Entertaining Dr Murdock

Spectator, The, Jun 10, 2000 by Wakefield, Mary

Some submerged unconscious mechanism creaked slowly into life and started unleashing emotions over which I had no control. I felt myself shaking, and then an irresistible desire to burst into tears. I could feel the congregation willing me to break down.

So I did. I cried. I couldn't help it. And, as I bawled, Mike and the congregation unwound their tentacles and fell away, replete. The electric organ started up its pious end-of-service wail, and I staggered back down the aisle, my head empty of all thoughts except `car' and `cigarette'.

Before I reached either of these, a woman I knew from the Wisdom Center accounts office stepped into my path. She took my hand and pressed into it something papery. `Can I just sow a seed into your anointed life?' Then another woman and an old couple appeared behind her. `We'd like to be a part of your anointing.' More paper. By the time I'd fought through the crowd and out of the double doors, I was clutching about $300 in cash.

The series of thoughts I had next still baffles me. I start up the car and pull out into the hot night. I think, very slowly, `So it's true, then. There is a God and he's into money.'

Thank God it didn't last. As I swung past the place where Mike's deluded admirer sat waiting in her dusty white dress, clinging on to her dreams for all she was worth, my brain suddenly switched back on. What could I have been thinking? Was it just too many hours of chanting? The shock of feeling singled out?

My left hand was still buried in crumpled notes. Without pausing, I grabbed a handful, wound down the window and stuffed them out into the rushing dark. And although I kicked myself later, scrabbling for petrol money under the seats, that handful was followed by the rest, poked through the narrow slit between window and door, snatched away by the slipstream, fluttering back down the road to the Wisdom Center.