by Simon Parke
‘It’s a Christian church,’ said Ginger. ‘That’s the only label I’m interested in. Now if you don’t mind - .’
‘It’s just something we should consider.’
‘What is?’
‘Not everyone loves the Romans as much as you seem to.’
‘I’ll tell you this once and once only,’ said Ginger moving towards him.
‘Calm down, Ginger!’ said Anton with a chummy squeal. ‘We don’t need to get heavy!’
Ginger was a large balding man in his forties, with staring eyes and a powerful physical frame. People could find him intimidating; even Mrs Pipe trod carefully around him.
‘Just chill out, man!’ said Anton, with an ‘innocent little me’ shrug of his shoulders, but Ginger was going to say his piece:
‘Francis of Assisi saved the church in the thirteenth century, saved it single-handedly. He reminded the church what it was about.’
‘So what is it about?’ said Anton. ‘So hard to know sometimes! Especially here at St Michael’s - it’s like trying to light a fire with wet wood!’
‘Unlike the priests of this time, St Francis showed some humility.’
‘Really? So what happened to yours?’ A look of intense hostility hit Anton.
‘Only joking!’ said the vicar, whose routine attacks were always well-sugared. ‘Why do you take everything so seriously?’
‘The Third Order or Tertiaries,’ continued Ginger, ‘follow the same Rule of Life as those in the enclosed order but work in the world-I do youth work.’
‘For now.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean you have a job for now - who knows about next week?’
‘I think you’d better go. But if you have any problems, Vicar, I suggest you take them up with the Bishop who we’ll all be seeing tonight.’
Fear briefly crossed Anton’s face.
‘Speaking of which, Ginger, I trust I can count on your support?’
‘Get out.’
‘As if I care anyway!’ said Anton, before sweeping out the door.
Eight
Wednesday, 17 December
Abbot Peter walked by the sea, his feet crunching the salty shingle. He had time to kill before the inspector’s arrival and liked this unclaimed space with its cormorant cries, brisk wind and early morning carpet of weed and crab. A late convert to the coast, the shore was now home, neither sea nor land, belonging to everyone and no one. The beach was an in-between place, a place of uncertain identity, which needed its own special by-laws. No dogs between May and October and people climbed on the groynes at their own risk. Rusting chains, set in concrete blocks, sat with overturned boats and discarded deck chairs.
The coast was never still, never yesterday, always today, a moving margin round this strange island, an adjustment of wave and stone, wind and rock. Always young and always old, the pebbles beneath his feet were freshly soaked yet 80 million years old, washed from the chalk, tough flinty survivors of this shifting and eroding landscape. He looked across to the beach huts, more recent arrivals on the scene. Peeling Edwardian sentinels of the crashing waves, all stood in line, doors locked for winter yet portents of summer sun. And rising above them all, above beach hut and briny, shingle and shore, the cream white cliffs, an erect expanse of chalk, which two miles on became the famous Beachy Head, the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain. From there, you could look out as far as Dungeness in the east and Selsey Bill in the west. Or you could end it all by jumping the 530 feet onto the rocks and wash below. Beachy Head was one of the most notorious suicide spots in the world and the cliffs of Stormhaven had their stories too. Not everyone who walked up them walked back down again.
But Peter’s mind was with the matter in hand. He knew the deceased and knew him well. But more interesting was this: he also knew the killer. He did not yet know their identity but he’d be most surprised if it was not the work of one present at the meeting last night. The chemistry of relationship had been one of savage dissonance. And he’d heard the opening words of the phone call Anton received when everyone else had gone. He had clearly been talking to his killer; and his killer had clearly attended the meeting. The inspector might be interested to hear of that.
