by Heide Goody
“I don’t need to be either. I just need a good spiel.”
Nerys looked back and forth to see if there were any passengers nearby.
“Listen. You’re the devil. Can’t you just magic up some cash?”
“What?” said Clovenhoof.
“Magic some up. Make some appear. Use your Satanic powers. Maybe give an evil laugh and in a puff of sulphur and brimstone make a great big pile of wonga materialise.”
“You assume I want to,” he said.
“You mean you can’t,” she said.
“I have learned that life is about setting oneself little goals and working to achieve them.”
“So, you engineered yourself a massive personal debt and put our home at risk just in order to give you something to do?”
“Exactly,” he beamed. “There.”
He gave the laptop a final flourish of a tap just as the tannoy announced they were coming into New Street Station.
“You know, if you’re the devil, you’re a really crap devil.”
“You trying to hurt my feelings, Nerys.”
“Satan is meant to be like the great adversary, this mighty fallen angel. And you… you’re stupid and petty and selfish and… you know what?”
“What?”
“You’re not actually very evil. You’re about as evil as a toddler on a sugar rush.”
Clovenhoof tucked the laptop under his arm as he stood.
“I like to think I’ve matured since the bad old days.”
“Gone to seed more like.”
He looked at her down his nose. “I can still produce a puff of brimstone and sulphur if you like.”
“No thank you,” said Nerys, promptly standing up.
“Too late,” he said and wafted a flavoursome bottom burp toward her with his free hand.
Nerys dashed to the exit, covering her face and coughing.
When the doors opened at the station, the stink rolled out before them. The noses of homeward bound commuters wrinkled in disgust and Nerys was compelled to declare, “It wasn’t me. It really wasn’t,” but that just compounded her apparent guilt and made her sound crazy.
Clovenhoof was still laughing as they rode up the escalator.
“Shut up,” said Nerys miserably.
“Oh, come on. That was hilarious. I’ve still got it in me.”
She flashed him a furious look. “And I’ll thank you to keep it there!” She repositioned the heavy banner in her arms. “So, what is this thing? And where are we going?”
“Picture, if you will, Birmingham as the board in a gigantic game.”
“I can do that, funnily enough.”
“And somewhere, someone has rolled the dice. Someone is hopscotching across the tiles. And they’re going to land.”
“Uh-huh. Clear as mud so far,” she said.
“All we need to do is find a place to sell and some people in the mood to buy, people with more money and greed than sense.”
“And you can find such people, can you?”
He grinned. “World’s full of them, my dear. The world is full of them.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
There was a flash of brilliant white and blood red.
Joan hoped it wasn’t her blood.
She ducked and rolled. It was something she’d done many times before but it was never a comfortable experience when you were wearing a full suit of armour. The explosive power of whatever Belphegor’s transport had done to her had triggered it as an instinctive response, but she was surprised to find herself tumbling down a small flight of steps carpeted in red.
The red was carpet. Good. Carpet was a good sign.
She stood and absorbed her surroundings. They had apparently emerged behind an altar. A woman who had been kneeling at a pew stood transfixed at Joan’s sudden acrobatic display.
“We’re in a church,” said Joan.
“How long have you been behind there?” said the woman.
Joan considered this. “How willing are you to believe in the sudden manifestation of heavenly saints?”
The woman gave her a sceptical look.
“Um, we were hiding behind here all along,” said Joan. White lies were quite acceptable if they calmed the nervous. “We were…”
“Fornicating,” said Rutspud, clambering to his feet in a wobbly fashion. “We were fornicating.”
The woman gave a little squeak of surprise.
“Where are we?” Joan asked.
“In the house of our Lord!” said the woman, disgusted.
“And more generally…?”
“This is St Philip’s cathedral!”
“Birmingham?”
“Of course!” snapped the woman and taking up her handbag, stomped out, possibly to report the two of them.
Rutspud stretched, his bones audibly clicking.
“Why did you tell her we were fornicating?” said Joan.
“Firstly, because people automatically believe you,” said the demon. “And, secondly, I understand that the Brits find sex so embarrassing, it kills off all future questions.”
“Good to know,” she said but her mind was already pondering the next question. “Why a church?”
“What?”
She put her hands on her hips and looked along the fluted columns and wooden upper galleries. “Why did we appear in a church?”
“Spiritual desire lines,” said Rutspud.
“Pardon?”
“Prayers of the faithful create well-trodden but unofficial routes to the afterlife,” said Rutspud. “Kinda like cow paths except with prayers instead of hoofs.”
“Not sure I like you comparing the faithful to mindless herd animals.”
“Seems pretty apt to me.”
“But what has that got to do with Belphegor’s shunting device?”
Rutspud’s face twitched. “You know what. Absolutely nothing.”
Belphegor’s machine had worked, even if Joan did feel as though she’d been fired from a trebuchet. She followed Rutspud down the nave towards the exit. He held back at the doorway, a stricken look on his face.
“What’s the matter?” she said.
“I can’t do it,” he said.
She looked out the door. The evening sun shone warmly on the grassy area around the cathedral and the tall office buildings, pubs and shop fronts beyond.
