SAINT PETER AND HIS BOOK

A little morality tale.

It was only a short queue. In fact, besides himself, Barry could only see one other, and he was clad in the robes and mitre of some sort of bishop.

Barry didn’t trust people who, by their dress, their uniform, announced they were holier than thou. Not that he had anything to boast about because he was far from perfect himself.

Born in a tiny terraced house at the rough end of town he hadn’t been shown much of an example of how to live a decent life from the moment he took his first breath. His mum had usually been drunk and his dad periodically in gaol, though when she was sober mum was as sweet as sugar and when he was at home dad was an all round good egg.

But he couldn’t blame them for his predicament. They’d been dead for ages. Mum had gone first. Her liver had packed up just before her brain might have gone the same way. Dad had then struggled along a few more years, doing the best he could, but the best was far from being even adequate.

Then, in his twenties, Barry had become an orphan who was genuinely ill-equipped to survive in the sort of society that demanded at least some standards that weren’t from the gutter.

In his late twenties he’d married, a nice girl with a pretty face until he’d rearranged her features in a fit of temper because she wanted this and that to be ever so nice, so perfect, and he just hadn’t a clue what nice was. So she had gone, scarred but alive, and he had done his first prison stretch where he’d learned, for the first time ever, that the best way to survive is put yourself first and to hell with anyone else.

Once free he had set himself about looking after his own best interests, which involved, rather too quickly for his own peace of mind, a second and then a third spell in jail, for various offences that mostly involved his asserting himself with his fists, putting himself first, grabbing what he could and to hell with the consequences.

That had been his life, and here he was in the queue. Second, he was, behind the Bishop.

He didn’t know that Bishop, had never met him as far as he was aware, and if he had he would have met a man who, like himself, spent a great deal of time asserting himself and even putting himself first. He had started well in a middling sort of home, risen through the ecclesiastic ranks, starting as a humble (well, if the truth was to be told, not quite so humble as he made out) curate in an inner city parish where he’d fallen in love with a choirboy, a relationship that had been to the advantage of both himself and that choirboy on account of the cash rewards he’d bought the lad’s silence with.

But word got out and he was transferred to a country parish with a snotty warning from the then Bishop, but he took note of that warning and fell in love with a cleaning woman instead.

She was young, pretty, and best described as the type of woman who would go with anyone for half an hour of ecstasy, and she achieved that ecstasy lying on her back and thinking of Elvis. The pop singer Elvis, that it, the one more girls claimed to love than anyone else on Earth.

Eventually he was promoted, and each time he did so he fell in love. He had to, didn’t he? After all, he was a man with a man’s instincts and nowhere enough will to control them because controlling them meant less unadulterated pleasure for him.

So he became a Bishop after a fairy long climb up a fairly simple ladder, and when he was at the pinnacle of that illustrious career he met and married a dead undertaker’s widow. She’d been used to a sedentary marriage to a man more fascinated with dead sinews than with her living flesh, and the Bishop had been a welcome improvement. She was old enough to have passed through the menopause and consequently less reluctant to let him play had there been any risk of an unwanted pregnancy as a result of some of the more interesting games he opted to entertain the two of them with. I say the two of them when I really mean him and him alone. She was good at lying back, dozing off and dreaming of Elvis even though he’d been dead for ages.

So we have our heroes in a queue. Two of them. Death had been kind to mankind for the time being, there being just the pair waiting in line for the time being.

You see, this was the queue at the famous pearly gates manned by Saint Peter, who had the task of deciding you should enter the Kingdom of Heaven and who should be cast aside to spend eternity in a place called Hell.

And the Bishop was at the front of the queue.

“Well well, a bishop,” he smiled at the Bishop, admiring the neatness of his robes and the sharp jewel-encrusted perfection of his mitre. “So good to meet you,” her added suavely.

“I appear to be dead,” grinned the Bishop, “after a life spent praising our Lord, and prostrating myself before his graven images in every corner of this land, wheresoever I went, I am finally here at the famous gates.”

“And it’s good to see you,” smiled the great Saint magnificently, “you must go through that door there,” and he pointed his staff towards a rather grotty door marked HELL in antique script

“What’s this?” demanded the Bishop, “I am a man of God! I have spent my lifetime doing good deeds and so on and so forth…”

“And so you have,” agreed Saint Peter examining the small print of his Book of Souls, “but there have been a few times when you have, shall we say, taken advantage of the wrong person for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way?”

“Well, I suppose I am a man…” stammered the Bishop.

“Was a man. Was,” corrected saint Peter, and he turned to Barry, who having heard what the Bishop had been told was already shaking in his ethereal shoes. He’d never had much of a chance in life, and here was he having another confrontation with stuff he’d never properly understood, and in the same queue as this educated bishop.

“Now you, Barry,” growled Saint Peter in a voice which sounded midway between a rottweiler and a nanny goat, “you,” he added.

“Yes sir,” whispered the old lag, fearful for what eternity might hold for him.

“I see, I see, I see,” murmured Saint Peter, “Yes, yes, yes.. you poor dear man … never had much but did manage to make something out of your very little even though you tripped up occasionally on your road through life…”

“I’m sorry, sir,” stammered Barry.

“It’s not always easy to know your way when everything’s going against you,” added Saint Peter, “not easy at all. So in you come, my boy, down that glade, treading softly on the verdant lawns until you come to…”

“WHAT!” interrupted the Bishop who was on his way to the door marked HELL in antique lettering, “I’m a Bishop and I’m condemned to an eternity in the darkest pits and he’s an outright no-good crook and going to Heaven?”

“You see,” murmured Saint Peter, turning to usher Barry through the gates and lock them behind him, “he had nothing to start with, maybe even less than nothing, but he called me sir, whereas you had an auspicious enough start and abused lesser mortals every step of your way, and called me ... nothing.”

© Peter Rogerson 31.12.20