Read Online Passage by Caroline Overington - Free Book Online Page B

thinking about my mother, who often said something similar: ‘Eat up, Paul, there are children starving in Ethiopia, you know.’
    ‘Do you read the Bible?’
    That was very definitely the next thing Brother Ruhamah said because I remember thinking: Okay, he’s a bible-basher. A bible-basher who eats crap from rubbish bins. He’s going to try to convert me .
    I told him, ‘No’, which was actually true. A State-school kid from an atheist family, I’d never seen a Bible, other than a Gideon my brother had once found in a bedside drawer in a motel at Ocean Grove.
    Brother Ruhamah continued. ‘Do you know what the Bible says?’
    I said, ‘I’m not religious.’
    ‘How do you know?’ he said.
    ‘How do I know what?’ I asked him.
    He persisted. ‘How do you know you’re not religious if you’ve never read the Bible?’
    I said, ‘It’s all bullshit.’
    Ignoring that, Brother Ruhamah said, ‘Haven’t you got any questions about the world? Why are you here, for example?’
    ‘I’m enrolled here,’ I said.
    He said, ‘Not here , at the university. Why are you here, on this planet? What’s the point of you?’
    I said, ‘I don’t know.’
    He said, ‘Yes, but I know. Come with me, and we’ll talk about it.’
    ‘Why don’t you just tell me now?’ I asked him.
    He said, ‘It’s not a simple story. It’s going to take a while.’
    It’s important at this point, I think, to say that Brother Ruhamah had a dog with him. It was an old dog, patched like a quilt, with rough hair and twelve longteats. I remember thinking: Whatever this bloke is about, if he’s got a dog, surely it’s benign.
    ‘What’s your name?’ Brother Ruhamah said, after he’d introduced himself. I told him.
    ‘It’s good to meet you, Paul.’
    We walked from the university to the City Square, wheeling Brother Ruhamah’s bicycle between us. We’re talking 1977, so it was when the Square had concrete benches and a fountain of some sort – and it was there, I suppose, that the active recruitment of me began.
    I cannot remember all of Brother Ruhamah’s words. My strongest memory is of the way he spoke – in low, comforting tones that made what he said sound so reasonable, so appealing. I was lost and needed direction; life was confusing, unless of course you knew the answers, which he did. He read from the Bible, which, as many who turn to that book already know, contains wisdom to soothe and inspire. He did not sit but squatted with his feet flat on the floor and his knees under his chin.
    The talking went on for most of the night and at some point I felt myself getting sleepy. It’s perhaps a measure of how comforted I felt that I was able to lie back on one of the concrete benches and have Brother Ruhamah fold a jumper beneath my head. I crossed my arms over my chest. I could see the rain falling like in a slow-motion movie through sheets of light from the Victorian street lamps. I drifted off to sleep, and didn’t wake up until the first trams geared up on the tracks in Spencer Street.
     
    There might have been a moment the next morning when, my bones aching from spending the night in the rain on a concrete bench in the City Square, I thought: Well, Paul, you’d better find ten cents and a phone box and explain yourself to your Mum. But I hadn’t showered or shaved or eaten that much and Brother Ruhamah said, ‘Don’t go home.’ Sometime in the night he had located, and now produced, another bicycle.
    ‘Borrow this. I will take you to where I live. You’ll like it there.’
    I mounted up and started to ride, and I’ll admit that it felt good to be gliding along on a gearless bicycle, lectures abandoned, once again carefree as the boy I’d been before divorce intruded upon my childhood. We made our way through the city, onto the Hume Highway, out through the suburbs and then onward, into the Victorian countryside.
    At some point, I’m sure, I thought: Whoa, where are we going, and how much longer? It was