Kingdom Come: A Semi-Autobiographical Novel

By Virginia Weir

Matilda Voisey is a member of the low-paid precariat, working one part-time job after another following the completion of her MA in Writing and her first novel. When her latest job ends, she finds work sorting mail at the local mail centre, only to battle the bottle, aggro and noisy housemates. In the dead time after Christmas, having worked a succession of eighty-four hour weeks, Matilda loses it completely, succumbing to alcoholism and psychosis.
Kingdom Come is the story of how Matilda recovers her mojo and discovers her strengths as a writer. It is funny and wry and full of hard-won wisdom. It is also the story of how Matilda recovers her faith in God and goes on to find employment and meaning again after a time in the wilderness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781788030731

Book preview

KINGDOM COME

A Semi-Autobiographical Novel

By

virginia wEIR

Copyright © 2017 Virginia Weir

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright C 1973, 1978, 1984 by the International Bible Society.Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Limited. All rights reserved.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 978 1788030 731

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

This novel is dedicated to the Spirit of

the Sovereign Lord, my inspiration.

‘If I knew that being a Christian was this wretched, I’d never have become one.’

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1

Even as she plodded towards an unspectacular 2:2, Matilda’s eye was always on the main chance. She wanted to write but of course a writer’s life is a poor one, so it made sense to train as something else. Liking the idea of short working days and long holidays, Matilda put herself down for teacher training.

Naturally, her relatives were appalled and tried to talk her out of it. Matilda, however, went ahead and snow-ploughed her way through a PGCE in Secondary Education.

She could find only bitty part-time jobs so, the ink on her teaching certificate scarcely dry, she took a month-long TEFLA Certificate course and flew out to Hong Kong. There she got a job as a schoolmarm in a local secondary school, teaching History and English to the children of taxi-drivers and waitresses. Sister Cynthia, the school Principal, patrolled the corridors in crepe-soled shoes to ensure that English, not Cantonese, was the language of instruction. In fact, the only Cantonese Matilda learned were obscenities and curse words culled from her boyfriend’s pillow.

In those days, she was staying in some ghastly white memsahib private club and institute known as the Virgins’ Retreat and in the sultry summer of 1992, while the she-dragon in charge was on vac, Matilda happily drank her way through a bottle of Beaujolais a day. When the she-dragon returned and the girls’ chits were examined, the predilection came to light and, after a stiff talking-to, the she-dragon forbade the club servants to serve her any more alcohol. Matilda was reduced to sloping out at supper time to the bars and clubs of Lan Kwai Fong for her daily ration of liquor.

On the first of September – the day the schools returned after the summer break – one of the Virgins returned from an extended holiday in the Philippines where she had married her (male) tour guide. This girl stopped only long enough to move her things out of the Virgins’ Retreat and invite a few of the other girls – Matilda included – to the Kowloon-side serviced apartment of a friend for drinks.

A glorious time of it was had by all and they returned just before the Virgins’ Retreat shut its doors at midnight, Matilda singing rugby songs of inane filthiness. The racket woke the she-dragon, who came down in silk dressing-gown and fluffy Minnie Mouse slippers just as Helen and Toni were carrying an almost-insensible Matilda over the threshold. Matilda was so drunk she spewed all over the potted yucca plant in the entrance vestibule and passed out. There was nothing for it but for the she-dragon to call an ambulance and have Matilda carted off to the Queen Mary Hospital. She only regained consciousness on a camp bed in the corridor in one of the women’s medical wards on the ground floor at a quarter to six in the morning. After ascertaining that she could walk, Matilda repaired to the ward bathroom to check that she still had all her teeth and that nothing was blackened or bruised.

The only memory she had of the evening was of coming-to in the back of the ambulance as it drove up the Peak and the few minutes thereafter as Sandy the Evangelical Christian took her though the Jesus Prayer before she sank back into unconsciousness. She had become a Christian.

Matilda walked out of the hospital that day – a little unsteadily, to be sure – and into the back of a taxi. At the Virgins’ Retreat, the she-dragon awaited. Matilda was whisked into the office as soon as she stepped into the lounge. Thunder and lightning followed. The upshot of that interview was that Matilda was expelled in disgrace.

Undeterred, she found lodgings with the mother of one of the teachers at the school. Sister Cynthia arranged for Matilda to teach evening classes to adults at the University of Hong Kong shortly afterwards – the idea was that an evening job would keep her out of the bars and clubs. As a ploy, it had only limited success – Matilda waited until after the evening classes were over before she attacked the bar in the Kowloon branch of Dan Ryan’s. It wasn’t until the New Year of 1993 that she gave the alcohol up completely, without so much as a backward glance. It was a miracle.