“It’s fine,” she said.
“Mmmm, no,” said Rutspud. He was quaking. Joan could see that the usually uber-confident demon was shaking.
“You’re not allergic to sunshine, are you?” she said.
“Demon. Not vampire,” he tutted. “It’s… it’s too big.”
She stepped out and looked up. “What is?”
“Everything! Up there. I can’t see the roof.” He gestured wildly with a skinny arm.
“The sky?” said Joan. “That’s just what it looks like. I thought you’d been to earth before?”
“I did, but I really didn’t go out much. Only at night anyway. It’s not so bad when it’s dark,” said Rutspud, risking a quick peek up at the sky. “Satan’s balls! They should put a lid on it.”
“Heaven has a sky,” she pointed on.
“No, it doesn’t. That’s just the Almighty messing about. My mate, Stephen, once told me how far away the sun actually is and…” He put a hand to his lips. “Makes me sick just thinking about it.”
Joan took his arm. “Come on. You can do this. We need to go out there.”
They took a few tentative steps along a path. It took them towards a road with tall buildings on the other side.
“So many people,” breathed Rutspud. “I’m not used to seeing them all walking around like this. They’re not even screaming.”
“No,” said Joan. “This is people being people. It’s what they do while they’re alive. In fact…” She stopped and looked round. “No one is screaming.”
“That’s what I said.”
“But you’re a demon. Those enormous eyes. The scaly ears.”
<
br /> “Flattering me to distract me from my fears, eh?”
“Why aren’t they horrified? Screaming? Running?”
“Posting pictures on Instagram,” added Rutspud. “Humans are stupid. They can only see what they want to see. Anything else they just blur out.”
“Is that true?” asked Joan.
“Working hypothesis. Now, can we get a move on?” said Rutspud. “Let’s have a look for the bishop guy who’s in charge round here.”
“And where will we find him?” She looked from building to building. “Not sure which of these might be the bishop’s palace. That one looks sort of imposing. ‘House of Fraser’. Is that it?”
Rutspud had squashed himself into a corner between the cathedral wall and one of the many pilasters around the outside. He crouched with his tablet on his knees.
“Come here,” he said. “I need you.”
“Yes?” said Joan.
“Stand there. Try and act like a wall.”
“What?”
“And a ceiling too if you can.”
She turned his back to him which was about as much of a wall and ceiling she was prepared to be and waited for him to finish googling on his computer.
Further along the cathedral wall, a thin crowd had gathered. A cloth banner on two poles said, ‘INVEST IN A PIECE OF HISTORY. OWN THE FUTURE!’ A woman who looked as if she wanted to be somewhere else (a brothel by the looks of her clothing) handed out leaflets to anyone who would take one and, somewhere in the crowd, a man with a megaphone was haranguing his potential customers, even the ones who had already stopped to listen.
“‘But what good’s a church?’ I hear you cry. And I would say, first up, that it’s not a church, it’s a cathedral. Compact, almost pocket-sized but positioned slap-bang in the tastiest piece of real estate in Birmingham. Invest fifty pounds today and you will walk away with your own stamped, signed and watermarked certificate of sponsorship. Invest two hundred and you’ll get a commemorative brick with your name on it. Invest five hundred and you will be included in the consultation group with voting powers at the point of privatisation.”
“Are you saying that they’re privatising the Church of England?” asked a loud man in an unnecessarily stuffy suit.
“They said they wouldn’t privatise the railways,” replied the megaphone salesman (who had a voice Joan thought vaguely familiar). “They said they wouldn’t privatise the telephones or the gas or the electric. They said they wouldn’t privatise the National Health Service.”
“They haven’t privatised the NHS,” said the stuffy suit. “Um, have they?”
“Astute investors can see which way the wind is blowing. And they will want a piece of the action when it’s ten quid admission price for a Sunday service and a grand for the big wedding dos. Check out our crowdfunder page for official details.” The salesman clapped his hands. “Fifty quid sponsorship certificate to that man there. Come on, folks. Show us your green. You need to invest before the rest. Supplies are limited!”
“Got it,” said Rutspud.
“Got it?” said Joan.
“Birmingham cathedral diocesan offices are on Colmore Row.” He looked at a dot on a map on his screen. “Which is directly over there.” He pointed.
Together they made their way across the bustling cathedral park and over a road crowded with red double-decker buses and bullish black taxi cabs. Rutspud hurried to stand underneath a protective coffee shop awning.
“Bardsey is nothing like this,” he said. “So many people here. Is the rest of the world like this?”
Joan considered her scant knowledge of the modern world. “A lot of France is pretty much like this, only… nicer.”
“Nicer how?” said Rutspud.
She gave a gallic shrug. “Well, it’s in France for one thing. Where’s this office?”
“Two doors down.”
They moved on together, had a brief fight with a revolving door in front of an office building and found themselves at a reception desk. Rutspud had to stand on tiptoes to see over the top of it.
The man behind the desk treated them to a very white smile.
“Good afternoon, madam and… sir? How can Freddy help you today?”
