Fandango in the Apse!

Text copyright © 2012 Jane L
Taylor

All Rights Reserved

For Billy Rankin, my own
personal hero.

My thanks to Ian Sutherland
for the cover design and James Brailsford for formatting.

Table of
Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

Chapter Twenty Two

Chapter Twenty Three

Surgery Day

Epilogue

Three months later

It never ceases
to amaze me how the ordinary piles of crap that most of us build our lives on
keeps growing.  Of course, not all of it is outside influence; most of us are
guilty of regularly adding to it.  We are the architects of our own downfall. 
Well, I am… oh, yes, I’ve spent years building my pile and recently I reached
the top, which is why I’m now sitting on a train hurtling towards London.

 To anyone looking at me, I must appear the picture of poise and calmness. 
My face is hopefully devoid of expression, there is no outward show of the raging
emotions ransacking my head, and certainly no inkling of what I am about to do
– of the huge step I am about to take.  Good.  It is my business and as far as
I’m concerned everyone else can go to hell.

I am a bad, bad person! I know exactly why I can say that with complete
conviction.  There are two reasons really, the first being that at the moment I
am utterly hacked off for falling into the trap of thinking that I, Katie
Roberts, a divorced, thirty-nine-year-old mother of two, might actually be loved. 
The second being the ubiquitous guilt that has underpinned my life, since the
first time my mother said, “You little brat, no wonder your father left”.

I was about four at the time, and quite unaware of the great gift my
mother had unwittingly bestowed upon me.  Now don’t think just because I
mentioned the guilt, that I’m about to embark on a self-indulgent whine-fest
about the unfairness of my life – I’m not, so just hear me out.

Seventeen years ago, I shagged a Catholic priest.  Ha!  You didn’t see
that coming, did you?  Before I go any further, I have to stress in the strongest
terms possible that it isn’t something of which I’m particularly proud.  I’ve
never told a living soul until now.  Well... when I say never, I might have
mentioned it once to fifteen women on a drunken hen night.  However, I assure
you other than that, my lips have remained sealed. 

In my defence, I have to say that there were mitigating circumstances, he
didn’t put up much of a fight, and I had just watched
The Thorn Birds
on
telly, and he really did have a look of a young Richard Chamberlain about him (only
better).  I’m sorry, I just couldn’t help myself.  I was a twenty-two-year-old mother
of two, bored senseless and married to “The Pig”.  That’s the name I use to
refer to my ex-husband; you’ll hear more of him later. 

So yes, I “seduced” a young priest.  He was the curate in my local church
and I’d gone there to discuss the children’s baptism.  They were both toddlers
and their un-baptised status was beginning to – you’ve guessed it – make me
feel guilty.  Not that I’m a churchgoer, not since I was a child anyway, but you
have to understand the Catholic religion is a bit like a curry stain on your
favourite blouse.  The harder you try to remove it, the more ingrained it
becomes.

 I’m not going to go into the finer details, suffice to that say one
thing led to another, and we ended up spending a glorious spring evening
romping vigorously on a carpet of bluebells in a particularly secluded area.  Halleluiah!
 Then another in a store room at the back of the church.  Then another… no!  I
can’t go on.  I know, I know, I’m going to hell.  

Now, everything would have been fine – that is, if you discount the fact that
he was a priest and supposed to be celibate, and if he’d treated the whole
thing for what it was; a quick fandango in the apse.  And I do mean apse. However,
not being an old hand in dealing with guilt like me, he broke down, told Father
Gus the parish priest and quickly found himself on a retreat to evaluate his
commitment to God.  Me?  Well, I kept my mouth shut and never set foot in the
church again.  By now, you may be wondering what this has to do with my trip. 
Well, in a roundabout way, quite a lot.

Fast-forward sixteen years from my ecclesiastical hell-raising amongst
the bluebells – that’s last year to those of you who can’t be bothered to do
the maths – and picture this.  As the co-owner of a fledgling flower shop, I
have what I think is a brilliant idea to boost business.  I will go to the next
parishioners’ meeting in the church hall and have a quiet word with the priest
about providing the flowers for the church free of charge.  In return, I would
leave my business cards, which he could pass on to anyone interested –
weddings, christenings et cetera. 

With my plan in mind, I entered the hall only to receive a shock, which
reverberated round my skull until I could actually see sparks in front of my
eyes.  Yep.  You’re right there with me.  Holy shit!  I was staring straight at
Richard Chamberlain.  How unfair is that?  And what’s worse, I can see he’s
recognised me and I’ve a fair idea from the dull flush beginning to bloom from
under his dog collar, he’s remembering lusty blow jobs amongst the bluebells. 

What are the odds after all those years, and a move of two hundred miles,
of bumping into your guilty past?  Pretty damned good in my case, obviously.  Are
you wondering what I did?  I did what any normal person would do – I plastered my
best Botox impression on my face, shook his hand and pretended I’d never seen
him before in my life. Thereafter, I bolted to the last row of seats in the
hall and hid until I could slink out unnoticed. 

