18. A Promised Kiss

Emma encourages Barney to see his fears for what they are.

THE REVEREND ROBBER

18. A Promised Kiss

Emma went up to Barney very carefully, making quite sure that her action could never be interpreted as improper, and looked into his face, anxiety showing in her lovely eyes. As if it was an instinct he took a step back from her and fell, bottom first, back onto his bed.

“What is it?” she asked, speaking softly as if she couldn’t hear the crashing of what Barney was sure was a fist on his window.

“The devil has come for me,” he almost yelped, can’t you hear him as he smashed against my window?”

“Oh that,” she murmured, then giggled, “but it isn’t any old devil, Barney.”

“Of course it is!” he snapped back, “I was warned as a child that there would be thunder and winds when Satan came for me, and I can hear both, the whispering but savage wind and the thunder of fists threatening to break the glass!!”

Emma nodded, and smiled again. “I can hear the wind and it’s blowing quite fiercely,” she said, “as if it was almost a storm. But the thunder is just something man-made rattling against your window. Look, Barney, I heard it too in my room next door, and no devil was coming to collect me I can assure you of that. So I looked out of my window next door to see what it was because as I just said I could hear it too. And then I knew what it was. No devil with or without horns, but what looks like a television aerial cable probably attached at the top end to the chimney and to nothing at this end because it’s been blown free. And nobody will do anything about it in the night because nobody will be watching the television at this hour, so they won’t know.

“A wire? Is that all? But listen to that, Emma! It’s the sound of the Antichrist himself, angry with me for playing with myself… Father warned me, he did, he knew about that kind of sin, and punished me for my filthy behaviour.”

“So you were playing with your what’s-it, were you?” teased Emma with a smile. At least that was her intention, to make light of the Reverend’s irrational fear, but he didn’t hear it as that. What he heard was a mocking voice that had no idea what it was like to be Barney Pickle and the memories from long ago that still haunted him as he approached middle-age.

“Take me, Satan,” he wept, “take me to your kingdom in Hell and douse my flesh with your flames. Yes, I deserve it and I deserve the shame of what I might have done had I thought of it, but didn’t. For I am the worst of all sinners, for I know not when I sin…”

“Barney,” whispered Emma, “you’re quite wrong, you know. Lie back on your bed and listen to me, for I have lived on this world a fair few years and know the tricks it can play on the innocent mind…”

“Lie back with you, a woman, in the room?” he gasped, “with you gazing at my unclean flesh? With a woman casting her mother Eve’s poison over me until I am bathed in evil and find myself touching…”

“Touching, Barney?” she asked gently.

“That which is private and should never be touched. It was the sacred lesson from my growing years, a lesson that my dearly beloved father beat into me so many time it seemed he wanted to take the very life from me to keep me pure!”

“Is that why you urinate on the floor in your bathroom at the parsonage?” she asked with a knowing smile, “for when I clean up behind you I have to dry the floor next to the toilet because a man has aimed at the toilet, and missed?”

He sat back up. “But it is needful,” he spluttered, “a man can’t always aim straight without… without… you must know..£ he groaned.

“Without touching yourself? Without guiding it by touching it?” she asked quietly.

“I suppose so.” He was lost in a confusion crafted by a father years ago, one who had no love in his heart for a son he probably never wanted.

“I was married, you know, and my husband, my dearest Ralf, a good man who passed away from cancer of all things, I knew what he had to do in life, and he never splashed the bathroom floor even when he was in pain.”

“I’m sorry… I didn’t know…”

“But you buried him, Barney, like you buried so many others. Men and woman, mostly good but I dared say sometimes less than perfect,”

“I’m sorry. I buried so many. Sent their holy souls to the kingdom of Heaven with love in my heart if I knew them to be good.”

“Lie back down, Barney,” she said, understanding how frail he was.

He struggled against her will, but she won, and he allowed her tto gently push his head down onto his pillow.

“It’s stopped banging,” he stammered, seeking for words to change whatever subject she had in mind.

“The wind’s dropped,” she smiled, “and I want you to show me something.”

“What?” he asked, still puzzled because the conversation seemed to be going every which way except where he expected it to.

“You said you were punished for touching yourself,” she said quietly, “and, dear Barney, I want you to show me where you touched yourself to deserve so much punishment. And then I will explain to you why there was no sin involved, a small boy scratching an itch or a grown man holding something so that he can aim straight. I don’t know what your father meant by punishing you for something that is perfectly natural, but whatever it was he was very, very wrong. Now show me.”

He couldn’t. Some things get so ingrained into a human mind that nothing can erase them, and his enforced education was one of those things.

She saw the anguish on his face and shook her head.

“It’s getting later,” she said quietly, “just you lie down on your bed and I’ll tell you what…”

“You will?” he was relieved that she wasn’t continuing to insist on him performing the devil’s sin.

“It’s really very late, the nasty noises have gone and I’ll sleep right next to you and if I see you so much as daring to touch your forbidden parts then I’ll kiss you,” she said, “and kisses only hurt when they’re the last kisses. I kissed my Ralf goodbye for a last time very soon before he irf, and so that he knew I meant it I gently held his forbidden part and told him that I loved him…”

He was so confused he didn’t know what to think or to say, so for once he said nothing and instead made room for her next to him. He was lost in a world of confusion and knew at that moment right there that of all things under the sun lying next to Emma was a million miles from being a sin.

© Peter Rogerson 18.04.24