Burley Cross Postbox Theft (7 page)

By the end I was just babbling any old nonsense at her: ‘Will he have his own teeth, Meredith? Won’t he mind dreadfully working with a bunch of amateurs? Will he be tall? Over six three? Will he speak with a northern accent? What if he has a tattoo? Must he be a believer? Will he be circumcised?’

Turns out (and this was a
total
bolt from the blue): HE’S PLAYED JESUS BEFORE!!

Meredith was just starting to fill me in on all the finer details (his hair is brown, almost black, his eyes are ‘a fine, cornflower blue’ …) when Seb came barrelling over. ‘Of course he’s played Jesus
before,’
he says, all droll and self-satisfied. ‘He’s quite the pro, apparently – he just has “the Jesus look”.’

Well, my jaw literally
dropped!
‘
THE JESUS LOOK
!?’

As I’m sure you can imagine, I was absolutely desperate to pursue this line of enquiry still further (I could’ve followed it to the ends of the earth, quite frankly!) but I was suddenly overwhelmed by a strong – almost violent – urge to find out something
even more pressing
, i.e.: DID TAMMY THORNDYKE KNOW YET???

I just yelled it at them. I just screamed it. I lost all sense of self-control.

‘DOES SHE KNOW?! DOES TAMMY KNOW
?!’

(Then I got rather short of breath and started to cough, and had to rummage around in my bag for my asthma inhaler.)

‘Nobody knows,’ Meredith snapped. ‘I really didn’t want to tell anyone until we’d sorted out the finer details of his contract.’

(Good heavens, Jess!
Get her
! What a terrible, old sourpuss!)

At this point Sebastian butted in again and started
congratulating Meredith on how she conducted the night’s warm-up. He said, ‘I always find the trust exercises you use so extraordinarily
liberating
, Meredith. And it’s not just the exercises themselves, it’s how you
approach
them, how you
time
them. So much skill! Such finesse! In fact I rarely finish one of your sessions without feeling this wild
surge
of emotion. I often get quite tearful! It’s rather embarrassing! They’re just so… so potent, so “connecting,” so… so empowering.’ (Well, it’s no great mystery how
he
managed to wrangle himself The Disciple Jesus Loved Best, then!)

Of course
I
wasn’t going to be outdone (even if I
don’t
currently have a speaking role!). I heartily agreed with him. I said, ‘When Tom Augustine touched my forehead and whispered, “You are alive, Emily! You are utterly free! Take your freedom, now, and celebrate the world with it!” I honestly thought I was going to
wet
myself! His hand was so cold! It was like being prodded by a frozen chicken leg!’ (In fact I seriously thought I
had
wet myself, Jess. That’s why I seemed so distracted when you were asking me whether the wigs were still kept on the top of the prop box.)

I then went on to say how I thought the improvisational exercises tonight had been
absolutely priceless
(weren’t they, though?!)! I said, ‘My favourite moment was when Arthur Wolf was “being an egg”, Sally Trident broke him into a frying-pan and then Jess [you!] yelled, “Oh
no!
Look! You’ve gone and broken his yolk!”’ (I mean that
was
hilarious!
And
utterly spontaneous, to boot!)

I’d barely finished speaking when Seb turned and delivered me THE MOST
FILTHY
LOOK!!!

‘Yes,’ he says, snidely, ‘Jess is
quite
the little comedian!’

(?!?!?)

With the benefit of hindsight, Jess, I think you were
right
to be suspicious of him. I think he
does
have it in for you. And it’s not only because you aren’t officially ‘one of us’, i.e. not currently resident in the village, but because he’s jealous of
your talent – pure and simple! He’s still stewing over the fact that your audition for Angel of the Lord went down so well. People were talking about it for weeks! Pammy Stevens got palpitations! The way you worked with the light towards the end – turned to face it, dumbly,
questingly
, then extended out your arms and slowly, dramatically, dropped your chin on to your chest…

Beautiful!

There was such an incredible atmosphere – you could’ve heard a
pin
drop in that hall.

WHY MEREDITH DIDN’T GIVE YOU THE ROLE
I WILL NEVER, NEVER UNDERSTAND!!

