Chapter 9 — Paddy

Paddy stands in drizzling rain, umbrella in one hand and Bible in the other, reading Psalm 23 to a crowd of mourners. Gusts of wind play with the pages and whip his robe about. He loses his place, stops reading and has to find it again.

Claudia would have laughed right there, funeral or no funeral. If only he could hear her laughter one more time. She used to laugh when she read this psalm—or cry. Paddy was never sure what was going to happen when she was doing the Sunday reading. And this was her psalm. ‘Can it please be Psalm 23?’ she would ask. No one could speak the words ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death’ the way she could.

He finishes the reading and puts his glasses away. A cherub-faced priest passes his walking stick to him, takes the Bible and does the prayers—his voice striking a soft baritone, which is good for church but too ‘right’ for this moment. This is a place of wrong-ness.

Sullen faces stare and glare, brooding behind dark sunglasses. Get it over with, they seem to say. Paddy understands the sentiment. If two members of his church were pedos, who’s to say Paddy isn’t one? And what about this other guy with the boyish looks?

And there’s the bishop in his stockman’s hat, raincoat and sunnies, smiling. If Paddy didn’t know him, he would think he was simple. That cheery mask will get a fist in the face if he keeps it up. It wouldn’t be the first time.

We’ve betrayed them and now here we are burying their Claudia.

On the grass directly in front of him, Claudia’s polished coffin beads up with water droplets, a thick mass of native bluebells overhanging one end of the casket. Paddy wonders if the gravedigger forgot to cut them away or if he saw them and deliberately left them. On the other side of the coffin, a dark, earthen cavity awaits, its edges bordered by bright green synthetic turf. Beyond that is another scarred memory: a headstone with the words Kerrod Spiers, beloved son of Claudia and Michael.

The priest’s prayers go on and on. Paddy shifts more weight onto his good leg. Only six days ago, Claudia had given Paddy a gift. There he was, sitting with her in Mia’s lounge room: him doing the talking and asking the questions. Then it had all turned upside down.

‘Patrick darling,’ she had said to him, taking both his hands in hers. ‘You know me, and you know this old glam girl is supposed to laugh at all the shit. But I have this deep regret: I never told your Janie how much she meant to my Kerrod and to me. Why didn’t I do that, Patrick?’

Coming at a moment when he was focussed on how Claudia might be useful to him, it had plunged in deep like an arrow. Now, it wasn’t just her hands holding his, he was holding hers. A presence had filled the room. Janie might as well have been right there, telling him to swallow his pride and make sure Claudia knew how much she had meant to Janie. Sitting up straight, Paddy had looked Claudia in the eye and told her exactly that.

Paddy’s throat tightens. He takes a tissue from his pocket, wipes his eyes and whispers a prayer: ‘Thank you, Jesus, for Claudia and the priest she has been to me.’

Paddy senses the eyes of the crowd upon him. The prayers seem to have stopped.

‘I’ve finished,’ the cherub whispers, nudging Paddy. ‘It’s 9.45. Better make this short and sweet.’

Keeping a firm grip on his walking stick, Paddy looks at his notes and at the crowd. He’s been warned not to preach. Claudia’s older sister gazes at him accusingly from behind a black veil. At the back of the crowd, a well-dressed man with a skinhead haircut and tattoos—who Paddy recognises as the one doing the eulogy—paces up and down, smoking, shaking his head and wiping away tears.

Paddy stuffs his notes into a side pocket, takes a deep breath and tells the crowd of Claudia’s gift to him. He prays for Claudia, thanks God for her, Janie and Kerrod, and concludes with a blessing.

The older sister breaks down and is comforted by her women friends. The man at the back walks forward and does the eulogy. The priest says the Lord’s Prayer, the casket is lowered and flowers are thrown.

Just when Paddy thinks it’s all over, there’s an angry shout and a ripple in the crowd: a grey-haired man restrains a bald young man in a suit. The young man glares at Paddy, his face drenched with tears.

‘It’s alright for you, you old bastard,’ he yells. ‘You never had any family!’

Paddy’s eyes lock with the young man’s.

‘Bullshit Bruno!’ a voice retorts. ‘Didn’t you hear what he just said?’

‘Please Patrick,’ the priest says, putting a hand on Paddy’s shoulder. ‘A soft answer turns away wrath. Remember?’

The young man walks off with the older man. Paddy starts to breathe again. Wind gusts, and rain showers down. Mourners brace their umbrellas against the wind and gather around the grave.

Paddy thanks the priest for his help and leaves for the car park where he hopes to find Michelle. While he walks, he tucks his stick under his arm: the movement of his legs somehow relieving the ache.

A text from the bishop arrives on his phone.

The doctor at the Blessed Margaret says Kelvin wants to speak with you Smiley

Not now, Paddy replies and keeps walking.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the bishop beelining for him. Adams being awake is a surprise: a complicated surprise. For a day and a half, Adams had been in intensive care where he had slipped in and out of consciousness like a yo-yo. Doctors had predicted he only had a few days to live. In the early hours of the morning, with the bishop presiding, Paddy and the family had gathered at his bedside while the last rites were administered to a barely conscious Adams. Before they left the room, Adams had fallen into a deep coma and was put on life support.

The saga of Adams was about to be all over. The family had looked relieved. Paddy didn’t know what to feel. There was relief about being able to leave the whole mess, of Adams the paedophile, to a just and merciful God. Then there was guilt about his contempt for Adams, and then there was fear. It was fear that won the day: fear that if Adams died, the mystery of the breviary password would die with him and so might the Jacksons.

Another text arrives, this one from Michelle.

They found a man handcuffed to a pole at Penrith, says he was tortured by Red last night. They found a body too

This can’t be good: nothing about Oksy, just Red on a rampage. Paddy looks around for Michelle’s car. She should be here by now. Another text arrives from her.

Look to ur right old man

He stops and turns. Michelle stands at the far end of the car park in a black-hooded coat, waving. He can just see one corner of her red VW. She calls out, telling him to hurry. On his way across the bitumen, he hears the bishop gaining on him. Paddy keeps walking but the bishop catches up.

‘Nice bit of bomb disposal there, Patrick,’ the bishop says.

‘Thank you, Steven,’ Paddy says, stopping.

Rain floats down. The bishop takes off his glasses and wipes water droplets off them, showing pale circles of flab around faded blue eyes. He turns to Michelle, who waves. He looks back at Paddy, the unspoken suggestion being that the bishop would prefer to talk to both of them. Paddy opens his hands in a gesture of invitation to speak.

‘I can see you’re busy,’ the bishop says, ‘but Kelvin needs you.’

‘So he’s conscious?’

‘Not exactly—he called out: “Help me Patrick!” I should say, he yelled.’

The bishop—looking like he’s about to cry—keeps talking. But Paddy’s on another planet. This breviary nonsense could prove to be nothing more than Adams playing some stupid game, even on his deathbed: making them grovel. A little pragmatism is what’s needed right now. ‘We like you because you know when to do “ruthless” and when to do ‘kind,’” his boss in finance had once told him. But that was before he lost Janie.

‘Damn you, Adams!’ Paddy says.

‘Really, Patrick!’ the bishop says, looking him in the eye.

‘Sorry,’ Patrick says. ‘But damn something!’

The bishop says goodbye and strides off. Paddy walks across the wet bitumen to Michelle, who’s on her phone. She puts the phone away and they get into her VW—which she has to fold herself into—and drive out of the car park.

‘Where are we going?’ he asks.

‘They’re still alive!’ she screams, grabbing his arm.

‘Who?’

‘All of them!’

‘Wonderful.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Patrick! Get excited.’

‘I am, I am!’ he says, smiling.

‘Could’ve fooled me! What is it with you God guys? You just don’t know how to get all screamy!’

‘Where are they?’

‘No idea.’

‘So, you got a message?’

‘A courier arrived,’ Michelle says, stopping at a red light. ‘A handwritten note from a Dr Robertson.’

‘Doc Robbo! David Robertson?’

‘That’s him.’

‘He’s the one who delivered Oksy.’

‘Red and Mia showed up at his place.’

‘And Oksy?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Thank God,’ Paddy says. ‘How did they do it?’

‘The commando way, by the sound of it,’ Michelle chuckles, taking the steering wheel in both hands and manoeuvring through a pool of water.

‘So, is the doc taking us to meet them?’

