A Dark Nativity

by George Pitcher

  But it’s bigger and better than that, I said. It’s what our fantasy and faith hang on – and what separates one from the other. And that’s the Spirit. That’s what I thought, anyway. If this story is true, in any real sense of that word, then it’s the hugest thing that has ever happened and can ever happen. If it isn’t in any way true, then it’s the most unimaginably vast con-trick perpetrated on us in human history. Either way, that’s a great story. For the time being, by which I mean this mortal life, I opted for the former. It just made more sense.

  “Will you cense the altar?” asked the churchwarden, who would have been called cadaverous by anyone who hadn’t worked in Sudan.

  “If you’d like me to,” I said. Hugh had told me that they’d want “the smelly handbag”, the thurible in which we swing the burning incense.

  My private vestry prayer at St Mary’s was a kind of alternative sermon. If there’s a God – and please God there is – this church isn’t about him, this vacuous act of self-reverence, aerated only by the bubbles of human endeavour: music, scripture and thought. Here it was Elizabeth Street, in what’s known by the lisping churchwarden as “the cheaper end of Belgravia”, but this emptiness pervaded the whole Church of England.

  I had been put in a light cope, suitable for the slight shoulders of a lady, to process in behind the choir, whose tenors were now making a manful stab at a canticle. There was one tall and pale one, loose folds of skin marking his weak jawline, whose head rocked from side to side as he concentrated on marking time with his scriptural words. A lawyer, I thought, or a chartered surveyor. A Pharisee.

  Dear God, I remember thinking, I’m the least in touch with the divine here, I feel no godly nexus as they apparently so effortlessly do. The way out of this thought pattern at critical times like these, I had learned from better-read colleagues, was to wager with Pascal that there was no God, but that this ritual at least made life bearable for those present, even joyful if you hit the right notes in the choir. Sitting in the sanctuary is difficult, watching His loyal servants at a distance, gathered together in the whimsy of the vain and ancient language of prayer and music, filling the void that He has evidently vacated.

  The cherished Anglo-Catholic former incumbent of St Mary the Virgin, Father Tristram, had retired and the abandoned but lavishly pensioned congregants were searching for a replacement, some witless cleric to serve out half a dozen years inadequately in the shadow of his illustrious predecessor.

  “There’s a woman dressed as a priest in our chancel,” I imagined Father Tristram saying.

  From the embarrassed smiles of some of the regulars, women as well as men, heads snapping forward to stare non-committally into the middle distance as they felt me process past them, I guessed that their default position was rather more Catholic than Anglican. We must make her welcome in our household of faith. But what to say? We’ll ask her if she knew Father Tristram and tell her how lovely he was.

  The women were the gilded trophies of flushed, pretend-busy men, who would escape to offices where they encountered other women only in servile roles, or else in the safe, faux-male stridencies of peer-group female colleagues who, they presumed, had sacrificed their womanhood on the altar of Mammon – who was a man, obviously.

  To all of them here, men and women alike, sacramental ministry, if they knew the term at all, was a post of implicit and cunning authority. A priest had magic hands and a cool and assured manner for the “manual actions” – they really call them that – over the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine and it was the kind of cupped-hand movement that went with oratory, not cooking. Here they were, on this Sunday morning, to celebrate their sameness, not the infinite variety of creation, not the other, scandalous foolishness of a faith that dared to suggest that a leper, a paraplegic, the terminal baby, the shoplifter, the rioter, the migrant, the loser, the candlestick-maker of the centrepiece of their dinner table, or, indeed, even a woman, could bear the same image of God as they bore.

  I sat in my sanctuary stall like a latter-day Pope Joan, failing to display the correct genitalia for cardinal inspection. There’s an apocryphal story that new popes have to sit on a loo-seat contraption to show that they have the right tackle, viewed from below. But this lot looked like I was flashing them.

