I sat in my sanctuary stall like a latter-day Pope Joan, failing to display the correct genitalia for cardinal inspection. There’s an apocryphal story that new popes have to sit on a loo-seat contraption to show that they have the right tackle, viewed from below. But this lot looked like I was flashing them.
I would distribute the communion wafers in a little while, but I knew I would look up afterwards to see those women and men who had sat fast in their pew, not through any sense of unworthiness on their part, but on mine, for my gender would have contaminated the Body of Christ with a chromosomal impurity that they couldn’t ingest into their own.
Well, stuff them, I thought from my privileged place in the holy of holies, beside the patten and the chalice and the veil and the purificators. If they don’t share the same bread as me, they’re not part of the same body as me. I despise their isolation. They’re neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm, and I spew them out. I knew I had to get away.
I’d heard a woman priest like me, one of my sisters I suppose, speak at the General Synod, wringing her claws as she entreated us to reach out to those in pain who cannot accept our priesthood. Way to go, girl, that’s really gospel. But when they refuse to reach out, intuitively, not to me, but for what I’m holding, the taking and the offering, the tearing and sharing, then all they’re doing is standing silently by, like soldiers I saw in Africa, who stood smoking while children slipped away in strangers’ arms. Or like those who stood silently beside others whose bloodlust had overcome them in the praetorium and shouted “crucify him”.
Lambeth Palace, where the Archbishop of Canterbury lives and works when he’s in London, occupies its own time and place, its own bureaucratic Narnia. It looks accessible and easy to reach, just over the Thames from the Houses of Parliament. And it’s like you have to walk away from it to find a bridge, Lambeth or Westminster, to walk back towards it. There are no train stations near it and even the buses seem to avoid it.
I approached from Westminster, across the bridge by Big Ben, turning right down the steps and along the river walk under the Victorian gables of St Thomas’ Hospital, crossing the lethal junction by the boat cafe on the south side of Lambeth Bridge.
You bang a heavy knocker on the little door beside the huge one in the red-stone medieval gatehouse and the keeper lets you in. Then it’s across the circular driveway, past gardeners tending lawns, towards the Palace front door. It’s like an Oxford college has been dropped into central London in some children’s sci-fi thriller, a parallel universe, a rip in the fabric of the metropolis.
“Why are you going?” Adrian asked that morning, as I put toast on the table.
“I told you. The lawyers want to wrap up Sudan.”
“But why Lambeth?”
“I suppose it’s where the lawyers want to be. The client is the Church. Headman’s office. Maybe the coffee’s better. Do you want an egg?”
I avoided the usual destination of this dialogue. Over all the years that we’d talked about it, I knew Adrian had never had a satisfactory answer from me. Why would I steal a lorry on my own? How could I have driven and navigated it a thousand kilometres through the Sudanese bush without help?
“Let me say that I came with you. Let me say it was my idea.” It was his constant refrain ever since I’d told the UN’s Stasi that I’d acted alone.
Several times Adrian had asked me why we couldn’t say that he’d had taken the lorry, why it couldn’t have been him that had acted alone.
“If one of us has to take the rap, why not me?” he’d say. “You could still get busted for this.”
“So?”
“Jesus Christ, Nat, we live in this big house – you want to be here. They might want to make you a bishop one day.” He’d look desperate, like I was deliberately misunderstanding him. “I was the nutcase, the guerrilla who wanted to feed the world. Everyone said that at the office, remember?”
“You’re in the public sector. If they came after you, they could come after the government.” It was my standard reply. “And they’d just throw you to the wolves. Leave it with me. I’m to blame. Leave it as a Church issue. It looks after its own. Plenty of evidence of that.”
Adrian would throw down cutlery or slam a door. “You just want all this to be about you. Your bloody drama. Your bloody heroics.”
“Is that what this about? Look there’s no point in us both going down, which is what happens if you fess up now. Let the Church handle it. They sent me, they can sort it. Anyway it’s done now.”
Maybe it was finally done now. I was beginning to believe Dean and the Bishop. Truly, it was a legal action that was dying of boredom. After the early media interest, the Australians wanted me hung out to dry. Vehicle and property theft (the latter a class action on behalf of several aid charities), criminal damage, endangering the lives of others, contractual fraud.
And maybe Adrian was right. Maybe I liked all this attention. The martyrdom. I’d acted alone, without Adrian, and I liked that story. It’s the one my doorstepper Tony had run in a Sunday paper and I’d liked it: “the fallen angel of mercy” he’d called me.
Perhaps they were both right, Tony the reporter and Adrian the husband. I’d flown too close to the Sudanese sun and was burned. I’d been summoned to the boss’s big house, the one behind impervious walls, bombed in the war, rebuilt and resilient, to be sacked. Well,
