by James Lark
‘There won’t be any trouble,’ Bernard shouted back, aggrieved that his beautiful revenge, his gift to Harriet, was being spurned. ‘I can get it back to him, it’s all in one piece, why on earth would there be any trouble?’
‘Because Jesus is here!’ Harriet shrieked, then flopped, exhausted, onto the sofa, sobbing hysterically.
Bernard looked down at his wife impatiently. He didn’t object to the church thing, but you could take it all a bit too far – and it was a bit late to be raising moral objections now.
‘Love, I know you’ve been at church, but don’t think you can suddenly bring Jesus into this. You didn’t worry about him when I first suggested the plan.’
‘But I didn’t know he was going to be here!’ wailed Harriet.
‘If you believe in him at all, then surely you believe that he’s everywhere,’ Bernard reasoned. ‘No, he’s here! Here, in Little Collyweston!’ Harriet clenched her fists in frustration – why was Bernard being so slow?
‘What are you talking about?’ Bernard wondered if singing in the choir with that Sloper man was getting too much for Harriet – she seemed to be breaking down under the pressure.
‘It was terrible, Bernard, he was there in the church looking at me, all the time he was looking at me and I knew that he knew that I knew what you were doing …’
‘Who was in the church?’
‘Jesus was. And … oh, it was dreadful, Sathan was talking away to him afterwards and asking him round for dinner, and I wanted to get there first, Bernard. Jesus should be coming to our house for dinner, but I couldn’t talk to him because all the time …’
‘Wait …’
‘… he was looking at me, staring and staring, and he knew…’
‘Wait, are you trying to say that there was somebody in the choir rehearsal saying he was Jesus?’
‘He is Jesus!’ shouted Harriet.
‘Like hell,’ snorted Bernard. ‘I’ll sort him out, I’m telling you – turning up and taking advantage of a naive church choir …’
‘Are you saying I’m naive?’ Harriet asked, suddenly angry.
‘No, but it’s obvious that …’
‘You think I’m gullible, do you?’
‘Yes,’ said Bernard decisively, suddenly deciding that the moment for tact was long since over. ‘Yes, I think that sometimes you are completely gullible, and I’m not going to have some arsehole taking advantage of that fact by going around pretending to be Jesus!’
Harriet gasped. ‘You will go to hell for that, Bernard Lomas,’ she hissed, ‘calling Jesus an arsehole.’
‘I didn’t call Jesus an arsehole, I called this man who is not Jesus an arsehole.’
‘He is Jesus!’
‘Don’t be so stupid, woman!’ Bernard shouted.
‘You’re the one who’ll look stupid when Jesus catches up with you,’ Harriet threatened tearfully, ‘calling him an arsehole and stealing a harpsichord. Well, I wash my hands of it all!’
‘Do you indeed?’ fumed Bernard, and stormed out of the living room. Harriet was left alone with her tears and Ted Sloper’s harpsichord.
Ted Sloper wearily reached his house after the choir rehearsal. He was worried that he hadn’t made a particularly good impression on Jesus. He wished somebody had warned him that the Lamb of God was going to be visiting, so that he could have arranged to be on holiday at the same time.
Going into his house, he was dimly aware of something having changed: his living room felt larger, somehow, and blander. But he couldn’t put his finger on what it was that had altered, so he presumed it was simply his mood. The rehearsal had got to him, obviously – that Petty-Saphon woman turning up had put him in the wrong frame of mind from the start, and then there had been all that arguing about the (in his opinion) utterly irrelevant topic of homosexuality. Jesus turning up to listen had been the icing on the cake.
He sighed and went into the kitchen to see if there was any beer in his fridge. There wasn’t, so he poured himself a whisky.
He had done his best not to say anything offensive, and for a while he had managed not to say too many swear words. The problem was that once he had got into the swing of the rehearsal, he’d kind of forgotten that Jesus was still in the church.
It had definitely been a mistake to call Anne a ‘fat lazy fucking cow’, even if it was essentially true. He was used to calling her what he liked, because the pillar that obscured her view also seemed to prevent her from hearing anything he said.
