Thy Kingdom Come

It was an ordinary day, rich with the unexpected: morning and evening I narrowly avoided car crashes. I was unharmed, but strangely stirred.

First came reckless driving at the roundabout. The way looked clear and I drove ahead. The car on my left which I expected to turn left or go straight instead changed lanes and followed the roundabout—crossing in front of me—towards the right exit.

I slammed on the brakes to let the crazy driver pass. “Good driving, Mister Magoo!” I muttered.

He—thick glasses, florid jowls and a white bandage on his bald head—glared at me, outraged to see my car shuddering to a stop a metre from his silver Corolla. I glimpsed a Saint Christopher medallion hanging from his rear-view mirror. I gestured, clumsily, that it was the wrong lane to make a right turn. The elderly driver shook his head dismissively—no possibility of error on his part!—and continued his leisurely exploration of the roundabout.

Saint Christopher had his hands full protecting that duffer.

Then, as the driver continued on through the roundabout, a four-wheel-drive ute, loaded with construction gear, powering from the opposite direction, braked screeching as the Corolla unexpectedly swept across his lane. The young bearded tradie gave the bandaged driver a blast with his horn and, grim-faced, pointed straight ahead.

I thought of telling him: Don’t assume human rationality or prudent behaviour. Maybe at some point we’ll always act with reason and decorum but that bright day hasn’t yet dawned.

I continued on to work, where I was assisting at an eleven o’clock funeral. Before the service my boss, the undertaker, warned me: there could be trouble. The deceased man had two families. He’d divorced years ago and then remarried; the two wives and their children did not get along. And now his will—excluding the children of his first marriage—had reignited hostilities. It’d be a tense service but hopefully there’d be nothing more than cold shoulders and dirty looks.

Every Quadrant features short stories by Australian writers.
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The two families sat on opposite sides of the hall. There were no greetings between them, no exchanges of commiseration. Fortunately, the short eulogies were not provocative and the civil celebrant prudently abbreviated the service. Less than twenty minutes elapsed between her welcoming the mourners and us wheeling the casket out of the hall. It felt almost indecently rushed. Relieved that there’d been no insults hurled or punches thrown, I drove the hearse away, taking the encoffined man to our crematorium.

In the afternoon I rested on my bed and read Pascal’s Pensees. I grew intrigued by his mystical “night of fire”—a strange, spiritual irruption that transformed his life. It was an experience foreign to me. I stopped reading to tidy myself for Tuesday’s five o’clock Mass. A handful of worshippers gathered, nearly always the same people. Often I was the only person under sixty.

I drove across town to Saint Fatima’s church, known locally as Fatty’s. I paused at an intersection, peering along the road before crossing lanes to turn right. A parked caravan limited my view but I launched forward, only to see a white four-wheel-drive ute powering towards me. The driver—startled—suddenly braked. It was the same bearded tradie I’d seen in the morning! He gave me an angry blast with his horn. He gestured with his hand to his head as if to say what the hell was I thinking?

Abashed, I mouthed sorry and gave an apologetic wave. This time I didn’t want to share my assessment of humanity’s foibles. He was shaking his head as I drove past.

I should get a Saint Christopher medallion. I needed protection! I was doubly cautious at the next intersection before turning in to the church.

We had a new priest, Father Chris, a younger man—mid-thirties—and Fatty’s was his first parish. He was refreshingly traditional, restoring the bells and smells and celebrating a reverent Mass. Each week on the noticeboard by the carpark entrance he’d display something thought-provoking: a quote from Pope Francis or some snappy sentence by Chesterton. Last week he’d had the first line of the Our Father. This week he had the second line: Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.

The Uniting Church across the road had a similar noticeboard. It read: Join us to celebrate Earth Week!

Inside Fatty’s I counted nine elderly worshippers scattered across the church that could hold two hundred. Father Chris told us it was the feast day of Saint Bonaventure. He elaborated: Bonaventure was a twelfth-century Franciscan who battled all his life with his sense of unworthiness. Twice asked to accept the office of bishop, he twice refused. Finally the Pope told him to accept, and he became a bishop and later a cardinal. Despite these offices Bonaventure insisted he was no more faithful—and no better—than any humble laundry-woman. He died, poisoned by opponents. Later, Bonaventure became the patron saint of bowel disorders.

