Nicola Barker - The Yips

‘You discussed the petition?’

‘Of course.’

She looks up, defensive. ‘I said we had over seven hundred signatures — two hundred more than we currently have …’

‘And how did he respond?’ Gene demands.

‘He didn’t. He just shrugged.’

‘He just shrugged?!’

‘Pretty much.’

‘Bloody hell!’ Gene’s incensed. ‘How’s that sanctimonious little prig manage to sleep at night?!’

‘He sleeps like a baby,’ Sheila sighs, removing the washing-up cloth from the washing-up bowl, wringing it out and then draping it over the tap. ‘He doesn’t really see it as a problem he can resolve. He says his hands are tied …’

‘That’s bullshit! You know that’s just bullshit!’

‘Is it, though?’ Sheila dries her damp fingers on a tea towel and then rubs her eyes with her knuckles, exhausted. ‘It’s easy to demonize him, Gene, but we both know — in our heart of hearts — that this was never so much a simple choice between right and wrong as a fluffed-up compromise between two lesser kinds of evil …’

‘Are you sure about that?’ Gene’s plainly not convinced.

‘Uh. No,’ Sheila admits, removing the tea towel from its small, plastic hook, shaking it out and then folding it in half, ready for use, ‘which could well be a sign that I need to take a step back from the situation — distance myself from the campaign; try and focus my limited energies on something more positive, something more attainable …’

‘Nah. Not your style,’ Gene maintains.

‘My style?’ she grumbles, grabbing a teacup and starting to dry it. ‘What’s my style, exactly? Three years of senseless rancour followed by a long and drawn-out nervous breakdown?’

‘Why change the habits of a lifetime?’ Gene teases her.

‘Well maybe, just this once, I need to rise above — be the bigger person …’

Sheila’s almost laughing as she says this.

‘ Pshaw! ’ Gene’s incredulous.

‘Thanks.’ She shoots him a jaundiced look as she places the dried cup into a nearby cupboard.

‘You don’t need me to tell you that there’s a massive principle at stake here,’ he persists, ‘which is that the church has a responsibility to the wider community, even if they don’t happen to be members of the Christian faith per se .’

‘You know, increasingly I’m coming to see the virtues in your philosophy,’ Sheila muses, grabbing a saucer from the draining-board this time.

‘Mine?’ Gene frowns.

‘Yeah’ — she gives the saucer a cursory buff and then places it alongside the cup — ‘taking the path of least resistance.’

‘That’s my philosophy?’

Gene’s plainly irritated by this.

‘I need to be more pragmatic’ — she shrugs — ‘compromise. Let things go.’

‘Who are you,’ Gene demands (only semi-joking now), ‘and what the hell have you done with my wife?’

‘I’ve placed her into an old box labelled “idealist”,’ she sighs, ‘punctured the cardboard with a couple of air-holes, and then carefully taped over the lid.’

She gives the tea towel a cursory inspection. ‘I don’t think she’ll be especially missed,’ she adds.

‘Well, for what it’s worth,’ Gene maintains, ‘I’ve always really loved your reformist zeal.’

‘ But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you ,’ she quotes, ‘ And loved the sorrows of your changing face. ’

Gene looks at her, quizzically.

‘W.B. Yeats. “When You are Old”.’

She gazes around the kitchen, pensively. ‘I feel old,’ she mutters. ‘I feel ancient. In fact I feel sort of … sort of desiccated .’

‘Like a religious coconut,’ Gene suggests.

‘Strung up on a high branch for all the blue tits to peck at.’ She grimaces.

‘I do love your pilgrim soul,’ Gene avows, ‘but not the sorrow. The sorrow part I can live without.’

‘With idealism comes heartbreak. With stoicism comes …’ She thinks for a moment, scrunching up the tea towel in her hand. ‘… yet more stoicism.’

‘Great! Bucket-loads of stoicism,’ Gene grumbles, ‘where the hell will we find the room to store it all?’

‘We can rent a railway arch,’ Sheila suggests.

‘Yeah …’ Gene quickly warms to this idea. ‘We can tie the bishop to a chair and chuck him in there, too.’

‘Alongside my little box of idealism,’ she muses.

‘Not such a little box,’ Gene snorts, ‘how about an unwieldy, plywood crate with rusting, stainless-steel supports?’

Sheila refuses to take his bait. She turns and grabs a cereal bowl. ‘Maybe my appointment to this post wasn’t the start of something after all,’ she ruminates, ‘but the end of it.’

‘How so?’ Gene scowls.

‘I just don’t think they view me as a functioning part of the team …’ She finishes with the bowl and places it into the cupboard. ‘And that’s not only locally, but in the diocese as a whole …’ This time she grabs a dinner plate. ‘I mean the bishop honestly seems to believe that my appointment was enough — that his involvement ends there.’

‘The pace of change was always bound to be slow,’ Gene interjects, ‘you knew that when you accepted the post.’

‘I basically just tick a box,’ she continues, ignoring his interjection. ‘I fill a quota. At best I’m a hollow symbol of change; the most shallow … the most superficial …’ Words fail her, temporarily, and she polishes the plate with an especial vigour. ‘It’s his automatic, fall-back position every time I bring up any kind of problem I might be experiencing with the PCC or any kind of issue I might have with the church warden …’

She places the plate down on to the worktop and quickly grabs another. ‘He basically just peers at me over the top of his spectacles as if to say, “You’re there , aren’t you? I’ve done my bit. I’ve stuck my neck out. Now stop your infernal carping, woman, grit your teeth, and get on with it!”’

‘He did stick his neck out,’ Gene concedes.

‘Yeah. I know that, Gene’ — Sheila’s starting to work up a real head of steam, now — ‘but what’s the point in making a controversial appointment if — once the appointment’s finally secured — you just back off, holding your hands up, basically refusing all further involvement?’

She finishes drying the second plate and slides it on top of the first. ‘I mean I’m virtually disabled by the PCC, the church warden’s from the Dark Ages, every remotely interesting initiative I try and undertake is either blocked outright or dies a slow and painful death due to a universal lack of interest …’

‘Is this a crisis of faith?’ Gene asks, mock-seriously, peering down at his watch. ‘Because Evening Service starts in approximately two minutes.’

Sheila frowns but says nothing. She reaches out and grabs a third plate.

‘What’s that thing you’re always quoting at Mallory?’ He tries his best to pep-talk her. ‘You know — that weirdly sadistic thing about God always testing the people he loves best the hardest?’

After a long pause in which she dries the third plate with a spectacular level of thoroughness, Sheila finally rouses herself to answer him: ‘ For he maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust ,’ she suggests.

‘Uh, no,’ Gene demurs.

‘ The inestimable treasure of tribulation ,’ she second guesses.

‘There you have it.’ He nods, gratified.

‘So I suppose — by my own warped logic — that I must be incredibly blessed right now …’

She smiles over at him, brightly, then places the third plate on top of the other two. ‘I must be tremendously blessed, stupendously blessed.’