Episode 33

Follow-my-leader; round the washing machine and under the kitchen table, over the back of the sofa and out of the window. What a fun filled game when you are a child, the crazy, mad, mindless rush. What a dangerous game when you are an adult. Follow-my-leader, burning your bridges as you go…up the hill and tumbling down the other side into some dark-alley-deeds-done by drinking too much Dutch courage.

Early knock off time on Friday and everyone looking forward to the desperately named ‘happy hour’; as in the ‘happy farm’ or the ‘happy home’.

By seven o’clock the inhabitants of Mercia, not having eaten since their lunch-time sandwich, were more than happy. By eight o’ clock they were heroes in all but the making, and headed for the town jail. But their righteous quest had ended in disappointment, and the bitter bile of failure and the unrequited hatred of kidnappers boiled in every vein of the crowd surrounding Clara. She was still at the centre. But for how long. And what was she to do with them now.

Follow-my-leader is an age old institution. If you want to get something big done, that’s the way to do it. But a leader is nothing without his followers and vice versa. You, as a leader, are not separate from the people. You become them, and they become you. Your ideas become theirs, and theirs become yours. You become part of a collective will. You don’t, as leader and instigator, have a separate will anymore – you can’t change your mind once you have made a contract with the crowd. You belong to them as much as they belong to you. They don’t just follow you blindly – you follow them too. You can’t just change direction willy-nilly, and you can’t just call the whole thing off in mid-flight. Mobs are notoriously hard to stop once they gain momentum. If you opt out they’ll just push someone else to the fore (usually every four years or so if it’s a political mob) and carry on doing what their hearts are set on. These were some of the implications soaking through into Clara’s consciousness. Basically she had a runaway train on her hands. It’s easy enough to turn the switch on …but stopping is a whole other matter.

A burning prison behind her and a crowd all revved up with nowhere to go was a recipe for disaster - an open invitation for any loony-toony to step into the breech and suggest something crazy. The setting was sublime…scudding clouds across a sickle moon, electric torches and burning brands heaving up and down in a tumultuous sea of bodies around her…a real night for devilry. Clara was frightened out of her wits. Things had gone so badly wrong. Once inside the prison the crowd had been outraged at being cheated of their prey. All that had been left for them to do was break a few bits of furniture on their way out and drift off home. But that would have been a most unsatisfactory outcome. They had come too far to fizzle out like that. They were on the boil. They needed to do something to get rid of all the pent up adrenaline pumping through their veins.

Then some bright spark had the idea to throw her burning brand into a wastepaper basket. Many people attest to the fact that it was a ‘her’, with punky hair and black lipstick. With a loud cheer the crowd had then scarpered out of there before the police could nab any of them and had run down the high street towards the city centre. They had finally stopped in the park opposite the Town Hall and were now waiting for Clara to speak. What was she to do?  She needed help desperately, but for once Samuel wasn’t there to help her. This was where she missed him…his guidance….the things he could do that she never gave him credit for. No use calling him now…she doubted he’d ever come back, except to get his clothes. She had pretty much alienated him for life, and the memory stung her again like a bee. She had been so horrible to him; she doubted if he would ever speak to her again.

But the crowd were milling about over her shoulder and starting to get agitated by her dithering and lack of direction. She was losing her grip on them. Alice, to add to all her troubles, was standing at her side, nudging her in the ribs and whispering things in her ear but Clara wasn’t listening to her anymore. It was listening to Alice that had got her into this mess.

She had to do something…give the crowd a focus. But what? Ronald Watts was missing…God knows where. She didn’t have much else to suggest except a house to house search and all the hell that would unleash.

Then she remembered the priest knocking at her door this morning.

“I was hoping you would do a favour for me,” he had said. “I am holding a midnight mass tonight for Joshua, and I would like you to come….and bring your family with you.”

Clara remembered how kind he had been to her…how un-judgemental and friendly…and then she thought ‘that’s it’. The crowd couldn’t refuse to go to a mass for Joshua. This was a sure way of getting everybody to calm down and break the momentum of the mob. None of them were regular church goers, but none would refuse, and it was getting to the witching hour.

“How ugly are we.”

The priest sniffed and looked up at the overflowing flock blocking the aisles and entrance halls. Some even stood outside, craning their necks to catch a word or two.

“How ugly are we when we bray like a bunch of donkeys at a gatepost. How ugly are we, when we run roughshod over our feeding troughs and trample our keepers.

“How unlike the humble little donkey that stands patiently by the child born in his manger. How unlike the gentle donkey that carries Jesus into Jerusalem.

“We are donkeys. No doubt about that. He who would argue against that may bray away in vain. We make as much sense as a donkey. We generally have as much dignity. Stubborn and intractable, we follow our appetites and our irascible inclinations without giving any thought to others. We don’t care who we tramp on in our search for self-fulfilment; our neighbours and even our own children.”