Mass commenced after a reflective silence. As we intoned, I confess to Almighty God and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned in my thoughts and in my words … I smiled, remembering my disapproval of the daft driver at the roundabout. I was certainly no different—and no better—with my own driving lapses. Father Chris saw me grinning, but his training allowed him to continue unfazed.

After Mass, Father Chris spoke to me. “Please tell me you weren’t smiling during Mass because I had remnants of lunch on my face.”

“No, it was the egg on my face. I realised I’d done the same thing I deplored in someone else.”

“Ah, yes. Our comical hypocrisies. Charles Dickens and Jane Austen wrote whole novels about it,” Father Chris said. “Have a good evening.” He walked towards the parish office.

I noticed his freshly-cut short brown hair had a sprinkling of grey. He’d been with us three months. I hoped we weren’t causing him stress. Outwardly, at least, I thought we were a friendly, peaceful parish consisting mostly of retirees. But no doubt some hard trials and dark secrets had been confided to him—including families split over money or wills.

I headed home. Dickens and Austen: Father Chris rose in my estimation.

Once on the town’s main road, I slowed and muttered, “Not again!” Driving towards me was the tradie in his ute. I lived in a small coastal village, so seeing him once more wasn’t remarkable. I noticed he was looking down, with one hand on the steering wheel and the other hand out of sight: he was probably fiddling with his phone, reading or writing a text as he drove. Drifting from his lane—his eyes lowered, smiling and oblivious—he headed straight for me.

I tooted the horn and veered away. Looking up, startled, he swung left, noisily shifting the equipment on the ute’s tray. A twenty-litre plastic drum slid from his ute, hit the road and burst, splattering crimson liquid across my lane. I had no time to react, going straight through the spill as if heedless of a flattened pedestrian’s blood. The tradie quickly pulled over and the last I saw before turning a corner he was running across the road to recover the shattered drum.

Who’s the dopey driver now? I exulted.

The result was a besmirched stretch of bitumen, but it could’ve been a nasty smash-up. I didn’t fancy dying in a head-on collision, especially a kilometre from my home. I thought, our hypocrisies aren’t so funny when they maim or kill us, or injure someone innocent.

“For all of us—me included—it’s a full-time job not being a blockhead,” I heard myself say, and that shocking admission hit my brain like a car crash. I considered myself smart and polite, at least I tried to be—more so than many people, anyway. “No,” my voice said again. “Comparing yourself with other people doesn’t establish anything. Don’t hide behind your mediocrity. Confess it!”

My stomach churned as if getting ready to vomit—just to spite me. My breathing slowed. My ribs felt sore from an unexpected interior wrench. My own follies and unkind acts leapt from memory. Recent fantasies—ridiculous and narcissistic—became grotesque scenes in an absurdist play. I knew my life was a struggle, which I frequently lost, to maintain some basic habits of decency and reason. Now I was nailed with the certain knowledge that in my mortality I would never be free of hypocrisy or vanity.

“Why do you think we were taught to pray, Thy kingdom come?” my voice rose again. I sensed my larynx had finally connected to a hidden recess where my deeper, truer self waited for the chance to assert itself and this time wouldn’t tolerate lame answers. I thought and replied out loud. “Because this world will never change—permanently—for the better otherwise. Not if it’s left up to us. It’s hard work keeping my own life from grubby disorder.”

Unsure what I was admitting, sensing a scary but exciting liberation—a clarifying shift in my vision of myself and the world—I stared ahead. It was as if some lens in my mind had clicked into focus: what was blurry was now clear.

The road ahead blazed with shafts of glare and fierce glints from the low summer sun: an immense purging incineration that gazed at the world and burned, barely restrained, over forest hilltops and purple-hued gullies. I gripped the steering wheel afresh with my trembling humble hands and drove home.

The tradie’s crimson sludge marked the road for years afterwards.      

Gary Furnell, who lives in coastal New South Wales, wrote on Machiavelli in the March 2023 issue. His most recent story, “The Pelicans Descending”, appeared in December 2022.