Alchemy. Maureen Duffy

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СКАЧАТЬ to get to know new members. Where can I find you?’

      ‘I’m in Drew’s office.’

      ‘Drew?’

      ‘Drewpad Singh.’

      ‘I’ve no memory for anyone’s name. You’re Jay. I can just about hang on to that.’

      I don’t know how I got home. In those days home was a studio flat in Earl’s Court among the last wave of nostalgic Aussies, and the new wave of Arabs who come over for treatment in the Cromwell Hospital. I walked a bit along the Embankment after we docked and then the wine hit me. I was looking for Embankment Station. The rest is a blank. The next morning when I woke I tried to put it all back together in sequence but it seemed something I’d dreamt, unreal. My clothes were hung over a chair. There was a half empty glass of red wine on the draining board in my slip of a kitchen. Had any of it happened? What had happened? I was rough with myself. Don’t expect her to call. That was it. Just chatting up one of the juniors. Being kind. It meant nothing. If you bumped into her in the corridor she’d be embarrassed if she remembered at all.

      I was ripe for disaster after an unhappy attempt to conform with a guy in Humanities at Sussex, a switch to law and aching after Zena who thought we were just mates, protecting each other from the sweaty socks and stewy underpants, when they wore them at all, of those colleagues we didn’t fancy, whose youthful necks were still aflame with fiery volcanic zits. At weekends I’d drift up to the Phoenix in Cavendish Square, rave the night away, sometimes ending up in a strange bed, learning new tricks, a rite of passage I felt entitled to. Chastity wasn’t an option as we neared the gay nineties. But heart and cunt stayed resolutely apart and one Saturday night the serpent scales came off my eyes and I saw the club scene for the frenetic search it was that could only end in tears after bedtime. When I moved to Settle and Fixit I’d been back just twice in seven years since I left Sussex and found myself a job and the studio flat. Grew up. Except that you never do, not inside. Zena had finally lost it to an ex-public schoolboy who already had his place booked as PPA to a rising Tory politician. He was too clever a lawyer to make the mistake of date rape but then he didn’t need to. By then she was tired of saying no and at least he bathed and washed his thin pale hair.

      Instead of clubbing I took to going home at the weekends, hanging out with the parents, the black labrador, the ginger cat and my brother’s family, the other members of our extending clan if they happened to be visiting. I knew Mam was worried about me, that she and Dad lay in bed in the morning talking around what I was or wasn’t doing. I said I was studying for my Bar exams, which was true, and that didn’t leave much time or energy for anything else.

      In true English style nothing was said of course. But there was no mention of Mr Right coming along either. Only once Roger my brother looked at me straight and said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be getting married.’

      I looked straight back at him. ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

      ‘So I’ll have to provide the grandchildren.’ Two years later he did, marrying Jenny, a schoolfriend’s sister who got conveniently pregnant on their Barcelona honeymoon. It left me free and gave my parents a new topic of concern. I began to think about moving up and into chambers, becoming a real lawyer instead of just a legal adviser to a small firm, drawing up contracts and leases, and keeping them the right side of company law.

      ‘So you’ll be able to get us out of trouble,’ Dad said when I told them I’d been called to the Bar.

      ‘What did you have in mind?’

      ‘I fancy one of those anti-capitalism demos myself. What about you, Linda?’ I knew he was only half joking. After taking early retirement when British Rail was privatised Dad was helping out at the local union branch office.

      ‘I might have a go at that Leylandii hedge they’ve planted next door if it grows any higher.’

      They were proud of having put me and Roger through university and we were both careful not to let a distance come between us as we moved away from Acton, further into London, Roger to the trendy Notting Hill semi his accountancy fees could afford, and me to the anonymity of Earl’s Court.

      Why am I dredging all this stuff up? Because, I suppose, it’s been lying there at the bottom of the pit that’s my stomach, a lumpy mess of potage, part birthright, part the indigestible experience I’ve swallowed whole over my thirty-odd years. Maybe it’s time to spew it all up and start again if you ever can. Marlowe was a dedicated melancholic for all his wisecracks so perhaps he isn’t the best role model for me after all. I’ve got to put all this aside and get back to Adrian Gilbert: I have to get into Wessex. Why don’t I just pick up the phone tomorrow morning, get the number off their website, and see what happens. I pour myself another glass of wine. Decision time.

      I dream I’m in somewhere cold and dark, lying on straw. I know my clothes are filthy and my hair matted. Then I’m talking to someone I can’t see. ‘I can help you,’ I say. ‘I can defend you.’ There’s a shrill buzzing noise. It’s the alarm going off. My heart is thudding somewhere up in my throat and I’m slippery with the acid sweat of nightmare or the killer night fevers of consumption and Aids.

      As I butter my toast and drink my coffee I bone up on tribunal procedure which isn’t something I’ve had to do before, and rehearse what I’m going to say when I get through to Wessex. Then I think I’ll try to see if the Temple of the Latent Christ has its own website. I log on and search via the ridiculously named Google. Bingo.

      They have indeed and it tells me there are branches of the Temple in Switzerland, Peru, Swaziland and the UK. It even invites punters to sign on for courses at Wessex. The fees seem astronomical but maybe things have changed since I left Sussex and these aren’t as bad as I think. Now I can listen, and watch, an address by a bishop. The site also offers me almost instant ordination if I will subscribe to their beliefs, become a member of their church, as I suppose I have to call it. ‘Unlike other sites offering immediate ordination we offer only to the committed who have subscribed to the tenets of our faith. You may choose to be a lay member or one of the chosen, the elect who may perform certain ceremonies as prescribed by the council of bishops and elders under the guidance of our Father in Christ, Apostle Joachim after a period of probation.’

      I wait for the address. First comes some unidentified but unmistakably numinous music, tonal religious candy floss. Then the bishop, or should I say the Apostle, against a desert background like that in pictures of St Jerome in the wilderness, except that there’re no friendly lion and lamb lying down together. The Temple of the Latent Christ it seems is every one of us. So far not too far from certain wings of traditional Christian theology. But it’s also all the committed wherever they may be. Shots of smiling faces and uplifted hands, brown and pink and black. We are all bound together once we have dedicated ourselves. No going back.

      Most religions have an opt out clause, except I’ve read somewhere, the Parsees’ Zoroastrians where you can’t get in and you can’t get out. I’ve frozen the frame on ‘His Charisma’. Now we go on. The Temple rejects the later Christian accretions of the Synoptic Gospels and bases its teachings on the scriptures of the Dead Sea Scrolls and those writings, the Apostle would not call them apocrypha, rejected by those who have perverted the true faith, together with Revelation. I begin to smell Gnosticism, usually somewhere at the heart of DIY Christian sects, the new evangelicals of our corporatist culture.

      Joachim is clean-shaven and smiling gravely. He gestures with shapely hands; expanding and contracting his meaning, pushing out into the world leaving his vulnerable heart unguarded and then drawing his audience back into it. He isn’t a passionate orator like Paisley or Martin Luther King. This is new style, low key, almost murmured. Nevertheless I can see that it could СКАЧАТЬ