showy. Not at all showy.
‘Some of them like anal,’ she ventured with a disinterested half-shrug, but her lips pursed and her eyes squinted as she considered her own words. A thoughtful silence then, ‘Some like oral.’ More thinking. ‘Sixty-nine … doggy … plain missionary …’ She was getting into the swing of it now. ‘Some like kinky … dress ups … dildos ... Some like to be spanked.’ She catalogued the depravities and paused at the end with something of a sigh, a bored sigh not an indignant one. Then she said a remarkable thing. With her eyes cast down and to the side, and evidently having exhausted the list of sexual acts she had been asked to perform, she concluded with the striking observation, almost an afterthought really. ‘Um … they all leave their socks on.’
She seemed genuinely offended by that one. Really put out about it. Anal had barely rated a shrug! But, you see, this is at the heart of the transaction. Fat men with humid armpits, kicking off their shoes, and not bothering with the socks.
* * *
The following evening Sister Patti and Sister Pru gave me an enormous brandy as the final stage in the consumption of a mammoth baked dinner with all the trimmings. We stood in their lounge room giving their framed photos a once-over while Patti and Pru started on the sherry. A photograph of the two women on the bookcase caught my eye. It must have been decades old. The women were dressed in dated swimsuits and stood arm in arm on a beach somewhere, beaming at the camera. I picked it up and turned with an inquiring raising of the eyebrow. They both looked stunning. Patti fondly took the picture from my hands, Pru moved closer, and we all stood there in our little group gazing at the image. ‘We joined the penguins at the same time,’ said Patti. ‘The same age to the month,’ added Pru. ‘Yes, two girls from the bush, lonely in the Big Smoke,’ said Patti with a nostalgic sigh, and shook her head as if she couldn’t really believe it was her. Pru angled the photo so I could get a better view and told me, ‘This was taken a week after we packed it in. It was never really for us you see. We really weren’t cut out for the Catholic Church.’ Patti nodded and finished Pru’s train of thought. ‘They sneered when we left. I can still see their faces. But we look happy there, don’t we.’
I looked at the photo again. They did. They looked delighted. I nodded. ‘You look like you’re in love,’ I murmured. The old ladies giggled. The sherry had made their cheeks pink. Pru put the photo back and Patti said musingly, ‘You know, we’ve had fifty years of pastors, preachers and priests in this house, all experts on love they’ll tell you, but you are the first to have noticed that.’ The two ladies walked to the lounge together holding each other’s arms for support. I glanced back at the photo again and took one last peek at Pru’s boobs. Nice.
* * *
It was about that time that I really started to find the sermons hard work. It got even harder after it dawned on me that I was an atheist. Sundays used to involve an early start for me. I had to be ready for when the show began at 9, which meant 7.30am at the church hall. That gave us over an hour to put out the chairs and fill over three hundred thimble-sized glasses with red wine for the communion extravaganza after the initial sing-song and sermon. The band would set up while we did this. The preparatory church devotions were carried out to the thumping of drums and Peter, the main singer, saying ‘one two – two – two’ into a microphone. Peter had been something of a B-grade rock celebrity, making it onto the front cover of the magazines twice. Once when his band went to Number 1 on the charts and once when he overdosed on an exotic cocktail of party drugs and was photographed face down in the urinals at a city nightclub. Security cameras had recorded him entering the toilets at 1am and the bar staff were alerted to his condition at 1.45am. That’s 45 minutes of men urinating on him in preference to disturbing their party long enough to go for help. A frank and emphatic commentary on the quality of his music. It’s hardly surprising that he had turned to God.