  I would distribute the communion wafers in a little while, but I knew I would look up afterwards to see those women and men who had sat fast in their pew, not through any sense of unworthiness on their part, but on mine, for my gender would have contaminated the Body of Christ with a chromosomal impurity that they couldn’t ingest into their own.

  Well, stuff them, I thought from my privileged place in the holy of holies, beside the patten and the chalice and the veil and the purificators. If they don’t share the same bread as me, they’re not part of the same body as me. I despise their isolation. They’re neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm, and I spew them out. I knew I had to get away.

  I’d heard a woman priest like me, one of my sisters I suppose, speak at the General Synod, wringing her claws as she entreated us to reach out to those in pain who cannot accept our priesthood. Way to go, girl, that’s really gospel. But when they refuse to reach out, intuitively, not to me, but for what I’m holding, the taking and the offering, the tearing and sharing, then all they’re doing is standing silently by, like soldiers I saw in Africa, who stood smoking while children slipped away in strangers’ arms. Or like those who stood silently beside others whose bloodlust had overcome them in the praetorium and shouted “crucify him”.

  Lambeth Palace, where the Archbishop of Canterbury lives and works when he’s in London, occupies its own time and place, its own bureaucratic Narnia. It looks accessible and easy to reach, just over the Thames from the Houses of Parliament. And it’s like you have to walk away from it to find a bridge, Lambeth or Westminster, to walk back towards it. There are no train stations near it and even the buses seem to avoid it.

  I approached from Westminster, across the bridge by Big Ben, turning right down the steps and along the river walk under the Victorian gables of St Thomas’ Hospital, crossing the lethal junction by the boat cafe on the south side of Lambeth Bridge.

  You bang a heavy knocker on the little door beside the huge one in the red-stone medieval gatehouse and the keeper lets you in. Then it’s across the circular driveway, past gardeners tending lawns, towards the Palace front door. It’s like an Oxford college has been dropped into central London in some children’s sci-fi thriller, a parallel universe, a rip in the fabric of the metropolis.

  “Why are you going?” Adrian asked that morning, as I put toast on the table.

  “I told you. The lawyers want to wrap up Sudan.”

  “But why Lambeth?”

  “I suppose it’s where the lawyers want to be. The client is the Church. Headman’s office. Maybe the coffee’s better. Do you want an egg?”

  I avoided the usual destination of this dialogue. Over all the years that we’d talked about it, I knew Adrian had never had a satisfactory answer from me. Why would I steal a lorry on my own? How could I have driven and navigated it a thousand kilometres through the Sudanese bush without help?

  “Let me say that I came with you. Let me say it was my idea.” It was his constant refrain ever since I’d told the UN’s Stasi that I’d acted alone.

  Several times Adrian had asked me why we couldn’t say that he’d had taken the lorry, why it couldn’t have been him that had acted alone.

  “If one of us has to take the rap, why not me?” he’d say. “You could still get busted for this.”

  “So?”

  “Jesus Christ, Nat, we live in this big house – you want to be here. They might want to make you a bishop one day.” He’d look desperate, like I was deliberately misunderstanding him. “I was the nutcase, the guerrilla who wanted to feed the world. Everyone said that at the office, remember?”

  “You’re in the public sector. If they came after you, they could come after the government.” It was my stan
dard reply. “And they’d just throw you to the wolves. Leave it with me. I’m to blame. Leave it as a Church issue. It looks after its own. Plenty of evidence of that.”

  Adrian would throw down cutlery or slam a door. “You just want all this to be about you. Your bloody drama. Your bloody heroics.”

  “Is that what this about? Look there’s no point in us both going down, which is what happens if you fess up now. Let the Church handle it. They sent me, they can sort it. Anyway it’s done now.”

  Maybe it was finally done now. I was beginning to believe Dean and the Bishop. Truly, it was a legal action that was dying of boredom. After the early media interest, the Australians wanted me hung out to dry. Vehicle and property theft (the latter a class action on behalf of several aid charities), criminal damage, endangering the lives of others, contractual fraud.

