The Minister's Voice in PB

(My school Easter hols draw to an end and I can feel quite pleased at how productive I have been. Of course I have put off the bigger projects so this might seem like displacement activity, but I have written 8 short stories in two weeks - always some rubbish in there, but three or four very good pieces. The last two, not in my usual vein, and they are all the better for that. Feels good.)

THE MINISTER’S DUTIES

It was Lillian called me. Said he was worse than before and that maybe I should come. Not that he was asking for me, you understand. He wasn’t. I never expected that he would. Even though we had played cards and shared words every alternate Tuesday and Thursday afternoon for almost ten years. He told me stuff he never told anyone else. I am used to that. People confide in me. It goes with the job. And they trust me with their innermost secrets. Nevertheless, I did not expect that Tom would be asking for me. But it was for me to bring God to the close of things, so I drove the thirty so miles to be with him.

I knocked on the front door, as I always did, and went straight in. Doctor Kerr was just leaving. He nodded at me and snapped the lock on his bag shut. He said he’d call in again later in the day. Then he picked up his stick and left.

‘It is good that you came, Minister,’ he said as he passed and he laid one hand on my shoulder, lightly and briefly.

Tom was not alone. A girl in a school blazer was there. She was reading out loud. Poetry. Nothing I recognised. My entrance silenced her and she got quickly to her feet, as one who has been caught doing something private. I recognised her at once.

‘He’s sleeping,’ she said.

I nodded. And accepted the chair that she offered me.

‘Lillian asked if I would sit with him till you came. Just so someone was here.’

I had not ever seen her in church. Her mother sometimes. But not the girl. In the street I had recently noticed her. Quiet and serious. She reminded me of a girl from my own past. A little taller, but her hair the same, and her eyes. I did not expect to find her here with Tom. I lost all my words for a moment, and some of my breath. It is wrong, I know, but I wanted to take her hand in mine. Just to hold it. And to close my eyes and be transported back to another time before the church figured so large in my life.

Maybe all old men have such thoughts.

‘You were reading to him?’ I said at last.

‘I don’t think he heard.’

She was moving towards the door and try as I might I could not think of anything to say that would keep her there a moment longer.

When she had gone I found reasons enough. A whole pocketful of them. I might have asked her about the book she had so quickly slipped into her blazer pocket. And what she had been reading. I might have asked after her mother and her father. I knew that all was not well in her home. And school, I could have asked how things were at school. I should almost certainly have asked her name, for I had forgotten it. I made a mental note to talk with her mother next Sunday and to find out, or maybe I could ask Lillian if she came over.

Tom coughed in his sleep and so brought me back to my duties.