Bible game show

My eight-year-old son’s teacher called on the last day of the school year. “We’ve had to evacuate the classroom to keep the other children safe. Your son is still in the classroom. You need to come pick him up. Right now.”

Jesus. It was only an hour from home time and that teacher couldn’t just hold out? I called my wife Vic.

“What’s happened?” Vic asked.

“They’ve ‘evacuated’ the classroom again,” I said.

“Oh for god’s sake,” she said. “Again?”

That evening, I asked my son Neko about it, gently.

“I got really frustrated and tipped over some chairs,” he said.

We sat down and read his school report together. Neko is “an enthusiastic, passionate member of our class,” it says. It’s true that he’s a zealous performer. Sometimes he gets upset when things go off-script. But I’ve not seen him tipping over chairs. We read on: “He has been working hard on learning about his emotions and how to express himself in a way that others can understand.” The phrasing struck me as odd. Surely others would understand this particular manifestation of frustration?

How Neko gets on at school is a concern, but in all honesty it’s me I’m really worried about. You see, your child is actually two people. They’re one person with you and another person out there, on the stage. You’re sitting in the green room, unaware of what’s happening out there. When the child performs well, the audience applauds. Bravo to this wonderful child. What a delightful specimen. His parents should be so proud. When the child performs poorly, however… What must the parents be like?

When I was eight, the same age as Neko now, I’d bike to the supermarket on a little red BMX and do the shopping on my own. I’d lug a big steel trolley around the aisles, with a handwritten list resting on the kid’s seat, at my eye level. Then I’d load the groceries onto the conveyor belt, and a checkout operator would start scanning the tins and boxes. They’d look behind me, wondering, then finish scanning and put both hands on the till, as if to say, “That’s as far as I can take it without your mum or dad.” Then they’d see my outstretched hand with exact change for the tally on the screen, and give this confused smile, which was actually part-frown. They were always happy to accept the money.

I’d catch a taxi home if there was money left over for the fare, and sometimes there was. Outside in the parking lot it was always the same gnarled taxi driver who’d help me get home. By my reckoning he’d been driving a taxi for about 90 years.

“You’re a self-made man,” he would say to me every time, in a raspy voice, chuckling at his own wit as he loaded my bike into the boot with the groceries. The comment made no sense to me then, and doesn’t even make that much sense now. True, I’d invested some effort biking here and taking the groceries off the shelf, but I hadn’t made anything. I got the money off Mum. She was the one who did the budget. The remarkable part was not so much me doing the thing, but that Mum had me do it myself. I don’t remember her making a song and dance about it, either. Shortly after dropping me off, that taxi driver would just plain forget about that good little boy doing the groceries on his own. That joke – if it can be called a joke – was, to him, newly coined each time. People just plain forget about the good kids. Barely give their mum a second thought.

On Sundays, Mum would send me to church. Frequently I went with Mum’s friends Carol and David, along with all of their children. I’d wait at their house beforehand. David was a wispy man who’d barely make an impression on the sofa cushion before he’d get paged to rush off and whip out some poor soul’s rumbling appendix. Carol would flow across the room to wave at the window, an enraptured smile on her face. She wore long skirts and always seemed to be undulating side to side, like a top-loader washing machine mid-cycle. Their flock of young children would skip behind Carol wherever she went, and occasionally break into song. They set the bar for family wholesomeness impossibly high. God level.

Carol and David’s church was one where people would frequently stand up, close their eyes and offer their palms to the ceiling. The ecstasy was a physical force; it pulled at their bodies and contorted their faces. Carol would sometimes open her eyes and look down the aisle at me, a boy whom she assumed had taken it upon himself to be saved at such a young age. I wouldn’t put it past Mum for her to have told Carol I asked to come with them. Perhaps Mum knew that good kids reflect well on their parents, or, at the very least, do not reflect at all. She may have hypothesised that sampling some religion smorgasbord-style might provoke good character. I was part of the faith experiment; my younger siblings back home were the control group.

