8. A BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATERS

Mary tells her story.

“If i were you I’d get out pretty sharpish,” growled the fat man’s alter-ego, “The last thing you want to do is get messing with virgins at your time of death, because if you do, well, I know you...”

“What do you know?” demanded Santa, “because thinking about it, you ought to know just about everything seeing as you’re me!”

“I know she wouldn’t stay a virgin for very long,” growled the other darkly.

“Who are you talking to?” asked the beautiful Mary, “didn’t you know that it’s bad manners, talking to yourself when you’ve got company?”

“Sorry,” murmured Santa humbly. The young woman was too beautiful to be anything but humble towards.

“That’s all right, then.”

“But where’s all the water coming from?” he asked as a wave crashed mere feet away from him and splashed him with foam. Then he asked curiously, “isn’t water usually wet?”

“It’s a river from the Holy land,” Mary told him, “and it’s dry because who wants to swim in wet water for hundreds of years? That’s what I had to do. Swim and swim and swim against a current that constantly tried to drive me back. But I managed it. I got here in the end!”

“But why a river?” he asked.

“It’s a flood of prejudice,” she said, eyeing him as if he really ought to have known that.

“What prejudice? Racial? Colour?” he was beginning to suspect that the tentacles of confusion that were threatening to find their way into his head might get ever more insistent.

“I’m a woman,” she said simply.

“I can see that,” he agreed, “and if I may say so the most beautiful woman I have ever had the privilege of seeing, especially in such unusual circumstances.”

“Well, I had to swim against that prejudice and somehow a river appeared for me to swim in, and because I didn’t want to get wet it turned itself into a dry river. But the prejudice was still there, eating at my soul, diminishing me even in my own eyes. I was beaten by my father, you know, beaten until I bled. You don’t know half the story. Only cosy little bits get told, and they’re mostly lies.”

“I don’t actually know any of it,” confessed Santa Claus thoughtfully.

“There was a man,” sighed Mary, “a soldier he was, from a foreign land where men can do what they like to women, with impunity.”

“Is this story of yours going to get seedy?” asked Santa, who didn’t fancy being embroiled in a seedy account of male misbehaviour at the top of a long marble stairway whilst being splashed by dry water.

“It’s no more seedy than that man was!” spat out Mary. “He did stuff to me, stuff I didn’t want him to do, and as a consequence he put me with child.”

“I thought you said...” began the Fat man.

“That I’m a virgin? Yes, I did, I put it about back then, told everyone that no man had ever been near me, but an angel had, an angel from Heaven. I can tell a good story, you know, and I could back then. I told everyone, my intended, though we were yet to get wed, my father who beat me anyway, I even told the neighbours, that I’d been visited by an angel and I was with child because of it. It was a good story and it saved me from being stoned to death, or worse.”

“I recognise bits of your story...” murmured Santa Claus.

“You should, seeing as you’ve spent a life-time living off the back of it!” Mary told him severely. “That’s what I meant when I said we’ve got something in common, you and I. When it’s cold across half of the world, when snows fall and ice fractures pipes, when all a body wants to do is shiver in front of a blazing fire, you and I have been central to the people’s fantasies.”

“I know I fed the proletariat with dreams, but you … what did you do?” asked Santa, thinking he knew the answer but wanting her to confirm it.

“I kept the truth to myself,” said Mary.

“And that’s why you’re here?” Santa was getting increasingly curious. Who was she really and why on Earth was she there?

“It’s a conundrum all right,” whispered his alter-ego, and he told him to shut up or else.

“Or else what?” sniggered that part of him that was too clever by far.

“Wait and see,” he murmured darkly.

“I’m here to meet you,” smiled Mary, “for together we have managed to provide comfort and joy to millions of people for two thousand years, and still do. They sing carols in churches and quite a lot of them actually believe that I gave birth to a healthy shining boy wrapped in a halo, that his father wasn’t my intended but an angel … all angels are lads, you know, but they’re not usually prone to seducing girls or young women, so I had to make my story convincing. But in truth, I was savagely taken by a soldier of the rotten Roman empire, against my will and with me screaming my protests in the darkness. But nobody came to help a teenage girl nor save her from sin. He hurt me when he did it and he hurt me nine months later when my baby was born.”

“In a stable, in a manger?” whispered Santa.

“That’s what the fantasists wrote, but no. My baby was born in a ditch, and in that ditch he died...”

“Died?”

Mary nodded. “I was too young to know what to do, and there was nobody willing to help me, so like so many other abused girls, when the laws are against them, I became my own midwife, and being shamefully ignorant, I didn’t know what to do when things went wrong. It was my fault that he died, but I didn’t know any better.”

“But what about the prophesy, what the angel said?” asked Santa, trying to fend off the confusion that was threatening to embrace him completely.

“I told you, didn’t I?” said Mary, “I made it up. It was a lie, but in the name of self-preservation I had to tell it. Back then there was such a thing as rape, you know, there always has been and still is, but two thousand years ago if there was to be any punishment it was the raped woman who was punished. So I told my story and escaped a stoning or whatever other punishment they had in store for me.”

“You poor soul...”

“So I lost my precious baby and feverishly, not so long after that I died myself. And over those centuries I found my way here to be with you! And we’re to go, now, under that rainbow and over that bridge to celebrate a cold season together!”

And she pointed.

There was a rainbow and a bridge, suddenly there in the absolute pitch of the hereafter, and she took him by one hand and led him towards them.

“Don’t go!” urged his alter-ego, but he wasn’t listening.

© Peter Rogerson 12.11.18