More Tea, Jesus?

This, Biddle knew, could only lead to territory to be averted in any way possible. ‘My word, these rock cakes are fantastic!’ he exclaimed, thrusting one into his mouth and unintentionally completing his distraction by uttering a loud scream. Slocombe and Milne stared at him in astonishment. ‘Um …’ Biddle began, apologetically removing a bloody rock cake from his mouth, ‘I think I’ve broken a tooth.’

The argument might have been curtailed earlier had any of the participants been in possession of the truth about what Jesus was doing at that very moment.

Since the end of the family service at St Barnabas, Jesus had been in no position to move any chairs at all, having hurried away to catch a bus to nearby Cogspool where he was working at a local homeless shelter that had recently started offering free Sunday lunches to those in need. He had quickly cleaned the toilets before the doors were opened, only to discover that today there was a problem.

‘Oh Jesus,’ complained Roy Hackett, who ran the shelter and had no idea how precisely his expletive was targeted. ‘I told them we needed more bacon, they’ve gone and forgotten the sodding bacon, and now there’s no bacon.’ The bacon situation now as clear as it could possibly be, Jesus softly enquired what had been on the menu. ‘Eggs and bacon. We always do eggs and bacon.’ Roy’s approach to cuisine was functional rather than artistic. ‘I would suggest bacon constitutes a good fifty-sodding-per-cent of that particular dish,’ he added, in case his volunteer hadn’t quite picked up on the full ramifications of the bacon deficiency.

‘So … you have eggs?’ Jesus responded, calmly.

‘That would be the other fifty per cent, yes,’ Roy impatiently replied.

‘Fine,’ nodded Jesus. ‘I’ve just the recipe.’

‘What, eggs and eggs?’ Roy sarcastically countered.

‘In the form of an omelette,’ Jesus agreed.

‘Oh, right.’ Roy poked his head out of the kitchen door and squinted; the shelter was filling up fast and there seemed to be rather a lot of new faces today. ‘Though we’ll run out of eggs I expect.’

‘Don’t worry,’ the new volunteer smiled back, ‘I’m good at making food go round a lot of people.’

Biddle had indeed broken a tooth, a diversion which caused Bishop Slocombe considerable merriment and Biddle considerable pain. In the long run, however, Biddle had achieved the near impossible feat of bringing the argument about serving to an end before it got violent, so he began to feel that in his own minor way he had managed to martyr himself.

Had God broken his tooth to prevent violence? Was this actually an act of divine intervention, he an unwitting pawn in a cruel trade-off for a greater good in the midst of a larger game? Was that what being a priest was all about?

As the Bishop administered more wine (the best he had to offer by way of an anaesthetic), Biddle explained that he had been in his new parish for so short a time that he hadn’t yet managed to register with a dentist.

‘Oh, you mustn’t worry about that,’ Slocombe exclaimed, refilling Biddle’s glass, ‘you must go to my dentist. He’s in Cogspool – he does every priest in the area.’

Biddle was not convinced that this was the best qualification for a dentist.

Chapter 4

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 …’