Triptych

Ten years ago, my first published work was a short story called ‘To All Their Dues’. The title is an allusion to Romans 13:7: ‘Render therefore to all their dues, tribute to whom tribute is due, custom to whom custom, fear to whom fear, honour to whom honour.’ This verse could be a call to orderly and ethical living. Or, decontextualised, it could be a tag line from a mafia flick: know your place in the hierarchy and give the capo appropriate tribute whether it’s Don Corleone, Tony Soprano or your local hood. In my story, the figure was Kyle Starrs, a paramilitary boss involved in extortion. The reader witnesses him entering a beauty salon and advising its owner that she will need to pay protection money. Render therefore to all their dues. Tribute to whom tribute is paid.

My working title for the story had been ‘Triptych.’ This was an apt choice because it is a story in three parts. The first focuses on Mo, the salon owner. The second part focuses on Kyle and the third on Kyle’s wife, Grace, who concludes the story by visiting Mo’s salon as a client. The triptych was used on a structural level to show the interconnectivity of existence. But, more broadly, the ‘triple’ was an insistent motif in the story. It occurs from the first sentence: ‘Three types of beauty salon: the pristine Swiss clinic where the staff might well be in scrubs; tart’s boudoir with a job lot of gold leaf; and then the retro parlour with a few framed fifties pin-ups.’

The holy trinity of the triple reaches its most explicit consideration in – of course - the third part of the story which focuses on Grace. In a close third person narrative mode, Grace recalls her religious upbringing. She stood as a child in the centre of Belfast with her parents, handing out religious tracts: ‘Three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon there would be all the shrieking laughing crowd from school. Is that not your wee woman from our year? Your wee doll in that big coat? It is her. Feel wick for her. Shout something over but.’ She recollects the mode of sermonising offered by the preacher in their church, the Reverend Dr Emery: ‘Everything he said was in groups of three. Sin, despair and iniquity. Our Saviour: past, present and future. A strong, hot welcome cup of tea, available at the back of the church after the service. The long, boring, repetitive service.’ And so, in terms of an appropriate title, ‘Triptych’ might have had just as valid a claim as ‘To All Their Dues.’

Having gone to church for the first sixteen years of my life, I had plenty of experience of listening to sermons with tripartite structures, of rhetorical devices involving groups of three. Just as Grace does in the story, I too had, in order to pass the time, counted people’s hats, counted the little diamonds carved into the beams. I too stared at the minister until he doubled and became surrounded by black light, before looking at the ceiling where his outline appeared in relief against the white ceiling.

In the 1980s, options were limited for Belfast teenagers and like many, I ended up at church activities on several nights of the week. The big hall with its floor marked out with tape for badminton, was a place where people, on a Friday night, could dance and play football. There were trips to roller discos and we were shown how to screen-print t-shirts. On a Sunday evening, there was more traditional worship. Very occasionally I would go to one of the tiny, independent churches which could freestyle it in terms of religious dogma because they were in someone’s back garden. There was one where a preacher spoke about how our daily life was shaped by forces battling in outer space. For illustrative purposes, he had pictures of schlocky, lurid planets that could have been lifted from a prog rock cover. But in the main, I went to our own church. At a fellowship meeting, I remember one young man from the local art college told us about a type of painting called automatism which involved people losing control of their minds and letting the devil take over. Someone like this was Jackson Pollock. I remembered the name and next day went to the school library to have a look and found an example, probably Autumn Rhythm. I couldn’t see anything too evil but I thought I had perhaps an unsophisticated sense of the Devil’s visuals.

Because the devil was, in fact, everywhere. On a church trip, the keys to the burn where the young people were sleeping got lost. They were found on a wall where they had dropped out of someone’s pocket. This transmogrified into a narrative where the devil had tried to disrupt our trip and had stolen the keys which had eventually been illuminated by the Lord. Rather than simple lost and found, we were at the mercy of battling, cosmic forces, just like those near the Day-Glo planets.

