More Tea, Jesus?

by James Lark

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I think …’ Sloper drew in a deep breath. ‘When I got home from choir … I found that my harpsichord had gone missing.’ Biddle nodded with an encouraging smile, then realised what Sloper had said and quickly replaced his smile with a look of concern.

  ‘You need to tell the police, Ted, not me.’

  ‘Yes … no, no, the thing is …’ Sloper leant forward. ‘I think that it might have been taken by Jesus.’

  It took Biddle several seconds to try and make sense of this new statement. ‘Why do you think that, exactly, Ted?’ he slowly asked.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit strange?’ Ted asked, hoarsely. ‘Jesus turns up, then my harpsichord disappears?’

  ‘I think Jesus has got better things to do than play your harpsichord, Ted.’ Biddle frowned. Did Ted know something that he didn’t? Could the Alpha and Omega be spending his time playing a stolen harpsichord in a secret location?

  ‘No, but … I think he’s taken it … as a punishment.’

  Again, it took Biddle a significant amount of time to absorb this idea.

  ‘Why a punishment?’

  ‘Because I used all those swear words in the rehearsal. Because I blasphemed.’

  Biddle considered this. Ted had indeed used quite a lot of swear words in the rehearsal, and let out an ill-considered ‘Jesus fucking Christ’ … but surely Jesus wasn’t the type to waste time confiscating musical instruments because of that?

  ‘I’m not sure Jesus even noticed you swearing,’ Biddle said, unconvincingly. ‘He’s very busy with … with other things.’

  ‘Of course he noticed,’ snorted Ted, ‘he’s God, isn’t he?’

  ‘Well … yes,’ admitted Biddle.

  ‘So … what do I do? How do I get my harpsichord back? Do I need to repent, or … or … do I need absolution, whatever that is?’

  ‘Repenting’s never a bad idea,’ Biddle said, thoughtfully. ‘But … I’m just not sure that Jesus has got your harpsichord. You’ll have to speak to him.’

  ‘No!’ Sloper hurriedly said. ‘No, I can’t do that.’

  ‘I’ll ask him, then,’ reasoned Biddle. ‘Would you mind?’

  ‘Not at all. As I said, I’m not sure he will have it, but …’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Ted, his respect for Biddle having experienced a sudden, unexpected growth. ‘I … I really appreciate that.’ He turned to leave, then turned back quickly. ‘I mean … as long as you don’t think it will make him angry?’

  ‘I think it will be fine,’ Biddle reassured Sloper, seeing him to the door.

  Chapter 22

  Gerard Feehan was in hell.

  His mother had not spoken a word to him since sending him upstairs to his room two evenings ago. She had continued to put food on the table for him at the usual times, but she did so without speaking or looking at him, apparently without even noticing that he had come to eat it. It was worse than disdain – it was dismissal.

  Apart from these wordless, miserable mealtimes, Gerard had been sitting tearfully in his room wondering exactly what his mother had heard – how she had heard – and whether she would ever forgive him. And waiting for the phone to ring.

  Gerard had given Pender Gannit his telephone number before leaving him and it was now a constant source of worry. He was worried that Pender would ring, that Pender would end up talking to his mother, which under the present circumstances might be the worst possible thing to happen.

  But Gerard was also desperately wishing that the phone would ring, that he would be able to talk to Pender again. Each distant noise in the house made him jump up with a start, full of hope, full of fear … but the phone rarely rang in the Feehan household.

  On the one occasion when it had, Gerard had felt his heart leap into his mouth so that he could actually feel it there, pumping away on top of his tongue and choking him; unable to breathe, he had crept to the top of the stairs and listened to his mother picking up the telephone – please God don’t let it be him, talking to Mother – but let it be him, forget the consequences, it had to be him – but Gerard wasn’t sure he even could talk to Pender, not now – he didn’t want to, that was it, he didn’t really want to anyway …

  And when Mrs Feehan’s muttered responses on the telephone made it apparent that it wasn’t Pender at all, Gerard had returned to his room overcome with despair. It had been several days now – had something gone wrong? Had Pender lost the number?

