Kruger's Alp by Christopher Hope

America.’
    â€˜I’m thinking of moving on.’
    â€˜Good. Knew you would come to your senses one day. Perhaps we should have a few words. Where are you?’
    Blanchaille told him.
    â€˜My God, right in the sticks. What’s that noise? I can hear people shouting.’
    â€˜Those are my parishioners. I’m under siege.’
    Lynch’s laughter was drowned in a shriek of static.
    And I saw in my dream how Blanchaille’s stay in the new periurban suburb of Merrievale as parish priest of the spanking-new church of St Peter-in-the-Wild had come to end in undignified confusion after just one month. The defection of his black housekeeper Joyce upset him particularly. She’d never got used to his arrival or the loss of the man he had replaced. How dreadfully unfavourably he must have compared with his predecessor, the youthful, energetic Syrian, Father Rischa. The Parish Consensus Committee had got to Joyce. They told her that Blanchaille was on his way out, they’d shown her the fatal mark of blood upon his lintel imprinted there by the Angel of Death who had passed that way and she’d shot off like a rabbit, an absolute winner in the Petrine stakes, in the thrice-crowing cock awards. Traitress. To hell with her!
    St Peter-in-the Wild was Blanchaille’s first parish and his last. He hadn’t been there two minutes when the complaints began.
    â€˜And what is the nature of your complaint, Mr Makapan?’
    â€˜History,’ came the simple if unexpected reply from the brick salesman. ‘Not only your own particular history, but your lack of understanding of the historical process in general and of our parts in it.’

    Blanchaille’s particular history – what was it? Unremarkable, really. A hostel boy, one-time altar server who had gone up to the seminary to become a priest. Why a priest? Because he wished to be like Father Lynch who understood the system of the Regime and sought to expose it. ‘You are not priestly material,’ Father Lynch had cautioned. ‘You are raised with the puritan, primitive, moralising web of the system and cannot destroy it, but what you can do is to hunt down the guilty men and bring them to book. That is your real vocation. Blanchaille, the police college waits for you – answer the call!’
    For once Lynch and the Bishop were in agreement. Blashford opposed his entry into the seminary and when the time came for Blanchaille’s ordination, continued to oppose it, avoiding the duty to perform the ceremony by being indisposed. Instead Blanchaille was ordained by a visiting Hungarian archbishop who was deported soon after the event for gross interference in the domestic affairs of the country. Blanchaille had long suspected Blashford’s hand behind the expulsion. Newly ordained, his first visit to Lynch had been disastrous. Lynch had stood him up in the pulpit and introduced him to the congregation as ‘the boy you might remember having served at this altar for many a year, and is now a policeman engaged in important undercover work in the country, hence his disguise . . .’
    Blanchaille had done no parish work. After six years of moral theology mixed with intense sexual agonies in the seminary, applying the purity paddle (a miniature ping-pong bat without the usual rubber facings) with a short, downward slap morning and night, whenever his errant member stiffened beneath his soutane, he went to work in the transit camps, the garbage heaps where the human rubbish, the superfluous appendages were thrown away; the huge shanty towns in the remote and barren veld set aside by the Regime as temporary homes for a variety of black people: there were in the camps the dependants, wives, children, grandparents of black workers in the cities; there were illegal immigrants who had taken work in the cities without proper papers; there were the aged, infirm and unemployable who had failed to fulfil the