Killing God

  (i) he doesn't exist

  (ii) and even if he did exist (which he doesn't), and even if he was trying to frighten me (which he isn't), why would he do it with snail shells? Why not use a bolt of lightning or a plague of bats or something? And why, if he was using snail shells to send me a message, why did he get the letters in the wrong order? I mean, he's God, isn't he? If he can create an entire universe in seven days, it shouldn't be too hard for him to get three crappy snail shells in the right order, should it?

  ‘What do you think, Jeeb?’ I ask Jesus.

  He looks up at me, smiling his dog-smile.

  And I take his happy silence for agreement.

  When I get to Splodge's house, Splodge, as always, is sitting on his doorstep in his parka, watching the world go by. His birthmark is really purpley today.

  ‘Hey,’ I say to him, turning off my iPod.

  ‘Hey, Dawn,’ he replies. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He turns and smiles at Jesus and Mary. ‘Nice coats,’ he says.

  Jesus and Mary wag their tails in agreement.

  Splodge looks back at me. ‘Where're you going?’

  I shrug. ‘Nowhere, really. Just wandering around, you know…’

  He nods.

  I smile at him, trying to work out how to broach the subject of snails. It's a tricky one. I mean, how do you ask an eleven-year-old kid with a half-purple face if he's been secretly collecting your painted snails, saving them up for months, then putting them back in your garden? How do you do that without making him think you're mad? Or without making him think that you think he's mad?

  You lie to him, that's how.

  ‘You know that van?’ I say to him.

  ‘What van?’

  ‘The blue one. You know, the one we saw yesterday. You said you see it around all the time but you've never seen anyone get out of it.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ he says, nodding. ‘The Farthings Furniture van. It went up the road a couple of minutes ago.’ He looks at me. ‘What about it?’

  ‘I'm not sure,’ I tell him, lowering my voice. ‘But there was a van parked outside my house last night, and I think I saw someone sneaking into the alleyway that leads round to my garden.’

  Splodge raises his eyebrows. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What were they doing?’

  ‘I don't know. I mean, it was dark. I couldn't really see very much. All I could make out was this shortish guy in a parka –’

  ‘You saw him getting out of the van?’

  ‘No… I just saw him going into the alleyway.’

  ‘Did you call the police?’

  I shake my head. ‘He could have been anyone, a friend of one of my neighbours or something.’

  Splodge frowns. ‘You should have called the police.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ I say. ‘If I see him again, I will.’

  I don't like lying to Splodge, but I don't dislike it enough not to do it. And, more to the point, it serves a purpose. Because now I know that Splodge didn't put the snail shells in my garden. Because, if he had, I would have seen the alarm in his eyes when I was telling him about the shortish guy in a parka who was skulking around my house last night. Because Splodge would have been that shortish guy in a parka.

  But he wasn't.

  I'm 99% sure of that.

  So now all I'm left with, snail-shell-and-killing-wise, is GOD.

  I put my earphones back in, hit the PLAY button, and head for the bus stop.

  deep one perfect morning (2)

  I get off the bus at the roundabout by the railway station and make my way through a rusted iron gate to a hedge-lined lane that runs parallel to the railway tracks. The lane is rutted with tractor tracks and murky brown puddles, but the ground in between the tracks is surprisingly firm, and I can walk it without too much trouble. Jesus and Mary run on ahead of me, sniffing around in the hedges, while I just take my time – walking steadily, listening to the music – as the lane leads me up into a quiet world of trees and fields and open skies.

  It's OK.

  I like it here.

  It makes me feel away from things.

  There are no bad-assy girls or mystery snails up here.

  There's just:

  a big black rook swooping over a barren field towards a spindly line of winter trees on the bank of an invisible stream

  a train in the distance, rumbling silently out of the station

  occasional dried brown leaves, dislodged by the breeze, spiralling down from the wayside trees

  Dawn Bundy and her dogs.