So what of last night? With four of the Parochial Council away on a pilgrimage in the Holy Land, including Roger Stills, the other church warden, there had been nine present in the parish room of St Michael’s, including Anton and himself. This left seven possible suspects: Ginger Micklewhite, the youth worker; Jennifer Gold, head teacher and church warden; Sally Appleby, the curate; Betty Dodd, long-standing member of the congregation; Malcolm Flight, treasurer, supermarket worker and painter; Clare Magnussen, successful businesswoman and Bishop Stephen, the Bishop of Lewes. One of those had wanted Anton dead. Perhaps they’d all wanted Anton dead, but one had acted with hammer and nails. One of them had stepped beyond acceptable spite.
The Abbot slipped on wet seaweed. Suddenly he was falling, tumbling down a pebble ridge; an ankle turned and his face slammed against hard stone. How quickly things change. Standing then falling, fearless then frightened, living then crucified, so much can change in a day, an hour, a moment. He lay still for a while, gathering his breath. He’d be all right, it was just a fall. He looked with a crab’s eye view at the beach huts where the gulls gathered for rest and preening. His lip was bleeding, fresh red blood stained his white handkerchief but not the quantities that this morning stained the vestry. It was time to haul himself up and get back to Sandy View.
An Inspector was coming to call.
Nine
This whole adventure had been an accidental affair and started quite by chance.
Digging last spring in the abandoned Armenian city of Ani, Gurdjieff and Soloviev had stumbled upon an exotic discovery. An underground passage led them down some broken steps to a cell of apparent monastic origin. Amid damp stone and torchlight, they discovered a niche in the wall stuffed with parchments of Armenian origin. Confusing numbers jostled with hieroglyphics and the two adventurers thought only of the price these might fetch in the market. Until Gurdjieff, skim reading one of the oldest sheets, noticed a clear reference to the Sarmoun Brotherhood and the city of Bokhara. All ideas of selling were forgotten.
Rumoured to have existed as far back as 2500BC in Babylonia, the Sarmoun Brotherhood was said to possess knowledge of the most secret human mysteries, expressed in a nine-point symbol. If the parchment revealed the whereabouts of this elusive sect, then was it not the most priceless object on earth? Over the following summer, Gurdjieff and Soloviev had travelled slowly across Central Asia to Bokhara, only to be met on arrival by silence or threat.
‘I suspect you will not be long in this city,’ the thin-fingered man had said as they drank his lemon.
***
After three more days of silence, they’d been on the point of returning west when an old man with no teeth and appalling breath approached them in the market. He made much of the need for discretion and privacy. Having withdrawn to an alleyway by the laundry, he said his name was Mussa and that he would take them to the Sarmouni but that as well as paying him, they must pay also for the services of his son.
‘My son will be most helpful,’ he said. ‘He knows this land like no other.’
‘So why cannot he take us instead of you?’ asked Gurdjieff.
‘He knows the land. But he does not know the donkeys.’
Eager to be on their way, the two young men paid in full and set off from Bokhara. With secrecy still demanded, they left at night to avoid public gaze.
‘Where is your son?’ Gurdjieff had asked, noticing only the one guide. He remembered the financial arrangements; he always remembered financial arrangements.
‘He has gone on ahead to ensure all things are safe. Now hurry, hurry.’
For twelve days they h
ad travelled with the old man who whistled all day long through his scattered teeth. Lying exhausted by brushwood fires beneath big night skies, sleep came easily despite their hunger. The old man said they had not paid for food; had they wanted food, they should have said and it would have been included in the fee. Out of the kindness of his heart, he offered the occasional bleak biscuit and chunk of well-dried fruit, and, in this manner, they travelled until they reached the bridge. For the final two days, he had demanded they wear blindfolds.
‘Welcome to Hell’s Mouth,’ said Mussa, happy at last to announce truly bad news.
Before them was a rope bridge over a deep chasm. The adventure was suddenly dangerous as adventures should be. In his memoirs, Gurdjieff would call it the ‘perilous bridge’ and not far beyond, they were told, lay the Sarmouni settlement.
