More Tea, Jesus?

by James Lark

  ‘You’ll have to speak up,’ Elliott responded, flatly. What kind of an idiot tried to whisper over club music?

  ‘Ah, yes,’ laughed Biddle, raising his voice. ‘Look, somebody over there has lost a contact lens and I thought you might have a torch or something?’ The DJ glared at him. ‘We just need a little light,’ Biddle clarified, ‘to find it. The contact lens.’ The DJ continued to glare. ‘I imagine it’s on the floor, so …’ He smiled at the DJ, who was shaking his head slightly, as if he didn’t quite understand the question.

  Oh, that’s it, Gavin Elliott thought to himself. The vicar was trying to show off how bloody good he was; no doubt he thought that this was the way to inveigle himself into some young queer’s trust and brainwash him into being normal.

  ‘You want light, yeah?’ Elliott muttered. He’d show this vicar how welcome he was in a gay club. ‘No problem.’ He turned and flicked a light switch, throwing the whole club into harsh, fluorescent brightness.

  ‘Oh no … please, I don’t mean …’ Biddle protested, but it was too late; the DJ took the needle off the record he was playing and picked up the microphone.

  ‘So sorry to spoil your fun,’ he said with deadpan sarcasm, ‘but this vicar has got, like, a really important announcement to make.’ He thrust the microphone into Biddle’s hand with a sneer. Blinking in the unexpected light, all eyes turned to Biddle.

  Elliott’s original hope had been that the clubbers would all feel the same loathing for clergy that he did, so would mob the vicar like a torch-bearing crowd in a horror film and, if not club the vicar to death, at least do him some lasting damage. He was disappointed not to see anything of that nature stirring, but the look of mortification on the vicar’s face almost made up for it. He leaned back to enjoy the spectacle.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Biddle, his amplified voice carrying over the confused murmur like the words of Christ reaching the masses from a fishing boat on the Sea of Galilee. ‘I’m terribly sorry about this.’ He knew the DJ was only trying to be helpful, but he really hadn’t wanted to interrupt the entire club.

  Still, now it had happened he might as well take advantage of the situation and he flattered himself that this was the kind of thing he had a natural gift for. ‘Now – a contact lens has been lost over there,’ he explained, watched by Gavin Elliott who wore a satisfied, twisted smile, ‘whereabouts did you say you last had it, Gerard?’

  Every single person in the club turned to see who Biddle was talking to. Gerard, his face even paler in the harsh light, gulped and gestured as before in a wide circle around him.

  ‘Okay, so it’s somewhere over there,’ Biddle continued. ‘Look, if you guys over there wouldn’t mind, you know, having a little look …’

  Gerard watched in horrified embarrassment, rubbing his contact-lens-free eye and wishing that he really had been abducted by an alien species.

  This increased to a strong desire to be struck down instantly by an alien death-ray when he felt his missing contact lens in the corner of the eye he was rubbing.

  The DJ wasn’t the only person having a shit evening. Pender Gannit, a 30-something with a permanent affectation of boredom, was actually bored. Somehow, no amount of drinking had been able to disguise the sad fact that Different got less exciting – and less different – each week. Early on in the evening he’d completely failed to pull a very attractive young blond, who had knowingly led him on before rampantly and successfully launching himself at another young, attractive boy and deliberately teasing Pender by continuing to be quite filthy with the other youth right in front of him. Pender was aware that he wasn’t as young or as beautiful as he had once been, but he wasn’t used to being snubbed.

  Then Pender had found himself the recipient of much unwanted attention from a highly irritating and ridiculously camp man who kept making large hand gestures; although he had made it very clear that he wasn’t interested, the hand gestures and exclamations had continued to pursue him all evening, his assailant apparently unable to take a none-too-subtle hint.

  Under the circumstances, the diversion caused by this vicar was almost welcome. It wasn’t any alternative to an evening feeling up a good-looking boy, but it was at least an entertaining break from the man with the hand gestures. Pender stood watching the search for the contact lens, aware of his stalker’s close proximity even though he couldn’t actually see any hand gestures at that moment.