But Jesus hadn’t been behind the pillar.
Ted winced to himself as he recalled the expletives that had erupted from his mouth after five minutes of the choir failing to understand his simple instruction to turn to If Ye Love Me on page 78 of their anthem book. He suspected that even Jesus, who was technically omniscient, had learned something new at that point.
On the other hand, when he had commented, ‘If Tallis had directed a choir like you, he would have discovered atonality three hundred years too soon,’ he was sure that there had been a snigger from where Jesus was sitting. It certainly hadn’t come from the choir, where his comment had been met by the usual row of blank, uncomprehending faces.
Had it been a snigger? Or was it a sigh of disapproval? Either way, Jesus wouldn’t have found much to snigger about in the rest of the rehearsal. Ted had made his greatest faux pas when the choir was singing through a descant for Praise the Lord, the King of Heaven. Noreen Ponty had enthusiastically entered a third above the note she was meant to come in on, and Ted’s frantic and angry gestures, followed by, ‘Noreen, you’re a fucking third too high!’ had been answered only by a look of confusion from Noreen and a renewed vigour in her singing. Finally, at the highest point of the descant, Noreen had reached a note that even a professional soprano would not attempt without first seeking medical advice. On hearing her piercingly shrill effort, Ted had exploded, ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’, remembering precisely three words too late that the man himself was sitting a few yards away.
Maybe he should have apologised. But he had felt a little ashamed when the rehearsal had finished, and there had been plenty of tidying up to busy himself with to ensure that he didn’t have to meet Jesus properly.
He poured himself another whisky and wondered how long Jesus was planning to stay for. Maybe there was still time to book that holiday.
His evening got significantly worse about half an hour later, when he discovered what it was that had changed about his house. Having decided to play through the Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Minor from book one of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, his favourite piece of reassuringly bleak music, he went to sit down at his harpsichord only to realise that it had gone.
Not understanding quite how this had happened, he continued to stand looking around his living room in silent astonishment for several minutes, clutching his copy of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
He went to check in his conservatory. It wasn’t there, either. And why would it be? He hadn’t moved it. There was no reason to move it. Especially not into the conservatory, where it was too damp to keep a harpsichord anyway.
He returned to the living room, still clutching his Bach, and had another look around. The harpsichord was still missing.
Under normal circumstances, he would have panicked and quite probably phoned the police immediately. But the first thought that entered his head was that the disappearance of his harpsichord might have something to do with his lack of verbal restraint when the Lion of the Tribe of Judah had been watching him.
Could Jesus have made his harpsichord disappear as a punishment for blaspheming?
And if that was what had happened, could Ted justifiably report it to the police? He was the one who had done something wrong, after all, and if the Son of God decided to disappear his harpsichord as a result, might the police support the action as the natural course of justice? Blaspheming, Ted knew, was officially a pretty awful sin.
This being the case, what did Ted have to do to get his harpsichord back?
If he was honest about it, he was rather scared of meeting Jesus again. But he did want his harpsichord back, very much.
Of course, there was a chance that his harpsichord had simply been stolen, in which case he ought to report it immediately. But he was reluctant to take this course of action while there was any risk that Jesus might have caused the disappearance. He didn’t want to end up looking stupid.
He slumped on his sofa dejectedly. He had no idea what to do. The man to talk to, he supposed, was Reverend Biddle – but there was a strong possibility that a visit to the vicarage would engender a meeting with Jehovah, something he was keen to avoid.
Ted tried phoning the vicarage, but it was engaged.
‘Christ,’ he muttered bitterly, then bit his tongue, glancing around in fear that his piano might suddenly disappear as well.
Chapter 21
‘The point is not to tell Jesus where he should eat,’ Sathan Petty-Saphon explained, ‘it is to ensure that should Jesus need to eat, he will know where to go. That is why I suggest we set up a rota.’
