if there was a … a duckling … whose mother didn’t dare let it swim in the water in case it caught one of the diseases you can catch from water,’ he said gently, suddenly feeling as he imagined a parent would when reading a story to their toddler.
Gerard leaned forward in his seat, his face showing intense concentration, and Biddle was unnerved by the idea of Gerard Feehan being his toddler. ‘Now – what happens when that duckling becomes a duck?’ Biddle asked.
‘It can’t swim?’ Gerard suggested, with a wide-eyed look of trust that further reinforced the parent/toddler ambience.
In fact Biddle hadn’t considered this possibility, having been thinking on a rather more complex level. ‘Oh …’ he responded, taken aback (and confused by the unfamiliar parental feelings welling up inside him), ‘yes, I suppose it wouldn’t be able to, would it? But what I was also thinking was that it wouldn’t have built up a resistance to the diseases in the water, and would probably get ill straight away and die.’ He looked at Gerard meaningfully. Actually it had confused things unnecessarily to make it about ducks, he thought. He wasn’t sure why ducks had come into his head. But it was too late now. Everything was getting rather confused in this encounter.
Gerard sighed. ‘It’s just …’ he began. ‘I don’t really think …’ he began. ‘The problem …’ he began. ‘I’ve never done – gone to a – done anything like – club – gay – and I wouldn’t really – on my own – what to – know to, what to, to …’
‘Okay,’ Biddle said, ‘tell me when you want to go out, and I’ll go with you.’ It was a bold thing to suggest, he knew, but it was the only way he was going to get the boy out at the end of the day, and it made him feel less like a parent.
‘What?’ Gerard’s mouth hung open in surprise. ‘You can’t!’
‘Why not? You don’t have to be gay to go into a gay club.’
‘But … you’re a vicar!’
‘I don’t think men of the cloth have been banned from gay clubs. Not to my knowledge, at any rate.’
‘But …’ Gerard was running out of excuses. ‘What say, what will, my mother?’
‘Will your mother object to you spending an evening with a vicar?’ Biddle asked. Gerard shrugged.
‘I suppose …’ he answered, helplessly, adding ‘not’ to clarify what he meant.
‘Well then.’ Biddle finished his mug of tea, feeling warmed by a strange, fatherly sense of pride … He immediately stopped the thought before it was fully formed – it wasn’t fatherly pride, it was the glow of having been of use to at least one person this month. It was a new feeling for him, that was all.
He wasn’t sure why he found the idea of being a parent so difficult, but he told himself that it was only because he would never bring up a child as wet as Gerard Feehan, and put the thought out of his head.
‘Don’t worry, I wasn’t planning on wearing vestments,’ he cheerfully informed Gerard, already wondering to himself what people did wear in gay clubs these days. He was already quite looking forward to the outing.
Gerard may have felt less uneasy about the idea of going to a gay club had he known that Jesus had already visited quite a few. After all, the Christ wasn’t just lying in bed between his weekly visits to St Barnabas – had anybody noticed him, they would have seen Jesus visiting many of the area’s lesser attractions over the few weeks he had been back on earth. There are people who would find even the suggestion of Jesus going into a gay club shocking and unseemly, but it was Jesus’ habit of doing shocking and unseemly things that had got him into so much trouble with people the first time round. He had come to help the lonely and the helpless; the clubbing scene, not unlike the church, had proved a big source of both. If Jesus hadn’t been paid much attention there either, it’s because the clubbing scene, like church, is full of people largely interested in external appearances and Jesus had been too busy to spend time tarting himself up to meet people.
But he had at least met some people. Even as Gerard was leaving the vicarage, Jesus was kneeling next to a young woman who was weeping into a gutter outside a noisy club on the outskirts of London. She had sobered up a fair amount in the time he had been talking to her, though if anything she was crying more than she had been when he had picked her up from the ground.
‘Can you tell me where you’re going?’ he asked her, provoking another burst of sobbing.
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