Crusaders (2 page)

‘Can you help me, boss? Please?’

The beggarman, pained and unclean, stood between John Gore and where he needed to be – the concourse of London King’s Cross, antechamber of the gateway to the north. The unbidden presence posed a question greater than he knew, one that Gore would rather have sidestepped on this bright and brisk morning, this day of all days.

As a rule he didn’t fret unduly about whether one’s good money should be doled out on request to the needy or distressed. His settled view – albeit the composite of a hundred different thoughts down the years – distilled into something quite simple. Yes, by such charity one soul was assisted, if only for the day; but why should the one be so favoured, when legions elsewhere were suffering the same or worse? Where was the social gain in a sole transaction? On the horns of this dilemma Gore was inclined to hang on to his so-called spare change, and if it betrayed an
economy
of pity – well, he forgave himself that much.

At this very moment, however, he was damnably late for a train. And so it was a small matter to fish a few coins from his pocket and be done.

As he rummaged, Gore threw glances all about him, anywhere but at the beggarman – his skin dry as a lizard, baseball hat tugged low, bomber jacket and jeans coated in dust as if he had crawled free from a collapsed building.

Finally he proffered a pound and some lesser bits, glancing to the platform clock above their heads. He had four minutes and seventeen seconds until his train pulled out of London. And yet,
still, an urgent thought occurred.

‘You’re not going to buy alcohol, are you?’

‘Fucking too right I will, boss, I’m an alcoholic.’

The beggarman’s alarming grin was full of pale recessive gums. Gore’s fist closed on the coins. The clock was running – four
minutes
and nine, eight, seven.

‘C’mon boss.’ Plaintive anew. ‘Offies aren’t open, are they? I just wanna sandwich, cup of tea.
Something
, please.’

Pointless, Gore knew, to stage an inquest. He dropped the coins into the outstretched hand, nodded to stall the man’s clearly
well-rehearsed
abasement, and hastened his steps for platform 7, a heavy travel-bag in each fist, his coal-black topcoat flapping at his ankles.

‘God bless, eh, boss? God bless!’

He shot a glance back over his shoulder to see the beggarman grinning scarily again, miming the tilting of some imaginary drinking receptacle to his lips, gulping down imaginary
mouthfuls
, and finally –
Bravo
, thought Gore – tossing the imaginary beaker aside to wipe his mouth with a grimy sleeve.

Doors slammed all down the deep-blue carriages of the Great North Eastern train, those not travelling waving their fellows goodbye. Gore kept moving, seeing only First Class insignia in every window, until he gave up and clambered aboard at the next open vestibule. Slipping down the aisle of a deserted carriage, noting its comfortable seating and places set for tea or coffee, he marvelled anew as to why he had been such a mule in asking his employers to stump up no more than the Standard Class fare. His own ingrained nature, so wearily familiar to him: he refused – he would always say – to set himself above others; wished, indeed, to live as though the option didn’t exist. But then here he stood, at the outset of a major endeavour – maybe his life’s work. Did he not
deserve
the simple courtesy, the teapot fetched to table, the individually wrapped biscuit?

A partition door fizzed open onto a Standard compartment thick with restless bodies and low din. Bulging suitcases and sports bags were being hoisted overhead, rowdy children
entreated to sit, brown-paper bags full of burgers and milkshakes ferried from hand to hand across the aisle. Ahead of him were a pack of six big men sporting black-and-white striped football shirts, trying to insert themselves into parallel four-seat berths. One of these gents, his scalp clean-shaven, strained his shirt with an expanse of belly so luxurious he might have been carrying twins. Gore motioned as to squeeze by, and found the lads
blearily
acquiescent.

He stowed his bags and counted his way down the aisle, seat number to seat number, until he came to his anointed place: 32 Facing. There, already installed and staring up at him, was a rotund teenager in a lime-green tracksuit, his broad face ruddy and belligerent. Beside him, a much smaller and leaner
accomplice
in a red model of the same tracksuit peered out from under a black baseball cap, drumming his fingers on the tabletop.

‘Excuse me, boys,’ Gore offered, extending his ticket, earning only a harder glare.

‘C’mon, lads,’ he tried afresh. ‘I think you’ll find that’s my seat.’

