The Gospel According to Luke (7 page)

Aggie did not grieve. The day after Kip left she threw herself at Matthew Rinehart, a dreadlocked anarchist from uni who had been asking her out ever since he discovered she was married. He moved into Aggie's house and introduced her to Tantra, deep ecology,
anti-consumerism and hallucinogens. Matthew did actually love Aggie, but he had this thing about monogamous relationships being spiritual death. After six months, he told her he was becoming too attached to her and that he had to move on. Aggie was six weeks pregnant; no surprise considering Matthew had refused to use man-made barriers when making love. But he was gone, and she was alone, so she had an abortion and then a year later, after Matthew had come and gone again, she had another. He returned to her once more, nine months later, and she told him about the two pregnancies. He wept, saying he had never gotten anyone pregnant, and to have managed it twice with Aggie must mean that it was meant to be. Four months later he got another girl pregnant – a stunning raven-haired pianist – and although she too had an abortion, the fact he had impregnated someone other than Aggie with his seed meant his belief in the predestination of their relationship was shaken. He left to explore the possibility of bliss with the other almostmother of his most recent never-to-be-born child.

Aggie was alone for three years. Then she started working as a drug and alcohol counsellor at St John Hospital where she met Dr Simon Keating. He was a decade older than Aggie, devastatingly attractive and very married. Aggie knew better than most the pain caused by infidelity and abandonment, but when Dr Simon Keating declared his passion and asked to move in with her she was so overcome with gratitude
that she managed to bury her guilt at being a homewrecker. She had two years of sex, holidays, parties and dinners and weekends spent taking his kids to the movies or Australia's Wonderland. Then one morning as he was getting ready for work, he announced that he had been having an affair with his wife and was going home.

Sometime later, Matthew returned, transformed from radical student to up-and-coming human rights lawyer. He wanted monogamy and he wanted it with Aggie. He moved back in, and this time Aggie really thought it would work. But after a year, he found a prettier woman to be monogamous with. He swore her looks had nothing to do with it: he fell in love with her
soul
, just as he'd fallen in love with Aggie's all those years ago at uni. He would love Tara even if she was as plain as anything. He didn't say,
as plain as you
, but Aggie understood that was what he meant.

So that was that. Three relationships, intense and corrosive. No one night stands, no flings, not even a single date. She had not, like most women she knew, formed any theories about why men are the way they are, or what a woman should do to find, enthral, keep one. She did not believe men were such a generic bunch that simple tricks like never accepting a date after Wednesday or touching his arm when you said his name would work for each and every one of them. Men were just like women: varied, likeable, detestable, human.

So it was not any philosophical or sexual political stance that led to her lack of romantic life, it was just that men did not ask out giants with frizzy hair and thick calves. And Aggie did not ask out men because she had never actually met one she liked enough to make the risk of humiliation and heartbreak worthwhile. Until now.

Aggie called Mal and told him she had a date tomorrow night.

‘Bullshit,' he said.

‘Is not. I met a bloke, I asked him over for dinner, he said yes.'

‘Well, I'll be blowed. You did warn him he'll have to clear the cobwebs out of the way before he can get it in, didn't you?'

‘How amusing. So you wanna come over and keep me company tonight?'

‘Love to, Ag, but Will and I are on our way out the door. Dinner with Marsha.'

‘I hate her. She always tells me she could do wonders with my hair.'

‘You should let her try. That mop of yours gets worse every day.'

‘Fuck you.'

‘And you wonder why you don't have any friends.'

Aggie hung up. She and Mal met through his friendship with her mother and when he started running a homeless shelter he hired Aggie as counsellor. She had
worked for him ever since, following him from the lost cause of the shelter to the bureaucratic nightmare of hospital-based rehab to the freedom and stress of independent sexual health counselling. He was her first, best, only friend.

She didn't know why this was so. Throughout her school and university years she had envied other girls and women their friendships, blaming her mother for not passing on the seemingly secret rituals and traditions of women, the things that allowed them to bond and stay bonded. By the time she graduated she had accepted her inability to form close female friendships the same way she accepted that her hair would never look nice and her father would never come back to life.

But then something remarkable began to occur. Standing guard next to paper-draped examination tables, squatting in vomit-filled gutters, stroking sweat-soaked foreheads, Aggie began to love women. Holding the hands of women at their most frightened, most vulnerable, Aggie knew a closeness and kinship that could not be found in a thousand slumber parties or shopping excursions. But these were not friendships; the connection disappeared with the solving of their problems.

Aggie loved women, empathised with them and yearned to help them, but she could not be friends with them. She didn't know why, she just knew that when she tried to talk to a woman about anything other than how she, Aggie, could help her, she forgot
how to be comforting, approachable and non-threatening. She saw the expectation of reciprocity in the other woman's eyes and panicked. She never knew what to say if it wasn't ‘how can I help?' She didn't know the language of female bonding outside of pain and tragedy.

Last week, standing in a bank queue, Aggie eavesdropped as the woman behind her told her companion about her upcoming hen's night.
We're renting an apartment in the city
, she said.
We've hired a bartender. We went shopping for outfits on Saturday
. It struck Aggie that she never used plural pronouns unless she was talking about work.
We
meant her and Mal, the clinic, the business.
We
never meant Aggie and a lover or Aggie and a friend or Aggie and her family.

Except, she closed her eyes and hugged herself, except tomorrow night,
we
are having dinner together. Luke Butler and I. We.

Ordinarily, Luke enjoyed the state conferences; they gave him an opportunity to exchange worship inspiration and ministry plans with the other pastors, and they were a spiritual boost, feeling the joy and energy of all those servants of Christ crammed into one big room. He had been especially looking forward to this year's since he finally had a senior pastorship, even if it was of a youth centre and not a church. But no matter how hard he tried to concentrate on the presentations and follow the discussions, his mind drifted again and again to Aggie.

