He leaned over closer. ‘Sister, if religion and arithmetic are just the same thing, why don’t we just put ’em together? Like the Protestants, see one time I went into this Protestant church and they didn’t have no crucifix or statues or nothing, just this big board up on the wall with a bunch of numbers on it — is that, is that the answer? Is that the right answer, Sister?
‘Well then look, why don’t we just, when we say prayers and get days of indulgence and stuff, why don’t we keep it all in a bank somewhere? And have like credit cards? Sister?’
The electric hand-polisher stalled, turned over and skidded out from under the wrinkled hand. Roderick made a move to fetch it, but stopped. Sister Mary Martha rolled over sideways and lay still and stiff, her withered cheek pressed to another withered cheek in the gleaming floor. Roderick stared, and four colourless eyes stared back at him.
‘…Holy Family Kit hits the Chicago dealers just make sure your boys are on the ball there, work out some kinda sales slogan, not just the old family that prays together routine neither, something peppy like Go! Go! Go for God! maybe or no, okay something like Say One For Yourself, Too. Well I don’t know Frank, you’re the adman… hang on a minute… what is it?’
‘Father, there’s a stiff downstairs. You wanta call the cops?’
‘Oh very funny, now go away stop bothering—’
‘But Father it’s S—’
‘Go away. You still there Frank? Nothing just… talking what? Ha ha, host, aw come on! Never get a dispensation in a million… need their head examined if they think… Ha ha, try that out on Jack, Father Warren here, he’s the science fiction nut around here…’
Chairs creaked, programmes fluttered, as a shrill voice finished flattening the notes of Bless This House. The man next to Pa wondered why they couldn’t turn off the heat when they had a mob like this, and the woman next to him wondered why they didn’t just run it all through closed circuit TV like they did over at the public. Pa said he didn’t mind, but then he was non-Catholic. Ma tried to nudge him but he went on, ‘Yep, getting ready for the eternal flames,’ he said. ‘Wanna see me weep? Gnash my — ouch!’
‘Oh you’re Mr Wood, aren’t you? I don’t suppose your little boy’s in the play — you know our little Traysee is playing Our Lady herself?’
‘Our Lady?’
‘The Blessed, you know. Mary. I don’t suppose your—’
‘Playing one of the wise men. Not sure just which one, Baal-hazar maybe.’
‘Oh yes he’s the little crip — handicapped boy isn’t he?’ The woman smiled a V-shaped smile. ‘You know I always think it’s best to keep them in a home. After all, if God—’
We do keep him in a home. Ours,’ Pa stage-whispered as the curtain rose on a centurion. A shrill voice began:
‘At thattime therewentforth a disease, a decree…’
The show, Roderick thought, must go on. Besides, nobody wanted to listen when he tried telling them, not Father O’Bride upstairs on his exercycle watching his own muscles ripple underneath his Sham Rocks t-shirt. Not Sister Olaf backstage here either, she was so busy keeping everybody quiet and trying to keep the choirboy from wiping his bloody nose on his surplice, and heck she didn’t even see anybody, didn’t even say she liked his costume it was just, ‘Okay get ready Wise Man Number Three’, as if he was jumping out of a plane or something, already the numbers one and two were moving forward (‘Little steps, little steps’) and the choir hummed We Three Kings of Orient Are. Then suddenly he was onstage in the blazing light…
The choir stopped humming. The audience stopped coughing and creaking.
Ma had taken a lot of trouble with the costume, saying that a sorcerer ought to look like a sorcerer. And since no one had made it clear which Wise Man Roderick was to play, she’d fixed up a kind of all-purpose outfit. She might have got away with the lunar bull-horns and the solar mask (even though its crazy blood-red grin would disturb children’s dreams for some time to come). Even when Roderick opened his giant wings to speak, the audience was less shocked by the fixed stare of some 500 dolls’ eyes, than by the revealed body draped in yellow, and bearing unmistakable appendages on the chest. 500 or more eyes stared back at him, at them, those lumps of painted wood which (Ma said) sorcerer-kings of old had worn to distract the gods. And between these great breasts nestled the sacred heart of Osiris, bright red, pulsing realistically, and gushing butane fire. With a bang, it went out.
A man snickered.
‘Jesus,’ began Roderick.
A woman gasped.
‘I mean here’s frankenst — Jesus, here’s—’
An angel screamed. A whispered command came from backstage and some of the larger choirboys moved to seize him. And then suddenly he was all over the stage at once, rolling, kicking, flapping his wings, disappearing under a heap of lace vestments to re-emerge minus a breast, dodging the black arm of a nun, crashing into the stable and emerging in a blizzard of straw — – until finally he was pinned down as the curtain descended, so that the last thing seen by the audience was his Satanic grin.
That was how they would think of it later, Satanic. One or two in the audience went so far as to imagine they had heard him uttering curses and incantations, that they had seen a forked tail which coiled around him to make the Sign of the Cross in reverse… Others had more practical reasons for being upset. Mrs Roberts, whose little girl had not yet made her entrance (‘Fly! Fly to Egypt! King Herod…’), made her way backstage to deliver a slap that left her hand stinging, Roderick’s metal singing.
‘It was like seeing a peacock hunted down and plucked,’ said Ma as the three of them walked home.
‘Phyllis Teens,’ Pa muttered.
‘Except that it used to be a wren, didn’t it? At Christmas all the English villagers would go out in a big pack and hunt down a wren. Men of good will…’
‘Why?’ Roderick asked.
‘Now don’t get all upset, either one of you,’ Pa said. ‘The disguise was beautiful whatever they say. And you done just fine in the play, son. Anyway remember, Christmas is just another Julian day. Day two million, four hundred forty thousand—’
‘Men of good will! Industrial England it was, so of course they had all kinds of funny notions, they, they thought the machines wanted them to do it. Yes so they killed the little bird and crucified it and carried it around the village singing
‘Yeah but why would they do that?’
‘Because, I don’t know why, because they were horrible Manxmen, maybe. People with so little imagination they call their home the Isle of Man—’
‘And,’ Pa said, ‘they couldn’t even put a cat together properly, left the tail inside. Sorry son.’
Roderick did not like jokes about body parts coming apart. Hearing one made him suddenly imagine he could feel the iron rods in his legs. He felt them now, even as he smiled. ‘That’s okay.’
‘That was a very strange play,’ said Ma. ‘All that business about the Virgin Mary, as if the infant didn’t count at all. She’s the big star, and he’s just a silly doll. Reminds me of the Egyptian priests, at the winter solstice they’d all gather in the temple and at midnight they’d come running out with this wooden doll, telling everybody the Virgin had given birth to this new sun, S-U-N I mean—’