Chapter 3

ACT THREE, SCENE ONE

“Well, you’ve got some fucking gall, turning up now, after all these years!” Riley spat the words out with contempt – but some indecision, which was evident in the way her accent wavered: part of her felt determined to be profoundly chavvy, so as to identify unequivocally with her mother, her mother who, she felt certain, has been so wronged by this man all those years ago; but part of her wanted to display her own moral and intellectual superiority, to show herself his equal, despite his rather stiff Henley-on-Thames Church of England demeanour.

“I must seem a terrible person to you, Riley,” Eddie replied. They were walking, rather aimlessly, through the back streets north of Kings Cock Station, Eddie having been summarily refused admittance to the flat by Olive, and Riley having been told that if she wanted to talk to the “dickhead” she should kindly leave with him, thank you very much.

Riley waited for the corollary to Eddie’s first sentence, but it didn’t come. “Yeah – and?” she pressed him. It was a long summer evening, but the light was failing, and she was finding it hard to read the expression on his face.

Eddie looked her in the eye. “There is no ‘and’, Riley. At least, I have no excuse for what I did; I can’t tell you, or myself, that I did the right thing. I did the cowardly thing – and I’m sorry.” They turned a corner into a large square with a central gated garden, where a small group of drunken youths were noisily fucking on the grass in a clumsy jumble of limbs, tongues and genitals.

Riley paused. Deep down, she felt moved by this strange man’s confession, and his lack of self-protectiveness. But she had spent the best part of thirty years listening to her mother’s anger and contempt at him – and she wanted to make him suffer. “Well, so why have you come back now?” she retorted.

“Because I am nearing the age at which, as an ideological ‘Undesirable’, I won’t ever be able to visit this country again, for fear of culling. And I wanted to meet my only child, for the first and probably the last time in my life. And – and I hope this doesn’t sound too patronising, Riley – I’m very proud of you: married, with such a successful career. You’ve done well.”

“Come on, Kyle, whatcha waitin’ for?” one of the revellers called out in the distance. “Fuck ‘er arse, go on!” Eddie rolled his eyes as he and Riley continued on their way along the path round the central lawn.

“Can’t: Loulou ain’t got no fuckin’ lube!” Kyle replied – whereupon the rest of the party, already busy fucking and sucking, burst into raucous laughter, chanting: “No lube Loulou, no lube Loulou...”

But Riley, unusually for her, was undistracted by these distant drunken anal complications – for the phrase “only child” had hit her hard in the stomach. She stopped. “No other kids, then? Second family? Wife?”

“No ... no...” The man was clearly struggling to know what best to say – but after a pause, he continued: “I’ve never met anyone I loved as much as your mum.”

“Oh puh-lease!” Riley halted, anger bursting out. “Loved her? Then abandoned her to a life of poverty and ‘prostitution’, in 2030s London? Couldn’t you have taken her with you – taken us with you?” The last clause was significant: Riley was beginning to realise that she was at least as angry and resentful for herself as for her mother.

“Oh! Did Olive never tell you?”

“What?”

Eddie paused again – partly to take in the information, but also because the drunken Loulou had called out in their direction, “‘Ey, m’ pussy guys – d’ya ‘ave any anal lube on ya?”

Eddie grimaced in embarrassment, but Riley, unfazed, called out, “Yeah, I fink I got some in me ‘andbag, love: ‘ere, come get it.”

“Aw, fucking!” called out Loulou. “Kyle, go an’ get it from the lidy!” Kyle duly got up and tottered across the grass toward Riley, his stiff cock waggling as he came.

“‘Ere, keep the whole tube,” said Riley, as she tossed it towards Kyle. Kyle was too drunk to catch, but dropped it and stumbled, in the process scratching the head of his cock on a rose bush and yelping in pain. The rest of his friends roared with laughter, “Clumsy cock! Clumsy cock!” as Kyle tottered back to them.

Eddie rolled his eyes again, before continuing his explanation: “I wanted to take your mum with me, but she didn’t want to come. She wanted to stay here, in an ‘Enlightened’ country.” Eddie gestured witheringly at the revellers on the lawn, fucking and fumbling in equal measure. “She saw that things were changing, thought that maybe with all this free sex craze which was sweeping the country, her life might be better, that people might treat her with more respect.”

“And why didn’t you stay?” pressed Riley.

“I was a Christian minister, Riley. And in those days, that was not compatible with the growing ‘Enlightenment’ mindset. I know you’ll find it hard to appreciate just how horrifying the new ideology was: everything I thought I stood for – fidelity, constancy, commitment, even love – all swept away under this terrifying barrage of lust, amorality, self-indulgence. I saw it as – well, no, it damn well was, and still is – wrong, just plain wrong!” Even in the dying evening light, Riley saw the man’s face etched with pain. “I had to choose, Riley – between the woman I loved, and the vocation to which I had decided to devote my life. I will never know if I made the right choice.”

