Pain Sluts

Chapter 3

The trainee apostle takes Laura to his trailer at the back of the caravan site.

‘It’s super important we pray with people once they’re saved, Laura,’ he says.

He leads Laura up the steps of his trailer to a cramped decking area, where a huge model of a T-Rex made of rusting scrap metal, draped in fairy lights and a Hawaiian boa, towers over a plastic chair and small table.

‘I’ll make us a Thank You Jesus smoothie before we start. Holy Spirit raises your core temperature.’

Laura, who used to think that being saved meant being yanked out of a towering inferno by a ripped firefighter or being dragged out of the water by a lifeguard, can’t be sure that she’s been saved, even though she still has a new shivery feeling in her belly from the service in the Fellowship. All the same, she likes the idea of being singled out for something special.

‘You got anything else, Nathan?’ she says. ‘Gran lets me have Lambrini on Fridays.’

Nathan opts for a long look that passes through Laura’s body like radiation.

‘The soul needs more than alcohol, Laura.’

Guiding her into a kitchenette overlooking the cockle beds, Nathan pours a carton of sweetened almond milk into a blender, adding bananas and a powder that looks like Agent Orange. Arranged on a rack above the draining board are sachets of hemp powder, matcha powder, spirulina.

‘God’s work is thirsty work, Laura. Did you hear the parable about the woman in the well?

A solar-powered angel toy with a rubbed-out mouth makes a buzzing noise on the worktop, bobbing its head around like a psych patient.

‘Sounds like a horror flick,’ says Laura. ‘You know, like The Woman in Black or Girl On A Train. It’s always a …’

The trainee apostle hits the on switch on the blender, cutting off Laura mid-speech. The buzz of the angel toy gives way to the dental-drill shriek of the blender.

‘She was a w***e,’ says Nathan. ‘When Jesus went up to her, she was by herself, drawing water out of a well. She was so shocked to be approached by a man, a total no-no in those days, she told Jesus to go f**k himself.’

Prickles form on Laura’s neck as Nathan speaks. Were trainee apostles allowed to swear or to say w***e? She thinks of the whores working the alley behind gran’s flat. Laura always wondered what it would be like to be one of them. Anonymous but at the same time desired. There but not there. Nathan hands her the smoothie in a cloudy pint glass.

‘Do you know what Jesus said to her?’ he says.

Laura shakes her head as she drinks.

‘If you knew who I was, lady, you’d be the one asking me for a drink.’

Laura follows Nathan down a narrow corridor towards the back of the trailer.

‘The blackout curtain in the master bedroom is super good for praying. Satan uses daylight to distract.’

The corridor is way longer than Laura would have expected, with closed doors on either side and a stink of fish raining down from a bulb. Laura’s smartphone goes off in her jeans pocket.

‘Through here,’ says Nathan. ‘And put your phone off.’

The door to Nathan’s bedroom is a thick, rust brown curtain with flowers. The only light in the room comes from a dolphin-shaped night light clamped to a single futon base, which projects a pale, watery rainbow on the wallpaper. A poster of a unicorn leaping over a deep ravine is sellotaped to the wall opposite the futon.

‘Love the rainbow light,’ says Laura. ‘My mate Jared bought the same one in Pride.’

‘Gay pride conflicts with God’s view of sexuality, Laura. For a male to lie with a male is an abomination.’

‘Jared’s a really good bloke though. He used to live in a refugee camp in Turkey. Came here with his brother Falak two years ago. He fixed my gran’s gate.’

‘What can Fellowship have in common with darkness Laura?’ he says, looking at her through the slits of his eyes, waiting for an answer.

Laura shrugs and sits down on the futon, wondering where to rest her glass. The smoothie is the same colour as piss turns when you’ve left it for too long in the bowl.

‘You remind me of her,’ says Nathan, suddenly. ‘The woman in the well. You have a thirsty soul. You crave things.’

