the christian girl

I have been having coffee with a Christian girl. It’s been leading to flirtation: she paraphrases scripture and grills me on catechism; I drink espressos for effect, but have to have five or six of them to keep my hands busy. It makes for terrible stomach cramps. When she talks to me about Christ’s death and resurrection I always think about fucking her; there is something sexy about eternal life and her devotion to theological creeds.

Once I put fake blood on my palms as though it were stigmata and showed it to her with tears in my eyes. I thought it would be funny, or that her inflamed fervour might push her into a handjob, but she just prayed for hours without a break, right up until the café asked us to leave. I never told her the truth and hoped that she would forget about it over time.

When I walk her to the bus stop I always make sure we get there a few minutes early. We have a routine of kissing there. She doesn’t mind kissing because she says it doesn’t compromise her love for Jesus. I always get carried away and try to get my fingers into her skin tight jeans, but it never happens; I get a glimpse of her crucifix and start to feel guilty, even though I don’t know why.

At night I dream of her own holy font.

Yesterday I suggested that we played Household Eucharist, substituting communion wine for cheap vodka. I would play the priest. Although she was reluctant at first she had to admit that it sounded fun. She loves the Sermon on the Mount – she lists it as one of her interests on her Facebook page – so I read some passages from it and gave her a hunk of baguette to chew. Christ’s body, I explained to her. She looked at it with her head angled to one side. Then I gave her a tall glass of the vodka and told her it was Christ’s symbolic blood, his metaphoric plasma, but she slapped me on the neck until I conceded: it was his real clear blood, his physical real presence in the magnolia living room, and I a proud atheist! The TV was on quietly in the background. She swallowed the vodka aggressively, anxious for some more Jesus in her digestive tract; it hit her pretty hard because she had never tried alcohol before. About half an hour later we had finished the bottle and I had stripped below the waist, she was in underwear. She was so drunk that she kept slumping backwards while I kissed her, but I put her hand on my dick and she clutched at it like it was a holy relic or an ordained length. I took her pants off and licked her cunt in quick goes; for a while it all felt incredibly concentrated, and to the sound of a daytime property show I felt as close to blessed as I ever had before. Her thighs shook of their own accord with my oral intervention and the hairs on my arms stood upright, and my chest felt tight in awe of her body parts, which all joined so perfectly together, and in my head I wept for the inner thigh, the middle back, the slightly prickled underarm! A few minutes later, when I was starting to rub my dick up and down her and I was going to ease it in, she all of a sudden recoiled away from me and, grabbing her clothes in a ball from the end of the settee, she ran screaming upstairs. She was screaming ‘sorry’, but I don’t think she was talking to me.

I got dressed and made an instant coffee. There was no milk in the fridge and it tasted awful, but I drank it black all the same. About half an hour later she was still upstairs but her father came in. He said hello to me and made himself an instant coffee. I heard him say the word rectum when he looked in the fridge and saw that there wasn’t any milk, and then I heard him pour the coffee down the sink and he came into the living room with a glass of red wine. He looked at the empty vodka bottle on the floor and saw my tousled hair but he didn’t say anything about it.

“Where’s Jane?” he asked pleasantly. For some reason this made me think of her at 40, slightly overweight but gentle and incredibly attractive. I could screw her away from her husband and her kids, sordid meetings in the Premier Inn or ugly passion in McDonald’s toilets, scrabbling for each other’s genitals with the stench of Big Mac still on our fingers.

“She’s upstairs,” I said. I blinked apologetically in his gaze.

“How are you, then?” he said, sipping at his wine. “How’s life?”

I told him it was okay. We sat in silence, straining to make out the property valuations on the TV.

“I feel like I’m waiting for something to happen,” I told him. The fading effects of the vodka had left me feeling very grave. He nodded sincerely. I could hear Jane sobbing upstairs but we both tried not to listen, her father absentmindedly turning the TV up and me shifting in my seat.

“She’s out of control for Jesus,” her father said, an afterthought.

“It’s something,” I agreed, wishing I’d got to fuck her.

“It’s bullshit,” he declared. He was drinking the glass of wine when I looked over at him.

