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.I wipe my face, lick at the blood.It has released its sphincter and bladder.Piss and shit run down its legs, drip onto the hotel carpet.There is laughter in the room, a boy’s loud joyous exhilarated laughter.There is a box in the corner; light dances and flickers across a screen.For a moment I stare, transfixed.Light dances from it, sounds come from within it, patterns forming patterns, sound echoing sound.Elated, I walk over to the bed.I am not yet satisfied.There is more to be had.The other creature on the bed is asleep, snoring.I lift its head, and for a moment the eyes flick open, there is rage there, but my teeth sink into its face and the eyes disappear forever.I pull away skin and muscle and bone and the blood gushes onto my face and neck and as it pours over me I can taste Creation but almost immediately I feel virile life being extinguished and this blood too is spent.I throw the carcass off the bed and lie down on the drenched silk sheets.As I fall into calm sleep, I hear the jumble of confused electric noise coming off the box in the far corner of the room; I am aware of the insistent humming of the bedside lamp above me; I can hear the dripping of the blood as it slides down the walls and falls in drops onto the carpet; the last sound I hear before blessed sleep is the violent, delighted laughter of the boy as he comes to lie next to me, wrapping his legs and arms around me.—EVERY CHRISTMAS THE Jews would steal a Christian toddler, put it in a barrel, still alive, run knives between the slats, and drain the child of its blood.Then they’d drink it.That’s the first thing I ever got told about the Jews.—I can’t believe Rebecca told you that shit.—I must have been about five when she told me.She made it sound like a fairytale …—… pretty fucked-up fairytale …—… I know, I know.Dad told her off when he heard her talking about that sort of stuff.He told us it was uneducated peasant bullshit.He sat me down and gave me a history lesson.He explained where the Jews came from, told us that the Bible was their history, told us about the Holocaust.He even explained what the Ashkenazi and the Sephardim were.Being Dad, of course, he put his own Marxist spin on it.He always said that the tragedy of the Holocaust was that the Nazis destroyed the Jewish proletariat.And he told us that the Bible was all crap and not to believe in any religion.—He was never religious?—Maybe when he was a kid.But, nah, he hated religion.His religion was communism.And heroin.—My Mum hated religion too.Typical Aussie, she taught me jack-shit.I had to go to school before I heard about Jesus.I believed in the Easter Bunny but I hadn’t heard of Jesus.—So how was she when you became a Christian?—I was never a Christian.—I thought you were …—… I was fascinated by religion; I read the Bible because Steve made me.I’m glad he did.It made me fall in love with reading history.I know, that’s not very Aussie of me.But I hardly knew any Christians.Just Steve and some of the kids at school.I knew the Catholics, the Orthodox, the Muslims.But they didn’t give a fuck about religion except for some fasting at Ramadan or Easter.That was all religion was for them.—I know exactly what you mean.It’s all ritual, no theology.When I got older I yelled at Mum, said: Your bloody Jesus was a Jew, how could you tell me the things you did? He was a Jew.—He wasn’t.—He was.—Listen to me.He was born a Jew but he came to earth to announce a new Covenant, to replace the old Covenant between Moses and God.—Now you do sound like a Christian.—I just fucking hate that liberal bullshit that claims we’re all brothers, that it’s all the same religion …—…’s the same bloody God …—Listen, all I’m saying is that if you’re a Jew, you claim to be a descendant of the twelve tribes of Israel.Your law is the law of Moses.You are the Chosen People.That’s it.Your God doesn’t give a fuck about anyone else.It’s all there in the Torah.If you’re Christian you believe in the resurrection of Christ, the Trinity and the new Covenant.If you’re Muslim then Mohammed was God’s last Prophet and you submit to the word of God as written in the Qu’ran.They are not the same thing.I can’t stand New Age Christian preachers trying to humanise the Bible.I can’t stand secular American Jews brandishing their copies of the Constitution as equivalent to Holy Writ and thinking they can be both Jewish and non-believers.Fucking bullshit.At least the Muslims are bloody honest.You can’t be democratic and monotheistic.Choose.It’s one or the other.—I disagree.That’s too hard, much too hard.You can be ecumenical.You can have a rabbi, a priest, a mullah …—… they go into a bar …—… You can have them get together, acknowledge differences but also accept similarities.Find common ground.Otherwise you are talking perpetual war.I can’t agree with you.—Listen, your mum didn’t make that up about the Jews, not the blood libel.It’s a fact.It’s in the Gospels, I can’t fucking remember exactly where, I think it’s in Matthew.The Jews answered Pontius Pilate: let His blood be on us and our children.If you’re a Christian, you have to accept that obscenity as fact.Your dad was wrong.Your mother wasn’t speaking as an illiterate peasant but as a believer.That’s the source of blood libel and I don’t give a fuck how many bourgeois theologians attempt to explain it away by theorising about the politics of the early Church and the Roman state.What are you? What do you believe? Do you believe that the Jews killed Christ? Or do you believe that the Jews are God’s Chosen People and his only people? Or do you submit to the word of God as revealed in the Qu’ran and unless you do you are doomed to Hell? This might offend your fucking democratic wishy-washy liberal pieties, but religion is war.—Why are you so angry?—Because people are cowards.—Who came first? Abraham or Moses?—Jesus Christ, I can’t believe this.And you’re the one who went to fucking university.—They don’t teach religion at university.—They should.—Why?—It’s history, it’s politics.—You sound like a bloody fundamentalist.Bullshit.God is dead.That’s what you learn at university.—Right, He’s dead, is He? Go ask Khadijah and Bilal next door.Go ask your mum.Go ask the fucking Israelis and the Palestinians or the Hindus and the Pakistanis if God is dead [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]