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You didn’t think you’d hear from me again, did you?
Thank you for respecting my privacy there for a while. That was really big of you. You wave people goodbye, you can’t always take it for granted they’ll leave you alone. Being alone with my thoughts really helped me, I think—or maybe it didn’t. I’m back here, aren’t I?
Anyway, I’m not doing this by myself.
Interior scene, Quaker meeting. Probably day, but who knows? There are no windows. The usual crowd is here, by which I mean there is no crowd. It’s just a couple of quakery-looking people, and a lot of empty chairs. They let me back in despite my tits comment. Quakers are very tolerant.
He told me I wasn’t allowed in his church, but this isn’t his church. It’s the demilitarized zone between religion and atheism. Quakers are pacifists, so they’re not allowed to come after me for that remark. I’ve been coming here a lot, and it’s really rather grown on me. A couple of weeks ago, an old lady got up and talked about how happy she was that her husband had finally passed. It was the first time in a while I was almost moved to tears.
You’d think he’d be smart enough not to show. I’m beginning to think he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed. My father’s been married barely four weeks, and here’s the door opening to admit the man himself. (The priest, not my father.) He’s brought his excellent arms and his beautiful neck, and he doesn’t even see me as he sits down in the back row. Why the back row, you ask? It’s where cowards go to hide.
I barely wait two minutes before I get up.
“Sometimes I think that women aren’t allowed to be Catholic priests because we’re not allowed to hand difficult decisions off to an imaginary friend.”
Now he’s noticed me. His eyes are beautiful, too. I can’t tell if he looks pissed off or scared.
My theory is that Quakers had to adopt pacifism into their religion to prevent routine homicides at their meetings. As far as platforms to air passive-aggressive grievances go, the only thing that beats a Quaker meeting is a Best Man speech. His eyes follow me as I sit back down, and yeah, all right, I think he’s mad.
Well. Good.
“I shared something with someone in good faith and now they’re using it against me.” He’s standing up and glaring at me. “It’s not a particularly good feeling.”
“I had someone duck out on me because they’re scared.” My chair scrapes over the floor as I get back up. It’s that weird, visceral noise that makes your toenails curl, so I have to speak a bit louder to be heard. “They’re trying to be all holier-than-thou about it, and it’s really—”
“Please.” It’s an elderly lady near the door. You remember how your grandmother sounded when she was scolding you for breaking a politeness rule you were trying hard to pretend you didn’t know about? She’s exactly that. “Take it outside.”
He ducks his head in remorse, and I do the same. I mumble a couple of apologies before I realize I’m making things worse—you're not allowed to talk, after all. We shuffle out of the room and abandon the safety of the meeting’s gag order.
Outside, London’s being London, loud cars and buses and the smell of rain in the air even though the sun is out and has been for a week. He’s right in front of me. The collar of his t-shirt is frayed, resting against the pale-freckly skin of his neck. All he’s missing is a Stetson and some leather chaps and he’d be Steve McQueen. Not that I know what Steve McQueen looks like. I hear he’s sex on legs, though.
“What the hell was that about?”
Right. We were having an argument.
“I can’t fucking believe you.”
It’s more like he’s having an argument and I’m watching.
“I get that testing my faith is like your whole thing, and I will say it’s something I’ve encouraged in the past—"
At least he’s not lying to himself about that.
“—but the people in there haven’t done anything to deserve you!”
“And you have?”
I take a moment to look at him, really look. He insists that God and the Church bring him peace. Judging by the bags underneath and the crow’s feet around his eyes, the thing that brings him peace has a higher percentage.
Suddenly, I don’t feel like snapping at him anymore. “Did she find you?”
“What? Who?”
“The fox.” He flinches, and I can’t help but laugh. “There was a fox that night at the bus stop. She was looking for you.”
“Fuck.” He paces a couple of steps, throws a wild glance over his shoulder. “You didn’t tell her where I went, did you?”
“Hey, you’d just dumped me for God. I didn’t feel like covering for you.”