*

There was a place I used to go in Brighton, at the top of the sheer cliffs they had cut away to build the railway lines and the train station. I climbed up on top of a brick wall when it was dark at night and sat up there, bathed in orange glowing light from the street lamps and the groan of the straining sleepers that trailed off along the south coast. The iron beams of the stations rear end towered up like the archaic husk of a ballroom, a shell around which the future could one day be reconstructed. There was romance in the metalwork, the floodlights heavenly white, the brickwork tired and changed. Trains ran below points and isolated portakabins and steel staircases. I sat there with a girl during a secret affair, which started at an awful party after the big anti-war march. We had laid on the floor in someone else’s bedroom in the dark and she said “I want you to fuck me”. I was sick minutes later, diarrhoea too; I left her waiting on the floor while I stood in the bathtub and puked and shit out the futility of the day, the two million ignored protests all petering out to bongos and soft drugs at the Serpentine. I told her about it and she took me home the next day, made me a can of soup, which I couldn’t keep down. We couldn’t fuck for days because I was so sick. It might have been food poisoning, in retrospect, but the possibility of our fucking hung in the air with real anticipation. Eventually it happened; down on the single mattress I slept on, listening to Lou Reed. It was a whirlwind few weeks; we drove in her car and drank heavily, smoked in the dark, walked and fucked through the nights. She picked me up from work at a hospital kitchen and we drove into the grey afternoon and kissed on the beach. Her boyfriend was in Spain. We were too poor to buy condoms which meant I only came once, the last time we did it. In the guest bedroom at her parents place in the middle of the afternoon. I heard her dad’s car pulling up in the driveway through the open skylight on her ceiling and came panicked into the rubber. I thought he’d want to kill me if he knew that I was nailing his daughter in his own house in the daylight. We sat on the wall above the station together and shared strong cigarettes. Her boyfriend moved back to England soon after that. Transport feels so integral to my sense of personal history.

*

Later I went upstairs to Jane’s room, to see if she was okay and to say goodbye. I knocked on the door but all I could hear was nothing on the other side of it. I rested my forehead against the cool wall of the landing. When I was young we had smashed up an ancient bench outside of a village church, which made the local papers. They wanted it to be wanton destruction, or Satanism, or something similar, but we just wanted it for firewood. It was a purposeful act untainted by our religious beliefs. Amongst the gravestones and the service timetables I thought about trying to believe, but it seemed like I shouldn’t have to try. I had stamped my foot through the seat of the bench and felt the old wood break.

Downstairs, Jane’s father was not where I had left him on the sofa. I walked around its edge and saw him down on the floor, doing push ups, his thin arms trembling with the effort. He had moved the coffee table to one side and taken his shoes off; he had his back to me. Instead of numbers he seemed to be counting his regrets with every push upwards. “I should have asked out Sandra Peters,” he said, his face red with the effort, “in the fourth year. I should have taken that job offer; it was so much money and I was just being a coward.” I picked up my jacket and went out of the living room, pulling the door behind me. “I should have slowed down,” he continued as I started climbing back up the stairs. “I should have slowed down before the accident.”

I knocked on Jane’s door again but there was still no answer. It opened when I tried the handle so I went in. She was lying on the bed on her back, still only in her underwear; her face was red from crying but she was breathing, just asleep. A Bible was open on her chest, its gilded leather binding drawing my eyes towards the shape of her tits. I strained my eyes, trying to commit the picture to memory.

On the way out of the front door I heard her dad panting in the other room.

*

Mentally, I use religious terminology to frame my romantic experiences. It makes sense to see the eye of God in a wet vagina, heaven in parted buttocks, Christ in a tired conversation just before the alarm goes off, to fuck yourself closer to God.

