PAULA’S LOVE LIFE

Niw then, what on Earth does this mean?

"Like mother, like daughter!” raged Benedict from his shelter behind the settee.

Benedict didn’t like raging like that, but for the first time in, oh, an hour or two, he was feeling genuinely angry. Paula ought to know better, a lovely girl like her and even lovelier than the mother he had alluded to. But she had done the unforgivable. She had been with Dennis Primpton and probably let him into her underclothes. And if anyone trespassed into those sacred fibres it wasn’t going to be Dennis Primpton. It was going to be Benedict himself. Not that he told himself that. He wouldn’t dared. Things like that didn’t exist.

At least, that kind of trespassing is what what Benedict thought she had done, and he had good reason for thinking it. Dennis was a well-known rapscallion of a womaniser and Paula, well, she was far from perfect.

“What’s mother got to do with it?” asked Paula, glowering.

“She’s a w***e!” snapped Benedict before he could stop himself, “you know it and I know it!”.

“How dared you!” snapped the girl, “you who dress yourself in absurd robes and reckon you’re perfect with that prayer book in your hand as if it held all the answers. What are you doing here anyway? Mother didn’t like you when she was alive and she most certainly doesn’t care one jot for you now that she’s dead!”

“She’s my angel, and you know it,” muttered Benedict, “she lies in my arms when the devil drives at her. She weeps salt tears for my Lord.”

“Pah!” spat Paula, “some Lord, who doesn’t know the difference between love and sex and is quite oblivious to the warmth of a beating heart and the ice of a deathly stilled one!”

Benedict, seeing that he might be safe from any potential personal attack, climbed up from behind the settee and stood there, gazing at her through watery eyes, his bald pate shining where the morning sun angling through the window struck it.

“I prayed for her,” he said softly, “I prayed so many times! I begged my creator that she might live and yet, look, she lies there in her chair and all the saints in Heaven can’t awaken her. Dead, she is, who might have lived a great deal longer.”

“Your saints might have woken her if they tried,” whispered Paula, “have you asked them? Have you prayed? Have you thrown yourself on the mercy of your creator and begged to see the light in her eyes again? Or have you just hovered there, convinced of your own folly?”

“Say no more!” rapped Benedict, “when our father has made his decision it cannot be unmade! Your mother, Paula, is dead, for her many sins have condemned her. She will never wake again, never laugh, never cry, just be what you see now, a sad old mess of flesh devoid of any vital spark, and ready to decompose like the dead do.”

“Who’s making all that noise?” whispered the mother in her chair, her gnarled lips barely moving and her frail voice barely audible.

“Keep out of it, mum,” hissed Paula, “It’s only Saint Benedict having one of his weird turns. For starters, he reckons you’re dead!”

“Chance would be a fine thing, what with all this noise everywhere,” groaned the older woman, and she sat up.

“Oh my sweet Lord, my prayers have all been answered!” breathed Benedict, wringing his hands. Then, carefully avoiding Paula who dominated the room in more ways than one when her delightful minifrock caught his eye which it did when he looked, he stepped towards her mother.

“I prayed for you,” he told her, “and that the wretched Brimpton boy might take ypur place at the pearly gates, might wait for harsh judgement following his carnal sins…”

“What you waffling about now?” demanded Paula’s mother, “the Brimpton boy? You mean our Paula’s fellow? The young rapscallion who reckons to be no better than he is? I could have had him way back, when I was young enough to be bothered about such things, and swallowed him alive!”

“He loves me,” sighed Paula, “and I love him. And Benedict, whoever you think you are, you can’t know anything about true human love, what with all the gobbledegook you come out with!”

“I know who I am!” snapped the monk, if that’s what he really was underneath a saintly persona, “I know exactly who I am: I’m your father!”

“No you’re not!” hissed her mother.

“Mother,” whispered Paula, “who is my father? You never told me…”

The older woman sighed. “I suppose you have a right to know… after all, there’s talk about genetic conditions you ought to know about if you’ve inherited them… so I’ll tell you.”

“It would be nice to know,” mused Paula, “as long as it’s not this Benedict here, and all his stupid platitudes.”

“I was out on the town one night,” sighed the older woman, “and the music was loud and intoxicating! I can still hear it in my inner ears! And yes, so was the drink a little intoxicating too!”

“Mother!” warned Paula unnecessarily.

“And this boy came up to me, right in the middle of the dance floor with girls swirling ll around me, all those full skirts half hiding legs modern lasses would die to own. And he reached towards me and took me by one hand…”

“No we wouldn’t mother envy old legs,” sighed Paula.

“And the boys, smart and shaved and handsome… all leaping around as if dancing was just that, and then this one boy, one wretched boy, moved in on me, got to be so close I could feel the warmth of his breath on me… and from that moment, Paula, I was pregnant with you!”

“Get back to being dead, you filthy w***e!” growled Benedict.

“Why did you say that?” almost wept the mother, “because you were there, your halo slipping like it does when the hormones are in you. Watching, I could feel your eyes across the dance floor, boring into me as the embryo inside me took shape.”

“I saw the way he breathed all over you, and swayed to a rhythm created in hell!” grumbled Benedict. “He made you with child…” and he turned on Paula, “this child!” he pointed, “this vomit of sin!”

“Thanks very much,” said Paula indignantly.

“I think I’ll die now,” announced her mother, “I’ve heard enough about the past. It never was much good, what with sweaty and callow youths breathing on you and babies growing inside you.”

“Mother,” said Paul reassuringly, “it doesn’t happen like that and you know it.”

“It did for me!”

“I’ve explained every detail to the dear old thing,” put in Benedict, smiling like the saint he wasn’t.

“Like you tried to explain to me,” said Paula sadly.

“When? I never did any such thing!” he almost exploded.

“Yes you did, then. Last Christmas when you took me to your prison cell and showed me a nativity,” reminded Paula. “In the cold and the dark and to the rattling of bunches of keys you told me how sweet an untouched maiden can be, how holy, how ready for Heaven.

“Ah, of course, I remember,” stammered Benedict, “so sweet, so innocent, so virgin…”

“Anyone in?” came a voice from the doorway.

“He’s young! Tell him to go away!” squawked the mother

“Is that you Dennis?” shouted Paula.

Dennis Brimpton strolled somewhat nonchalantly into the room. “Who else could it be?” he asked, and he winked at Paula and then at her mother. “Hello darlings,” he murmured.

“Of course, sweetheart,” Paula and her mother replied in a strange sort of unison, as if they both meant the same thing.

“You here?” the newcomer asked Benedict.

“Maybe…” the reply was cautious, sounded hopeful.

“Then let’s go out on the town, Benny my love,” grinned Dennis Brimpton. “Leave my daughters in peace and let’s you and me make whoopie under the stars!”

“I’ll bring my book…”

“Nah, leave that behind,” grunted Philip, “what I’ve got in mind isn’t in there...”

© Peter Rogerson 17.07.22

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