He shoves his hands in his pockets, shoulders pulled up in a way that makes him look like the guilty Catholic school boy I’m sure he’s been at some point in his life. “Fair enough,” he says. He sounds fucking chastised, and I realize I’m over this conversation.
“I really should—"
“D’you want to grab a coffee?”
You know how righteous anger can feel like such sweet, sweet relief? You’re into someone, and you spend your days fretting about what to wear, what to say, whether to tie your hair back or leave it open, whether that thing you said last time was adorably quirky or just weird. Then the person dumps you, and you’re free. You wear yoga slacks and eat ice cream, you leave your hair unwashed for days, you say whatever you want as you’re sat on your couch insulting contestants on Strictly Come Dancing. Getting to be mad is incredibly freeing.
Then the person comes back, and with a single sentence wipes it all out. They’re into you. They want you around, they want to grab coffee. It’s like losing your grip on the edge of a cliff. You’ll be cursing the entire way down, but that won’t help you when your brains splatter all over the rocks at the bottom.
I tuck some stray hair behind my ear, try to remember what kind of underwear I put on this morning. “Sure, yeah. I have to open the café in about an hour, anyway.”
“Perfect. Puts a time limit on it.”
Right. Fuck you, too.
------
He asks for a cappuccino with extra foam and insists on paying for it. I insist he doesn’t, it’s a whole thing, until I shove a carrot at him and tell him to give it to Hilary.
If you had any doubt that God has a sense of humour, just look at carrots. Or bananas. I watch him wrap long fingers around the veggie stick and take it over to Hilary’s cage, and cross my fingers that carrots won’t make me randomly horny for the next few weeks.
Come to think of it, extra foam? I mean. Really?
Hilary nibbles on her carrot and provides a crunchy soundtrack to our awkward silence. For someone who wanted to have coffee he doesn’t seem to be feeling particularly chatty. He licks the foam off of his spoon like it’s an ice lolly, and I catch myself worrying the corner of my mouth with the tip of my tongue.
“So how have you been?”
“I read you’re not meant to keep them on their own.”
We speak on top of each other, my desperate conversation opener easily pushed aside by his weird one. His eyes shift.
“Guinea pigs, I mean.” He points at Hilary’s cage. “They’re herd animals. You’re not meant to keep a single one on its own.”
“You’re a guinea pig expert now?”
He shrugs. “I read it online. If it’s on the internet, it’s true, right?”
The internet had a pretty accurate take on celibacy, so yeah.
“She used to have a friend. Stephanie.”
“What happened to Stephanie?”
“He was a hamster, so I had to give him away.”
He nods, looks down at his cup as he spends way too long scooping up a spoonful of foam. “How long does it normally take you to get over someone?”
The words come out of his mouth, and then they just hang there between us. I’m picturing them looking mean, with sharp edges and covered in icicles. I wish they were physical, so I could grab them and shove them back into his mouth. Shove them in hard, make him bleed. My God, imagine him with a split lip, dishevelled because he just got punched in the face. How hot would that be?
“I’m sorry. That’s a really inappropriate question.”
“What do you want?” That’s so rude. What does anyone want? Companionship, validation. Probably hard to get that from a guy who last spoke to humanity over two thousand years ago. “Why are you here?”
He scans my face, holds my eyes as he curls his tongue over a spot of foam on his lip. “What were you doing at the friends meeting?”
“Waiting for you.”
I don’t have a better answer. You’re caught with your hand in the cookie jar, you plead guilty and hope for a deal.
His face darkens. “I told you—”
“Not to come to your church anymore. I didn’t.”
“That’s—” His voice pitches like it does when he’s upset. “You know what I meant by that!”
“Do I? Maybe I don’t speak Church. You’re the one who asked for coffee.”
He makes a sound like a creaky door, puts his face in his hands. I pick up his cup—the coffee’s gone, but it’s absolutely covered in foam; I’ll be lucky if it all comes off in the dishwasher—and take it over to the counter. “A lady once said to me that fucking a priest is like fucking God.” She said something similar, anyway. “What do you think?”
“I—” He drops his hands. “I think that’s an entirely awful thing to think about.”
