5 THE HOSPITAL PATIENT

The Priest is most confused and unwell

Father Samuel Tinder opened his eyes, and prayed.

There could be no doubt about it. He had suddenly and most unexpectedly responded to the excitement of the day and been snatched by the Almighty from the hands of a Satanic entity and brought to this clean, antiseptic and very beautiful place.

He was, in short, in Heaven.

And because his ending had obviously been so traumatic he had been kindly put into a very comfortable bed in Heaven, probably for him to recuperate from the trauma of transition. After all, one moment he had been on the street, trying not to ogle too much at the woman who was saying something to him, though what it was she said wasn’t exactly clear in his mind, and the very next moment he was goodness knows how many zillion miles away in Heaven. But miles don’t mean much in the Afterlife, do they.

He looked about him, his ever curious mind greedy to be fed as much information about this paradise as he could glean. And what he saw threatened all of his preconceptions as to what his Lord’s Heaven would be like.

For a start, there was the bed. The image of a verdant bower might have been suggested by his studies of the Afterlife, but here that were machines, one in particular that might prove to be annoying as it beeped quietly to itself every few moments. There was what could only be a television screen that was somehow showing a series of moving lines on a monochrome background.

Things must have moved on a bit since the Good Book was composed, he told himself, and if I’d thought more about it I would have realised that must be so. If nothing in the affairs of man stands still then certainly everything in the affairs of my Lord must move on at a truly marvellous pace.

Then he saw the young nurse in her uniform.

How could he have been so stupid? There would be no nurses in Heaven because nurses, and particularly least this nurse, were female, and there were no females in Heaven. They were barred from the place. His studies had proved that beyond all doubt: no female would be permitted into God’s Heaven unless she adopted all the best things about men and as good as became one.

I am in the other place… he found himself thinking, aghast at his rejection from the Afterlife he’d spent a great deal of his life training himself for.

Then,

What have I done to deserve this? Was I wrong about refusing the funeral of the dead harlot? Had I been misinformed and wasn’t she a harlot at all? But then, my sources were beyond reproach, especially the dear old soul who insisted that the deceased had lived a debauched life of almost unbelievable sin…

Then,

What did the good Samaritan woman call me? Cruel? Did she say I was cruel, I who haven’t nursed an evil or unkind thought in all my days…

Then,

No woman could be a good Samaritan! I was deceived by the anti-Christ! It never suggests any such thing in all the books I’ve studied on the subject. Good Samaritans are always male whilst the Priests cast stones on evil women, stoning them to death in pits of scorching sand…

It was all too much for him and he tried to turn over in the bed that the Lord had laid him in. Or Satan. The bed that Satan had laid him in. He started weeping at the gross injustice of his own pure heart unaccountably being sent to Hell and damnation. But there were wires all over the place, and a tube going up one nostril which pulled painfully as he struggled to turn over.

They must have made a mistake, he thought.

“Now Father, are you troubled?” asked a voice. A female voice. He hated the sound of it, and how did she know what he was thinking? Then an astounding concept crossed his mind. Had the ancients who had communicated directly with the Great Lord Himself mistranslated that deity’s words? This was a woman, she was in Heaven, she was young, she was smiling … were women allowed in Heaven after all? Had a cruel error been made thousands of years ago and a positive been mistranslated as a negative?

That must be the answer. Either that, or the Lord had made changes to his routines and finally forgiven Eve for her original sin.

“Are you … forgiven?” he asked, surprised at how weak he sounded.

But then, the transition to Heaven must have been a mighty draining affair…

“Pardon?” she asked.

“For the sins of Eve… are you in a state of grace, forgiven for the incident of the apple?”

“Now don’t be silly, Father, I’m a nurse, a very busy and overworked nurse, and I’m in Saint Bodolph’s cardiac unit, trying to stop you from dying! So don’t waste my time or it might be you who suffers!”

She had a lovely, slightly Welsh, accent.

And St Bodolph’s hospital, he knew, was less than a mile from his own church. In England. On Earth. So not in Heaven.

So he wasn’t actually dead! Why on Earth had he thought that he was?

Oo0oo

Sophia Stone sat with her laptop on her knee, in her favourite chair in her front room, and smiled to herself.

That idiot of a Priest, the one who didn’t understand either bank cards or human nature, had given her a really good idea for her next book. She’d been stuck for some time, trying to work out how she could manoeuvre a tale of a fisherman lost in a storm and a young widow clinging desperately to him as the boat almost foundered, and do it in such a way that it brought tears of joy to the readers’ eyes.

But she wouldn’t have a fisherman or a real storm, but a Priest and a different kind of storm, the sort that roars through the human heart and drags even a holy man into a world of passion and desire. This would make a good story. It would contrast the nonsense that was religion with the fire that is unrequited love.

She loved the idea. And her fictitious priest would be just like the nincompoop who didn’t understand bank cards! The whole thing would glide along with her heroine seeing him and falling for him and he, being bound to rules of celibacy, would constantly reject her whilst inside being tormented by his natural instincts. And it would reach a climax and she might, though she doubted it, hint at the bedroom as the story came to an end.

She didn’t take her characters into bed with each other for the simple reason that she’d never been in bed with a man herself and could only imagine what it was like, and her readers were more experienced than that. And she hadn’t been to bed with a woman either, she thought as an afterthought, come to think of it.

She began to draft out the start of her novel, just in note form with little details of character and situation, when the door bell rang.

Impatiently, she clicked her tongue, placed her laptop carefully onto the carpet next to her chair, and went to see who it was. She didn’t have many visitors and she was perfectly happy living and breathing on her own.

It was Jonathan O’Donnelly, pale and drawn and apologetic for interrupting her.

“You’ll be at the mark two funeral this afternoon?” he asked, knowing she would but needing to mention it.

“You know I will,” she told him, “come in and tell me what I can do for you.”

“I won’t if you don’t mind. Don’t want to set tongues wagging!” The joke was feeble, and he knew it. “I just wondered if you’d heard that terrible Priest has had his just deserts?”

“He has?”

“Last night, apparently, opposite the theatre just as it was turning out...”

“I was there! I saw him!”

“It was reported that after a woman went up to him and spoke to him he collapsed. Onto the pavement in a pool of unconscious cleric!”

“He did? I … yes, I spoke to him, told him he was a thoughtless prat, or something like that. I didn’t wait for a reply because I like to be among the first at the car park or it can take an age to get out.”

“Then maybe it was you...”

“Or someone else?”

“Could be. Anyway, he had a heart attack, they say. I thought you’d like to know. He’s in Saint Bodolph’s, so he’s not dead.”

“Oh. I wonder … the man’s a fool but I didn’t mean for him to die. I just wanted him to know what we thought of him.”

Jonathan nodded. “Anyway, I thought I’d let you know, and now I must rush. And I’ll see you at the funeral this afternoon.”

“Of course. I’ll be there...”

Jonathan O’Donnelly left her on the doorstep and she stared thoughtfully after him as he sadly walked away.

Had it been her words that had reached to his heart, and touched it?

© Peter Rogerson 11.1.19