The gift of tongues, prophecy, exorcism … what might such concepts mean in a complacent backwater of North London? For Richard Bowen, adolescence becomes a nightmare when his parents join the charismatic movement and find a devil in his brother.
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Tim Parks
Dedication
Title Page
Part One: A Devil in the House
Part Two: The House Party
Copyright
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Published by Vintage 2011
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Copyright © Tim Parks 1985
Tim Parks has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 1985 by William Heinemann Ltd
First published by Vintage in 1999
Vintage
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780749396176
For Mark
Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks moved permanently to Italy in 1980. Author of novels, non-fiction and essays, he has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask and Llewellyn Rhys awards, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His works include Destiny, Europa, Dreams of Rivers and Seas, Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education and A Season with Verona.
ALSO BY TIM PARKS
Loving Roger
Home Thoughts
Family Planning
Goodness
Cara Massimina
Mimi’s Ghost
Shear
Europa
Destiny
Judge Savage
Rapids
Cleaver
Dreams of Rivers and Seas
Non-fiction
Italian Neighbours
An Italian Education
Adultery & Other Diversions
Translating Style
Hell and Back
A Season with Verona
The Fighter
Teach Us To Sit Still
The few half-remembered events of seventeen years ago which prompted me to write this novel have been altered beyond all recognition for the purposes of fiction. No reference to any living person is intended or should at any point be inferred.
T.P.
IT WAS DONALD Rolandson brought the Sword of the Spirit into our house and it would have been about 1968. The world was full of strange new things just then I remember; there were wars and threats of wars and marches, an explosion of new hairstyles and new religions, and so perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the Sword of the Spirit should have arrived that year, the tongues of flame and the dove and all the things she brought with her like leaves in a whirlwind. Nevertheless, my mother wasn’t pleased at first.
‘I’m not sure quite who he thinks he is,’ she said, ‘or who he thinks he’s going to impress, playing holier-than-thou.’
My father would have been peeling the shell off his boiled egg. He had a high opinion of Rolandson and anyway he never spoke at breakfast.
‘If he wanted to play that game he could have joined the Quakers or the Plymouth Brethren,’ Mother said, and she said, ‘If he has to beat his breast in public I don’t see why he has to go and do it here. And after the best kind of education like that too.’
She poured the tea.
‘As if everything was all going to change suddenly, just because he’d arrived. But they all think that at first of course.’
And then she laughed. ‘I suppose he’ll grow out of it, bless his heart.’
She sat down with a grapefruit opposite Father and they looked at each other across the formica top of the table.
Father said, ‘Where’s Adrian?’
Mother turned to me. ‘Go and get Adrian,’ she said. ‘Tell him to come down here at once. He’ll be late for church.’
I went out of the kitchen and up the broad staircase. As soon as I was well out of the room they began to talk again, but I didn’t hear what they said because the walls of our house were very thick and the doors likewise and anyway they both spoke very low.
My sister was in the study sitting on Father’s desk, swinging her legs and speaking on the telephone to her boyfriend at the Missionary Training College in Croydon. I went up the stairs.
‘Bugger,’ Adrian said.
His room was quite dark with the curtains still drawn, the windows closed, and it smelt stale, of dirty socks and of sleep; the floor was littered with clothes and empty cups, record sleeves.
‘That’s what she said.’
‘Groan,’ he said. ‘The hell with it. Say I’ve got a headache if you have to say something.’
Adrian hadn’t been to church for more than six months now. In fact he didn’t come down to breakfast very often either. But on Sunday Mother considered it a kind of duty, I think, to remind him this was the Lord’s Day; and so it was she always sent me upstairs to wake him and to tell him he’d be late for church. She didn’t go herself because she was afraid of Adrian. She was afraid she would hear him say something she didn’t want to believe her son could say.
‘They’re loonies,’ Adrian said. ‘Bloody nuts.’
I went into my own room and put on my maroon tie and the herringbone jacket and combed my hair down to the collar, looking in the mirror.
In church Father preached about Gideon’s men whom the Lord sorted out by making them drink water from a stream and the ones who picked up the water with their cupped hands so they could look over their shoulder while they drank, those ones He sent home because they didn’t trust in Him completely but in their own eyes: but those who put their heads down and drank directly with their mouths, those ones He took to His bosom and He kept because they trusted in Him entirely. And my father said that in this world we shouldn’t always be looking over our shoulders at new fashions and new ideas, nor even at our fiercest enemies, but that we should drink directly from the life-blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ who had given His Body for us.
