Ay-rab… yeah okay… now, yeah you got the rest of it, the hologram portrait of Saint Ant — better make it Patrick, the market research newsletters all say Anthony’s downmarket this year…’
Roderick passed along, down the front stairs, and found Sister Mary Martha in her usual place, on all fours. In the gloom, Roderick could just make out her frail figure, the skinny hand gripping an electric hand-polisher that moved back and forth over the same old spot.
‘Hi Sister, gee it’s dark down here. How the heck can you see what you’re doing? Gee I hope you get it done in time to see the play. It’s neat, all about this metallic conception I guess and how the wise men and the sheep men get together to look at this star because they, because somebody didn’t count it in the census. Pa says about censuses what it is they figure if they can just count everybody once, they figure they got it made. He says what they want is to keep the population down to zero, everybody being just a big nothing. He says the whole point of science is people controlling birth and death. Only I guess in those days they didn’t have birth-control so they had to send out soldiers with swords to cut up all these babies. I guess we don’t get to do that part.
‘Anyway I gotta go soon because I’m one of the wise men, I bring in the Frankenst — frankincense. So here’s a Christmas present for you. I made it myself. Should I open it for you? Here, see? It’s a rosary.’
The figure did not look up. Roderick sat on the step and held out the string of beads. ‘Ma says they got it all wrong about Our Lady giving the first rosary to St Dominic. She says really it was Lady Godiva gave it to the Benedictines. Ever hear that story? No?
‘Well see it was in England and they had this tax problem just like Caesar Augustus, you know? And this Lady Godiva’s husband was the tax collector and he was so mean she felt sorry for all the poor folks paying these taxes, so she did a strip in front of everybody. So her husband said he was sorry and he built this big monastary and then she gave them the first rosary. Only maybe that wasn’t the first one either even though it was a hundred years before Dominic, because Ma says the Hindus had rosaries a long time before that, 32 beads for Shiva and 64 beads for Vishnu, what do
The figure did not look up. ‘Well, Pa doesn’t like religion much, he always says the collection’s the most important part of it, you know? He sounds a lot like this other guy I heard once, who said religion’s all just counting and numbers, telling the beads like a bank teller. Number magic he said. Number magic. He said if you want to go to Heaven get a big goddarn computer. Sister?’
He leaned over closer. ‘Sister, if religion and arithmetic are just the same thing, why don’t we just put ’em together? Like the Protestants, see one time I went into this Protestant church and they didn’t have no crucifix or statues or nothing, just this big board up on the wall with a bunch of numbers on it — is that, is that the answer? Is that the right answer, Sister?
‘Well then look, why don’t we just, when we say prayers and get days of indulgence and stuff, why don’t we keep it all in a bank somewhere? And have like credit cards? Sister?’
The electric hand-polisher stalled, turned over and skidded out from under the wrinkled hand. Roderick made a move to fetch it, but stopped. Sister Mary Martha rolled over sideways and lay still and stiff, her withered cheek pressed to another withered cheek in the gleaming floor. Roderick stared, and four colourless eyes stared back at him.
‘…
‘Father, there’s a stiff downstairs. You wanta call the cops?’
‘Oh very funny, now go away stop bothering—’
‘But Father it’s S—’
Chairs creaked, programmes fluttered, as a shrill voice finished flattening the notes of
‘Oh you’re Mr Wood, aren’t you? I don’t suppose your little boy’s in the play — you know our little Traysee is playing Our Lady herself?’
‘Our Lady?’
‘The Blessed, you know. Mary. I don’t suppose your—’
‘Playing one of the wise men. Not sure just which one, Baal-hazar maybe.’
‘Oh yes he’s the little crip — handicapped boy isn’t he?’ The woman smiled a V-shaped smile. ‘You know I always think it’s best to keep them in a home. After all, if God—’
We do keep him in a home. Ours,’ Pa stage-whispered as the curtain rose on a centurion. A shrill voice began:
‘At thattime therewentforth a disease, a decree…’
The show, Roderick thought, must go on. Besides, nobody wanted to listen when he tried telling them, not Father O’Bride upstairs on his exercycle watching his own muscles ripple underneath his Sham Rocks t-shirt. Not Sister Olaf backstage here either, she was so busy keeping everybody quiet and trying to keep the choirboy from wiping his bloody nose on his surplice, and heck she didn’t even see anybody, didn’t even say she liked his costume it was just, ‘Okay get ready Wise Man Number Three’, as if he was jumping out of a plane or something, already the numbers one and two were moving forward (‘Little steps, little steps’) and the choir hummed
The choir stopped humming. The audience stopped coughing and creaking.
Ma had taken a lot of trouble with the costume, saying that a sorcerer ought to look like a sorcerer. And since no one had made it clear which Wise Man Roderick was to play, she’d fixed up a kind of all-purpose outfit. She might have got away with the lunar bull-horns and the solar mask (even though its crazy blood-red grin would disturb children’s dreams for some time to come). Even when Roderick opened his giant wings to speak, the audience was less shocked by the fixed stare of some 500 dolls’ eyes, than by the revealed body draped in yellow, and bearing unmistakable appendages on the chest. 500 or more eyes stared back at him, at
A man snickered.
‘Jesus,’ began Roderick.
A woman gasped.
‘I mean here’s frankenst — Jesus, here’s—’
An angel screamed. A whispered command came from backstage and some of the larger choirboys moved to seize him. And then suddenly he was all over the stage at once, rolling, kicking, flapping his wings, disappearing under a heap of lace vestments to re-emerge minus a breast, dodging the black arm of a nun, crashing into the stable and emerging in a blizzard of straw — – until finally he was pinned down as the curtain descended, so that the last thing seen by the audience was his Satanic grin.
That was how they would think of it later, Satanic. One or two in the audience went so far as to imagine they had heard him uttering curses and incantations, that they had seen a forked tail which coiled around him to make the Sign of the Cross in reverse… Others had more practical reasons for being upset. Mrs Roberts, whose little girl had not yet made her entrance (‘Fly! Fly to Egypt! King Herod…’), made her way backstage to deliver a slap that left her hand stinging, Roderick’s metal singing.
‘It was like seeing a peacock hunted down and plucked,’ said Ma as the three of them walked home.
‘Phyllis Teens,’ Pa muttered.
‘Except that it used to be a wren, didn’t it? At Christmas all the English villagers would go out in a big pack
