Perhaps Trev would have understood these people better, whoever they were.
Harrigan had always gone to church in the company of women: his beautiful mother, his hard-faced aunt and, until they had rebelled, his two sisters, with himself in the middle, the loved child. His father’s absence had been pure defiance against the church and, Harrigan thought now at a distance of years, this all-enclosing regiment of women and, as Jim Harrigan saw it, their dotage on his son. Like his father, Harrigan had lost faith a long time ago. When he was a small boy, it had a magic for him. He remembered walking up the hill to church on Sunday morning and looking up at the high steeple of St Augustine’s climbing into the sky. He thought it was beautiful. In the church, he had been fascinated by the statues of Mary and Jesus on either side of the white wedding-cake altar, imagining them coming to life, Jesus reaching out his hand, Mary smiling. Visions of Bible stories had filled his head, brightly coloured images that he had taken from the picture books he used to read. Visions which had strangely and paradoxically died — over time, it had taken time — in the rigours of his adolescent education at St Ignatius. The thoroughgoing arguments he worked through diligently in class had turned the words to ash on the page; words were all they were. After this he had gone through the motions, had become a stranger in that particular world. Someone perfectly in disguise but in reality a double agent, something he had been ever since. Any residual belief had been erased by his mother’s death. Almost. When you live with images for that long, they are burned onto the skin from the inside out. They still hold on to you, if only in memory, like everything that comes out of the past.
In this cold and ugly hall, the people were subdued, waiting. There was no need for the preacher to call for quiet. He stood at the centre of the inner circle, at the centre of the seated crowd.
‘Friends,’ he said into the silence, ‘today we are fortunate enough to have some new companions among us. People who, like yourselves, want to find the way to redemption and truth, to a lasting peace of mind. So I would like to ask our new companions to stand up and introduce themselves and tell us why they have come today. Perhaps we could start with you, Martin. You say your wife left you. Do you want to tell us about it?’
Following this initial invitation, people stood one after another to tell stories of intimate and scarifying detail to a room filled with strangers. Harrigan himself listened and waited. He spent his working days with people who were either professional liars or wanted to strip themselves naked like this. On the whole, he preferred the liars. Their agenda were easier to detect.
‘I’m Paul Harrigan,’ he said, when his turn came. ‘I’m here as someone who worries about the fate of our young people. I wanted to see what you might have to offer them, Graeme. Whether it’s some way of life which might give them more hope for the future than many of them seem to have today. I meet a lot of them in my work. I was listening to one of them talk about that just this morning. I wonder what his fate will be.’
‘That’s very admirable, Paul. Yes, our present world destroys all hope, does it not? Do you have children of your own?’
‘I’d like to keep that to myself. This is about me, not anyone else.’
There was a rustle of surprise. The preacher smiled.
‘Normally we have no secrets in this room, Paul. It’s a condition of entry here, as I thought I had told you. But if that is how you see it.
Would you like to tell us what you do for a living?’
‘I’m a law enforcement officer.’
One way of announcing you’re a fucking walloper, as his father had always put it.
‘Thank you, Paul. I don’t think we have any other policemen here today, although we have had in the past. We’ll begin now. Bronwyn?’
In a wholly unexpected move, the woman in the blue tracksuit walked to the back of the auditorium and extinguished the lights.
Harrigan found himself sitting in complete blackness. He became still, listening and waiting, a prickle of apprehension at the back of his neck. There was the collective noise of those in the room breathing, and then a shuffling, scraping noise, the sound of someone who had become disorientated and had dropped something. In the darkness, there was the suspension of any sense of place. Then a woman’s ghostly and untrained voice was heard, singing:
There was silence. Then Harrigan heard the preacher’s voice, disembodied and echoing against the high ceilings of the hall: ‘We are in the darkness, you and I. Come with me and I will show you the way to the light.’
As he spoke an image began to take shape slowly on the screen at the back of the hall: a figure in a long white robe, seven small glittering stars balanced over his outstretched hands. The preacher stood in silhouette against this image, his shadowed face edged with light. Pale wall lights appeared around the auditorium, illuminating the faces of the watching congregation.
‘Welcome to you all, my blood brothers and sisters in Christ. Please stand and link hands,’ he said. There was a rustle as each person took the other’s hand. Harrigan grasped the hand of an elderly man on one side and a woman of indeterminate age with vague blue eyes on the other. ‘As we stand here on the edge of eternity, I ask you to remember this, my brothers and sisters. You and I are one flesh, one body. Yes, and we love each other, as parent and child, brother and sister, so we love. Close your eyes. Think on this. We are as one. Repeat after me.
We are as one.’
‘We are as one.’ The response came strongly, fully voiced.
‘We are as one,’ the preacher said again.
‘We are as one,’ the crowd responded.
‘We are as one.’
‘We are as one!’
In the shadow and light, a sense of anticipation continued to grow.
Harrigan, perhaps the sole person in the room who had not closed his eyes as requested, glanced from one person to the next, and then to the preacher. The preacher was also open-eyed and watching, looking at him directly or so it seemed. He gave the impression that everyone in the room was within his sight.
‘Please be seated,’ he said.
There was another rustle as the participants let go of each other’s hands and sat down again. The preacher began to speak without emphasis, almost without emotion, moving from one person to the next in the circles of chairs. Those present turned their heads to watch him, straining towards him. His voice took on the quality of a chant, unremitting and at an even tempo.
‘We know, do we not, that Jesus loves us, even beyond death. His blood is the blood of life, one drop of it has the power to redeem us.
To wash us all clean of the grievous weight of life. That is the depth of his love. But do we return that love?’
He stopped in front of the man who spoken about the breakdown of his marriage. ‘I ask you this, Martin. Do you cry aloud in the night for God’s love? No?’
The preacher leaned towards the man and spoke softly, although his voice was heard throughout the hall. ‘You must. You must hunger beyond life for the love that God can give you. Until that hunger consumes you, you will never be satisfied. No one …’ He paused and stood upright, then continued moving. The silence was intense. ‘… no one can deny God and live. Do, and in your heart there will be only death. And then? Oh, my friends, I only tell you this, these are the end-times and Jesus will come for you now on any day, at any hour. He will come with terrible speed and there will be no time for you to say, Oh, I must do that before I go. When we push open these doors to the streets, will the storms that presage the end of the world be raging outside? How do we know they will not? In the next day, the next hour, will it be you who stands on the bridge to all eternity with the abyss of Hell beneath you? Will there be a way across for you? Then the fear of God will come to you, and oh, yes, it will raise up the hairs on your head and a cold black wind will drive you down to Hell for all eternity, to a world without end.’
As he listened, Harrigan had the strange sensation of feeling cold down his spine. That needle along his
