Nicola Barker - The Yips

‘But you kept the baby,’ Valentine observes (oddly protective of the student Sheila).

‘Yeah. I was into my thirteenth week when I found out about it — pretty late. I stayed at college until the end of my third trimester then moved back home for the birth. My mother was very supportive. She’s one of those really lovely, wholesome, nurturing types. She offered to take care of Stan, full-time, when I returned to university. I was eager to finish my education — attended for one term, enjoyed the holidays; everything seemed hunky-dory — and then on the train journey back up to Oxford after the Easter break I had a kind of … well, I guess you’d call it an epiphany.’

Valentine has combed out Sheila’s hair and is now slowly walking around her, assessing the work to be done. She stops in front of her.

‘An epiphany?’ She reaches over and grabs the scissors from the pouch.

‘Yeah. I mean it sounds so ridiculous when I describe it in actual words and sentences — it was more of a feeling than an event as such.’

‘An epiphany,’ Valentine repeats, savouring the four, sharp syllables on her tongue, and then: ‘What kind of a feeling, exactly?’

‘Well, I was sitting on the train’ — Sheila adjusts the towel around her shoulders — ‘it was fairly empty, not peak hour or anything, and I had my back to the engine. The countryside was flowing by backwards — I remember that very clearly for some reason. I’d been enjoying a book. It was part of the reading list for a course I was attending on the Colonial Novel: An Area of Darkness by V.S. Naipaul?’

Valentine just shrugs, apologetically.

‘I’d reached this section — about seventy-odd pages in — when Naipaul spends almost an entire chapter describing the Indian attitude to defecation. It was kind of funny and disgusting. I was eating an apple. I put the book down on to the seat beside me and just sat there for a moment trying to dislodge a piece of apple skin from between my teeth with my tongue.

‘I sort of de-focused. Then the door at the far end of the carriage opened and a woman — a British Rail employee — came trundling into the compartment with a drinks trolley. The trolley made that loud, jiggling-clinking-clanking sound as she shoved it along. She pushed it down the middle of the carriage towards me. I was still holding my half-eaten apple. And as she approached I just …’ Sheila’s voice breaks slightly. ‘I saw God. I just saw God — moving towards me in a kind of heatwave with the woman and the drinks trolley …’

‘Crazy!’ Valentine’s amused and startled.

‘I know. Completely weird. Completely random and nonsensical. It was just this … this overwhelming sensation. Like the world was suddenly turned inside out. The hairs on my arms stood on end. I just felt God inhabiting the train, filling the train, filling me. I was touched by God. It was completely out of the blue. Came from totally left field’ — she shrugs (almost regretfully) — ‘and that was that. My old life was over.’

‘You were born again.’

‘Yes.’

Valentine moves to the back of Sheila and pulls her hair into a ponytail with her hand.

‘Speak now or forever hold your peace!’ she intones, mock-warningly.

‘My peace is held,’ Sheila maintains with comic sobriety.

Valentine cuts the hair above her fist then flashes Sheila the disembodied ponytail.

‘Toodle-oo!’ Sheila waves, grinning, as Valentine shows it to Nessa (who strokes it, with a coo) then places it into a nearby pedal bin.

‘You’ve got loads of cats,’ Sheila idly volunteers (as four saunter into the kitchen in quick succession).

‘Eight. Mum used to breed them. Now she hates them.’

‘I quite like cats,’ Sheila muses.

‘God turning up with the drinks trolley!’ Valentine chuckles, returning, with renewed vigour, to the task at hand. ‘Who’d’ve thunk it?’

‘Depressingly prosaic,’ Sheila snorts, ‘I’m hardly giving St Paul much of a run for his money.’

Valentine chuckles and commences the cut, proper. Sheila closes her eyes and relaxes for a while as Valentine snips and fluffs and fusses.

‘Is Gene very religious?’ Valentine suddenly asks.

‘ Gene?! Heavens, no!’ Sheila exclaims. ‘Not remotely! Although …’ She pauses for a second. ‘Credit where credit’s due — it was basically down to Gene that I became a vicar in the first place.’

‘Really?’ Valentine’s intrigued.

‘Yup. It was being around Gene, experiencing his patience and his quiet optimism and his … well, his goodness in the face of such terrible adversity that finally developed what’d been a pretty random, religious experience into something way more coherent.’

‘But if Gene isn’t religious himself’ — Valentine’s confused — ‘then how can you —’

‘I struck a kind of … well, I suppose you’d call it a deal with God,’ Sheila hastily interrupts. ‘I hadn’t known Gene very long at that stage, but late one night — after we’d been chatting for hours over mugs of watery drinking chocolate in the hospital cafeteria — I went home, knelt down at the foot of my bed and said to God: “If you’re powerful enough to turn me inside out like this — and for no apparent reason — then you’re powerful enough to heal that lovely, good, patient man at the hospital.”’

Valentine stops the cut for a moment, surprised.

‘I mean I was very green back then, very silly, very pushy, slightly scared , even,’ Sheila confesses, ‘and — in all truthfulness — I think I was secretly hoping to be disappointed at some level, looking for a way out.’

Sheila blows an especially ticklish chunk of cut hair from the end of her nose. Valentine recommences the cut, frowning.

‘It was also a subtle way of consciously engaging with the feelings I’d started to develop for Gene,’ Sheila expands, ‘feelings which’d gradually evolved — over a series of days and weeks and months — from pity to compassion to love. And of course there was an element of pragmatism to the whole thing, too,’ she confesses, wryly. ‘I just sensed — knew — right up front, that Gene was to be a vital part of my journey; a necessary part, an essential part. I honestly don’t think I would’ve had the mental and emotional strength to go on and pursue a career in the Church without Gene’s example — his constant guidance and good counsel and support.’

‘You think your prayer cured Gene?’ Valentine demands, almost indignant.

Sheila winces. ‘ A man’s steps are of the Lord ,’ she promptly quotes — almost ironically, ‘ How then can a man understand his own way? ’

‘But you do think that you saved him?’ Valentine persists. ‘That he owes his life to you?’

‘Nope. I think he owes his life to God. I think God saved him. I was just a lucky filter. An adjunct.’

‘But how does it … how does it all work , exactly?’ Valentine wonders, still inexplicably irritated. ‘I mean if Gene isn’t religious. If you’ve never actually shared the same, core beliefs? Doesn’t it make him feel almost …’

She’s going to say ‘used’, but then stops herself at the last moment.

‘How does it work?’ Sheila echoes, closing her eyes and smiling, blithely. ‘How does it work? With endless amounts of compromise, of course! And self-denial. And frustration. And confusion. And bitter recrimination. And constant resentment. And utter boredom …’ She pauses, briefly, to draw breath. ‘And bouts of incandescent rage,’ she continues, opening her eyes again, ‘gales of hysterical laughter. Perhaps even the tiniest sprinkling of Divine Providence …’ She glances up at Valentine, shrugging, resignedly. ‘Pretty much like any marriage, I suppose.’