In Church
by
Aahlu
by
Aahlu
Paul, our daughters boyfriend was still here this morning when I got up.
“They are stocktaking at work” he said “so they don’t need me today”
I looked at him and he looked at me, over the toaster, over the breakfast table, over the mess of coffee and muesli my husband and daughter had left when they went off to work.
“So a day off then?” I asked “Lucky you. With pay I hope!”
Paul nodded.
I finished my toast and waited while he finished his.
“So what are you going to do with your day?” I asked at length..
He licked his lips, tasting anticipation I think, rather than marmalade.
“I thought we could go for a walk together” he said, “down to the old village you know, if it’s a nice day”
Well it was a nice day so we did take that walk. All the way down Long Lane to St. Mary’s, the old church which is all that is left of the village of West Lepe. The car park, said to be the site of the village market place is now a farmyard, and the position of the church itself, about two miles from it, gives some indication of the size the village once might have been.
There is nothing much to see now of the village except for a lot of bumps and ridges in the fields where the cottages had stood, green grassy fields with sheep in them and the lane with a bend in it where the stream cuts through at a little ford. Last time we’d been that way we’d picked crab apples. Last autumn that was in the rain. Now the sun shone in early summer, birds sang and the skies were clear.
We walked along leisurely, side by side and unhurried and Paul told me how much he loved my daughter and how he was going to marry her one day. I don’t want to rush things though he said, she is young yet so I don’t want to restrict her freedom.
“You’re both young” I told him. “Too young to be thinking about marrying. Why don’t you take her on holiday some where instead? Isn’t Tenerife good at this time of the year?”
He thought about that for a while as we walked, taking our time, looking at the sheep and the bent over old trees. West Lepe might have been a good place to live once, I thought, before the plague came and took all the people away.
By the ford there was a single plank bridge which I made a fuss about crossing, making out I’d fall in so that Paul would hold my hand, which he did in the end. He is a good boy but sometimes he does need some encouragement. Encouragement? It was his idea to come out here in the first place!
We walked up the slow hill away from the ford towards the looming grey flintstone church building and the grassy, sheep nibbled burial ground around it. They still hold services there, apparently, at Easter and on Christmas eve I think. There is ivy on one side and some gone wild roses climbing around the windows on the other, dead leaves and some blown rubbish on the floor of the porch where a pinned up, faded notice listed some local events. I don’t know the age of the place but it feels old and sad too, as if it knows it has been all but abandoned. But the door was not locked, we knew it wouldn’t be, after all there was nothing to steal inside and no thief would bother to come out here anyway, through the farmyard ‘cos there is no other way.
It was cool and gloomy inside, echoing as the huge iron latch clicked down on the door when we closed it behind us, smelling of dust and damp and that faded patina of pious innocence and prayer.
Someone had signed the visitors book when we looked at it. A Mr and Mrs middle America from Boise Idaho. Ancient and peaceful they’d said. Saxon, Mediaeval and pre Reformation the guide sheet said. Note the piscina and carved slate memorials…….
I walked to the middle of the floor at the bottom of the aisle where a huge, cobweb festooned display of dead flowers still adorned the stump of the font. It was macabre, eerie even, creepy in a way that I found suddenly an incredible turn on.
“What do you think?” Paul asked as I stared down the aisle towards the altar.
“Weird! I whispered. “It’s just so…… weird and…..if I ever got married again I’d want to do it in a place like this!”
Paul grinned at me lewdly and I knew immediately what he was thinking.
Blue slate memorials formed the floor of the aisle, worn shiny by centuries of devout feet. ………… Robert, beloved son of somebody or other and his wife Alice twentieth day of July in the year of our Lord seventeen sixteen…………. In his forty fifth year, Ebeneezer…………… at peace………At rest……Beloved………..beloved…………..beloved………….
I took off my jacket and put it on the end of a pew, took off my boots and socks and walked on the cold tiles of the aisle in bare feet as far as an ancient stone arch. Beyond this arch there was a little step and beyond that step two enormous tombstones lay side by side in the floor as black as midnight’s own obsidian eyes.
The floor gleamed, as if it had been polished recently. Perhaps it had. Their recently would be seventeen twenty three, by the look of the inscription. Aged thirty one oh best beloved.
“This is where my husband will stand” I told myself. “Waiting for me, without turning round as my father, escorts me up the aisle.
In my head I heard the music, the Bach, the Sibelius, the whatshisname’s serenade for strings. I knew what I was going to do when that piece began.
It was quite a narrow building and the step up led to an even narrower part about two thirds of the way along. That must be where the original church began, I supposed, and the place where the rood screen used to be.