When I saw Carol looking at me, I’d jiggle my hands at my sides, making tiny circles, trying to summon the spirit, trying to conjure what Carol had. But I could not appropriately sway back and forth to the holy rhythm, cleansing the soul with my repeated action. I’d open and close my mouth so that Carol might think I was singing, but I didn’t know the words. When we were whisked off to Sunday school part-way through the service it was always a relief, because from there it was more about memorising stuff out of books, and that was something I could handle.

I don’t know whether the adults determined that I’d go to a Christian after-school club because the Sunday outings just weren’t working on me, or if it was part of the package, but once a week I’d skid my BMX into the gravel driveway of a grey building set slightly below ground level, like some kind of office bunker. About twenty of us would sit up straight in a circle in a carpeted room downstairs. There, an excitable guy named Charles – who was dressed either for the office or a particularly formal end of the world – would stand in front of a felt-covered board and stick Velcroed bible story pictures onto it. He’d regale us with stories of barbarians, harlots and all manner of people whose lives improved immensely once they acknowledged the almighty “King”; or people who already believed in the “King”, but had to do absolutely crazy shit to prove that their conviction was rock solid.

There was always a quiz at the end. Charles might ask us to recall a fact from the story (fair) or bonus bible background questions (sometimes unfair, since it assumed extensive Sunday school attendance). Correct answers earned you points, which you could cash in for stickers or stationery. It was essentially a bible game show.

How I coveted those prizes. My hand went up every single time. I sat up so straight my back was like an arrow pointing at heaven – which is what I would have said if I thought it would help me win. After a few weeks, I started to wonder why I was never called on to answer. I mean, we’re talking about a pretty small pool of competitors. Was Charles wearing faith-sensing lenses set into those huge, amber-framed glasses? Oh god. Could he literally see right through me?

At the end of the session Charles would be joined by Rhonda, who had been preparing biscuits and cordial so silently in the next room that her entry was always a surprise. She had a drawn look to her, as though she’d been partially desiccated. Her face crackled into a thousand lines when she grinned. Before snack time, Charles and Rhonda would ask if anyone that day would like to take the lord into their heart. Much was made of this; it had an official air to it. The ritual also stood in the way of the rest of us getting the snacks. Someone would raise their hand and be led away, then return some time later, presumably with their hearts filled up. Then we could have the snacks. The suspense waiting for the snacks – in particular the pink, scallop-edged biscuits with hundreds and thousands on top – was nigh on intolerable.

After twelve weeks without a single point, I knew I’d have to take action to have any sort of chance. I volunteered. Rhonda collapsed into a smile and Charles trained his glasses on me, paused, and assented with the tiniest nod. They led me downstairs (how far underground did this place even go?) to a tiny room with no windows. There were chairs stacked around us. Charles put his hand on my head and chanted some stuff about entering my heart. I understood little of it except that this was some kind of contract.

“How do you feel?” Charles asked, as he withdrew his hand and took his glasses off to clean with a handkerchief.

“Um… good?”

“Wonderful, just wonderful,” said Rhonda. “So young.”

After that I went and sat back down with the group, who promptly flocked to the snacks, visibly relieved there would be no further wait.

Next session: no points. Nor after that. Nor ever. The whole thing had been a complete waste of my soul. It appeared that there was no way for me to meet the criteria.

Mum herself wasn’t religious. You might have been fooled into thinking otherwise, based on strategic full-family church attendance at various locales in later years. But just ask the Mormons, and they’ll tell you – after a deep breath and a stiff, non-alcoholic, non-caffeinated drink – that Mum is religion-proof.

You’d hear their bike wheels crunch up the stoney driveway, and look out the window to see the sun bouncing off their white shirts. In the hotter months I felt for them, in those black trousers. There appeared to be no summer uniform. They’d lean their bikes up against the scraggly Hoheria tree in front of the kitchen, near death from all the feral cats using it as a scratching pole (and likely just as well – if it had grown to full size it might have pushed the house over).

