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
