The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

Two people walking ahead, a man and a woman, turned right and went round the side of a wide building with large windows symmetrically spaced across its fa?ade. Simon looked because it was the only other option. If Seed wasn’t ahead, behind or across the road…

There he was, going in through a side door at the top of a concrete ramp. He stopped when he saw the man and woman approach, said hello to them, but it wasn’t the sort of greeting that would pass between friends, Simon thought. They knew each other, but not well.

Once they’d gone inside, Simon approached the door and saw that it had been wedged open. He peered into a wide, empty foyer containing a reception desk with a cash till at one end. Beyond the foyer was a corridor leading to another door. Closed. There was a poster on it that Simon couldn’t read, and a table to the left, covered with leaflets, books and pastel-coloured pamphlets.

Three elderly men with long, straggly hair and matted beards passed him on their way in, leaving in their wake a smell of stale sweat infused with alcohol. Homeless, Simon guessed. Once they’d gone into the room, he moved. The poster on the door at the far end of the corridor was headed ‘Quaker Quest’. Immediately, Simon thought of his two miserable experiences of Laser Quest in the early 1990s-birthday parties he’d been unable to avoid, friends from university who strove to be wacky. He pictured the three ageing tramps he’d just seen running around a darkened room, brandishing glowing swords.

‘A spiritual path for our time,’ the poster said. ‘Monday evenings, Friends House, Euston, 6.30 p.m. All welcome.’ At the bottom there was a website address: www.quakerquest.org. Simon picked up a leaflet from the table, a mini-version of the poster, but with more text. ‘Are you looking for a spiritual path that is simple, radical, contemporary? The Quaker experience could speak to you. We offer a series of six informal open evenings, exploring such issues as equality, peace, God, spiritual practice and faith in action. We will share our individual and common insights through presentations, discussions, questions and an experience of Quaker worship.’

Simon skimmed the titles of the books: A Light That Is Shining, The Amazing Fact of Quaker Worship, God Is Silence. He glanced at the closed door. It sounded as if there were twenty, perhaps thirty people chatting inside. Every so often, Simon caught a whiff of egg. Were there sandwiches? Was that why the three homeless men were there-free food?

Simon picked up a pamphlet called Advices and Queries: the Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain. The booklet contained paragraphs of spiritual wisdom, numbered one to forty-two. Beneath the forty-second, there was a quote from someone called George Fox, dated 1656, about being a good example to others and walking cheerfully with God. Simon flicked through the pages, reading some of the shorter passages. Number eleven made him angry: ‘Be honest with yourself. What unpalatable truths might you be evading? When you recognise your shortcomings, do not let that discourage you. In worship together we can find the assurance of God’s love and the strength to go on with renewed courage.’

When you recognise your shortcomings, do not let that discourage you? Not a word about addressing those shortcomings, trying to stamp them out or replace them with more noble character traits. For the first time in his adult life, Simon felt nostalgic for the Catholicism of his youth.

He stood motionless in the corridor and listened as the clash of voices subsided and a woman started to speak. The predictable welcome, the timetable for the evening-Simon could hear most of it clearly enough. He frowned when he heard her mention Frank Zappa, assumed he’d misheard. No, there was the name again: she was asking if everyone had heard of Frank Zappa. Bizarre. No one said they hadn’t, as far as Simon could make out, but the woman told them who he was nonetheless. ‘Mr Zappa is reported to have once said, “If you want God, go direct”,’ she told her audience. A few people laughed.

A man’s voice took over, saying, ‘We Friends agree with Mr Zappa. God doesn’t need the help of a man in a silk suit asking you for money. Quakerism is an experience-based faith-we only trust what we’ve experienced ourselves. Quakers have an unmediated relationship with God-in other words, we go direct. There’s no holy book, no churches or clergymen, no official creed, and we don’t always use the same words. We define our experience of this immense “something other” in different ways. “The Divine” is one, “God” is another, “the light”…’

‘You can go in, you know.’ Simon turned, found a security guard standing behind him, an elderly man with a concave chest. ‘People turn up late all the time.’

