Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

He used to do the rounds with his pamphlets, and he’d stop off in our kitchen for a cup of tea. And then he’d get going on one of his stories about fighting communism in Korea and finding God.

‘Don’t mind Derek,’ my dad would say, ‘Derek’s a talker.’

Finding God changed his life, Derek reckoned. ‘After that, it was no more boozing for me, no more taking the Lord’s name in vain, no more Korean tarts.’

I wouldn’t have minded hearing more about the Korean tarts, but my mum would say, ‘Ah well, what’s done is done,’ or, ‘least said soonest mended,’ and offer him another Jaffa Cake.

He had a way with words, Derek did, but as long as Dad was there he was just television, a programme you’d watch while it was on and then not think about until next time.

Dad was a painter and worked for himself, which meant he worked for whoever would pay him the hourly rate. He loved paint – it was the icing on the cake, he said, the final touch that pulled everything together – all the different stages of the job, the plastering, the carpentry, the tile work – and transform them like magic into a room. People say if you can piss you can paint, but my dad was a craftsman. He’d cut a line along a glazing bar, hand steady as a surgeon’s. His gloss would settle on a door like dew on grass – without a single brush mark, the dimples fading before you’d stopped looking.

He fell off a ladder and broke his neck. He was painting a ceiling at the top of a stairwell and had a heart attack, but it was the fall that killed him. Next thing I know we’re having prayer meetings in the lounge. That summer Mum put the house on the market and we caught the bus.

It was all right for me, Caro, the Jesus bus. As long as we kept moving. I missed out on a few years of school and what might have gone with it – friends my own age, football. I never got any qualifications, but it didn’t hold me back. I made enough to buy this house. I got you. For Penny, though, it started too soon and ended too late. In her mind, I don’t know if she ever escaped. What was she learning all those years? Hard to imagine. Hard even for me and I was there for some of it.

To start with at least we had Walter, which was better than nothing. We’d sit in class on the top deck and he’d say, ‘They are all gone into the world of light,’ and he might be remembering old friends from his missionary days, or he might be doing English. English was the poems Walter had learned at school. There weren’t any books on the bus, apart from the Bible, so he did it all from memory – Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Kipling, Masefield. He recited bits of Shakespeare but never told us they were speeches from plays. We’d get no warning that a poem was on its way. It would just start coming, and something in the sound would tell you – the first rhyme or just the way the words knocked against each other. We learned from Walter that the quality of mercy is not strained, and that the child is father of the man, and that the old order changeth, giving place to new. Then he’d get back to history – or geography, which was history with maps drawn on the blackboard – and we’d learn how the old order of British rule had given place to shabby arrangements about which there was nothing interesting to say.

He lived in the past. He was sentimental about a British working class that no longer existed. He admired doers – men who got their hands dirty or fought in the front line or understood the customs of the Punjab. And he’d get misty-eyed over Indians who’d worked with him in Jalandhar. One in particular, called BJ Chaudhry – a name that would come falteringly to his mouth, followed by silence or a growl of throat clearing.

Mornings on the Jesus bus we studied Walter’s brain. We listened. We wrote things down. We answered questions to show we were awake. Then we were free.

Free to get up to no good, usually, until someone collared you to clean the bus, or scrub a bucketful of spuds, or help Derek with the chemical toilet, which was just for emergencies but filled up pretty quick even so. I learnt fast and was good with my hands, so I’d be sent on the roof to patch a leak, or underneath with gaffer tape and wire hangers to keep the exhaust pipe from rusting off. When Derek had a job on – fixing someone’s boiler, say – he’d take me. I spent half my childhood up a ladder or with my head in a cupboard or my arm down a drain. Plumbing was Derek’s trade, but we’d turn our hands to whatever would earn us folding money.

We kept moving. Stopped where we could – lay-bys, backstreets, patches of waste ground, windswept moors where sheep grazed and sullen ponies stared into the rain. There’s only so long you can park a double-decker bus with a stove-pipe poking out the window before someone’s hammering at the door, telling you to move on, or sniffing around with awkward questions. But wherever we showed up, there were people to welcome us, odd jobs for us to do. We were on the grapevine, you see, Caro. Celebrities for Christ. We’d done what they talked about doing – we’d given all that we had and followed Him . That was worth a food basket, or five quid over the odds for unblocking a sink. We were the Jesus bus and a donation was the next best thing to getting on board.

The grown-ups had taken to complaining about it – all this moving. They’d grumble when they thought we couldn’t hear. It began to come up during prayers. Derek would open the Book in search of guidance. Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it . But where were we to look for Nineveh? I will live in thy tabernacle forever . And wasn’t the Jesus bus our tabernacle? Cheryl, who was Tiffany’s grandma, hated the cold. It played hell with her veins. She’d been a streetwalker, she told us, before she let Jesus into her heart, but she’d never done drugs, not like her daughter, Tiffany’s mum, who was still on the game round King’s Cross, God help her. All that standing was murder on the legs. And you couldn’t wrap up warm, even when it was freezing, or they’d never see what was on offer. They shall enter into my sanctuary. Tiffany would have a different life, thanks to the Jesus bus, Cheryl said, but it was hard even so, not to be able to put your feet up by the fire of an evening and watch a bit of telly. And the Lord appeared unto him and said, Go not down into Egypt. Dwell in the land which I will tell thee of . Yes, but which land was that?

It was all right for Derek. He liked driving the bus. He liked wrestling with the gearbox on the hills. It took muscle to turn the steering wheel. He’d get called a thieving gyppo, like the rest of us, or a pikey, or an asylum, but he got respect too. He was a prophet with plumbing skills. What more could you ask for?

He was a believer, Derek, I’m not saying he wasn’t. But God’s plans had an uncanny way of falling into line with his own convenience. So when his back started playing up and it got hard for him to steer the bus along those backstreets and country roads, his revelation at Bible study shouldn’t have been such a surprise. But it got everyone’s attention. Even in mum there was a shift from one kind of stillness to another.

Mum. My mum, Penny’s mum. She was there, more or less, on the bus with the rest of us. And she did her share of the work, though maybe not so much mothering. It seems to me now that she held the bus together. Arguments ran aground against her silence. She wasn’t calm, exactly. She was a light bulb that flickered from time to time as though it might go out. The less she said the more the others waited. ‘What do you think, Flo?’ someone would ask. ‘I’m right though, Flo, aren’t I?’ And they’d wait while she flickered off and on again. If I ever doubted that there was a world of the spirit more real than this one, I only had to look at her. For all his visions, Derek seemed too heavy-footed to get anywhere near Heaven. My mother was already halfway there.