We were a hand clappy, hallelujah kind of church. People would say ‘praise God’ a lot and when they shook hands they’d say ‘bless you’. The more hip ones would say ‘bless you brother’. We were a close-your-eyes-and-raise-a-hand-to-God-when-you-pray kind of church. The Sunday sessions involved lots of standing, swaying people with beatific smiles on their faces, the one hand raised, lips murmuring in prayer, being moved by the spirit of God or something. I suspect that this rarely happened without an audience. There was a lot of theatre on Sundays. And we were a church of healers and miracle-workers, a touched-by-the-hand-of-God-falling-backwards-into-the-arms-of-another kind of church. And we were a speaking-in-tongues-when-the-spirit-moves-us kind of church so a lot of babbling went on at the moment of falling backwards.
Sunday morning used to mean a congregation of otherwise normal people working themselves into a frenzy. An hour of singing. Music building up to a crescendo. Voices raised in prayer. And the devil used to get banished a lot on Sunday mornings. He was rebuked and chastised and ordered from the church ‘in Jesus’s name’ but he kept coming back. He would be driven from Jonathon with the gout in his knee, in Jesus’s name. He’d be rebuked for his part in Yvonne’s cancer, in Jesus’s name. He’d be ordered out of Barry’s bad back, in Jesus’s name. And each time, Jonathon and Yvonne and Barry would fall backwards at the touch of the preacher’s hand, to be expertly caught and laid out flat, where they’d lie in convulsive prayer for a while, then rise and limp and hobble back to their seats looking well-pleased with themselves. But the devil would keep coming back for more, which is what kept us all in business. It would happen every Sunday. A sucker for punishment, Satan just wouldn’t take no for an answer. So week after week he had to be rebuked afresh, in Jesus’s name. Amen.
We used to tag-team the sermons, the preachifying going for a little over an hour all up, with music between each sermon. There were five of us pastors. You couldn’t really say that we had radically different styles but different styles would probably have been frowned upon anyway, so we pretty much said the same things in the same ways. Have faith. Love God and each other. Don’t commit adultery. Steer clear of wanking and gambling. Jesus was very kind and we should try to be the same. He died for our sins so we should be grateful for that. It was all pro forma stuff and I have to admit that sometimes when I was preaching to those people and I saw their radiant up-turned faces, I used to feel a bit of a hypocrite. But I always reminded myself that it was a means to an end and I wasn’t really hurting anyone. After all, as I told myself at the time, I was only giving them what they wanted. Hope and entertainment.
After the Sunday morning session and before the Sunday afternoon session we would gather in Gregory’s office and count the money. No-one seemed to think that this was a little odd but it was the quietest time of a Sunday. Heads bowed, and the susurrus of whispered voices as we counted softly under our breaths. Like prayer. Gregory had founded the church in 1987 and he was therefore the acknowledged primus inter pares of the five pastors. He’d sit behind his desk while we ranged our chairs against him in a semi-circle on the other side. Gregory had a big girl’s bum. It was contained within a pair of over-tight trousers where it expanded to fill the available space. He was an expert on sin, constantly on the alert for the seven deadly ones, yet cheap Kmart shoes seem to have been acceptable in the eyes of God. We parted company on that one, I’m afraid. Our counting always ended the same way: Gregory leaning back in his chair, hands crossed on his lap, saying, ‘Not good enough.’ The Sunday afternoon sessions used to involve a lot of brow-beating as a result. Sunday afternoons always brought in the better yield. It was all a little distasteful I have to say.
But it was the point of all the hypocrisy. It was why this atheist played the part in prayer group, youth group and church. Because at the end of every Sunday, Gregory would call me into his office and hand me an envelope. My cut. A few thousand dollars in cold hard cash. I’d take it, go home and count it again, shamelessly. This was the pay-off. You see, it paid the rent on The Mission in Kings Cross. It paid for the clean needles. It paid for the abortions and divorces. It paid for rehab and hospitals. And it bought groceries for all those single mothers. If Gregory and my congregation had known where their money was going it would have been all over for me in an instant. They would have rebuked the devil in me and driven him from their midst. They would have thrown me out on my arse, and women would have died from dirty needles, children would have gone hungry, and unwanted babies would have been born unloved. It was a small price