‘I go no further,’ said the old man.
‘But you promised to take us to the settlement itself. You can’t leave us here!’
‘You are not far away. Truly.’
‘Truly?’
‘It is a short walk only.’
‘You have made this walk yourself?’
‘Not myself. But my son - he says it is a short walk beyond the chasm.’
‘So you will not cross the bridge?’
‘I am old and ugly but not yet a fool.’
‘Yet you are you a liar.’
‘A liar? You call me a liar? My son will defend my honour!’
‘He’ll have to appear before he does,’ said Gurdjieff.
‘He went ahead.’
‘He blends in well with the scenery.’
‘Years of training.’
‘The invisible man. Who wouldn’t pay well to have the invisible man on their side?’
There was a pause in the conversation by the perilous bridge.
‘So you won’t kill me?’ asked the old man.
‘Kill you?’
‘You swear on the grave of your grandmother that you will not kill me?’
‘We will not kill you.’
‘Or hurt me?’
‘Or hurt you.’
‘This is good and honourable, you are good men and I am a liar. I do not have a son.’
And now laughter broke. Hungry, scared and swindled it was all they had the strength for.
‘You laugh because you are better?’ asked the old man, suddenly taking offence.
‘What?’
‘You laugh because you imagine yourselves better than me?’
‘No!’
‘You think I am the excrement and laugh at me like you are not?’
‘You are excrement,’ said Gurdjieff, regaining his seriousness quickly. ‘You lie, cheat and swindle. You let people down. You’re a large pile of it.’
‘Laugh at others but weep for yourselves too,’ said Mussa. ‘You are my brothers in the brown stuff, I think so.’
Soloviev looked uncomfortable.
‘We just seek the truth.’
‘As once did I, my friend, as once did I.’
‘So what happened?’
‘You reach a certain age, yes? And then realise you doing big waste of time.’
On leaving, Mussa took his donkeys with him. As he pointed out, they would be no use on the rope bridge. Gurdjieff and Soloviev watched him disappear. His last words had perhaps possessed a kinder edge.
‘I lie about many things. This I cannot help, learned from my mother. But I am not Mr Lie when I say the Sarmouni community is nearby.’
Gurdjieff felt the thrill again, the call again. It was time to see what they and this rope bridge were made of.
Ten
Anton had his critics but then everyone has their critics from the Buddha onwards.
***
Arch-critic Mrs Edwina Pipe, flower arranger and occasional haircolourer, said he changed everything and did nothing.
‘You watch, Abbot,’ she’d say, as she polished the chalice. ‘He only leaves his large vicarage for things which interest him - or for holidays abroad. And have you been inside? The Reverend Stone was here twenty years and couldn’t even get his door painted but this one? You wouldn’t recognise the place now and all done with the church’s money. He has a new power-shower in the old scullery. All that soaping of his body when he should be out visiting. Imagine it!’
Mrs Pipe appeared to be following her own instructions.
***
Everyone agreed, however, that Anton Fontaine had sorted out the parish finances. His first month in the job had been spent neither in the pulpit nor in pastoral care. Rather, he had settled down at his computer and had the time of his life, sorting out the figures. The change was instant, like dark clouds giving way to sun. For the first time in many years at St Michael’s, people knew how much money there was in the parish account. This was a particular revelation to the Treasurer. Malcolm Flight had been appointed to the role whilst absent from a meeting and much against his wishes. He was a man who so disliked banks that he refused to have a personal account. He seemed the obvious choice to Anton.
And almost everyone liked Anton on their first encounter. He wasn’t stuffy and he made them laugh with his impressions in the pub and his ability to burp at will. He loved hilarity and naughtiness and made jokes about body odour in sermons - which had its own delight after twenty-three years of the depressed Reverend Stone.
Yet like seeping oil on cardboard, unease stained the fabric of parish life. Anton got bored of you very quickly. He now wanted someone new to meet.
