by Heide Goody
"What?" said Michael.
"We haven’t got to that bit yet?"
Clovenhoof was in the kitchen.
"What are you doing in there?" asked Michael suspiciously.
"Looking for booze," said Clovenhoof. "And changing my vegetables."
An hour and half later, as the jaunty closing number played over the credits, Michael sat almost entirely dumbfounded.
"Sacrilege," he whispered.
"It’s funny," said Ben.
"It pokes fun at Our Lord."
"It treats Jesus himself with great respect."
"Too bloody much," muttered Clovenhoof, extracting a defrosted oven chip from his underpants.
"But it makes crucifixion out to be a… a nothing. The suffering of Our Lord is trivialised."
"It mocks organised religion," said Ben. "Petty people twisting the true spiritual meaning of life."
Michael shook his head.
"And Reverend Zack has watched this. He even quoted it to me."
"The man’s got taste," said Ben.
Michael, his mind an unpleasant and confused whirl of contrary thoughts, got up and paced the room.
"It’s getting late," said Ben, standing up and dragging Clovenhoof to his feet.
Clovenhoof popped the chip in his mouth and rummaged around in his crotch for another.
"Yes," said Michael absently and saw the two of them to the door.
He stood at the door for a long time and then went and closed the curtains against the night.
"A new blog entry, Little G," he said to the computer.
"Yes, Michael."
"Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a horrible and blasphemous work," he began. His words rolled onto the screen as he spoke. "Our Lord was whipped, impaled and left to suffocate to death under the weight of his body in a hot, unforgiving sun. I should know. I was there. Life of Brian makes his supreme sacrifice seems as trivial as the pagan bunnies and Easter eggs that have replaced the true Easter celebrations. And yet…"
He stopped to gather his thoughts.
"And yet, Life of Brian pokes fun at the accidental misunderstanding of religious truth, at the ease with which false prophets can gain credence, at the almost impenetrable socio-political situation in which Our Lord lived. Perhaps this work of blasphemy is as close to the truth as the concept of Christianity grasped by the misguided flock at St Michael’s church. In the absence of God’s voice, is the church just an empty shell where half-truths are perpetuated. Is it a relic? A fossil?"
Michael wondered if his cynical mood was exacerbated by his weariness, his wretched evening with the cubs, and the nagging thoughts of what Clovenhoof had done with his frozen food compartment.
"Where is modern spirituality?" he said. "If we cannot access God through the church, how do we find him in this new age? Little G."
"Yes, Michael."
"Do a search with keywords ‘spirituality,’ ‘God,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘new age.’"
"Yes Michael."
A flood of text and images filled the screens. Evidently, Michael realised, he was not the first to have these same doubts, these same questions.
~ooOOOoo~
Nerys slid a coaster along the coffee table and placed a steaming hot mug on it.
"A nice hot chocolate for you," she said to Jayne and then sat down in Molly’s chair with her own drink and put her slippered feet up on the pouffe.
"So," said Jayne, stroking Twinkle as he sat in her lap, "would you describe this as an average Saturday evening?"
Nerys did a quick mental checklist. Big bag of cookies. A tub of ice-cream waiting in the fridge. Hot malty drinks. A dating game show on the telly.
"Pretty much," she said.
"Hmmm."
"What?"
Jayne sipped her drink and winced at its heat.
"I suppose you gave me the impression that your life was a non-stop high power rollercoaster of work, social engagements and so many eager men that you had to beat them off with a stick."
"Well, not non-stop," said Nerys slowly.
"And one of your friends suggested to me that perhaps you’re not so much beating them off with a stick as trying to trap them with nets and harpoons."
"Did Ben tell you that?"
"I’m not saying who it was."
"It was Ben, wasn’t it?"
"It doesn’t matter what-"
"Well, you can tell Ben to keep his thoughts to himself. Just because he got down on his knee to me right there" – she pointed at a spot on the rug – "and I had to spurn his advances doesn’t mean he can start spreading rumours."
