Читать книгу More Tea, Jesus? - James Lark - Страница 10

As Biddle cycled unsteadily up the darkening road towards his house some hours later than he had intended to return, he saw a small, hunched figure sitting on his doorstep. He sighed – if it was the drunk man needing the toilet again why couldn’t he use the bus stop like everyone else? But as Biddle got closer he saw that it wasn’t a man at all – or at least, barely.

‘It’s … Gerard, isn’t it?’ he asked, wishing he’d brought some chewing gum to cover up the Chianti still lingering on his breath. A pale face looked up at him through misted glasses.

‘Oh – er – Mr … Reverend Mr,’ the boy began, uncertainly.

‘I’m sorry, have you been waiting long?’ Biddle asked, hoping that his visitor had only come to leave some kind of message. He didn’t want to be uncharitable, but lunch with Bishop Slocombe had been more punishing than usual and right now what he needed more than anything else was a long soak in the bath with a good book. Not the Good Book, which wasn’t really designed for bath-time reading. He would have another stab at Weaving the Spell of Civilisation, an Indian novel which was not necessarily a good book either, but which had been recommended to him by a friend as brilliant and life-changing. It had proved to be neither; in fact, he had only ploughed on with it because he felt that it was the sort of multicultural writing he ought to be aware of as a vicar. After all, there might actually be people in his parish, even in his church, who had read it as well.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, remembering that there was a boy on his doorstep. ‘Did you – er …?’

‘It’s – I wanted to – there was something, to talk with you … about …’ Gerard Feehan said, earnestly and a little incomprehensibly.

Biddle sighed inwardly. A vicar’s work was never done.

‘Well,’ he said brightly, ‘you’d better come in, hadn’t you?’ He gave Gerard a broad, reassuring smile, then winced at the pain that suddenly shot from his tooth.

It wasn’t at all helpful that it hurt so much to smile. As a vicar, he saw it as one of his duties to smile a lot, especially when parishioners visited him and smiling was essential to put them at their ease.

On the other hand, he gathered from the worried look on Gerard’s face that it was going to take a lot more than smiling to put this visitor at ease. He needed something comforting, homely and even a little authoritative; it was on occasions such as these that the Victorian hostess trolley which he had found at a remarkably low price several years back really came into its own.

A while later, Biddle sat opposite Gerard Feehan in the vicarage living room with freshly poured tea and an atmosphere of comforting, homely authoritativeness. ‘I don’t know,’ Gerard Feehan was saying, his face contorted in thought. ‘My mother?’

Biddle restrained himself from saying ‘tsk’.

‘Gerard,’ he began, trying to maintain his kindliest voice whilst adding a subtle note of teacherly sternness. ‘What makes you think that your mother has anything to do with it?’

‘Well …’ Feehan shifted awkwardly in his armchair, almost knocking off the teacup on the saucer perched next to him. Biddle instinctively leapt forward to catch the cup; seeing the vicar lurching towards him, Feehan nervously bolted halfway out of his seat, this time actually knocking his cup of tea off the arm of the chair. Biddle narrowly reached it in time to avert disaster; the cup successfully caught, Feehan rather unnecessarily grabbed at it, almost succeeding in upsetting it for a third time. ‘Sorry, I’m sorry,’ he nervously apologised.

Biddle wondered if it might be an idea to start giving his parishioners tea in plain old mugs – possibly the ones that he got free from Leading in Love, a Christian organisation of whose actual aims he was unsure, unless they were to keep vicars supplied with mugs bearing their logo. He was growing aware that a whole generation had been brought up unequipped to deal with cups and saucers, or for that matter Victorian hostess trolleys; the trust won by his vicarly tea-serving utensils might not really be worth the risk to his carpet.

‘Erm … listen, not to worry, it’s only a carpet after all!’ he laughed, wincing at the resultant stab of pain in his tooth.

‘Are you alright?’ Feehan nervously enquired, anxiously holding the cup and saucer in place with a shaking hand.

‘It’s … nothing, just a tooth problem,’ Biddle explained.

‘You should see a dentist about it,’ Gerard suggested helpfully.

‘Yes. Thank you,’ Biddle replied. ‘You were telling me about your mother,’ he reminded Feehan.

‘Oh – well, I …’ The young man drew in a long breath and looked down at his knees. ‘I get on – my mother – with her, very well, you see.’ He coughed; he was not enjoying this conversation. He wasn’t sure if he really should have brought up the issue in the first place, and having done so he was wishing very much that he hadn’t. Conversations were not his strong point at the best of times, and this one was proving particularly difficult, especially since his words had started coming out in the wrong order.

‘Why do you think that has anything to do with the way you feel?’ Biddle asked, after a pause.

