21

When Charlie tells us about Jesus and the leopards

We managed to get a decent night’s sleep on our bed of prayer cushions. The sun streamed through the window in the little room and woke us up early. Even though we thought it was very unlikely anyone would be around, we wanted to get away before most of Wales was awake.

We’d found a map of the area pinned to a bulletin board outside, next to a poster for a diet club from 1997. We figured out that we were only a few miles from the nearest village, but we decided to keep cycling until we got to a bigger one called Tythegston eight miles down the road. We could stop there for breakfast, make some phone calls home, and work out how to get to St. David’s on just over thirty-five quid. We all agreed that we weren’t going to make the full distance on our bikes. We thought maybe we could try and sell them to raise enough money for train fare.

We’d made sure to put all the cushions back and tidied up the place so it was just as we found it. There were some low, grumbling, clanking noises coming from the pipes. They were probably still trying to process Phyllis’s pear-and-potato turnovers.

Riding a bike dressed as a choirboy isn’t easy. We draped the cassocks over the handlebars to stop them from getting caught in the pedals and to keep our hands warm. And then we were off. There was a low-lying mist in the churchyard and Ben thought it would be funny to make ooooooh noises like he was a ghost or something. Let’s just say, we found out later it wasn’t the best idea he’d ever had.

We stuck to our plan and cycled right through the first village and up through the hills toward the next. It was a beautiful morning and it felt good to be alive. We sang all the best hymns from school, like the one that goes “Who put the hump upon the camel?” and “One More Step Along the World I Go.” I think we were feeling the aftereffects of sleeping in a place of Our Lord and bathing in holy water.

A couple of miles into the journey we met a convoy of TV vans from South Wales Today, BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 on a particularly narrow road. Charlie panicked, fell off his bike, and ripped his cassock. We were too busy laughing because we could see his SpongeBob Square-Pants boxers to even consider that the vans might have had something to do with us.

It felt like we were making pretty good time. We’d only had two pee stops and I was beginning to feel like everything was going miraculously well for a change.

And then we saw the taxi.

Ben spotted it first when he turned around to check whether Charlie was actually pedaling. Their bike suddenly screeched to a halt and I almost got a face full of SpongeBob.

I was about to mouth off about being more considerate to other road users—meaning me—when Ben pointed a shaky finger over my shoulder and said, “Fred, mate, is that a taxi?”

It was a little ways off, but there was no mistaking the big black T painted on the white hood.

“Yeah, Ben, it is,” I said in a quivery voice.

Charlie let out this weird wobbly noise that sounded a bit like a crazed turkey and grabbed hold of his tummy. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. Now I know he was a secret smuggler, but we didn’t find out about that until later.

Ben looked at me with big buggy eyes. “You think it might be—” He didn’t finish—instead he did this big gulp like he was swallowing some puke—so I filled in what we were all thinking.

“The Gaffer?”

“Yup, the Gaffer.” Ben gulped again.

I kicked down on my pedal. “I suggest we don’t hang around to find out. Let’s get a move on.”

We started off down the road as quick as we could. I tried to convince myself that just because there was a taxi with a T on the hood like the one from Barry didn’t mean it was the Gaffer, but it turns out I’m not very good at being convincing.

Every time I looked over my shoulder the taxi seemed to get closer, which I guess made sense, because the taxi had an engine and we just had our legs. I kept shouting to the others to keep going but it was pretty obvious the taxi was going to catch us.

I looked for an escape route. Tall thick hedges lined both sides of the road and I couldn’t see any other turnoffs we could take ahead of us. Essentially, we were trapped. I remembered the gun we’d seen on the boat and realized we were either about to get sprayed with bullets or be run over like bowling pins. Come to think of it, we did look a bit like bowling pins in our cassocks.

The engine behind us growled and we all screamed. I turned around and saw a bald man in the driver’s seat. He looked like he’d walked right off the set of The Sopranos.

Charlie did not help my panic level by shouting, “We’re all going to die!”

And Ben shouted back, “If you don’t start pedaling harder, I’m going to be the one who kills you!”

That’s when Charlie wailed, “We’ll need a freaking miracle to get out of this!” Which was not a very proactive way of dealing with the situation.

I took one last look over my shoulder. The taxi was only about thirty yards away. Charlie was probably right, only a miracle would save us. But as I didn’t believe in miracles, I prepared myself for certain doom.

It was probably because I was preparing for doom that I didn’t immediately notice the sheep in the middle of the road, standing there like it owned the place. I only just managed to stop myself from smashing into it.

I shouted out to the others, “Watch out, there’s a sheep in the road!”

Charlie hollered at me, “That’s not just any sheep! That’s Sheila!”

I don’t know if he was right or not because another one appeared from a gap in the hedge and it looked exactly like Sheila too.

And then another.

And then a whole bunch more. There were hundreds of Sheilas, maybe thousands. Forming a bleating, baaing, woolly wall between us and the taxi.

The bald man got out of the taxi and started waving his arms around and shouting for the sheep to get out of the way, but luckily they didn’t seem to understand. Probably because they were sheep. Then he said, “Oi, kids. Stop. I only want to talk to you.” Which, frankly, sounded like a lie.

Ben said, “Come on, let’s get out of here,” and because it was a very good idea, we did. We could hear baldy shouting at us as we sped off, but there was no way any of us were stopping to talk to him.

When we felt we were far enough away, we dropped the bikes over a fence and lay down on the grass, our chests heaving and our minds racing.

I was the first to speak. “That was so close! I can’t believe we got away!”

Ben said, “You’re right there. I thought we were goners for sure.”

Charlie sat up and, with a glazed look in his eyes and this dreamy sound to his voice, said, “It was amazing, the way Sheila and her family showed up, just in the nick of time.”

Ben gave me the side-eye. “Mate, I’m not sure that really was Sheila.”

“Well, I believe it was and that’s enough for me. That was a real-life miracle alright.”

“We were lucky, that’s all,” I told him. I didn’t think there was such a thing as miracle sheep. But Charlie wasn’t having any of it.

“No, that wasn’t luck, Fred. We were saved from the Gaffer. Saved by a miracle. Sheep are very biblical animals, you know. Jesus had a whole flock of them.”

“Did he?” It sounded familiar but I wasn’t sure.

Ben didn’t seem convinced either. “So Jesus had a whole load of sheep following him around while he was busy doing churchly things with the people of olden days? Nah, don’t buy it. Wouldn’t a flock of sheep have got in the way?”

“Jesus was a shepherd.” Charlie said that quite proudly, like he’d just remembered.

Ben looked really confused. “I thought he did something with trees or wood?”

Charlie nodded. “He was a very talented man, was Jesus. That’s why he’s still so famous now. Wood, trees, shepherding, and doing churchly things with poor people . . . oh, and leopards.”

“Leopards?” Now I knew that didn’t sound right.

But because he sounded so certain when he said, “Yeah, he helped a load of leopards once and now he’s helped us,” I gave him the benefit of the doubt. If Charlie wanted to believe he’d experienced the miracle of Sheila the Savior Sheep, I didn’t have to ruin it for him with the facts. And to be honest, the only fact I was interested in at that point was that we’d escaped the Gaffer and we were still on our way to finding Alan.