‘Lenni,’ he said gently after a while, ‘that question is bigger than all other questions.’ He leant back and the pew creaked again. ‘You know, it’s funny, I get asked why more often than I get asked anything else. Why is always the hard one. I can do the how and the what and the who, but the why, that’s the one I can’t even pretend to know. When I first started doing this job, I used to try to answer it.’
‘But you don’t any more?’
‘I don’t think that answer is in my jurisdiction. It is only for Him to answer.’ He pointed to the altar as though God might be crouching behind it, just out of sight, listening.
I gestured towards him, in a ‘see, I told you so’ kind of way.
‘But that doesn’t mean there is no answer,’ he said quickly. ‘It is just that the answer is with God.’
‘Father Arthur …’
‘Yes, Lenni?’
‘That’s the biggest pile of crap I have ever heard. I’m dying here! And I have come to one of God’s designated spokespeople with a really important question, and you refer me back to him? I tried him already, but I didn’t get an answer.’
‘Lenni, answers don’t always come in the form of words. They can come in a variety of forms.’
‘Well then, why did you say that this was a place of answers? Why not be honest and say to me, “Okay, well the biblical theories aren’t watertight and we can’t give you answers, but we do have a nice stained glass window”?’
‘If you got an answer, what do you think it might be like?’
‘Maybe God would tell me he’s having me killed because I’m restless and annoying. Or maybe the real God is Vishnu, and he’s hella pissed that I’ve never even tried to pray to him but kept wasting my time with your Christian God. Or maybe there is no God and there never was, and the whole universe is being controlled by a turtle who’s massively out of his depth.’
‘Would that make you feel any better?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Have you ever been asked a question you couldn’t answer?’ Father Arthur asked.
I had to admit, I was impressed at how calm he was. He really knew how to turn a question around. I was obviously not his first ‘why am I dying’ rant. Which, in a way, made me feel worse.
I shook my head.
‘It’s horrible, you know,’ he continued, ‘to have to tell people I don’t have the answer they want. But that doesn’t mean this isn’t a place of answers – it’s just that they might not be the answers you expect.’
‘Tell me then, Father Arthur, shoot from the hip. What is the answer? Why am I dying?’
Arthur’s soft eyes fixed on mine. ‘Lenni, I—’
‘No, just tell me. Please. Why am I dying?’
And just when I thought he was going to tell me that an honest answer was in breach of church protocol, he ran his hand over the grey stubble on his chin and said, ‘Because you are.’
I must have frowned, or he must have regretted being tricked into saying something truthful, because he couldn’t look at me. ‘The answer I have, the only one I have,’ he said, ‘is that you are dying because you are dying. Not because of God’s deciding to punish you and not because He is neglecting you, but simply because you are. It is a part of your story as much as you are.’
After a long pause, Arthur turned to me. ‘Think of it this way. Why are you alive?’
‘Because my parents had sex.’
‘I didn’t ask how you came to be alive, I asked why. Why do you exist at all? Why are you alive? What is your life for?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I think the same is true of dying. We can’t know why you are dying in the same way that we can’t know why you are living. Living and dying are both complete mysteries, and you can’t know either until you have done both.’
‘That’s poetic. And ironic.’ I rubbed at the spot on my hand where the cannula had been digging in the day before. It had left behind an ache. ‘Were you reading religious stuff when I came in?’
Arthur held up the book beside him. It was yellow with wire binding, tatty edges and bold letters – The AA Road Atlas of Great Britain.
‘Were you looking for your flock?’ I asked.
When New Nurse came to get me, I thought Arthur might fall to the ground and kiss her feet or run through the newly opened door screaming, but instead he waited patiently as I made my way to the door, handed me a pamphlet and said he hoped I would come again.
I don’t know whether it was the impertinence of his refusal to shout at me, his reluctance to admit I was annoying him or the fact that the chapel was so nice and cool, but as I took his pamphlet, I knew that I would be back.
I left it for seven days. I thought I would give him long enough to presume that I probably wasn’t coming back. Then, just as he settled into his lonely life inside his empty chapel, bam! There I was, tottering slowly towards him, my best pink pyjamas on and my next round of challenges to Christianity loaded and ready to fire.
This time, he must have spotted me coming down the corridor through those frosted windows, because he was holding the door open for me and saying, ‘Hello, Lenni, I wondered when I’d be seeing you,’ and just generally ruining my dramatic re-entrance for everyone.
‘I was playing hard to get,’ I told him.
He smiled at New Nurse. ‘How long