‘No. We’re going to St Vincent’s,’ she says, pointing at a TomTom on the dash. ‘We have a witness—a nearly dead one. The doc had him admitted.’

‘The witness is—’

‘A little boy that Red and Mia brought with them.’

‘Fortunately not admitted to the same hospital as Adams.’

‘Yes. Very fortunately.’

Michelle’s phone rings. She swipes the screen, and without any introduction a man launches into a ‘last night at dinner’ story. Michelle laughs loudly whilst navigating her way out of a minor traffic jam and explaining to her friend that she really can’t talk right now. They say goodbye. Michelle cruises up to a T-intersection with a red arrow pointing left. A sign says ‘M4 City’.

‘By the way,’ Michelle says, ‘what was Bishop Steven on about?'

‘Adams is out of the coma and asking for me.’

‘We should go there after this and put a gun at his head: “Tell us the code, sir!”’

‘Indeed.’

The lights go green and they accelerate up a slip lane to the freeway.

‘How do you do it?’ Michelle says. ‘How the hell do you get your head around what you were just doing back there? Dressed in that awful black robe like it’s some kind of theatre—burying the dead. Where does that fit?’

‘Well, it’s like God has this problem—’

‘You bet he has! What’s he going to say to Mia and Oksy? And this little boy? They had him and Oksy in cages, for Christ’s sake!’

‘Cages?’

‘Dog kennels, actually: courtesy of your all-loving and all-powerful God.’

They reach lights below a cloverleaf of freeway. Paddy leans back and stares at a smooth arch of concrete. Michelle’s question feels embedded in that arch: perfect and untouchable. The lights turn green. Michelle eases the car across a wet sheen of concrete and turns left into a middle lane.

‘I’d like to record our conversation,’ she says, reaching into her bag.

She pulls out a camera, turns it on and places it on her lap, the lens pointed at him.

‘Do we really have to do it this way?’ Paddy asks. ‘Is this for a National piece?’

‘No: not yet, anyway. It’s just that I’m in Year 9 mode, Patrick. I can smell a “God full of shit” moment. It’s just too good to miss.’

She laughs. The camera’s red light flashes.

‘You’re on abbot,’ she whispers.

Paddy can’t think of anything to say. Michelle has threatened to do this for years, ‘Imagine yourself in my shoes’ she would say. ‘You’ve got a microphone shoved in your face with a million people listening—let’s see how full of answers you are then.’ He starts talking anyway, delivering a summary of what they’ve just been speaking about, including her question. Michelle pulls a cigarette out and waves it at him—unlit—telling him to stop bullshitting, to cut to the chase.

‘Do that thing you do!’ she says. ‘You know—that honesty shit.’

She’s right. He needs to forget about the microphone and just be himself. His mind runs back to a place in the Old Testament where the reader is told that ‘God repented.’

‘According to the book of Genesis,’ Paddy begins, ‘God was sorry he had made mankind. And so he should be, we think, sometimes. Especially on days like this.’

‘Hear, hear!’ Michelle says, putting the cigarette down.

A list of recent horrors scrolls through his head. If only he could be out walking and talking in that rain with her. In here with this camera is so suffocating and claustrophobic. Too bad. He’ll start with the only thing he knows, the only thing that enables him to get out of bed every morning: love. It’s such an easy target but there’s no other way.

‘What if,’ he says, ‘in order for love to exist outside of itself, it had to relinquish control of something, had to risk hate?’

‘Are you for real?’ she says, looking at him for so long he worries she might rear-end someone. ‘You’re telling me that this “love”, aka “God”, had to let Kerrod be molested? Janie be murdered? Mia be raped? Claudia be murdered and Oksy be kidnapped?’

‘It’s not a good look, I admit,’ Paddy says.

For fucks sake! he can hear Red saying just two days ago. What was this God of yours thinking?

‘He’s like a dodgy carmaker,’ she says. ‘“Let’s try this one, shall we Gabriel? Oh no! Back to the drawing board.”’

‘You exaggerate, Michelle. But yes, God does have his failures.’

‘So what’s the point in being God?’

‘What about you, Michelle? What would you do if you were God?’

‘Quality control sir: gently terminate all the defective ones.’

‘And the next day?’

‘Keep going until—’

‘You’ve designed the perfect product, right?’ Paddy puts some heat into that word ‘perfect’. He’s been here too many times himself to let her get away with being so bloody simplistic.

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘Which only ever does your will,’ he adds.

‘Yes. No. I mean—’

‘You’ll want to micromanage, won’t you?’

Michelle sighs. They stop behind a dirty white ute. Conversation grinds to a halt.

‘Keep going,’ she says.

‘None of us wants a universe ruled by a control freak,’ he says. ‘Everything tidy, black and white and safe. Oh, there’s a baddie, kill that one. There’s a volcano, douse that one.’

‘I work with one of those,’ she says, following the ute.

‘So did I, for a while. He wanted to have all the God stuff on his own terms: orgasm without responsibility, children without family, church without God.’

‘Do you mind if I ask who you’re talking about?’

Michelle adjusts the camera. Paddy hesitates. Kelvin Adams is the one he had in mind but as he thinks about, it could be himself in a different kind of way. Yes, he had tried to care for his family, but in another way it had been an inconvenience. He had disguised it well, but he had been a control freak when it came to what he really wanted.

‘Let’s just say I’m talking about a few different people,’ he says, ‘back in the day of my finance career.’

‘Okay,’ Michelle says. ‘Let’s go back there shall we? You have awkward people at the office, but you’re doing alright—then one day your wife’s murdered. How on earth could such a stuff-up on God’s part move you closer to him?’

Leaving the camera sitting on her lap like an accusing eye, Michelle accelerates past a big orange crane, adjusting the camera’s mechanism without even looking at it, the way a musician might play an instrument.

While Paddy thinks, Michelle turns the camera on herself and says that she doesn’t even know if this interview will ever be seen by anyone. She adds that if it is, the viewers need to know that she is not just being a smart arse journalist, she really is curious to find out exactly how Paddy’s religion makes any sense of the shit that’s happening right now.

Meanwhile, Paddy looks out at the dripping wet. A dull ache throbs in both temples. How can he—how dare he—use his Janie in a philosophical debate? Janie would laugh. She’s probably laughing at him right now. ‘You’re so clever with words Patrick,’ she had always said. How he hates that compliment: to be known as ‘clever with words’ would have to be ‘damning with faint praise’. It probably wasn’t even a compliment, just a mischievous little land mine, planted to explode under the growing weight of his arrogance. ‘I’m proud of you,’ his mother had once told him, ‘but you always have to be the smartest person in the room.’

‘When you see Christianity as nothing more than a noble lie,’ he finally says, looking sideways at the camera. ‘You go to mass the same way you go to the theatre: it’s an indulgence, a beautiful escape from reality. It was how I came to terms with life. But out in the real world, “Nature red in tooth and claw” is what I expected—there’s no one to blame, it’s just how it is. You’re supposed to be—’

‘Okay with death and misery?’ Michelle says.

‘And I was. I liked the thought that it was all just biology: “the clean and well-lit prison of one idea,” as Chesterton says. All that angst could be explained and reduced to the idea that we were nothing more than complicated plants. Managing the economy, healthcare, religion and politics was just a matter of managing a code of ethics we had created ourselves and could tweak whichever way we liked. How liberating!’

‘And how much more in harmony with nature.’

Paddy’s neck aches. Michelle changes lanes to avoid queuing behind a big purple truck. Paddy thinks back to his ‘harmony with nature’ stage and how it made so much sense and then no sense at all. Contrived was how it felt.

‘Science,’ Paddy continues, massaging his neck, ‘rather than being a place of honesty, became a weapon I used to prop up my philosophy. For me, even the existence of God—or not—was a question for science. God was unable to be measured, therefore God did not exist.’

‘And one day your measuring device recorded a God blip?’

‘It had been there every day of my life, Michelle. I couldn’t escape this thought that if meaningless chaos was the mother from which we came and to which we return, why do we behave as if it isn’t? If it’s true that we came from an abyss of nothingness, where does all this heartache and joy—and sweet reason—come from? Hydrogen atoms? How could our dreams and our music be so much better than the thing we came from?’

‘I hear you,’ she says, taking a deep breath. ‘But that “faith, hope and love” crap just sets you up to get hurt.’