"So, you really have men queuing up around the block?"
"Not round the block as such but there have been plenty of them."
"List them."
"All of them?"
"All of them in the last year."
"It has been a slow year," said Nerys. "Let’s see. There was Mark and Graham. That was some night. There was Stephen." She paused. "Or was it Trevor?"
"Clearly a memorable relationship."
"It didn’t last. He didn’t like empowered women."
"Really?"
"And…"
Nerys stopped.
"Three men," said Jayne. "Two in one night and one whose name you can’t remember."
"Definitely either Stephen or Trevor." Nerys shuffled uncomfortably. "Look, Jayne. I’m not necessarily the woman I used to be. Molly’s death has given me a lot of perspective. I take things easier now. I’ve matured. I’m waiting for the right man."
"You mean you’re too knackered to keep chasing them."
"Hey, I’m not the one left on the shelf here!"
Jayne slammed her mug down on the coaster and leaned forward, spilling a once sleeping and now surprised Twinkle onto the floor.
"I will have you know that Glyn Pettigrew gave me quite the snog at last year’s Young Farmers dance."
"Right, sis. Listen. One, Glyn Pettigrew is not a young farmer. He’s forty-five if he’s a day. Two, with two whiskeys inside him, he’d snog one of his own cows. Three, that’s one snog in twelve months."
"Ah!" snapped Jayne. "But you haven’t taken population density into account."
"What?"
"If you consider the number of eligible men per square mile, my one Welsh snog is worth ten times your metropolitan fumbles."
"You think the men of Birmingham will flock to you over me?"
"Given the chance!"
"Ha!"
"Ha!"
Silently fuming, Nerys sat back in her chair.
"Next Saturday we hit the pubs and clubs."
"Bring it on," growled Jayne, grabbed Twinkle more roughly than was necessary and stuffed him back in her lap.
They sat there for a good minute while, on the screen, women far younger, blonder and thinner than them cooed over the muscle-bound hunk they were competing for.
"Ice cream?" said Nerys.
"Yes, please," said Jayne.
~ooOOOoo~
On Wednesday evening, Clovenhoof strode unannounced into Michael’s flat and did several deep lunges to show off his knee-length hiking shorts. Michael, in the middle of a phone conversation, frantically waved for him to get out, a gesture that Clovenhoof chose to ignore.
"So, Friday morning," said Michael. "Ten o’clock." He nodded and uh-huhhed. "Thank you, Mistress Verthandi. I will see you then."
Michael hung up.
"You shall not suffer a witch to live," said Clovenhoof.
"What?" said Michael.
"You. Consorting with fortune-tellers."
"I have no idea what you’re on about."
"Mistress Verthandi. Does tarot readings out of a shop off Birmingham Road."
Michael scowled at Clovenhoof.
"What are you wearing?" he said.
"My best scouting gear," said Clovenhoof, striking a pose. "Khaki shorts and a bright orange cagoule. I’d be wearing hiking boots and woolly socks if, you know, if I had any actual feet."
"So, you don’t want me and Ben to come help tame the little scamps?"
"I didn’t say that," said Michael quickly.
Clovenhoof imagined that he would have the cubs under his sway within moments but realised the error in his assumption the instant they entered the church hall. Clovenhoof was good with adults. Adults stayed still. They listened to reason. They were predictable. They were easy to mess with and manipulate.
What he saw as he walked in was a mass of tiny green-clad people, running pell-mell around the room with such furious abandoned that they were innumerable and infinite. At the centre of the screaming maelstrom was a fat man in a cub leader shirt that did not fit him.
"I know him," said Clovenhoof.
"Pitspawn," said Ben. "He used to be into war gaming. And Satanism. Before he found God."
"Pitspawn found God?" said Clovenhoof.
"Apparently, he had a traumatic encounter with the divine."
Clovenhoof stared intently at his hooves, said nothing and hoped Pitspawn didn’t recognise him.
"His name’s Darren," said Michael. "Although at cubs we call him Baloo."
"Why?"