  Or didn’t Pender care about him enough to get in touch?

  Worst still, what if Pender was with somebody else? This idea tormented Gerard most of all, the thought of Pender in bed with another person, giving his love to a different body as freely as he’d given it to Gerard. The image would quickly become unbearable and Gerard would force it from his mind, but it always remained somewhere far back in his consciousness, a niggling insecurity that constantly threatened to force itself back into Gerard’s thoughts.

  Why hadn’t he asked Pender for his phone number? Perhaps Pender had forgotten that Gerard didn’t have his number and was waiting for Gerard to ring him. Maybe Pender was going through the same agony as Gerard.

  That, Gerard knew, was pretty unlikely. He also knew that the likelihood was that Pender really didn’t care all that much, and probably wouldn’t be all that interested in getting in touch again. But Gerard still hoped against hope that the telephone would ring and that it would be for him, Pender saying, ‘I’m so sorry I haven’t phoned sooner, I lost the bit of paper your number was written on, but I’d really like to meet up again … if you’d like to …?’

  And they would meet up and see each other, smiling, hug each other, talk nervously … Pender would say how much he had missed Gerard, Gerard would admit that he thought he might be falling in love with Pender, who wouldn’t say anything, he would just grin and kiss Gerard and hold on to him tenderly …

  These fantasies offered Gerard occasional moments of respite from his torture; having slept no more than a few hours over the last couple of nights, he found that the images in his head were beginning to take on a more solid form, almost more real than the bedroom he was entombed in. But, as each fantasy faded back into unreality, Gerard would be left with an even greater sense of hopelessness, an empty loneliness that seemed more real and tangible than anything else.

  He had woken from an uneasy hour’s sleep in the early hours of the morning and felt Pender’s form in the bed next to him, and in a state of half-sleep he had experienced Pender leaning over him and kissing him. He had woken with a jolt in an empty bed and another wave of loneliness had swept over him. As he huddled in his bed, shaking and sobbing, he felt that he had never been so afraid.

  There was not even anyone to pray to: God had deserted him. Gerard knew that God could not be interested in somebody who had sinned as he had. God had turned his eyes away from Gerard even before his mother had, and it was no more than he deserved. He was on his own.

  The loneliness, combined with the tension of not knowing what was going to happen, what his mother would do and whether Pender would ring back, was more than he could bear – it was, he felt, threatening to kill him. But he was trapped; there was nothing he could do and nowhere he could go, so he continued to wait, trapped with his unbearable thoughts which went round and round in his head but led nowhere.

  Meanwhile, Mrs Feehan sat in her living room, motionless in her hard-backed armchair. Sometimes she looked at the framed pictures in the room, all of them showing the same boy. The smiling face of the baby in his pram, the colours slightly faded now but the memory still warm and happy. The toddler in the snow, wrapped up in so many clothes that it was impossible to make out his face (which was just as well, because at the time he was monotonously crying on account of the cold). The small, frightened blond boy on his first day at school. And the same boy as he had grown older, still in school uniform, still pale and awkward, his face growing in seriousness with each passing year. And him as a young man, standing next to Mrs Fee
han, his arm tentatively encircling her rigid shoulders, her stern face next to his …

  A mother with her only child. Her boy, the boy she had brought up on her own.

  Mrs Feehan had not, however, been enjoying happy memories. As she had glanced from photograph to photograph, frozen in time in their frames, they had only made clearer the indignity of what had happened. The corruption that had been visited upon her family. The look on their faces testifies against them; they parade their sin like Sodom …

  The pale boy in the photographs had been irredeemably corrupted by Reverend Andy Biddle.

  The very thought of the name made Mrs Feehan’s body tense up; she was sitting so rigidly that she ran a serious risk of cracking down the middle.

  At mealtimes, she would stand up from her chair and prepare food for two people. She could not bring herself to look at, or even think about, the other figure who ate with her. She prepared meals for two people because that was what she had always done. But she knew that things could not continue to go on as they had always done.

