Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

‘It’s nice to have you back, lovey, it’s been too long.’

I’ll go mad if the voices don’t stop. If I don’t bleed. If I have no ink.

Voices and visions were all in a day’s work for Derek. He’d hear the word of God in the roar of the traffic. One day he told us he’d had a vision of a field bathed in golden light, a barn for worship, a river. ‘Almost a week ago now,’ he said. ‘Last Thursday it must have been because it was the day Lester found a crack in the cylinder head, and we prayed over the bonnet.’

Lester had been a machinist, but had mashed his hand and taken early retirement. Then his wife left him for a trombone player who used to busk on the embankment, and Lester caught the Jesus bus.

‘I took a walk along the canal,’ Derek said, ‘and asked for guidance. I saw the field floating on the water. I didn’t think to mention it. Not until this showed up.’ He held out the envelope, crumpled from sweaty hands and trouser pockets and smelling faintly of dung. ‘It’s been chasing us around the country. See all these addresses.’

It had come from a farmer called Lloyd Morgan. We’d met Lloyd at a revival meeting near Brecon. The date of the letter was the day of Derek’s vision. It had been written, Derek assured us, at the very hour of his walk along the canal. Lloyd Morgan was offering the Jesus bus and its weary occupants a place of rest.

It was a few days later, on that last trip, that they sent us kids off up the road in search of blackberries and we found the orchard and I saw this place for the first time, and I swore I’d have it, with Penny as a witness, and little Tiffany, whose mother was on the game. We stayed that night on the side of the road, near the church. From the top deck where us kids slept you could see the chimney stacks through the trees. ‘I’ll have it,’ I told myself as I went to sleep. ‘I will, though.’ If Derek could have visions, so could I.

I woke from a dream of apples. I was still getting dressed when the bus started up. We only had forty miles to go, Derek said. We’d be at the farm in time for breakfast. Before we’d picked up any speed we passed the gateway to my house and I saw it had a name – Talgarth Hall. And there was the lawn sweeping up to the front door, and there were the apple trees. We turned into a lane that ran along the side of the orchard. I had a glimpse of the stables and a last look at the back of the house, as we rose between fields to a moor where sheep grazed, then down into another valley. Settling into a seat near the front I watched the roads narrowing, the villages getting meaner and more sparse. Crossing a bridge, we joined a river and followed it upstream.

Lloyd was at the entrance to the farm, filling potholes. He gave Derek a sideways nod and led us on foot through the yard and up a track. We followed at a perilous tilt, the old panels creaking, Derek wrenching the gear lever into first as the gradient steepened.

The field Lloyd had in mind for us sloped down towards the river. He had us park at the top end, next to a stone barn with an iron roof. When Derek cut the engine, it coughed a few times and sighed and the silence closed in. You felt the bus and everything in it come to rest. A butterfly settled on the windscreen. You could hear birdsong and the water washing the bank where the river curved around the bottom of the field. For a moment no one moved. I felt their contentment crowding in on me. I knew things would never be the same. I’d lived through changes, Dad dying, then Derek saving our souls, and I had a premonition that this was next – a change we’d never recover from.

Derek called a meeting. He showed us the cold water tap by the gate post, told us where we’d be digging the latrines, outlined his plans for the barn, including a couple of sleeping rooms and a gathering place with a log-burning stove. He led us in prayer. To mark this new beginning, he said, he was going to baptise us all in the river. Not all in one go, but over the next few days, because it would take time for the Lord to make known to him what new names we should take. Each of us in turn would renew our commitment to Jesus, opening our hearts to his love. First, though, Derek himself would have to be baptised. He asked Walter if he’d mind doing the honours. ‘The oldest among us,’ Derek called him ‘our John the Baptist, if you will.’ Was I the only one who felt, following that thought to its logical conclusion, that Derek was getting above himself? They did it after breakfast, both of them fully dressed, standing with the water up to their waists. We gathered under the trees to watch.

‘From henceforth,’ Derek said, ‘I shall be called Caleb and this our field shall be known as Hebron.’ He held his nose and dipped down into the water and up again.

While the water was still cascading from his hair, Walter began. ‘I baptise thee, Caleb, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. We thank you, Heavenly Father, that by water you have bestowed upon this thy servant the forgiveness of sin and have raised him to the new life of grace, for the sword outwears its sheath and the soul outwears the breast and the heart must pause to breathe and love itself have rest. Though the night was made for loving and the day returns too soon, yet we’ll go no more a roving by the light of the moon…’ He stopped and we heard the water tumbling over the rocks and watched the sand martins swooping in and out of their nests. Walter looked lost and cold.

After a moment, Derek said, ‘Amen,’ and helped him back to the bank where the women were ready with towels. Walter couldn’t stop shivering, so they piled him with bedding and sat him by the stove.

Next morning Derek had his breakfast alone. He appeared while the girls were washing up. I’d thought about who would be next. Walter, obviously, then Lester, then the women. The kids would be done in order of age, probably. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I could still remember the first time I’d been done – a humiliating experience at the age of ten to have to lower my head over the same pink bowl that Penny had been bathed in as a baby, and in our own front room with our new friends in Christ looking on, whoever they were.

‘I have prayed and fasted,’ Derek said. ‘I have sought guidance from the Good Book. I have looked in my heart where Jesus resides, my Lord and saviour.’ His eyes had settled. I turned to see who he was looking at. It was my mother. ‘Flo,’ he said, ‘the Lord who directs me in all my doings has removed the scales from my eyes. You are to take the name of Azubah.’ And my mother did something I’d never seen her do before. She blushed.

In the Book of Daniel, Caro, Azubah was Caleb’s wife. But if you’d been there you wouldn’t have needed to know that. I knew it, but I didn’t need to. Derek was coming on to my mother. In front of everyone. In front of me. There weren’t any couples on the Jesus bus. I’d never noticed before. There was no reason why I should have. It was the way things were. The kids were too young. As far as I knew, the grown-ups were too old. None of them were married – not to each other, anyway. There’d been a kind of equality in that.

I saw Derek’s game all right. He wanted my mother in a way that it had never occurred to me that anyone might want her. For this, the least of his crimes, I hated him.

I’d always been good – cheerful, eager to get stuck in and do my bit. Now I went on strike. Latrines were dug, the barn was kitted out for sleeping, an old sink was positioned under the water tap. Caleb was directing the construction of Hebron, and I wanted nothing to do with any of it. I slunk out of sight. I went up over the hill towards the woods, or sat by the river. Penny brought me scraps from the kitchen.