Chapter Ten

THE FUNFAIR WAS riotous, the lights flashing and the sirens blaring. Further on, in the faded ballroom, something was even rowdier, a huge press of men with plastic pints of lager spilling out on to the boardwalk, whistling and catcalling.

From somewhere inside, louche music played.

Adam saw Julia peer inside, then look sharply forward and step up her pace to a near-run. Intrigued, he pulled her back, wanting to know what had caused her change in demeanour. A pin-thick gap between sweating beer guts gave him the glimpse he needed.

He let go of her hand and barged through the crowd.

Evie was pole-dancing on a stage, apparently participating in some amateur competition. She had exchanged her sundress for a skimpy bikini and the raffia wedges were replaced with diamante stilettoes. Her routine was so blatantly suggestive the other competitors whispered behind hands or sat watching with milk-souring expressions. She was more popular with the men, though.

Adam had never seen tongues literally hanging out until now.

Every man in the place wanted to take her from that pole and fuck her raw.

The very air swam with sex and violence.

It smelled of sweat and stale beer.

Adam fell forward on the carpet and retched over some huge tattooed hulk’s shoes.

He looked up to apologise, only to see a fist descending at speed and from a great height. He shut his eyes, resigned to unconsciousness, but the fist was halted by a flailing, kicking dervish who proved, once Adam had groggily come to his senses, to be Julia Shields.

‘Get off him!’ she shrieked.

The pole-dance music stopped.

Somebody took Adam by the arm and dragged him away from the hulk, then handed him a paper tissue to wipe his mouth.

In the meantime, the hulk had stepped back from Julia and was being calmed down by a group of friends.

‘Come on, Adam,’ said Julia gruffly. ‘You need a lie down.’

Evie leapt off the stage and stood with a hand on her hip, staring fiercely at Julia.

‘What’s your game?’ she demanded. ‘What are you doing with him?’

‘I don’t have a game,’ said Julia haughtily. ‘You’re the one with the agenda. We all know what it is. Well, I don’t think he deserves it.’

‘Get your hands off him!’

‘Come on, Adam.’

Adam, unsteady on his feet and with black spots floating in and out of his field of vision, followed the most soothing voice. It happened to be Julia’s.

He wove through the mob in a dark-edged dream, his stomach in revolt, his brain furred up with equal measures of revulsion, despair and, behind it all, a confusion of lusts. For Evie, for Julia, for flesh, for sin, for forgetting – any or all of them boiled within him as his feet trod an unknown, careless path.

Greasy smells of frying onions and burnt candyfloss and engine oil mixed with the sea salt, swimming past him, with the noise and the press of heated bodies.

He came to his senses on a bed, sprawled out where Julia had pushed him. She had loosened his collar and taken off his boots.

He opened his eyes slowly, taking her in as she hovered above him with a tooth glass of water. Her fair hair shone like a halo.

She sat down on the side of the bed and stroked his brow. He couldn’t hold back any longer. He laid his head in her lap and burst into tears.

‘There, there,’ she said, and every caress of her fingers, mopping up his tears, was like the re-establishment of some long-lost bond.

‘What’s happening to me?’ he pleaded. ‘Why is it happening to me?’

‘Darling, I imagine this has been a long time coming. You’re tired. You’ve used up too much energy denying your nature and masking it with this old-time religion of yours.’

‘What do you mean, my nature? You don’t know me that well.’

‘I know you very well, Adam. You and all who came before you.’

‘What are you talking about?’ His lament came out as a strangulated bellow. ‘What is going on in this village? Julia, I have dreams – such dreams. Dreams of being a Puritan preacher who takes a witch for a wife. What does it mean?’

‘It means you’re the last in a long line, my love. And so is Evie Witts.’

‘What line?’

‘I shouldn’t say. The village secrets aren’t mine to disclose.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake! Forgive me, O Lord. I’m leaving. I resign.’

‘You won’t.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Evie won’t have it. You won’t leave here without her. And she’ll never leave.’

Adam contemplated this. Julia was right. Except he would make Evie leave. He would make her come with him.

‘Tell me why you came here,’ said Julia in a low, persuasive voice.