*

Years before I had a holiday with a girl I had already broken up with. We had been strictly not fucking in the weeks since the breakup, but had reached an agreement that – seeing as we had booked the holiday as a couple – we would fuck throughout it; I was more excited about that than the prospect of sightseeing or relaxation. We had met drunk and she jerked me off in a room full of sleeping friends, where we had lit an open fire in the middle of the living room floor. The house had been picked for demolition, which gave the party a sort of end-of-days ambience. A couple of weeks later I went down on her on her parents’ settee. She was sixteen and I was a bit older, but we were both nervous and our voices trembled. The holiday was about two years after that. We slept in a tent and in the evenings it would be very dark and I’d roll us cigarettes, and we’d fuck until the tent smelt weird, her short thighs like lanterns guiding my way. It was an odd mood afterwards because we were broken up, and she carried herself as though she regretted the holiday. I had been bugging her all through the week about wanting to watch her piss, and for some reason one night she relented; she crouched outside the tent and did it, and I shone a torch down there to see. There were mallards nesting in the stream behind the trees that backed onto our tent. Her face was sad and caught in the edge of the torchlight and the whole thing left me feeling a bit nauseous; it changed our relationship a lot. Earlier in the holiday we had been at the beach. The trees had come all the way down to the shore, dipping their roots into the heavy salt water. Around the trees there was soggy brown mud, but it quickly became sand as fine as table salt that blew into my eyes with the wind. An old man stopped me. He was walking a small ugly dog and it was hard to understand his accent. In the middle of his weathered cracked face was the most frightening nose, huge and red, but dotted with white crusts that made the whole thing look like a giant scab. I thought about dead leaves, tree bark, plaster, I couldn’t help it. He told me to go to a place called Bembridge. Later we were walking in the rain through some gardens that grew on a huge fissure in the cliffs and we fucked in a wooden gazebo, shaded by huge oaks. She just hitched her jeans down some and I opened my fly, and she rode me, facing the footpath. Something about it felt a bit forced, like we were doing it because we thought we should. I photographed her with a disposable camera, in the bath, but when the film came back developed the picture had been removed. A year afterwards, just before I left to go to university, we fucked for the last time. I hadn’t seen her for a couple of months beforehand and she had been seeing another guy for six months, but I visited her at her parents’ house. It felt refreshing to say goodbye and to let go of an old piece of life, and we went at vigorously, me coming far too quickly. We laid for a while and then I got up to go; she asked me to promise not to ever tell anyone, because of her boyfriend, but I’m sure he’d have understood that it was something we had to do.

*

I turned out of Jane’s street and was going to meet some friends but there was a woman screaming just up the road. She flitted between English and what sounded like Russian, shouting for help. I saw a girl running up to them, clutching a mobile phone, and I ran up too, already feeling crushed by what I knew was going to be my own helplessness. I got into the woman’s front garden and saw a man collapsed down across the threshold of the house. The girl with the phone looked at me and I noticed the tears on her cheeks.

“Help,” said the woman desperately. She stared into my eyes. “He’s dying.”

The girl had phoned an ambulance and was talking to the operator. She was hysterical on the phone. It felt like this had all been orchestrated in advance, that everything was already decided. The man was on the floor at my feet and trying to breathe but I don’t think he could do it and I looked at him. I felt a weird attachment to him, sharing the end of existence. His wife screamed his name, Ivan, and I think she was praying while the girl yelled into the mobile. She shouted CPR instructions at me and I got onto my knees and lifted the man’s head with my hands; it was as heavy as a rock, his cheeks wet with his own saliva. He had stopped breathing, choked on life, his wife trying to breathe her own deep into his lungs. The ambulance came and hurried him on board. It rocked under the weight of their efforts. The girl closed the couple’s red front door and we left. The last time I saw my grandfather he had visited my parents’ house, and when he stood in the garden he cried and said he didn’t want to go home. Why do you bother in the face of death? Why do you not bother? It sounds weird but this dying man was somehow overflowing with life.

We walked together for a while, quietly, and she had stopped crying; I think we both felt reluctant to split up. We had become the truth of something unbelievable for each other, a confirmation. I imagined her legs and her skin. She had dark hair and thin arms. I asked her if she wanted to go for a drive and she said yes. We walked to my car and drove out of town. It was starting to get dark. Our faces flashed blue in the light of the stereo while we listened to David Bowie. It was ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’.

I pulled over at the derelict Necton Diner, quite far back from the road. She had some sandwiches with her in a plastic bag, one filled with ham and cheese and the other with salami. The salami smelt strong and made the entire car smell with it, the dense air heavy with highly spiced sausage. We at the sandwiches in the occasional quiet that followed a barrage of traffic. The diner ached with death, its counters abandoned, its tables unwiped, swallowed back into the flatness of the landscape, submerged into its wet soils. We got into the back seat of the car and started taking off our clothes without a word, our bodies making shadows with the passing headlights. We did it attentively, her flat chest against my stomach, and it sounded like the trees were applauding us. Afterwards I thought of Jane as we drove back into Norwich.

