8. A Vicar in the Shower

The DI has a problem when it comes to maing the Reverend Barney Pickle presentable

THE REVEREND ROBBER

8. A Vicar in the Shower

The Reverend Pickle found it to be an almost impossible struggle as he was guided back down the stairs, not sure whether his legs were working properly. His mind was everywhere but where it ought to have been. Not even the word shower had registered and he was beginning to wonder whether the grim reaper had somehow morphed into the woman who was helping to guide him down the stairs, maybe to the threatened depths where sinners spend eternity.

But when they reached the small shower room he got to realise two things: one was a clue and the other a shock. The glazed floor gave it away to start with, and then the single rather austere shower dripping because of a worn washers completed the picture.

He’d been to college as a student and had been obliged to take a shower after physical activity, though he hed never actually understood why grown men (he was that, he had believed, though he was in his late teens when he started college) needed the sort of physical exercise that involved rugby balls.

Back then there had been several showers and a whole group of laughing, joking, teasing fellows (and him, he being no member of that group, by choice, but he was obliged to be amongst them), and the whole group of sweaty and usually mud-stained beings had revelled in the floods of steaming water that washed over them. There had even been soaps, plastic bottles of liquid stuff that had foamed when they massaged it into their bodies.

This shower, though, seemed to be only an imitation of one of those in his student days. It consisted of a pipe, a tap and a rather battered rose. There was a wooden bench where those being showered might sit if they needed to sit in order to dry themselves, and not much else.

He looked with a strange desperation at Doctor Blanding. So he was to shower, which was a huge problem so far as he was concerned, but he had an even bigger problem: Doctor Blanding was a woman and not just any kind of women but a hussy. He could tell that because her very shape spoke of hussiness. She was what the student lads had called gorgeous and add several more personal comments about her shape.

Not that he, personally, saw her that way. He saw her as a symbol of evil, a woman who had inherited the very worst features of her distant fore-mother, the dreadful Eve of biblical fame. Why, she even had breasts! And obvious breasts at that. But it seemed worse was to come. She was going to be there while he was helped off with his clothes by the Inspector. That in itself was an offence against nature, because that man might chance to catch a glimpse on his body what should never be seen by any man or woman. His father had beaten that piece of information into his brain when he’d been only a child at infants’ school He was even given part of a tennis ball clumsily cut into halves so that he could cover those precious organs rather than risk them being seen by others.

It made sense, did protecting himself from the sinful eyes of others and although the tennis ball had long since found its way into a landfill site, he had ways and means of protecting himself from the curious or even disinterested gazes of others. But how could he achieve that with a rather haughty senior policeman dragging his clothes from him and a hussy standing next to him, curiously, watching?

“Please,” he managed to force through vomit-stained lips, “let me…”

“Then strip off!” growled the DI, “and don’t take any notice of us. The doctor here will make sure you’re in good health before we let your Bishop have a few minutes with you…”

The doctor… so that’s what the hussy was, a doctor? He’d heard of such creatures, women who spent their expensive training peering at the contents of a man’s underwear, and here was one of them! And he had to get undressed in front of her!

“No,” he spluttered, “you, she, might see…”

“Nothing that I haven’t seen a thousand times before,” she half snapped and half sympathised. “Now come on, Barney, and get those kegs off you! I’ve got sick patients to see before I can have my lunch. And I need to check you over in case there’s an undiagnosed problem.”

She frowned at him and all might have gone well but she added, “and don’t worry if I catch a glimpse of your little old man, I’ve seen plenty of them, so many that they bore me.”

“It’s evil!” he yelped sounding very much like the child he’d been a quarter of a century earlier when hie father, that good man who had forced awareness into him with a handful of canes and a heavy frown.

“Oh dear,” she sighed, “then let me wait outside until you’ve finished cleaning yourself. That’s all right Inspector, isn’t it?”

DI Glumpy nodded almost impatiently, and Doctor Blanding made her way into an unused cell, probably where a queue for the shower was formed during the busiest time in the early hours when the pubs turned out.

“Now strip off!” grated the DI, not used to having grown men behaving like toddlers. “And make sure you wash all that scum off your face!” he added.

“Don’t look…” begged Barney.

“Don’t look at what? I’m a man too, and I’ve got something very much like what you’ve got,” snapped Glumpy, “now get showered or I’ll report you to the super, and you wouldn’t want that! No sir, you most certainly would not want that.”

And so it was that the Reverend Barney Pickle became a very clean Reverend, and much to his own satisfaction nobody, neither detective inspector nor female doctor got a glimpse of whatever it was they clearly wanted to look at, and he was able to dry himself and look around for his dirty pile of clothing.

“We’ve got clean stuff for you, so you can leave those vomit-stained rags to be cleaned,” snapped the DI, “you see, father, we have a lost property box and it’s your good luck that it contained a well-laundered pair of boxer shorts, must be your size because they used to fit me before I borrowed them if I needed to. Now get them on and I’ll find something to cover the rest of you.”

The Reverend Barney Pickle was beginning to pull himself together. A series of unpleasant shocks seemed to have gone elsewhere leaving him compos mentis, so he quite simply said,

“As long as there’s a clerical collar. I need to wear one of those or my Lord won’t recognise me.”

© Peter Rogerson 04.04 24