‘But it’s what we are, Michelle. We’re the odd ones out. We human animals have a super-nature: the blood of a god flows in our veins.’

‘Bloody hell. Couldn’t God have stopped the clock at the Neanderthals?’

‘You as a cave woman? I don’t think so.’

‘I do. Instead of talking shit, I could be clubbing you and eating you.’

‘Sorry—too old and too tough.’

Paddy smiles. This is why the viewers love Michelle: she does hilarious so well.

‘Here’s an idea,’ Michelle says, lighting the cigarette and sliding her window down a little. ‘Before we’re all bloody zombies, stop the clock now.’

‘Maybe not. According to the maths, if the story of our planet was shrunk to twelve months, Homo sapiens would have only been here for twenty-seven minutes: the last two thousand years in just sixteen seconds. Chances are, we’ve got some more evolving to do.’

‘Evolving? More like extincting in the next ice age. Bye-bye to another God-accident.’

‘Not an accident if you look at the odds, I’m told that if the Big Bang had been out by one part in 1060, we wouldn’t exist. Someone set the controls to make sure we arrived! They say it’s like aiming a rifle at a two-and-a-half-centimeter target twenty billion light years away and hitting it. Our bullseye was rigged! It gives me goose bumps just thinking about it.’

‘Fuck!’ Michelle says, swerving to avoid a bicycle rider who’s just swung around a corner and almost fallen into the line of traffic.

Horns honk. The rider gives the forks.

‘When it comes to goose bumps,’ Michelle says, running a hand through her hair, ‘all this cosmology has got nothing on Anne Rice’s vampire novels. The sheer supernatural sensuality of fresh human blood: and there’s the poor old vampire—unable to die—staring into a meaningless abyss. Talk about a living hell.’

‘Unless, of course, there is a meaning.’

‘Not for me; I’m over it.’

‘Don’t be over it. Anne was right.’

‘She scared me, the naughty thing.’

‘Well, my dear, it is scary—and somehow beautiful—when a supernatural being is obsessed with you.’

‘This is ridiculous.’

‘What?’

‘You: an old man making me nervous—are you a vampire?’

‘Maybe not the kind you’re talking about!’ he laughs. ‘But according to our world, I’m a bloodsucker of sorts, perhaps even a potential terrorist, given that I’m ready to die for my faith.’

‘Please, Patrick, I’m not ready for another one, not another death.’

‘Neither am I, but there are far worse things than death.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like the way I was before Janie got to me.’

‘As in, a happy old businessman?’

About to quip that he wasn’t so happy, Paddy stops himself and sends up a silent prayer for wisdom. Michelle stubs out her cigarette and puts the window back up. Paddy sits up a little straighter. What he’d like to say next is tricky: he doesn’t want to be the preacher, but he can’t think of any other way to say it.

‘I was proud of my suits and seminars,’ he says. ‘I was always on the side of the angels when I was at work: spouting honesty, integrity and faithfulness. Work was where my life worked, you might say.’

‘Don’t knock it sir. Life would be shit without work.’

‘It would be. But for me it was really just an anaesthetic.’

Michelle accelerates over a hill. Red traffic lights loom. They stop at the back of a queue.

‘What do you mean by anaesthetic?’ Michelle asks.

‘It’s like this. I’m the senior finance manager. The day comes for our company’s awards ceremony. Along with a few others, I notch up a medal of merit and we all go out to celebrate at a five-star hotel: beautiful people, lovely meals and a waterfront view. Half way through the awards, I duck back to my room, which I’m sharing with the CEO. There he is on the carpet, high as a kite and sobbing his heart out, telling me how this awards night is all shit, that his family’s fucked and his kids are going off the rails. ‘What’s the point?’ he asks me. All the stuff he can see and touch—his car, his wife, his house, his salary—no longer counts, he says. It’s the things he can’t see and can’t touch, he explains: things like love, hope and joy. These are what he wants.’

‘Jesus!’ Michelle says, driving away as the lights turn green. ‘Your CEO actually said that?’

‘Yes, and although he was stoned, it was as if an anaesthetic had worn off and he was being more sober than I had ever seen him.’

‘And he was back to normal the next morning?’

‘He was. He begged me not to say a word about it, told me it was just a weak moment.’

‘Holy hell!’ Michelle yanks on the steering to avoid a baseball-sized rock in the middle of the road. ‘That bloody thing could roll a car.’ The camera on her lap falls over. Keeping her eyes straight ahead, she repositions it. ‘So,’ she says, ‘what did you do?’

‘I was stunned. Here was the man who had already reached the top of the pile I was climbing, confessing to me that it was all shit, that he was a drug addict, a liar and he’d been cheating on his wife. It was so honest, but he refused to ever talk about it again.’

‘What about his family?’

‘They never had a chance. He transferred overseas and left them behind.’

‘Meanwhile, you were getting worried.’

‘Yes. To put it mildly, I was doing some hard thinking. I felt like I was looking at a picture of my future self: conquering the mountain and walking away empty.’

The freeway branches into two, forming another motorway on the right.

‘You can read this kind of stuff two ways,’ Michelle says, veering left and continuing along the M4. ‘Deep and meaningful or meaningless. When a CEO is that dysfunctional, it could be that he’s just out of whack with the real world.’

‘Or, that the so-called real world is out of whack,’ Paddy says.

‘Maybe.’

‘There’s no “maybe” about it, Michelle. I’ve seen this over and over again. People so terrified of this thing—this God business—that they have to talk about it in code. Bertrand Russell, the atheist, for example: his own daughter believes that his entire life was actually a search for God. Like God is some irresistible woman we run from.’

‘I saw that once,’ Michelle says, grinning.

‘How do you mean?’

‘I worked in this little town. A stunner of a girl sang at the pub: all the guys shamelessly in love with her, except for one who said he couldn’t stand her. He wasn’t fooling anyone.’

‘That was me once.’

‘And now you think it’s me?’ she asks, steadying the camera.

‘It’s everyone, unless shit happens, forcing us to wonder if we’ve been too hard and fast in our conclusions about God.’

‘Exactly what kind of shit are you talking about?’

‘For me, it was a virtual prison yard that I would walk nine to five every day: at one end was my tidy little office block in the city and—once Janie was gone—at the other end, a lounge chair, a bottle of whisky and a few old books. You ask yourself: “I wonder how many others are going through this ritual tonight?”’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘I got tired of trying to be sensible, of trying to believe that this ache was just a glitch.’

Michelle asks Paddy to say that again. He says it again, and she laughs and laughs.

‘You bastard,’ she says. ‘You’re getting to me.’

‘I hope so. If this so-called “glitch” is at the centre of everything—despite the tooth and the claw—miracle is what this story is really all about.’

‘Okay if I keep doing this?’ Michelle asks, putting another cigarette in her mouth.

‘Of course.’

Winding her window down, she lights up, draws back and after what seems like forever, blows a long stream of smoke into the breeze and the roar of trucks and cars. Taking a few more puffs, she stubs it out and winds the window back up.

‘So,’ she says, ‘if we have the possibility of some kind of Higher Power—how on earth do you get from there to this “personal Jesus” stuff?’

‘Well, you certainly can’t just think your way there.’

‘But we have to, Patrick. You’re always singing the praises of mind, reason, logic.’

‘I do and I don’t.’

‘But you do! It’s why I bloody well listen to you.’

Traffic stops for lights. A bikie eases into a lane on Paddy’s side, the rider glancing at Michelle. She waves him in. He accelerates past.

‘There comes a point,’ Paddy says, ‘where we have to follow not just the logic of the argument but the logic of the evidence—wherever it leads.’

‘And if it doesn’t stack up?’

‘You’re back to “some kind of Higher Power” as you put it. But if the facts do stack up, it can be quite disturbing.’

‘And loopy—a journalist could spend their whole life on miracle stories.’

‘Most are nonsense, but that doesn’t let us off the hook.’

Rain comes down in buckets. Traffic slows. Michelle puts the wipers on.

‘It feels so “tribal myth,”’ she says. ‘Virgin birth, water into wine, walking on water.’

‘Shamelessly pagan!’ Paddy says. ‘I love it!’

‘And I laugh.’

‘They call it “the scandal of Jesus”, Michelle. We can keep our dignity with a Moses but not with someone saying, “I am the light of the world ... eat my flesh and drink my blood.”’

‘But—?’

