“Faith is as personal and as private as a thing can be,” Della once told me. “If you understand someone’s faith, you know their soul. But most people aren’t very comfortable with the idea of personal faith. Sometimes, it’s just too much effort, too challenging. They have to ascribe to some pre-ordained vision of things, where there are books and preachers and teachers to lead them through the minefield of knowledge. Prophesies tell them what they need to know, words written millennia ago by some holy-man drunk on monastery wine and eager to bury his cock in the young girl from the local village. Then they wonder why their faith lets them down so much, and causes so many wars and death and hatred. Simple reason — it’s not their faith. It’s a ready-made idea of faith. De-humanised. Just add belief.”
It was a hot summer’s day, only a couple of years before the Ruin really took hold and threw people back two hundred years into anarchy and poverty. Della sat in a garden chair, reaching over every now and then to snatch a sweet from the table next to her. I was lying on the lawn, mindful of insects and ants, feeling the sun cook my exposed scalp but not really caring. The sunburn would be a brand of the day, a reminder of what Della was telling me. She was a wise woman, and I knew nothing. I loved her.
“You have faith? “ she asked. The question surprised me, but I felt I recovered well.
“Of course.”
“Good.” She said no more. I was afraid that she would ask me where my faith was set. She’d know if I lied, she’d read me like a large-print book held under a magnifying glass. Because in truth, my faith was based solely in her. I wondered whether she really ever knew that.
“You may need it one day.”
She did not look at me. She stared into the eye-blue sky, a strange smile on her face. A smile I did not like. She carefully took another sweet from the table without looking at what she was doing. She could just as easily have snatched up a bug.
“Why?” I said, finally.
She glanced down at me, then nodded up at the sky as if the fluffy white clouds could explain everything. “Bad days coming.”
Fuck, was she right.