She was brand new to him, yet he felt he knew her deeply. She was as much an orphan as he was, with
her tragic father and her deviant mother both abandoning her, leaving her to be defiled and discarded by some rough plunderer. Luke was heartbroken at the loss of that lanky, awkward, freckle-faced girl, whom he would have adored and protected. It was too late to save that child, but it was not too late to save the woman she had become.

During the dinner break, he tried to contribute to the discussion at his table. He ate, smiled, nodded, even offered up a relevant comment or two, but underneath it all he was thinking
she
.

‘Well, you're the expert, Luke. What do you reckon?'

He pretended his mouth was full, gesturing apologetically, forcing himself to concentrate. They had been talking about inner city youth ministry. Something about reaching out to the unchurched. Graham, the boy who'd asked the question, wanted to take his youth group into the city backstreets, have them preach to the down-and-out on their own turf. Someone else at the table thought that was a mistake because of the biblical injunction to stay away from sin.
Aggie
he thought. He faked a swallow, took a large sip of water, flicked through his mental database for a relevant scriptural illustration.

‘This discussion makes me think of Peter,' Luke said and smiled. ‘Remember how he forced himself to sit down and eat with all those unclean gentiles, eating food which hadn't been prepared according to dietary
law? Scripture told him this was wrong, but Peter felt called by God to reach out. He realised that God hadn't got the old laws written down and then retired. God was – is! – active, involved. He sees what's going on down here and He knows that some things can't be solved in the way they would've been two thousand years ago. He calls us – calls Graham here – to a new interpretation.'

Graham beamed, the girl sitting next to Luke patted his back, told him she could understand why they'd given the Youth Centre to him. ‘You're the real deal, Luke Butler,' she said. ‘God is so alive in you.'

He left the conference early, snuck into the NCYC through the back gate and went straight to his cabin. He needed solitude to think and pray. He found the connection to the Holy Spirit he'd failed to find at the conference and suddenly he was inspired; the true meaning of his new obsession was stunningly apparent.

He leant into the window, weeping into the darkness outside, letting his tears run down his cheeks, onto his throat and then his chest.
Lord, I thought I knew you, I thought I understood the way you loved your creation, but my knowledge was incomplete and shallow. But I understand now, I really do
. This
is how you feel about humanity
.
This is what it is to adore, to cherish, to
love
a weak and sinful human being. In loving her, I finally understand how you can love the least of us, love
me,
and I thank you for this insight, this joy
.

Once a month, Luke gave a sermon at the main city church. The idea was to keep his preaching skills alive and, at the same time, reassure the parents of the NCYC kids that the man in charge of them was an honest to goodness, real deal, Christian Revolution minister. He enjoyed leading the service, but was less fond of the hand-shaking and conversation afterward.

On the Sunday night he was to see Aggie, he spoke on the need for Christians to lead the community in tolerance toward ethnic minorities. The sermon bordered on political, and he noted the frown on Pastor Riley's face, but he also noted the expressions of shock on some of his congregation and the electric way they whispered to each other when he had finished. He knew he had succeeded in piercing their layers of indifference and hubris.

After the sermon, Luke had six invitations to share the evening meal. Five of them were from the families of young women he knew were interested, and the other was from Belinda who gushed about the ‘braveness' of his sermon and told him it inspired her to go eat at that little Turkish place down the road. Luke turned down all offers with the truth that he had a previous engagement, and deftly avoided further questioning from Belinda by exclaiming his lateness.

Her house was enormous, taking up the entire corner block of her street. It appeared to be three storeys, plus an attic, and the front garden was crowded with
red and yellow rose bushes and several varieties of wildflowers that he could not identify. He had never known anyone to live in such an imposing place, and he was unusually nervous as he waited for her to answer the chiming bell. But then she opened the door and his anxiousness dissolved.

She grabbed his hands and dragged him inside, kicking the door closed and talking non-stop as she led him up and down stairs, through low doorways and winding corridors. She told stories about the paintings hanging on the walls and the history of each piece of antique furniture. She was particularly proud of the old claw-foot bath which had once belonged to a convent. ‘You can see the indentation,' she pointed out, ‘from all those nuns' heads. They must have been short. My feet hang right over the edge when I lie in it.'

‘You are uncommonly long,' Luke said. ‘Tall. You're very tall. Extremely tall.'

‘Yes.' She laughed. ‘That's true.'

The walls were lined with paintings in heavy gilt frames. Luke did not know if the art was good or bad, expensive or cheap, but what he did know was that sadness leaked from every picture. A small girl weeping into a bunch of daffodils; a black-cloaked woman leaning over the rail of a suspension bridge, the wind whipping her cloak behind her; a grey soldier, leaning heavily on his bayonet; a series of landscapes, each darker and more desolate than the last. No smiles or
sunshine. No fluffy animals or cheerful cottages. And tellingly, no photographs.

He asked her about it and she shrugged. ‘I took them all down after Dad died. It was just too depressing. In every photo the only person who looked happy was him. Mum was always gorgeously sullen and I was always gangly and self-conscious, but Dad was . . . I used to have a wedding photo hanging over my bed, but I trashed it when Kip took off, and then when Simon moved in we had a picture of us together in the living room and a photo of his kids in the study. Matt and I had a lot of photos . . . It seemed pathetic to keep them up after he left.' She smiled. ‘I suppose not having any photos is even more pathetic, isn't it? It's proof that I'm a total Nigel-no-friends.'