‘I know, you’re thinking, “What about all those churches with Jesus’ name on them?”’

‘I wasn’t actually—I was thinking about a time when I watched you conducting mass. It was beautiful and it was dignified.’

Paddy leans his head back and sighs, recoiling at the thought of turning mass into a work of art, even of idolatry, where he—the presiding priest—is the centre of attention.

‘It might have looked dignified,’ Paddy says, ‘but the fact is, mass is an invitation to participate in the deep and humiliating sacrifice of Jesus, the Friend of Sinners. While we sing, kneel and pray, he is at work in our hearts: imploring, reconciling, rummaging through old baggage and healing wounds. This is the hungry-for-love God, the shameless, interfering saviour we all lean away from. Dignity is the last thing on his mind. It’s as if he’s a doting mother who simply wants to hug us. But we would rather keep our distance: a lofty spirit of the desert sands, for example, is much less intrusive and seems more worthy of the name of God.’

‘At least that way—’ Michelle says, stops in mid-sentence and adds, ‘I almost said, “the lofty one is more user friendly.” But that’s not necessarily true, is it?’

‘It depends on what you mean by “user friendly”. Tyrants, for example, and, ironically, philosophers and artists—love mysterious, unapproachable gods and use such gods to justify absurdity, fanaticism and violence.’

Michelle tells him that he’s just summed up all religion. Paddy stops for a moment; his hip has had enough, he needs to shift his weight. While he thinks about that, Michelle overtakes a car and passes him a cushion from the back seat. He pushes it behind his back, thanks her and says he can’t agree with her statement. It’s half right, he tells her. She wants to know what he means.

‘Most major religions share this transcendent theology,’ he says. ‘But Jesus “throws down the God gauntlet.” In him we have a personal, even rational and accountable God, showing his cards and being vulnerable.’

‘And offending.’

‘Yes, particularly those who hate the idea of God in the thick of life: the copulating, the blood and the guts—singing, laughing, hurting and praying; a God who enjoys a good glass of wine.’

‘God the wine lover—now you’re talking sir.’

‘And to make matters worse,’ Paddy adds, leaning back and stretching old muscles. ‘A God who has relatives with claws and tails.’

‘God, the cousin of the shrew?’ Michelle laughs and slaps the steering wheel. ‘Now that’s newsworthy, Patrick!’

‘“Good news,” madam, if you’ll excuse the pun, but I can’t let this go without mentioning our unmentionable religion: secularism.’

‘Stop right there, sir,’ Michelle says, waving a hand.

‘Stop what?’

‘This playing with words crap. Secular is non-religious, by definition.’

Paddy knows he could keep going, could play this word game with Michelle for all it’s worth. He needs something more to the point. They stop at lights. A mother and son—in green plastic raincoats—walk across the road, the boy throwing gravel at the cars and the mother trying to stop him.

‘Look at that poor child,’ Paddy says, pointing. ‘A secular god with his own parade ground, mirrors, hairstyles and priestly robes. Try offending him and see what happens. Secularism has given him a god to worship called ‘Me’; he has his own sacred book called ‘My Opinion’ and a sacred cow called ‘My Lifestyle.’ Soon—’

‘I get it, I get it!’ Michelle says.

She laughs out loud, her dark eyes flashing, and tells him he’s got his gig on National any time he likes. The lights go green and they drive away.

‘It’s tragic,’ Paddy continues. ‘That little chap is guarded by an army of parents and barristers—and everybody terrified—doing their best to pretend this child is amazing, knowing that the minute we go to ‘this is right, that is wrong’ we offend our society’s golden rule. Next thing, he’ll be an untouchable ‘Western Fundamentalist’ launching a ‘My Lifestyle’ suicide attack: a child sacrifice, as it were, on the altar of secularism.’

‘On that we agree,’ Michelle says, swerving to avoid a meandering L-plater. ‘It’s all so “emperor’s new clothes”. I was at this child management seminar the other day—you could cut the air with a knife.’

‘Impossible to be honest in those places,’ Paddy says. ‘You never know who’s going to be offended at what.’

‘Seriously, Patrick, I was tempted to paint a clown’s face on each of the bloody presenters and have them mouthing the Joker’s famous question.’

‘The Joker?’

‘You know, the bad guy in that old Batman film. He shows up at a function and mingles with the terrified guests: “Why so serious?” he asks.’

They stop talking. Paddy checks his emails. There’s one from EJ about making a visit to Australia. He replies, telling her to leave it for a few months.

‘So,’ Michelle says, ‘with all these false gods around and idolatry even creeping into your Mass, isn’t everything we ever say or think about God, some type of idolatry?’

‘It’s always a danger,’ Paddy says. ‘I like to think of it as parallax error; it’s in everything we think about God, but God allows for it. It’s why the old theologians came up with the “Principle of Restraint.”’

‘Restraint from what?’ Michelle asks, picking up the camera and holding it closer to Paddy.

‘From making fools of ourselves,’ Paddy says, looking straight into the lens. ‘If God is both personal and beyond personal, unlimited by time and space, and is the everywhere itself; if God pervades all things—visible and invisible—then attempting to lay God out on a page of text will only get you so far. There comes a point where our “God statements” start to look like dead tissue in a jar of formalin.’

A car travelling at the same speed draws alongside Michelle, a man at the steering wheel—in police uniform—staring at her and waving a finger like she’s a naughty child. Michelle puts the camera back on her lap. The cop gives a thumbs-up and accelerates past. Letting out a long sigh, Michelle shakes her head and wonders aloud why all this God stuff has to be so complicated.

‘What are we supposed to do then?’ she asks.

‘What every self-respecting human has always done.’

‘Which is?’ Michelle asks, looking around for the cop and holding the camera up in Paddy’s face again.

‘Challenge it. Attack it! Fear it!’ Paddy answers, forcing himself to keep looking into the camera lens. ‘Make yourself spiritually conspicuous, but not in a religious way. Make it a secret journey. Embarrass yourself before God, let out the angst, the rage and the prayers. The next part—’

‘I pass on all those.’

‘Maybe not, maybe you’re already doing it.’

‘Me on God’s radar? I don’t think so.’

Paddy smiles at her. She keeps the camera on him, wanting to know what the joke is all about.

‘God’s not put off by our outbursts,’ Paddy says. ‘He’s a hopeless lover and poet—he’ll take the ranting of an atheist as a prayer if he gets half a chance.’

‘I’m no atheist, and I don’t go for those angry YouTube screamers with their God-hating shit,’ she says putting the camera back on her lap.

‘It’s not all “shit”, as you say. Some of those speeches are accidental hymns of praise to God.’

‘Come again?’

‘All these stories of personal triumph, postscripted with, “By the way, God didn’t help me.” Meanwhile, here they are rejoicing in this cruel and beautiful work of art called “The Universe”: facing adversity, growing through suffering for goodness sake! Talk about a back-handed compliment to God!’

Paddy takes a deep breath and steeples his hands below his chin. He’s wanted to get this one off his chest for a while. Rain pours down.

‘What about you, Michelle?’ Paddy asks. ‘If you’re no atheist, where are you?’

‘Borderline, I’d say.’

‘Curious, then?’

‘You wish Patrick,’ she says, laughing. ‘Anyway, what did you mean before about “fear it?” I didn’t think you were into that fear bullshit.’

‘I’m not into that, but I am into what they call the “numen” or the “numinous.”’

‘Bloody hell, not another word.’

‘It relates to one of the oldest words in language, “taboo”, which actually means something so terrifying you would spend your whole life running away from it, but so beautiful you would spend your whole life chasing it.’

‘I get the chasing bit,’ she says, swerving to avoid a cardboard box. ‘But what did you mean before, about the “next part”?’

‘It’s not about something you do.’

‘Well, what in the freaking hell is it then?’

‘“Being found” is the way Janie wrote about it.’

‘Isn’t it God’s job to find us?’

‘It’s tricky. Remember that stuff about God having to relinquish control of something in order for love to exist outside of God? This is where it boomerangs: in order for us to be found by God, we also have to relinquish control of something.’

‘What do you mean by “relinquish control?”’

Paddy hesitates, trying to work out a way of getting to the point. Words like ‘self-abandonment’ and ‘obedience’ come to mind but they have often proven to be red herrings.