"Because cub leaders all take a name from Kipling’s Jungle Book."
Something small and grubby kicked Clovenhoof in the shin.
"Hello, Spartacus," said Clovenhoof.
The boy narrowed his eyes.
"How do you know my name? Are you a paedo?"
"I was a teaching assistant at your school."
"Oh, yeah. I heard you had to leave because you got the head teacher pregnant."
"That’s not true. And she was like ninety years old."
"I know. You’re a dirty old man."
Michael strode to the heart of the chaos and held out his arms for attention.
"Pack! Pack! Pack!" he yelled.
The whirlwind slowed but did not stop.
"Oi! You horrible maggots!" bellowed Clovenhoof. "Listen to the man!"
That stopped them.
The cubs, who had transformed from an amorphous whoosh of noise into twenty small boys in green tops, neckerchiefs and woggles, stopped and then sat on the floor.
"Thank you," said Michael. "As you can see, boys, tonight we have new helpers. In the form of…"
"Baghera," said Ben with the haste of someone who had clearly been thinking about his Jungle Book name and didn’t want anyone else to steal it.
"Kaa," said Clovenhoof with a grin.
"Baghera and Kaa," said Michael.
"Akela Michael?" said Spartacus Wilson.
"Yes?"
"Have they been CRB checked?"
"What?" said Michael.
"How do we know they’re not perverts?"
"I’ll have you know I’m the very finest of perverts," said Clovenhoof.
Michael put his hand over his eyes. Darren gave Clovenhoof a strange and penetrating look.
Falling back on the tactic of divide and conquer, Michael split the cubs into three groups to do some badge work. Michael’s group worked on their hobbies badge, which mostly seemed to consist of fleecing each other with three card monte. Ben gleefully helped a bunch of boys with their camping badge and rapidly taught them a series of useful rudimentary knots. Clovenhoof teamed up with Darren to help the boys working on their emergency first aid badge.
"Yes," said Michael to PJ, "but I don’t think Rock, Paper, Scissors counts as a hobby."
Michael had made the mistake upon first meeting PJ of asking him what PJ stood for. The little lad had scratched his impetigo and said, ‘Pyjamas,’ as if Michael was mentally deficient.
"But I’m dead good at it," said PJ.
"Fine," sighed Michael and shook fists against the scabby boy.
PJ’s rock beat Michael’s scissors. They shook again and PJ’s rock was bested by Michael’s paper. PJ’s scissors was beaten by Michael’s rock and then both produced paper. And from that moment on, Michael beat PJ eight times in a row.
"Not fair, Akela," said PJ.
"I didn’t cheat," said Michael. "I could see how you played."
"What?"
"Your strategy."
"I was just being random."
"No." Michael was lost in thought for a moment. "Nothing is random. Hey, Kenzie. Come over here."
"Now, you want a slipknot for your basic snare-style animal trap," said Ben, checking each of the boys’ knots. "Of course, if you were forced to fend for yourself in the wilderness, you would need to fashion yourself a weapon. Blades can be made from sharp stones, especially flint. But if you need weapons for hunting, you could fashion spears out of straight branches."
A couple of the boys, taken by the notion, looked around the hall for any suitable materials.
"I suppose at your height, you’d need a spear thrower. I could show you how to make an atlatl which Palaeolithic man used to hunt Irish Elk."
"You do chat a load of guff," said Spartacus, who had until that moment been busy selling bags of sweets in exchange for other cubs’ badges.
"If you’re not interested in this," began Ben, "you can-"
"Do you live at home with your mom?"
"What?"
"I bet you do. Your mom’s a great fat heffalump."
A couple of the cubs giggled.
"You don’t know my mom," said Ben who felt control of his little group sliding out from under him.
"Yeah, your mom’s so fat even light can’t escape her."
The laughter grew in strength and confidence.
Ben panicked and he felt something he not felt in decades, the fear and embarrassment and impotent rage of being picked on by the biggest kid in the playground. He had almost forgotten what it felt like. He had pushed it down to the darkest depths of his mind but now it came bubbling back to the surface: the fear and the embarrassment but, more than that, the rage.
