hybrid faiths had begun to emerge. Faiths that justified the most brutal treatment of those who begged to differ, brutal treatment of strangers or people who just didn’t look or sound right.
Even the community they’d been living with deep in the woods outside Newark had begun to develop its own twisted version of Church of England Christianity. There was an ex-parish vicar who opened their community meetings with a sermon and a prayer. The prayer Jenny could even go along with, occasionally murmuring the words with everyone else. But the sermons were gradually becoming more and more hate-filled and poisonous; blaming the Taliban, al-Qaeda and some pan-Arabic, pan-Islamic plot to destroy the decadent West. The words were beginning to make sense to some of the people there. It gave them someone to blame, an ethnicity to universally despise and a justification to turn away many of the faces who emerged from the woods asking for food and shelter.
Jenny had vowed to keep this place just as free of that kind of bigotry as she had of vulture-eyed young men who might want to turn this refuge into their own personal harem. So, there were the rules. Jenny’s Laws. No public prayers, no preachers, no organised faith and no prayer room, to list but a few of them. Those who needed to commune with God were at liberty to do so, but quietly and privately.
Dr Gupta was right, though. She never realised how many of the people here wanted to hear Latoc’s Old Testament nonsense; needed some sort of spiritual guidance. Someone to tell them once a week that God was smiling on them, that they were doing the right thing, pleasing Him, that everything, one day, was going to be all right. They wanted to be reassured that the loved ones they’d lost in the chaos, the riots, the fights for supplies, or died from drinking bad water or spoiled food, were in a better place now and would one day be reunited with them.
This was a shit world everyone had inherited. Completely shit. Every day a tedious and repetitive grind for survival. The lights that Walter had managed to power with his generator had been their only luxury - a glimpse of the wonderful past and a promise from her, and Walter, that the future was going to get better.
It’s no wonder they were turning to someone like Valérie Latoc. From what she’d heard second-hand, he was telling them all the things they craved to hear; that this was all for a reason, part of a bigger plan and they were a big part of this bigger plan. If she’d been a little smarter about things, she could have done the same; moulded some version of a faith to suit their ends. Just enough to give them all some comfort and certainty that they were right to be out here, struggling together for some future goal and that God was jolly pleased with them. And, of course, that God was quite content with the community being run by Jennifer Sutherland.
That’s all she’d have had to do. But she’d have felt like a fraud.
Instead, like a stupid tyrant, she’d laid down the law, and now someone had arrived who was feeding on that need like a hungry mosquito on a bare forearm.
‘So why don’t we just say his probation is over, Jenny?’ asked Walter. ‘Tell him his time’s up and you’ve decided to let him go.’
Jenny shook her head. ‘I’m not sure I can now, Walter. I think if I told him to go we’d have a riot on our hands.’
‘So what can we do?’
She looked out of the window at the far platform. Perhaps there’d be a cap to this? So what if near on sixty, or even a hundred, members of their community appeared to be regulars now at Latoc’s prayer service? There were over four hundred and fifty people here. He still only had a minority. Provided his church-goers continued to do their bit on the work rota and there were no silly dictums from the man that said women had to shroud themselves from head to foot, or they could only eat fish on a Friday, or some other bizarre and illogical article of faith, then perhaps they might not need to turn this into a confrontation.
Maybe the novelty would wear off. Maybe Valérie Latoc wasn’t as polished a preacher as he thought and his turnout would eventually begin to wane. It was early days yet.
‘I