On the plus side, he was now equipped to discuss in depth the pros and cons of bestiality, should it turn out to be one of the issues bothering Gerard this time round.
‘You’d better come in,’ he said as he stepped out of his car, greeting Gerard with an encouraging and now somewhat-expensive smile.
‘Right – stop,’ Biddle said in his calmest, kindliest voice. ‘Why exactly do you think God wants you to remain celibate?’
‘Well …’ Gerard shifted restlessly and hugged his mug of tea to his chest. ‘I … I’ve been thinking about – you know, when I – we were talking – what about yesterday, I was …’ His words were coming out in the wrong order again, but this was a subject he didn’t seem able to discuss without considerable verbal difficulty. ‘I know it’s not – being it – wrong – it isn’t – gay, I mean,’ Gerard hastily added, without making it altogether clear what he did mean, ‘it’s just that I start – whenever I think about – very empty and lonely, I feel – thinking about it, I mean – and I think that that there’s no, God telling me there’s no, that I should spend the rest of my life, I to, to … focussed on him.’
Biddle nodded, slowly digesting the words and reordering them to discover their hidden meaning. ‘I’m not sure that those are the conclusions I would have reached myself,’ he finally commented.
‘I’ve been about it an awful lot,’ Gerard earnestly insisted. ‘Praying, I mean,’ he clarified.
‘I’m sure you have,’ said Biddle, smiling. ‘But who’s been doing all the talking – you or God?’ (Biddle allowed himself a moment of inward satisfaction at having come up, quite spontaneously, with such a profound yet quotable aphorism. A little pithy, perhaps. Maybe a bit too evangelical in thrust. But these were minor worries when, as a statement, it fitted the situation so well. Definitely one to bear in mind and use again.)
Gerard stared awkwardly at his tea, saying nothing. He took one hand off his mug to remove his glasses and began listlessly fiddling with them. ‘Do you want to know what I think?’ Biddle asked. Gerard nodded, and fiddled with his glasses. ‘I think that the reason you feel empty and lonely is that you are lonely. I think that you’re putting words into God’s mouth because you’re afraid of going into areas you haven’t been in before.’ Gerard fiddled with his glasses. Biddle cleared his throat. ‘Gerard, God created us to have companions, human companions.’
‘I know …’ Gerard began, fiddling with his glasses.
‘You need to get out,’ Biddle insisted, ‘meet people your own age. Form some relationships, maybe even a special relationship.’ Biddle deliberately met Gerard’s eyes as the boy replaced his glasses – Gerard recoiled from the long, hard stare, looking as if he wished for all the world that the chair he was in would swallow him whole.
Gerard shifted in his seat; he wished for all the world that it would swallow him whole. ‘Just – not sure – I’m …’ he started, and fell silent again. Biddle wondered for a horrific moment if he was going to have to explain the basics of sexual relationships to the boy, doing diagrams on the small blackboard he had in his kitchen for writing memos on. Finally Gerard spoke again. ‘I don’t really – to form that – know how kind of relationship, I don’t, meet people, don’t, really.’
‘Okay,’ said Biddle, kindly, ‘have you thought about going to a – a gay club, perhaps?’
‘Um …’ Gerard coughed, nervously. ‘My mother …’
‘Your mother doesn’t come into this, Gerard. You wouldn’t be taking her with you.’
‘But …’
‘No, you really wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be her sort of thing at all.’
‘No, but …’ Gerard looked at Biddle questioningly. ‘I thought that … part of the point you were – with the omelette – was that in trying to find an place for itself in a hostile world, gay culture has kind of created an artificial sense of identity which actually … um … works against it, as far as the perception of gay … er … people is … er … concerned … and …’ He coughed again. ‘I thought you were probably saying that because of this it’s better not to in the … er … gay … er … scene – become involved.’
Andy Biddle had years of experience in keeping his happy, caring smile on his face in spite of all kinds of provocation. But it was a definite effort to remain smiling after this baffling yet uncharacteristically articulate speech. How had Feehan managed to read all of that into his omelette? How had he managed to say it all when as a rule he couldn’t even string a sentence together?
‘Well, Gerard …’ he began, wondering exactly what he was going to say. No more pithy aphorisms occurred to him, but he felt he ought to keep talking anyway. ‘You’re right, of course, that … that there are things in the world that we have to be careful of. But it’s not a solution to cut yourself off from those things altogether.’ He thought for a moment – a comparison in these situations often helped drive a point home, but he was reluctant to use another cooking metaphor. The omelette experience had made him wary of all foodstuffs – entertaining, yes, but too vague. Biddle sought inspiration from other sources. ‘Imagine if there was a … a duckling … whose mother didn’t dare let it swim in the water in case it caught one of the diseases you can catch from water,’ he said gently, suddenly feeling as he imagined a parent would when reading a story to their toddler.
Gerard leaned forward in his seat, his face showing intense concentration, and Biddle was unnerved by the idea of Gerard Feehan being his toddler. ‘Now – what happens when that duckling becomes a duck?’ Biddle asked.
‘It can’t swim?’ Gerard suggested, with a wide-eyed look of trust that further reinforced the parent/toddler ambience.
In fact Biddle hadn’t considered this possibility, having been thinking on a rather more complex level. ‘Oh …’ he responded, taken aback (and confused by the unfamiliar parental feelings welling up inside him), ‘yes, I suppose it wouldn’t be able to, would it? But what I was also thinking was that it wouldn’t have built up a resistance to the diseases in the water, and would probably get ill straight away and die.’ He looked at Gerard meaningfully. Actually it had confused things unnecessarily to make it about ducks, he thought. He wasn’t sure why ducks had come into his head. But it was too late now. Everything was getting rather confused in this encounter.
Gerard sighed. ‘It’s just …’ he began. ‘I don’t really think …’ he began. ‘The problem …’ he began. ‘I’ve never done – gone to a – done anything like – club – gay – and I wouldn’t really – on my own – what to – know to, what to, to …’
‘Okay,’ Biddle said, ‘tell me when you want to go out, and I’ll go with you.’ It was a bold thing to suggest, he knew, but it was the only way he was going to get the boy out at the end of the day, and it made him feel less like a parent.
‘What?’ Gerard’s mouth hung open in surprise. ‘You can’t!’
‘Why not? You don’t have to be gay to go into a gay club.’
‘But … you’re a vicar!’
‘I don’t think men of the cloth have been banned from gay clubs. Not to my knowledge, at any rate.’
‘But …’ Gerard was running out of excuses. ‘What say, what will, my mother?’
‘Will your mother object to you spending an evening with a vicar?’ Biddle asked. Gerard shrugged.
‘I suppose …’ he answered, helplessly, adding ‘not’ to clarify what he meant.
‘Well then.’ Biddle finished his mug of tea, feeling warmed by a strange, fatherly sense of pride … He immediately stopped the thought before it was fully formed – it wasn’t fatherly pride, it was the glow of having been of use to at least one person this month.