‘Think of an ocean,’ he says. ‘It’s like there’s this ocean of grace, always moving towards us, besieging us. In the end, the only real power we have is the power to say “no”. If we don’t say “no,” that lovely ocean will keep coming. So why not just stop saying “no?”’

‘That ocean of grace is looking pretty small right now,’ Michelle says, speeding up to get past a line of cars in a merging lane.

‘Maybe we’ve had enough for one day,’ Paddy says.

He leans back, breathing slow and deep. He’s been talking, preaching too much.

‘If you don’t mind,’ Michelle says. ‘I have a couple of questions about the diaries. I skipped the first three, as you recommended, and I’m in number four. But I need help—it’s boring as hell. I’m worried this could be a long and slow read.’

‘I’ll give you my—’ Paddy says and stops in mid-sentence.

A truck has eased a little too close. Michelle negotiates the truck and tells him to relax.

‘We have airbags,’ she reassures him, patting the steering wheel. ‘Anyway, you were saying?’

‘Fourteen years ago, after EJ left home, I had a few drinks one night and randomly picked up diary number six. Not one prayer in the whole book.’

‘So—she’d lost her faith?’

‘Sort of; more like losing what wasn’t worth keeping. Smack bang in the middle of a dark page of writing, I found this G.K. Chesterton quote: “Despair ... does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy.” Right after that, Janie says she’s over trying to make her life joyful. She hopes Jesus won’t mind, she says, if she stops going to church, stops praying and stops her music classes.’

A message from the doctor comes through on Michelle’s phone, asking when they will be arriving. She passes the phone to Paddy and points at the TomTom. He takes his glasses from his pocket, puts them on and sees that it’s 10.16; the TomTom says they’re due to arrive at 10.45. He types 10.45 into the message box, touches ‘send’ and gives the phone back to Michelle. They return to their conversation.

‘This God of yours seems rather irreligious,’ Michelle says.

‘Exactly. He would much rather us be honest and be unbelievers.

‘Even if it means offending him?’

‘God’s not as easily offended as most people think, especially if masks are falling off and we’re being true. In C.S. Lewis’ novel Till We Have Faces, the queen is so ugly that she wears a mask for most of her life: she hates herself and she hates the gods, but all she gets from them is silence—until the end of her life—’

‘Why the hell did they wait so long?’

‘It wasn’t until she was about to die that she took off her mask and fully expressed what she was offended about.’

‘Kind of like “gloves off?”’

‘That’s it. Janie quotes the queen at the back of diary six. She says something like, I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till the word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?’

Michelle repeats the words. ‘“How can they meet us face to face till we have faces.” I love it.’

‘Same,’ Paddy says. ‘And the irony is that when it comes to masks, many who start out loving God have a lot further to travel—in order to truly know him—than those who start out hating him.’

They stop talking. Rain showers down hard, the windscreen turns a watery grey, cars slow and headlights are turned on.

‘What about people like me,’ Michelle says, pointing at herself, ‘people who haven’t even started hating or loving?’

‘Maybe just get on with what’s in front of you. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for example—who will probably never be able to believe in God, given the things done to her in God’s name—having to push past the death threats of Islamists and the silence of the progressives just so she can tell the world about honour killings and the excision of six thousand little girls every day.’

‘And still not just a hater—I don’t know how she does it.’

‘Then there’s Jody Williams, the landmine activist; another of Janie’s heroes. I once watched her addressing the UN. I had this picture of the angels in heaven applauding her and of Jody turning to heaven and saying, “If you’re up there, God, then get off your bloody backside and fix it!”’

‘She’s amazing,’ Michelle says with a chuckle. ‘I would back her against any barrister.’

‘She owns the room when she speaks,’ Paddy adds. ‘At least that’s how the Canadian ambassador put it. To my mind she’s a prayer embodied in human flesh. Not surprisingly she gets a paragraph in Janie’s diary six, which is free of God talk but actually one big prayer.’

‘How so?’

‘I used to think that prayer was like a shopping list. But it’s more like diving into a river of non-verbal joys and aches, certainly not just a list of requests, which is what Janie had been doing.’

‘Which is what we all do.’

‘So you actually pray?’

‘Who doesn’t hedge their bets? You telling me I shouldn’t?’

A vehicle cuts in ahead of them, the driver giving the finger to Michelle. She blows a kiss and accelerates past him into a lane filled with a long line of traffic. They come to a halt. The other driver speeds past, honking his horn.

‘Maybe,’ Paddy says. ‘Maybe stop and listen.’

‘Like, to schizophrenic chatter?’

‘Not at all, that’s about verbals. This is about shutting up and letting God have a turn at praying back to you in God language: symbols, rituals, human faces walking past you in the street; films, music, animals—trees. Our community, actually: the body of Christ.’

Paddy’s phone vibrates with a message from Madeleine about a problem with the monastery kitchen roster. Someone is going to have to fill in for Adams: Paddy messages that he’s working on a solution.

‘So,’ Michelle continues, ‘God prays too?’

‘We are told that the Spirit of God prays with “sighs too deep for words.” We’re invited to join in, to let that part of us, which doesn’t have language, be made known.’

‘That’s your job, sir. I’ll report the facts.’

‘But how can you report the facts if you don’t have the vocabulary, Michelle, the ability to imagine what’s staring you in the face?’

She looks straight ahead, both hands firmly on the steering wheel, as if waiting for him to elaborate. Paddy rubs his eyes and stretches out his toes. He’s not the fast thinker he once was. He needs a nap.

‘We’re God phobic,’ he says, ‘and spiritually illiterate. Our vocabulary is crippled with lab-speak, shrunken to the point of view of some guy in a white coat.’

‘I’m not sure I follow.’

‘Science is held up as the only way of knowing—we get intimidated by words that sound scientific. “Gene”, for example, sounds more powerful, more solid than “soul.”’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Political-think gets into our brain, and our imagination is politicised; psychology gets in, and it’s psychologised; biology, and it’s biologised: each discipline laying claim to knowing the answer to the human dilemma, leaving our imagination more fuddled than ever.’

‘That sounds so arrogant, Patrick.’

‘True, but you’d have to agree that right now, biology is the flavour of the month, the darling of materialism. It offers simple solutions to a world that’s on the run from the uncertainties of a real imagination.’

‘And your point?’

‘The taproot of a healthy imagination seeks the wellsprings of joy. Yes, today you might find her flirting with a biologist—looking responsible and safe—while the biologist talks up happiness and the survival of the species, but tomorrow she’s back to her old habits, slumming it with a priest: contemptuous of the longing for security, and in particular, for popularity.’

‘Patrick, you need to meet an artist friend of mine. She’s a recovering fame addict: her art always had “I’m chasing grant money” stamped all over it. But not any more.’

‘It’s our world now, unfortunately. The imagination you find wandering the internet has been suckled on the teat of sales gimmicks—whatever is funny and easy to mimic. Hence, the rash of memes. In fact, it’s as if the imagination of our young has been memed: pruned, bound and turned into a pretty little bonsai tree—a toy.’

‘Jesus, Patrick,’ Michelle laughs and nudges Paddy. ‘I’d love to take what you just said and turn it into a meme.’

He doesn’t laugh. He’s too wound up. She reassures him she’s joking. He smiles. He wouldn’t be surprised if she did it just for a joke. She tells him she has more questions, if that’s okay. He nods a yes.

‘What did you mean by “on the run from the uncertainties of a real imagination”?’ she asks, putting the camera back up on the dash and angling the lens at Paddy.

‘You can see it everywhere,’ he says. ‘Sex, for example. The West is obsessed with orgasm, but that’s not the case in many ancient cultures where the process is the big deal. In the Old Testament for example, we find the term ‘knowing’ used to describe what happens. Us Westerners see a flower, see sex and speak of “reproduction”: we look downwards—at the physical, practical and mechanical—instead of upwards. We simply can’t imagine that a flower, or sex for that matter, could represent the ecstatic interpenetrating love of God.’

‘Or—if you were at my place last night—the romantic efforts of a brain-dead Neanderthal.’

‘I thought you liked Neanderthals?’

‘They’re cute, okay?’

Michelle turns the radio on. A squawky voice talks up a car wax product, a DJ promotes a Christmas Eve concert. Paddy rests his head and dozes. ‘Jingle Bells’ plays.

‘Bloody hell!’ Michelle says, turning the radio off again. ‘Let’s talk more about that genes and souls stuff.’

