The Evangelist

Music:

Nunc Dimittis, Michael Tippet

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The Evangelist

She often went to the park but her need of it was different this time, increased. She would finish her shift, descend the high-street, pass the clogged bus traffic, turn off left down the quiet cobble-street that led to the black, balustrade park entrance, and enter. Upon entering, a calmness always enveloped her. It was like crossing over into a slightly different world, a world which operated at a slower speed, a world with the volume turned down a little. Perennial lawns and flowerbeds surrounded the castle in impermanent carpets. The old Roman castle stood vast and imperious and constant at the park’s centre. Down in a different, lower section of the park, at the bottom of steep slopes, there was the bandstand and the pedalo-lake. Picnic tables with parasols.

            There was a particular crest in the park which Fiona favoured. It was located in a quieter, more peripheral pocket of the park. It was a long elevated section, bordered in railings, overlooking the slopes and the bandstand and the glimmering lake. At one end, there was a dark shrine of unknown dedication, a grotto of some kind behind locked gates. Trees, leafless now, extended their limbs a long way out over the railings. On the other side of the railings, smaller trees enthusiastically craned from below. Fiona loved these trees, their suspended blizzard of squiggles, their nude crooked arms and crooked fingers.

            Fiona climbed the crest and discovered that all the benches were occupied. She hovered by the railings, gazing out over the familiar view. She glanced, every so often, at the benches, hoping someone would move on. She monitored the situation with concealed desperation. 

The morning had been grey, misted in a kind of doubt. Now the beginnings of an eager brightness suffused the world. Parted clouds revealed low, wintry sunlight which lay prettily on the lake and on the bare slopes. The air was still chilly. The little, ambling people, all in hats and scarves and coats, did not linger or sit for long.

            But the eight benches, all painted an aged black, some splashed in places with the white of congealed bird shit, which lined the length of the crest, all the way from the locked shrine to the downward curve where the crest slanted into steps, each had a sedentary occupant. On one was a tramp with a diagonal mouth, lost in a world best known to himself, talking and sometimes humming aloud. On another was a young couple, their faces hidden in the conference of a long, appeasing embrace. On one bench was an eccentric, wearing a gilded ankle-length leather jacket and, on his head, a most unusual, mad-hatter-style stove-pipe hat. He was the local Monster Raving Looney Party candidate. On another was a gothy youngster wearing loud, black makeup on her face and magenta-pink ribbons in her jet-black hair.

            The young couple, their faces still hidden from the world in dark hoods, got up then and began stumbling down the slope that led up to the crest. They remained linked as they passed out of sight, disappearing around one of castle buttresses. Gratefully, Fiona sat down in their place.

            She wasn’t sure how long she was going to stay, how long she was going to remain seated on the bench, looking out over the park. A long while, she suspected. She had a huge appetite for stillness. 

She half-acknowledged her neighbours on the benches. She didn’t really feel united with them in a common purpose but knew that, in a way, she was. 

There was no possibility of forgetting about the recent tragedy. It lived inside her with a grim, dogged insistence. Her stillness was a way of allowing this pain within her to breathe, to speak aloud to the extant, shapely world. She acknowledged her pain, she permitted it a kind of agency. In the days following the tragedy, she had cried a great deal: deep, unmannered tears. Now, there were no tears left inside her. Her grief was a dry source. An unlubricated ache was what remained.

But she really did feel a huge peace here. And, in a way, her pain enabled her to discover something in this place that she would never have discovered otherwise. For that she felt almost grateful. 

More than that, her neighbours on the benches to her right and left seemed to feel it too, they too seemed to feel something of this grand peace. They were a congregation united in a shared relief. It was a curious, indescribable feeling, a feeling of attention on the part of her neighbours, a feeling of some common balm being extracted, some agreed-upon notion of the sacred. The air grew warmer.

People got up, moved on, the tramp, then the goth, then the Monster Raving Looney. Others came and settled wordlessly in the place of these predecessors. On the bench directly to the right of Fiona, a very beautiful young woman seated herself. She was a little insecure and sullen, but very, nearly angelically, beautiful. Birds, unidentified and many and a little perplexed by the warming weather, sang passionately in the bare branches of the trees. Church-like calm descended upon this horizontal community, upon this row of people on benches. Fiona noticed and was gladdened as the mood and demeanour of the woman beside her visibly shifted, as some inner tension seemed to dissipate and her entire being appeared to pleasantly slacken and relax. The light of a quarter-smile even began to shine, softly, from her pale, moody face.      

That’s when the evangelist came by. Fiona’s head was turned by his first bursts of speech and she felt immediately that a fragile grace were being interrupted. She felt the sudden perishing of something precious, the bursting of a kind of amniotic sac. Right away, she found herself mourning the moments before he had shown up.   

He entered from the right, climbing up the stone steps. He began working his way along the benches, greeting each person and making his purpose known to them as diplomatically as he was able. The first person he approached made no secret of their distaste for public proselytising, perhaps for religion in general. So the evangelist moved on, accepting the rejection with a sort of satisfied bow. He accepted each rejection with the same bow, as necessary blows that, in accumulation, would move him closer to Christly-ness. 

