Descent (9 page)

‘Oh aye?’

‘Do you have the photo handy?’

‘Just a mo – aye.’

‘Look at it and listen to this: “And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men.” Revelation, chapter nine, verse seven. Next verse: “And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.” What your father showed you is a Bible!’

‘No,’ said Calum. ‘The pages were that thick, if it had been a Bible the book would have been a lot bigger than it was, and it was big enough.’

‘Well, the New Testament, then.’ I thought for a moment, then a detail clicked into place from a historical novel I’d read a year or two earlier: Umberto Eco’s
The Name of The Rose
. ‘The pages are thick and white because they’re not paper – they’re vellum. What you’ve got is a manuscript of the New Testament, in some language and alphabet that’s not known any more, at least not online.’

‘Been searching on it, have yi?’

‘Of course I have.’ I told him how I’d found my clue. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t,’ I added.

‘Huh!’ he said. ‘I believed myself, didn’t I?’

‘There you go,’ I said. ‘Scepticism works.’

‘So why,’ Calum asked, ‘would anyone keep it a secret?’

‘You said it yourself,’ I told him. ‘Well, your father did. People could get burned for having it, he told you. Back in the old days, the Roman Catholic Church was dead suspicious of translations of the Bible into local languages. I guess your Gypsy-rover ancestor wasn’t too keen on explaining to the Spanish Inquisition what he was doing with one. If he didn’t know what it was, that made it even more risky. Could have been full of black magic or heresy or whatever. Especially if it was in a language no one spoke and letters nobody could read.’

‘Why would it be like that in the first place, though?’

‘My guess,’ I told him, with all the authority of a ten-minute trawl through online resources on alphabets, ‘is that it’s a script invented by some medieval monk or whatever, like St Cyril’s supposed to have invented Cyrillic, to translate the Testament into some obscure language in Eastern Europe. And you know what that means?’

‘I know all right,’ said Calum. ‘It means it’s worth a fucking fortune.’

I laughed. ‘There’s that, aye. But it’s worth even more to scholars, to the Church, to science – well, linguistics …’

‘Nae doubt,’ said Calum, grudgingly. ‘But as far as I’m concerned it’s staying right where it us, until such time as my old man passes it on tae me.’

‘You could tell him what I’ve told you – heck, you don’t even need to mention the photo. Just say you searched on what you remembered, the Roman numeral and a description of the picture—’

‘No,’ said Calum. ‘He’d still be fucking livid. He’d never trust me again.’

I thought about this.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s leave it. But … I hate to say this, but I trust you a bit more now.’

‘Ha-ha! Gee, thanks, old pal.’

‘You know what I mean.’

Calum sighed. ‘Aye. Well, let’s leave it at that.’

And we did.

On Wednesday evening, about 7.30, I sat at the living-room table, refried slices of Sunday’s nut roast and sweet potato heavy in my belly, and struggled with
Jane Eyre
for English homework. Mum was down at the old container port, ladling out soup to the destitute. Dad was working late. Marie was in Glasgow, working the early evening in a bar as usual through the week.

I highlighted a passage that puzzled me, searched on it, and consulted Calum, to find him as baffled as I was. We exchanged a few messages with Sophie to help us distinguish wheat from chaff. I don’t know what Calum made of it, but I went on to read the first critical discussion that Sophie recommended and found it very helpful indeed. In the midst of my effort to avoid using that discussion’s wording in my own, someone rang the doorbell. I thumbed to the door camera and saw a man in a black suit standing at the top of the front steps. Holy shit! I thought. A Man in Black! Then I smiled at my own silliness as I noticed the white clerical collar above the black shirt-front.

Rather glad of the interruption, I folded the phone and went and opened the door.

‘Hello?’ I said.

The man was young, slim and pale, with broad, muscular shoulders. He stuck a fingertip inside his collar and slid it back and forth for a second or two, then desisted and stuck out his hand. I shook, finding it cold.

‘Good evening!’ he said, in an unexpectedly deep and resonant voice. He glanced down at a phone in his left hand. ‘You must be … Ryan Sinclair?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

He smiled, his teeth as white as his collar. His right arm twitched, as if he’d been about to shake hands again and had thought better of it.

‘James Baxter,’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

His accent was Scottish, but educated. He might have been from Edinburgh.