  I know this lane pretty well, I walk the dogs up here whenever I can, but I don't know anything about the church at the end of the lane. It's just a church, an old stone church with an old stone tower, surrounded by a tumbledown graveyard. And usually, when I get to the wooden gate that leads into the graveyard, I just turn round and start heading back. Not today though. Today I stop at the gate. And today, for the first time ever, I actually read the faded lettering on the wooden sign above the gate. It reads:

  THE SECRET OF THE

  LORD

  IS WITH THOSE

  WHO FEAR HIM,

  AND HE WILL

  SHOW THEM HIS

  COVENANT

  I look at it for a while, reading it through a couple of times, but it doesn't seem to make any sense, so I call the dogs and unlatch the gate and we go on into the graveyard. A curved path leads us along through the shadows of ancient trees and gravestones towards the front of the church, and as we follow the path I can smell the earthy scent of the dead leaves under my feet. I stop for a moment, looking down at the rotting leaves on the path, and I wonder…

  Dead leaves.

  Dead bodies.

  These fallen leaves, I think to myself, they come from trees whose roots suck up stuff from the ground. And this is a graveyard. The ground here is full of dead people. Dead bodies, rotting flesh, leaking out God-knows-what into the soil – blood, dreams, brains, memories, emotions… and the roots of the trees are sucking up all this dead-body juice, and the juice is making the leaves, and the leaves themselves are crumbling and dying…

  I could be standing on the remains of somebody's emotions.

  I walk on.

  There's a stillness to the air now, no sense of time. The old stone walls of the church look stern and sullen in the mid-morning light, and the flint-grey tower looms cold and dark against the bright January sky. The church door is set within a wooden-roofed entrance porch. It has a stone-tiled floor, a stone bench on either side, and stone walls hung with church and community notice boards. I stand there for a while, gazing idly at the messages:

  CHRISTIAN STUDIES COURSE, WORSHIP FOR

  THE YOUNG

  BREAD AND CHEESE LUNCH

  ARE YOU SUFFERING FROM ANXIETY AND

  DEPRESSION? BEREAVEMENT?

  DRUG AND ALCOHOL DEPENDENCY?

  EMOTIONAL PROBLEMS?

  CHURCH SERVICES FOR JANUARY AT

  ST MICHAEL'S CHURCH:

  MORNING SERVICE BEGINS AT 10.45

  With Revd David Welchman and the

  Soloist Martha Angstrom.

  EVENING SERVICE STARTS AGAIN AT 6 P.M.

  With Revd David Welchman and the Soloist Alan Taylor.

  EVERYONE WELCOME

  It doesn't actually say what day the church services are on, but I'm guessing it's probably going to be Sunday, and I suppose I should have realized that there won't be anything happening here today. I mean, it's not as if God needs worshipping every day of the week, is it?

  But I'm here now, so I might as well try the door, just in case.

  I try the door.

  It's locked.

  I stare uselessly at it – a big slab of heavy dark wood, giant-sized hinges, cast-iron bolts – and I try to imagine what's behind it. Silent church things, I suppose. Pews and pulpits. Stained glass. Darkness.

  The unwelcoming smell of God.

  At my feet, Mary lets out
a troubled whine.

  I look down at her. ‘What's the matter? Don't you like it?’

  She nervously wags her tail.

  I smile at her. ‘Too spooky for you?’

  She yawns, embarrassed.

  Beside her, Jesus barks quietly – letting me know that he's not afraid. He's fine. But if Mary wants to leave, well… that's fine with him too.

  ‘Come on then,’ I tell them. ‘Let's go.’

  We leave the porchway and follow the pathway back through the graveyard towards the gate. About halfway along the path, set back in a little flower garden, there's a wooden bench. It looks like a nice place to rest for a while, and my legs are kind of tired from all that walking, and it's not as if I'm in any great hurry to be anywhere else…

  So I sit down.