He was a tall, black man with a slight stoop. He wore aviator sunglasses, a brown duffel coat, and a big tartan-patterned scarf. He spoke English with a strong African accent, was occasionally overcome by a brief, joyous laugh, and went about his evangelism with a kind of confident, charismatic pushiness. He carried a bible with him, a medium-sized blue bible, with a battered cover and pages soft with use. Held tightly between his right thumb and the front cover of the bible was a stack of pink bookmark-sized cards printed with scripture fragments and contact details. He handed one of these to each person he spoke to. In general, people pocketed them without giving them even a cursory glance. 

He came closer, his voice loudening and his words becoming clearer. One of those seated on the benches indulged the evangelist in brief, angry-sounding conversation, the specifics of which Fiona did not catch. They spoke in lowered voices and though the tone of their talk was audible, the words themselves were not.

With clerical suaveness, the evangelist stepped back from the second man and walked on. 

Fiona noticed that the young, beautiful woman beside her, seated at the centre of the bench directly to the right, seemed suddenly petrified. She tensed up again, she went very pale and seemed solidified by an adrenal nervousness, like she wanted to run away but couldn’t.

Fiona immediately understood the young woman’s anxiety. She felt unusually sympathetic to it, unusually involved with it. She was clearly panicked by the approaching evangelist. Fiona had witnessed this woman’s transformation in real time, she had watched as something about this place- the view, the sound, the quiet, the light- had altered her for the better. That work was abruptly undone and that bothered Fiona far more than any personal irritation she felt. Fiona hoped that the evangelist might register the woman’s timidity and leave her be. He didn’t of course. He greeted her with a big smile and, with only the most implicit invitation, sat down beside her on the bench.    

“What’s your name, princess?” he said.

It was so obvious that the woman wanted the evangelist to leave her alone but that, for whatever reason, she lacked the assertiveness to tell him so. 

She sat there, invisibly straight-jacketed, bullied into stasis, laconically answering the evangelist’s questions. Are you married? Do you go to church? Her handbag lay in her lap, her legs and arms were folded, her body language was utterly cold and closed. But the evangelist just didn’t seem to care. He then began a wayward recital, telling the story of the fall of man in a sluggish, emphatic style, accompanied by expansive hand gestures.   

Fiona had had enough of this. She felt almost elated at the unexpected acuity of her outrage. She stood up and started towards the bench where the evangelist and the young woman were seated. 

She wasn’t someone who involved herself readily. In general, conflict was something she shied away from. But on this occasion she felt full of a comforting resolve, a certain sense of grievance. She appreciated this feeling of confidence. As she approached, she reminded herself of the woman’s discomfort, she recalled some of the evangelist’s more patronising ways- certain mannerisms and snippets of behaviour which he had not inflicted on the men he had spoken to- and, bolstered by her own sense of irritation, her sense that something rare and holy had been shattered by his evangelism, she was absolutely ready to admonish the evangelist, to let him feel the weight of her tongue, to drive him away as something pestilent and undesired.

But, approaching, the strength that had propelled her this far suddenly went away. Something gave her immense pause and she was left naked, stripped of purpose, uncertain how to proceed. She hovered by the evangelist and the pale woman. She briefly looked away. She noticed the locked shrine, the enclosed darkness. The wind had blown fallen leaves into the shrine. Standing upon their rotting paste, imprisoned by the barred gates, she thought she deciphered a strange, frightening shape. She looked out at the view, beyond the railings and the leafless trees, out at the slopes and the bandstand and the tiny, ambling people. She spied a nearly indiscernible pair of Canada geese on the water. She looked back. The evangelist sat there, his back to Fiona. She approached. 

At this new proximity, she noticed a long scar running down the back of the evangelist’s hairless head. The scar was diagonal, a dark crack almost as long as the handle of a teaspoon. Where the ridge was thickest, the skin either side of it was a little reddened. Fiona noticed, also, a small deformity in the evangelist’s left ear. The lobe was oversized, a bulging globe of skin. A birth defect or an injury? Fiona wasn’t sure. 

These small signs on the evangelist’s brown cranium- whether signs of damage or imperfection- touched something in Fiona. They soothed her, sadly. She thought of the baby she had miscarried and felt confused. She felt, only briefly but intensely, the sharp pang of its most shocking moment and saw its most shocking sight. She realised that if her miscarried infant was present in the world at all, then it was present everywhere and present in all people. She could not say who or what it would have grown up to be. This very mystery was her task: to sit with it, to maybe forget about it. She had moved to defend this young, somewhat vulnerable woman because she had initially seen her as a victim and the evangelist as an enemy. Now, as she stood before them and they both looked at her with quizzical, wondering eyes, she did not feel this certainty. She felt like an evangelist herself, able to proselytise with unique purpose and knowledge, and swollen, as lately she had been swollen, with an important message of love. 

“Excuse me,” Fiona said to the evangelist. “I’m currently exploring Christianity. I have a few questions for you. Do you mind if we talk over here?” She gestured to her bench.  

The woman seemed to understand what Fiona was doing. She seemed to recognise the grace of Fiona’s lie, the light that radiated out from it. The woman’s eyes communicated an inarticulate gratitude. 

Like the evangelist, the young woman was different up close. Fiona noted that she wasn’t, in fact, quite as beautiful as she had seemed.

The evangelist was not used to this kind of enthusiasm and went eagerly with Fiona to the neighbouring bench.

“I love this place,” Fiona said. “Isn’t it beautiful here?”    

The evangelist turned his head, showing the deformed ear. Through his dark, steel-rimmed lenses, he looked out at God’s world, at the ranks of rolling clouds in the blue heaven, and dispassionately agreed.