***
‘Well of course Ginger and the vicar don’t get on and never will,’ said Mrs Pipe to Abbot Peter one day. (He remembered her hair as being blue that week.)
Ginger Micklewhite, the middle-aged youth worker, had just stormed out of the church in deep fury, after reading a note left by Anton.
‘He won’t have a boss, that one! Ginger does his own thing and God help you if you get in the way. With him, you start as his enemy and make your careful way from there. But the vicar isn’t careful, you see. He isn’t careful at all.’
Ginger had been a youth worker in the parish longer than most could remember. Funded by the Local Authority in an arrangement he handled himself, he ran his own show, free of the church’s prying eyes. No one knew exactly what he did. By the time Ginger was at his desk, most of the parish were in front of the TV or asleep.
Everyone said he was doing a wonderful work with the young people of the area, but no one knew exactly what it was.
‘The vicar wants to flush him out,’ said Mrs Pipe. ‘I heard them talking in the vestry. Ginger said they must be upfront with each other; he likes to see all your cards on the table.’
‘And how did Anton reply?’
‘He says: “I don’t think you want me snooping around your little empire, Ginger. You might find I close it down!” Well! They weren’t the best of words, Abbot!’
***
At a meeting of the Parochial Church Council when Ginger was absent, it was Anton who’d asked the unspoken question:
‘Does anyone here actually know what Ginger does? I mean, really?’
Betty Dodd had said that he was very good with the young people but Betty was eighty-six and the fact remained that no one had seen anything of these young people in church, which was where they were meant to be surely?
‘They need their own space, their own culture in which to grow,’ said Ginger. ‘They won’t want to sing your songs and you wouldn’t want to sing theirs.’ And no one argued because they liked their songs and frankly, there was enough conflict in the world and Ginger could be so aggressive.
Certainly Betty Dodd didn’t argue. At her age, perhaps she was past arguing. She’d seen off six vicars in her time in Stormhaven, Anton was her seventh, and each ha
d been equally disappointing; seven different disappointments. She was one of life’s servants, tucking in behind the leader, there to open up, close up, clear away and wash the toilets. Jennifer said she was loyal to a fault; that she should stand up for herself more. And then came what Edwina Pipe called the ‘Bogbrush’ affair.
‘He called her “Betty Bogbrush”,’ would you believe? Anton called her “Betty Bogbrush”!’
‘To her face?’ asked the Abbot.
‘Oh no. She’d left the room to go to the toilet but she heard him from the corridor. She was mortified.’
‘And Anton? How did he react?’
‘Oh, he thought it was all a great laugh.’
‘He does like a laugh.’
‘Well, she may have lived through two wars but something died in her that day. She never said anything, of course, but then you don’t, do you? You just wait.’
‘You know a lot,’ said Abbot Peter appreciatively as Mrs Pipe continued with the arrangement of dahlias.
‘Now of course she reckons that’s what everyone quietly thinks. Like the vicar, they smile to her face and laugh at her behind her back. Betty Bogbrush!’
Eleven
The Sarkar returned to his cave and washed his bearded face. His physical body was tired but his spiritual body alive to the events of the evening. As their leader, he had today presided over the Ceremony of the Key, an annual enactment of great significance in the Sarmoun community. It was a moving event and one that defined their strange calling in the world.
The community of monks and lay members would wait until the setting of the sun. Under the darkening sky of the Hindu Kush, a procession of men and women holding candles then led the community, intoning a dirge. The Sarkar would greet them and the procession would halt. The ritual then required a dervish to approach him. Arms crossed, and hands on his shoulders, he would kneel before the Sarkar. Upon being handed a large key, the dervish would then make his way to a carved door, set in a large square wooden box. The box itself was a strange and slightly ugly affair, angular, awkward and festooned with flags, swords and maces - the imagery of war, power, coercion and authority. The dervish then placed the key in the ornate lock and slowly turned it.