Beyond the arch the pews were put in sideways, two on either side of the aisle. They were more elaborately carved than those plain, stained deal ones in the body of the church, reserved for the select few, perhaps benefactors of the church, rather than ordinary people. The only piece of stained glass in the building was there, in the window behind the altar and that a fragment only, rescued no doubt from some earlier times. Green and blue it caught the light, an abstract pattern of perhaps the leaves of trees, folk memories, buried deep, of Eden.
A lot of the older memorial stones lay half hidden beneath these pews and while the names on some of them could be seen, you could not see their dates. Dark blue slate slabs the size of a door, brought from a long way away indicated money and influence had once held sway.
I sat in the one seat which alone faced the altar and thought of the ceremonies which once must have been performed here. Had all the pews in the main body of the church ever been filled I wondered. If they had then that would be about three hundred people.
Three hundred people sitting watching some old boy in a dress and bathrobe chanting and muttering his well rehearsed performance. Well there was no sign of anyone else in there now except me and Paul, and nothing on the altar either, except a plain white cloth and a thin sprinkling of dust.
Three hundred people if all the pews had been taken, plus the parson and his attendants and now there was nothing and no-one except Paul and me and the sunlight patterning the floor. Diamonds and rectangles elongated, angles distorted, planes pressed into unbelievable shapes.
I walked forward, through the arch and into the body of the most ancient part of the church, the knowledge of what I was going to do drawing me closer to the altar.
No it is not desecration if the building has been de-consecrated ………but this one hadn’t had it? Not if they still held services here.
Services to the dust on the floor, the grime of ages, to the dead petals or dead flowers in a dead building with memorials to dead people who once believed in a dead religion. As dead as the stone they’d hewn it from originally. As dead as their founder who they’d nailed to a tree………
Paul had taken off his own jacket, I noticed. No, more than that for his chest was bare.
The step up was so slight that it took no effort at all.
The aisle was narrower there, above that step, narrower and overlooked by pews which were bigger, darker, more ornate.
“Weird!” I said to myself. “Snakes for goodness sakes………..!”
Misiericords, incense burners, bronze crosses standing tall on polished sticks. And grinning skulls in rows or niches, sockets staring sightlessly.
“Go on!” Paul said. “I dare you!”
“Shut the fuck up, I said savagely.
Paul laughed. Swearing in church, he said knowing what I was going to do anyway. He just wanted to aggravate me.
I looked up at the hymn numbers in their rack on the pulpit, stained cards numbered six six six, off white and black. The steps were curved that went up to the ornately carved dais with the reading slope in front of it. Cool oak against hot feet, cool air against my skin as I pulled up my shirt.
Could that really have been the hymn number I wondered.
“Here beginneth the first lesson” Paul announced grandly when I got out my tits.
There was a little drop down seat in the back of that pulpit onto which I deposited my hurriedly taken off and mostly inside out clothes. I was ready for him then, an offering for him to place on that sacrificial altar.
“Slut!” he whispered as I came down the stairs.
He didn’t mean it though, he only says things like that to provoke me.
“Get your fucking clothes off!” I hissed as he grinned lewdly at me.
Without further ado, he did.
There was a cloth of some sort over the top of a thicker pad of something on the top of the sturdy oak table which served as the altar. I sat up, lay down, spread my legs for him as he approached, pale and painfully erect. But I can tell you something, that altar was exactly the right height for Paul to slide his lovely, lovely cock straight into me without stopping.
“Bloody hell you are wet!” he informed me gaily.
“Anticipation…….” I replied. “You know I’ve been thinking about this since breakfast this morning!”
“I thought you had” he said, pinching my nipples, both at once, so unexpectedly that I screamed.
“Bastard!” I cried, so he did it again, harder. Well it all goes towards making me wetter.
Stained glass coloured our skin. An angel swooped and somewhere in the roof someone’s devil died again its endless death. Music played, torrentially, thunderously, the drumbeat rolling, reverberating around the emptiness.
He called me names and in return I abused him roundly, squeezing his little boys thing with my muscles until, immobile, he could only grunt and groan.
When I am in my bedroom no-one cares if I scream, and in that church, on that afternoon, I screamed and shouted anyway and still no-one cared.
“I am going to fill you!” he said, his face rigid.
“Bastard!” I snarled, “you could never do that!”
I was numb nippled but still he had not done with me. I was past caring though by the time he began to smack my legs. Paul can be a real swine sometimes you know. I might have taught him the arts of lovemaking very well, or so I thought but sometimes he does work things out for himself, which is very pleasing. I mean, it was ages before he realised I really did want him to hit me, but once he’d worked out when, where and how, without me having to tell him twice, he soon got very good at it. And practice makes perfect of course because now, as his smacks grew harder and more frequent, I felt myself beginning to come.
