THE WEEPING WAITRESS

Seemingly small things can be quite upsetting

“Life,” thought the Reverend Jodie Marsh, “is too much like a tortoise who’s lost the will to run.”

She stood by her pulpit, duster in hand, and wiped it with the same automatic movement that she used every day, careful not to damage the ancient and rather magnificent bible she kept on its lectern. This was her favourite time of the day, when she could saunter through self-imposed duties and whisper sweet nothings to the air around her.

Smiling warmly to herself, she looked up at the rows of empty pews, and sighed, then she cancelled the sigh in disbelief and stared.

The absolute certainty was that there never another soul in that building at this hour. Nobody for the dust of ages to drift on from hidden rafters high above the mock Norman arch that supported the roof. Nobody to disturb the serenity of this beautiful and ancient house of her God.

But that certainty was smashed by the woman sitting midway along a row half way back, towards the main door.

It was more than a woman, it was a weeping woman. The fact that a woman chose that time and place was enough to send scurrulations rattling like loose marbles through her arterial passageways and exciting something south of her navel. But the weeping: that was something else. Something that added an edge to her excitement and a sudden and unexpected need for the toilet as a matter of urgency.

“Excuse me!” she whelped, and teetered off to the closet, which was off the sacristy and smelt of disinfectant.

Once relieved, she returned to the main body of her beautiful church, aware that a tingle was still playing ping-pong somewhere behind her lower intestine, and almost leapt up when she saw that the weeping woman was still there.

“I must help her,” she decided as she adjusted her clerical collar so that it was less hidden by any one of her chins, and she made her way towards the tearful woman in the central pew.

The tears were genuine enough, of that she was certain as she stared at the unhappy creature. She can’t, decided the Reverend Jodie, be more than in her mid twenties and the skirt she was wearing was a disgrace of brevity. But it was a pretty pleated garment and for a moment Jodie wondered if something like that would suit her, until she told herself she was far too old and her dimpled legs were unsuitable for such an out-and-out display of immodesty.

Besides the blotchy eyes and tear-stained cheeks the woman was probably beautiful. Jodie didn’t have much experience of beauty, though occasionally her evening quaffing of inexpensive sherry influenced her vision to the extent that she thought she could detect a hint of it in her bedroom mirror.

“Can I help you, dear?” she asked, snapping the silence like a naughty boy snapping a school ruler.

The pretty woman looked up at her, and her heart, never the most stable of organs, almost did a somersault when she saw misery at close hand.

“Nothing can be that bad, surely?” she went on to ask. Then, aware of her chosen path in life, she added “would you like me to pray with you, dear?”

“I’m not … a believer...” stammered the pretty woman in a pretty voice. “In fact,” she went on with almost unbelievable courage, “I think it’s … all rubbish.”

“Of course it is, dear” murmured the Reverend Jodie Marsh until she heard herself and mentally hissed damn which, unfortunately, came out audibly.

After that she didn’t know what to say because she was aware that under stress she occasionally suffered from a mild dose of Tourettes and words like damn could fall unbidden from her lips.

“I’ve been evil,” stammered the prettiest creature since Eve had taken her first prehistoric breath in that wonderful garden of trees and flowers that somehow had evolved from nothing, “I’m a sinner.”

“We’re all sinners, sod it,” assured Jodie wincing at her own verbal weakness, then, “I myself have been known to sin, my dear. Why, only last night, before bed, I looked in the mirror and blew a kiss at my own reflection, and that is a genuine sin, if ever there was one.”

“I let a man touch my leg,” whispered the angel in a short skirt, “I actually let him rub his hand on my thigh when I was standing by the dining table with him and trying to serve him gravy with his steak.”

“Did you slap his face, bugger it?” asked Jodie, almost out of control, what with the way her kidneys were trying to seduce her liver and her gall bladder was all awry.

“You don’t slap people like that!” exclaimed the delightful creature, “he’s much too important to be slapped!”

“Of course,” agreed Jodie, successfully erasing a very naughty word indeed from the sentence.

She thought for a moment, then sighed.

“I suppose the trouble with important men is they think every girl wants them to feel her thighs,” she said thoughtfully. “I know a Bishop once who wanted to do more than feel my own thighs, to be honest, and if my surplice hadn’t covered my legs down to my ankles he might well have tried. I sometimes wish he had...”

“I let him do it,” wept the young woman, fresh tears replacing those that were drying. “I let him run his hand up my thigh until he nearly… oh, I’m so dreadful I wish I was dead!”

“Nearly what?” Jodie couldn’t help herself asking.

“You know, got there,” sobbed the woman, “he very, very nearly got there! I really should have slapped him!”

“Oh lordy me, arsehole,” sympathised Jodie.

“But I couldn’t. Not there in front of so many important people, and with him being who he is...”

“You poor, poor soul, fart,” agreed Jodie.

“I mean, what would the papers say when they reported how a waitress slapped the Prime Minister...” wept the woman.

© Peter Rogerson 1.10.19