In the stalls in his white surplice and blue Oxford hood, Rolandson said very loudly, ‘Ay-men!’
‘There he goes,’ my mother whispered. ‘He can’t even keep quiet while his own vicar is preaching.’
‘He wants to make a grand impression,’ she said. ‘You can see that a mile off.’
I always sat with my mother and we always put ourselves in the last pew of the church because my mother liked to be able to see exactly who was in the congregation and then also, in this position, she could make signs to my father to tell him whether his voice was carrying right to the back or not. If she lifted both hands and put them together over her mouth as if in concentration, then this was a sign that his voice wasn’t carrying well and he had to speak up. But actually this was a favourite gesture of my mother’s anyway, whenever she was trying to think quietly and seriously about something; and so sometimes, engrossed in the sermon, she would do it absent-mindedly and Father would start to boom with an enormous voice so that everybody in the congregation was taken by surprise and the younger people would turn round and grin at each other – ‘the under-twenties’, as my mother called them. But I roasted in embarrassment.
My sister, Anna, didn’t sit with us at the back of the church; she sat in the front row right beneath the pulpit because after the sermon she would go up with two other girls and they would sing together with guitars on the white chancel steps. Anna was a great fan of Billy Graham’s ever since she had seen him at a rally at Earls Court and she’d gone to the front to kneel before the Lord in the presence of thousands, even though she was already a Christian and had been for ages. So on the chancel steps she sang ‘I Gotta Home in Gloryland that Outshines the Sun’, and ‘You Gotta Walk that Lonesome Valley’, and all the other songs that were on the Billy Graham record, turn and turn about, one week after another.
When they finished singing ‘What a Friend We have in Jesus’, Rolandson said ‘Ay-men’ again in a loud, near ecstatic voice and some of the congregation said ay-men too because it was a sort of habit really to repeat what the clergymen said over these small things.
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ my mother whispered to me, ‘if he said “Ah-men”, but why does he have to say “Ay-men, aaaay-men”, as if we were at a blessed American Revivalist meeting or something?’
My father gave the blessing then, his favourite one: ‘And now unto Him who is able to keep you without stumbling and without stain …’ He used to make his voice rise and fall a little with the words so that it was mesmerizing – ‘May the Lord bless you and keep you, yea, may the Lord cause his face even to shine upon you …’
And now, after the blessing, there was always a long moment of quiet which was supposed to be for silent prayer, and it was this moment, almost the end of it in fact when everybody was already half-ready to go, shuffling for gloves and hats and handbags, that Rolandson at last spoke out. He stood and spoke; and in the quiet and cold of the half-full church his voice was truly enormous.
‘It is the Word of the Lord causes me to speak,’ he boomed – the congregation froze still as one surprised animal – ‘and the Sword of the Spirit opens this my mouth. Speak through me Holy Spirit: breathe on me Breath of God …’ – and then he simply began to gabble very loud; to gabble, sounds quite indistinguishable as language or even words, but dramatic and rousing and guttural, and as he gabbled strangely like this he turned and slowly raised both arms towards the stained glass at the back of the church, through which the winter sun plunged on to bare pillars in great splashes of wine and blue. He went on like this for two or three whole minutes, gabbling, gabbling, gabbling; a noise of words without words. Then he stopped abruptly, but still held his arms raised, outstretched, draped with the white surplice like the pictures of the prophets in my Illustrated Revised Standard Version. The congregation began to fidget, ill at ease, and to lift their knees off their hassocks and wiggle their bottoms back on their pews. But my mother stayed still knelt, absolutely rigid with shock.
‘It is the Lord hath spoken,’ Rolandson finished with a falling voice, ‘and a great and mighty wind is blowing through our land. Let it touch even me, Lord, let it touch even me. Blessed be the Word of the Lord.’
He sank down to his knees and buried his head in his hands and appeared to weep.
At lunch we had lamb as always and there was Grandmother, my father’s mother, who was deaf, and Anna’s boyfriend, Ian, from the Missionary Training College in Croydon who always came on a huge Japanese motorbike. He had a small round freckled face with a broken nose and big ears and he grinned almost all the time, so that my father despised him, I think, though he never actually said anything. But if he hadn’t despised him he would have said something to the contrary.
It was a very quiet lunch except that Grandmother wanted to complain about the water board who were digging up her front drive in Palmers Green and then Anna tried to start a conversation about the church in China, which was where Ian had been called to go as a missionary; but my parents wouldn’t join in any of this. They didn’t mention Rolandson either.
