7. AN ESCAPE FROM THE CHAR WOMAN

“Look over there, there’s someone you ought to avoid,” hissed or shouted or breathed T***y no sooner had the two of them set foot back in the Past, and she pointed.

“Who is it?” asked Elaine, half curious and half not bothered.

“Pikey,” T***y told her, “look at him… what do you make of him?”

Elaine looked and from the minimum that she could see she knew that Pikey was a clergyman. A dead clergyman, true, but weren’t they all dead? It was a comforting thought. She rather enjoyed being dead. It took the headache out of living.

“A priest?” she asked.

T***y giggled. “He’s convinced he’s in Heaven,” she laughed, “he knows he’s dead because he killed himself! Quit deliberately! He swallowed a cocktail of pills that could only have done one thing, and that’s kill him.”

“But why think this is Heaven?” asked Elaine, “after all most folks I’ve met since I arrived here are nothing like saints!”

“It’s what he spent his life believing. Here, let him explain.” She either beckoned or called or shouted, and Pikey, who had the very demeanour of a priest, complete with servile stance, appeared too close to Elaine for comfort.

“The Lord be with you,” he simpered.

“Tell me about yourself,” demanded Elaine, “I hear you swallowed some pills.”

“It was the char woman,” sighed Pikey, “she came twice a week, and on one occasion, and only the one, her feminine flesh got the better of me and I weakened. Oh, how I fell from grace! Before I could think what I was doing I was on top of her like a demon from Hell. I couldn’t help myself. And great forces gathered inside me, forces that I couldn’t control, and, well, a few weeks later that dratted woman told me she was in the family way, and could we do it again…”

“It would happen,” grinned T***y, “but there are pills.”

“From the very pits of Hell!” snarled or smiled Pikey.

“More convenient than having to face up to being a celibate father!” suggested Elaine.

“Oh, it wasn’t that!” protested Pikey, “but I got an itchy rash and went to see Doctor Smith and he told me I had the pox! That dratted char woman had not only tempted me into doing the most evil thing I could think of doing, but she had infected me too! I couldn’t stand the shame, all the whispering that would echo round the cloisters in my church as I tried to preach piety, so I put an end to it, and ended up here, in Heaven, the very existence of which proves that I was right all along when I spoke of eternity from the pulpit. The only trouble is, look as I may, I can’t find the big chief.”

“You won’t,” said T***y.

“There’s no such person,” added Elaine, “I’ve never understood this obsession of some people, believing that there’s a deity somewhere who will either make things right when he feels like it or punish everyone if stuff goes wrong! It’s an invention of some frustrated father round a desert camp-fire in the bronze age or somewhen like that, making up stories because the kiddies wouldn’t go to bed! And he looked around and saw how he couldn’t understand what was what, and made up a creator to explain the inexplicable.”

“You vile pervert!” snapped Pikey, “of course there’s a god. There’s got to be!”

“Why?” asked T***y, “one of my best punters was a bishop, and he said it was all nonsense. Just a nice little earner, that’s how he put it. He’ll be around here somewhere because he breathed his last after chewing on rotting oysters.”

“Yuk!” murmured Elaine.

“Anyway, he was a good client,” sighed T***y, “very dependable, and he always had clean underpants.”

“Important,” nodded Elaine, quite sure that it was because, well, William had been different.

“Are you trying to tell me…?” demanded Pikey, “you’re lying. You must be! The bishop was one of the holiest men I ever met! The staunchest of believers! And the oysters weren’t bad! He came for tea to my vicarage and I made sure they were perfectly healthy by rinsing them in a solution of bleach and disinfectant before I let him eat them!”

T***y grinned at him. “I wasn’t lying. You can’t lie here, Pikey,” she said, “nobody can. It’s impossible! You try it.”

“You mean, you killed the Bishop?” asked Elaine, “one man of faith poisoning another man of the same faith? Oh how that tickles my fancy!”

“Anyway, to get back to what Pikey was saying,” sighed or shouted T***y, “this isn’t any kind of heaven. It’s what we fondly call the Past because it doesn’t seem to have an actual present and I can’t see any future any time soon, can you?”

“It’s Heaven!” protested Pikey, and then he paled. “but now I‘m here I know it isn’t,” he wept. Or might have wept had he eyes with which to cry or any tears to spill.

“Well, that sorts out one conundrum,” decided Elaine, “most misery in the bad old times before we pegged it was inevitably because folks were divided by too many different interpretations of old stories that were no more than prehistoric fancies told by long dead gaffers round faded camp fires in one or other desert.”

“That’s quite right,” came a new voiceless voice.

“Why, hello Wongy,” greeted T***y, “long time, no see.”

“I wander about, here and there in the huge Past we inhabit,” replied the newcomer, “and it was me that did it, way back if there’s any such place as back.”

“Did what?” asked Elaine, guessing the answer from the ravaged expression on what might have been his face, but wasn’t.

“Told the nippers silly stories to scare them to sleep,” he murmured, “you can’t begin to know what it was like back then. There we were crossing a desert, going from A to B in our own slow way, and the nights could be rough, what with the fire crackling and warming us and the old lady looking like old ladies do when you love ‘em, and you fancying a bit of the other but the kids were wide awake and looking on. Those blasted kids were giggling as if the world was a funny place when it wasn’t, and to shut ‘em up I bored them with stories I made up there and then, on the spur of the moment you might say.”

“And one of them was Heaven?” asked T***y.

“’Cause it was! A perfect place with a good guy in charge, the one who created everything in the first place. Then I actually died like folks do wherever you find folks, and I popped up here. Lonely it was back then, but since I’ve been here it’s gradually got sort of crowded.”

“So you see, Pikey, you were quite wrong, There is no heaven,” Elaine whispered.

“Oh well,” he said after a moment’s thought, “I had fun while I believed it. And as a bonus I put the char woman up the spout. It wasn’t all bad.”

© Peter Rogerson 29.08.21

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