  The embarrassed (but oddly attractive) boy for whom the search was taking place seemed to be trying to attract the vicar’s attention, but the vicar was now so involved in choreographing the search that he wasn’t listening. The boy finally managed to grab the vicar for a moment and whispered something into his ear. Pender leaned forward, intensely interested in the proceedings. He caught a faint whiff of familiar aftershave and knew that the man with the hand gestures was standing right next to him.

  As the boy spoke to the vicar, the vicar’s smile dropped. The vicar nodded, slowly, then re-instated his smile. ‘Okay, folks!’ he said to the crowd. Heads which had previously been morosely scanning the floor turned to listen to his next instruction. ‘Thanks for your help searching, that’s been great, really great!’ The vicar beamed. ‘Well done to all of you! But, as it turns out, the contact lens was never actually missing in the first place. So … we can turn the lights back down and get back to having fun!’

  A deathly silence followed this statement; various people who had been crawling around on the floor slowly got to their feet, looking daggers at both the boy and the vicar. ‘Thanks, everyone!’ the vicar repeated, his smile beginning to look a little strained. The only person who appeared pleased was, bizarrely, the DJ, who seemed to be in paroxysms of helpless laughter.

  Gavin Elliott took as long as possible to restart proceedings, genuinely hoping that the bombshell would result in the lynching he had initially anticipated, but when he saw that silent, hateful glaring was to be the order of the day he wiped the tears of laughter from his eyes and turned his attention to the lights and music. At least that vicar wasn’t going to be in any position to convert anyone to his delusional way of thinking that night.

  Various ideas had started to form in Pender’s head. ‘I would give my back teeth to know who that vicar is,’ he muttered to himself.

  ‘Reverend Andrew Biddle of St Barnabas Church, Little Collyweston,’ said a voice right next to his ear, ‘but you can call him Andy.’ Pender caught another whiff of the aftershave. He turned to face his persecutor, as the lights finally dimmed and the music sprang back into life.

  ‘How do you know?’ Pender shouted above the music, and the camp man gave him a broad grin, a wink and a knowing hand gesture.

  ‘Were you serious about giving your back teeth for that information?’ he asked, putting his hand on Pender’s shoulder and leaving it there. ‘Perhaps I didn’t mention that I’m a dentist …’

  Pender smiled. ‘Maybe not my back teeth,’ he answered.

  ‘It would be extremely ungrateful of you not to show your thanks in some way,’ Vernon Tait persisted, with a gesture of mock outrage.

  What the hell, thought Pender, it was only one night. ‘I’ll have to see what I can do,’ he said, pushing himself up against Vernon as the crowds and the atmosphere of the club pressed in around them. He drew in a deep breath of the dentist’s aftershave, which admittedly smelt quite expensive, and hardly noticed the dentist’s hand move towards his crotch – the first of many similar hand gestures that evening.

  Chapter 9

  ‘I won’t ask where you’ve been.’

  ‘Just as well, I wasn’t going to tell you.’

  ‘You look like you’ve had a fucking rough night.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Pender ran his hand over his chin, wishing he’d bothered to shave. He had a hangover and wanted to catch up on the sleep he hadn’t had the night before.

  ‘Burning the candle at both ends?’ enquired Irene Hamble mildly, looking up from her computer without slowing her typing. Pender fl
ashed her a quick, charming smile and nodded.

  ‘Coffee, Pender?’ Christine Soddy asked jovially. ‘You look as though you could do with one.’

  ‘Tea for me, I can’t stand that instant stuff.’

  ‘Tea it is.’ Christine winked at him and went into the kitchen. Even having known him for some ten months, the women in the office seemed to think that Pender was a delightful young man. It wasn’t an image that Pender made any effort to maintain, and it wasn’t a view that was shared by his boss.

  ‘Is it too much to ask you to turn up even the slightest bit on time?’ Mick Breen continued to complain as Pender made his way to his desk.

  ‘At least I’m here.’

  ‘I’ve been having a fucking nightmare, we’re trying to run a newspaper here. I don’t care where you’ve been, I don’t care what you’ve been up to, though knowing you it was something pretty fucking disgusting, but get here on time or I’ll give your job to someone else.’