  And maybe Adrian was right. Maybe I liked all this attention. The martyrdom. I’d acted alone, without Adrian, and I liked that story. It’s the one my doorstepper Tony had run in a Sunday paper and I’d liked it: “the fallen angel of mercy” he’d called me.

  Perhaps they were both right, Tony the reporter and Adrian the husband. I’d flown too close to the Sudanese sun and was burned. I’d been summoned to the boss’s big house, the one behind impervious walls, bombed in the war, rebuilt and resilient, to be sacked. Well, I knew I wasn’t going to be sacked, but Adrian still thought I might be and I liked him thinking that too. It had been a real possibility at one time. I can’t say I’d ever cared much, other than Adrian had told me I would be fired and he’d have been proved right. I’d always known I’d find somewhere to live though, maybe abroad. He’d have to come with me.

  When you enter the front doors of Lambeth Palace, there’s a flight of red-carpeted stairs directly in front of you, less of a stairway to heaven than a celebrity airstair. At the top, turn left for first class, the holy bits, drawing rooms and chapels. Right for the rough trade, admin and staff. I was turned right.

  A large library at the end on the left. A huge bay window, overlooking gardens and Parliament’s terraces beyond. A conference table the size of a Thames pontoon. This had been the archbishop’s study until a predecessor had decided it was too grand and should be more widely used. It amused me momentarily that an archbishop should think that he was wasting space.

  There were already two of the lawyers I’d met several times before, a woman and a man, in their forties but looking prematurely old. The Palace’s chief of staff slid into the room through a door concealed in the bookcases that covered one wall. And a nice young man from Church House, our civil service function from the north side of the river.

  And there was another woman already in the room. In the shadow, by a cabinet on the right of the window. She had a slim ring-binder open in front of her and she looked up when we came in, but didn’t move until the chief of staff came in, then she walked down the room and handed him the file. She was short, with a grey untended bob, and she wore a floral blouse, open at the neck revealing a modest string of pearls.

  “Thank you, Cara,” said the chief and Lambeth’s Moneypenny smiled briefly at everyone except me and trotted out. I bet they think I don’t remember those details, but I do.

  We settled to it at the window end of the table. The gist of it was that the Australians would settle for aggravated damages, including the replacement of the damaged truck, amounting to some $400,000.

  The male lawyer did most of the talking. “As we know, the good news is that we avoid a UN tribunal, both expensive and wearisome. We can probably get them down on damages.”

  “Insurance will pay,” said the chief of staff, turning to me reassuringly.

  “The plaintiff has, as you know, always wanted to come after the Church Commissioners, who were technically your employers at the time of the incident, rather than The Fed,” continued the lawyer. “That’s partly because we have more money – cleaning out a small charity is neither lucrative nor edifying. But it’s partly because they’re also demanding that in settlement a CDM is taken against you, Natalie, as principal party.”

  Not quite the absolution that the Bishop had promised. A Clergy Disciplinary Measure in a consistory court, almost certainly meaning the suspension of my clerical licence, so no job with the Church any more. It wasn’t what I had been expecting. Naturally, a CDM had been mentioned in the past, but only in the context of it being unnecessary because the Church was essentially my codefendant.

  “Why, if they’ve got their money?” It was the chief of staff again.

  “They’re accepting that Natalie acted alone. I suspect it’s their principal witness, James Adaire, whom I think you know, Natalie?”

  “Jimmy. Yes, I know Jimmy,” I said. “Blimey, he still wants his revenge after all this time. I thought the drift of it was that they’d climbed down. I thought my crucifixion was off the agenda.”

  “There’s still another way,” said the lawyer, shifting on his seat like he was coming to the whole point. I looked hard at him. “Now they’re talking of settling, we don’t need to go to court. But if we were to refer Natalie for a psychiatrist’s assessment, it could be treated as a pastoral rather than a disciplinary matter.”

  It took a moment for the horror of that to sink in.

  “No,” I said. And left it there.