Biddle sighed. Sathan Petty-Saphon had been talking to him on the telephone for nearly half an hour now, and his patience was wearing dangerously thin. ‘I don’t think he does need places to eat, Sathan,’ he explained. ‘I’ve told him that he is welcome to any of the food in my house. But the only thing he’s eaten so far is a couple of fish he cooked for breakfast, and now I think about it, I’m pretty sure I didn’t have any fish in the house to begin with so I suspect he either caught his own, or made them out of the five loaves I had in the bread bin.’
‘Really?’ asked Petty-Saphon suspiciously. ‘Are the bread loaves gone?’
‘It was a joke.’ Biddle sighed. ‘I didn’t really have five bread loaves in the bread bin.’
‘But that’s exactly the point I’m making: do you have enough bread in your bread bin, in case Jesus needs bread?’
‘My house is pretty well-stocked,’ Biddle reassured her. ‘Except for a lack of real coffee and gin, I think I’ve got everything Jesus might need.’ He could sense Sathan Petty-Saphon’s annoyance seeping down the telephone line. ‘In any case, as I’ve been trying to say, he doesn’t seem to need anything.’
‘Well, he looked like he needed a good solid meal to me. He’s too skinny.’
‘Sathan, you can’t say that about the Messiah.’
‘I don’t see why not. If he looks like he needs feeding up, then it’s because he does and, as Anglicans, we are the obvious people to do it.’
‘Sathan,’ Biddle struggled to drill his point home to her, ‘Jesus did decline your offer of dinner.’
‘He politely turned down the offer so as not to cause me too much trouble,’ Petty-Saphon contradicted him.
‘I don’t think that it was a polite refusal,’ Biddle insisted. ‘I think he didn’t want to go.’ The comment was received with a moment’s silence; so rare was this in a conversation with Sathan Petty-Saphon that Biddle hastily went on, ‘I think he’s just too busy.’
‘Doing what?’ demanded Petty-Saphon.
‘I don’t know,’ Biddle replied miserably. This was something of a sore topic – it was all very well to have a special guest like Jesus staying, but Jesus seemed to have his own agenda. Biddle had no idea what was on it, but it was getting in the way of Biddle’s plans. Jesus had completely ignored all hints that he might want to stay in with a bottle of Cuvée Prestige and watch The Mission. Where the Deliverer was now, Biddle had no idea, though he currently felt in need of some form of deliverance, if only from Sathan Petty-Saphon.
‘Reverend Biddle,’ Sathan Petty-Saphon said, as if beginning a new paragraph in a lengthy diatribe, ‘I’m going to be blunt. Do you really feel that the vicarage is the right place for Jesus to be staying.’ It wasn’t a question, so much as a statement that the vicarage was absolutely not the right place for Jesus to be staying.
‘Of course it’s the right place for Jesus to stay,’ Biddle answered irritably. ‘It’s the vicarage, which belongs to the church. It therefore belongs to him. If anybody shouldn’t be there, it’s me.’
‘Theoretically that’s all true,’ agreed Petty-Saphon, ‘it’s simply that other people in the parish have bigger and, if we’re honest, nicer houses, and I would hope that Jesus could be given as suitably illustrious a welcome as we are able to offer.’
‘I see.’
‘All I wanted to make clear was that, should you see fit to move Jesus to a bigger residence – and after all, it can’t be easy for you, either, having him in your way all the time …’
‘He’s not in my way,’ Biddle snapped, now audibly annoyed. He wished that Jesus was in his way. He wished he knew where the hell Jesus was.
Well – not where the hell, naturally. That was an inappropriate expression. Wherever Jesus was, it certainly wasn’t hell.
In fact, Jesus was in Cogspool, which was a little less like hell than an evening eating dinner with Sathan Petty-Saphon. Instead, he was eating kebabs with the homeless and disenfranchised; the food was hellish, but to the homeless and disenfranchised it might as well have been a gourmet meal – it was food that they needed, and it was welcome. Furthermore, in the company of Jesus it somehow tasted a hundred times better than anything they’d ever eaten before.
