Pastor X

As soon as he had extricated himself from the last attendant who had something to say to him, Pastor X got into his Prado and eased out of the Church compound. Once on the highway, he depressed the accelerator and cruised home. After parking the machine, he went straight to the bedroom. He needed to make some calls in total seclusion. First to the bank manager whose number he now had, then to his friends abroad. He was about to fulfill his lifelong quest. Unique and wonderful, the emissions made by big money, for everything is relative!

  He stood at the window, looking out as he rang the manager.

  ‘You have insufficient credit to make this call,’ came the message from the service provider.

  He had bought airtime re-charge cards but had forgotten to recharge. He remedied that by keying in the number on the card. The card could not be found. He keyed the number again this time very carefully. He was lucky. He rang the manager. Line engaged. He redialed. Once again the line was engaged. He waited for a minute or two and redialed.

  ‘The number you have dialed is not available at the moment. Please try again later.’

  He tried. ‘The number you have dialed is busy now.’

  “Nonsense!” he muttered, as his anxiety and his temper rose. He redialed.

  ‘The number you have dialed is not reachable.’

  He redialed.

  ‘The number you have dialed is wrong.’ Automatic redial five seconds later was met with, ‘The number you have dialed does not exist. Please check the number and redial.’

  He threw the phone on the bed, paced the room for a while, and then threw himself on the bed beside the phone. He stared blankly at the ceiling. Then, slowly his hand drifted towards the phone. This time he pressed the Contacts button and scrolled down until he found the manager’s name. He pressed the dial key.

  ‘The subscriber you have dialed is not reachable.’

  ‘Relax,’ he muttered. He tried to relax- in vain. Lord, give me even the tiniest pinch of luck. He redialed.

  ‘The number you have dialed is barred from incoming calls!’

  “Impossible,” he shouted. He redialed furiously. The phone went dead. In his excitement he had forgotten to charge the phone the previous night. In the morning, he had taken the charger with him to church, with the intention of charging the phone during the church service. He had even taken out the charger and plugged it in. Why did he not follow that up to its logical conclusion? Why did someone call him at that very moment causing him to forget to put the phone on the charger?

  “My God,” he exclaimed, as it dawned on him that the charger was still in the church vestry.

  He went to the sitting room and almost lifted the landline phone receiver. With the advent of the cell phone, it had been relegated to a relic of history. A modern man did not want to clutter his way of life with relics of this or that. He had left behind the bulky and inconvenient VCD, the analogue TV and the CDMA modem for internet.

  Now he could boast of a Home Theater, HD Flat screen TV and internet-able mobile phone. Soon there would be more gadgets, like iPod and iPad, to aid him in his busy life’s journey. If only he could get to the UK, to Europe and eventually to the USA. People would know he was a man with a calling, a mission to serve and to prosper. His oratory, his ability to ‘talk’ to people’s pockets, people’s bank accounts so that money flowed to his church was nothing short of phenomenal. His charm kept them coming for more, leaving more and more funds for the work of the church. If only he could go overseas! There they had real money; real dollars, Euros, and pounds sterling. He would come back not just loaded but almost overloaded. That is where Switzerland came in. The Swiss banks knew how to protect a man’s wealth and how to dispense in accordance with his wishes.

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll buy two more lines and, of course, two phones,’ he promised himself. ‘No; maybe one dual-Sim card phone. I need at least two cell phones.’

  But first he had to deal with the present predicament. He could rush to town and buy a new charger or proceed to his Church and retrieve the old one. He had recently fired his house help for lying to him.

  “I pay you to lie for me,” he had told him, “not to lie to me.”

  Maybe they- whoever they were- were paying him better.

  He chose the Church; after all it was a Sunday and finding a charger in town would not be easy. He changed from the formal Sunday attire into something casual, white slacks and shirt to match. Out he went. He got into his Prado and crunched in the gears. He drove determinedly towards his destination.

  The central business district was almost deserted. Even the zone where young men did brisk business selling used cell phones was deserted. He joined the road that passed by his church and on to the high-density suburbs beyond. He gunned down that road like a maniac, until he saw a police patrol car ahead of him. Then he slowed down to ninety kilometers an hour. Instinctively he felt his left pocket, just to make sure he had the small bunch of keys. It was not there. He checked the other pocket. Not there either. He opened the glove box. Nothing there! He had left the keys at home in the clothes that he had donned for Church service! He slammed on the brakes, bumped over the kerb onto the shoulder and stopped on the grass verge on the left side. He was about to make a u-turn but realized he was on a dual carriage way. He would have to drive on up to the robots and negotiate his way to the other side and back to town and beyond- to his house in the low-density northern suburbs.