  And I gaze out over the graveyard, looking without thinking at the tombs and the crosses and the trees and the headstones…

  And then I close my eyes and bow my head in thought.

  psycho candy

  I like being in this big black nowhere place. I could stay here for ever, alone in my unworld, with my eyes closed and the dark music playing, not being thirteen years old, not having to not think about anything, just listening to this beautiful nothingness…

  But there's always something, isn't there? There's always something that brings you back from your nowhere. And this time it's a sudden touch – the touch of a finger tapping softly on my shoulder – that jolts my heart and jerks me out of my void. I gasp quietly, a startled breath, and my eyes spring open, bombarding me with the too-bright dazzle of the outside world, and there on the path in front of me is a kindly-looking man in a beige corduroy jacket.

  ‘I'm so sorry,’ he says, as I fumble the earphones from my ears. ‘I didn't mean to frighten you.’ He smiles, showing me that he means no harm. ‘Are you all right?’

  He's not young, this man, but he's not old either. He's probably somewhere between thirty and forty. Medium height, medium size, medium just about everything. He has a harmless-looking face, very ordinary light-brown hair and totally average dull-brown eyes (that match the colour of the battered old briefcase in his hand). Beneath his beige jacket, he's wearing a dull-black shirt with a white dog collar – you know, a vicar's collar. So, unless he's going to a fancy-dress ball, I'm guessing that he actually is a vicar. Or a priest, or a rector, or a curate or something. I don't really know the difference.

  ‘What?’ I say to him.

  He smiles. ‘I just wanted to make sure you were all right, that's all. I saw you sitting there, you see, and I thought perhaps you were ill or something…’

  ‘No,’ I tell him, looking around to see where Jesus and Mary are. ‘No, I'm fine. I was just, you know… I was just thinking.’

  He nods, as if he understands. ‘It's a good day for thinking.’

  I spot Jesus and Mary sniffing around a headstone on the other side of the path, and I almost call out their names, but I stop myself just in time. I mean, this guy's a vicar, so he'd probably be offended if he knew my dogs were called Jesus and Mary. And although I don't care (because, as far as I'm concerned, it isn't offensive), there's no point in needlessly upsetting him, is there?

  ‘Are they your dogs?’ the vicar says to me.

  ‘Yeah.’

  I whistle them – once, twice – and they both come trotting over.

  ‘They're beautiful,’ the vicar says.

  ‘Thanks.’

  He watches them as they come up and sit down beside me, and I watch them too – wondering why they're just sitting there quietly, with a hint of childish embarrassment in their eyes. Why aren't they doing what they usually do when they meet someone new? Why aren't they running round in circles, wagging their tails and whining their beautifully stupid little heads off?

  ‘I'm David Welchman, by the way,’ the vicar says. ‘I'm the parish vicar here at St Michael's.’

  ‘Right,’ I say, nodding my head.

  He nods too, smiling at me, and I think he's probably waiting for me to tell him my name. But I don't think I want to. I don't know why not. I just don't.

  ‘What are you listening to?’ he asks me, glancing curiously at the earphones in my lap. ‘Anything I'd know?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  He nods his head in a middle-aged-man-talking-to-a-teenage-girl-about-music kind of way. I wind up my earphones and stuff them in my pocket with my iPod. The vicar smiles at me again.

  A cold wind is beginning to blow now, whipping up piles of dead leaves into tiny brown tornadoes, and above the church a bank of grey clouds is looming heavily across the sky.

  ‘Looks like rain,’ the vicar says, gazing upwards.

  And even as he says it, I feel the touch of a single drop of rain on my hand. It feels icy and hot, very big and very small, like a miniature storm on the head of a giant pin.

  ‘Well,’ the vicar says to me, hefting the briefcase in his hand. ‘I must get on…’

  ‘Can I talk to you about something?’ I ask him.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I'd like to talk to you about something.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ he says, not very convincingly. ‘What is it you'd like to talk to me about?’

  ‘God.’

  I'm pretty sure the vicar doesn't really want to talk to me, but I'm also pretty sure that he can't say no. Because:

  (a) It's his job to talk to people about God.

  And (b) it's pouring with rain now, and it wouldn't be very Christian of him to leave a young girl outside on her own in a storm.