‘We’ve done church, yeah?’ one of the homeless people told Jesus, his mouth half-full of gourmet kebab. ‘The vicar down the road, he’s alright. Always got the doors open. I sometimes, like, go inside for a bit. Not when they’re doin’ religion, though.’
‘Nah, we’re not religious,’ a younger man agreed. ‘Don’t understand all that talkin’ Catholic over each other, but it’s, like, friendly, an’ he’s a good man. Keeps ’is eye open for us, y’know.’
‘Father Alex,’ the other continued. ‘Know ’im?’
Jesus nodded. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘I know him.’
As they gratefully ate every last mouthful of their kebabs, Jesus explained to them what went on inside his Father’s house. They listened in rapt silence, until Jesus finally asked them to come home with him.
It was an open invitation he had been extending to anybody and everybody, but the people who were interested were mainly the homeless and disenfranchised.
‘But, should things become difficult, that’s all, my house is always open to him.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Petty-Saphon.’
‘Sathan, please. Now …’
Biddle groaned. That ‘now’ was the start of yet another paragraph. Not for the first time that evening, he muttered a quick prayer pleading for some excuse to put the phone down. ‘I presume you’ve told Jesus about the parish entertainment tomorrow?’
‘Yes,’ Biddle answered uncertainly. The topic must have come up when he was putting out chairs, even if he couldn’t remember specifically telling Jesus about the event.
‘Is he coming?’
‘I … it seems probable that he has other things to do.’ Biddle felt that if Jesus wasn’t keen to see The Mission, he was unlikely to make a great effort to come to the parish entertainment, which didn’t even feature Jeremy Irons.
‘Hmmph.’ This clearly wasn’t good enough for Sathan Petty-Saphon. ‘Perhaps you could impress on him that it is one of the most important social events on our church calendar. Since he has come to visit our church, I feel he would want to be made properly aware of the event.’
‘Yes, yes,’ muttered Biddle, thoroughly irked that Sathan Petty-Saphon was giving him orders to relay to Christ, which in terms of hierarchy was entirely the wrong way round.
‘He might even like to take part.’
‘Doing what?’ Biddle asked, incredulously. ‘You want him to get up onstage and perform his greatest miracles for us?’
‘He might like to do something,’ Petty-Saphon insisted. ‘Perhaps he could tell a parable. Which brings me to the matter of Sunday.’
‘What about Sunday?’ Biddle asked, through gritted teeth.
‘I wonder if you should a
sk Jesus if he would like to preach?’
Biddle was furious that he hadn’t thought of it himself. ‘Of course I’ve asked him to preach.’
‘And?’
‘He …’ Biddle paused. ‘He said he’d think about it.’
‘I’m slightly concerned that …’ Sathan Petty-Saphon’s concern was interrupted by Biddle’s doorbell. He sighed in relief.
‘Excuse me, I think that’s Jesus now,’ he told her. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to discuss this another time.’ He hurriedly put the telephone down without waiting for a response, feeling a simultaneous stab of guilt at what, in his job, constituted an unprofessional level of rudeness.
When he opened his front door, he was surprised to see that there was nobody outside. He looked around, whilst the idea that Jesus might have turned himself invisible flickered into his mind. He dismissed the idea quickly – there was no example in scripture of Jesus turning himself invisible, so what possible reason would there be to do it in Little Collyweston?
Biddle was about to close the door when he heard a voice hissing at him. ‘Vicar!’ it said.
‘Yes?’ Biddle replied, for he was indeed the vicar. ‘Who is that?’
Ted Sloper’s face emerged from the bushes opposite Biddle’s house.
‘Is Jesus there?’ Sloper enquired, still hissing.
‘No, I’m afraid he’s—’
‘Thank God,’ said Sloper, darting out of the bushes and into the vicarage.
Bemused, Biddle closed the front door after him.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘I need your advice,’ panted Sloper. There was a wild, distraught look in his face.
‘That’s what I’m here for,’ Biddle said, with a smile.
Sloper observed Biddle’s smile morosely – did the man never have a bad day? ‘It’s … er … complicated,’ he started.