‘I’m all right out here.’

‘Suit yourself. They won’t bite.’ The man started to walk away.

‘Is there anything else going on here tonight?’ Simon called after him. ‘In the building, I mean.’

‘No. Just Quaker Quest.’

Simon thanked him. No doubt, then: Aidan Seed was inside that room-a man who’d looked Simon in the eye and sworn he believed only in the material world, facts and science.

Checking the security guard wasn’t watching him, Simon turned the door handle, opened the door a fraction. Now there was a gap between it and the frame that was wide enough to see through. He saw chairs in semi- circular rows, people’s backs-some straight, some hunched. There was Seed, in the middle of the front row. Simon couldn’t see his face.

Beyond the chairs, the top half of the woman who had mentioned Frank Zappa was visible. She was talking now about something called ‘giving ministry’. She was young, younger than Simon, with a pretty, doll-like face, which surprised him. He frowned. Had he been expecting everyone at Quaker Quest to be pig-ugly? Her hair was dark brown and glossy, centre-parted and tied back from her face. Like Olive Oyl from the Popeye cartoons, only more attractive. She wore a blue sweatshirt and a rectangular blue plastic badge on a string round her neck, with a large white ‘Q’ on it.

The other speaker, the man, wore the same uniform. He was bald, overweight and sweaty. When the woman stopped talking, he took over, defining what worship meant to him. ‘It’s in every sense the spring, the ground,’ he said. ‘It’s what sends me out into the world.’ Having delivered his lines, he stood back, smiling.

‘When all the still centres of all the people present meet in the middle, we call that a “gathered meeting”,’ said Olive Oyl. ‘When a meeting gathers, that’s our opportunity to get to know one another in the things that are eternal. Actually…’ She paused and giggled, as if she’d just remembered a rude joke. Simon imagined the sort of comments Colin Sellers would be making if he were here. I’d like to meet you in the middle, darling. Etcetera.

‘To go back to the subject of ministry for a second, I had a funny experience that I’ll share with you, even though it’s a bit embarrassing,’ said the woman. ‘Sometimes, in the silence and the stillness, you start to get what seem like little messages. Some are for you to share with the meeting, others are for you alone. Over time, you learn to distinguish one kind from the other. Sometimes you get a message that seems to be teasing you.’

The tittering that followed this remark had a knowingness about it; evidently there were people in the room who knew all about receiving teasing messages from-what had the sweaty bloke called it? The Immense Something Other. Wankers, thought Simon before he could help it. He resolved to be more accepting and tolerant, the minute he’d got the hell away from Friends House.

‘One day when I went to meeting, I was feeling a bit hot and bothered. I’d had a silly row with my boyfriend that morning,’ Olive Oyl continued. ‘I’d caught him rinsing some cutlery and putting it back in the drawer, still wet. When he told me there was no point drying it, that it would dry on its own in the drawer, I went ballistic. Anyway, at meeting later that morning, I started to hear this voice in my head. It kept saying, “Cutlery is not eternal.” ’ She laughed, and her audience laughed with her. ‘I knew that message wasn’t to be shared-it was a private joke, just for me. And I was so grateful for that. It’s no accident that gratefulness and “great fullness” sound the same.’

The radiant expression on her face made Simon want to gag, as did her contrived avoidance of the word ‘gratitude’. He’d have liked to tell her what he thought she was greatly full of. Applause broke out. Simon had seen and heard enough. He was about to stand back when he saw Aidan Seed turn in his chair. He wasn’t clapping with the rest of them. He was the only person Simon could see who wasn’t.

Seed looked sickened. Even from a distance, in profile, through a crack between a door and its frame, his disgust was unmistakeable. ‘You’re not one of them,’ Simon muttered under his breath. ‘You’re never going to be one of them. So what are you doing here?’ He wasn’t expecting an answer, neither from Seed, who couldn’t hear him, nor from a supreme being eager to communicate with him confidentially, so he wasn’t surprised when he didn’t get one.

He went outside, hailed the first free cab he saw and told the driver to take him back to Muswell Hill. To Ruskington Road.