by Adrian Plass
“Course I did. Of course I went. I’ve never forgotten it. Lovely warm, moonlit night, it was. We met up by the kitchen door round the back of the house with our towels and crept along behind the hedge that ran down the hill toward the bottom gate. When we got down behind the trees she didn’t waste any words, just dropped her towel on the ground, stripped off, quick as a blink because she’d left all her undies off, and dived in. So I did the same. When we came out she dried herself on her towel and then just laid on her back on the grass staring up at the sky, with not a stitch on, all lit up by the moon. What a body! Soft and silvery.”
Mike took a deep breath, lost in reverie for a moment.
“Then she asked me if I wanted to do it with her.”
A great stillness had settled on the rest of us. I cleared my throat.
“And did you?”
“Did I want to, you mean?”
“No, you twit! Did you do it?”
A suggestive leer crept on to Mike’s face. He opened his mouth to speak.
“We girls do talk, you know, Mike,” interposed Angela casually, as she popped a chocolate into her mouth. “As a matter of fact, as you were speaking I suddenly remembered Amanda telling me about this, although at the time she refused to say who it was, even when I hit her with a pillow. She just said it was one of the boys.”
Mike pursed his lips, then chewed on a fingernail as he peered intently at Angela, brows furrowed. He was trying to see right inside her head.
“No,” he said gruffly at last, “wanted to, but — I couldn’t.” He glanced at Angela again and sighed. “When I thought of all the times I’d sat in a café with some girl, dreaming about what I’d like to do to her, and then made a complete fool of myself by having to make idiotic, stupid excuses for not standing up when it was time to go — it’s all right for you women. And then when it actually came to it, I dunno. I was a flop. Literally. I think she was a bit too — ”
“Too much in charge?” suggested Angela, with just the faintest trace of bitterness in her voice. “The pencil-sharpener more impressive than the pencil?”
“Something like that, I suppose.” He shifted in his seat, wrestling with the memory. “You know, I couldn’t believe she was just lying there, starkers, waiting for me to do what I’d been thinking about doing all day, or for two or three years, depending how you look at it. I’ll tell you what I reckon it was. I don’t think I’d twigged that women’s bodies were so — well, so real, all made of flesh and skin and hair and stuff. Blimey! What am I going on about? Actually — maybe it was the moonlight. Made it all a bit too much like a fairytale. Sex and fairytales don’t really go together, do they?”
“No,” said Angela.
“And how did Amanda react to your, er — your lack of interest?” asked Jenny.
Mike turned to her, raised his eyebrows, and shrugged. “Didn’t seem that bothered either way, to be honest. Certainly didn’t make a fuss about it anyway. She had another swim, then we got dressed and went back up to the house. She must have gone back to her room — fell fast asleep I expect, and I went back to mine and spent what you might call a restless night, to put it mildly, wishing I could have another go and hoping she wasn’t going to tell anyone.” He looked quizzically at Angela. “I’m quite surprised she talked about it really. Are you sure she didn’t say who it was?”
“She didn’t say anything at all about it,” confessed Angela serenely. “I made that up to ensure we got the strictly historical version, rather than the one you’ve been regaling your mates with for goodness knows how long. I hadn’t the faintest idea whether you’d actually ‘done it’ or not.”
Mike stared at her blankly as his brain computed this piece of information. At last a wry smile appeared on his face. Once again grudging admiration had succeeded in chasing away the potential affront.
“Well, you’re right,” he said, “I suppose I have sort of told it the way I wished it’d been.” Something seemed to strike him forcibly. “In fact, it had gotten so I really did remember her and me having sex three times in the moonlight. But — we didn’t, did we?” He slumped back in his seat, saucer-eyed, like a puzzled small child. “You know, I can’t believe that’s not true. It wasn’t my first time after all, was it? I made it up.”
“Yes, but what amazes me” — Peter was on the point of bursting — “is that two members of a church youth group should even contemplate going off at night to have — well, to do that sort of thing. We weren’t supposed to be even thinking about sex.”