Many came and went, but the final pair were called Elder Todd and Elder Rob. As a child it puzzled me that they all bore the first name “Elder”. By this point Mum was no doubt the stuff of Mormon folklore. The last clue of the crossword puzzle. The conversion to end them all. I imagined that they’d gather around the fire and conjecture that should you convert Mum to Mormonism, you could retire early.

Mum charmed them both, like all the others. She’d smile and laugh, and make endless cups of milky, sweet tea. Just happy for the company. I don’t even think they got the book out, initially. Elder Rob seemed the shrewd one, the businessman. While he sat at the kitchen table with Mum, outside Elder Todd would shepherd the siblings and me, five kids in all, around the house. We’d beam at this delightful visitor happy to throw balls with us and sit around in the grass.

On what would be their final visit, I pulled out a gridiron ball we got in a Christmas package from one of the churches. I’d been practising running my fingers across the faux leather laces to spin it on release, giving it some stability as it corkscrewed through the air.

“Wow, nice,” said Elder Todd. “You could be a quarterback one day.”

This embarrassed me, partly because I didn’t really know what a quarterback was, but also because even then it seemed empty flattery. It was more than that: though I appreciated the kindness, the showmanship of it bothered me. It didn’t seem real; it felt like marketing. Me practising with the ball to make a particularly American connection with these distinctly American strangers; he with the well delivered compliment aimed at endearing him to me.

Through the window I could see Elder Rob sitting up a little straighter, posturing a little more aggressively, talking intensely over the book. Mum held a fresh mug of tea with both hands, drawing it closer, smiling at Elder Rob through the steam. Later, when they pulled their bikes up the side of the house and made to leave, they didn’t smile as broadly as usual. They didn’t say, “See you later.”

I came away from this amalgam of religious vignettes believing that people who went to churches and youth groups, or rode bikes in white shirts and dark pants, were all engaging in the same kind of wholesome theatre as people into dungeons and dragons and the like. Members of a special club, where you really didn’t get much out of it unless you go all in, and that was the problem: I never even felt partially in.

Now, this is either what Mum intended for me, or exactly the opposite. On the one hand, she may have wanted me to evaluate all options available to me, and form my own beliefs. Or it was engineered in such a way that I would always find it somewhat awkward and confronting: an inoculation against religion. It may be an example of genius-level parenting, not least because either way the outcome was the same.

A couple of times a week, on days I’m working from home, I bike my son Neko to school. His bike has a frame suited to the size of his body, and has gears. When I was his age, my BMX had only one gear. If you needed to go faster, you pedalled faster; if you needed more power, you pedalled harder, standing up and leaning into it if necessary. It had those brakes you pedal backwards to engage; I’d slam them on at speed and skid out the back wheel, streaking a swash of burnt rubber across the pavement – wobble – and then accelerate again. There were clackers on the spokes that went kachunk kachunk ka–chunk when you slowed down.

Everyone was on bikes when I was a kid. There were rows and rows of bike stands at school, packed full. At Neko’s school there’s one bike stand with three other bikes. Total.

When I say farewell at the classroom door I look at the chairs inside and just hope that they stay upright. I leave him with parting words of encouragement, but I don’t know how much effect they’ll have. He’s going to be in this classroom all day. I don’t really know what’s going to happen.

Can you grow a person, or do they just grow themselves? It’s supremely defeatist parenting to think that you have no say in the matter. But you do wonder. If someone had asked Mum, “How much independence does a child need?” I wonder if she might have answered: “All of it.” Did she know that I’d even come back from the supermarket, every time, with the goods? That I would come to equate organised religion with people into dungeons and dragons? That Charles placed a contract on my soul in a cupboard while Rhonda withheld the pink biscuits? There’s no way Mum could have known all these things. I guess she just had faith that I’d work it out.

Neko biked to the park on his own the other day. It’s at the end of our street, round a corner you can’t see past. If I walk up the street a little, I can see all the way to the park. But I know I probably shouldn’t.