I mean all that hogwash she came up with afterwards about the cast ‘not being about individual egos, only about The Collective Will’, and ‘really needing to find the right kind of balance’ (it’s an amateur production of
The Passion
, Jess, not a Soviet-era-style, group gymnastics display)! And that interminable speech about things being ‘real’, and then ‘moving into fast-forward’, and then ‘suddenly becoming hyper-real’ – but ‘not acting,
never
acting’, just ‘being’, just ‘believing in the moment’, just ‘cherishing the moment’, just ‘making the moment true…’ (what on earth does that even
mean
, Jess? ‘Making the moment true’?).

If Meredith is – as she claims – such a staunch advocate of the truth (what’s her other favourite catchphrase? ‘Be sincere, be here’ – with a pious little pat on her heart?!) then how on earth can she possibly justify casting Tammy Thorndyke as
St Martha?!
St Martha!

Tammy Thorndyke’s converted to Buddhism! I swear to God, if I have to hear another
syllable
about that infernal trip she and Baxter took to Tibet last year, and how she got altitude sickness halfway up a mountain and collapsed, and then, when she came to, how she felt ‘an incredible warmth in her throat chakra’ which slowly spread throughout her entire body,
making her feel like ‘a glowing bottle of preserved ginger’ I honestly think I shall spontaneously combust!

As I said to Jill Harpington the other day (while we were picketing Wharfedale Council about those awful, new recycling bins), ‘Isn’t it unfortunate that Tammy’s recent “conversion” doesn’t appear to be offering any kind of formal impediment to her singing lead soprano in the church choir?!’
(Ouch!
Climb back into the knife drawer, Emily!)

But that awful, piercing vibrato, Jess! It’s more than my shattered nerves can bear! Drew Cullen – on the organ – even turns off his hearing aid, and he’s
deaf as a dodo!

I actually conducted an informal survey with the help of Gillian Reed last year (Gill’s the blowsy, buck-toothed piano tuner’s wife who polishes the church pews etc.) after she mentioned to me, in passing, that the bats were defecating at almost
twice
their usual volume on the days when the choir either rehearsed or performed.

With a little casual investigation it became increasingly clear (I can show you the graphs if you like – in fact I’ll dig one out for you, right now) that the more music we sang in a
higher
register
, the more guano the bats produced – often (like when we were rehearsing ‘Jerusalem’, for example) defecating over
three times
as much!

Then – and this was the
real
eye-opener, Jess – when Tammy was off for a month in August (nursing her youngest daughter through a botched nose-job down in Guildford) the overall quantities produced fell by
almost two-thirds!
OVERNIGHT! Right across the scale!
I SWEAR!

Utterly fascinating (I know), but I suppose we’re trespassing a little off the subject here, because let’s face it, Jess (as I said earlier this evening), if ‘the truth’ really is Meredith’s main priority, then why does she persist in ignoring what’s so patently true about St Martha, i.e. that it’s not a glamorous role at all!

Martha’s a
work-horse
, Jess! She spends virtually
all
of her
time throughout the Gospels
JUST DOING THE WASHING-UP
!!

That’s why Jesus gets into a row with her when she tells Mary Magdalen to stop hanging around with the boys all night and give her a quick hand with the kitchen chores! Jesus gets into quite a bate about it. He tells her that Mary is much better off where she is (just sitting on the floor, staring at his ‘Godhead’), and that Martha’s eternal soul would be far better served by doing the same thing herself!

(Well, that’s all fine and dandy, Jess, but if Martha hadn’t done the chores, what in heaven’s name would The Twelve have eaten for dinner? How could Jesus have hosted The Last Supper? And what would Michelangelo have painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, all those years later? A dozen hungry people arguing over a raw turnip?! Hardly an appropriate subject matter for such a prominent art work I’d’ve thought!)

It’s
ridiculous
, Jess! Pure hokum!

I mean Tammy Thorndyke has a
dishwasher
, for heaven’s sake! And she has a
char
(if it’s socially acceptable to describe dear Susan Trott in those terms)! And she gets all her dinner parties professionally catered by the sister of that haughty besom who runs Pinenuts (the Swiss tea-house in Ilkley). D’you know her? The Dutch girl with the strange eyebrows who Duncan calls ‘The Exclamation Mark’, because she always persists in looking alarmed (no matter how conservatively he orders).