“Well, at least Amanda and I were following our instincts a bit and having an adventure,” declared Mike, apparently revived by Peter’s outburst, “while you lot were telling yourselves sex didn’t exist and pretending to be spiritual. At least we were honest.”
“Oh, really, that is so silly!” Jenny bent forward and banged her empty mug down on the table exasperatedly. Her accent seemed to grow stronger and stronger as she continued to speak. “I’m sorry, but this is exactly the sort of thing that makes it so difficult for young Christians, or ancient Christians or Christians of any age for that matter, to get the whole business of sex into perspective. Let’s face it, we all — nearly all of us, anyway — want to have sex.” She challenged us with her eyes. It appeared that none of us were willing to take up the challenge. “We want to have sex with the right people and the wrong people, in appropriate situations and in inappropriate ones. When I was on that church weekend I’m quite sure my head was full of sex. I thought about it and dreamed about it and sometimes pictured having the most lurid experiences you can imagine with the sort of people Malcolm and Ethel and my mother would definitely not have wanted me to go around with. I’m pretty sure some of my fantasies would have made Mike’s fairytale moonlight encounter beside the bloody pond look as pure as the driven snow.”
She drew breath for a moment.
“No, Peter, I didn’t go on that weekend to think about sex, any more or less than I went on that weekend to not think about sex. I went there to be who I am and, hopefully, to let that person meet God and find out what he wanted to say to me. I wasn’t interested in what he wanted to say to some weird, cleaned-up version of me, but to the incomplete, complex, sinful person that I actually was — still am.”
Seeing Jenny’s head turn in his direction, and sensing that her guns were about to be turned on him, Mike flamboyantly pressed himself even farther back into his corner of the sofa.
“As for you, Michael Ford, you know how much I hated what Andrew did last night, but you’ve just done precisely what he accused you of, and you can’t be allowed to get away with it. I can assure you that at no stage did I tell myself sex didn’t exist, nor did I, except for the silly quiet-time, reading your Bible thing, knowingly pretend to be spiritual. In the highly unlikely event that some boy had invited me to go bathing in the nude at midnight with the option of making mad passionate love afterward, I would probably have wanted to go very much — depending on who’d invited me, I hasten to add. But I’m pretty sure that, in the end, I wouldn’t have gone. Partly because of fear and lack of confidence, I don’t mind admitting that, but mainly because it really, really did matter to me that, as far as I’d worked it out, and I have to tell you I don’t give twopence for how other people work it out, God wanted me to stay a virgin until I got married. I’m still a virgin for that same reason. I do my very best not to indulge them, but I still have all sorts of fantasies about screwing with all sorts of people, and I shall continue to follow Jesus in this state until either he finds a man for me to marry, or I die, in which case it won’t be an issue any more. What he wants is more important to me than anything else.
“Is all that honest enough for you? Believe it or not, Mike, there’s more than one kind of adventure in this world, and I am not celibate by some sort of stupid, wimpish default. Have I made myself clear?”
Mike grimaced, nodding rapidly and defensively, temporarily cowed by this shrapnel burst of words. With her cheeks flaming and her eyes flashing, Jenny lo
oked as vibrant and alive now as she had done up on the hills this morning. I wondered if anyone would ever get round to researching the correlation between spirituality and sex appeal. Not a question to be raised just at the moment. What a woman she was revealing herself to be. And what a Christian. Her words had stirred something in me for the first time in months. It had been like listening to the sound of a trumpet. I was almost beginning to feel excited about the idea of getting back on a platform again — almost.
“So — do you mean to say that lust is all right, then?” asked Graham, who had listened to every word of Mike’s account and Jenny’s impassioned speech with total absorption.
“I think what Jenny’s saying is that regardless of whether it’s all right or not, it happens. But the thing is, Graham,” Angela screwed her eyes tight shut and clicked her tongue with frustration, “asking if it’s ‘all right’ doesn’t really get us where we want to be, does it? It makes us sound like twerpy kids in an infant class checking nervously with each other about what might make teacher cross. We might not know much, but I think we have to deal with what we do know in as grown-up a way as possible.”