The bigger boy stirred, thumping his little friend on the arm. ‘Aw bollocks man, it’s the
cloth
.’

The titch, snorting, pointed a dirty finger at Gore. Then the two of them lurched from the seats and pushed their way past him, hooting. Gazing after their retreating backs, Gore poked a finger into the clerical collar snug at his throat, running it round to the nape of his neck. Other passengers were watching him with
curious
eyes. He lowered himself into the warm vacated seat. Moments later, the train shuddered all through its length and set to rolling out of London.

In the seats opposite were a young couple, their hands clasped atop the table, making conspicuous her twelve-carat sparkler and silver wedding-band. She was dark-haired and wary-eyed. Her burly husband bulged out of a yellow polo-shirt, his
heavy-fringed
haircut one his mother might have given him.

The woman leaned over to Gore. ‘Eee but I’m glad you got sat there, Father. Them little
beggars
…’ She looked to the window, as
though it were all too much, then back to Gore, as though she could not let it pass. ‘I’d say it was your dog collar what did it, mind. Where do they
get
it from?’

Gore only shrugged, as to say it was a mystery. And as three they shared a desultory smile, reassured for the moment by the restoration of the peace, the coincidence of shared values.

Here as always Gore was quietly amused to find people of his own age or older so keen to address him as ‘Father’. True, he wore the clothes of his calling, but it seemed to him a larger issue of
persona
– something to do with his standing six feet and three inches, or the speckles of silver in his thick black hair, belying his
thirty-one
years. The frowning cast of his features, too, had always aged him, not to speak of his grave demeanour. The latter, though, was a choice of his, a matter of personal style: Gore had always been of the mind that a good minister of God needed a touch of the actor about him.

He unfolded his newspaper and bit his lip at a front page reporting strife at the annual conference of the Trades Union Congress in Blackpool.
BLAIR TO SEVER UNION LINK
? Scanning the write-up he gathered that a few coming characters in the Labour Party – to which he had subscribed staunchly since his fourteenth birthday – had been mouthing off about policy at
supposedly
private dinners. Most likely, Gore assumed, in the hope that their unthinkable thoughts be controversially made public by the journalists in attendance. It was all too clearly the behaviour of a government-in-waiting, growing bumptious in the queue for succession. Amid a list of MPs quoted in defence of their brazen colleagues, Gore searched for, and was unsurprised to find, the name of the man who would be representing him before this day was done – Dr Martin Pallister, Labour member for Tyneside West, newly promoted Opposition Whip for Education and Employment. The man, indeed, for whom his older sister was employed as strategist, spin doctor and all-round major-domo. Susannah had always been a purposeful soul, and in Pallister she seemed to have found a prime focus for her energies. They made a team, sharing the same taste in good dark suits and well-minted
phrases. Gore himself had first encountered Pallister more than a decade ago, when they were both scruffy lefties of a sort. Now the MP and his sister had joined the big push to revise Labour’s gospels. That they were clearly effective in same did not allay his view that they were a gilt-edged disgrace.

His meditation was broken by murmurs from behind the
outspread
paper, and his arm was lightly tapped. It was the husband.

‘I’m gannin’ to the buffet car, Father, can I fetch you back owt?’

‘Oh, well, actually I’d love a tea if it’s no bother.’

Gore’s hand went to his pocket, but the man was shaking his head and clambering out of his seat. His wife smiled. ‘I’m Tina Grieveson, Father, how’d you do?’

‘John Gore. Pleased to meet you.’

‘Aw, likewise I’m sure. Me husband’s Stuart.’

‘A most considerate husband he is too.’

Stuart Grieveson returned bearing three plastic cups, a wad of napkins and a fistful of miniature milks. ‘How far you gannin’ the day then, Father?’

‘Call me John, please. I’m for Newcastle.’ He noted the
recognition
wrought by his horizontal vowels.

‘Aw, you’re
from
the north-east then?’

‘I used to be,’ Gore smiled. ‘Been away a good while. But I’m back now. For work.’

‘Aw, really?’ A thoughtful silence. Tina made as to spit
something
out. ‘And is it – as a
vicar
then? That you’ll be working?’

Gore gestured down his collared and black-clad frame. ‘No, as a circus clown.’