Laura isn’t sure whether being compared to the woman in a Bible story is a complement. She can smell Nathan’s aftershave more clearly now, not only because of the proximity of their bodies in the small airless room, but because his sweat makes the high notes stand out. When she’d first met Nathan a few hours earlier, at the Fellowship on Charnelwood Road, he was sat on a low wall outside the front door, in a bridal dress, veil, and long train. A sandwich board that read ‘You Can’t Get from A Man or Woman What You Can Only Get from God’ hung around his neck. Laura wondered whether he was trans or non-binary. There was a trans in school who scared the living s**t out of her. But then again, he also looked like one of those people they locked in stocks in medieval times, the bridal train curled around his feet like a chain. No sooner had Laura started feeling sorry for him than the ‘g’ and ‘d’ consonants in the word God assumed weight and mass in her mind. She noticed he was handsome, with blond hair clipped into a burr cut like velvet.

‘You’re the type who could backslide quite easily, Laura,’ he says now.

Taking the glass form her, and resting it on the floor next to a bass guitar in the corner of the room, he leans over her body to reach for the dolphin light, fumbling for the off switch on the cord.

‘We’ve got no time to waste.’

When the room is dark, apart from a seam of daylight seeping in under the door curtain, Nathan paces the bedroom like a big cat in a zoo enclosure. Punches the wall. Then, as if he’s suddenly hot, he takes his hoodie off, throws it on to a fake prickly pear cactus in the other corner. It takes Laura a moment to register that underneath the hoodie he is naked.

‘Take your blouse off too,’ he says. ‘Clothes are an obstacle to achieving full spiritual connection.’

Laura isn’t wearing a blouse. She is wearing a cropped T-shirt on loan to her from her older sister, Kim, who moved out of their gran’s flat six months ago to move in with her boyfriend, Tyler. The T-shirt has a picture of an evil clown from an old timey horror film and smells of Kim’s knock-off ‘Daisy’ perfume. Laura doesn’t want to wash the T-shirt in case the scent of her sister disappears.

‘Skin to skin praying will allow God’s divine healing energy to flow freely,’ says Nathan. ‘There’s no time to waste. The enemy could already have infiltrated.’

Laura pictures a scrap metal T-Rex version of Satan coming up the steps of the trailer, a flashing snake around his rusty neck. She imagines the no-face wind-up angel toy from the kitchenette flying down the corridor like a cockroach. Sensing her hesitation, Nathan kicks the cactus pot.

‘I’m starting to wonder why you even came to the fellowship, Laura? I took you for someone more mature. Braver. But …’

The smell of aftershave has metabolised into something more like a taste than a smell. Medicinal. It collects in Laura’s throat like powder. The truth was that Laura didn’t know exactly why she’d gone to the Fellowship, except that it was something different to do with her time. When the flyer had come through the door of gran’s flat, a week earlier, ‘Who Else Knows How Lonely and Scared You Are?’ emblazoned across the cover, the words spoke to her. Also, she liked the artwork. But Nathan was right. She hadn’t gone to the Fellowship for exclusively spiritual reasons, whatever spiritual meant.

‘Sorry,’ she says.

She takes off her top as requested, relieved that the room is so dark. The roll of whiter-than-white fat around her waist makes her look like a glow worm. Last week, a boy in Year 10 had called her a fupa, which was short for Fat Upper p***y Area. She hates, too, her sticky-out belly button, the crater of scarred tissue on her upper arm from the BCG, her lumpy arms in general. For a minute, she worries that the angle of her body, the rhythm of her breathing, will alert Nathan to the possibility that she might not actually be saved, whilst another part of her just wants to go home. Looking over, she notices Nathan has lowered his head. His head looks like Christ’s head on the cross in the picture in gran’s living room.

‘Lord Jesus. Thank you Jesus. Thank you for saving Laura from the sin and lust and deceit in her heart. Make her as thirsty for your juicy word as the w***e by the well. Shoot your loving mercy into the channels of her body Lord Jesus. Hallelujah.’

