The man they call the Archbishop continues in this vein as Debbie McGee crawls across the room and takes her place by her partner. As the Archbishop cants, Paul Daniels continues to mutter about bees and magma, then finds new faults with the Archbishop’s taxonomies and offers his adjustments and interpretations as they arise.
The Archbishop blesses further elements and compounds, below the ground and above it. He spits as he speaks. He rocks and closes his eyes and turns his head to the ceiling.
For the first twenty-five years he roamed the streets of Soho, they called him Vicar. His fervent brand of spiritual ejaculation held nothing of the established Church of England but he dressed in black and spoke like the master of a public school. He preached to untold generations of forlorn vagrants. His flock came and went. They entered the city and found succor in its fetid core. Some came for sex. Some came for drugs. Some came for pints and packets of crisps. Some came for jobs. The fortunates came in the evening and left before the dawn. The unfortunates stayed for longer. He preached to them all. But it was the men and women who loitered and lingered, and who were more touched by the sex and the drugs and the liquor and the desperation for vocation, whose attention he drew. He collected these vagabonds. They came to squat with him in his underground palace like dozens had before them. Most who stayed were addicted to something, or half mad, like him. Many remained for years, some for decades, but none stayed as long as him. “You’ll outlive us all, Vicar,” they said.
After a quarter century of service to his delinquent parishioners he was promoted in their vernacular to the episcopate. His elevation came after his hair and beard, once a living sponge of golden curls, had turned grizzled white. They altered his title to “Bishop” as befitted a man of his age. Nobody could remember whose idea it was.
The Archbishop had welcomed the change. He was nothing if not vain. He had ridden the wave of adulation and preached more vehemently still. He had donned purple like others of his kind. He had reveled in his false position even more assuredly than before and lauded his status over the residents of his squat.
It was not eighteen months since his flock had taken the step to add the prefix to his already illustrious title. Paul Daniels had been the one to instigate this latest alteration. The addition had initially been delivered with more than a hint of sarcasm. “Arrrrch-bishop!” Paul Daniels had spat one morning when the ramblings of the old man had come between him and his first fix of the day. After that the epithet had slowly taken hold, and now it was ingrained. Now it was just his name, as if his own mother had bestowed it upon him.
The woman whose mother didn’t christen her Debbie McGee leans against the shoulder of her beloved and turns her head toward him so that her mouth is adjacent to his ear.
“The ground’s moving. It’s shaking. Truly it is. Maybe the Archbishop felt it too. Maybe that’s why he’s blessing the earth tonight.”
Paul Daniels is riffling through a pack of playing cards. It’s a defective pack, discarded and thrown into a dustbin from which Paul Daniels retrieved it. Their backs bear the logo of a Soho sex shop and their fronts, in small rectangles bordered by the specific number and suit of each card, bear a picture of a different naked woman being fucked by a different dog. A busty brunette is being mounted by a Weimaraner. A blonde receives the graces of a ferocious-looking pit bull. The Ace of Clubs presents another being humped by a pack of chihuahuas. Although there were a number of slightly defective packs of pornographic playing cards in the bin round the back of the sex shop, Paul Daniels laughed and snorted when he saw this particular set and stuffed it into one of his pockets.
“Shush,” he says, and he continues to shuffle. He’s testing his handiwork on a new trick. He divides the pack of cards into two with the thumbs and middle fingers of each hand, and uses the nail of his index fingers to press each half-pack into a crescent so the cards can be released and allowed to tumble back together.
“It was rumbling,” continues Debbie McGee. “I felt it right through my skin and bones. Like it was an earthquake or something.”
“No earthquakes in London. Never have been,” said Paul Daniels. “Isn’t that right, Archbishop?”
The Archbishop enjoys a direct question if it presupposes his superior intellect, and he generally pauses from his sermons to answer it.
“What you asking?” says the Archbishop.
“Earthquakes in London. There’ve never been any earthquakes in London, have there?”
The Archbishop narrows his eyes. “Earth quaking in London?” He struggles over each consonant. His gums are soft. “No earth quaking in London for a thousand years. A thousand years or more. The earth hasn’t quaked since the dragons last woke. Since the red and the white dragons came from the mouth of the river and swept up over the city. But now it quakes again. We can all feel it.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” asks Paul Daniels.
“Tremors, my boy. Tremors. The ground is alive once more. The earth is riddled with beasties.” He stretches back to gaze momentarily at the ceiling then rocks forward to consider the floor upon which he sits. His hips creak.
It cannot be said that the Archbishop doesn’t look his age because nobody knows his age. But he does not look any age, any age that is possible. He appears past the count of years, past any numerical measure. His spine is pronounced and it curves crooked. Vertebrae seem to protrude through his skin like the plates of a stegosaurus. The hairs that grow from his head and his chin haven’t thinned but are so old