After two years of teaching school, Matilda got a teaching job at the British Council. It was wonderful, especially after teaching teenagers. By this time, she had become a charismatic Christian and was going to church in Cheung Sha Wan, where she was baptised and where she began to pray in tongues. She spent the summer looking after recovering addicts. It was there she got the idea for her first novel, sketched out on the back of a tax return, and she duly returned to the UK.

Her plan was to do an MA in English-language teaching at All Saints University in Fleet, where her parents had retired. At the last minute, however, she changed her mind and decided to follow her heart and do an MA in Writing instead. She enrolled in September, the day after she signed the lease for a studio flat in Goodramgate, equidistant from the campus and from her parents’ Victorian terraced house.

2

What a glorious, happy time she had of it, studying for her MA in Writing! Whereas her undergraduate days were spent fending off depression and sex-starved Freshers, now they were spent taking classes in The Modern Novel and in British Writing Since 1945 and knocking her novel into some semblance of shape. It was only a short walk from her Goodramgate flat to the All Saints campus. She joined a small charismatic fellowship known as City Mission and went to both morning and evening services on Sundays and to the house group on a Thursday evening.

This last was a group of Christians who met once a week to study the Bible and to pray together. The house group she joined was one specially for students and she got to know the other young people in the church.

Not too long after she started at All Saints, her Catholic grandmother had a stroke which meant she required more nursing care than her aunt could provide and was moved into a residential hospital. Matilda took the train up to Glasgow to visit her in the three-week break at Christmas and again in February when the first semester was over. Granny had a room of her own and Matilda went up with a rucksack full of goodies from the Christian bookshop in town.

But Granny proved impervious to the Good News. She interrupted Matilda’s rhapsody on City Mission to ask, ‘And what’s wrong with your own church?’

‘City Mission is my church, Granny,’ Matilda replied.

‘I meant the Catholic Church,’ said Granny.

‘I would’ve gone to the Catholic Church if they told me I was a sinner in need of saving,’ Matilda said.

‘Why didn’t you, then?’

‘They didn’t tell me I was a sinner. City Mission does.’

It sorrowed her that Granny was proving as indifferent to the blandishments of the gospel as her parents and sisters. Never much of a prayer-warrior, Matilda would get down on her knees and pray for the salvation of her family. City Mission had all sorts of tips when it came to witnessing to families but these were useless in Matilda’s case, as their radars were so finely-attuned to God-talk that they would reject whatever she had to say whenever the conversation came remotely near the subjects of Jesus or eternal life.

Matilda returned to Fleet on the night mail train. She washed at the station rest room and walked into town, towards All Saints.

‘No rest for t’wicked,’ she murmured as she went to the campus library.

It so happened that Thursday night when they were discussing a portion of scripture, a reference was made to the Unforgivable Sin. Hearing about the Unforgivable Sin is almost a rite of passage in fundamentalist churches. As soon as she heard the phrase unforgivable sin, Matilda felt white-hot pinpricks all over her flesh.

‘Surely not,’ she said. ‘There’s no unforgivable sin.’

‘It’s in the Bible,’ said Avril, another postgraduate.

‘Where?’ she asked but Avril had already been side-tracked by another conversation.

The idea that there might be a sin so horrid that it could not be atoned for filled Matilda with horror. If there was an unforgivable sin, then it stood to reason, in Matilda’s mind, that several facts claimed about the Christian religion could not be true. If, for example, there remained a sin which put a person beyond redemption, then it could not follow that Jesus’ death on the cross was a propitiation for all sin. Furthermore, Jesus could not take the credit for salvation alone, since a person’s salvation obviously depended upon their not committing the unforgivable sin. And so on. In fact, the more Matilda thought about it, the more her faith was in danger of becoming a ball of wool whose thread was being yanked so often and so hard it threatened to unravel completely.

The first thing to do was vouchsafe the facts. Matilda took her New International Version Bible and searched it for mention of this mysteriously unforgivable sin. She found a reference to it in Matthew chapter 12, verses 22 – 32:

They bought him a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute and Jesus healed him so that he could both talk and see. All the people were astonished and said, Could this be the Son of David?

But when the Pharisees heard this, they said, It is only by Beelzebub, the prince of demons, that this fellow drives out demons.

Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, "Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand. If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand? And if I drive out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your people drive them out? So, then, they will be your judges. But if I drive out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.

"Or again, how can anyone enter a strongman’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man? Then he can rob his house.

"He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters. And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men but