Paddy tries to remember what they’ve been talking about. It all seems a jumble. Bridges, cars and industrial estates sail past. They pass underneath a walkway to a large shopping mall. The word emptiness comes to mind. The mall will be a good starting place.

‘See that?’ he asks. Michelle nods and he continues. ‘If I were a fat old man in a business suit who owned that mall—’

Paddy stops speaking: a vehicle is skidding to a stop in front of them, red taillights glowing. Michelle jams on the brakes, cursing the driver. They slide to a standstill, almost touching the other car.

‘You were being the fat old man,’ Michelle reminds him, with a sly smile.

‘It’s like this,’ Paddy says, returning the smile, ‘a fruit can be made seedless and a society can be made soul-less.’

‘And you’re talking about me?’

‘Not at all—you’re a threat, a good threat.’

‘A threat?’

‘On National for example, you called shopping malls “hatcheries.” I loved it.’

‘It was just a joke.’

‘But no joke for a businessman intent on breeding customers who live to shop at his mall: “synthetic humans”, I call them.

‘Speaking as a once-upon-a-time businessman yourself,’ Michelle says, laughing and driving on.

‘Guilty as charged, your honour.’

‘Surely though, Patrick, it’s not the end of the world.’

‘It spirals down, Michelle. Having bred people incapable of imagining life as anything other than a mall, scientists conduct experiments on such populations and use their research to say that soul-less and dysfunctional is the new normal.’

‘But what if we are just bulls and cows doing our thing?’

‘If only,’ Paddy says. ‘You put bulls and cows in cow paradise and they’ll be happy. You won’t find them suiciding and substance-abusing. In fact—’

‘But look at our health care,’ she says, slowing down as the car approaches a pool of water, ‘our environmental clean ups, aid programs. Crime rates are down. We’re arguably a much happier society than ever.’

‘A well fed belly? No spiders to bite us? Yes. But what about this empty space between our brain and our gut: our heart and soul? “Men without chests” is how Lewis described such a society.’

‘It doesn’t seem to matter, Patrick.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Paddy says, reaching for a pipe that’s not there. Michelle sees what’s happening, chuckles, and passes him a packet of chewing gum. He takes a piece and asks her if he can say one last thing.

‘No,’ she says, putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘I’ve had enough—for one day, maybe for a year.’

‘But this is important.’

‘Okay, make it quick,’ she says, turning the camera off.

‘When “soul-less” is held up as natural, the very idea that there’s something better on offer—which we could be missing out on—is offensive. Empty and happy works, thank you very much; take all your joy and despair somewhere else.’

‘Time for a fuel up,’ she says, slowing and indicating left.

A car horn beeps behind them. They turn into a servo, the bump of the kerb jarring Paddy. He winces and changes position. His head aches. Michelle opens the console and offers him Panadol and a water bottle, reassuring him that she’s a healthy girl. He takes two while she fills the tank.

Back out on the freeway, Michelle wants to hear more on Janie.

‘Got another diary?’ she asks.

‘Number seven,’ he says. ‘Lots of Addo quotes.’

‘Lights, camera, action!’ she announces, placing the camera on the dash.

This camera business is getting a bit weird. About to say that he’s had enough, Paddy hesitates. What if God is in this? Sending up a Deo juvante—‘with God’s help’—prayer, Paddy focuses on a wall of concrete that’s streaming past and starts talking.

‘According to Bishop Addo,’ Paddy says, ‘the West only ever asks two questions: “Does it hurt? Is it fair?” And it wonders why its children are soul-less.”’

‘OCD and depressed,’ Michelle adds.

‘I looked up Addo on YouTube,’ Paddy says, staring at the camera, ‘and found a sermon where he was quoting a poem called Jesus of the Scars by Edward Shillito. “Africa’s got Jesus of the scars,” Addo was saying. “The West wants Jesus of the latte.”’

Michelle stops at a set of lights and claps in applause.

‘That’s the quote of the day,’ she says. ‘I want to get back into these diaries. No wonder Janie loved this guy so much!’

‘I was actually jealous.’

‘And embarrassed, I imagine.’

‘Yes. He’d lit a fire in her: she was passionate, even had the courage to go down to the school. Then it all fell over, and to my shame, I felt pleased. “So much for that,” I thought.’

‘Little did you know.’

‘Little indeed.’

‘I wish Janie were here, now,’ she says.

Paddy looks out at the rain. If Janie were here, she would probably be the one having this conversation with Michelle and he would most likely be stuck in his pride, defending his noble lie. The lights go green and they accelerate through the intersection.

‘Who was that poet?’ Michelle asks.

‘He was English: World War I. My favourite verse says something like, “The other gods were strong, but you were weak. They rode. You stumbled to a throne. But to our wounds, only God’s wounds can speak … and not a God has wounds but you alone.”’

They slow to a crawling pace behind a long line of red taillights, alternately blurring and clearing as the wiper sweeps the windscreen. Finishing on that poem feels good. Paddy could stop the story right here without opening his own can of worms, which is where Michelle always wants to go.

‘Does Janie talk about you and her?’

‘In number twelve—I think she’s talking about the two of us. She says the colour grey is the colour of misunderstandings and mistakes but it can also be the first colour of dawn. She says friends see more of it in each other the closer they get. Enemies never see it—all they see is black and white.’

‘And you were?’

‘I was the guy who talked up “grey” and “tolerance” but it was a sham. My “grey” was really “black”: rage and pride.’

‘How so?’

‘It wasn’t like I was a bad guy. Pride will go to any lengths to be a nice chap, to justify one bold fact about itself and to make that fact look pretty, even ethical and responsible.’

‘And your fact was repressed rage?’

‘That was a symptom. My fact was a lifestyle preference thing: a determination to live according to my appetites. One appetite in particular: money.’

Drawing back on her cigarette and exhaling, Michelle changes lanes and speeds past a white station wagon. Paddy waits for her to say whatever it is that’s on her mind. Nothing comes. Most likely it’s to do with the way he just slammed the whole idea of lifestyle preference. She looks at him as if she’s just read that thought.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I was sounding very religious and self righteous there, but—’

‘I know’ Michelle chimes in, flicking her cigarette out the window. ‘You’re a sinner with a saviour, right?’

‘Saved from what, though?’

‘Sin?’

‘What’s sin?’

‘I don’t bloody know Patrick. Not being good, I suppose. What would I know?’

‘What do you mean by “good?”’

‘What do you mean by it?’

‘Whatever our society conditions us to approve of—isn’t that it?’

‘Whatever indeed, smart arse,’ Michelle says, looking into her rear-view mirror. Speeding up, she moves across to the fast lane and overtakes a row of cars, the speedo hovering around 130 kph. Paddy stares out his window at rainclouds showing patches of blue. His little bit of sarcasm was a preacher’s liberty. Another apology is due.

‘Sorry,’ he says.

‘Well,’ she sighs. ‘I don’t know this God of yours, so I’m screwed anyway aren’t I?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Not?’ she laughs. ‘I’m in, even if I’m not a member?’

‘To quote C.S. Lewis, my guru, “We know that no person can be saved except through Christ—”’

‘There you go, see, I’m fucked.’

‘Hang on! Let me finish. Lewis qualifies that by saying, “We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him.”’

‘You’re telling me he’s saved me even though I’ve never met him?’

‘You meet him every day.’

‘I’ve heard that sermon too. Anyway: even though I don’t know him, I’m his. Is that it?’

‘Possibly,’ Paddy says, staring straight at her: curious to see if she’s sincere. It seems that she is. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘if you really want what he stands for.’

‘I don’t know what I bloody want anymore.’

‘Ultimately, everyone gets the thing they want most of all.’

‘Bullshit!’

‘No bullshit—it’s a fact of life.’

‘What the hell?’ Michelle says, looking at him and smiling. ‘You and your riddles. Do you have any more?’

‘Yes. “Even if we get what we want, we might not like it.”’

‘Do you mind enlightening me?’

‘I just quoted Aslan, a character in one of C.S. Lewis’ stories. He’s talking about self-will: having our own way, at any price. “I did it my way.”’

‘Ah: the spiritual pride thing. Is that what you think when you see me?’

‘It doesn’t matter what I think. Nor does it matter much whether you think you know him. “Does he know you?” is what’s important.’

They stop talking. Michelle overtakes a line of cars and pulls in a little too sharply. Horns beep. Paddy rests his head and closes his eyes. It doesn’t matter what I think, feels like the truest thing he’s said all day.