Levering herself out of her chair and dropping to her knees beside the fire, Angela took a couple of birch logs from the wicker basket that stood against the wall. Averting her face to avoid the intense heat, she leaned forward and half-dropped, half-threw them carefully into the very center of the blaze before sitting back on her heels. What a waste of valuable silver, I thought.
“Jesus said that just lusting after someone in your heart means you’ve already committed adultery, so there you are. It’s not ‘all right.’ But nor is talking nonsense about the difficulties that arise — or in Mike and Amanda’s case didn’t— when you try to honestly take that on board. Covering it up is like putting those silly woolly whatsits over your spare toilet rolls. Mind you,” her hands dropped helplessly to her sides in a little moment of desolation, “Jesus also made it perfectly clear that we mustn’t condemn people who are guilty of adultery, so I guess I’ve been failing pretty badly on both counts lately. There’s murder in my heart, folks. I can’t stop hating. Haven’t given up yet though.”
She looked so sad kneeling there. At once Jenny left her seat without a word, knelt down in front of Angela, and gathered her into an embrace.
Jessica and I had often expressed our disquiet about certain exponents and advocates of the modern hugging culture, especially in the so-called family of the church. I, especially, found it extremely difficult to offer or receive “hugs without history,” as we privately called them. But what Jenny had done was just about as right as it could be. I had always thought that women tended to be better at this sort of thing than men. They didn’t seem to feel the need to indulge in the mutual back-patting that most of us manly blokes used to cover our embarrassment. Jessica said that when men hugged they looked as if they were trying to bring up each other’s wind.
Hug over, Angela dried her eyes on a tissue pulled from the sleeve of her jumper. After a grateful little smile to Jenny, who was dabbing at her own eyes as she settled back into her chair, she turned to Mike. Damage limitation, I guessed. I was right. Good old Angela.
“I was just thinking, Mike,” she said, with a sort of rainbow brightness, “I bet you made up for this moonlight disaster of yours later on. Am I right?”
“Not half,” agreed Mike in somewhat thin buccaneering style, and then, with a strange depth of sadness, “none of ’em as good as the first time, though, when I didn’t actually do it — three times.”
You know who we really need here, don’t you?” said Angela a few minutes later when mugs had been refilled and spirits restored a little. “I should have asked Malcolm and Ethel to come down. They’d have put us back on the straight and narrow. None of this flying off at tangents if they’d been here. I wonder what they would have made of Mike’s little escapade. Come on, we’re allowed a one-word guess each. Fire at will.”
“Deeply shocked?” suggested Peter in a slightly troubled voice.
“That’s two words,” said Jenny. “Amazed, I would say.”
“I suspect that their flabbers would have been completely gasted,” said Mike lazily.
I said, “That’s lots of words, but I suppose it’s based on one word so we’ll let you off.” I thought for a moment. “They would have been discombobulated.”
Getting up and moving round to the space behind the sofa as we spoke, Angela had taken a heavy volume down from one of the shelves that lined the wall at the end of the room. Resuming her seat, she flicked through the pages for a second or two before finding what she was looking for.
“Here we are. I think they would have been ‘agitated, appalled, astounded, confounded, disgusted, dismayed, disquieted, horrified, jarred, jolted, nauseated, numbed, offended, outraged, paralyzed, revolted, scandalized, shaken, sickened, staggered, startled, stunned, stupefied, traumatized, unnerved, and unsettled.’ ”
She slapped the book shut triumphantly.
“A bit hurt?” said Graham quietly.
A faintly shame-scented silence.
“Anyway,” Angela laid the thesaurus gently down on the floor beside her chair, “in their honor, let’s get ourselves a bit more organized. What do we fear most? That’s the question we said we’d answer.”
“Miss! Miss! Done mine, Miss!” cried Mike, leaning forward and waving his arm stiffly in the air like a keen infant.