  But (c) he's obviously got some stuff to do, some business-y/briefcase-y kind of stuff, and he'd much rather be doing that than talking to me.

  And more importantly (d) he's a man, a middle-aged man, and I'm a teenage girl, and there's no one else around just now, and he probably thinks it's not very appropriate for a middle-aged man to be on his own with a teenage girl (even if that teenage girl is kind of round and lumpyish and non-delectable).

  So what's he going to do?

  Well, he's going to compromise, that's what he's going to do. He's going to say to me, ‘Come on, let's get out of this rain,’ and he's going to hurry along the path towards the church, holding his briefcase over his head, and me and Jesus and Mary are going to follow him, and when we get to the shelter of the stone porch, that's as far as he's willing to go.

  ‘Sit down, please,’ he says, flapping rain from his jacket.

  I look at the locked door, then back at him. ‘Can't we go inside?’

  ‘Well,’ he says carefully. ‘I think it's probably best if we talk out here.’

  ‘Why's that?’ I reply knowingly, looking him straight in the eye.

  It's a terrible thing to say, totally unnecessary, and the part of me that is me (the Now Dawn) regrets it almost immediately. And even the other part of me (the Cave Dawn – who I know gets a tiny kick of irrational satisfaction from seeing the squirm of discomfort in the vicar's dull-brown eyes), even she knows that we're not being fair.

  But it's too late now.

  (I'm sorry.)

  I've already said it.

  (Sorry.)

  And there's nothing I can do to take it back. All I can do is lower my eyes and sit myself down on the cold stone bench and pretend that nothing happened.

  (What happened?

  Nothing. Nothing happened.

  There is no Reason Four.)

  ‘So,’ the vicar says to me after a while. ‘How can I help you?’

  His voice is still quite kindly, but there's an edge of caution to it now. It sounds like the voice of a gentle man talking to a potentially violent lunatic.

  I raise my eyes and look at him.

  (Sorry.)

  And then, trying to appear as perfectly normal as possible, I say to him, ‘Is it wrong to keep bad things a secret?’

  He gives me a concerned and slightly puzzled look. ‘I'm not quite sure what you mean.’

  ‘If you know that something is wrong,’ I expla
in. ‘I mean, if you know that someone has done something wrong, something that they shouldn't have done, but you don't tell anyone about it… is that wrong?’

  ‘Well,’ the vicar says, his voice very serious now. ‘It all depends on what this person has done.’ He looks at me. ‘Is this a hypothetical question? Or are we talking about something that's actually happened?’

  ‘Yeah, it definitely happened.’

  ‘I see. And do you know this person who's done something wrong?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He looks at me again, more concerned than puzzled now. ‘Can you tell me what sort of thing this person has done?’

  ‘Something pretty bad.’

  ‘Have they broken the law?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have they hurt anyone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Badly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How badly?’

  ‘As bad as it gets.’

  The vicar slowly shakes his head. ‘And you're telling me that you know this person? You know what they've done?’

  ‘Yeah… I know them. And I know what they've done. And it's bad… you know, it's against the law. It's wrong.’ I look at the vicar. ‘Do you think I should tell someone about it?’

  ‘I think you'd be making a terrible mistake if you didn't.’

  ‘Right… so you think I should do something?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘You don't think I should just sit back and let it happen?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  I look at him. ‘So how come it's all right for God to let it happen?’

  ‘I'm sorry?’

  ‘It's a criminal offence, isn't it?’

  The vicar looks puzzled. ‘What is?’

  ‘Failure to report a crime… it's against the law. It's illegal.’

  ‘I'm sure it is –’

  ‘So how come God gets away with it? I mean, he witnesses all kinds of horrible stuff, doesn't he? But he never does anything about it. He never tries to stop it. He never reports anything. He never calls the police.’ I look at the vicar. ‘If anyone else did that, they'd be arrested.’

  ‘Well,’ says the vicar. ‘I think you're being slightly ridiculous now –’