Free The Book of Daniel by Mat Ridley

sour in my memory. There I had been, feeling safe and secure under His watchful and apparently loving gaze, when all along He’d had this up His divine sleeve. I was furious.
    In the days that followed, my mother did her best to put a brave face on things, but she wasn’t very successful. Whereas before she had been as cheerful a person as you could imagine, always bustling around the house with a song and a smile on her lips, she now drew in on herself. Her smile became brittle, and was swiftly replaced with a melancholy look whenever she thought I wasn’t looking. But then she started doing a lot of other things when she thought I wasn’t looking, too, such as picking apart the clothes my father had left behind, one thread at a time, and reading books with such blunt titles as The Absent God and The Cult of the Church . I wasn’t the only one pissed off at God, it seemed.
    And then there was the drinking.
    Within twenty-four hours of my father’s departure, my mother discovered a new religion, and before long she was worshipping at the Church of the Distilled Spirit: services every evening from eight o’clock (and often all day at weekends, Hallelujah). I did what I could to prevent it, dutifully tipping bottle after bottle of the stuff down the kitchen sink when she was upstairs sleeping it off, but like the heads on some kind of eighty-proof hydra, more bottles always sprang up to replace their fallen brethren. I tried to talk her out of her self-destructive intentions, but with no success; the only topics of conversation—or, more accurately, sermonising—my mother was interested in were (a) what a bastard my father was, and (b) how God had betrayed her. I found myself agreeing with her on both counts, and in doing so, would often let myself be carried along in the bumpy flow of her vitriolic outpourings rather than try to steer her away from the jagged rocks farther downstream.
    As the days immediately after my father’s departure dragged by, I grew increasingly bitter, and increasingly worried for my mother. I was terrified that I was going to come down to breakfast one morning to find her drowned in her own vomit, but instead of prayers of gratitude when I found she was okay, all I could find in my heart was hate towards God. Where was His mercy now, when my mother needed Him most? Why had He chosen to punish her like this after all she had done in His service?
    Sloshing around in between the drinks, the same questions came from my mother—and as they went unanswered, her former love for the Lord turned to hate. Seeing her suffer so, I ran alongside her as she journeyed away from God. Not once did I look back over my shoulder, and that wasn’t because I was afraid of being turned into a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife in the old Bible story. It was out of disgust.
    Of course, ours wasn’t the first family to fall apart due to infidelity, and it’s true what the cliché says about time being a great healer; despite all that I’ve just said, after only three weeks there were already a few signs of normal life beginning to show through again. However, as with most injuries, healing could only proceed if the wound was left in peace, and that was apparently not on the cards for my mother and me. Just when I began to hope that the worst was over, and that perhaps I wouldn’t need to pour any more whiskey down the sink, Geraldine came back into our lives.
    In former times—and they already seemed so long ago that it was perfectly natural to refer to them as such—Geraldine was my mother’s best friend in the church. They were like some kind of unstoppable Christian wrestling tag team: ‘The Holy Avengers’ maybe, or ‘Righteous Justice’. My mother was the organiser of the partnership, content to roll up her sleeves and methodically wear problems down one task at a time, whilst Geraldine was the talker, more likely to be strutting around the ring and yelling her opponents into submission. If there was