The cuckoo-clock squeaked out two as my father was scraping up the last of the cauliflower. We were late, which was serious Sundays with a sermon to prepare. He had to shout then to Grandmother to have her pass him the cruet, but she still didn’t hear: she started talking about her drive again and whether the water board were going to have to pull up her rose-beds next; and so then Father lost his temper.
‘Where’s Adrian?’ he demanded.
My mother said she didn’t know, she hadn’t seen the boy for two or three days now: she made her lips puckered and grim in the open pale face she had.
‘I’ll tan that young laddie’s hide so soon as I set eyes on him,’ Father said. ‘Skipping off all the time without so much as a by your leave to his family. It’s offensive.’ He didn’t look up from his plate but ate rapidly and nervously, and he used to eat so close to his plate sometimes when he was in a mood, his glasses would steam up.
‘Where is Adrian?’ My mother turned to me then.
I said I had seen him at the bus-stop after church with his girlfriend and he had waved but I didn’t know where he was going. He had had his guitar with him.
‘Which girlfriend?’ Mother asked.
‘Anne-Marie.’
‘She’s an odd little creature, she is,’ Mother said, but then she added, ‘Bless her dear soul,’ – and this was something she always said when she was about to criticize someone and then thought better of it; because in the Bible it says, ‘Judge not, that thou be not judged’; and again in the Old Testament, ‘the good man strikes not but heaps up coals of fire in Hell on the head of his enemy!’
While the older ones were taking forty winks, I went out to feed the rabbits. I picked dandelion-leaves and frosty spinach round the back where the curate’s house was tagged on to the back of ours. We shared the same big garden. The rabbits were in two hutches by the steps that went up to the church vestry; a little suntrap it was, bright in the day’s cold sunshine; and while I was stuffing in the food the curate came out from the vestry door and stood at the top of the steps in his long black cloak watching me.
‘How are the little beggars getting on today then?’ He laughed.
I said, okay.
He came down and took one in his arms, the white one called Peter that had turned out to be a female and given birth to eight more. I said the problem was I was really a bit too old to have rabbits now. I mean, I had got them when I was very young and everything and now they just kept living on and on and I had to keep feeding them, which was a pain because no one would ever want to buy a rabbit when it was already so old, and I had grown out of them.
He laughed still: he was very tall the Reverend Rolandson, blond-haired and blue-eyed with a straight nose and a great strong chin, and I remember when he first came to see my father for an interview my mother was very keen to have him because she said in the end it was nice to have a nice-looking fellow about the place and he would go down very well with the under-twenties, which was the future of the church when all was said and done. Perhaps at that time she was even thinking of pairing him off with Anna. Now though, in that long black cloak with the white rabbit held to his chest in the frosty sunshine, he looked very strange, Rolandson; he looked like a magician or a model, or someone in a film.
He said, ‘I hope no one was offended by what I did this this morning. I’ve been praying about it ever since.’
I didn’t know what to say.
‘I really didn’t have any choice though, to tell the truth. Quite suddenly the Lord just told me to do it.’ He was looking at the rabbit which was twitching to be away now. The cages smelt a bit. ‘The Lord’s going to do great things for this church. Great things,’ he said, and his voice was urgent and conspiratorial. He had great blond bushy eyebrows that lifted and fell as he spoke.
I took the rabbit from him and slipped it back in the cage while he started brushing at all the white hairs that had stuck to his cloak.
‘Bother!’ he said, and then he said, ‘Are you saved, Richard?’ and I said yes, I was, and he said, ‘But what about Adrian? He never comes to church, does he? Is he saved?’ – and I said I didn’t really know about Adrian, we never talked about it.
‘The Lord is going to do something really marvellous here,’ he told me. ‘Marvellous. But the forces of Satan are legion.’
When I went back round the front of the house Ian was showing Anna his motorbike. He revved it up and took a turn round the front drive, and then Anna climbed on the pillion and he revved it up again and took another turn around the drive with her on the back and then my father came storming through the front door in a flaming temper and said if they wanted to make such an infernal racket why couldn’t they go and do it elsewhere because he was trying to write his sermon and he needed a bit of peace and quiet. Under wiry black hair his cheeks and forehead would be boiling pink like salmon when he was angry and he would be holding an orange or an apple in his hand because he always ate fruit while he wrote his sermons. So Ian took Anna out on the street on the pillion which was what Mother had forbidden them to do and why they were stopping in the drive in the first place.
