Evensong by John Love Read Free Book Online

homosexuality,” said a voice from the audience. The longboom mike immediately swung over to him. “Anything offensive to normality and decency, you’ll be sniffing around it for its money. Even,” sneeringly, “the love that dare not speak its name.”
    She smiled unpleasantly. “In Brighton they call it the love that dare not speak its name because its mouth is full.” (Indrawn breaths.) “Try a mouthful. It cures all afflictions. Even fundamentalism.”
    Anwar was aghast at her aggression. And yet: just one of her, against all of them. She was like a small creature baring its teeth and refusing to back down. Ever. Against anyone.
    “This is your new fascism! Anyone who disagrees with you, you call them afflicted! Brand them as fundamentalists! Turn them into hate figures!”
    “I don’t hate fundamentalists. I just think that 99 percent of them give the other 1 percent a bad name.”
    “Most of the people you brand with that—that offensive word, are legitimate religious scholars.”
    “Scholars who know more and more about less and less. And religious scholars ,” she hissed, “were put on Earth by God for me to offend them. Real scholars are scholars of a body of knowledge. You’re scholars of a body of unproven and unprovable belief. You belong in the Dark Ages. What conversations you must have in your own heads!” (More uproar.)
    “You’re not an Archbishop, you’re an Arch business woman !”
    “And,” someone else shouted, “an atheist!”
    “I’m not an atheist. But I won’t buy what you’re selling. I want something better.”
    “Something better? You want God in your own image?”
    “I want us in God’s image. Does God want us ignorant and superstitious?”
    “How dare you presume to say what God should want us to be!”
    “It’s what your priests have been doing for generations, and claiming it’s God speaking through you. Our God’s outgrown that. Evolved, perhaps. And if your God hasn’t, then I and my Church have the right not to believe in him. Or her. Or it.”
    “Do you even believe in the New Anglicans’ God?”
    “Not just believe. Approve.”
    There was more of this; a lot more. After it had finished, the New Anglicans’ ratings soared. The rest was history. In the following three years she implemented most of the Room For God projects, and the New Anglicans became the world’s fastest-growing major Church.
    Anwar sat in his living room for some time after the recording finished, repeating it to himself while the shadows lengthened around him. He knew it word for word. And he knew that inside it was something he needed. Something which would help him understand her, and this mission. He couldn’t see it yet, but he would if he reflected on it carefully. That was how he liked to work: carefully, and reflectively.

    He was born an American citizen. His pre-Consultancy name was Rashad Khan. His family were third-generation Pakistani immigrants, living in Bay Ridge, New York. His parents were both successful lawyers. He spent a comfortable childhood in a large nineteenth-century brownstone house on Ridge Boulevard. He had brothers and sisters with whom he exchanged normal affection. His family were not particularly religious, and neither was he.
    His parents feared he might be mildly autistic. He wasn’t, but he had some of the outward signs: a certain social awkwardness, and a liking for routine, for having everything in its fixed place, tidy and orderly. And he liked to see inside things—how they worked, what they were really like under the surface.
    He probably saw more of the UN Headquarters Building in New York then, when he lived not far from it, than he did when he became a Consultant. He’d often look at it from across the East River, or at closer quarters from East 42nd or East 48th Street. It was an archetypal mid-twentieth-century building: clean and bright and optimistic when built, but now tastes had changed and made it ugly. Levin, when they met