The most innocuous of things were tainted by the diabolic. A few years before, I had won a single called ‘Wild West Hero’ in a radio competition. But it was said that the band, Electric Light Orchestra, so seemingly pleasant in their melodies, were apparently concealing subliminal satanic messages in their music. My prize wasn’t simply a catchy ode to the pioneering spirit. The unconscious mind was something to be feared because the badness was already inside us, waiting to be activated by certain signals.

Belfast perhaps had a unique focus on the satanic. In his book Black Magic and Bogeymen: Fear, Rumour and Popular Belief, Richard Jenkins puts forward the idea that a British Intelligence Unit, Psy Ops, deliberately encouraged fear of the occult. They placed black candles and upside-down crosses in a range of locations. The intention was a cross-paramilitary smear, that violence had unleashed satanic forces but also had the practical goal of encouraging fearful teenagers not to venture out at night.

In 'To All Their Dues', the young Grace becomes for various reasons disaffected with the church: ‘You could listen to tales of a mostly Old Testament world of hard justice. You could listen to his lamenting tone: oh why is the world filled with such evil? You could think: I don’t know if I believe in this.’ And I suppose that that too happened to me. I saw intolerance and narrowness, arrogance and sanctimony. Mostly, I just found it hard to believe. But I want to acknowledge that what I have done here, in outlining my own experience, is collapse eighteen years into the kitsch, the fearful, the ridiculous, an incredible elevation of the self as being at the centre of the cosmos. Undeniably, there was also generosity and people trying to lead careful, decent lives. There was community. And, beyond church structures, there were those with private, at times very negotiated faiths that were sustaining and deeply precious.

It is no surprise that my writing has been quite fundamentally influenced by my early experience of church and belief. Readers have pointed out to me religious allusions in my work that I didn’t realise were there. The many hours reading and listening to bible stories, absorbing their syntaxes and rhythms, has shaped the deep structures of what I do. And then there are the ways in which religion and spirituality are my actual subject matter. In my novel, The Benefactors, a monologue considers the different interpretations of the parable of the talents. A character presents the difficulties of being the child of missionary parents. At the most important, heightened part of the novel, an unlikely person bursts into a spontaneous rendition of Jesus Loves Me. The title, The Benefactors, is a reference to Luke 22:25.

Ultimately we are all insignificant. That’s what I feel. Life is short, fragile, arbitrary, and in the grand scheme pretty meaningless. Christianity seems to assert the opposite: there is direct intercession with a cosmic power through prayer; the idea that an omnipotent being is illuminating a key on a wall in County Antrim. There is pattern and purpose. But fiction, all art really, can do the same things. It insists that in the midst of the epic span of history and the grand cosmos, an individual’s experience – even a tiny aspect of it - is significant. A story, with its incisions in time, presents structure and shape.

I have a story called Last Supper. Instead of the Last Supper of Christ, the disciples around the table, we have a ramshackle bunch of workers in a café run by a charitable Christian organisation, which provides a stable workplace to those in need of it. The boss, a young man called Andy is trying, against the odds, to keep the café afloat. He is sincere and committed. He came to the church after an intense religious experience on his brother’s stag night, when he had come across a Gideon’s Bible: ‘the paper was almost translucent and the print miniscule … and he didn’t know if he’d been reading for two minutes or two hours because time seemed to stretch and bend and collapse and a fleeting thing that he had never been able to articulate before started to take form in a way more substantial than worlds … all was overwhelming and the beauty too because there was Marty’s sweatshirt lying in illuminated folds like a sleeve from one of those old paintings.’ It is never clear if this experience is precipitated by the divine or a pill he had possibly been given.

Nonetheless, Andy cares deeply about the café which is an important sanctuary for the people who work there whose lives have been, and are, difficult. By the end of the day - and the end of the story - we know that the café will have to close for good. Outside there is betrayal, uncertain future, and a pitiless world. They put a white paper cloth over a long table in the café. Andy is in the middle of Rosaleen and JD. There is the bread and wine which they share: Battenberg cake and non-alcoholic cava. There is kindness, love even.

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