Sean Happens 14

Mr Dill wiggled his eyebrows. ‘A hole didn’t use to be a place where you took money out of…It could have been much more painful than that.’  

‘Could have been, but wasn’t,’ Miss Dill replied. ‘We all need to believe in something and do stupid thing that don’t make sense, till later. Sometimes not even then. We’ve all got a bit of the Jonah in us.’

‘What’s a Jonah?’ Sean glanced up at her through long lashes. His face and gleaming cheekbones accentuated by the heat of the water as he stepped out of the bath and she wrapped him in a thin towel.  

‘A Hebraic prophet that predated the birth of Christ.’

‘Oh, do shut up!’ Miss Dill unravelled the towel. She rubbed colour into Sean’s arms and legs. ‘Jonah is your typical man. Always running away from his responsibilities. But in this case, he’s running away from God.’

‘I didn’t know you could run away from God,’ said Sean.

His high fluting voice made Mr Martin and Miss Dill cock their heads and smile at each other.

‘You can’t,’ Mr Martin said. ‘God’s solution to most everything was to kill everybody—men, women and children, and cattle. He’s a penchant for killing cattle too. But it was for everybody’s own good.’

‘You’re confusing the boy,’ Miss Dill said. ‘Jonah was likely playing truant from God. He was on a big ship and he fell asleep. And God sent high waves to waken him up.’

Mr Martin sighed. ‘Well kinda. Everybody on the ship knew what God was like and they were going to die. So they woke Jonah up and asked him to talk to the Jewish God. Jonah said they’d be fine if they just threw him overboard to drown.’

‘That’s rotten,’ said Sean. ‘I wouldnae have flung him overboard.’

Miss Dill mussed his hair. ‘No, you probably wouldn’t have.’

‘Well, you probably wouldn’t have,’ said Mr Dill. ‘But they knew the rules. It was either him or them. So they flung him overboard. And he got eating by a big fish called a whale.’

Sean pulled on his pants. His Spiderman nylon pyjamas were tight around his ankles and too small for him. The bath water gurgled around the plughole. ‘I know whit a whale is,’ he declared. ‘I’m no a baby. I’ve saw wan millions of times in cartoons.’

‘Well, this wasn’t a pen and ink whale,’ said Mr Dill. ‘You don’t want to get eaten by a whale. But God moves in mysterious ways. He got the whale to spit Jonah up on the beach.’

‘That always happens in the cartoons I watch,’ said Sean. ‘If wan fish eats another, it gets the hiccups and spits it oot.’

Miss Dill rubbed his arm. ‘That’s exactly what happened.’ She shook her head and made a face.

Sean knew that was meant to shut Mr Martin up.

‘You know what happened next,’ said Mr Martin. ‘God told Jonah to go to Ninavah. It was a big city. It took Jonah three days to walk through it and tell everybody they were going to be killed very soon. God had decided and there was nothing they could do about it because they were all evil bastards and deserved it. Even the cattle were evil and probably sodomites too.’

‘Language,’ said Miss Dill. ‘You’re frightening the boy!’

‘How can a swear word frighten a child?’ Mr Martin hissed. ‘May I remind you, he’s already seen his dad put a big bloody bolt through his chest? A few bloodies isn’t going to make a bloody difference.’

‘There’s no talking to you, when you’re like this,’ Miss Dill stated.

‘So did Jonah die?’ Sean cut in.

‘I apologise,’ Mr Martin nipped his lips together and bowed slightly to both of them. ‘Yes, he did die… but not there and then. God had a day off. He let all the Ninevanians off too after they stopped eating and drinking and fornicating and rubbed their faces with soot from their fires. They burnt a few animals and let the smoke drift up to God to appease Him.’

He shrugged. ‘But Jonah wasn’t happy. He didn’t like being made a fool of. He’d sat outside Nineveh and waited for everyone in the city—including the cattle—to get smashed. When it didn’t happen, he moaned at God and told Him he wasn’t a proper God.’

‘Well,’ declared Miss Dill. ‘That was a nice bedtime story. Why don’t you go into Sean’s room and put on a Betamax copy of The Exorcist for him to watch?  

‘Is Jonah in The Exorcist?’ asked Sean.

‘Well?’  Miss Dill waved an arm towards Sean, inviting her brother to explain.

He cleared his throat and laughed. ‘Yes, he is. It’s the same film really. Different time period. You’ll understand better when you’re older. It’s faith versus reason. And reason never wins. St Thomas Aquinas drew on the works of Aristotle. He set it all out nicely in the kind of Latin an educated man could read. It wasn’t enough to be pious. You had to be blessed with the right stuff. And since St Thomas Aquinas avoided women, like a man avoided snakes. We can infer where evil is meant to lie?’

‘He was probably a closet gay,’ suggested Miss Dill. ‘In my experience, so many women-hating men like that are. It’s no great surprise that The Exorcist involved a pubescent girl.’

‘You better not let our churchy friends hear you saying that,’ Mr Martin said. ‘Or there could be a witch hunt.’

‘Oh, what fun,’ cried Miss Dill. ‘I haven’t been involved in one of those for a while. I’m sure it’ll be very entertaining. It always is. Until it involves you…I think we’ve larger things to worry about.’       

  She pushed Sean in the back. ‘Let’s get you into bed. And see if you can get some sleep. Just remember Sean, none of this is your fault.’

‘Am I a Jonah?’ Sean asked.

‘No, indeed you are not,’ declared Miss Dill.

‘We all are,’ said Mr Martin, contradicting her. ‘The important thing is not to forget who you are and what you are.’

‘You’re very special,’ Miss Dill told Sean.