere. That and being partially clothed in the sitting room meant that she hadn’t been an overnight guest. Adrian wouldn’t be leaving me, I knew that. That would involve too much initiative. They used the house because they were too poor or mean to use a hotel. She was either married or lived too far away, or both, though that was of little real concern to me. So what was of concern to me?
I resolved, after staring listlessly at the weather forecast in the back of the newspaper, that I wasn’t going to throw him out, at least not immediately. It was too high-maintenance an option, would mean transfer of belongings, too much talking, and I had a shedload of work in submissions to General Synod on provision for those opposed to women bishops, which already had to be compressed by the conference I’d just co-organised. In those days, I thought that was important. On such prosaic considerations were my life decisions made back then.
So I suppose I decided to forgive him. Or tolerate him, which is pretty far from forgiveness. But we’re in the forgiveness business, Christians. Given all that unfolded subsequently, this was Jonah bound on a calm sea for Jaffa before being flung into the belly of the whale.
I met Adrian in the crypt cafe of the cathedral early that evening. He was largely silent as I knew he would be. He had the grace not to offer excuse or apology. He sat, staring up the cavern of mausoleums towards the military dead, and said at one point: “I don’t know what’s going on. I never wanted any of this.”
I let the ambiguity of that hang in the musty air. Then told him we’d live separately in the house for a while. It was a big house. We’d look at each other from a bit of a distance and see what was left of us to salvage. It was an aggressive version of giving each other some room, which was the kind of expression we were taught in priestly training.
“I don’t know what happened to us,” he said.
“We hung out and got married,” I replied.
He swung aside in his seat. Then he stood and slowly walked out, giving me time to catch him up, which I didn’t.
Adrian’s not the sort of man women notice, but he had a quiet commitment that I took for strength when we worked in our overseas aid outfit in Kentish Town. The regular cast passed through. Earnest young women making a difference, young men with shaven heads ameliorating the plight of the proletariat, distracted girls filling in before marriage; our generation’s spare parts finding no other purpose for themselves in the nation’s economy.
We pitched ourselves as The Fed, a charity started a decade or so earlier by Jake Sorresen, one of those self-starting hipsters with a thirst that couldn’t be sated on peace and love. He was alpha-male meets folkie, Surrey goes to Lindisfarne, long and languid, loose and smiley, hair like metal wool tied behind a monkish pate, his clean-shaven, weather-beaten face set against the power-beards of the big foreign-aid charities, with their centralised executives and bibbed chuggers outside the Tube stations.
His was a flat organisation, a federation of autonomous cells in Britain and the US, which commanded their own relief missions, the only resource from central office being intelligence. Famine or floods, we were quick. Jake’s office would call for resource and like a mini-cab firm putting out a fare, a team of two or three could be in the field within thirty-six hours. These pathfinders would assess and advise, calling down the right response, very often from the big agencies. Yes, it was exciting.