Acts and Omissions (28 page)

You must be patient. I am going to introduce you to a new character, one I fear you may not find it in your heart to love, but Veronica plays an important part in our tale. There are times when we must stoically eat our plate of school liver (horrid tubes visible) before we are allowed out to play.

Come with me now to a church in Lindford. Not the parish church (where Fr Dominic now serves), but one nearby with a gothic revival building of the type that looks as though it might soon be cut loose by the evil archdeacon, Matt the Knife, and turned into a supermarket. No, more likely a nightclub called Holy Crap, or something similarly witty. It is in the clubbing district, such as it is, of Lindford. Beside the church is that narrow alley where last year – you may remember the incident – two men picked on the wrong faggot. A CCTV camera now keeps watch. Every Friday and Saturday night the church pitches its gazebo in the little yard behind the railings, and from here the street pastors operate, dispensing love, hot chocolate and flip-flops to the lost souls of Lindford.

We will pop in now and see what's going on in St James's church this Low Sunday morning. The first thing you will spot is the lack of pews. The Victorian Society took a tonking here, all right. There are cheerful banners. Someone plays thoughtful music on an electric piano. Can this be another Evangelical stronghold? By no means! This is an inclusive church, my friends, where God is mother and father of all, in the commonwealth not the kingdom of heaven. It is bishop Bob's kind of a place. Change from the bottom up not the top down. They do good work here in their rainbowy way.

Veronica wears a simple cassock alb and Peruvian stole in bright colours. Lent is now over, so she has laid aside her equal-marriage campaigning rainbow dog collar. She is not the incumbent, she's a university chaplain. Here comes Geoff the vicar now. It's a baptism, so he's wearing the stole with Noah's ark animals on. I believe somebody made it from upholstery fabric. It would cover a nursery chair very nicely. The baptism will move seamlessly into the Annual Parochial Church Meeting (getting in before the end of April) and be followed by a simple agape meal.

I don't suppose you want to stay for a church AGM, do you? No. Let us ‘risk the hostile stare', and tiptoe back out as the congregation stand to sing ‘Will you come and follow me if I but call your name?' (tune: Kelvingrove).

A glimpse of Veronica is all I vouchsafe you this week, dear reader. Instead, I will whisk you back to the Close and into the study of the Revd Giles Littlechild, the canon precentor. The Littlechilds have just returned from holiday in Heidelberg, visiting in-laws and older son (Gap Ya). Giles has read somewhere that you should do one thing each day that scares you. Opening his work email inbox surely qualifies.

He scrolls through, delicately, like a bomb disposal expert. Excellent. Nothing too dire. But then a new email pings in.

Oh God. A last-minute application for the post of tenor lay clerk. They can't
not
interview him, can they? And then they'll have to appoint him, because he'll be the best.

Lord have mercy! Frankly, Giles would rather have a tone-deaf moose on the back row of
dec
than Freddie May.