‘So, what does God stand for?’ Michelle asks.

‘Have you ever read the Gospels?’ he asks, keeping his eyes closed.

‘Which ones? The Gospel of Thomas? Phillip?’

Paddy can’t believe what he’s just heard. Opening his eyes, he leans forward and sits a little straighter. Michelle repeats her question whilst accelerating over a long, slow hill and stopping behind a queue of cars. There’s no smile on her face, no sense of a joke.

‘Is there a problem?’ she asks.

‘Did you know that most of those so-called “Gospels” were written at least fifty to a hundred years after the four that were written by Jesus’ earliest followers?’

‘Four? I thought there were dozens.’

‘Yes, if you believe the conspiracy theorists and grail hunters.’

‘I don’t believe anything. What are you trying to say?’

‘I’m trying to say a fact: the four I’m talking about—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—have well established evidence that they were written within thirty to sixty years of Jesus’ crucifixion—not to mention various letters that were written at the fifteen-to twenty-year mark.’

‘But I watched a movie about this, and it seemed that the “Phillip” one was less misogynist. They argued that it more like what Jesus would have taught.’

‘Not at all.’

Michelle looks at him and looks back at the traffic, her mouth drawn tight. Confessing her ignorance of theology, she asks him to elaborate on his ‘not at all’ comment. The queue of red taillights thins out and cars begin to move. She puts the car into gear and accelerates along a roadworks detour, well over the speed limit. Meanwhile, Paddy explains how populist scholars have tried to segue backwards through history, mixing and matching documents to show that Jesus was just like them.

‘They love The Gospel of Phillip,’ Paddy continues, ‘because it says in one place that Jesus kissed Mary—but the document is so damaged it’s not clear what kind of kiss it was.’

‘Cool. How tantalizing.’

‘Truth be told, these Gospels are rather underwhelming. Their writers would not have known their texts would be used in a twenty-first-century gender battle. The early followers of Jesus were already way ahead of the rest of the world on that one: “In Christ’s family,” it says in the letter to the Galatians, “there can be no division into Jew and non-Jew, slave and free, male and female. Among us you are all equal.’”

‘“All equal!” It actually says that?’

Paddy laughs and tells her it’s the best-kept secret of the church.

‘So I could become a priest? A priest-ess?’

‘The church wouldn’t let you. But we’re told in the letter of 1 Peter—addressed to all believers—that in God’s eyes, each one of us is now free to join “a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”’

‘So, if the quarrel wasn’t about gender politics, what made these other gospels so controversial?’

‘It was their disregard for truth and fact. Even without knowing their pedigree, their tone gives them away. They’re steeped in Eastern philosophising and allegorising, whereas the tone of the earlier Gospels is so Hebrew, so much more authentic: the Jesus in them is far more concerned about actions than talk.’

‘In journalist-speak, we call that a different voice.’

‘Yes. The actual events of Jesus’ life—the things he did—were the ground out of which the message grew and shaped the language of the first followers, hence all the talk of “eyewitnesses.”’

Paddy closes his eyes and leans back in his seat. His headache still hasn’t gone away.

‘You spoke of Eastern philosophising. What sort of philosophising are we talking about?’ Michelle asks.

‘The human body was evil. Christ was not really human—couldn’t be human. They despised the physical world. The very idea of a wounded God was anathema.’

‘But didn’t they like sex and stuff?’

‘Cynical sex—yes: “We’re stuck with filthy bodies, so let’s go for it.”’

‘Hmm.’

‘And it gets worse: their Gospel of Thomas has Jesus saying, “Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of life … For every female (element) that makes itself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”’

‘Oh my God! Misogynists?’

‘Indeed. And you can walk into any church today and feel the influence of this kind of thinking. It’s called “Gnosticism” and is often confused with Christianity: all that the fear of the body stuff, the contempt for women. Yes, male politics had a hand in it, but the fact is the Gnostics left their tail in the church and their influence is still with us.’

‘Fuck!’ Michelle mutters, hitting the brakes and pulling up hard behind a long line of cars.

‘It’s in Janie’s diaries too,’ Paddy says.

‘It would have to be,’ Michelle says. ‘Janie loved to remind us that, as she put it, our “luscious, feminine bodies” came out of the heart of God.’

Nosing the car to a standstill behind a red sports car, Michelle says she wants talk more about Janie, closer to the time she was murdered, if that’s alright. Paddy says he’ll do his best.

‘Did you ever,’ she says and pauses, ‘go down to the school to see for yourself, to watch Janie in action?’

‘She invited me once. It was a hot afternoon, not long before the attack. We were sitting on the back veranda at home, having coffee—one of those conversations where you’re not looking at each other. EJ was in the pool with Mia. I was exhausted from a long business trip, my head in the paper. I already knew that she wasn’t doing the classes any more. I probably could have handled classes—but this “hanging out” thing she’d been talking about really scared me. I could tell by her over-nonchalant air that she’d been thinking about asking me for a while. She just said: “I’d love it if you could come with me on Friday. Do you think you could dust off your old guitar?”’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said I was too busy.’

‘Fudged your way out?’

‘I did.’

‘Fair enough, I guess.’

‘Not fair enough, Michelle. What you have to watch out for in this business is when you see the face of Jesus and you turn your back on it.’

Conversation ceases. Pylons, billboards and road signs flash past. Michelle turns the camera off and keeps the car positioned in a fast-moving lane of vehicles. Tears slide down her face. She takes a tissue from her bag and blows her nose.

Paddy thinks back to the beginning of life in his newly un-Janie home: cold meat pies on the table, phone calls going unanswered, grimy floors, months of steadily gaining weight, chats with the company CEO about work performance. Empty wine bottles on the kitchen bench and constant talking: talking to himself, to the dog, but never with EJ. With her it was all questions: questions about late nights on the internet, mysterious phone calls and explanations that sounded increasingly like untruths—a beautiful daughter now lying about everything, including the weather, the time and even the colour of her dead mother’s eyes. Occasionally he would escape it all by leaving EJ with Mia and Bushka while he went to see his mother or drove out to his son Joe’s dairy farm.

The traffic lightens. The rain slows. Michelle’s questions keep coming. To Paddy’s relief, the camera is still turned off. The TomTom says they have ten minutes.

‘I sense there’s more,’ Michelle says. ‘I just don’t get that a guy like you could have been in the kick-arse world of finance and then become the way you are now.’

‘It’s not all “kick arse”. I was in the investment game. It works to have what you might call ‘thinkers and perceivers’. I had that in my personality—just had to sit on the part of me that screamed sometimes.’

‘I don’t want to be rude, but there’s no way you just perceived your way out of all this crap. There must have been some really shitty stuff.’

Paddy licks his lips and swallows. Michelle reminds him that the camera is off. She understands that this is confidential, she says. He might as well put it out there.

He talks about driving out to Janie’s grave late at night and drinking himself stupid, lying in the dirt, sobbing and apologising to her for being a hopeless husband and a failure as a father; driving back home drunk and tipping boxes of Janie’s stuff out onto the floor, getting down on hands and knees and finding a card from Addo to Janie.

‘An actual card from Addo?’ Michelle says.

‘Yes, with a photo of Mother Teresa, taken when Teresa had visited Addo. Below the photo he had written, “We must learn to swim with God in shark-infested waters—”’

‘Shark-infested, alright!’

‘Yes, but he was talking metaphorical sharks: our pride and fear, our shadow-selves.’

‘I know, Janie used to talk about them all the time.’

‘There was a prayer on the back in Janie’s own hand, which I memorised: “The fruit of service is a broken heart, the fruit of a broken heart is love and the fruit of love is hope. Jesus, can you do something with me? Can you turn me into a sacrament?”’

Conversation stops. Michelle eases the car away from a truck. Paddy rests back in his seat and looks out at a darker and greyer sky. How can he keep this up? How can he, the man who made such a mess of his own family, talk to anyone about anything?

Michelle takes an exit and joins another long line of blurry red taillights. Paddy slides his seat further back, stretches and wriggles his toes. The clock on the TomTom says 11.41 am.

Michelle points to a CD wallet and invites him to help himself. Flipping through the wallet, he finds a Christmas album of Handel’s Messiah. Michelle grins, raises her eyebrows and offers him a set of well-padded headphones.