  “Listen, Natalie, this needn’t be arduous or intrusive,” said the chief of staff. He’d clearly been prepared by the lawyers. “But you were in a very post-traumatic circumstance. The Bishop said as much. If you needed some treatment, some counselling, that’s not just good for the case, it’s good for you.”

  “No,” I repeated. “I’m not mad. You can’t make me see a doctor this side of a criminal trial. Anyway, it sends the wrong message after everything that’s been in the papers. It’s not mad to want to feed people.”

  They variously looked at their files.

  “I can’t see that we could get the damages down or avoid a CDM if you’re sure you’re refusing that path,” said the lawyer.

  “I am sure. I’m not mad, whatever a shrink might find, and I’m sure they can find something, anything, in anyone. Is that what you want?” I’d turned to the chief of staff and he looked kindly at me. “Anyway, I can’t see that it works. Either they find I’m mad and you have to defrock me, or I’m not mad and we’re at square one.”

  I could tell it was a good point, but not one they wanted to hear. In practice, it’s very hard to remove a priest’s holy orders, but if I was sick in the head, I could be on long-term suspension being looked after. Some of them would like that, I knew.

  The meeting broke up shortly after that.

  “Take care, Nat,” said the chief at the top of the stairs.

  “I’m sorry this has taken so very long. I’ve been a lot of trouble,” I replied, looking away down the corridor.

  “The Archbishop sends his love,” he said and retreated into the dark.

  That evening, Adrian leaned against a kitchen unit, eating cereal. “What did they say?” he asked.

  “They said it’s over if I pretend to be mad.”

  Adrian snorted. “Really? And are you?”

  “No. I said I wouldn’t see a trick cyclist.”

  “So what now?”

  “I suppose I may have kept the case open,” I said sadly into a cupboard. “I wasn’t prepared to pay the price.”

  I knew what I’d done was going to cost the Church a whole lot more money. And then there was the disciplinary action against me. That could cost me my ministry, whatever the newspapers and the Bishop said.

  “So it’s not over,” said Adrian.

  “It is finished,” I said emphatically. “They didn’t want to know if you were there or not.”

  6

  So, Sudan. Time to tell the truth. One time – the time I’m going to tell you about – I stole a lorry loaded with maize and beans and drove it into the bush. Well, we did. Over the half-dozen trips I made there, I watched skeletons that were alive, in a wa
y, though not fully human. I held children with absurdly huge heads as they died. You know the sort of thing. It’s not that you’re providing any sort of comfort – there’s no time for that. It’s just that they’re easier to dispose of if you’re holding them as soon as they’re dead. And it’s more hygienic than leaving them on the ground. Their families, if they’re not too weak themselves, will very often try to hold on to the bodies for mourning, or seek to bury them in their own shallow graves, where animals might dig them up.

  Sometimes we kept them alive and I guess that’s what people call job satisfaction, isn’t it? But you need to understand that a famine is as irresistible as a tsunami. You can’t stand in its way and hope to live. You’re always dealing with the aftermath. The killing is inevitable. It just is, whatever your charity adverts might say. We’d keep them alive to die next time. The only way to stop famine is to open the money valve from north to south, stop food trading and kick out crap African governments. But that’s not going to happen, is it?

  There’s a Dinka lament, sung by the men as they drive stakes into the arid soil to secure torpid oxen, which repeats again and again that the gods of a new harvest will come to them in the husks of the dry crop seed that they are forced to eat. It’s a wail that hangs in the air of Bahr el Ghazal in the evenings as if the world has been stilled to listen. If only. The cycle of fighting and oppression over so many decades in southern Sudan had made starvation a commonplace. What conjures a sort of phosphorescent burning in the well-fed bellies of aid workers, those of us with our seven barns filled to the rafters with grain, those of us who are the self-satisfied refuseniks from late capitalism, is that we can’t slow the Monopoly board games, the market’s measure of success by excess. We’re treating the consequence in Sudan of the economic glut way north, in Europe and the US.