‘I thought …’ Feehan continued to look at his knees, and the hand resting on the saucer almost imperceptibly started to tilt. Biddle held back from leaping forward to steady it again. ‘I heard that – that what made people – it was – that it was – the relationship with your mother – to do with that, that made you …’

‘Nobody knows, Gerard,’ Biddle interrupted, unable to bear the boy’s misery, or his bizarre sentence structure, any longer. ‘Everybody has theories, nobody knows. Scientists don’t, psychologists don’t, vicars don’t.’ He looked at Feehan’s thin, unsmiling face and decided to play up the gentle kindness in his voice, eliminating the sternness altogether for the moment. ‘The point I was trying to make, Gerard, is that if you didn’t choose to be gay’ – Feehan shrunk away at the word ‘gay’, reminding Biddle how long it had taken the boy to explain exactly what he was worried about – ‘and let’s for the moment assume that your mother can’t be blamed, either,’ – a slight look of relief at this – ‘then what, or who, is it that made you how you are?’ Biddle looked expectantly at the serious young boy opposite him who refused to meet his eyes. The serious young boy stared blankly into the distance.

Biddle tried to suppress his growing exasperation. He would have preferred Gerard to work it out for himself, but the boy clearly didn’t need to be patronised at this time. ‘It must have been God, mustn’t it!’ he beamed, recoiling again at the sudden shooting pain in his jaw. He made a mental note to phone that dentist first thing in the morning.

‘Oh. Oh yeah.’ Feehan frowned slightly, as if trying to come to terms with this new concept.

‘And do you believe that God would create you in a particular way if it wasn’t what he wanted?’ pressed Biddle. He watched Feehan’s intense features grapple with this.

‘Do you mean …’ Feehan finally began, then stopped. He took off his glasses and fiddled with them, a look of thoughtful concentration on his face. ‘I suppose not,’ he finally concluded. A slight but significant chink had appeared in his stony expression.

‘There you are, then.’ He wondered how old Gerard was; the boy had a youthful face and a thin, wiry body, both of which matched his air of immaturity, but their opening conversation had established that he was no longer at school – Biddle thought the boy might actually be in his early twenties. Clearly there was some growing up to be done. Ideally away from his mother.

Feehan had been staring at his knees again – undoubtedly running over various objections to the common sense that had been introduced to him. He was probably about to bring the Bible into it, Biddle conjectured as he refilled his teacup.

‘Doesn’t the Bible say …’ began Feehan.

‘What the Bible says and how people interpret it are two very different things,’ Biddle said. He put the teapot back down on his Victorian hostess trolley. ‘We can talk about what the Bible says as much as you want, Gerard, but you need to work out what it says to you, not what other people have told you it says.’

‘But ’ Feehan was clearly still struggling with the intensity of the thoughts running through his mind. ‘What would it mean if my mother did …’

His mother again. Perhaps some sort of accident ought to be arranged.

He quickly repented of the thought.

‘Gerard,’ he said. ‘You are who you are. That is something that you need to accept. It’s a good thing.’ An unwilling smile slowly began to spread across Feehan’s face. Encouraged, Biddle added, ‘Wasn’t one of the main things Jesus said “do not be afraid”?’

Something clicked into place in Gerard’s mind, a minor epiphany which lit up his eyes with his newfound understanding of a great truth. ‘Mr – Reverend, I mean, Biddle?’

‘You can call me Andy,’ smiled Andy, gratified to see the effects his wisdom was having on the boy at last.

‘This morning – the omelette it – you made was – it was about human sexuality, wasn’t it?’

Biddle continued to smile, half closing his eyes in thought. Finally, he opened them again and looked at Feehan’s bright, excited face.

‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘That’s right.’

It was completely dark by the time Gerard walked out of the vicarage, still feeling a little uncertain but comforted by the reassuring glow of having had a thing that had been worrying him a lot explained in a way that had made enough sense at the time for him to feel less worried about it now. As reassuring glows go it wasn’t exactly rock solid, but that was about as reassuring as it ever got for Gerard Feehan.

In the moonless night he almost bumped into the stranger walking in the opposite direction up the path to the vicarage and he leapt backwards in terror, stumbling into a bush. The stranger caught hold of his arm before he fell and Gerard regained the closest he ever really came to an upright position, panting slightly and waiting for his thumping pulse to return to a normal speed. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ the stranger chuckled, and carried on up the path. Gerard scurried away back to his home.

Biddle heard the faint knock at his door and sighed. A minute later and the bath would have been running and he probably wouldn’t have even heard the knocking. For all that the person knocking knew, he was already in the bath. So what real difference would it make to the person knocking if he ignored it?

He glanced at his watch. It was probably that drunk man wanting to use his toilet again. Unless it was Gerard, back with more concerns. Either way, it was late and it had been a long, trying day. Whoever was knocking, they could surely wait until tomorrow. Except for the drunk man, who could use his own toilet.

There was another knock, quiet but insistent, and Biddle had another brief struggle with his conscience. His conscience didn’t put up much of a fight; he really needed that warm bath.