Closing her eyes, Laura focusses on Nathan’s words. Was she as sinful as he claimed? The other night, after receiving the flyer about the Fellowship, Laura had had a random fantasy about the Angel Gabriel being sent by the Lord to impregnate her. She’d left her bedroom window open that night so that the angel could slide under the sash like the T2 in Terminator and turn into a real flesh and blood boy. In the same week, she’d given Jared’s brother Falak a hand job in the alley.

When she opens her eyes, Nathan is sitting beside her on the futon, holding something in his hand. A rectangle of colourful fabric.

‘Put this on,’ he says. ‘There’s still too much light pollution.’

The rectangle of fabric is one of those bandanas Laura has seen surfer boys wearing on the beach. When Nathan ties it around her eyes to create a blindfold, the pressure of his hand takes her back to the service at the Fellowship, where he’d lain his hands on her in prayer.

She was sitting next to the heavily tattooed mother of a boy with Down’s Syndrome at the time. Nathan was playing the guitar on a wooden dais at the front of the hall, leading the congregation in a song called ‘You Gave Away Your Majesty’, having by then swopped his bridal veil for a grey Adidas hoodie and combat trousers. Laura sang along with the lyrics, which were about God ridding people of their shame. The hall crackled like grass catching fire. Individuals made their way down the aisles, toppling from time to time, like toddlers trying out their new legs. The mother of the Down’s Syndrome boy screamed ‘Take Me Jesus, I Bloody Love You.’ Laura must have been out of it for a while; she had a habit of falling into trances, especially when she was stressed. When she emerged from her trance, Nathan was kneeling to her side.

‘We pray that you move inside our sister Laura tonight, Lord Jesus.’

It was something she’d seen Dynamo doing on TV, guessing people’s names. Nathan brought her hand to his abdomen. A pulsing energy passed directly from his skin into hers, swarming through her like a flash flood, occupying every part of her. It was a bit like a scene in an old film she and Kim once watched, called Cocoon, where an alien f***s a human in a swimming pool, regenerating the human’s life force. It wasn’t f*****g in a strictly human sense, but it was similar. The alien had an aura of light around their body, which was their life force made visible. When the light whooshed around through the human, they convulsed like they were having an orgasm.

‘Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden of Eden,’ says Nathan, tightening the bandana. ‘There’s no shame in it.’

Through the bandana, daylight is still visible under the door curtain. To the right of the curtain is the plastic cactus. Beside the cactus is a pair of trainers with massive lips, a box of Andrex tissues, an empty blue WKD bottle. Normal, reassuring everyday stuff. Outside the trailer, kids are kicking a ball about.

‘Don’t be scared,’ says Nathan. ‘It’s God’s will.’

Nathan kneels in front of her on the floor, resting each of his palms on her shoulders.

‘Lord Jesus, may this sanctified flesh of mine be a conduit for your love. Lord Jesus. May the force of your righteous mercy flow like a river into Laura, not the measly dribble of love you sent her in the service Lord, no offence Lord, but a purifying mega-tsunami, purging her blood of Satan’s load.’

Nathan groans like a woman in childbirth. The words lord and Jesus and hallelujah are lost in a gibberish of pulverized consonants.

You’re hurting my shoulders actually Nathan,’ says Laura, when Nathan presses into her shoulders too hard.

‘God’s force is working through me in tongues, Laura,’ he says.

Looking back on the event, Laura can’t remember precisely when Nathan brought up the subject of armpit s*x. But around midway through the praying in tongues, he stops to tell her that God has one more instruction for them.

‘It’s only happened to me once before. This level of clarity in the messaging. God is working overtime to secure your future in his Kingdom, Laura. He loves you like a father. But his final revelation will only be revealed to me when I’m free of the distractions of flesh.’

Laura can’t help thinking that if God’s love is like a father’s love, then this was a huge waste of time. The last time she and Kim saw their real father was at a meeting in a council office arranged for them by the social worker. Since then, he’d gone to live in Prestatyn.

‘Actually. Maybe we could do it another time Nath,’ she says.

A football smacks the window so hard the trailer lurches forwards like a boat. Nathan leaps up from the futon.

