Toy Fights by Don Paterson

Author:Don Paterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2023-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

23 Oombara Coombara

Home from Ireland and back at the mission, I was now armed with a perma-erection to underwrite my fundamental sinfulness. If this wasn’t something to apologise for, I didn’t know what could be. The endless prayer meetings were led by the kindly Jim Sprunt, a giant baboon of a man with a hook nose so big he had trouble drinking properly, and had to pour liquids into his face from one side. Jim had initially made his name as an exorcist, but now had the forlorn and underemployed air of a too-successful pest controller. The accompaniment to our sung praises was provided by a (clearly gay, I can see, now the mists have cleared) bouffanted beanpole called Brian. He had a twelve-string guitar, the first I’d ever seen. It sounded like … a twelve-string guitar, which is really enough, if you’ve heard one. Two guitars emerge from the shape of one guitar, one a heavenly high ghost of the other. They can be slightly out of tune and be even more beautiful, as the detuning creates a chorusing effect. This is fortunate, as they are murder to get in tune, and therefore usually aren’t. I made a mental note: one day I would play a twelve-string guitar.*

I was more desperate than ever to be baptised, and my second-class status was really bothering me. After the Baptism in the Spirit, real power was conferred. You would receive one of the charismata, which were the gifts of either Tongues, the Interpretation of Tongues, Prophesy, Miracles, Healing, and so on. Dave thought one was Invisibility, but he wasn’t well. Baptism in the Spirit, though, depended notoriously on God’s inscrutable whim, and attempts to rush him into anything tend to be counterproductive. Some members of the group had been waiting for years, and those individuals were effectively sacrificed to underline his divine capriciousness. (Again, it hadn’t occurred to me until now to think how cruel this was, given the whole thing was made-up bollocks.) The seemingly endless stint as Under-Christian is also crucial to building up the frustration needed for the dam-burst of hysterical gratitude that convinces the baptised of the reality of their experience. I think the group registered how useful such young and zealous recruits could be, though, and I was earmarked for early promotion.

I rolled up one Tuesday night to find they’d booked the star preacher on the circuit – an appealing, dumpy little guy from Aberdeen (affectionately known as The Wee Pope, in a touching demonstration of their genuine lack of interest in sectarian matters). His shtick was pretty much identical to the others’, just much louder and more quivery: where some would shake from their lack of conviction, he shook with an excess of it. He spoke quite normally, but when fully inflated with the Spirit sang in a high-pitched, heavily vibratoed monotone that drooped at the end of each phrase, like a ghost from Scooby-Doo. We started prayer, and were an hour or so into our private chunterings when I heard him walking amongst us.

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