They’re standing up and Johnny is calling Zero to tell him round two is on when his phone rings. He answers it. “It’s for you.” He passes it across.
“Yes?” She listens intently for a minute, nodding silently. “All right, I’ll do it. Thanks.” She hangs up, glances at Johnny. “Playtime is cancelled. Tell Zero to bring the car round; we have a date.”
“Uh-huh. Where?”
She starts walking, back the way they’ve come. “That was Lockhart. Schiller’s on his way to the airport and his pilot’s just filed a flight plan for Denver. As his Mission has a compound outside Colorado Springs, that’s probably where he’s going. Also, Lockhart’s got me a gilt-edged ticket. They run a weekend spiritual retreat for interested outsiders from time to time—with a remarkable track record of generating born-again believers. In fact, the conversion ratio is one of the things that got his attention.”
“So you’re going to go in and sniff around?” Johnny’s expression makes his reservations glaringly obvious.
“Of course. What could possibly go wrong?” She gives him a sardonic look. “Better hurry; I want to see if we can make the four p.m. shuttle to JFK.”
I’M AT HOME THAT EVENING, ENJOYING A LONG HOT BATH, WHEN my phone rings.
It’s been a trying day. From the whole suit-wearing thing to the offsite visit to HMGCC, Pinky and the amazing pyroclastic pigeon-zapper, and then the usual tiresome bullshit in the COBWEB MAZE working group, which is trying to nail down the extent of the damage caused by the BLOODY BARON committee being infiltrated by—no, let’s not dive in the acronym soup just yet. I go home early out of sheer brain-dead exhaustion, hit the Tesco Express for a ciabatta, microwave curry, and a bottle of wine, and just as soon as I get into the steaming hot bath in hope of unwinding, I hear my phone begin to call from the kitchen table downstairs.
(Do you take your phone to the bathroom? I reckon it’s one of the fundamental dividing lines of modern civilization—like whether you hang the bog roll so that it dangles in or out, or whether you eat your boiled eggs big-endian or little-endian. Anyway, I’m an old fart now—I’m over thirty—and I feel the need to actually put the bloody thing down for a few minutes a day. Even though it is a JesusPhone, and all JesusPhone users eventually wind up crouched in a dank, lightless cave, fondling it and crooning “preciousss…”)
So there is a loud slosh from behind me, and a baby tsunami rolls across the bathroom floor as I leg it for the stairs, swearing and hoping I left the kitchen window blinds down. Naturally I stumble on the third step and take the rest of the stairs with three bounces of the left buttock, rebound from the passage wall, and topple into the kitchen, reaching the phone on the table just as it goes silent. And then the front door opens.
“Bob? What are you doing?”
It’s Mo, back from the office earlier than I’d expected, clutching a couple of shopping bags. Unfortunately she’s not alone: trailing behind her is Sandy—a civilian teacher, friend of hers from way back—also clutching the shopping. I make a dive for the tea towel and manage to slip on a floor tile and go arse over tit—or maybe the tit is busy making an arse of himself: by this point I’m thoroughly confused.
“I was having a bath,” I explain when I stop swearing and the pain in my head, where I whacked it on a cupboard on the way down, subsides enough to permit business as usual to resume. “Then the phone rang.” The penny drops with a loud clang. “We’re meant to be doing dinner, aren’t we?” With Pete and Sandy, old friends of Mo’s who go way back. Pete’s a witch doctor—sorry, a priest of some sort—and Sandy is a high school religious education teacher with a sideline in pottery. Nice enough folks as long as you keep the conversation away from work.
“I’ll just be in the living room,” Sandy says helpfully, and disappears, leaving her smile hanging in the air like the Cheshire cat. (I’d say “smirk” but I have it on good authority that women do not “smirk.” At least, that’s Mo’s story, and she’s sticking to it.)
I manage to catch my balance just in time to help Mo deposit the shopping bags on the table. “Let’s have a look at that,” she says, then inspects the back of my head for a few seconds. “Hmm, everything seems to be intact, but you’re sprouting a lovely egg.” She kisses it, making me wince at the sudden pain. “Why don’t you go upstairs and finish that bath, then join us when you’re human?”
“My thoughts exactly,” I agree fervently, then retreat towards the stairs, dignity in tatters.
Half an hour later I make my way downstairs, drier, cleaner, and fully clothed. Mo and Sandy are bickering good-naturedly over the makings of an M&S meal, so I make myself useful and lay the table. Partway through, the doorbell rings; I answer the door, carving knife in hand (you can never be too careful) and find Pete on the doorstep, clutching a couple of bottles of wine. “Come in,” I say, and drag him through to the kitchen. For the next couple of hours Mo and I have the opportunity to lose ourselves in the clichéd middle-class role-play of hosting an informal dinner party—just as long as we remember our employment cover stories: Mo teaches history of music at Birkbeck (about a quarter true) and I’m a civil servant working in IT support (also about a quarter true these days).
The first course is leek and potato soup a la Marks and Spencer, accompanied by a rather acceptable New Zealand sauvignon blanc while the filet of trout is steaming in its own juices in the oven and Sandy unburdens herself of some workaday frustrations. Teaching is changing again, or something of that ilk—which in turn means more work for teachers, juggling lesson plans and learning new jargon. “Policy-making in RE tends to be very hands-off,” she explains; “it’s political poison, so they usually leave it alone.” Religious education in schools may be the law of the land, but aside from de-programming successive generations through boredom it’s turned into as much of a political third rail as public transport policy: whatever you do will be wrong for someone.
“Take class Ten B. I’ve got three Hindus, four Muslims, six Catholics, one Jew, two random pagans, and a Jedi. That’s going by what their parents tell us, on top of the default Church of England types who wouldn’t know a chasuble if one bit them on the pulpit. There are another three militant evangelicals and a Seventh Day Adventist who’ve been withdrawn, lest I pollute their precious ears with knowledge of rival faiths, and a couple of out-of-the-closet atheists who sit in the back row and take the piss. Now there’s this”—she’s waving her hands in counter-rotating circles—“spiritual centeredness program coming from the top down, and a whole new four-year curriculum for comparative religious education along with coursework, and my performance is evaluated on the basis of the averaged continuous assessment scores of said Jedi, pagans, and atheists…”
(Her hair’s turning gray and she’s only in her late-thirties.)
“Huh. What kind of evangelicals withdraw their kids from RE?” I ask.
Mo looks at me pityingly, but Sandy is allergic to ignorance, bless her: “Oh, you’d be surprised. Churches often behave more cultishly the smaller they get, trying to hold on to their children by making it hard to leave—and one of the easiest barriers you can put in someone’s way is to convince them that everyone else is some kind of satanic monster, doomed to hell and all too keen to take you with them. Comparative RE is pure poison to that kind of mind.”