  Woe to them! They have brought disaster upon themselves. The Lord had rained down burning sulphur on Sodom and Gomorrah, and so he might justly choose to punish her own tainted household. It was surely for such events that her house was insured against Acts of God. But burning sulphur could not be relied upon in twenty-first-century England and, this being the case, she would not recoil from her duties as a vessel of the Lord’s castigation. She had considered the situation and consulted the scriptures and the instructions of the Lord were very clear. Fortunately, the Lord had also supplied her with the means to deal out the allotted penalty, so there was no need for burning sulphur.

  Woe to the wicked! Disaster is upon them! They will be paid back for what their hands have done.

  Yes, there would be a reckoning. Not only with the boy – with the vicar.

  Chapter 23

  On Saturday morning, Jesus beat Biddle into the kitchen again; this time, Biddle found the Son of God making an omelette.

  ‘You were quite right about not whisking the eggs for too long,’ Jesus commented. ‘Otherwise it comes out as more of a soufflé, doesn’t it?’ Biddle smiled and nodded sheepishly. For a moment, he thought about telling Jesus at length how he planned to use the omelette illustration in a series of sermons, but thought better of it. There was, he was sure, no fooling Jesus.

  ‘Actually, I wanted to speak to you about preaching,’ said Biddle brightly. ‘I wondered if you might be interested in doing the sermon this Sunday.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No pressure, you understand, if you haven’t got time, but since you’re here I thought …’

  ‘Yes,’ repeated Jesus. ‘I’ll preach on Sunday.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Biddle, elated. Having Jesus Christ preach ought to raise the communion on Sunday morning to a whole new level. ‘It only needs to be about ten minutes, ideally not too heavy, either – the children will be out at Sunday school, but some of the adults prefer it to be kept simple.’ Biddle noticed Jesus’ unmoving face. ‘But … whatever you see fit to say, really,’ he hurriedly added. Jesus nodded, and tipped the omelette out of the frying pan onto a plate.

  ‘Would you like this one?’

  ‘Oh… please.’ Biddle took the plate and tucked into the omelette. It tasted divine, and he was sure that he couldn’t only put that down to his recipe. ‘Oh,’ he added, his mouth half-full, then chewed and swallowed before going on, ‘the other thing was that tonight is our parish entertainment. You probably heard in the notices the other week …’ Jesus nodded, beating together some eggs to make a second omelette. ‘You don’t have to come, if you’re too busy,’ Biddle reassured him, ‘but you’d be very welcome … er … if you’re not.’

  ‘It’s a slightly odd time to be having a parish entertainment,’ Jesus commented. Biddle cleared his throat awkwardly. He’d had a feeling that Jesus might notice that.

  ‘That’s exactly what I said,’ he chuckled nervously.

  It was, indeed, exactly what he had said. To have an evening of light-hearted parish fun at the start of Holy Week, the most serious week in the church calendar and the climax of the sombre period of Lent, seemed downright inappropriate. When he had been informed by the parochial church council – by Sathan Petty-Saphon, to be precise – about the plans for the church entertainment, Biddle had immediately responded that it couldn’t possibly take place at such a time.

  But there were complicated reasons why his attempts to move it had failed. Firstly, it had been explained to him that it was a church tradition that the parish entertainment was always held on the Saturday before Holy Week.

  ‘There are some traditions in every church that are not good traditions,’ Biddle had said with a smile, ‘and I’m afraid that I think this might be one of them.’

  Ah, but it wasn’t just a tradition for the sake of it. Biddle remained unclear about the details, but Petty-Saphon had explained that the vicar before last had instigated the parish entertainment as the beginning of Holy Week as a rather radical move to free the church from its rigid adherence to unnecessary ritual and an unnatural, unscriptural domination of attitude and mood by the church year – the vicar before last had, it seemed, been a bit like that. Whilst the idea had, at the time, proved deeply unpopular with the congregation, and in its early years many people had resented and even tried to oppose the parish entertainment, the same vicar had, on dying, left a significant bequest to the church of St Barnabas and many of the older members of the congregation felt that as long as his money continued to ensure that St Barnabas was able to serve coffee and biscuits free of charge after every service, it was a matter of honour to retain the positioning of the entertainment which he had established.