"Yeah?" he said in a quite but furious tone. "And your dad’s so tiny he has to wear a life jacket in the bath."
"Hey!" snapped Spartacus.
"Your dad’s so tiny he gets bullied by Borrowers."
"That’s not funny," said Spartacus but the other cubs disagreed. Several of them were sniggering.
"Your dad’s so tiny he was mistaken for the Higgs Boson."
"You’re not allowed to talk like that to me."
"You’re dad’s so tiny, he gets hand-me-downs from Barbie."
All the other cubs were laughing now.
"That’s not fair," whined Spartacus.
"Do you want me to stop?" said Ben.
"Yes."
"Yes what?"
"Yes, please?"
Ben smiled.
"Good. Now, who wants to know how to dig a bear trap?"
Hands shot up and Spartacus’s sticky mitt, whilst not the fastest, was among them.
Darren walked from Clovenhoof (who was playing the role of the injured party in their first aid scenario) to Clovenhoof’s phone (which was playing the role of a phone on a plastic chair) and pretended to dial.
"Nine nine nine," said Darren loudly. "I would like an ambulance please. My dad has cut himself. We live at thirty-two Windermere Crescent. Thank you."
Darren put the phone down.
"Like that."
"Well, that’s not very true to life," said Clovenhoof.
"Isn’t it?"
"For a start I’m clearly too young and good looking to be your dad."
"We’re just roleplaying here," said Darren.
"But it’s meant to be realistic. I spend a lot of time around injury and death."
"Do you?" said a cub called Jefri.
"I work in an undertakers," said Clovenhoof, "and I’ve seen the results of more accidents and mishaps that you could shake a stick at."
"Could you bring a body in for us to see?" asked Jefri.
Clovenhoof was immediately tempted but decided he liked his job too much to risk it.
"I don’t think so."
"Could you take us to see on
e?"
"Maybe. Now, who can tell me what was unrealistic about that situation?"
"That phone," said Jefri.
"That’s a real phone."
"It’s a breeze block."
"What’s unrealistic," said Clovenhoof, who was starting to take jibes about his phone personally, "is the lack of blood. I’ve just cut my arm whilst chopping potatoes. I’m likely to have hit an artery. Now, what we need is…"
He cast around and saw exactly what was needed.
"That one," said Michael, tapping a card.
Kenzie flipped it over. It was, once again, the queen of hearts.
Michael took Kenzie’s money yet again, mentally adding it to the total that would need to be reimbursed to Kenzie’s earlier victims.
"How do you do it, Akela Michael?" asked Kenzie.
"It’s patterns," said Michael. "There’s an order to things. You think you are shuffling the cards randomly but you’re human and you are drawn into behaving in certain ways. I’m sure I could come up with an algorithm to explain it."
Michael was excited by his discovery that ordinary human behaviour was apparently quite predictable. He was sure there was a link between human behaviour, the world at large and those signs of God he had been reading about on the internet.
He would have so many questions for Mistress Verthandi.
"Make sure you arrange the spikes evenly around the base of the pit if you want to properly impale the animal," said Ben from across the hall.
Michael looked up.
"Er, Baghera?"
He would have gone over to check that Ben was sticking to the proper activity but was diverted by Clovenhoof’s first aid group.
"So, here I am, casually chopping vegetables," said Clovenhoof, "and, distracted by a passing zebra…"
Clovenhoof slipped with his imaginary knife, punctured the straw hole of a box of blackcurrant squash and fell to the floor screaming and writhing while purple juice squirted everywhere.
"Quick!" he screeched. "Call an ambulance!"
The first aid cubs, at once on their feet, dashed for where the phone had been.
"Where is it?" yelled Jefri.
"A phone is never where it’s meant to be," said Clovenhoof, continuing to direct a spray of blackcurrant up into the air. "Where did you have it last? Is it down the back of the sofa?"