  He quickly rejoined the fairly low Sunday afternoon traffic and changed to the inner lane that would permit him to turn at the robots and back towards town. But as he drove on he realized that some passing motorists were hooting to draw his attention to something. One of them actually rolled down his window and pointed to the rear tyre while shouting something Pastor X could not hear. He tugged at the steering wheel and immediately realized it was a puncture. He switched on the hazard lights and slowed down to a stop almost on the island separating the carriages, metres away from the robots. He went out to check. The rear-left tyre was losing pressure rapidly. The nearest petrol station lay over a kilometer away behind him. He removed his jacket, put it on the back seat and rolled up his sleeves. Then he opened the boot and took out the jack and wheel spanner. Awhile later, the troublesome wheel was out. He gave it a quick inspection. A nail had punctured it, presumably when he went over the kerb, onto the grass verge. He put the wheel under the vehicle near the jack as a precaution- something he had come to appreciate.

  He went back to the boot and took out the spare wheel. The moment it touched the ground he knew or feared it would be flat. That is exactly what he established upon pressing his foot on it. Apparently, it had developed a slow leak through the valve, or so he assumed. It had been like that for maybe the whole week or two weeks even. Remember his car was a Toyota Prado barely a year old. His other car was naturally a Mercedes Benz Sports. He considered it a wee bit immoral to go to church in such a car. The elevation was insufficient and the psychological effect it would have on the congregation was inestimably inferior. He hoped it would not be misconstrued as ostentatious exhibitionism but as a measure of the bounty that awaited all true believers, who dutifully ‘coughed’ the requisite tithe. While the church faithful struggled to keep the church leadership on this high pedestal, it did not question the practice or doubt the importance of keeping up appearances. After all, the Prado had the church name pasted on its door. It was not the Pastor’s Prado, but ‘our’ Prado, the faithful would say. It was a marketing or advertising window for the Church and that was good enough. Bless you.

  That Sunday afternoon, the people’s Prado stood there on a major highway, near the robots, broken down, with Pastor X in rolled-up sleeves and two flat tyres. Looking like he had been forsaken by luck or God or both, he stood there beside the Prado staring blankly at the tyre. And occasionally at the blue ocean above, not a solitary cloud up there.

  Presently, a passerby stopped to inquire if all were well. ‘Was it not clear enough,’ said the look on Pastor X’s eyes.
The passerby moved on. Then an idea entered the pastor’s head.

  “Hey, brother,” he called out to the man. “Excuse me.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m in a proper fix.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said the passerby, as he approached the motorist. “How can I help?”

  “The tyres- both are flat,” he said, pointing.

  “Don’t you have a spare wheel?”

  “This is the spare wheel; both are flat, as I said.”

  “Oh, so the one on the other side is ok?”

  “I guess so.”

  The man went round and gave it a quick check.

  “Sure; this one is fine. Do you have a pump? I could pump the pressure up and then we drive to the petrol station, down the road, for them to fix it properly.”

  “I do not have a pump.”

  It sounded like the song- There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza.

  “Then you have to hike a lift or go by kombi to the garage. I could guard the car for you until you get back,” he said, smiling.

  “Would it be too much to ask if I sent you to the garage?”

  “Well, eh, no. It’s okay, but it means I’ll be late for my appointment.”

  “I’ll do something to remedy that,” said Pastor X, smiling back- knowingly. “What’s your name?”

  “Tendai.”

  “Are you a Christian, Tendai?”

  “Oh, yes. My baptism name is Gladwell.”

  “Alright, Gladwell. I’m Pastor X.”

  “Oh, really? Glad to meet you in person.”

  He gave Gladwell fare and enough money for fixing the tyre. The latter expertly spun the wheel across the road, waved down a kombi and left.

  Pastor X took the wheel spanner, got into the Prado, reclined the seat and lay back. At least that was one problem solved, he reflected. ‘I don’t have to push tyres to a petrol station,’ he muttered. ‘Not to mention the indignity of carrying the tyres into and out of kombis.’

  Frustrated, exhausted and yet a bit relieved, he lay there, unable to think. He was about to fall asleep, and would almost certainly have done so, when he heard a noise followed by a sharp ‘thump’ as if all wheels had suddenly come off Prado. His not-inconsiderable weight- for he was a chunky bloke, had destabilized the jack and it had given way. Prado was now resting on the rim of the deflated tyre.

  In a moment, he was outside bending over the damaged jack and the dented belly of his beloved Prado. Did they make them out of recycled beer cans?

  “Foolish me,” he whispered.

  He took out his cell phone to check the time, only to put it back quickly. The battery was down: he knew that, didn’t he? He let out the greatest yawn of his life. What a waste of precious time, he thought as he looked at a passing plane. Was it going to Europe? The sun was still struggling to feed the world now in dire need of great quantities of energy. Traffic had increased three-fold and was still growing. He counted not less than ten sixty-foot container trucks going into town from South Africa and three Prados following his lead, as it were. Many inconsequential vehicles passed, too.

  Chapter 3- Projects