Those were Father Wendy’s thoughts, as she walked along the Linden on Monday morning, thinking about the gay nightclub massacre in Orlando. She remembered – of course she did – her daughter, Laura, on that zebra crossing all those years ago. How absurdly easy we are to kill. Look at this poor skin of ours! We have no defences, none, against hatred and knives and bullets, against hurtling mangling metal.
‘Things might have been different, but they could not have been better.’ Can she say that? No! How could things not have been better? If the driver had not been distracted; the assault rifle not bought, not made, not invented. Oh, to wind back, and make this not happen. Make it never, ever happen.
Mary, mother of us! All Wendy can think of is blood. Spilled. Tipped over. Wasted. There is nowhere to take her pain, except to the cross. She can do nothing but weep there, in that terrible place where there was no defence against hatred, nails and spear, or the sword that pierces the heart.
Across the world candle flames burn. Rainbow flags flutter at half-mast.
*
‘Well, it looks as though muggins here is the lightning conductor again,’ said the bishop. ‘At least he said it to my face this time. I suppose that’s progress.’
Kat had her If you say so expression on. ‘I’m guessing you’ve not checked Twitter, then.’
‘Argh!’ The bishop flung his hands up. ‘Do I want to?’
‘You don’t. Out of interest, why didn’t you tell him you’re going to the vigil?’ she asked. ‘He’ll think you changed your mind because of him.’
‘Then let him think that. Kat, he’s hurting.’
‘We’re all hurting,’ she said. ‘But he’s bang out of order, barging through here like that and screaming at you.’
‘Yes, well. Setting aside his manner, what do you think about what he says?’
There was a long silence. Steve waited. ‘OK,’ said Kat. ‘Here’s what I think. Freddie says he’s being “erased”? Maybe he should try being a gay black woman.’
There was another silence.
‘That’s a fair point,’ said the bishop.
‘He didn’t even acknowledge my existence just now. I mean, we’re not playing Top Trumps here, but you know?’
‘Yes,’ said Steve. ‘I’m glad we aren’t, because I’d probably lose.’
Kat half-laughed. ‘You’d so lose, Steve. At least you realize that. But Freddie?’ She shook her head. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I care about him. But there’s not much room in Freddie May’s head for anyone except Freddie May.’
The bishop’s crime had been to ask for prayers for the victims of Orlando without mentioning the LGBTI community. He then responded – aghast at himself – with another blunder: that of presuming to pray for the LGBTI community, while opposing equal marriage. It looked as though the only mistake he had managed to avoid was that of remaining silent.
He took a coffee back into his office to calm down, whereupon he foolishly ignored his EA’s advice. Ah yes. How charming. @FreddieMayTenor, deploying the LoveWins hashtag like an incendiary device. Boom. How do you like them apples, homophobe? Maybe when he was as old as Methuselah Steve would just shrug this kind of thing off. ‘Jesu, lover of my soul, let me to thy bosom fly.’
Once he was composed, he went back out to face the coming week, and to check that Kat was doing all right. Did she want to take the day off?
No, she was fine, but thanks for the thought. They went through the diary. Interviews tomorrow for the social welfare officer; ordination of priests on Saturday; meeting with the dean, Matt and Helene from HR on the restructure; announcement of the two new archdeacon appointments the following week. Hah, a chance to be hated by the arch conservatives instead, unless he was very much mistaken. ‘Cover my defenceless head with the shadow of thy wing.’
Jane was supposed to spend Monday in a day-long faculty training session. Before she met Matt, she would have had no qualms about throwing a sickie; but the man had such a sweet dogged diligence to him, dammit, that she was shamed into professionalism. So here she was in Sweet FA Lecture Room 2. And she didn’t even have the heart to play bullshit bingo with her poet friend, Spider. The full house – synergy, light touch, deep dive, digging down, solutions-focused, moving forward – slipped by unticked.
At lunchtime, she escaped to the park to eat her Sainsbury’s meal deal. She glanced up at the sign by the gate as she entered. There was the familiar blue logo with its ring of yellow stars. Lindford arboretum, regenerated by those bastards in the EU, pumping their bastard millions into the run-down provinces. Did Jane trust the Brexiteers to look after anything outside London and the home counties? Did she bog roll.