‘Likewise,’ I said.

‘You’ll be wondering why I’m here.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

He hesitated for a moment as if wondering the same himself.

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Yes. I’m from the church.’

He fished from the breast pocket of his jacket a laminated card and held it up to my face, and coincidentally to the door camera. The card showed a photo of himself, with his name and the name and logo of the Church of Scotland. I waved my phone in front of it and confirmed the card’s authenticity.

‘Yes, I see, but … my mother’s not in, and anyway she goes to the other – uh, the Episcopalian church.’

‘Oh, that’s fine,’ said Reverend James Baxter. ‘We local ministers all work together, you see. And I’m not here to visit your mother – I’m here to visit you.’

I took a step back. ‘Why?’

Another toothy smile. ‘I understand you went to church last Sunday for the first time in several years,’ he said, ‘and, as part of the parochial pastoral ecumenical outreach initiative, I’ve been asked to pop by and see if there’s anything you’d like to discuss. In confidence, of course, if you like. Or with your parents present, if you prefer.’

‘Oh, no!’ I said. ‘Uh, not with my parents and not, uh, at all actually, I’m fine, and as it happens I’m quite busy at the moment, homework and that, you know, and …’

As I spoke his countenance became more and more disappointed and dejected.

‘Are you quite sure?’ he asked, in a concerned voice. ‘I got the impression you might be … troubled in some way.’

‘How?’

He gave me a direct, knowing look. ‘I’m only ten years older than you, Ryan, and I remember very well what it’s like at your age. All kinds of personal problems and perplexities can weigh on your mind – they certainly did on mine! Are you sure there’s nothing you’d like to get off your chest?’

‘I didn’t mean how was I troubled,’ I said. ‘I meant, how did you get the impression that I was?’

‘Your vicar noticed,’ he said. ‘Connie’s quite perceptive about these things.’

The easy familiarity of his tone, and my rush of embarrassment at the thought that Reverend Connie Jameson had observed me from the pulpit, left me feeling I had little choice. I also had a strong suspicion he might elaborate on the discussion right here on the front step.

‘Well, come in then,’ I said.

As I closed the door he stood in the hallway, peering around then looking up the stairs as if expecting to be invited up there.

‘Uh, in here,’ I said, opening the door to the chill, formal front sitting room with its sofas and armchairs and big bay window. ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’

‘Ah … yes, thank you, but coffee would be perfect.’ He twitched up his eyebrows. ‘If I may?’

I thought of the quarter-full jar of precious instant. But he was a guest.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Thank you. Black, no sugar.’

‘I’ll bring it through in a mo,’ I said. ‘Uh, make yourself comfortable, Mr Baxter.’

‘James, please.’ He smiled and went in.

When I returned bearing coffee in a cup and saucer for him and a less formal but more generous mug for myself, he was lounging cross-legged in one of the pair of armchairs on opposite sides of the fireplace.

‘Thank you, Ryan.’

I sat down facing him, then searched for and found a coaster for the mug, which I carefully and rather pointlessly placed on the glass-topped coffee table between us.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘James.’

Baxter fixed me with a penetrating gaze over the rim of the cup as he sipped. He sighed appreciatively. As he replaced the cup on the saucer, which was balanced on his crooked knee, he seemed to notice for the first time a clamshell on the fireplace’s tiled surround.

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘An ashtray! I haven’t seen one of these in a long while. How very civilised!’

He picked up the shell in a darting movement of the arm and put it on the coffee table. The cup and saucer on his knee didn’t wobble. He took a lighter and a gold-coloured cigarette packet with no visible health warnings or scare-pictures from the side pocket of his jacket, tapped a cigarette out and lit up. I watched open-mouthed. I hadn’t been in the same room as a lit cigarette in my life. The air instantly filled with the acrid odour.

‘I hope you don’t mind?’ he asked.

‘Not at all,’ I said, though I did, quite a lot. The room was going to smell like my mother’s clothes usually did when she came back from helping the poor. I would have some explaining to do.

‘Now, Ryan, as I was saying. When I was your age, and just beginning to take my nominal faith seriously, after’ – he flashed a smile – ‘the usual bout of adolescent atheism, I found myself worried over matters that weren’t really very important at all. For example – I know this might be embarrassing, but bear with me – ah, to be blunt, erotic dreams and fantasies. They’re nothing to feel guilty about.’