‘Nobody else would take the post,’ moaned Adam. ‘And I couldn’t find another. I have a reputation – for being a bit too hardline. I’m an embarrassment to the church, this stupid soft-centred namby-pamby church of ours. Where are all the muscular Christians now? That’s all I want to be.’

‘I think you’re a very muscular Christian,’ said Julia soothingly, putting a hand on his upper arm and squeezing it. ‘You have the soul of a missionary. In fact, one of your predecessors had been a missionary. A Victorian chap, came to us from Congo. A rather unsuccessful mission, I gather. He bore some interesting scars.’

‘What are you talking about – my predecessors? You keep coming out with these bizarre statements, speaking as if you were 400 years old yourself.’

‘I need to mind my tongue, don’t I? Thank you for telling me about how you came to be here. Now, how about the girlfriends?’

She smiled roguishly and ruffled his hair.

He shut his eyes and whispered, ‘Nothing to tell.’

‘What? You’ve never had a girlfriend? Is that what you’re telling me?’

‘The risk … Too much.’

‘Risk? What risk?’

‘Risk of temptation. Temptation of the flesh.’

‘Adam, you aren’t a monk!’

‘I wanted to save myself. I wanted to be pure.’

‘You’re a virgin?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t kiss like one.’

‘Thanks, I think.’

‘You weren’t born for the celibate existence, my love. You need more than that.’

‘My flesh is so weak …’

‘Don’t think of it as weakness. It’s another way of being. It’s not wrong, it’s not right. It’s how God made you.’

‘God would not make me a – fornicator. It’s His way of testing me, the hardest test He could give me. I don’t care for drink or gambling or money or anything like that. But Evie Witts … Oh, Evie Witts …’

‘Never mind her. She’ll never be any good to you.’

Julia’s fingers had strayed to his loosened dog collar, at which she pulled gently. 

‘I’ve always wanted to take this off you,’ she whispered.

‘No, you can’t,’ he whispered back, but there was no firmness in it, no purpose. She pulled it free of his shirt, exposing the lower part of his neck, which she bent and kissed.

‘Poor Adam,’ she crooned. ‘So intense, so full of fire. So desperate for a fuck.’

She let one finger move down Adam’s chest, gliding between his pectoral muscles, dipping down into his abdomen. His capacity for resistance was gone. He was floating somewhere in a place where his moral compass didn’t operate, a badland. A badland that was good, that felt good, as good as Julia’s fingertip tracing his waistline before grasping his belt and sliding it through the buckle.

The memories of Julia’s kiss and Evie’s pole-dance had left him semi-erect even through the unpleasantness that had followed. Julia’s sudden statement of intent, in removing his belt and unbuttoning his trousers, brought him to full engorgement straight away.

‘Nobody has ever done this for you?’ she said, still disbelieving, pushing his trousers over his hips and thighs to release his cock. ‘Except yourself, of course.’

‘I try,’ he gasped, ‘not to. I try to think of – other things …’

‘It’s killing you,’ she said. Her hand closed around his testicles. ‘Feel that, Adam. So tight, so pulsing with need. You must be awash in sexual desire, 24 hours a day, with nowhere for these little swimmers to swim to, except when you dream. You do dream, don’t you, Adam?’

‘I told you,’ he gasped. ‘I dream. All the time. Vivid dreams. Sinful dreams.’

‘Your only outlet. Your brain and body conspire in your sleep, Adam, to get the release they’re so desperate for. You deny them, you deny yourself. You aren’t made for abstinence. Your unconscious has spoken.’

‘Don’t say that, don’t say that. I can resist …’

‘You can’t.’

He arched his back and gripped at the sheets as Julia’s fist found his cock, wrapping itself perfectly around its rigid girth. The feel of her clasp, of his enclosure in it, tipped him over an edge. He couldn’t turn back now. This was his fate, for good or ill. 

‘You shouldn’t,’ she said, and her hand moved up, moved down, weakening his spine. ‘Why resist it? It’s what you want. Fear is not a virtue, darling, and it’s fear that holds you back. That’s not strength. That’s not muscular Christianity. That’s craven cowardice.’