She found a bench facing the lake. Sometimes there were kingfishers, would you believe it. Here, in the centre of Lindford. She got her phone out to check the news. Jesus. Really? Scoring political points off Orlando? What’s wrong with you people? Oh, what are we doing here, Matt? Let’s run away to New Zealand. Let’s be migrants, and abandon this toxic fractured me-first other-hating country.
I miss my baby boy, she realized. Be safe, Danny. She should have known not to read those desperate text messages from the nightclub. Mommy I love you. They shooting. Damn. Damn this toxic fractured me-first other-hating race we belong to. Let’s hold a referendum on humanity: better in, or out?
Jane stared across the lake. And there went the kingfisher, low, fast, piping as it went. She caught a bright patch of light flickering on the water. A ring of stars. Ah bollocks. Migraine.
Nothing else for it. She got up and headed home to sleep it off, handing her lunch to the homeless guy on the next bench. Before long, all words would turn to scribble. Tears began to leak out. Let them. Handy pressure valve. So what was this all about then? It was usually some massive iceberg she’d failed to spot. Ah yes. She’d leave if it wasn’t for Matt, be long gone to New Zealand by now. Turquoise sea. Kingfisher sea. Halcyon days down under. But Matt still believed. Believed there was an anti-venom. Believed the cross made a difference. He voted Remain.
By now her head was a shaken tin of spangling brangling metal triangles. She blotted the tears with a sleeve. There was no leaving. There was no believing, either. Just a desperate grab for the coat-tails of Matt’s faith.
People gathered. In Florida, in Soho, in Sydney. They packed the streets. They linked arms. They sang. Humanity: best of races, worst of races. In the cathedral, Dean Marion led the vigil for Orlando. She spoke of the prophet Elisha. ‘Open our eyes, Lord. Let us see that those who are with us are more than those who are with them.’
The bishop was at the Lindford vigil, in St James’s in the heart of the clubbing district, where the street pastors scoop up the helpless and lost. Many of our friends were there. On the church floor, a circle of tea lights twinkled like stars. Geoff, the vicar, led the prayers. Then a man began to sing in the silence. An old revivalist hymn. ‘Jesus paid it all. All to him I owe.’
‘Och, would you believe, nobody knew it!’ lamented Neil. ‘Do you know it? Why not? I thought they’d all join in!’
‘Well, I’m sure you sang beautifully, darling,’ said Ed.
‘Right. So there was me, like a big jessie, voice cracking. Come on, guys, little help here?’ Neil shook his head. ‘I thought ma wee friend from the choir might bail me out, but no. Sat there on the floor all wrapped up in his rainbow flag. Och, don’t look at me like that, we all know he’s a drama queen – there were people looking out for him.’
‘Good.’
‘Then finally someone joins in – thank you, bishop! He was there, the bishop. Me and Dom and a bunch of others took him for a drink afterwards. In the Lion.’
‘No! You’re kidding me.’
‘Why not?’ demanded Neil. ‘He havered, but I said Ah ah. What would Jesus do, bishop? I think you’ll find he’d go and drink with the sinners, am I right? So we’ll have no arguing, if you please.’
Ed laughed. There were no immovable objects in the path of Neil’s irresistible f
orce. Well, that would give the diocesan comms officer an exciting hour or two, if the story got into social media. A bishop walks into a gay bar . . . He couldn’t wait to hear Dom’s version.
Neil was half-right. There were people looking out for Freddie. But he fended them off. #LoveWins, right? Then how come he was eaten alive by hate? That hymn totally killed him. ‘Jesus paid it all.’ That’s the one that swung it, back in juvie, in chapel – converted him? ‘Sin had left a crimson stain, He washed it white as snow.’ And then the plane landing safely? Ah cock, he was so not gonna be like this ever again? But this morning? Yep, there he is, screaming at Paul? (Face palm: Steve.) Sure, he can say sorry, and Steve’ll be all, I forgive you, let’s draw a line under it – AGAIN. Freddie has zero credibility here. Talking the talk, all, ooh, #LoveWins, when honestly? He’s just as big of a hater himself.
