I Am The Local Atheist by Warwick Stubbs

never
heard of it before. I looked over at Lucas but he was slouched
across the couch with his head hanging off the sofa arm, eyes
closed and his mouth on the verge of sucking in a fly that was
hovering around him. The leaflet made it into my fingers and was
gently pulled out of the clear plastic socket it sat in.
    Christie walked out of her office looking like a zombie – arms
hanging low, head slung back and mouth open in an exaggerated moan.
I wondered if Lucas was eventually going to rise from his slumber
looking like this. I also wondered if I had suddenly stepped into a
scene from Resident
Evil .
    “ Why David? Why?”
    “ What?”
    She raised her
hands. “What is so hard about getting an extension lead, installing
it in the server, feeding it through a couple of walls and then
connecting it to my computer?”
    “ Ummm…”
    “ Exactly! Useless!” She looked down at the leaflet in my hand.
“Everything okay?”
    “ Yeah, sure. Just never heard of this Bridge thing
before.”
    “ Oh. It’s for people with substance abuse problems. They work
with clients to bring about a new attitude to how they approach
life. They work with families as well as single people, but it’s
all designed to try to encourage the client to approach their
entire life with a different attitude, one that obviously doesn’t
rely on alcohol and drugs.”
    “ Right. Basically the AA?”
    “ Yeah, but designed on trying to create a stronger focus on the
family as a means of helping to beat the abuse. It’s not just about
going straight, because so many family problems are caused by
substance abuse, but about working with the client to improve
family relationships while being straight.”
    I nodded my
head and put the leaflet back where I found it.
    “ You can keep it if you like. They’re free.”
    “ No I’m okay.” I coughed feeling awkward.
    Alice walked
out of her office and said “I need to go over to the men’s hostel
to sort some of their stuff and decide whether or not any of it
should go to the Family Store. Would you like to come along, since
you haven’t been there yet?”
    “ Oooh, yes please!” Christie clasped her hands together. “Can
David come along as well? Please?”
    She hadn’t
even asked me if I wanted to come.
    Alice looked
at me with an understanding grin. “Sure.”
    I didn’t
understand anything. It was like a completely silent conversation
had passed between them so quickly that it had passed right over my
head without me even knowing.
    We all looked
over to the guy slouched all over the couch. The fly couldn’t make
up its mind where to land on him.
    “ Should we wake this guy or leave him here?”
    The fly
finally decided to land on his nose. Lucas shook his head
violently, arms sprung upwards as his body lurched forward. He sat
up and looked at us.
    “ Well,” said Alice. “I guess God wants Lucas to come with
us.”
    “ What?”
     
    I was finding
that I didn’t like Alice much. She seemed nice, but I always got
the feeling that she was hiding something, some acquired knowledge
that amused her. Christie had that laidback nature about her, ready
to make a joke of anything, but Alice, even though she often looked
for a good sarcastic reply, seemed to be looking more to confirm
her own suspicions about the world. It was annoying. Even more so
when that look was turned towards me.
    The men’s
hostel was an old villa that had been purposely built to contain
large numbers, almost like one of those old psychiatric wards you
see in movies set in the 1940s: crumbling wallpaper, mould growing
around the door frames, and dark and dingy corners where patients
obsessed with the night hang out on a consistent basis demanding
their food and meds be brought to them for fear that light might
singe them into oblivion if they took two steps closer to the rays
reflecting through the windows.
    Alice said The Salvation Army struggled to find funding to do
even minimal repairs on it – “the budget is that