“Mm. Andrew’s done his as well. Five left. I gather Peter’s asked if he can do his at communion in the morning. I don’t know if we’ll get through the other four of us now, but there’s always tomorrow. We’ll see how we get on. Agreed?”
Agreed.
“Okay, who wants to start?”
No one immediately. Given a few seconds more of everyone studying the floor and the ceiling to avoid catching anybody else’s eye, I think I might have volunteered, but in the end it was Jenny who spoke first.
“I don’t mind beginning,” she said evenly.
Relaxation and deep gratitude all round, naturally.
“Go ahead, Jenny,” I said, “the floor is yours. What do you fear most?”
Angela threw me an odd glance and a nod after I had said these words. I was in the middle of wondering how much more of this weekend was likely to involve investigations into why women chose to look at me in strange ways, when realization hit me. She was reacting positively to the fact that, for once, I had taken charge.
Jenny smiled round at us all before starting.
“Right. First of all, nothing to do with fears, but earlier on some of you may have noticed my feeble attempt to communicate the fact that I used to be head over heels in love with David when we were in the youth group together, and — ”
“Good Lord, so was I!”
Mike’s limp-wristed gesture and caricatured effeminate voice made me think of Peter’s first “hard thing.” What a nightmare.
“And— yes, thank you, Michael — I told him all about it while we were walking on the hills this morning. I confessed I’d been interested to see if those old feelings had completely disappeared — they had, by the way — but I promise you all, I certainly had no intention of mentioning it, because of . . . because of Jessica. I . . . well, I sort of got myself into a position where I had to talk about it, didn’t I, David?”
A twinge in my most recent guilt wound.
“My fault, Jenny. I chickened out and turned it all on you. Sorry.”
“Oh, no, that’s fine, honestly. No, I just wanted to come clean, you know.”
She cleared her throat a little nervously.
“The thing I’m most afraid of is loneliness.”
Me too. Me too. I had a sudden image of walking through my own front door tomorrow and felt sick.
“Very simple. If I think about it too much I get quite frightened by the idea of ending up on my own. Despite what I said when I was telling Mike off earlier, it’s not just the physical relationship. It would be nice if th
at was part of it. What I’d like is someone who’s specially mine.” She lifted an eyebrow in my direction. “Someone to share the washing-up.”
She conducted the silence that followed with her hands.
“I’m afraid that’s it, folks. When you get home, if you say prayers, say one for me. Pray that I won’t always be alone, but pray even harder that I’ll go on following Jesus faithfully if he tells me that he’s going to be the only man in my life. Thank you all very much. And — I’ve so enjoyed being here. I really have. Thank you, Angela. You’re such a special person.”
Nobody said anything for a while, then Angela spoke.
“Thanks, Jenny. I think we’ve got a few experts on loneliness sitting round this fire tonight. I’m one. We’ll pray about that in the service tomorrow morning, shall we?”
Nods and murmurs of agreement.
“Good. Who’s next?”
“Er, does anyone mind if I go next?”
Graham glanced from face to face, a bit-part actor nervously taking the lead for once.
“Go ahead,” said Angela.
“Okay.” Graham pressed his lips together and swallowed hard several times. Anchoring himself to his chair with both hands, he said, “I’m . . . I’m afraid of nothing!”
I didn’t altogether blame Mike for his little snort of laughter on hearing this. Given the swallowing, hand-anchoring build-up to Graham’s statement, the consistently timid nature of the man, and the hushed, dramatic style of his revelation, I would have been surprised if he had reacted in any other way. The problem for Graham with this response was obvious. It must have been like finally steeling yourself to take a cherished antique or precious stone or heirloom to be valued, and being peremptorily told that it was worth nothing. Jenny smacked Mike’s knee. Mike said, “Ow!” and rubbed his leg, pretending it had hurt.
“Don’t worry, Graham,” said Jenny, “he thought you meant you’re not scared of anything. You didn’t mean that, did you?”
Distress was instantly chased away by relief on Graham’s features.