Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine

Author:Wendy Erskine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Last Supper

The six-inch gash in the sofa’s vinyl has been done with a blade, and whoever was responsible dug a hand into the foam to pull out a sizeable hunk as a souvenir. Now, no matter how carefully the sofa’s taped up, it’s going to look like it’s been in the wars. Who was sitting at that spot today—table four, the low one, by the window? There were those young guys fresh out of the barber’s who’d ended up wrestling with each other in a bout of laddish high spirits but unfair to judge because it could have been anybody.

Andy points it out to Jake.

I don’t know anything about it, he says. I didn’t see nothing.

Jake, I know that. I’m just saying, look what somebody’s gone and done.

Rosaleen shakes her head.

The church is not sure whether to retain the coffee shop, which is run in collaboration with a mental health charity to provide a supportive workplace for those who need it. Good, but there are so many other worthy projects which could offer assistance to a greater number of people. This place loses too much money. Even members of the congregation, while considering the cafe as a generally worthwhile enterprise, tend not to frequent it. The older churchgoers prefer a little more ease and comfort, and the younger ones a venue near the church where in the evenings singer-songwriters, often pretty ones playing the keyboards or on occasion the ukulele, sing songs that could be about Jesus or their boyfriend.

The coffee shop is called Jesters. The pictures on the old menus were of a medieval jester, but when Andy got the new menus done, the graphics studio showed him a picture of a joker and asked if that would do instead. Sure, Andy had said, because it looked more or less the same. When the menus came back from the printers they featured the joker, but in addition the liberty had been taken of incorporating other playing cards into the design. Above sweet treats there was the queen of hearts and over breakfast there was the king of diamonds.

A member of the church who happened to call in was appalled. The new menus, he pointed out, were highly inappropriate: how could Andy have thought them acceptable when the Bible was so very, very against games of chance? Did Andy not know his Bible? Andy had said that it was just a menu, nobody was actually playing any card games in the place, but the church representative was adamant that the menus should not be used. To get them redone would have been both expensive and a hassle, so Andy had gone to Shop Kwik for a few black markers and made everyone colour in the offending images. Rebekah and Jake had messed about, swiping each other, tagging each other on the face with the pens. Rosaleen had coloured in with total precision. JD watched them do it. He said that the outlines, especially the joker and the jack now looked positively satanic.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.