Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam by Peter Goldsworthy Read Free Book Online Page A

what would be the point of faith?’
    ‘That’s fine advice for us,’ she said. ‘But what do we tell
her?
Jesus wants her for a sunbeam?’
    ‘Perhaps she doesn’t want to be told anything,’ he said. ‘In many ways this is far more difficult test for you.’
    ‘What you are saying — this is a test? This was given to us as a test of
faith?
What’s the answer? Is it an essay, or multi-choice?’
    He paused before answering, shocked by her harshness. He licked his lips, his mouth opened and closed, without speaking, groping for an answer that was not quite ready. He was out of his depth, or had forgotten his lines. His avuncular manner had vanished, his eyes reddened, he was close to tears. He mumbled a few words about eternal peace, about Emma going to a better world, but they could plainly hear that his heart wasn’t in it; he was of their generation, skeptical of the unknown. His heaven was on earth, and would be man-made, if at all.
    ‘Remember the story of Abraham and Isaac?’ he finally said, huskily. ‘The Lord tested Abraham’s faith by asking him to sacrifice his son?’
    Despite his anguish, Linda’s face purpled with rage, instantly.
    ‘Fuck you,’ she said. ‘And fuck any God who would play such horrible games.’
    Rick rose from his chair, unastonished by the words she had spoken, even though he had never heard her utter such words before, or even seen such an extreme of anger. The same feelings, if not the same words, were on the tip of his own tongue; there was nothing else that could be felt.
    ‘Perhaps I didn’t choose my example well. What I meant to say …’
    ‘I think we’ve talked enough, John,’ Rick said. ‘We’d like to be alone.’
    As they stood at the door, holding each other, watching Father Cummings drive away for the last time, they realised suddenly how much they had aged in the past months, at a much faster rate than their household clocks and calendars had measured out. It seemed that this young priest, approximately their own age, now belonged to a still younger generation.
    ‘It’s up to us,’ Rick said to his wife. ‘No-one can help except us.’

9
    The priest’s words of advice stuck fast in their minds, nevertheless, like a tune heard once in the morning that can’t be shaken off, repeating, interminably, through the day. The possibility that it was somehow an ordeal, a trial, was difficult to shake loose, if only because of its deeper implication: it pandered to the hope of a solution. Their powerlessness was deformed into guilt, which was bent itself into over-attentiveness, into a smothery kind of love that the little girl was forced sometimes to turn away from, to physically
hide
from. Famine-thin, increasingly fragile, easily bruised, it was as if she sensed that her parents might cuddle her to death, or at least cuddle her back into hospital. She shut herself in her room for long periods, alone, and — it seemed to Rick and Linda, in their worst moments — betrayed.
    ‘It’s as if there’s a wall there — we’re on one side, she’s on the other.’
    ‘We can’t help her — but I think she thinks we
won’t
help her.’
    The worry-programme had bypassed one possible solution, or pathway, much earlier, but goaded by guilt, and self-blame, returned to it, was dragged back to it, again and again — although for some time neither discussed the path with the other, believing that for the first time in their marriage their thoughts had diverged too widely, that the idea was so outrageous, so
unspeakable,
that no two sane people would ever think it together.
    Rick first spoke the unspeakable. They lay talking in bed in the small hours, trying, as always, to talk each other to sleep, to talk themselves empty, to talk out the day’s accumulated worries. A volume of Dickens lay discarded on the floor; another waif had died; he had become unreadable.
    ‘Maybe we should all go together,’ he said, inserting the words suddenly, without warning,