‘Oh, I don’t,’ I said, wishing I could curl up in a ball. My bizarre abduction dream hadn’t recurred, but the past couple of nights I’d wanked myself raw reliving its climax.

‘Very good, very good. There are pamphlets, you know, the church’s youth website is very helpful, with online confidential counselling if you feel the need, so to speak.’

‘Uh, well, I might look into it.’

‘Another common pitfall,’ he went on, after sucking hard on his cigarette while frowning at the ceiling, ‘is untutored Bible reading.’ He raised a hand, his fingers in the exact position of a priest’s when blessing a congregation, except that the priest isn’t usually holding a cigarette between his upraised fore and middle fingers at the time. ‘Not that we wish to discourage personal Bible study – quite the reverse! But focusing on random passages from the scriptures, without understanding their context, can lead the unwary reader very far astray.’

‘Well, to be honest,’ I said, ‘I haven’t read much of the Bible for myself, and, uh, if I wanted to I’m sure I would ask Reverend Jameson for a study plan or something, or my mum, but as it happens I’m very busy studying English literature right now, so I’m not sure I have time to …’

‘Well, of course! That’s your duty for the present, though you will find the Bible very useful even for English literature, so do consider some … properly guided reading, if you wish to explore the scriptures further. Again, the church website has excellent resources for the young inquirer.’

‘I’ll check it out,’ I lied.

‘And I’m sure Connie would be happy to enrol you in a Bible study group – a sort of Sunday school for adults, so to speak. I believe it meets on Thursday evenings.’

‘Well, maybe, but …’

He tapped ash into the shell. ‘I see you’re looking puzzled. Allow me to explain. The Churches, the established Churches that is, as well as the Free Church and even our Roman Catholic friends, have noticed recently a rather unhealthy preoccupation among, ah, certain lay people with End Times prophecies, as they’re called. Not surprising, really, when you consider the times we’re living in. Wars and rumours of wars, and so forth. Earthquakes in diverse places.’

‘Oh, don’t worry, sir,’ I said. ‘I’m not interested in anything like that.’ This came out not quite as I’d intended. ‘Not unduly interested, I mean.’

‘The book of Revelation,’ Baxter continued, as if I hadn’t spoken, ‘is a highly symbolic and deeply obscure work, as no doubt it was intended to be. Have you read it?’

‘I’ve … glanced at it, I suppose,’ I said.

‘If you were to take it literally,’ he said, ‘you might come away with the impression that Christians expect to spend eternity praising a dead mutant infant sheep inside a giant glass cube from outer space.’

The slight shock I felt at this crudity must have shown on my face.

‘Ridiculous, of course,’ Baxter said, with a smile. ‘But even people who would flinch at these words, like you just did, and regard them quite rightly as a grotesque, malicious, village-atheist caricature of our hope, can still be found earnestly and fearfully expecting someday soon to see – to take an instance at random – locusts with human faces, women’s hair, and lions’ teeth swarming from a huge hole in the ground.’

He stubbed out his cigarette, shook his head, and gave me another challenging look.

‘Nothing like that troubling you?’ he asked.

‘No, no,’ I said.

‘You sound alarmed. You look worried.’

‘No, I’m fine.’

‘Any dark thoughts on your mind?’

At that moment, I had a few, thanks to him.

‘No,’ I said.

‘You’re definitely not worrying over the book of Revelation?’

‘Definitely not,’ I said. ‘Uh, I really should be …’

‘Of course, of course,’ Baxter said. ‘I’m forgetting my manners.’

He stood up, catching the now empty cup and saucer on the fly as they fell and laying them on the table in one smooth swoop. They didn’t even rattle.

‘Thanks for the coffee,’ he said, ‘and the hospitality of the ashtray. And thanks for listening, and for being so open.’

If I’d been open, it wasn’t by intent, but I had an uneasy feeling that I had been more open than I’d intended. I saw him out, returned his wave as he sauntered down the steps, and shut the door. Resisting the temptation to lean back against it and breathe out, I nipped to the downstairs toilet and took a spray-can of air freshener to the sitting room. Only after I’d rinsed the shell and the cup and mug and left the sitting room with the door open for the smells of tobacco smoke and jasmine to fight it out did I sit down at the living-room table and breathe out.