CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: THE MISTRESS OF COMPARATIVE RELIGIONS

Has Griselda met her match in the lecture on comparative religion...?

Miss Damienne Bustthruster proved she was a single unmarried personage with every breath she took and every other lady she stalked when the mood was on her. She was a great mass of womanhood, from her swollen ankles, past her huge and pendulous bosoms to the mass of curly white hair that crowned her huge and eccentric cranium. She was every bit a Christian woman, being a touch on the sadistic side and prone to outbursts of what is called Anglo-Saxon but usually consists entirely of words beginning with the letter “f”. Her god was her saviour; for any other deity would have condemned her to an eternity in the Underworld. Her god was lust and the heat of the fiery orgasms she encouraged from her own flesh when nobody else was around to witness them. She lusted, all right, but usually for the unattainable. The good Professor Stroggleoff knew of her vanities, and preyed on them when his own nights were dark and lonely, and she found herself tolerating his attentions rather than welcoming them..

And Griselda sat on the front row of the lecture room, pen in hand, expectantly waiting to be filled with new knowledge. As a child she'd always been condemned to the back row of her school classes, so a seat at the front was a novelty to her. She was dressed in her shortest concept of a mini-kilt, and so rather than her bottom sitting on it, it splayed around her thighs whilst the only part of her attire that could cushion her against the hard chair was a flimsy pair of knickers she had misguidedly converted into the most minuscule of thongs. To say she was uncomfortable, therefore, was to understate things. Every time she wriggled the hardness of her seat tended to send unpleasant pains through her nether regions, making her flinch.

There were other students there, mostly of the female persuasion and mostly dressed far more modestly than was she, but near her at the front was one of the gymnasts in a black leotard, and she already had reservations about that group of girls. It wasn't so much the frugality of the leotard as the vacant expression on the girl's face, as if her entire life consisted of nothing. Maybe thought Griselda, that's what a devotion to physical exercise does to a gal!

Miss Damienne Bustthruster was speaking. Her voice was low and some might call it sexy if it had issued from any mouth but hers. Even an elephant could have made her vowels into a carnal invitation, yet from her mouth they were more like some kind of dire threat. And as she spoke her eyes roamed round the room, going in different directions from each other so she obviously had everyone in her view at all times. It was almost spooky and certainly unpleasant.

“If we want to compare tree-hugging with paganism we must go back to the very beginnings of worship,” she said. “Tree hugging is a form of worship that has been around since time immemorial. It is even suggested that early hominids, who were on the start of the path that would eventually lead to homo sapiens, spent a great deal of time in the many extensive forests that covered huge swathes of the planet fairly cuddling a wide range of trees. It was their concept of sexuality. They believed that once hugged, a tree contained the essence of their spirit and passed it on to any other who chanced to hug that same tree. Thus the females became pregnant. They believed that was the essence of reproduction, and it was a neat enough conclusion formed, of course, in primitive ignorance.”

Griselda thought this was nonsense and decided, in the interests of honesty, to say this, so she stuck up one hand in exactly the same way as she had as a child at school almost a century earlier. The very act of doing that brought back memories of her childhood, memories that she preferred to forget because they had everything to do with humiliation and nothing to do with education, so she started pulling her hand back down again. But the teacher with her eyes roving very possible way had noticed, and paused mid-sentence.

“Are you wanting to contribute to this lesson, Entwhistle?” she asked in her velvet-smooth poisonous voice.

The ignorant cow could at least have called me Miss Entwhistle, thought Griselda. Even the President of the United States called me Miss when he addressed me.

So, “Miss Entwhistle, if you please,” she demanded.

At that Miss Damienne Bustthruster seemed to increase in size. It was a kind of magic and it amused Griselda. The teacher's pendulous breasts became even more pendulous, her hair seemed to spray even further from her head and her eyes gave every appearance of rotating slowly in their sockets.

What she said next seemed to consist entirely of a single word beginning with the sixth letter of the alphabet and repeated in a wonderful variety of ways. It needs no repeating here, of course. Griselda considered it no mean feat for the cross-eyed woman in front of her to achieve a sentence in which the only word was repeated as a noun (both common and proper), a verb, an adjective and even an adverb. The woman (if woman she be) was using more skill in that sentence as anyone had managed to use with a single monosyllable in Griselda's entire lifetime. It was awesome, and Griselda felt a sudden surge of respect for the speaker!

In the end, and after her bosom had settled back down to its normal pendulous dimensions, Miss Damienne Bustthruster seemed to pull herself together.

“Well?” she demanded, querulously

“You're guessing, you know,” said Griselda with an unfair amount of authority in her voice, which in all other respects matched her rather demure and sexually explicit appearance.

“I'm what?” raged the Bustthruster voice. And it did rage. Loud and angrily and clear. Even the ancient walls of the rugged building seemed to shake in time with it.

“About the - what did you call them? Hominids? About them and the things they did. You've no evidence at all. It's all supposition.”

Miss Bustthruster drew herself to her full stature and faced Griselda. “I have studied it,” she said, her voice, to those who knew her, dangerously low. “I have pieced together this and that little smidgen of evidence and I have concluded what I have concluded. And after so much deep thought and hard study you can take it from me that I have got it absolutely right. Now, Miss Entwhistle, kindly tell me on what authority you contradict my studies. Now, please.”

“Oh, that's easy,” smirked Griselda, standing up so that her bottom found some ease from the pressure of the hard wooden seat that was already leaving a red impression on it, one that could quite easily be seen by the students sitting behind her as a consequence of the extreme brevity of her tiny skirt. “If those hominids, as you call them, had gone about hugging trees all day they would never have made their way across the vast plains where there aren't any trees, and I think I read somewhere that they did just that.”

Miss Damienne Bustthruster seemed to be on the point of exploding when the door to the lecture room swung open and Professor Stroggleoff marched in. He stomped to the front of the class and glared towards Griselda.

“Well?” asked Miss Damienne Bustthruster, “have you come to pleasure me with that revolting willy of yours, or what?”

“I would never dream of doing any such thing!” admonished the Professor. “Are you having problems with Miss Entwhistle, my dearest Damienne? If you are please let me know and I'll attend to her.”

“I'm not your dearest anything, and I never have problems with anyone!” snapped the comparative religions tutor. “We are merely debating the validity of my research, and that's all! I think Miss Entwhistle gets my point.”

“I get that it's all guesswork based on fresh air,” said Griselda. “Very much like the substance of every religion I ever heard of! But if that's the case, who are any of us to point a finger, that's what I say.”

Miss Damienne Bustthruster made a small but very deep and almost manly squawk, and crossed herself. “Blasphemy!” she cried, and contrived a second remarkable and explicit sentence consisting entirely of different versions of the same “f” word. Griselda was truly impressed and decided there and then to have a go herself in the privacy of her own room.

“That's enough of that!” barked the Professor.

The girl sitting near Griselda, she who was still clad in a brief black leotard, stood up and faced Griselda.

“That's enough,” she whispered. “I do believe I'm going to have to take you down a peg or two before you do any more damage!”

And she waved both hands in the air in a way that might be called theatrical or might, on the other hand, be seen as demonic, and muttered something dark and unfathomable in an unbelievably husky voice.

And simultaneously Griselda felt the years pour into her as she rapidly started regaining her old and craggy and very witchlike shape, and her tartan mini-mini-kilt stretched and blackened into a long charcoal skirt of indeterminate design and her nose grew and grew until it almost touched her exaggerated chin.

The last thing she heard as she fell in a dead faint towards the hard stone floor was the combined gasp from the rest of the class and a demented cackle (beginning with the letter “f” from the tutor in charge.