“We would like to see the bishop,” said Joan.
“The bishop?” said the receptionist.
“Bishop Iscansus,” said Rutspud.
Freddy the receptionist’s smile flickered, as though he’d considered telling Rutspud that he knew full well what the bishop’s name was, and then immediately changed his mind.
He looked down at a diary.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“It is very important that we see him,” said Joan.
“Too important for an appointment,” said Rutspud.
Freddy gave a pained expression and an over-exaggerated sigh. “It’s really, really important to make appointments. It’s like trying to get a cut and blow from Toni and Guy. You can’t just drop in and hope. It just ends in heartache and there’s enough of that around. Chocolate truffle?”
He offered them a bowl from below the counter. Rutspud took one immediately.
“We don’t want chocolate truffles,” said Joan.
“They are delicious,” said Freddy, “and you’d be doing me a favour. Freddy has somewhat overindulged of late. My stomach is like a mound of jelly. Wobble-wobble. You can poke it if you like. Have one. Go on.”
Joan attempted to maintain her temper. She was a soldier. She was armed and armoured. She could take on an army on a good day. She had no intention of being defeated by a nice man with a bowl of chocolates.
“Please. We have something of great importance to discuss with him. We’ve come a very long way.”
“And it is a lovely accent you have,” said Freddy. “France?”
“Yes, yes, but we do need –”
“Freddy loves France. The fashion. The food. And Freddy cannot get by without a little bit of Edith in his life.”
“Edith?”
“Non, rien de rien,” he began to sing in a passionate but strangled falsetto. “Non, je ne regrette rien…”
A woman in a severe suit came over to the reception.
“Anette Cleaver,” she said, smoothly. “Perhaps I can help. Mr DeVere, you have other duties to attend to.”
“Freddy was only trying to brighten the day,” the receptionist muttered.
The woman, Anette, steered Joan and Rutspud a little distance away from the reception desk.
“I overheard you mention that you hoped to speak to His Lordship.”
“We have something very important to discuss with him,” said Joan.
“Perhaps I can help,” suggested Anette.
“It has to be the bishop,” said Rutspud.
Anette gave him an unpleasant look. “Then I really can’t help you. His Lordship is not here at the moment. He is away on ecumenical business.”
“Oh, he’s been here, there and everywhere,” said Rutspud. “We know.”
“Then you’ll understand that he has a very full calendar.”
“So, do you know where he is now?” asked Joan.
“I’m not permitted to share that kind of information,” said Anette, affronted. “I don’t know how they do things in…” She looked Joan’s armour up and down. “Wherever. But, here, you can’t just wander in and demand to know where someone is.”
“That was kind of our whole strategy,” said Rutspud unhelpfully.
Joan wished he hadn’t said that. Partly because it was sort of true.
“So, can we make an appointment?”
“The bishop’s schedule is organised by the administration team. You will need to speak to one of them and I do believe they have all gone home for the day.”
“We could come back tomorrow to speak to them then?” said Joan.
“I don’t know about that,” said Anette. “You will need to make an appointment.”
“An appointment to make an appointment to speak to a man who
is not here?” said Rutspud.
“Indeed. You have it exactly,” said Anette, pleased. “Now, we are closing in a few minutes.”
She gestured to the door, nodded curtly and left them in the cold and unhelpful reception area.
“That’s it?” said Joan. “Defeated by bureaucracy. Our quest already over.”
“Didn’t even last long enough to be called a quest,” said Rutspud.
“Suggestions?”
“Grenades?”
“Why? What will that achieve?”
“Shits and giggles?” he said with a shrug.
“No,” she replied with a sigh. “Let’s head out, see the sights and maybe something will occur to us.”
“Maybe try the local cuisine,” said Rutspud, fishing around in his bag and pulling out his jelly babies.
“This is Britain. They don’t have a cuisine,” said Joan.
Freddy the receptionist caught up with them at the door.
“There’s no point in coming back tomorrow,” he whispered secretively.
“Why?” said Rutspud. “Do we need an appointment to get an appointment to get an appointment?”
Freddy drew them behind a tall potted plant behind the door as though that would somehow conceal them from view. “The bishop’s not here.”
“We know.”
“He’s not been here for months. He’s disappeared.”
“As in… poof?”
“If only it was that simple. Now, what I hear – and you didn’t hear this from Freddy – is that he stormed out of a financial accounts meeting months ago. Yelled something like, ‘I didn’t sign up for this!’ and left.”
“Oh, that’s interesting,” said Joan.
“And I mean months ago,” said Freddy. “They took three weeks to report it to the Synod office and there’s been no moves to get in a replacement.”
“Are you sure?” said Rutspud.
Freddy looked down at Rutspud, knowingly. “Freddy works reception. Nothing gets by him. Eyes of the hawk. Ears of the wolf. Hips of the snake.”
“So, even if we got an appointment…”
“There’d be no one to have the appointment with. The bishop is a missing person.”
“Then we’re truly sunk,” said Joan.
“Are you two from out of town?” said Freddy.
“More than a little,” said Rutspud.