A Dark Nativity Read online

  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.

  2

  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 & Chi
ps 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 hord
es 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.