Honestly
, Jess, it’s just a
joke!
The ‘real’ and the ‘hyper-real’ and all that ‘fast-forwarding’! What’s she trying to do, turn us all digital?!

Anyhow – to get back to our little spat – I was still recoiling from the ‘comedian’ comment, when Meredith suddenly started throwing in her
own
two-pence-worth, saying how she didn’t think you and I were ‘a terribly good influence on each other, and, by extension, on the group’.

You and me, Jess? Not a good influence? What on earth can she possibly
mean?!
The bare-faced
gall
of the woman! The pure, unalloyed
cheek
of it! I just felt like grabbing her by her bony shoulders and shaking her and
shaking
her! I just felt like
screaming
into her horsey, self-satisfied face: ‘I’m a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother of five, Meredith! How
dare
you stand there in your awful, gold-braided, ethnic pantaloons and scold me like I’m a seven-year-old child!’

But I just bit down hard on my tongue, Jess, and tried to rise above. Let it go, Emily, let it go, I thought. Do as the Good Lord would’ve done.

(It wasn’t having all that much effect, I’m afraid, and then that thing
you’re
always saying popped into my head: ‘They only hate us because we’re beautiful!’

I repeated it to myself, three times. It was
extremely
helpful.)

Yet even
that
wasn’t to be the end of it, Jess! Worse was still to come! Seb then interrupts Meredith to say how ‘disruptive’ he’d found our contributions in Group Discussion!

I must’ve looked simply
stunned
by this (I think I probably started wheezing again – with the shock – and then staggered back, supporting myself, faintly, with a trembling hand, against the wall) because Meredith quickly butted in to say how much they appreciated our input, overall, and that she couldn’t deny we’d invested a great deal of effort. (Remember our special DVD night, Jess?
The Name of the Rose, The Omen, The Da Vinci Code, Nacho Libre
and
The Passion of The Christ
, all in one go?)

Seb wasn’t to be put off, though. He started muttering under his breath about how ‘unhelpful’ he’d found your views on the Catholic Church turning Mary Magdalen into a whore because ‘they all feared the vagina’.

Obviously I leapt straight to your defence! I said
I’d
told you that because I’d read it on the internet.

‘Oh! On the internet, Emily!’ Seb snorts. ‘Well, that speaks
volumes
, doesn’t it?!’

Then, before I can even open my mouth to respond, he continues, ‘And how about when you said Jesus “hated his own family”, and “thought Buddhism was a big pile of mumbo-jumbo”? Were these shining little gems
also
mined online?’

Well, that was
it
, Jess!

WAR!!

I drew myself up to my full height (5′3″, in heels) and said (in my best Ice Queen voice), ‘If you want to take issue with
those
views, Sebastian, then I’m afraid you’ll need to take issue with the Holy Bible itself!’

Meredith gazed at me for a second, perfectly astonished. ‘It says Jesus
hated
his own family in the Bible?’ she demanded (plainly shaken to the core).

‘I believe there’s a fairly memorable moment in the Gospel of St Matthew,’ I loftily enlightened her, ‘when Mary and Jesus’s brothers arrive, unannounced, to pay him a visit. A disciple comes to tell him (he’s preaching a sermon at the time) and Jesus refuses – point-blank – to interrupt what he’s doing to give them an audience. He simply asks, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Then, later on, he justifies this slightly high-handed treatment by saying, “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother,” i.e. Jesus doesn’t play favourites…’ (I deliver Meredith an
especially
, stern look at this juncture.) ‘We are
all
his kith and kin.’

‘Poppycock!’ Seb scoffs. ‘That doesn’t mean he
hates
his family!’

‘You can chose to interpret it any way you like,’ I sigh, turning to look at him with an expression of infinite sadness (and of infinite pity. And of infinite patience – it was a highly complex and abstruse expression, very Sphinx-like – as I’m sure you can imagine). ‘But haven’t
you
hated your family sometimes, Seb?’ I continued, swinging out my arm, rather dramatically. ‘I mean haven’t we
all?
Just as our Sweet Lord did?’

Everybody was (quite naturally) rendered dumb for a couple of seconds by my infallible logic, but then Meredith started muttering something about ‘Tammy being very hurt, very
injured
, by the mumbo-jumbo comments’.

‘Matthew 6: 7,’ I announced, crisply. ‘“And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many worms.”’