*

I once worked for two days as a maid at a Butlins holiday camp, partnered up with an amateur middle aged actor called Trevor Blackman. He had a thick moustache and gave me a lift to the job in his red Vauxhall, and he talked with slightly irritating mannerisms about his life as a struggling actor who did temporary catering and cleaning work on the side. Apparently he had a tiny role as a security guard in a medium sized British football comedy, and he told me that his moustache was often useful in getting work in period pieces. When I asked him what period pieces he had acted in he went very quiet. He was also a competition disco dancer; he hand-jived without music and his legs swung dangling loose like string, his finest moves like a drunken Travolta impersonator. Our job was to clean the chalets nearest the beach. We had to wipe the surfaces and cupboards, sweep the floors and make the beds. I hated making the beds. Trevor and I each took one half of the sheet as we limply tucked it under the cheap mattress, me silently, he imagining future acting jobs that would never materialise. He kept mentioning his agent, a company in London who he had sent a portfolio of versatile moustache shots to, but they sounded like con artists, and he was still waiting for the wages from a TV advert he had done nearly a year before. We were really shit maids. I spent most of the time smoking outside the chalets, and Trevor made himself cups of tea and drank them sitting on the doorsteps. After the last day of work he drove me back to his flat, I can’t remember why; it was a surprisingly nice place. He went off to get something from one of the other rooms, which all had their doors closed, and I noticed a stack of pornography under a pile of letters. There were five or six different magazines. I suppose Trevor must have been lonely. When we went our separate ways I told him I would look out for his face on television and he smiled beneath his moustache, his supermarket denim brilliantly blue in his porn-filled Worthing flat. I found him on the internet yesterday, photographed in the local presses: “Worthing’s Disco Man on Britain’s Got Talent”. He made it to the final 200, apparently. In the photograph his tie was yellow and his clothing black. He seemed less steeped in tragedy than the man I remembered, but it was definitely him.

*

After I dropped the girl back home I went to meet an old school friend of mine. We called him Child, a nickname rich with low-grade irony because he had the face of a man twice his age. He was waiting for me outside Tesco, and he held one half of a cheese and onion sandwich in his hand.

“Hello,” I said. I tried to shake his hand but the sandwich was in the way, so I squeezed his shoulder instead.

“You ready?” he asked nervously.

“What for?”

“The protest.”

He explained that he had organised a one-man protest against Tesco. I asked what he was protesting about and he seemed uncertain, but mumbled something about dehumanizing the worker with those self-service checkouts they use. It sounded like a pretty weak protest but I agreed to go in there with him. Child hadn’t been himself for a few months, since he had accidentally killed his own cat. He had been running a fire drill in his terraced house and was carrying the cat downstairs when he lost his footing. They fell together and he had held onto the cat tighter, trying to keep it safe. When he stood up at the bottom of the stairs with a cut forehead he saw that the cat in his arms was dead, its little tongue poked out of its busted mouth; he had crushed it with his falling body. Although he had planned the fire drill himself he said that he had been really tired, on account of how early in the morning it had been. He was crying when he told us this. It messed him up a lot. He kept the cat’s ashes in an urn on the top of his TV.

We went into the Tesco, which was quite empty. For some reason they were playing deafening pop music, which I was sure they didn’t usually do. It was a day of many revolutions. Child walked conspicuously up to the self-service checkouts. I could see his lips moving as he walked. There was a security guard with folded arms looking straight at him from the other side of the checkouts but Child didn’t seem to have noticed. He glanced over his shoulder and then started shouting, right at the checkouts.

“Machine!” he shouted. “Machine! Not a person! You aren’t! You’re mechanical components! VDUs aligned with checkout software! Not a person, with personal traits! Machine!” He was spitting with intensity and his face had turned very red. He was still holding the sandwich.

The checkouts mechanized voices asked him to scan his first item, told him there was an unexpected item in the bagging area. They started a meaningless dialogue with Child, as though they were human after all.

“I won’t scan on you!” he replied. “Don’t touch my fucking apples!”

“Please scan your first item,” said the checkout. They were patient and gave second chances.

“You’re trying to befriend me!” groaned Child. “Your hypnotic lasers! I’m not a coupon! I won’t be won over by your motherboard!”

The security guard had walked over to Child and took him by the arm. Child was crying. The guard led him towards the automatic door. He wasn’t rough with him.

“It wasn’t my fault,” he sobbed. “I fell.”

It seemed like he needed to be alone.

*

When I went outside Child had gone. The security guard was laughing about it with one or two friends; they looked like security guards too and had heads the size of farm animals and blank empty eyes. Their voices made me feel futile. I walked up towards the city hall but saw a part-acquaintance whose name I couldn’t remember but whose face contorted with familiarity. He was sticking A4 posters to the inside of a telephone box.

“Hi,” I said. He turned around.

“Oh,” he said. “Hello.” He was wearing a cricket jumper underneath a suit. The trousers were very short. He looked tired and had red-rimmed eyes.