  Pender ignored him. He’d heard it before, in any case. ‘I’ve got a story,’ he said, taking off his battered leather jacket and sitting down at his desk.

  ‘Have you?’ Breen said, witheringly, perching himself on the edge of Pender’s desk. ‘Have you, Pender? Because I’m getting a little bit cynical about that claim, because it seems to me that when you have a “story” it really means you’re going to spend the whole day, or what’s left of the day, on the Internet, presumably looking at something pretty fucking filthy, though I haven’t bothered to check the Internet history on your computer yet because frankly I can’t face it, everything’s enough of a fucking nightmare already.’

  Pender logged on to his computer, unconcerned by Breen’s (entirely justified) accusation.

  ‘Tell me how it is, Pender, that I never read any of these “stories” you occasionally say you have? There’s a gap, Pender,’ Breen slammed his hand down on Pender’s desk, ‘between the stories in your head and what you actually manage to write. Because what you actually manage to write amounts to nothing, fucking nothing. I’ve seen about half an article from you in the last five fucking weeks. What’s going on? Do you fucking work here or don’t you?’

  Pender tapped away at his keyboard, blocking out Breen’s voice as he checked his emails. Mick Breen looked at him with loathing, allowing Pender a moment to fail to answer his rhetorical question before continuing. ‘That’s why, Pender, when you come in here and say you’ve got a story, I find it a little bit difficult to get excited, because you’ve yet to get one of these mythical stories onto paper to share with the rest of us.’

  Irene Hamble continued to type out a story about some prize-winning local pigs, wilfully oblivious to the string of expletives spilling from Breen’s mouth only metres away. She wanted to be in a nice office, so she had decided to simply ignore the bits that she didn’t like. For quite a lot of the time, that meant pretending that she couldn’t hear her boss, but she could always concentrate on her work, or on her pot plants, or on the conversations she often had with Christine about babies and wheelie bins.

  ‘By the way,’ Breen muttered, ‘you got sixty-two points on the football this week, though I don’t know how you fucking managed that. I spent weeks choosing my team and it’s been frankly fucking pathetic, only just made it to thirty points this week, I mean what the fuck’s that?’

  ‘Thanks, Christine,’ Pender said, as a mug of tea arrived at his desk.

  ‘I got fifty-nine points,’ Christine chuckled, ‘he’s been going on about it all morning.’

  ‘Well, what’s the point in choosing a fucking brilliant team when all the crap players go and get all the fucking points?’ Breen complained. ‘I’m sure the numbers aren’t right this week, anyway. When I get a moment, I’m going to head down to the sports department and ask them what they’re fucking playing at.’

  Pender grinned at a particularly rude email from a friend in the city. ‘It wasn’t in my mouth at the time,’ he typed back.

  ‘Did you throw this wad of paper in the bin?’ Christine called across the office.

  Breen looked up. ‘What paper?’

  ‘This annual directors’ report.’

  ‘Of course I fucking threw it away,’ Breen called back, ‘you don’t expect me to read it, do you?’

  ‘You’re supposed to put paper in the recycling bin,’ Christine argued back.

  ‘The trees are screaming,’ Irene plaintively commented, without looking up.

  ‘So what’s this story, then?’ Breen said, looking back at Pender. Pender finished typing another email, then sent it and looked up.

  ‘Okay. There’s this vicar. In a gay club.’ He paused.

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘There are obvious conclusions to be drawn.’

  ‘Are there?’

  ‘He’s a local vicar. This is a local paper. It’s a story.’

  ‘Is it, Pender. Is it?’ Breen got up from his perch. ‘So there’s a vicar who might be gay – what, are you expecting people to be surprised?’

  ‘A gay vicar in Little Collyweston will scandalise the majority of our readership,’ Pender pointed out. ‘It’s a local paper, remember who we’re aiming at – anybody with any social conscience, awareness or intelligence reads a proper newspaper.’

