第 20 页

When I got in, my mother was wearing a pair of headphones and jotting something down on a piece of paper. In front of her was a large radio set. I tapped her on the shoulder.

`You could have given me a heart attack,' she snapped, switching knobs up and down. `I can't talk now, I'm receiving.'

`Receiving what?'

`My reports.' And she jammed on her headphones and started scribbling again. It was well over an hour before I could get any sense out of her. We sat together with a bowl of Vesta beef risotto, and I learned how she had gone electronic. Her radiogram had suddenly blown a crystal, which mean no World Service. She had rushed to the shops with her bank book to find an alternative, and seen an advert for a built-it-yourself CB radio. She bought it, and the cheapest pocket transistor to keep her going. It was an extravagance, but the Society had just collapsed, and she needed something to take her mind off it. She said it was very difficult, but she'd done it, just the same, and now she regularly spoke to Christians all over England, as well as listening to the radio. Already, there were plans of a meeting, and a newsletter for electronic believers.

`It's the Lord's will,' she said, `so don't pester me when I'm doing it.'

Perhaps it was the snow, or the food, or the impossibility of my life that made me hope to go to bed and wake up with the past intact. I seemed to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.

* * *

Sir Perceval stayed on his narrow chair long after his host had left for sleep. Under the burning torch he puzzled over his hands. One lad—Awas curious, sure and firm. His gentle, thoughtful hand. The hand for feeding a dog or strangling a demon. The other hand looked underfed. A stark, questioning, blank, uncomfortable hand. A scared hand but the hand for balancing. Perceval had been angry that night. His journey seemed fruitless, and himself misguided. His host had asked him why he had left, not really

wanting to hear, presuming reasons of his own, that the king was mad, or the Round Table ruined. Perceval had stayed silent. He had gone for his own sake, nothing more. He had thought that day of returning. He felt himself being pulled like a bobbin of cotton, so that he was dizzy and wanted to give in to the pull and wake up round familiar things. When he slept that night he dreamed he was a spider hanging a long way down a huge oak. Then a raven came and flew through his thread, so that he dropped to the ground and scuttled away.

* * *

When I woke the next day, the sun was just forcing itself through the snow clouds, against the dusty window. The house felt quiet. Usually, my mother played tapes, and I could hear her singing along, or working out a new harmony. She had started to travel with Pastor Finch and his demon bus, whenever he came to the area. She felt she'd had a lot of experience and would be a help to other distressed parents with demon-possessed children. She'd begun a self-help kit for the spiritually disturbed. What not to do, who to contact, which passages of the Bible to read. And of course, the choir liked to make tapes, to sing the demon away. Most were Pastor Finch's own compositions. I was glad she had a hobby, but not pleased that my particular sins were listed in the self-help kit. Still, at least she hadn't stuck in a passport photograph, warning the North-West to lock up their daughters.

I stayed with them until just after Christmas. Forced to watch endless programmes on the Nativity, and to eat mince pies with Mrs White, who was so nervous she started to hiccough uncontrollably.

`Jack, get the smelling salts,' ordered my mother, seizing Mrs White's nose till she went blue. The smelling salts didn't work, and Mrs White had to be taken to the bus stop on my father's arm.

`It's all your fault,' grumbled my mother. `And on Christmas Eve too.' Then she went back into the living room to take a sip of port and peek at the Christmas presents. She couldn't bear not to open her presents, and it was still only eleven o'clock.

We decided to play Beetle to pass the time.

`You've cheated,' exclaimed my mother, as I fitted the last red leg on my insect. `Never trust a sinner.'

`All right, we'll play again.' And we did, right up until five minutes to twelve, when my mother leapt up and switched on the radio to hear Big Ben. `Get your glass,' she cried, filling it up with lemonade and a smattering of port. `Merry Christmas, praise the Lord, now what have I got?' And she made a dive for her pile under the tree.

`Look, you've pulled the angel down,' I complained. She stuffed it back upside-down, one hand still tearing off the paper.