I asked what he was doing and he passed me one of the posters, which was printed onto yellow paper. It said “Looking for Happiness?” in a large Helvetica font. There was a photograph of a couple beneath; they were both gazing into each other’s eyes and smiling, and each of them was holding a length of rope tied into a noose. “Try Suicide” it said under that, then “Here to help YOU” and a local phone number.

He explained that he had set himself up in business as a suicide doctor. I thought he meant underground euthanasia, but he laughed and said that he made videos for people that would make them kill themselves. Seeing as both of his parents had done it, he said, he knew death, better than most people. When he was six he had walked in on his dead mother in the family bathroom, her wrists cut open and her face still warm from paracetamol vomit. He had felt happy for her because she had done it to be with her dead husband. Seeing that, he said, had made him realise that he could help people take their pain away. He didn’t want to kill them; he wanted to help them kill themselves. It was about responsibility and self-control. He had studied film at university. His videos would push them into the bravery of action.
I asked if he had had any customers yet. One, he said, a guy called Horlicks, like the malt drink.

“He was convinced his wife was having an affair,” he said, “and didn’t want to worry about it anymore. He said he was sick and couldn’t sleep, and I told him it was a difficult situation that we needed to address. In the video I showed his wife fucking his best friend while they listened to ‘Lady in Red’ through cheap speakers; afterwards they both walked around his bedroom and looked through his things, calling him a cunt and a loser. “Look at his shit loser clothes and things,” they said. His best friend pissed on his things then set fire to them. I interviewed his parents for the video and they said they wished he was dead, and they laughed when they said it. Then his wife was fucking someone else, a work colleague I think, with industrial noise in the background. It felt claustrophobic, like a headache. They both looked at the camera during it and said “We hate you Gary”. Gary was his name. Gary Horlicks. There was this one beautiful shot, where on the wall at the edge of the frame, just beyond this man’s white moving buttocks, was a photograph of Gary as a child. He was wearing shorts and had these big tears in his eyes. It was pathos. When they came they grunted out “Just kill yourself.” It was a pretty crushing video,” he said matter-of-factly, squinting into the wind. “Kind of primal.”

“Did it work?” I asked. He nodded.

“He did it.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“I helped him. He was in touch with his unhappiness and I helped him to get away from it.”

I looked at my watch and he said he had a lot more posters to put up. We shook hands like strangers and I wanted to see Jane again.

*

Once in London I visited a strip club in Soho with an ex-lover. I think we thought it might rejuvenate our stagnating sex life. It was a hot May night and I was wearing jeans and sandals, but the bouncer let me into the club anyway, probably because it was so expensive. It cost fifty pounds for both of us to get in. We were taken to a table and asked what we wanted to drink. I felt a weird need to try and appear sophisticated and ordered a double bourbon, which cost ten pounds. I drank it quickly and it tasted like money. We watched the strip show, which wasn’t particularly arousing, silently staring forwards at the moving flesh. After another round of drinks we were asked if we wanted a private dance, where a girl comes and does it right in front of you. I looked at my lover and she nodded so I said okay, and gave them another twenty five pounds. The dancer was a blonde Brazilian in underwear. She seemed really tall, but it was hard to tell because I was sitting down. She spoke to us for a while, as though we had just met in a supermarket or at a bookshop, but she was wearing her underwear and it was a dark club and she was about to strip to her bare genitals right there in front of us. After a few minutes of quite formal conversation she started to dance. She was really attractive and had firm tanned limbs, and her tits were precise. She took her pants off and I didn’t quite know how to feel. It was hard to get too excited in the circumstances. She turned her back to us and looked over her shoulder, then bent over a bit so we could see the intricacies of her spotless cunt, which she rested her fingers over. She faced us then and put one foot up on a chair and spread her legs apart and we stared right into her. Then that was it. We thanked her and said goodbye, and she wished us luck with our degrees. I don’t remember if we went back home and fucked that night, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t. We broke up soon after and only really fucked one other time, a few months later, when things had become incredibly strained between us. In her basement flat we just started doing it. Maybe we were bored. She stopped me and said I had to use a condom. I didn’t have any with me so I went back to my house to get some and rushed back to her flat. I went back inside and we went at it again, me fucking her from behind. I still hadn’t put the condom on because I liked to start off without it. She told me to hit her, but I wasn’t sure about it so pretended I hadn’t heard. She said it again, then shouted it. It’s easy to go along with something like that when you’re in the midst of coitus. I punched her on the back and the shoulders, tentatively, but harder when she told me to. It felt sexy and wrong at the same time. I got carried away with myself and knew that I wasn’t going to get the condom on in time. I pulled my dick out and came on her back. It was involuntary. We found that we didn’t have a lot to say to each other in the minutes that followed. She was behaving like I had committed an incredible betrayal, even though she had told me to do it and I had just tried to please her. It had become a sort of test, and the very fact that I had done it meant that I’d failed. I left our relationship behind with my seed spilt in tender violence.