At tea, which was potato-cakes with butter, eaten on our laps, Father said he was sorry if he’d been a bit short previously, and Anna who always wanted to be in their good books finally brought the whole thing out then – wasn’t it terrible what Roley had done this morning, she said, and wasn’t he presumptive: he should join the Pentecostalists if he wanted to gabble rubbish like that. She sounded really outraged, more so even than my mother did when she talked about Rolandson. Ian said, with half a potato-cake still in his mouth, that there was a great deal of talk at the Missionary Training College about the charismatic movement but that the Principal thought it was all rubbish and codswallop.
My father though was very calm that evening. He took his glasses off and wiped them and put his fingers in his eyes. He had been praying about the problem for some long time he said, asking the Lord for guidance, and he said he thought when all was said and done we must keep our hearts and minds open to Christ’s word of renewal, whatever source it came from, and must examine every new thing on its own merits and never never never be too proud to listen to anyone, however lowly. Everybody was subdued after that, and so I got up and took the dog out and I threw stones at the pigeons that settled on the lawn.
I told Mother I couldn’t go to church in the evening because I had some homework I still hadn’t done for tomorrow. She said I shouldn’t leave my homework for the Lord’s Day but she didn’t really try to change my mind because they wanted me to do well at school. Everybody said I was a borderline case and I had to work very hard.
Adrian came in at nine with Anne-Marie before Father and Mother were back from the After Eight prayer meeting. They went straight upstairs to his room and then I tried to listen to them on the little intercom system I’d wired up between his room and mine by hanging wires out of the window and attaching them to a microphone behind his radiator: but I couldn’t hear anything really, just the clicking of the radiator as the heat came on and went off and some very distant muffled voices and one loud thump. What did I expect to hear? I went to bed early and listened to Radio Moscow but then when I tried to go to sleep I couldn’t for thinking what the Reverend Rolandson had done this morning, speaking in that gabbled voice and then talking to me about the forces of Satan being legion; but I wasn’t exactly sure what ‘legion’ meant. I always felt a bit guilty, to tell the truth, at the end of Sundays, embarrassed and uneasy, so I took out my Bible and read a page at random and prayed. I wondered if perhaps I wasn’t like one of those men of Gideon’s who drank from their cupped hands and were always looking over their shoulders. Or if you didn’t grow out of the church one day like you grew out of keeping rabbits.
In the week Adrian and Father had a terrible row and it only ended finally because Mother came in and wept so loud they couldn’t go on. It actually started Tuesday night, I think, when Adrian came downstairs and found Anna and Ian whispering in the hall and he pretended not to know who Ian was because he had never actually been introduced before.
‘Is there a telegram for me?’ he asked, referring presumably to the motorbike. ‘Dear Grandmother not dead at last, I don’t suppose? We can’t peal the jolly knell and revel in our inheritance?’
Anna got very upset by this kind of fun; so in a peeved voice she announed Ian’s name and status. ‘You’re not the only one who has friends, you know,’ she said, and Adrian said, ‘Not a carnal relationship, I trust?’ and he winked at Ian, who blushed through his freckles.
‘Oh you!’ Anna scowled. ‘You think you’re the bee’s knees, don’t you!’ and she stomped off into the lounge, leaving the red-faced Ian behind her. On the piano she banged out, ‘Christian, can you see them, on your Holy Ground, / How the troops of Midian throng and throng around?’ and Adrian left, shouting with laughter. Later, Anna said to Mother she thought it was demonic the way Adrian laughed sometimes, really fearful, as if he wasn’t her brother at all but some other evil person.
Mother must have mentioned this to Father because the following evening when he and Adrian were playing chess together he brought it up, and he said Adrian shouldn’t be too hard on Anna and me because we weren’t that bright in the end, everybody knew that, but we were all still equal under God and we must learn how to treat each other with respect. Adrian and Father played chess together about once a week, whenever the one’s being in coincided with the other’s not having too much work to do. They were both very good at the game and a few years ago they had shared out the victories quite evenly, but now Adrian was getting better and winning almost very time. ‘He has a mind like a scalpel,’ Father used to say, ‘really brilliant,’ and he never complained when he lost but was rather proud of how clever his son was. So generally when they sat down together, bent over the board, Father with his big, bristling dark head almost touching Adrian’s, which was smothered in very long, very blond hair, there was a general feeling of peace and reconciliation about the house and Mother said there was nothing she liked better than to see her husband and son playing together and having fun. It did her heart good, she said: she used to peep in at them through the lounge door a moment and then hurry off, as if her prolonged presence might somehow jeopardize this blessed peace.
Adrian chewed at the space between his thumb and first finger