1. THE DEBIT CARD

Sophia Stone was happy. But then, that was nothing new because Sophia was usually happy, not in the delirious sense of meaningless giggling but in the way of feeling a mixture of contentment and joy for most of the time.

So it was never a surprise to see her smiling at the day as if the day had every right to be happy too. And it would come as no shock to anyone who knew her that she somehow lifted the heaviest weight from the heart of a depressed soul whenever she came into contact with a person so weighed down, and just by being her.

Her week, as with almost everyone else, began on Monday.

Most weeks she went to the supermarket on Mondays, in the morning as early as she could in order to get the worst chore of her week done and dusted as soon as possible and almost certainly before her chosen hour for coffee and biscuits at eleven o’clock. It was only after achieving that landmark in her week that she would sit in her favourite armchair and open her laptop and place it on her lap.

Sophia Stone was a writer. A fairly well-known published writer, and you may have heard of her if you live in my own corner of cloud cuckoo land. She wrote stories of love and betrothal, of young men and young women collapsing into each other’s arms, of mouths pressed together in interminable kisses, of lives so fantastic that her army of readers must conclude that they must surely reflect her own.

But they didn’t.

Because underneath the almost infectious happiness that was her spirit and her life she was a lonely woman with a loveless life. She had, in fact, reached the very portal of middle age with never the hint of true romance in her life. No strong arms around her, no sworn testimonies of eternal love. Instead, she fantasised about a life she might have lived and maybe even wanted to live, and wrote it down for her fans to read.

And she did have fans. Plenty of them. Mostly women, they lived normal lives, maybe with a partner or maybe without, doing ordinary jobs, being as everyday and normal as most people are, which means they were mostly unaware of happiness until they picked up one of Sophia’s books of love and enchantment, and turned its pages.

Deep down she knew that something was missing. She had to because it flourished in the lives of her imagined people. But on the surface, underneath her intoxicating smile, there was a plateau of isolation.

Her home, a small semi-detached Victorian house in the suburbs, was her castle, and she withdrew into it on her own every single day. Callers came to the door and callers went without ever passing over the threshold unless there was a tap to be fixed or an annoying problem to be attended to. None stayed, not even for a cup of tea and a biscuit. Hers was not an inviting little house despite her warmth and her happy smiles.

A particular Monday dawned, a shopping Supermarket morning, and on that particular Monday morning she was cloaked in her usual happy smile and nodded cheerfully to neighbours, who nodded back. She did her rounds of the shop, placing this or that or the other in a shopping trolley, and then making her way to the check-out.

She joined the shortest queue, which is always a mistake because, in the blinking of an eye or a badly-printed bar code or a misplaced credit card the shortest queue can become the longest queue.

And in front of her a priest was having trouble with the checkout.

Oo0oo

Father Sammy Tinder was troubled.

He was one of those thoughtful men who liked to understand everything and put everything in the right order in his mind, but suddenly something had arrived in the morning post that he couldn’t quite put in any sort of order. It was a new bank card, a debit card, and the accompanying letter said he must register it and use ot straight away, making sure that he cut his old card into a multitude of pieces to prevent it being taken by a criminal and used by that undesirable. And he knew there were crimes about, that unchristian evil-doers were quite happy to pave their way to hellfire and damnation, using stolen cards and misappropriated money.

So before he had gone to the shops, in urgent need of a bottle of whiskey which he sampled of an evening in tiny quantities mixed with ginger cordial (for his health, he told himself), he had taken his sharpest scissors to the old debit and reduced it to slivers, which was all well and good. But he failed to take proper notice of the letter, which also advised him to pop the new card into one of the many Automatic Teller Machines that had sprouted in the town during recent years, which would register that it was in use.

The Supermarket was never particularly busy so early on a Monday morning, so it was a sensible time for him to go there. His requirements were few. He had a woman who “did” for him twice a week, thus reducing the burden of housekeeping on his ecclesiastic shoulders to something approaching zero. This gave him plenty of time for his studies, which consisted on detailed research into the Old Testament. He loved the Old Testament and its characters and often, in his sleep, fantasised about meeting Adam and warning him about Eve.

This time he selected his whiskey, a half-sized bottle despite the fact that is was an expensive way of buying the golden liquid, but during his years of training he had been warned of the slippery slope to alcoholism and Hell, and decided a middle way with a small bottle and ginger cordial would stand a reasonable chance of being safe. He also selected a few choice items for his meals. His cleaning lady didn’t do cooking, only light dusting, but his microwave did.

A few years ago it had been a sensible choice: microwave or television, and the microwave had won out. The television companies, he had been told, were neglectful of Faith in favour of filth and mind-altering humour, and he had never wanted his mind to be altered, tending to forget that the whiskey he bought whenever he ran out was as good as anything when it came to altering minds.

So his trolley contained a half bottle of whiskey and several meals-for-one designed to be irradiated in his microwave cooker, and he went to the check-out. Then, he told himself, it would be time to go home and have a nice cup of tea.

He didn’t like coffee because some way along the line of his life he had been told that it contained mind-altering caffeine. He didn’t want his mind to be altered at all. Not the least little bit. If it was he might end up, Heaven forbid, in the unending darkness, and enduring the fiery horrors, of Hell.

He arrived at the front of the check-out queue, aware that there was a woman behind him, and not particularly wanting to upset her by being slow because upset women, he knew, could turn into the worst of harridans.

“It’s been rejected, Father,” said the check-out woman, and he didn’t understand what she meant.

“Pardon?” he asked.

“Your card. It’s been rejected,” she repeated.

Rejected? How could it have been rejected? It had only arrived today, in the post.

“But it’s new,” he said, blinking because he was afraid he might start crying, and that would never do. Crying at a check-out, he was certain, was a sure-fire way of starting going down any number of slippery slopes.

“Did you register it?” asked the check-out woman, wearily. After all, it was Monday morning and a whole day of scanning cornflakes and toilet rolls lay ahead of her, so she had every right to feel weary.

“Register it?” he repeated, owlishly.

“Yes. Put it in an ATM so the bank knows you’re using it,” she said.

“I didn’t know...”

“Have you any other cards?” she asked, “maybe a credit card, something you can pay with instead of your unregistered card?”

He shook his head. He only had the one card. What would he be doing, having more than one?

“Cash, then?”

He shook his head again. No. No cash either.

Then something happened that proved the woman in the queue behind him wasn’t any kind of harridan but most likely an angel from Heaven sent by the good Lord to help him.

“I’ll help you register your card, and then you’ll be able to pay me back if I pay for your few things,” she said.

Order was gone and chaos had arrived. But the chaos saw his shopping paid for and a smiling woman taking him outside the supermarket to one of those cash machines in the wall.

“Here. I’ll show you,” she said.

© Peter Rogerson 07.01.19