‘Stay,’ he says, when she tries to follow him out of the bedroom, having lifted the blindfold moments earlier. ‘Your soul is still in grave mortal danger.’

Through the pane of thin glass that is the bedroom window, Laura sees him shouting at the group of twelve-year-olds kicking a ball in the car park. His back is turned to her, she can’t see his face, but the expressions on the faces of the twelve-year-olds reminds Laura of the reaction shots you got in horror films, as if they’ve been spooked in some unimaginable way.

When he returns to the trailer, he is agitated. He duct tapes the curtains to the wall, and blocks the light from the hallway with a blanket. A series of raised stripes on his inner forearm that Laura hasn’t noticed before gleam in the dark of the room.

‘The inside of the body is a temple for the Holy Spirit. But the outside’s OK’ he says, randomly, without turning.

Laura doesn’t know what he means.

‘Outside the body. So, If I come in your armpit it’s fine. It’s not a sin.’

‘Come?’ she says.

He turns and stares straight into her.

‘The Lord wants me to masturbate.’

Nathan kneels down and fiddles with his fly. The twelve raised stripes on his forearm remind Laura of the scars that Kim’s friend Sugar has from cutting.

‘My armpit is hairy as f**k though. Kim took the Veet. I could come next week instead? I’d prefer that. I could -’

‘You took your blindfold off, Laura,’ he interrupts, without looking up. ‘You need to focus on praying not on looks. I can’t do this without your help. It’s a commandment from God.’

Laura slips the bandana back on.

‘You’re sitting way too high up,’ he says.

He climbs on to the futon behind her, rests a palm on her shoulder to steady himself. She hears the rustling of trouser fabric, exasperated outbreaths. Wiry hairs from his chest touch her back.

‘Open your arm a bit, for chrissakes’ he says.

Afterwards, he takes her home in his camper van, which is airbrushed with depictions of the Milky Way and the moon, with added angels and impossible horses. The Moon has the face of an angel cherub like the face in the Teletubbies sun.

‘Noah’s brother Onan spilled his seed on the floor rather than impregnate his dead brother’s wife. It was thoughtful. A mark of respect. The Bible doesn’t forbid m**********n,’ says Nathan, after a fairly long silence. ‘In case you’re wondering, Laura.’

They drive across the common land that separates the peninsula from the town, passing the tiny airport Laura has never seen planes landing in. When he’d moved into her armpit in the trailer, it was a strange silent affair, with hardly any movement on his part, just the sense of him burrowing into the recesses of her armpit, getting smaller not harder, and then ejaculating in a cold, small trickle on her back. She’d felt strangely removed from the situation, as if it was happening to somebody else, which was the opposite of how she’d felt in the church. Afterwards, when he was zipping up his fly, she checked the notifications on her phone. Kim had sent a scan picture of the baby she was expecting at Christmas. The baby looked a bit like an alien, but in a good way. The more Laura focused on the silvery white lines of real live bone in the scan image, arcing upwards along the baby’s back around her skull, the more she felt as if nothing Nathan said or did really mattered.

‘I wasn’t thinking anything,’ says Laura.

They turn off the common into the estate, passing the skinny woman who always pushed an empty supermarket trolley around the playground, and then, as they pass the Londis, Jared and Falak and their friends.

‘Drop me off here,’ she says, when they get to the bus stop at the corner of gran’s street. ‘I’ll walk the rest of the way.’

Nathan pulls into the bus stop as requested.

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,’ he says, parking up. ‘I tried. The Lord tried.’

‘You said I was already saved anyway,’ she says.

Nathan shakes his head and starts the engine.

‘I was married once,’ he says. ‘Yoked to an unbeliever. I prayed for guidance, Laura, prayed like a maniac day and night, especially before uniting in flesh, but the Lord was adamant. She had to go. Like her, you’re not spiritually ready.’

The baby scan is on the phone in Laura’s pocket, warm against her ass. In the wing mirror, she sees Jared and Falak.

‘I’m good, Nathan,’ she says.