They had reached the other side of the square now, and Riley continued to look hard into her father’s anguished eyes. In the distance the drunken party were chanting, “Too drunk to fuck! Too drunk to fuck!” as the hapless Kyle fumbled, trying to staunch his bleeding glans at the same time as spreading lube on his cock, all the while stroking it vigorously in a vain attempt to stop it going flaccid from pain, embarrassment, and too much alcohol.

But then: “Oh fuck, I’m gonna puke,” moaned Kyle.

“Chunder! Chunder!” sang his companions, before bursting into raucous laughter.

Eddie groaned in disgust, as he ushered his daughter out through the gate at the other end of the garden, pursued by the sound of splattering vomit. “Riley, may I tell you about how your mum and I met? Maybe that will help you to understand...”

... cue those arpeggios again,
but this time fading into a slightly ecclesiastical, though studiously middle-class mood:
perhaps a bit of quiet organ music...

ACT THREE, SCENE TWO

... for we are now in a carpeted theological library
in a student chaplaincy building in central London,
and it is now Sunday 16^th May 2032,
in other words, about three and a half years after our last flashback.

She caught everyone’s attention the moment she walked in. Dressed in high heels, a short leather skirt which left very little to the imagination, a tight crop top and a slightly undersized leather jacket which barely concealed her large jiggling breasts, wearing what seemed to everyone else in the room to be far too much makeup, and ridiculously long false eyelashes – she could not have made a greater contrast with the half a dozen or so sincere university students hunched over their Bibles on the sofas of the C. S. Lewis Reading Room in the University of London Anglican Chaplaincy, surrounded by wall-to-wall bookshelves.

“Can I help you?” asked the Reverend Edward Turner. He felt sure the newcomer must have taken a wrong turning somewhere. The undergraduates in his Bible study group shifted awkwardly on their dusty cushions. The young ladies in particular, dressed mainly in long skirts, buttoned blouses and cardigans, scowled suspiciously at the new arrival; whilst the males in the group looked gobsmacked.

The interloper smiled hesitantly, clearing her long straight dark hair out of her face to reveal a winning smile. “Hi, I’m Olive. They said at the desk that there was a talk going on in here. Can I sit in?”

“Oh ... oh, of course,” flustered the young curate. “Do sit down. I’m Eddie. Everyone, make room for Olive, won’t you?” The others shuffled about so as to create a very wide berth for the newcomer. “Which college are you from, Olive?” asked Eddie, intrigued.

“Oh, I’m not from no college, Sir,” replied Olive. “I was just walkin’ home from work, and I was feelin’ pretty bad about meself, and I saw the sign on the door, you know, ‘Anglican Chaplaincy’, and thought maybe I could get some help here, some spiritual advice, ya know? And the lady at the desk told me there was somefink going on in here...”

“Why of course!” exclaimed Eddie, pleased to have a chance at some proper evangelism, and a change from the ranks of repressed cradle-born churchgoers he normally had to deal with. “We’re just in the middle of our Bible study at the moment, Olive, but if you don’t mind joining us for our last quarter of an hour or so, then you can stay on afterwards and we can have a proper chat!”

Olive sat down, sliding along the settee so as to peer over the shoulder of blond becardiganed Samantha from SOAS, at her open Bible. The male students’ eyes were inevitably drawn to Olive’s long bare legs and the unseen but imagined space behind her short skirt – but Eddie made the effort not to be distracted. “Samantha,” he asked, “could you pick up where we left off?” Samantha, crinkling her nose at the smell of perfume and strawberry vape breath wafting at her from her new neighbour, adjusted her glasses and read:

One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, “She is Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her. Then she went back home. The woman conceived and sent word to David, saying, “I am pregnant.”

“Hang on a minute,” interrupted Olive – much to the annoyance of Samantha. “This David, he just went and, like, took this bloke’s wife and fucked her, just like that?”

There was a sharp shocked intake of breath from the other girls – no more so than from Samantha, who looked as if she wanted to be sick. The boys smirked, clearly delighted and fascinated by this sluttishly dressed foul-mouthed newcomer; a couple of them shifted awkwardly on their seats as they attempted to surreptitiously rearrange the contents of their trousers. But Eddie maintained his professional cool, replying with careful charm, “Yes, that’s right, Olive. David was the king, so he could more or less do as he pleased.”

“And he didn’t get stopped or nuffink? I mean, I get fucked by loads of guys – but like, I get paid for it, I do...” There was another sharp intake of breath from the girls, and Samantha squealed in alarm – whilst the boys, mouths agape, fiddled inside their pockets to rearrange their growing erections without, they hoped in vain, being noticed.

“Perhaps if you’d let Samantha finish the reading, Olive? suggested Eddie.

“Oh yeah, sorry, yeah, sorry Sam, go on, yeah...” muttered Olive.

