BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
He is seventy-seven, and he has never missed a Sunday. Let that land. He locks the church at 5:45, unlocks it at 6:00, and in the fifteen minutes between, fifteen minutes of silence, of solitude, of the only intimacy he has ever truly wanted, he polishes the brass as though God keeps score in microns. His name is Geoffrey Thistlethwaite, which he does not so much offer as lay upon you like a damp vestment you did not ask to hold. He wears a dark jumper from Edinburgh Wool, clean trainers, and a bespectacled face that has not so much as twitched since Vatican II. The Council, he means. The great betrayal. He was twelve, and he has never forgiven the Church for moving his chair.
Every morning, he steps over the man in the porch. Not around. Over. One foot, then the other, a movement so practised it has become liturgical, ranked somewhere between the genuflection and the sign of peace. He does not look down. Looking down would require seeing, and seeing would require the one thing Geoffrey has spent seventy-seven years learning to avoid: adjacency to inconvenience.
Inconvenience is the sin against order. Order is the only morality he has ever understood.
The man has been there since November. His name is not Geoffrey. His name is irrelevant. He sleeps on cardboard, owns one shoe, and has not eaten in thirty hours. His face is the colour of a used bandage. His hands shake from something that is not cold. Geoffrey carries a missal, a key ring, and a small vial of holy water for emergencies. He wears sandals in the summer, cork-bed, brutalist, revealing toes like pale grubs, and one of six sets of trainers in the winter, the same Nike model since 1998, grey cloth held together by prayer and habit. Around his neck, St. Francis beads, Franciscan, third order, the knots rubbed smooth by forty years of anxious fingers. The beads sit just above his belly, which is soft and round and filled with custard creams, Tunnock’s tea cakes, and the quiet self-congratulation of a man who has never missed a Friday abstinence except when a bacon butty from Greggs called to him from the warm side of the counter, or when a pepperoni pizza arrived at the wrong house and he ate it anyway because throwing it away would have been waste, and waste is a sin against order, whereas gluttony is merely a venial whisper he can polish away before Saturday confession. He has a dispensation for everything, you understand. He issues them to himself in the same locked drawer where he keeps that tablet. The belly does not judge. The belly only receives. It is the most theologically honest part of him.
He defines an emergency as a layperson touching the chalice. He defines an emergency as a a hole in the offering basket. The man in the porch defines an emergency as frostbite, as wet socks in December, as the moment you realise your only living relative has changed her phone number. They do not discuss this. They have never discussed anything.
Geoffrey believes he could be the most Christian person in the building. This is not arrogance, you understand; it is diagnosis. He arrives earliest. He stays latest. He complains loudest, though only in a whisper, and only to the tabernacle, which, unlike his wife, cannot answer back. He knows the rubrics. He thinks he knows the Latin, though his pronunciation is a crime against the Venerable Bede and his vocabulary tops out at mea culpa. He knows the precise fold of the corporal, the correct pressure for extinguishing a sanctuary candle, thirteen newtons, no more, and the name of every pope since Pius IX, including the antipopes, because Geoffrey collects schisms the way other men collect stamps. He does not know the man’s name. He does not want to know. To know would be to act, and to act would be to disrupt the schedule, and the schedule is sacred. The man is not.
Now. The private life. You did not ask for it, but you must hear it, because it is the key to the whole locked room.
Geoffrey Thistlethwaite, sacristan, daily communicant, wearer of Franciscan beads, has a penchant for cheap lager and hard porn. Not the soft-focus marital variety. The loud, algorithmic, window-shattering kind. The kind with titles that would make a dockworker cross himself. He drinks three cans of Carlsberg Special Brew every evening, the purple can, the tramp’s champagne, the official lager of the lonely middle-class sinner, and watches, on that tablet he keeps in the locked drawer beside his 1962 Missal, videos that would cause his beloved Pius X to rise from his tomb and walk backwards into the Tiber. He does this after locking the church. He does this before Compline. He does this with the same fastidiousness he applies to the purificators: a ritual, a habit, a small death repeated until it feels like life.
He justifies it, naturally. He is not proud of it. But he has constructed a theology of Savilian loopholes so elaborate that it would make a Jesuit weep with admiration. The flesh is weak. The spirit is willing. He goes to confession every Saturday, the same sins, the same priest, the same murmured penance of three Hail Marys and a firm purpose of amendment that lasts approximately until the church door closes. He has confessed the lager forty-seven times. He has not once confessed the pornography. Nor has he ever confessed the man in the porch. It has never occurred to him that the three categories might be connected by a single, slender, rotting thread.
He receives communion daily. On the tongue. Kneeling. From the priest alone, never, ever from a layperson, never, ever in the hand, because that would be a sacrilege, unlike the tablet in the drawer, which is simply a weakness. Then he steps over the man again on his way out.
Same feet. Same sandals or trainers, depending on the season. Same face, unmoved. Same silence, undisturbed.
The Gospel says, I was hungry and you gave me no food. Geoffrey says the sanctuary candle was burning unevenly. The Gospel says, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink. Geoffrey says the purificator had a loose thread. The Gospel says, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me. Geoffrey says the wine was too bold, the thurible swung like a common garden incense burner, and the extraordinary minister had acrylic nails. The Gospel says, Depart from me, I never knew you. Geoffrey will be surprised by this. Genuinely, clinically, completely surprised. He will blink in the unforgiving light and pat his beads for comfort and wonder where it all went wrong, because he kept the schedule, he polished the brass, he never missed a Sunday.
The man in the porch will not be there. He will be elsewhere. Warm. Finally seen. Sitting with the HIV-deceased Cambodian hookers and the tax collectors and the people who never learnt the correct pressure for extinguishing a candle. Geoffrey will stand alone, clean, pressed, fragrant with beeswax and self-regard, justified in his own eyes. And those, of course, are the only eyes that matter. They have always been the only eyes that matter. Which is the whole problem. That is the whole, quiet, devastating, howlingly funny problem.
The Lord did not require purificators. The Lord required a hand reaching down. And Geoffrey Thistlethwaite has not reached for anything but the remote control, another can of Special Brew, and his miserable pindick in a very long time.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024) and The Flaw (2024).