slumber talk

3: By Prayer And Petition

Suddington's Baptist Church happened to be the largest one in the county, and the most dominant building in town. I hadn't been to a service in a very long time, but whenever Tiffs was back home we made an effort to show our faces there – soak in the residual benediction. There was something about being a pastor's daughter that made it a little difficult to rid yourself of the faith, and Tiffs never seemed to mind.

We headed down to the square by way of the aspens at the edge of the copse, the same route Tiffs had taken yesterday, tracing faded footpaths down to the concrete pavement bordering the overpass and into the urban breach. She was still groggy when we started out over the front stoop and into the November frost, tripping over herself a few times as we navigated the trek to the bottom of the Hill – despite her willingness to accompany me on this tradition of sorts we'd shared since the move, she had never been a fan of early rising. A few of those falls had been into mud slicks. Had my sister been awake enough to care, she might have had more to say about the unfortunate staining it had left on certain regions of her leggings.

Today just so happened to be Communion, which usually took a little longer to set up. I settled for getting her in one of various yoga positions under the hand dryer in the stone bathrooms of the church, trying my best not to laugh too loudly and grab the attention of the congregation that was finishing up their monthly breakfast and preparing the sanctuary for the service.

By the time the organ player had sat down and Tiffs and I had crept in to take our seats, her clothes were nearly dry. Her thighs still stuck to the pew with an audible suction, though, and it took 2 of Tiffs' pinches in my side to get a hold of my silent, shuddering laughter before we reached the opening hymns.

I think it should be okay to admit to yourself that church can be a painful experience. If you were going it alone, yes, definitely, but the effect was much more magnified if it was in the sort of clique-y, fraternitised county where one's neighbours were screened for familiarity before they were deemed valid or viable enough to be bustling members of the community, instead of stragglers sectioned by the door. I wouldn't blame the faith for this, though Tiffs and I disagreed upon it frequently. It seemed obvious to me that if you placed the importance of the gospel upon the heads of secluded, small-minded parishioners, who were as susceptible to a stroke as they were to the general hivemind they had grown up in, then King James was bound to undergo a serious interpretive shredding by elders who wished for their hamlet to remain clean and their tribe more or less contained. Tiffs was of the opinion that the whole thing had been rigged from the start, and that the good words of our Lord and Saviour had only ever been intended as a divide between the classes – some sort of morally-ambiguous quarantine that justified the detriment of the poor and kept them from moving too quickly up the social ranks.

When Dad passed on, I thought I'd never have a reason to attend church again. Battlebricks had been as backwards and bigoted as parishes came, and in comparison, Suddington's churchgoers seemed almost defenceless. Infected by a benign kind of ignorance, rather than the malignant biology that had claimed our father's brain. I'd stayed holed away in borrowed university accommodation for as long as I could, while Tiffs, who had only been 16 at the time, had to make the back-breaking decision of whether to reach out to our estranged mother or enter the public care system. My dorms in East Anglia could barely house myself and a roommate; there was no way she could stay with me.

We'd stayed up 'til 1:00am by his casket, placed in the middle of our living room because we couldn't afford the rates at the funeral home, debating and crying and trying to figure out what to do. I told her to go and do exactly what she wanted, regardless of how she thought I might respond. It was a no-brainer, really; Tiffs had wanted her mother since the day she could talk, and had the roles been reversed and the same choice of evils offered onto me, I think even I would have done the same. I'd gone through Dad's personal things, found his leather-bound log book he used to keep in a locked drawer of the pastor's office, and flipped through the pages with erratic fingers till I found the page labelled 'NAYA,' and the faded, colourful postcards they'd continued to send to each other in the demise of their marriage. Mum had answered on the second ring. After a stifled cry with her, she hadn't hesitated a second to open up her home for Tiffs to complete her GCSEs.