  Breen paced up and down next to the printers. ‘Okay, so you want to run a fucking vicar-in-a-gay-club story, at best that’s page nine or ten, it’s nothing. He could’ve been there for any number of reasons.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t fucking know!’ snapped Breen. ‘Serving the gay community, handing out gospel tracts to queers, use your imagination.’

  ‘I’ve been using my imagination. That’s why it’s a story.’

  ‘Is it, Pender. Is it?’ said Breen again, pacing more and pressing his fingers together next to his mouth. He stopped pacing and faced Pender. ‘Okay, Pender, if this is a story then we’ll run it, but I want facts, okay? A vicar popping into a gay club isn’t news. I want something we can run on the front page. I want scandal. Outrage.’

  ‘I’ll make something up.’

  ‘Get some facts to base it on, Pender, we can’t just make something up. It’s not like we’re the sports section, making up the fucking football figures.’

  Pender got up, reaching for his jacket. ‘I’ll go and do some investigative journalism, then,’ he said.

  ‘No you fucking won’t,’ Breen exploded, ‘sit down! I know what your kind of investigative journalism means, it means spending the rest of the fucking day in bed!’

  ‘Yeah, possibly with a vicar. I’ll bring you back some nice photos.’

  ‘Sit the fuck back down.’

  ‘You want a story,’ Pender said, strutting towards the door. ‘I’m going to get you one.’

  He didn’t look back to see Breen’s reaction, but carried on walking past Irene (who was just commenting to Christine that ‘I couldn’t believe that anyone would want to steal a wheelie bin’) and out of the office. He heard the door click shut behind him just as Mick Breen began another expletive-filled tirade.

  Once outside, he stopped at a newsagent’s and bought himself a pork pie, which he nibbled at thoughtfully as he wandered home in the cool spring air. There was no need to be in the office on a Friday – it was virtually the weekend. In any case, he was forming a plan that would involve his working on a Sunday morning, of all times.

  He spent the rest of the day in bed.

  Chapter 10

  On Saturday evening, Andy Biddle settled back in his bed to have another go at reading Weaving the Spell of Civilisation, the Indian novel that hadn’t made any kind of impression on him after seven months of attempting to be inspired by it. To Biddle, it seemed to do no more than recount in a rather dry, laboured style the comings and goings of an extremely uneventful Indian village, and the first sentence on the page he had reached brought the dullness of the village comings and goings back into his head so forcefully that he nearly gave up again straightaway. Honestly, for
all the incident the book contained, he might as well read about Little Collyweston.

  He started again and managed to read the same sentence several times over before realising that he had started reading, then finished the page before he realised he’d been concentrating on the thoughts in his head instead of the words in the book. He skipped back a few sentences, but it made no sense, so he read backwards to try and find a bit he recognised. He eventually found himself back at the first sentence, which he didn’t recognise either, so he read again from the beginning. Then he remembered that he had read the first sentence already – what was it he’d been thinking of then? He was already reading on, but again he wasn’t concentrating; he was now trying to recall what he’d been thinking about when he first read that sentence. A word halfway down the page caught his attention suddenly – hold on, he’d read that bit before, hadn’t he? Though he wasn’t sure what it was actually referring to. He looked at the sentence leading up to the bit he recognised, but it didn’t ring any bells.

  He needed to concentrate. For the third time, he started again, but felt so dispirited by reading the (now hugely familiar) first sentence that he couldn’t summon up enough energy to carry on.

  He put the book down on the duvet, staring ahead of him. There was too much in his head.

  Another week had passed and he had played his part in the usual comings and goings of village life, probably less successfully than usual. A lot of his energy in the last week had been spent excusing a sermon in which he had, for reasons even he had started to forget, explained how to make an omelette. He had also, he realised, spent the best part of a day shopping for clothes so as to look nice on a particularly unsuccessful charitable expedition to a gay club – if Gerard Feehan had been terrified of the whole concept of gay clubs before, God knows how he felt about the reality.

  Even leaving these disasters aside, what kind of impact could he really expect to make on – well, anything, really? He spent all his time dealing with tiny church problems rather than addressing the important issue of living. He was another week older, another week closer to death, without having completed anything of any eternal worth.