Chapter 18: Faith and Charity

Alex

2025

It was a long train ride from Rickmansworth to Reigate, but for Alex it was worth the effort. In any case, the travel time had been reduced to rather less than an hour since the new railway line from his Docklands office has been opened. He could work late, which for form's sake was increasingly often since he'd been promoted to management, and still arrive at Diane's one bedroom flat before dark.

Diane provided probably the best fun Alex had ever had with an internet date. She was amusing. She was good conversation. She was sexy. And she was wonderfully passionate between the sheets.

But there was a reason why she'd advertised her availability on the internet even though she was still in her twenties and four years younger than Alex. And that, despite a regime of several diets and regular exercise, was because she was undeniably plump.

Now she was discussing her plans about changing career. Marketing was no longer the vocation for her she once thought it was.

But a career in the church?

"Relax," said Diane as she pecked Alex affectionately on the cheek. "We can still have sex."

"But with a vicar?" said Alex. "That can't be right."

"It's the Church of England, silly," Diane laughed. "I'm not going to be a nun."

"Can vicars have sex?"

"Why not?" said Diane. "It's not illegal, is it?"

Nevertheless, Alex wouldn't let the subtleties of religious doctrine interfere with a good story. He was happy to announce on his fourth pint in the Archbishop Williams that he was fucking a nun.

"A nun!" exclaimed Dave, who worked in accounts. "That's fucking insane, man. Nuns don't fuck."

"Well, she's not a nun exactly," Alex clarified. "She's applying to be a vicar."

"That's the same thing, innit?" suggested Eddie, a big bearded guy with a management role in HR. "Vicars. Nuns."

"Vicars can fuck," assured Terry. "It's just that most vicars aren't chicks."

"Don't be so sure about that," said Dave. "I've heard that's not true any longer. More women than men work as vicars these days. We'll have a fucking woman archbishop next..."

"Then the pope'll be a chick too," said Eddie. "Only popes can never fuck. Not legally, anyway."

"We need Larry from Religious Affairs to sort us out on all this," Alex joked.

"Don't be a twat," said Eddie. "He's some kind of Muslim or Sikh or something. Anyway, he never drinks. Whatever religion he belongs to, it's against drinking. But still, Alex, your vicar girlfriend sounds better than the last one. She was a fucking farmer's daughter..."

"She's probably gone back to sucking donkey's dicks," sniggered Dave. "Does this nun of yours pray before she fucks?"

"Vicar," corrected Alex. "No, I don't think so."

"Perhaps she'll dump you, so she can stick a crucifix up her twat," suggested Eddie.

"You've seen too many perv pornos, man," said Terry.

"How do you know what they show?" wondered Eddie. "Anyway, it's fucking common knowledge. It's all that sexual frustration, innit?"

Alex enjoyed a good laugh with his mates after work. These days, he had no anxiety about getting a phone call from Gabby demanding his immediate presence. Diane wasn't as experienced or as sexually adventurous, but she compensated for it by the extent of her devotion. Alex wasn't sure he could ever confess to his workmates that he'd met her through a dating website or that she was somewhat overweight. Well, she wasn't obese as such. She didn't have those horrible saggy folds that some women had. And, anyway, more and more women—and men—were overweight these days. Alex sometimes worried about the stomach bulge over his own belt. Being overweight wasn't such a big deal. After all, Diane wasn't as bad as Eddie's wife. She was so obese that Alex wondered about the physical obstacles the couple had to overcome to have sex. Online porn gave helpful advice on this aspect of sex as it did so many other critical questions of the human condition, but it still didn't tempt Alex to seek out Eddie's wife and give it a try himself.

Alex was well suited to life in middle management. He knew he was never going to become a great journalist, even of something as lightweight as VR. He struggled so hard to say anything interesting or enlightening about the virtual world. It was considerably more trivial than television and its content was becoming ever more narrow as the online community ossified around what it was already comfortable with. Even VR porn, on which he was an entirely unacknowledged expert, had become ever less interesting. Perhaps there would be a day when VR rendering was less blocky, when the exasperating jerkiness didn't interfere with rapid scene changes, and when VR entertainment wasn't so slavishly derivative of things that had come before, such as porno movies, gaming, blogs and social network sites. When that day came, transistors would be using graphene rather than silicon, quantum computing would be used for other things than performing calculations on remote servers, and the gear he'd have to clamber into would be more comfortable than the stuff he had to use these days.

The path to being a successful manager at Reuters-Fox was mostly about anticipating the right impression to make to the right people. As long as business affairs were kept in some kind of order and the right numbers were entered into the spreadsheets, Alex's job was mostly measured by his ability to be witty and unthreatening at meetings, to be willing to do stupid overtime even when it wasn't needed, and to be good company in the pub. You didn't get anywhere in Reuters-Fox if you weren't a team-player and didn't have the right attitude.