William Boyd - Ordinary Thunderstorms

The sermon lasted two hours. Darkness clouded, then occluded, the skylights in the gantried roof. Adam was sitting upright, his eyes half open, in a semi-conscious, zoned-out state, hearing the noise of Bishop Yemi’s sonorous baritone, but comprehending nothing, when, all of a sudden, he realised it had stopped, There was silence: his brain re-engaged with the world. Bishop Yemi was staring at him and Turpin.

“Please stand, John 1603 and John 1604.”

Adam and Turpin rose to their feet as Bishop Yemi left the dais and approached them. He placed the palms of his hands on their foreheads.

“You are one of us now — we will never turn you away. Welcome to the Church of John Christ.”

There was a sporadic chatter of applause from the rest of the congregation before the rock music boomed out once again and Bishop Yemi danced enthusiastically out of his chapel.

♦

John 17, the woman with no front teeth, took Adam to a room full of piles of clothes, clean but un-ironed, and asked him to help himself. He chose a cornflower-blue shirt and a pin-striped navy-blue suit that didn’t quite match: the pin-stripes on the trousers were wider than those on the jacket. He asked if he might exchange his golf-shoes for some other footwear but John 17 said, regretfully, “We don’t do shoes, love.” Still he was glad to surrender his filthy white shirt — stained with Philip Wang’s blood and his own — his white denim jacket and Mhouse’s beige camouflage cut-off cargo pants. John 17 turned away as he changed — the fit was perfectly acceptable.

“I suppose you’re hungry,” John 17 said as Adam refastened his ‘John 1603’ badge to his pin-striped lapel.

“I am, rather,” Adam confessed, and he was led down a corridor to the small communal dining room where he picked up a plate and joined the end of the queue of other members of the congregation. They were being served rice and beef stew from pots bubbling over gas jets. Adam loaded his plate with rice and held it out to have the stew ladled over it. He looked up to thank the server and saw that it was Mhouse, wearing a plastic badge that said ‘John 627’.

“Hello,” Adam said.

“Yeah?”

“You’re Mhouse.”

“Yeah.”

“We met. I’m Adam. I was mugged — you took me back to Chelsea…” He was going to add, and you beat me up with an entrenching tool , but thought better of it.

“You sure?”

“You lent me some clothes. You found me at the Shaftesbury Estate. Remember? It was you who told me to come here.”

“Did I? This is my church…” She looked at him, head cocked, as if trying to place him, somehow. “Oh, yeah…I remember. You finished with them clothes?”

“John 17 has the trousers — but I still have the flip-flops.”

“No prob. I wouldn’t mind the flip-flops back.”

“I’ll bring them to you.”

“Cool.”

He smiled at her and then helped himself to several slices of white bread and went to look for a place to sit. The room contained half a dozen Formica-ed tables with four seats set around them, like a small workman’s café. Turpin was sitting at a table with two other men, the seat beside him empty, so it seemed logical for Adam to join his fellow convert.

“Wha-hey, city gent,” Turpin said, admiring Adam’s new clothes, as Adam slipped into the seat beside him. Then Turpin said to the other two men, “This is Adam.”

“Hi. I Vladimir,” the first man introduced himself. He had a perfectly shaven head — a gleaming oiled dome — and a small neat goatee. His eyes were darkly shadowed, he looked terminally exhausted. He extended his hand and Adam shook it.

“Gavin Thrale,” the other man said, in a middle — class accent, raising his hand — not offering it for shaking. He was an older man, in his fifties, perhaps, also bearded, but heavily, with an old salt’s full grey shag, and had a long lock of matching grey hair swept across his forehead and tucked behind his ear like a schoolboy. He had said ‘Gavin Thrale’ with a subtle inflection in his voice that implied that it was a name that Adam might possibly recognise, though he would prefer to remain incognito.

The four men ate their beef stew in silent concentration. Turpin ate like a porker at the trough, slurping, chewing with his mouth open, making small grunting sounds of pleasure as he swallowed.

If Adam hadn’t been so hungry he might have found it nauseating, but he shut his ears and concentrated, filling his belly with his first proper meal in two weeks.

Turpin finished first and pushed his plate to one side, expelling a soft belching whoosh of air.

“What’re you doing in a place like this, Adam?” he asked, picking at his widely spaced teeth with a fingernail.

Adam had prepared himself for this question. “I’ve had a series of nervous breakdowns,” he said, unemotionally. “My life sort of fell apart. I’m trying to put it back together.”

“My wife chucked me out,” Turpin volunteered. “The Birmingham wife. Turned very nasty. Got to lay low for a while, you know. Very angry and unhappy woman. Out for my blood, I’m sorry to say.”

“Hell hath no fury,” Gavin Thrale said.

“Sorry?” Turpin said.

“What you do to her?” Vladimir asked.

“Not so much to her , exactly,” Turpin said, unperturbed by the question. “More a ‘family’ matter — very delicate — other members of the family were concerned.” He went no further.

“I come to England, come to London for heart surgery,” Vladimir said, unprompted. “In my village they collecting money for one year, send me for London to fixing my heart.” He smiled engagingly. “I never be in big city like this. Too many temptings.”

“Temptations,” Thrale corrected.

“What happened?” Turpin asked.

“I come here. I go to hospital. Suddenly I feeling OK, you know? So I check out.” Vladimir shrugged. “I have problem with heart valve — it fix himself, I think.”

“What about you, Gavin?” Turpin asked.

“None of your business,” Thrale said, stood up and left.

♦

It became clear, once the congregation of the Church of John Christ had finished their meal, that there was to be no lingering.

Mhouse and John 17 began to put chairs on tables and another John started mopping the linoleum floor.

As Adam, Turpin and Vladimir left the church they were bade farewell by Bishop Yemi himself. He shook their hands, then gave them a hug.

“See you tomorrow, guys,” he said. “Tell your friends — six o’clock, seven days a week.”

Vladimir drew Adam aside. “You like monkey?”

“Monkey? What’s that?”

“Knack. Maybe you say ‘beak’? We call it monkey.”

“I’ve never tried it.”

“You come with me we go smoke monkey. You have money?”

“No.”

Vladimir shrugged and smiled, clearly disappointed. He seemed an almost innocent soul. “I like monkey too much,” he said and wandered off, leaving Adam with Turpin.

“Where you headed, Adam?”

“Chelsea.”

“Great. I’m headed for Wandsworth. Got a wife up there I haven’t seen for a year or two. Might put me up for the night.”

Turpin had some money and offered to lend Adam the bus fare to Chelsea—“Now that we’re brothers in John Christ, eh?”—an offer Adam accepted, promising to pay him back as soon as he could.

On the bus, Turpin, still exhaling soft gusts of beef-laden air from his gut, and every now and then pounding his breast — bone as if something were stuck there, said, “What do you make of this John Christ story, then?”

“Pure mumbo-jumbo,” Adam said. “It’s all nonsense — this god, that god. Complete rubbish.”

“No, no. Hang on,” Turpin said, frowning, the deep pachy-dermous creases on his brow folding into an unnatural wave effect. “You got to give credit to—”