  In any case, it was already on the calendar now, and moving a date already fixed on the St Barnabas calendar would be like moving a mountain. It simply wasn’t possible.

  Biddle had eventually concluded that trying to change a fixture that had taken on a sacred quality to the members of the church wasn’t worth it, so he had reluctantly resigned himself to the inappropriate start to Holy Week and decided that, in the name of leading his congregation and maintaining a relationship with the community, he had better throw himself into it with some enthusiasm.

  None of which he felt in a particularly good position to explain to Jesus, so he skirted round the issue by saying that it would be a lot of fun and reiterating the fact that Jesus was more than welcome to come along if he was able to.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ Jesus promised.

  ‘And of course,’ Biddle added, encouraged by this vindication from the man whose opinion really mattered, ‘if you’re at all interested in … uh …’ Suddenly he realised that what he was about to ask was even more inappropriate than the date of the entertainment, and he broke off, embarrassed.

  ‘Yes?’ Jesus looked at him, eyebrows raised.

  ‘I was just going to say … if you wanted to perform anything …’ Jesus looked back, questioningly. ‘In the performance. The show.’ Biddle coughed, trying to hide his discomfiture.

  ‘What sort of performance would you be after?’ enquired Jesus, as his omelette sizzled away.

  ‘Oh, anything, apparently,’ Biddle said. ‘I wasn’t here last year, but from what I gather it’s mainly songs. Some people do sketches, or read poems – I’m told there’s a man called Tony Paton who can do impressions of all the British Prime Ministers and Zippy from Rainbow …’ Biddle frowned. ‘To be honest, I’ve never met him. I suspect that the entertainment is the only church event he ever comes to.’

  ‘What will you be performing?’ Jesus said, a wry smile playing around his lips.

  ‘I was going to sing My Way,’ enthused Biddle, ‘only I thought that it wasn’t very scripturally sound to be singing about doing it my way, being a vicar and everything.’

  ‘Very true,’ Jesus agreed.

  ‘So I’ve written a new version called Thy Way.’

  Jesus was
suddenly busying himself arranging the second omelette on a plate so his back was turned, but Biddle was pretty sure the saviour of the world was smiling in approval. He hardly liked to put a spanner in the works, but a promise was a promise.

  ‘There was … er … one other thing …’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Did you … uh … This might sound like an odd thing to say …’ Biddle shifted his feet, nervously, and put another piece of omelette in his mouth, which conveniently delayed the question for a little longer.

  ‘You want to know if I took Ted Sloper’s harpsichord?’ Jesus suggested.

  Biddle nearly choked on his omelette. ‘Erm … did you?’ He coughed.

  ‘No,’ replied Jesus. ‘Bernard Lomas took Ted Sloper’s harpsichord.’

  ‘Ah!’ nodded Biddle, as if everything had suddenly clicked into place. In fact, Jesus’ answer raised several further questions, but Biddle thought that he had probably asked enough for one morning.

  Gerard Feehan walked up to his bedroom door for the fourteenth time, his heart thumping, his mind too confused with different emotions to properly evaluate what he was doing.

  He couldn’t. He hadn’t even thought of doing anything like this before.

  But things hadn’t ever been like this before.

  And his mind insisted that this was the only way, that if he didn’t do something, he’d be miserable forever.

  He felt his legs weaken at the thought, the idea that he was actually going to do it, going to take action. He put his hand on his door handle and let it rest there, struggling with the part of his brain that was telling him to let go and give up and go back to lying miserably on his bed as he had done sixteen times before.

  No. This was it. He was going to do it.

  He opened the door and before he could change his mind he went through it, and crept towards the stairs. He put one foot after another on the steps, clutching the banister in the hope of taking some of the weight off his deafeningly loud footsteps – surely Mother had heard him by now – but he was at the bottom now and moving quietly down the hallway, towards the front door. He didn’t pause, he didn’t look back; his heart was pounding so loudly he was sure that even if nothing else had given him away it was bound to alert his mother to what he was doing, but he didn’t look round, he continued towards the front door, undid the latch as quietly as possible, started to open the door …