`This is from Pastor Spratt,' she said eagerly. I nodded, wondering what on earth could be that shape and

get through customs.

`Oh look,' she cried.

It was an elephant's foot, with a hinged top. She hesitated a moment, then flung back the lid. It was an elephant's foot Promise Box; two layers of little scrolls, all rolled up, each with a promise from the Word. My mother had tears in her eyes, as she put it carefully on top of the sideboard.

`What's this from Auntie Maud?' I asked, picking out a hard, long object.

`Oh it'll probably be a sword stick, you know what she's like.' My mother tapped her head. `It's this I'm interested in, from your father.'

It was flat, and not very well wrapped. Slowly she unravelled it, and there it was, a catapult. I couldn't believe it.

`Why's Dad bought you a catapult?'

`I asked him to, it's to get rid of them cats next door.' And she told me how she'd tried everything from scraps to menaces. But still they peed on her prize roses. She was going to ping at them now with dried peas. I shook my head, not knowing how to say that I had only bought her a cardigan….

I didn't see much of them for the next couple of days; they were at church. And it was in the first post after Christmas that my mother received the dreadful news. It was about the Morecambe guest house again, or rather, its owner Mrs Butler.

`Definitely a job for Pastor Finch,' said my mother, putting on her coat to go to the phone box. As soon as she had gone I picked up the letter. It seemed that Mrs Butler, depressed by falling numbers at the guest house, and frustrated by the constant nagging of the health authority, had taken to drink. More importantly, she had got herself a job as matron of a local old folks' home. While there she had taken up with a strange charismatic man who had once been the official exorcist to the Bishop of Bermuda. He had been dismissed under mysterious circumstances for some kind of unmentionable offence with the curate's wife. Back in England and safe within the besotted arms of Mrs Butler, he had persuaded her to let him practise voodoo on some of the more senile patients. They had been caught by a night nurse.

Imagine my mother's feeling; the Society for the Lost had been a bitter blow, the Morecambe guest house a terrible shock, but this was the final straw. I stared into the fire waiting for her to come home. Families, real ones, are chairs and tables and the right number of cups, but I had no means of joining one, and no means of dismissing my own; she had tied a thread around my button, to tug when she pleased. I knew a woman in another place. Perhaps she would save me. But what if she were asleep? What if she sleepwalked beside me and I never knew? Then the back door slammed and my mother marched in on a gust of wind, the knot of her headscarf blown up on to her cheek like a patterned goitre.

`What a mess,' she raged, throwing the letter on to the fire. `If I'm not sharp I'm going to miss my broadcast. Fetch the headphones.' I passed them over to her, and she adjusted the microphone.

`This is Kindly Light calling Manchester, come in Manchester, this is Kindly Light.'

Miscellany

About the author

Jeanette Winterson was raised by a family of Pentecostal evangelists in Lancashire, England. After studying English at Oxford, she moved to London, where she still lives. Her next novel, The Passion, will be published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in 1988.

Review (excerpt)

"If Flannery O'Connor and Rita Mae Brown had collaborated on the coming-out story of a young British girl in the 1960s, maybe they would have approached the quirky and subtle hilarity of Jeanette Winterson's autobiographical first novel…. Winterson's voice, with its idiosyncratic wit and sensitivity, is one you've never heard before."—Ms.

Synopsis

Adopted into an evangelical household in the dour industrial Midlands—where the heathen are everywhere, especially next door—Jeanette cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of God's elect. She knows all the verses to "What a Friend We Have in Jesus;' and very little about the world. Although never exactly lamblike, Jeanette embroiders grim religious mottoes and shakes her little tambourine for Jesus like a good missionary-to-be.

But as this budding evangelical comes of age, and comes to terms with her preference for her own sex, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household crumbles. Her mother, the pastor, and the flock go to work on Jeanette's demons, denouncing her as someone "to whom it is impossible to speak the truth." Yet Jeanette's insistence on listening to the truths of her own heart and mind—and in reporting them with wit and passion—makes for an unforgettable chronicle of an eccentric, moving rite of passage into adulthood.

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