After my unexpected meeting with the bluebell-stud-muffin (I really can’t
name him), I had what I can only describe as an epiphany of biblical
proportions.  I experienced something profound for the first time in my life –
genuine unadulterated guilt, coupled with a flash of insight into my character
so disturbing, it almost had me ringing the doctor to demand special dispensation
for another course of mind candy within the hour. 

What the hell had I been thinking – shagging a man of the cloth, a person
who had made the decision to devote himself to the church?  All those years on
and the morality of that was only just hitting me?

The trouble was, having felt the genuine article, I then realised that I
had at some stage grown out of the guilt instilled into me as a child– thinking
back, I was about twelve when it happened.   I had come to the conclusion, that
the woman I called mother had been using me as her whipping boy; an infinitely
better option than admitting her vicious tongue and mean nature might have been
the cause for my father’s quick exit to the other side of the world.

Now here is the crux of the problem: as I say, I was twelve at that point
of realisation, plenty old enough to have gone forward to live a life
unfettered by the shackles of my mother’s bitterness; any normal person would
have, but you have to remember we’re talking about me here. So what did I do? 
I deliberately hung onto the guilt, using it as a tool, a perfect excuse to
behave exactly as I wished. 

My God, it was a shame I wasn’t still in counselling, because Patti would
have had a field day with this.  I haven’t told you about Patti, have I?  She’s
a lovely woman, a bit eccentric, but totally dedicated.  I have an inkling she
gave up on me about half way through our sessions though.  I “exasperated” her,
she had said.  I carried on going because she fascinated me.  She had a look of
Ann Widdecombe on speed (use your imagination), her bright, intelligent eyes
always stoically interested in whatever bullshit I came out with week after
week.  God bless her.

Where was I?  Oh yes, I remember.  So having made a conscious decision to
hang onto my security blanket of guilt, I  left it unhindered to wend its insidious
way into my psyche, to remain there well fed and cared for until the cosmos or
some higher power made the decision to smite me down with its memory. 

This epiphany, insight or whatever you want to call it, had an enormous
effect on me.  I could now envisage every bad thing I had ever done – and there
were plenty – for exactly what they were.  Without the gloss coat of inflicted
guilt as a catalyst, they were shabby episodes of hedonistic greed and self-indulgence
disguised as reaction. 

I am just about conceited enough to assume you want to know what I did
with this insightful regression into my life.  Well I’ll tell you – I went to
Waterstones. Yep, that’s exactly what I did. I went to Waterstones and bought a
book on the Ancient Art of Shamanism.  I have to admit it wasn’t the book I
went in there for, I was
looking for Jilly Cooper’s latest offering,
just to make myself feel better, as you do.  However, as soon as I walked into
the shop my eye was drawn to the fifty per cent off table, now extended to
seventy-five, and there sitting on top, was the beautifully illustrated book. 

Being a sucker for books that will look nice on the coffee table, I
perused the blurb.  Shamanism was a new concept for me; of course I’d heard of
it, although not in enough detail to want to add it to the rest of the bulging
trivia already packed into my under-used brain.  But beggar me, if
synchronicity wasn’t working in full force that day.  The blurb promised that
upon reading the book I would – “Take a voyage into the wilderness within and
find true freedom”.  How could I resist that?  Especially as it offered the
bonus of finding my totem animal – guardian spirit to you and me – although I
never quite got that far.

Now, you have to understand that meeting my priest from the past wasn’t
the only contributor to my present state.  God no, things are never that simple,
are they?  

You see, a few months prior to this unexpected meeting, and after years
in the self-imposed dating wilderness following my divorce, I finally lowered
my expectations of the opposite sex enough to start seeing one.  Robbie
Collins… strange to think there was a time when just hearing that name had the
power to send my brain soaring off on any number of flights of fancy and now it
makes me want to spit.  Robbie, the man with a body hewn by hard physical work
and features arranged in such a way that whatever his expression, he was heart-stoppingly
gorgeous.  Robbie, the bloody commitment-phobe.

Of course, I wasn’t aware of his aversion to commitment.  Mind you, it
has to be said, he hid it well.  You see, I was at the stage of planning ahead,
as we women tend to do.  Which house would we live in – his or mine?  Should we
get a dog or a cat?  How would the boys feel about their mother living with a
man? That sort of thing.  He, on the other hand wasn’t, but by the time my
brain had assimilated that fact, it was too late – I had humiliated myself to
such an extent I still cringe about it now.  

So you see, this combination of self-realisation and self-humiliation
coming in such close succession – aided to some extent by the book – is what
has prompted my trip today.  I’m not going to sit here and tell you I read the
book and reconnected with my soul or found my spirit guide, I might have done
if I’d put some real effort into it, but I did reach a few conclusions.  The
main one being…I Had To Change…I Would Change!  My whole life had been about
trying to evade the impact of pain, denying who I really was…well, no longer.  I
damn well know who I am now, and I don’t much like what I’ve found.