CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: A REVEREND'S DEMISE

Drawing an end to the debauched career of the Reverend Thybottom

Next day Griselda sat in her little tumbledown cottage with the sun streaming through a window she'd broken the previous month after a midnight flight back from the local pub where Thomas the Greek, mine host and worse, had failed to dilute the beer to his usual low standards and consequently she had imbibed enough to make her wobbly but not enough for her to know that her judgement was impaired, and had failed to distinguish between door and window.

Once home she'd switched on her computer (even old ladies like Griselda Entwhistle can have computers: it's allowed by law, and even actively encouraged by the BBC) and had cobbled together a very special document that she had printed on her ancient but very serviceable dot matrix printer.

This is it, she thought to herself with a crooked grin on her wrinkled old face, one that stretched, it seemed, from ear to ear, ducking under her nose and thin like a single line with a tooth jutting out. It was the certificate she had coaxed out of Professor Stroggleoff together with the document she'd just printed, and it was her passage to mischief. She still found the Reverend Ian Nigel Thybottom to be a pompous a*s who sullied the village of Swanspottle with his attachment to the McMudd sisters, all three of whom had made a career out of firstly seducing the local cleric and then making him their slave (of sorts) if he proved to be weak enough to allow it, which he mostly did.

There had been several similar vicars and curates over the years and they all had been adequately weak, so far, and Griselda who had no love for any deity anywhere felt almost painfully aggrieved as if she had been besotted by the faith.

Breakfast was a platter of owl eggs and newts' tails, a mixture she found anything but pleasant but had read about in a book on ancient lore, and it put her in the right frame of mind for tackling the good Reverend Ian Nigel Thybottom head on. There's nothing like an unsavoury and unpleasant breakfast for stimulating the irritable sinews of old ladies like Griselda Entwhistle.

The day was lovely. Even she could tell that, what with an early morning sun blazing down from a sky that might have come fresh from a child's paint-box if it contained only pastel blue. She had chosen to walk to the village. It wasn't far because Swanspottle was one of those one-lane affairs that had barely justified the expense of building a church back in the thirteenth century when the building (now a virtual ruin) had been erected by a team of masons who had been put in a pretty bad mood because they'd been told in no uncertain terms that their labour was a gift to God and hence required no remuneration from the church authorities. There was muttering about children starving, but the clergy had soon shut them up with dire threats of hell-fire and damnation, so they had toiled with very little will, and their children had starved. It hadn't taken many centuries before the roof had taken to collapsing as a consequence of poor workmanship.

The Reverend Ian Nigel Thybottom was in and for a change he wasn't entertaining any of the McMudd sisters, not even the fat one who thought life would be easier if she spent the rest of her life lying in his bed and prepared to accept his semen as a consolation for her lack of mobility, at any time, day or night.

“What can I do for you, witch?” he asked, gruffly. He could be very gruff when he wanted to be, gruffer even than an all-in wrestler with a sweaty jockstrap.

“I have come,” she announced, rather grandly. “I have come to be your servant with a certificate of qualification signed by the good and wise Professor Stroggleoff of Scrumblenose University and the offer of a job in Swanspottle under your tutelage, signed by the Bishop himself.”

She thrust a pair of papers into the Reverend gentleman's hand, the hastily scrawled certificate issued by a reluctant Stroggleoff and her own home-printed letter which was laid out in a fine array of fonts and which offered her employment under the tutelage of the Vicar of Swanspottle, the Reverend I.N.Thybottom, for the next ten years or until that reverend gentleman moved on.

“I've got myself qualified,” she said, briskly, and removed her rather tall and pointed black hat from the top of her scrawny old head before pushing past him and walking into the vicarage.

“Things'll have to change here,” she began. “I don't like the look of this, no sir I don't, not if I'm going to live in like the Bishop says in his instructions. But before we discuss all that I need to be shown to my room. I need to freshen up. I do hope it's en-suite?”

The Reverend Ian Nigel Swanspottle was lost for words. His stood there with his mouth wide open and just stared at her, giving an almost perfect imitation of a confused goldfish..

“En-suite?” he stammered after a pause that lasted for so long Griselda thought there might be time for her to boil a kettle and make a pot of tea while she was waiting.

“I can hardly be expected to walk stark naked to the bathroom when there's a man around,” she replied, cheerily enough. “And I do like to go to bed commando. I do like to feel the fresh air from the world outside my window whistling between my boobies!”

“Boobies?” he echoed.

“I'm a lady and us ladies do like a bit of privacy,” she chided him. “Now, Revvy, you'd better tell me where we pray together. The Prof at Uni said we ought to pray at dawn and then hourly until dusk, unless, of course, there's something else to do, like hold church services or bury the dead. And he did say that flagellation is a good thing. A little blood spilt now and then focusses the mind on the good Lord and his doings. And we all need that, don't we? We all need our minds focussing on the good Lord and his doings, don't you think? Tell me, rev, where do you flagellate? Maybe we could do it together, a good sound self-thrashing to keep our minds on the job … it's going to be fun working with you, I know it is, fun, fun and yet more fun!”

“Fun...?” he stammered, then: “No! I can't have it! I can't have an old witch sharing my home with me and saying dreadful things about walking round the place with no clothes on and fl-fl-flagellating!”

“I have my appointment from the bish,” sneered Griselda. “And just in case you think I'm going to be up to no good, Constable Lockemup's moving in too. He spends time with my young niece, you know. She's only nineteen and as innocent as a flower in spring! So she'll be coming, too. She'll need en-suite as well because she likes walking around naked as a jay-bird, too �" she must have caught that off me or it might be in the family - and her bosom is a bit on the proud side. She can't help it, of course, being innocent, but there are some nasty people who go so far as to suggest she's had surgical assistance, which I can categorically state she hasn't. Now, Rev �" you don't mind if I call you Rev, do you? - you pop out to the old church and take a service under the blue skies and I'll get settled in.

“It's going to be fun, isn't it? You and me and my niece and good old Lockemup all together on a winter's night and quite safe from any annoyance from those dreadful McMudd sisters...”

The Reverend Ian Nigel Thybottom's mouth was open in horror. Suddenly he could see his world turning inside-out and upside-down and any other physical distortion brought about by opposites. In one dreadful moment his carefully constructed life had come tumbling down at the behest of a crowing old witch.

It was all too much fore him.

He paused for a moment like that, all puce and bulging, and then he opened his mouth, and screamed long and loud. His eyes actually swivelled in his head, his face turned purple as his blood built up a pressure that no amount of skin or flesh or bones could hold back, and right then and there he had a powerful stroke which caused a good part of his brain to stop functioning. Within an hour all he was capable of doing was falling onto his knees and praying in a monotone to a god who wasn't there and consequently couldn't hear his entreaties.

Meanwhile Griselda Entwhistle shook her head, took her two sheets of paper from his twitching hands and quietly left the vicarage.

“Better go back home,” she muttered. “Lockemup'll be waiting. Better tidy myself up a bit.”

There was nobody around to see how the little old woman with her witch-like hat suddenly metamorphosed into a dainty young flirty thing with breasts to die for and the tiniest skirt seen this side of the sixties by man or beast. But waiting by her front door was Constable Lockemup and he had to thrust one hand deep into his pocket when he saw the way she looked and the inviting smile on her face, just to avoid causing himself any premature embarrassment.

THE END