The pep talk, coupled as it was with a slow jerking back and forth of his foreskin, didn’t really sink in. But he was absorbing the gist, letting it settle into his consciousness together with the divine sensation of being touched intimately by a woman, so that the two would always be inevitably linked.

She made me do it. Already his bargain with his maker was being stored up for rehearsal. She has a serpent’s tongue.

He wondered, in his delirium, if she really did have a serpent’s tongue, and if so, how that would feel, licking and flicking around the sensitive underside of his glans.

But Julia did not need to perform any manoeuvre more extravagant than her perfectly judged handjob to take Adam to that higher plane of pleasure. He was already too close, caught in the grip of her elegant fingers and her seductive whisperings. Behind his eyes, bright colours burned while every muscle tensed, every string pulled tight. 

‘Julia,’ he panted. ‘Julia, I …’ The words tailed into a low, suffering sigh. His abdomen and Julia’s fingers were smeared with ejaculate, rapidly cooling where it lay.

He could no longer feel his bones and his thoughts drifted into a place of repose, of sleep, of forgetting. He didn’t even last long enough in his post-orgasmic wakefulness to look into Julia’s face.

When he came to, she was lying naked in the bed beside him.

‘Oh God!’ he cried, once an initial sensual, sleepy warmth had given way to hard reality. ‘What have I done? What’s happened to me? Julia, why are you …?’

‘Oh sweetheart, please calm down. You’ve done nothing. You’ve rather been done to, though. Don’t you remember?’

‘Yes, yes. So that was – all?’

‘Wasn’t it enough? I was hoping you might have rallied a little, after your nap.’

She bent her head to kiss him, but he struggled and pushed her off.

‘Julia, this is, this is – oh God – wholly inappropriate.’

‘Holy? There was nothing holy about it.’

‘Not holy! Oh just, just, just … What’s the time?’

Julia yawned. ‘About four-ish.’

‘We have to leave in an hour. Get up, get dressed. Oh God.’

‘Oh, must we?’ she purred with a wicked smile that made Adam feel suddenly much less resolved. ‘It’s so long since I shared a bed with an attractive man. Now I’ve got one next to me, I think it would break my heart to let him go.’

Adam bent his legs and hid his face in his knees.

She was sent to test me. I failed. 

He rose heavily, still in his black shirt, which had ridden up to his nipples, his trousers rumpled around his ankles. His black boots had never been removed, and his stomach was tight with flaking dried semen.

He was thirsty and there was a vile taste at the back of his throat.

As soon as he registered it, he thought of Evie, and the huge surge of longing and guilt and tenderness and exasperation and loving hatred almost knocked him back on to the bed.

‘Adam, don’t be like this.’ Julia sat up, ran fingers through her hair.

‘Like what? We have to go. The driver’ll be waiting for us.’

And so will Evie.

He pulled up his trousers and buckled his belt. He left the room without a backward look.

In the car park, the villagers milled, many the worse for an afternoon spent in the seafront pubs.

‘’Ere ’e is – the reverend ’imself.’

Laughter of a not particularly charitable nature greeted Adam as he hurried across the car park, still beset by an urge to vomit. No sign of Evie.

‘You look rough, Rev. Too much communion wine?’

Adam shook his head and tried to smile, but the nausea was stronger than ever.

It was another five minutes before Julia appeared, looking as immaculate as ever.

She hoisted herself on to the bottom step of the bus with a feline smile and a flash of leg and left Adam to his clipboard.

What if she said something? What if she spread it round the village that they had …?

But the return of Evie broke into his worries. Back in her halter dress, she tripped through the cinder car park as merrily as if she had just returned from a picnic in a fragrant meadow rather than a pole-dance competition in a tawdry dive bar.

Drawing close to Adam, though, her placid expression soured.

‘Where’s your girlfriend?’ she hissed.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Yeah, you do. Your fancy piece. Nice bit of aristo fanny you’ve landed there, vicar. Congrats.’

‘Evie, there’s nothing –’

‘Oh, don’t bother about me. I know when I’ve been outclassed.’

She flounced on to the bus, with that same flash of knicker-free bottom she’d given him on the outward voyage.

He had to throw up into some scraggy weeds on the other side of a low brick wall before they set off again.