The café’s opening in twenty minutes, so I switch on the sandwich maker and check that there’s enough milk. “I’ve thought about it quite a lot,” I say as I lean down to check the bottom shelf, my arse sticking up like the hump of a camel. “I have to say, it didn’t particularly feel like I was fucking God.”
He’s rubbing his nose, just scrubbing away with his palm against the tip of it. “I don’t know what that even is. I don’t know if you’re—telling me I’m bad at sex, or—” He squints. “You know, if that’s what it is, I’d like to remind you that I was coming out of a considerable dry spell.”
“Not my fault you let yourself get out of practice.”
The grimace he pulls makes up for the fact that this isn’t at all what I’m getting at. I don’t really want to get into the quality of the sex we had. Weirdly enough, it’s not even something I think about when I think about the time we spent together.
“I wanna buy you a guinea pig.”
Okay. Weird. “I already have a guinea pig.”
“Yeah, but—a second one. So she’s not alone.”
Too real. I shrug and busy myself with the till. “There’s no pet shop nearby.”
“That’s all right.” He gets up, spreads his palms like he’s giving blessings. “I have a car.”
Well, that’s grand.
------
The thing about central London is that driving in it is, well, really stupid. When I close the café, he pulls up in his Nissan Micra (it’s a deep purple colour and missing a rear light). He sits outside and blocks two lanes of traffic while I wipe down the counters and chuck the pinny in the wash. By the time I join him, he’s sweating and throwing harassed glances in the rear view mirror.
“So where is the next pet shop?” He squeezes in between two cabs, and I clutch the sides of my seat.
“Battersea, I think.”
“I have no idea where that is.”
There’s something deeply ironic about a priest, shepherd of people and provider of guidance, asking for directions. “I’ll put it in my phone, hang on.”
The fact that we get there in one piece is no less than a miracle. He takes forever to park the car, shimmies it back and forth and throws me apologetic glances from the corners of his eyes. I watch his hand on the gear stick, strong fingers curling around hard plastic, watch the muscles in his forearm play as he shifts from first to reverse. For a priest, he’s stacked. What kind of guy takes a vow of celibacy and then hits the gym to sculpt his delts?
“Do they really just sell live animals in shops?”
It’s like I’m the one who asked him to come on this outing with me. I don’t wait until he’s locked the car, so he has to jog to catch up with me.
“Seems weird, doesn’t it? Seems like they shouldn’t be allowed to do that.”
“They don’t sell cats, I think. Or dogs.” The shop’s quite large and laid out with fake-wood linoleum floor. A small dog is yapping somewhere in the back. Maybe they do sell dogs? “Just small stuff, like birds and rodents and—fish.”
“Never understood people who keep fish.” He’s got his hands shoved into his pockets and peers around like a teenager who’s been dragged out of his comfort zone. “Of all shitty pets, fish are the shittiest.”
Can’t disagree with him there.
The guinea pigs are in a big enclosure in the back. It’s about the size of the space behind the café’s counter, which just drives home that I’m probably just clumsy knocking things over all the time, not working with insufficient space.
“That’s a whole fucking herd!”
He’s standing there with his hands on the enclosure’s railing, mouth hanging open as he stares at the vast expanse of bedding and the guinea pigs frolicking around in it. There are also a few bunnies, small enough that they blend in quite seamlessly.
He shakes his head. “Herd, is that the right word? They’re different for different animals, right, like a pride of lions—”
“—a murder of crows—”
“—a glaring of cats, that’s a weird one—”
“—a skulk of foxes?”
That one gets me the stink-eye. I look back over the herd—or cluster? Muddle? Amalgamation? A brown, fluffy bunny sprays bedding behind itself as it dashes across the enclosure.
“What’s he doing?”
He’s noticed it, too. As we’ve both got our eyes glued to this bunny that’s moving in hectic leaps and bounds, I realize what’s going to happen seconds before it does.
“Oh, God.”
“Oh, no.”