Stuart eked out a smile that persuaded his wife to follow suit. Gore felt they were all suitably at ease, and so grew expansive. ‘No, that’s right. What I’m doing, I’m going up to what they call
plant
a church.’

‘“Plant”, you say?’ asked Tina.

‘You mean start it from scratch, aye?’ said Stuart. ‘Build it out of nowt?’

Gore nodded, gratified by this speed of uptake, for he had been braced to deliver a longer explanation. ‘That’s right. It’s funny, I’ll
be giving services in a local school to start with. Until we find out whether I can pull a crowd. The Church has its doubts, to be
honest
. But it’s the fashion right now, you see. Not new churches, as such, more like new
sorts
of churches.’

‘Where’ll you have yours then?’ Stuart asked. ‘What bit of Newcastle?’

‘Out west. Hoxheath?’

Stuart let out a low whistle. ‘Dear me. What they call inner-city preaching, eh?’

Again Gore sensed a familiarity of terms. ‘Are you churchgoers yourselves?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Tina. ‘It’s Gosforth where we are in Newcastle, we belong to a nice big congregation.’

‘That’ll be a blessing.’

‘Oh it is. We have quite a brilliant young vicar, I must say, fella by the name of Simon Barlow. He’s your age, probably. You don’t know of him by any chance?’

Gore forced a smile while nodding into the brim of his tea, though it was as if he had just swallowed rat poison. These two were Anglicans, then – his own people – but of a markedly
different
stripe. Barlow had been his contemporary at Grey Theological College, and ‘brilliant’ was a wildly naive assessment. He knew too that any church where Barlow declaimed from the pulpit was bound to be evangelical by nature, its pews filled by solid
suburban
couples whose lives nonetheless had seemed listless and grey until the day they met a guy called Jesus.

‘Hoxheath, but, good lord,’ exclaimed Tina. ‘You’ll not be short of souls to save round there. Them little charvers what were in your seat? Plenty more of that sort in Hoxheath.’

He was familiar with such reactions, thought them snobbish, the knee-jerk of those who imagined an afterlife populated solely by their own ‘sort’. Rather than cavil, he resorted to a stock tactic – smiling gently to himself, stirring his tea, meaning his silence to intimidate.

Stuart, though, was made of impervious material. ‘So how in hell did you get lumbered wi’ this job? I mean to say – you
must’ve done summat awful to get sent to Hoxheath.’ And he chuckled.

‘Well.’ Gore set down his plastic spoon. ‘I was serving my title, as we say, down in Dorset, quite happily really. Then the Bishop of Newcastle came to me and said he had a plan for Hoxheath – for a few estates that weren’t getting reached by the older churches. He needed a man, so he asked me if I’d take it on. I didn’t think twice, really. I mean, I took it as a privilege. A duty, if you like.’ This seemed to chase the condescending smiles from the faces opposite, so Gore ventured a sharper angle. ‘It’s a challenge, of course, I know. But that’s what life’s made of, isn’t it? We can’t run from it, we in the Church. We have to be out in the world. Among the people.’

‘Aye, right enough,’ offered Stuart, after a moment or two.

‘Anyhow – it’s just the world of work these days, isn’t it? You go where you get sent, wherever you’re told to. I was told to plant a church.’

And Gore shrugged, as to say that was the size of it. Still, just the simple stating of his mission –
I was told to plant a church
–
resonated
at his core. He would never phrase it so for the layman – much too pompous to be let away with – but these were the times when he believed he was about the work his Father intended.

Pleasantry had receded, silence settled. Gore withdrew his pen and notebook from his coat, and started to embroider some
jottings
he had made toward a sermon drawing on St John’s account of the Good Samaritan.
‘If any man hath this world’s goods, and seeth his brother hath need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion against him – how dwelleth the love of God in him?’

Such a well-minted entreaty, the quintessence of his tradition – the stripe running up his own spine. Mother religion, ‘the heart of a heartless world’. And yet with what ease did a well-wrought phrase become a platitude. What should be the segue? He
scribbled
quickly.
‘As fellow Christians we are commanded to love our fellow man as ourselves. But it’s not easy. We have all faced a stranger in need and said, “Not today friend, I have troubles of my own
…”’