And Chloe and Ambrose, they’re all, come back with us for a bit? But he can’t face it. Man, they are both so sweet, and the vibe tonight is all so ‘What unites us is stronger than what divides us’? He knows he’ll only spoil it. Catch you later, guys.
*
And the world goes on. Virginia goes for her interview, and gets the job. Last year’s deacons pack their bags and go on their ordination retreat. Hedges are thick with honeysuckle. Thunder mumbles off stage. Flash floods drown the golf courses of Lindfordshire, turning lanes into rivers and dips into fords. The sun comes out, and for a moment the grass heads are made of light, though no one sees it.
On Thursday Father Wendy drives to the crematorium for a funeral. She passes the landfill and thinks of buried sin. Turfed over, watered. A green hill far away.
She hears the news on the radio as she drives home. Jo Cox, MP. Murdered in her Leeds constituency.
Scrap your sermons. Start anew. Write something like this: We must throw away our divisions, our hatred, our greed. We must bury them all, turf them over, water them with tears, if we are ever to inhabit – leave or remain – a green and pleasant England.
Father Dominic is trying to write his sermon. But he can’t concentrate. He’s remembering school, and how much he hated it. Todd, you big fag, lend us your English essay. Slaughterhouse 5. Suddenly he recalls the passage about reverse time. The un-bombing of Dresden. Planes flying backwards, dousing the fires, sucking the bombs back up. The women in the factories dismantling them, the specialists burying the components. Hiding them. Where they will never be found. ‘So they would never hurt anyone ever again.’ That was the quote.
He thinks of Pulse nightclub. The bullets sucked back into the rifle. The wounds closing. The dead getting back up. The events in Birstall reversing themselves, Jo Cox alive again. And not just that – all the bullets, all the hate in all the world, in all of human history, all sucked back out, undone, dismantled, buried. And no more hurting and destroying in all God’s holy mountain.
Chapter 25
he summer solstice dawns. The longest day of the year, we tell one another, northern-centrically. Longest of days, shortest of days. It all depends on your point of view. Everything depends on your point of view, because the British people are sick of experts. What’s important is your truth. Postmodernism has gone to seed, bolted like old rhubarb. Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb. Words can mean whatever you want them to mean, facts are anything you conveniently invent – and there’s glory for you. Glory, glory, hallelujah, in the Humpty-Dumpty EU referendum debate. Why, it is purely my whimsy that today our planet’s rotational axis is most inclined towards the sun, and that it is therefore the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere. You believe whatever you like.
Petrol rainbows smear on roads and run down the gutters. The sun comes out again. Mackerel sky, mackerel sky over the diocese of Lindchester. Not long wet, not long dry.
It’s Jane’s birthday. Fifty-five today. She should really get up, but she’s still wrung out after last week’s triple migraine extravaganza. Like a hangover with none of the fun beforehand. There’s a breakfast tray on the bedside table, a red rose in a vase, empty cafetière, croissant shrapnel. She stretches. A bumblebee shadow floats on the muslin curtain. Old bombus, droning like a Lancaster bomber.
This is it. This week. In, or out? She ponders the curious suspended state on this side of any liminal event. Losing your virginity, for example. Nothing you read, or imagine, or hear, can convey the experience in advance. There is no shortcut. You have to go through that door yourself, in order to look back and ask if that was it.
Or getting your degree results. Hah, not quite such a public ordeal these days, is it? Jane can vividly remember that walk across Oxford to check the board at the Examination Schools; the weird timelessness when the results were already decided, but she didn’t yet know. A day much like this, gravid with rain and eschatological menace.
Or getting married. That before/after divide. The bride in the porch. The groom waiting. (Not that it had been like that for Jane.) Wait, what about giving birth? – good one! She recalls her surprise at seeing the cot wheeled into the delivery room. That was when she grasped it was really going to happen. This bump would be a baby in the cot. Hell, our foremothers made their wills before their confinement. Yes, it would soon be over; the babe would be out. Maybe you’d both be alive, and maybe not.