Putting them on, Paddy leans back and closes his eyes. A voice sings of darkness covering the earth and of God’s glory being upon ‘thee’: the words ‘glory’ and ‘thee’ sticking like knives in Paddy’s mind. In the Gospel of John, ‘glory’ is a code word for crucifixion. It seems that God might be bringing something to Paddy’s attention, something he doesn’t want to do: like visiting Kelvin Adams.

A hospital visit as such is doable. But what about being at the bedside, actually having a conversation with Adams, praying with him and using his name? Paddy could simply stand there, say a few words of greeting and walk out. No, he couldn’t. And he won’t. If nothing else, he needs that code and the identity of the wearer of the diamond. Adams is an eyewitness, for God’s sake, he must know.

Then there’s the added complication of God’s agenda. What if there’s a spiritual gift here: something that’s more for Paddy’s benefit than Adams’? Supposedly he’s the godly abbot condescending to help a poor broken sinner when in fact he’s nothing more than a mercenary. Words written by C.S. Lewis run though Paddy’s mind: ‘If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.’

‘Wakey, wakey!’ Michelle says, patting him on the shoulder. ‘We have nowhere to hide from whoever or whatever it is that’s following us.’

‘Following?’ he asks, looking around.

‘Joking,’ she says.

They stop at a zebra crossing. A long troop of dripping pedestrians walks across. Bringing up the rear is a group of umbrella-carrying nurses wheeling a patient on a bed—one of them holding up a bag of fluid attached to an intravenous drip.

They find a park, walk to reception and are ushered into a room where a white-coat-clad Doc Robertson sits looking at a computer screen. The receptionist introduces them as ‘Abbot Williams’ and ‘Ms Colton.’ The doctor remains focussed on the screen. The room smells of disinfectant and fear.

The doctor looks much older than Paddy had imagined, and, it would seem, rather sullen. Middle age has clearly happened to the bright young medico Paddy remembers: thinning hair and salt-and-pepper beard changing the once surfer into a serious GP.

Michelle glances at Paddy as if to say, Is this the guy? Paddy nods.

Without even looking at them, the doctor begins talking at high speed. The police have already been to see him, he tells them. The boy, whose name is Yop, is now under police guard and there will be no visitors. Red gave him a video camera, he explains, and he’s given that to the police. Michelle rolls her eyes.

‘This is serious,’ the doctor says, looking at Michelle. ‘The entire hospital has just been placed under surveillance, which means that—along with me—you have both now become “persons of interest”.’

Michelle holds down a laugh. Paddy wishes she wouldn’t do that. None of this is the doctor’s fault.

‘You might see something funny in this,’ the doctor says, staring at the screen, ‘but there’s a boy out there dying.’

‘Is there anything else you have to tell us?’ Michelle asks.

‘What am I supposed to do?’ he says, standing up. ‘They show up at my door at 4 am with guns—covered in blood and stinking like an abattoir. They tell me not to talk to the police. But, I have to take this boy to hospital. I have to talk to the police.’

Paddy asks him about Oksy. He tells them that she’s not well. He treated her with antibiotics, he says, and wanted to take her to hospital, but Red and Mia had refused.

‘Where are they?’

‘I don’t have a clue,’ he says, sitting down at his screen again.

Michelle asks more questions but the doctor doesn’t seem to know much more. His briefcase, there on the desk, looks so new and perfect with its gold fasteners and clean black lines. While they talk, people walk past a window, stealing glances at them. Paddy looks at his phone, pretends to read messages, and prays silently for wisdom.

It seems they’ve wasted their time. Why did they even bother coming to see the man? He has doctor’s work to do—he lives in a healer’s world. Paddy lives on the greasy edges of life. Ignorance is working for the doctor right now, and for everyone’s sake they need to keep it that way.

A nurse comes to the window, beckoning the doctor. Looking at a clock on the wall, the doctor opens the door and chats with her. The nurse hurries away.

‘I need to go to the boy,’ he says, picking up his briefcase.

A white envelope, with Paddy’s name written on it, lies on the table where the briefcase had been. The doctor glances at the envelope and looks at Paddy. Of course, the place must be bugged! This is the Doc Robbo that Paddy knows, the prankster, except that this is no game. Paddy picks up the envelope and places it in his pocket.

‘Thank you for doing this much anyway,’ Paddy says, shaking his hand.

‘Sorry if we’ve wasted your time,’ Michelle says, her eyes widening.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ he says. You’re the ones in trouble.’

Michelle goes to say something more but the doctor turns and walks out, closing the door carefully behind him. Paddy stands there for a moment, looking at Michelle.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘let’s go.’

Two minutes later they’re out of the hospital and back on the M4. Paddy rips open the envelope. Inside is a handwritten note; Paddy easily recognises the writing as Red’s. He reads it aloud.

‘We have Oksy. We have the Wand. There’s a deal going down between Spiers and Dog. We’re at the doc’s shack in Shale Valley. Bring a chopper and land at the GPS coordinates for a place called Grey Mountain Well. You’ll find it on Google. 11 pm tonight or tomorrow night. This is Plan A. Plan B will be Belstone airport. My phone is 0406 458 332.’

‘I’m finding a pilot and a chopper,’ Michelle says, accelerating past a line of cars. ‘And I’m doing a night landing even if I have to borrow a million dollars.’

‘And I’m coming with you,’ Paddy says.

‘No you’re not.’

‘I think I should.’

‘Why?’

Paddy is about to say he’s sure he could help somehow but he stops himself. What’s he going to do? Bring a gun? Fight? He looks at Michelle. She’s focussed on overtaking a vehicle in front of them, and she’s smiling. She’s seen the same joke as him by the look of it. The very idea of him doing anything on a helicopter flight like this is laughable: if anything, he would get in the way. Whatever happens next is going to have to be her call.

‘You could take a photo of that note for me,’ she says, passing her phone to him.

Paddy takes a photo and another with his own phone, putting Michelle’s phone and the note into her bag.

Paddy’s phone vibrates with a text from the monastery cellarer.

It seems we won’t be having any lunch tomorrow

I’ve found a volunteer cook, he texts back.

With Adams in hospital, the noviciates have been quarrelling about who will take over Adams’ shifts on the cooking roster. Paddy has had enough: he is the ‘volunteer cook’ he has found. He could use an extra evening down there in the kitchen anyway—food preparation has become his golf.

By ten o’clock that night, Paddy’s hip is feeling better than ever and he’s down to singlet, shorts and bare feet, preparing the meal: the motors of a cool room, fridge and freezer humming quietly in the background while he chops and trims chicken meat. The air is hot and still, and thoughts of the Jacksons and Michelle weigh heavy on his heart. He’s already nicked one finger and dropped a chicken breast on the floor.

It’s all so wrong! This is supposed to be a civilised country, but here they are hiding up in the mountains, maybe already dead. And he can’t even talk to Mia’s mother about it!

Despite all this, he finds himself looking forward to a moment when he knows the cellarer will be offering him a glass of red. If it’s after nine on a Wednesday night, the rule is that the noviciates can turn the dining room into an internet café and have a glass of wine: the wine being allowed on the understanding that they’re having a drink with one of the teaching staff. Paddy is the only staff member tonight and here comes the cellarer with the wine.

Paddy accepts the glass, and they all laugh loudly as he proposes a toast to the St Columba’s cellarer. The toast done, Paddy turns to a chalkboard on the wall in front of him, which has a list of instructions to the cook—like an old friend offering him something solid, good and useful to do.

With the meat ready, he cuts open a bag of muddy spuds and counts out thirty, pushing away clots of mud under an icy stream of water. Next, he peels and dices the potatoes on a wooden chopping board, then pumpkin and onion: the whole lot going into two big pots, along with garlic and herbs. A few hours from now, this will have an irresistible aroma.

Lighting up two gas flames, he places the pots on top and stands back with his hands on his hips, surveying the job, which his dad would have described as ‘the damage’. He tries to say something to God but chokes up. It’s going to be a long night.

Leaning his back against the wall, he closes his eyes and prays for the Jacksons, for Michelle and for Adams. ‘Kelvin Adams,’ he says out loud.

Taking a big mouthful of wine, he walks into the dining room, which is now deserted, and sits at a PC. The connection is slow. Yop’s face is the number-one news item along with photos of atrocities against West Papuans. A green dot tells Paddy that EJ is online.