He paused to give them the evil eye. He could hear by his tone that he was in a bad mood tonight. He never knew it until he started lashing into them. But he was only human after all. He was tired and irritable. He’d been very busy of late. Three teenage suicides in the last month and the parents didn’t have a clue. They never do. Totally unexpected they said. But he knew there were a whole lot of hurting youngsters out there with nowhere to go in a dead-end town that didn’t care about them. Yup. He was in a bad mood alright. He knew there were kids out there that needed help, but none, or very few, ever came to him. He was too yesterday. Today they dealt with their problems in a different way. This was the age of the pointing finger. Whip up a witch hunt and pin the tale on someone else.

“We are sneaky and treacherous. We cannot be trusted. We only look out for number one. If we can get away with something we will certainly try. If we could steal our neighbour’s apple, we would. If we could blame someone else for it, all the better. A donkey does not take responsibility for what it does.”

He paused here for a moment. The crowd were waiting to see which way he went with this.

“How ugly are we. Unloved donkeys. Biting the hand that feeds us. Kicking the one who brushes us and cleans our stall. Then we look around and say…how ugly is the world.

“Well, what can you do with a donkey like that? Can you hold him to account for his actions? Hee haw. Certainly not. It’s a donkey for goodness sake. He knows not what he is doing.

 “Uncared for and uncaring. And if these donkeys go on a rampage and trample a field of corn, or take an innocent young man and nail him up on a cross, are these donkeys to blame? Are they evil donkeys?

“Well,” he said, looking up at his congregation and taking his glasses off. “How much empathy does a donkey have anyway? How much empathy does a donkey have if he is humiliated and beaten and set to work from a very young age? How much generosity does he have in his heart? Mean, lean and bitter. Life is hard for a donkey. He is a sullen and bad tempered brute to be sure, but who can blame him. His only pleasures in life are giving someone else a kick in the pants so they may feel what he feels. That’s what we often bray at each other isn’t it……‘now you know what it feels like’.

“Who can blame them when they lash out? They are wholly too preoccupied with their own pain to notice yours. They are so busy trying to ease their own lot that they are not inclined to notice yours. Shall we punish these people…these donkeys?”

Many of the people were wondering if the priest had just forgotten about Joshua altogether. Perhaps the huge attendance had gone to his head and had muddled his poor brain.

“For all of you who have come armed with pitchforks tonight, I need to remind you that the person you are hunting….and in this case it seems to be a little old lady whose blood you are braying for…is merely a donkey like yourselves. Someone who is trying, misguidedly, to ease their pain. She has merely done what was done to her. It’s a law of nature. Something precious was taken away from her once, so she has taken something precious from you…as donkeys are wont to do.

“But this is an unforgivable crime you say. Rubbish, I say. And so says Jesus. She does not know the anguish she is causing. This is a senile old lady for heaven’s sake, not some all-powerful witch. This is after all the twenty first century.

“We can pray for Joshua….and indeed we do, but it is not his soul that is in jeopardy here.” And here he paused to look around at the people sitting in front of him. “It is yours.”

A loud rumble of thunder rattled the stained glass windows.

“Revenge is sweet. Like ice cream and coke. You know it's bad for you, but it is delicious. And of course once you've had one you want another. Revenge is never satisfied. We LOVE revenge. We plot and plan and daydream all day long on how to get our own back on someone who has wronged us. If someone hoots at us for whatever reason, don’t we fret and fume and scheme of the slowest possible way to rip out his testicles?

“Everyone knows ice cream and coke rot the teeth and give us diabetes. Diabetes restricts the flow of blood to the extremities of the body like our hands and feet, vital limbs which sooner or later begin to rot and have to be amputated.
This is bad. Revenge however is worse. Revenge rots the soul.
Revenge prevents the soul from accessing its organs of sympathy and goodwill towards man. Valuable organs which begin to atrophy and die from disuse until eventually God comes along and lops them off completely. And that is how we slowly grow into spiteful, miserable old sods that don't have a good word for anyone. And the blacker we paint them, the sweeter our revenge…and the more justified.

“This little old lady has not only kidnapped Joshua, she has kidnapped your minds as well. She has filled you all with hate and revenge and put your souls in jeopardy. She didn’t mean to. Do you think she’d have done this had she been in her right mind…if she hadn’t been suffering some sort of terrible anguish? If she hadn’t been under some terrible duress? Why do I even have to spell it out for you?” he asked, staring at them with a cross face.

“She is misguided….criminal….sure. But she can’t help herself. And she isn’t possessed by the devil. She knows not what she does. She is a troubled soul. She is preoccupied with her own pain and is unconsciously sharing it around with everyone else.

“It is so much easier to just say she is evil than to forgive. We need someone to blame. For the pain. But then again, I suspect this is not just about a wicked witch who stole a little child anymore. I think this is about you….and your pain. I think you see this as an opportunity to get your own back…for all the things that were done to you when you were a child and throughout your life…and take it out on a little old lady.”

He pulls a disparaging face at this.

“This is so outrageous that I am tempted, God help me, to judge you for it, but I just have to keep reminding myself that you are just donkeys…and know not what you do.”

With that he closed the bible and looked towards the windows where the rain was rattling down on the window panes. It was a calming sound. Soothing. The congregation listened for a while, not quite sure what to think or feel about the sermon.

“Let us bray,” was all he said.

It was a quiet and subdued crowd that walked down the church steps…right into the spiteful, scheming arms of Alice.