26. Misogyny at Large

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

Emma is making headway against life-long brainwashing...

“Nurse,” whimpered Gozza Scumbag, his voice frail like a sickly child’s might be, “Please, nurse…”

“Don’t take no notice of him. He’s a cry-baby,” Jed called after Amy as she went to pay attention to his brother, who had done very little but sleep since his admission to hospital the previous day.

“Yes, Gozza, what is it?” she asked with sympathetic gentility.

“I’ve… my head… I can’t… it hurts,” he groaned.

“Let me look at you,” she said, and she sat by his bed and picked up the notes attached to the foot of his bed. “Yes,” she said, “you’ve got a lot more pain than your brother, Gozza. I want a doctor to take another look at you and he’ll sort you out.”

“He’s having you on, nurse !” growled Jed, “there’s nowt wrong with him! Never has been! Him and his sore head!”

“Thanks for your input, Doctor Scumbag,” growled Nurse Jones, “I’m glad that the many years of study have made you so confident that you’re right and never wrong.”

Gozza Scumbag looked as pale as he felt, and the nurse could tell at a glance that there was something wrong with the lad. So she scurried off in search of Doctor Rogers. May Rogers was a popular figure in Brumpton Hospital because of her inexhaustible supply of patience.

“Hey, bruv, you want to get into her undies then? Is that it?” cracked Jed.

“Shurrup,” responded Gozza, and he turned over so that he could no longer see the taunting expression on his brother’s face.

“You were fun once,” growled Jed, “and up to all sorts of pranks. What about that bank job you tried, eh? Making a cheap picture comic look like a gun, an’ then actually holding the bank up!”

“It were a bible book,” groaned Gozza, “and it were only a joke!”

“But that silly vicar got sent to gaol because they thought it were him!” gloated Jed.

Further sporadic conversation was cut out by the return of Nurse Amy Jones with the attractive and silver haired doctor May Rogers who had come to see why one of the Scumbags boys wasn’t apparently responding to treatment.

And she had a worried expression on her face.

Meanwhile, at the Cowslip Retreat the Reverend Barney Pickle was in a most confused state, and Emma was doing her best to break through an invisible wall of his bewilderment. For that was what it was. He had worked out with his brain set to logic that many of is preconceptions had been planted in him during a childhood that had been dominated by a father whose apparently only pleasure lay in administering brutal punishment in return for blind belief in what he saw as an ancient and immutable truth. That father had actually taught religion at a secondary school until the brutality of his punishments had been discovered by a more sympathetic headmaster, and he had been summarily dismissed.

“Your father’s dead,” reminded Emma, “and all of his words have gone with him. All the lies. All the sadism. If there are such places as Heaven and Hell I know which one he’s gone to, and it won’t be Heaven.”

“You can say that, but can you prove it?” demanded Barney, “in my mind I know what you say makes a lot of sense, but buried deep inside my head there are other things that demand to be called truths, contradictory things, and I can’t shake them off!”

“You poor dear man,” sighed Emma, “look, it’s time for you to make a concrete decision, one that is fixed in your mind for ever. Are you going to stay here and see your time out, maybe give it a chance to heal you, or are you going to drag yourself back to that miserable parsonage of yours? Where you can sit and revisit the lies your father battered into you and convince yourself, against the grain of all common sense, that he was right, that maybe he had an eye on the future that few are blessed to have, and you have been privileged to share it?”

“I don’t know…” he moaned in reply, “don’t forget there is the good book…”

“Oh? Your bible? Does that go on and on about heaven and hell and how no man who knows what his willy’s for can hope to ever go to the former?” she asked, impatiently.

“I’m all confused and messed up,” he murmured, “please, Emma, give me time. I’ll know the truth sooner or later. And then all will be well.”

“You know what I feel is really odd?” she asked.

“Besides me and my obsessions? You’d better tell me, then.”

“It was your father who bullied and beat you and who forced, syllable by syllable, his nonsense into your head, wasn’t it? And there’s no need for you to confirm it because you’ve told me often enough in the day or so that we’ve been here. But think about that. Your father. The man who shared his genes with your mother and therefore created you. To put it bluntly, the man who did all the things he calls forbidden things before you were born, and did them to the woman who was your mother, in order to give you life, things that he has battered you into believing are evil. But he did them! He lay with the woman. He was naked with her. It’s the only way, unless you start believing in virgin births in the twenty-first century!”

“Don’t!” he begged her.

“Just think about it, Barney. Think as deeply as you know how, and see the truth for what it is. And while you’re thinking, please come to a decision. Are we staying or are we going?”

“I don’t know,” he replied miserably.

“Then will you permit me to make a decision for you?”

“I don’t know…”

“This is hopeless! So I will, knowing how cross your Bishop will be if you go back home before your cure at the Retreat is over!”

“It’s not a cure…”

“It’s what I say it is,” Emma told him determinedly, “and I say it’s a cure. And we’re staying for a long as it takes. So come along, get a move on, and don’t you think you should tell Father Teatrader how sorry you are?”

“Should I?”

“Of course you should” You called all the things he accepts as normal quite evil! Sinful! I think it’s about time you and I had a proper chat and I demonstrated using common sense and logic how your fancy version of misogyny is no good at all!”