Like I said, he can be a real swine when he tries. Brilliant at holding me there, right there, on the very edge of the edge.
I swore at him again and again, to which he merely grinned wryly, before swiping me a couple of times lightly across the face.
Burning I screamed at him, my voice falling flatly, futilely on his unheeding ears. I wanted his stuff inside me at that moment more than anything else in the world, wanted to feel the bursting pulses of life spurting through this church.
Stone faces sneered down at me. Look at the whore, they said to each other. Here in this place. The typical fallen woman! Tongues extended they queued for me, dripping spite and bile and their own uncontrollable watery juices. Dust thickened, coagulated, our sweat lightening it. Paul began to groan massively while for me the precipice loomed closer and closer then faded, the point of no return edging from front to back.
I could have fucked for England then and won first prize easily. I writhed and jerked and bit his mouth, poor Paul, when he tried to kiss me.
Then it was too late, too late to do anything about anything. Except howl and scream as the cataract burst within me.
He could not hold back the torrent then, neither mine nor his, any longer. With a yell that almost deafened me he did as he’d promised, his level best to entirely fill me.
Well if there was a god there I hope he enjoyed our little exhibition. If there was a god there he’d only got himself to blame. Had there been a bell in that tower of his I would surely have rung it.
Paul stayed sort of bent over me for ages after he’d come. He might have fallen asleep I suppose, oh I wouldn’t have been surprised. But eventually I had to retrieve my legs, put my feet down, push him away so that he slithered out limply. Oh dear, poor little thing! It looked like I’d broken it again!!
“Fucking hell Vicky!” he breathed. “That was brilliant!”
“That’s your fault, you bastard!” I told him succinctly. “And god, if you’re still there, yes my nipples do hurt terrifically”
“Are you alright?” Paul asked thoughtfully.
I nodded, wanting to wait awhile then do it again.
Slowly, slipperly, a dribble of his stuff tickled its way onto the altarcloth.
“You okay?” I asked, to which he smiled broadly.
“Vicky” he said again, “that was fucking terrific!”
He’d come a lot I could tell but it was rather naughty of him I think to wipe his thing on a corner of that cloth.
“Fucking sacrilege! That’s what it is!” Paul told me.
I grinned, smoothed my hands down over my belly.
“I reckon this sort of thing used to happen in places of worship a lot more than most people think” I told him.
I’d read that it was so, somewhere.
“Anyway” I said, “Do you want to do it again?”
He looked at me, startled.
“Only joking!” I said sheepishly.
We both knew I wasn’t but we also both knew he’d not be able to do it again so soon anyway. I thought I’d ask anyway. The way I was feeling at that moment I’d have had the vicar if he had walked in.
“Wait awhile can you?” Paul asked hopefully, knowing from experience the way I was feeling.
“Its alright” I told him. “See how you feel when we get back to the car”
That was more than an hour away so I knew he’d be up and running again by that time. And I know he could easily be because my daughter told me sometimes she does it three times a night with him.
But all too soon the chill of the stone got to us, bringing goosepimples to my thighs and to Paul’s shoulders and shins. We cuddled awkwardly, me sitting sideways and him standing in front of me, seemingly on only one leg.
“My feet are cold” he told me.
“Well we’d better get dressed” I said.
Side by side we walked back down the aisle, angled sunshine filling the engraved letters on the tombstones with a pure liquid light.
“Look at that!” I said excitedly. “Beloved has gone all golden……”
Somewhere about one of my socks had got fed up with waiting for my foot to warm it up and decided instead to hide. Socks are like that, aren’t they? Sneaky! They cleverly mould themselves to the shape of you foot on their insides and to the shape of you shoe on the outside while keeping mum about the whole thing until such times as you come to take them off for some reason, for instance to wash them.
I stared at the flaming gold letters on the floor and the afternoon sun streaming through the ancient stained glass. We’d brought the church to life, albeit only briefly, for the first time in probably five hundred years, shown it what love was all about, whatever, to the contrary, passing parsons had instilled into it.
And there was my sock, inside my boot all the time, hiding in the first place I’d looked for it.
Five minutes later Paul unlatched the door and we stepped into the porch, then into bright sunlight.
“What have you been doing in there?” An officious voice asked inquisitively.
It was only the local busybody looking over the hedge.
“Brass rubbing” Paul told her boldly.
“Brass rubbing?” the busy body challenged rudely. “But there aren’t any brasses in there”
“My dear” I said, scratching my crotch and staring at her boldly, “There are now, ‘cos we’ve just put some in!”
Sometimes you know, where jobsworths and busybodies are concerned I simply cannot resist!
In Church. © Aahlu. 2007
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Sun, 2nd May, 2010
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