Free Beautiful Child by David Menon

of me when I heard Reagan and Thatcher go on about the free world being anywhere that wasn’t communist. They were so ideologically blind. Thousands of people simply disappeared off the streets of those countries during that awful, dark time and yet they call that freedom? Torture and repression, the rape of women, it was all part of the way those countries operated and the Vatican sucked up to every one of the administrations because they were all devoutly Catholic. It turned a blind eye because Pope John Paul II had been brought up in communist Poland and had a view of the world coloured by those experiences. But he should’ve seen beyond that and that’s when I stopped believing in papal infallibility.’
    ‘I’m glad there are no hidden microphones in this room,’ joked Phillip, ‘but where did the priests come in?’
    ‘They were a group of priests who’d administered to the poor of Latin America for decades and were tired of the injustice of never seeing people’s lives improve. They wanted the poor to be liberated from the land owners who kept them in poverty but who were in league with the dictatorships. So it brought the priests into conflict with the dictatorships who then turned to the Vatican for help. The Pope insisted that the priests stopped preaching their word of liberation for the poor and stuck instead to the official teachings of the church. Then along comes the Sandinista administration in Nicaragua and things really kicked off. They were a left wing party that took a lot from the liberation theology priests and they were democratically elected by the people. But of course, they wanted liberation from poverty for the people so Washington and the Vatican set themselves against them and made life as difficult as it could for them.’
    ‘And all because they wanted justice for their people.’
    ‘Precisely,’ said Brendan, ‘but the church isn’t interested in justice, Phillip. It just craves obedience. It was during this time that the Reagan administration recognised the Holy See as a nation state, thus giving the Vatican the same recognition status as any other nation state even though you and I both know that it’s no more the size of a park and nobody actually lives there, not even the Pope himself. But as a nation state it carries a great deal of influence and that’s what the Reagan administration wanted in it’s support of anything that wasn’t communist, whether democratically elected or not. It’s been a grave sin against the whole of mankind, Phillip.’
    ‘So what are we doing here?’
    ‘Because in our own small way we can bring a little Heaven into the lives of our flock. We can advise them as a compassionate Jesus would and not as some white-robed idiot in a dark version of Disneyland would.’
    ‘You’ve given me a great idea for the sermon tomorrow.’
    ‘Don’t get yourself into any bother now,’ Brendan advised, ‘We need to keep free thinkers like you, Phillip.’
    ‘Don’t worry, Brendan,’ said Phillip, ‘I’ll put a cloak around my words.’
    *
    Susie Schofield was sitting with her fiancé Angus having a sandwich lunch in her office at Schofield Caravan Parks headquarters. The company didn’t have a grand suite of offices and didn’t need one. They occupied half of the second floor of a two storey office block just a stone’s throw from Manchester University on the Oxford Road going south out of the city. Susie had forty staff to help her deliver the company’s objectives and got really pissed off with journalists who turned up to interview her and who only wanted to approach things from the perspective of her being a woman. Did she do anything differently from a man? How would she know? She’d never been one. She was her father’s daughter and had inherited much of his character but she ran the business her way. Some of the staff liked her and some of them didn’t, although she would say that she had more trouble from other women than from her