The bunny’s caught up with its prey, an oven potato-sized, black guinea pig with spiky fur curling in cute little rosettes. I barely catch a glimpse of the adorable white spot it’s got in the middle of its forehead before the bunny lands on top of it and buries it underneath its fluffy, round body. Floppy ears bounce and a round little tail wiggles as the bunny—
“It’s shagging it.” He sounds like he did when he figured out he’d come to my house to have sex. “The bunny’s shagging the guinea pig. They’re not even the same species.”
“Well.” I can’t look away. You probably know how that feels. “Close enough, right?”
The bunny’s not got a lot of stamina. It’s already leaping off again, hopping away and leaving behind a thoroughly shell-shocked, dishevelled little bean shape. I point at it.
“I want that one.”
------
I’ve been assured that Theodora’s a girl, which is probably for the best, considering I want to keep her in the same cage as Hilary. She rides home with us in the dinky Nissan Micra. When I put her into her new home, Hilary greets her with that odd purring that guinea pigs sometimes do.
“What the hell is that?” He’s standing in front of the cage, ducking down with his hands on his thighs and his arse sticking out. “I swear, these animals are a fucking practical joke.”
I’ve perched my butt on the edge of a nearby table. I made sure it’s the one that’s pushed up against the wall, so it won’t slide out from under me.
“Kind of fitting that you’d give me one, then, isn’t it?”
He straightens up, hands raised in his patented what-do-you-want-from-me gesture. I hold up a hand. “No, didn’t mean that. It’s a very thoughtful gift, thank you for the guinea pig.”
The café’s silent, then, barely lit because when you turn too many lights on after hours, random people will walk in and ask if you’re open. It’s no joke, I’ve had that happen after ten at night. His face is cast in shadows, so I try to pretend that he’s some guy I don’t even know. I regret it a split-second later. He’s so scorching hot; if he were a stranger, I’d be trying to get him to corner me in a dark alley.
“You really have to tell me what you want.” I sound a little too genuine. I don’t enjoy that he brings that out in me. “I like the guinea pig, and I’m sorry I stalked your church away from Church. But you have to tell me what you’re doing here.”
“I want to have sex with you again.”
Right, okay. At least that’s straight-forward. I shift to make my jeans rub against my crotch. “Just this once? One for the road?”
“Goddammit.” He paces a few steps, shoes click-clacking on my hardwood floor. “Is that an option?”
“No.” The word falls out of my mouth like a bite of hot potato. It’s startling. “I don’t think so. Sorry.”
He stops, looks at me with his eyes reflecting the street lights caught in the window. “I think you actually are sorry. Which is really messed up, when you think about it.”
I don’t have an answer to that. I stay quiet, glad for the way the shadows make it almost feel like I’m alone in the room. There’s some shuffling from the guinea pig enclosure, some more purring and excited chattering. I’ll probably have to get Theodora her own little house to hide in.
“I won’t have to quit right away, do I?” His voice is shaking. It’s probably mean, but I can’t help a laugh.
“You don’t have to quit at all, mate. Not for me. In fact, I think the collar’s pretty sexy.”
He sniffles, but he’s laughing as well. “I fucking hate you.”
“That’s not very Christian of you.” I push myself off of the table and grab my bag. There’s only so much teasing a woman can take, right? “I assume it’s going to be my place again, considering yours has Pam?”
He shudders. “God, yeah. Just the thought—”
I grab him by the collar (just a normal collar, but that’s what God gave us the power of imagination for) and interrupt him with a kiss. It burns through my body like sharp whisky, lights a fire underneath my stomach. I’m pretty sure my panties are ruined for good.
He slides his tongue into my mouth, and I push him back. Sex in the café, we’re not quite there yet.
“Take me to church, Father.”
His jaw muscles work. “I swear, one more line like that—”
“All right, all right.” I lead the way to the door. “Take me to my flat in Stratford, then. In your purple chariot.”
He flips me off as he pushes past me and makes the café’s bell jingle. “You’re an entirely horrible person.”
It’s the universal language of love. It’s the one I understand, anyway. I give my crotch a quick squeeze as I follow him outside.
And … I think I’ve got it from here. Would you mind locking up when you leave? Thanks a bunch, you’re a treasure.