Yeah – death. No shortcuts and evasions there. We all have to go through that door by ourselves, and face the results of the ultimate referendum: sheep/goat? Not that she believed in all that. But, oh, Shakespeare was right. Conscience makes cowards of us all, as we contemplate that undiscover’d country . . .
What undiscovered Britain lies on the other side of the vote? Life is comprised of moments like these, she thinks. When it all hangs in the balance, could still go either way – until it goes one way. The box is opened and the cat is dead. She thinks of all the players of history, whose life’s narrative looks so fixed now – it was like this for them, too. All those votes and arguments; the battles, plots, negotiations, all the human schemes that could have gone either way. They would have felt contingent upon so many variables at the time, only to be reduced to plonking determinism in the student exam scripts she’d just been marking. She imagines GCSE history questions decades from now: What were the causes of Britain’s vote to leave the EU in 2016? Or: What were the reasons why Britain voted to remain in the EU in 2016?
But this pregnant pause, this holding of the breath, will be forgotten and swallowed up in what happens next. In, out. Win, lose. Yes, no.
*
Such are Jane’s musings on her fifty-fifth birthday on Midsummer morning. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday still lie ahead. A little plane toodles above the Lindfordshire landscape trailing a Vote Leave banner. A few valiant souls – including Ambrose (now more or less recovered) and Chloe – campaign door to door for Remain. Chloe is called a chink, and told to go back where she came from.
In Lindford General there are births and deaths. Elsewhere committees action things, or not. People shop and book their holidays. They renew their passports. They pay rent, or mortgages. They claim their benefits, or beg. They go to work, they look for work. They splash out, they eke out.
The clock ticks. The unimaginable approaches. On Thursday morning myriad little plywood portals will open up to the undiscover’d post-referendum country, from whose bourn no traveller returns. We must all walk into the booth alone and make our cross. There will be no time-travelling Doctor to report back from 2020 with reassurances or warnings.
You, dear reader, have the advantage over my characters. You could be the Doctor. You could seize them by the lapels and remonstrate. You could open champagne and pour them a congratulatory glass. Depending on your point of view – and assuming any of this were real. But we will linger here a bit in the limbo of ignorance, where my people are still processing other matters.
There is sport! The European Championship is unfolding. English cricket and rugby are prospering. We may barely spare them a nod, overshadowed as they are by the Referendum. The ordinations in Lindchester d
iocese straddle the great divide. Priests last Sunday, deacons this. The two new archdeacons will be unveiled on Friday. If Bishop Steve truly were the cat-stroking Bond villain some take him to be, this would be an excellent week to bury the news that he has appointed a gay woman to the post of archdeacon of Lindford. But he really isn’t that clever. He wasn’t even clever enough to spot quite how his WWJD drink in a gay bar was going to play among his more conservative clergy. He has morphed into a curious hybrid: the homophobic gay Mafioso.
Ah, if only all this had happened hereafter, there might have been time for many words on these matters. But events have overtaken us, dear reader. Your author is not omniscient. Nor am I omnipresent. We cannot be everywhere all at once. We must choose.
We will fix upon Tuesday, after evensong. Poor Freddie had not yet found a way out of the corner he’d hated himself into. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ does not play so well, if you are locked in self-loathing.
‘How are you doing?’ asked Ambrose. ‘I was worried about you after the vigil.’
And there it was. Worried about you. In his experience that was code for: Look everyone, Freddie’s gonna do something irresponsible and dumb again. Cue the judging.
‘I’m good,’ he said. ‘Hooked up with a couple of guys, went back to their place?’
‘Did that work out for you?’ Ambrose asked.
They were standing under the big lime trees on the Close. Swifts and swallows flittered low over the grass.
‘Excuse me? This is none of your business. Seriously.’
‘OK.’
‘No, not OK.’ Freddie got right up in his face. ‘Don’t do that OK thing, when you’re totally disagreeing with me? So I went back to their place, and yeah, we got fucked off our faces, had ourselves a threesome, and know what? It was good, it was fine. Is that OK with you?’
‘If you’re happy, yes.’
‘Yeah, I’m happy.’ He stepped back. ‘And I don’t owe you anything. Not a thing. Just so’s we’re clear?’
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