*

I went over to Jane’s place and knocked on the front door. There was no reply for ages but there were footsteps inside the house, so I waited on the doorstep. It was long dark and the air smelt of coal smoke. I peered through the glass of Jane’s front door and saw a silhouette approaching it. It was Jane. She opened the door slowly and said hello when she saw it was me. She smiled a bit.

“Sorry about Household Eucharist,” I said. I felt relieved to see her.

“That’s okay,” she said. She had put on some blue jeans and a jumper. “Do you want to come in?”

We went into the living room. The coffee table was still over to one side but her dad was nowhere in sight.

“He’s gone out,” she said apologetically.

Jane made us both some coffee while I put the furniture back. We sat on the sofa, the overhead light blaring in the awkward dark. I tried to remember her body but it already seemed distant.

“I still want to, you know,” I said.

“I know,” she said. She picked up a Bible from the table and started thumbing through it. I did the same with a TV guide.

I heard a key in the front door. Her father. He came in and smiled weakly at us. He was holding a yellow poster in his hand, which he stuffed into his coat pocket when he saw me looking at it. It looked like one of the suicide posters.

“Hi dad,” said Jane.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m going up to bed.”

“It’s only eight o’ clock.” She sounded worried, the Bible pages rustled like leaves under her fingers.

“It feels later,” he replied. “Goodnight.”

His footsteps creaked up the stairs. I read about soap operas and listened to him cleaning his teeth, a cursory once over. His door closed quietly. I laid my hand on Jane’s thigh and she picked it up and moved it back into my lap.

“Please,” I said. I hated to beg but it happened anyway. No one made me feel like Jane.

“I can’t,” she said. “I don’t want to.”

“So? Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to.”

“Not this. Look,” she said, “I like you. As a person. But I don’t want to do it with you.”

“What about the kissing? The vagina?”

“It got carried away. I’m sorry. I have to save myself for Jesus.”

“Fuck Jesus!” I shouted. “There is no fucking Jesus!”

Her face went red and she punched me in the nose. I felt the bone break and my eyes welled up with tears and I could feel blood on my lips and tongue. It dripped onto the nights TV listings. She put the Bible down carefully and walked to the front door.

“Out,” she said. She opened the door and pointed into the street. “Go on, fuck off.”

I clutched my nose and went over to her.

“Jane,” I said. “I didn’t mean it.” I cried because of the broken nose.

“Just go.”

I leaned in to try to kiss her but she pulled her head away and my nose left smeared blood on her cheek. She shoved me backwards and I tripped out of the door and onto the path. I was spread-eagled on the concrete. My face looked dreadful. She threw her handkerchief out to me and said that she didn’t want to see me anymore, said that she was giving up coffee once and for all. The door closed on us.

I picked myself up and staggered through the damp streets towards the cathedral. It felt like talking to a priest might help me make sense of Jane’s stupid religious mania. The wooden doors were heavy to open and towered over me; they were very serious. I walked towards the altar, reminding myself to not be reverent. My flat soles squeaked on the flooring. I saw the priest sitting on one of the pews. He was reading yesterdays newspaper and sipping from a bottle of wine, but had turned to look at me as I approached him. He was about fifty but his hair was thick.

“Can I have a word?” I said. My face felt tight from the drying blood.

“Yes,” he said. “I don’t usually see people at this time of night. Norwich isn’t that kind of place.”

“This isn’t a confession,” I said.

“I’m not a Catholic,” he said. He handed the bottle to me. I nodded and took a long swallow.

“There’s a girl,” I said. “Christian.”

“Ha!”

*

He was a good guy, the priest. Told me I’d be better with a Jew. Jews aren’t afraid to get fucked up at Purim, he said. And you fuck a Jew on the Sabbath there ain’t nothing like it, he said. Sex is the woman’s right, he told me; they want you to fuck them and they want you to fuck them well. He said he loved to fuck girls from the Abrahamic faiths. He’d done Christianity a lot already and was now working on Judaism. He said he looked forward to the fresh challenges of Islam. He wanted to go down on a Muslim girl.

I said he didn’t talk like a priest.

He said I didn’t talk like an atheist.

We shook hands and I went to the synagogue.