Samantha was not pleased at having her name abbreviated by so evidently loose a woman, but, stuttering, she continued: “In ... in...

In the morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it with Uriah. In it he wrote, “Put Uriah out in front where the fighting is fiercest. Then withdraw from him so he will be struck down and die.” So while Joab had the city under siege, he put Uriah at a place where he knew the strongest defenders were. When the men of the city came out and fought against Joab, Uriah the Hittite died.

When Uriah’s wife heard that her husband was dead, she mourned for him. After the time of mourning was over, David had her brought to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son. But the thing David had done displeased the Lord.

“So hang on,” Olive interjected again. “What ‘displeased the Lord’ then? The fact David knocked her up wivout so much as an ‘if you please’, or the fact he done her husband in – or what?”

Samantha had had enough. Eyes flashing, the blonde slammed her Bible down on the pew. “Have you no shame at all?” she hissed at Olive through her perfectly aligned teeth. “Don’t you think Bathsheba had some part in this? What was she doing bathing naked where others could see her anyway?”

“Hang on, Sam,” responded Olive. “It wasn’t her fault David was ogling her. I mean, she prob’ly had nice tits an’ all, no wonder he –”

“She was a temptress – just like you!” interrupted Samantha.

Olive fixed Samantha with a steely glare. “OK, Sam, so what if she was a temptress? She’s not the one God was displeased with, was she? And I bet God wasn’t displeased with David just for fuckin’ around: he prob’ly did loads o’ that! No, He was displeased with him for abusin’ his power – for takin’ a woman that wasn’t his to take, for killin’ her husband. It’s power wot makes people do bad fings, not fuckin’ sex.”

“Oh, really?!” screeched Samantha. “You think you’re so clever coming in here, flaunting yourself like that, pretending you ‘feel bad’ and need some spiritual advice, and then proceeding to tell us – us! – what the Bible means. You’re just like Bathsheba: an amoral interloper from outside the Palace. If you really want some religious counsel, leave your ‘Enlightenment’ nonsense out on the scrap heap where it belongs!”

There was uproar, and everyone in the room piled in with their opinions. Eddie tried to calm things down with a well-meaning “Now now, let’s all try to be charitable, shall we?” – to no avail. Ironically, it was Olive who managed to silence the uproar, by suddenly pulling up her crop top to reveal her breasts – large, natural, swaying and jiggling in all their youthful glory. The girls froze in horror; the boys gawped, their eyes suddenly as wide as Olive’s areolas, their tongues drooling. Eddie groaned and held his head in his hands.

“See, Sam?” smirked Olive. “All your self-righteous talk can’t grab people’s attention, but one glimpse of me tits can. It was tits wot King David wanted: tits and pussy and arse – and God didn’t blame him for that! Ya know what I do for a livin’, Sam? Guys pay me money to show them me tits, and me arse, and me wet cunt – ‘coz that’s what they want. And if they pay me extra, I let them fuck me! That’s what guys have always wanted – so don’t you be so hypocritical as to blame me for givin’ ‘em what they want. The world is changing, Sam: the Enlightenment is here, the Fuckers Party is in control, this country is turning itself over to Pleasure – and self-righteous hypocrites like you are on the way out!”

Samantha’s pale skin had turned bright red, her perfect teeth bared in rage and humiliation, and her blond hair clinging to her now sweaty face as she screeched, “No! I will not be driven out of my home by the likes of you! I am no hypocrite for believing in something greater, something wiser, something more meaningful and lasting than your filthy unrestrained Pleasure. You think you’re special because you have this mad ‘Enlightenment’ craze on your side – but you and your kind are the ones abusing your power now. You think you can take over this country, and maybe you will – but at the end of the day, Olive, you’re nothing but a SICK, PERVERTED, FILTHY...” – Samantha hesitated briefly, as if on the precipice of something quite dangerous – “FUCKING WHORE!!!”

Samantha clasped her hands over her mouth – her mouth which had never uttered such obscenities before, but had been goaded into it by her despised interlocutor. And then she screamed – a desperate, inchoate, terrified screech which harnessed all the fear and humiliation she felt, not just at Olive, but everything she represented, which Samantha feared – nay, knew – was taking over her world and which threatened to make her a stranger, an Undesirable, in her own land. Now, even her precious biblical safe space was sullied, invaded: nowhere would be safe anymore. As so she dropped her Bible, turned, and ran, slamming the door behind her.

The other girls followed, some out of sympathy, others out of similar fear and desperation, and some out of sheer confusion. The boys lingered a bit longer, their eyes fixed on Olive’s full breasts and wide luscious areolas, which continued to jiggle and sway irresistibly – until she pulled her top down again, and they realised that they too, like King David, were voyeurs, cowards and hypocrites. Eddie gestured to them to leave – and they did, closing the door quietly behind them.