Good Omens

“Tea, please,” said Mr. Young.

“My word, you really have gone native, haven’t you,” said Sister Mary gaily, as she bustled out.

Mr. Young, left alone with one sleeping wife and two sleeping babies, sagged onto a chair. Yes, it must be all that getting up early and kneeling and so on. Good people, of course, but not entirely compost mentis. He’d seen a Ken Russell film once. There had been nuns in it. There didn’t seem to be any of that sort of thing going on, but no smoke without fire and so on. …

He sighed.

It was then that Baby A awoke, and settled down to a really good wail.

Mr. Young hadn’t had to quiet a screaming baby for years. He’d never been much good at it to start with. He’d always respected Sir Winston Churchill, and patting small versions of him on the bottom had always seemed ungracious.

“Welcome to the world,” he said wearily. “You get used to it after a while.”

The baby shut its mouth and glared at him as if he were a recalcitrant general.

Sister Mary chose that moment to come in with the tea. Satanist or not, she’d also found a plate and arranged some iced biscuits on it. They were the sort you only ever get at the bottom of certain teatime assortments. Mr. Young’s was the same pink as a surgical appliance, and had a snowman picked out on it in white icing.

“I don’t expect you normally have these,” she said. “They’re what you call cookies. We call them biscuits.”

Mr. Young had just opened his mouth to explain that, yes, so did he, and so did people even in Luton, when another nun rushed in, breathless.

She looked at Sister Mary, realized that Mr. Young had never seen the inside of a pentagram, and confined herself to pointing at Baby A and winking.

Sister Mary nodded and winke

d back.

The nun wheeled the baby out.

As methods of human communication go, a wink is quite versatile. You can say a lot with a wink. For example, the new nun’s wink said:

Where the Hell have you been? Baby B has been born, we’re ready to make the switch, and here’s you in the wrong room with the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness, drinking tea. Do you realize I’ve nearly been shot?

And, as far as she was concerned, Sister Mary’s answering wink meant: Here’s the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness, and I can’t talk now because there’s this outsider here.

Whereas Sister Mary, on the other hand, had thought that the orderly’s wink was more on the lines of:

Well done, Sister Mary—switched over the babies all by herself. Now indicate to me the superfluous child and I shall remove it and let you get on with your tea with his Royal Excellency the American Culture.

And therefore her own wink had meant:

There you go, dearie; that’s Baby B, now take him away and leave me to chat to his Excellency. I’ve always wanted to ask him why they have those tall buildings with all the mirrors on them.

The subtleties of all this were quite lost on Mr. Young, who was extremely embarrassed at all this clandestine affection and was thinking: That Mr. Russell, he knew what he was talking about, and no mistake.

Sister Mary’s error might have been noticed by the other nun had not she herself been severely rattled by the Secret Service men in Mrs. Dowling’s room, who kept looking at her with growing unease. This was because they had been trained to react in a certain way to people in long flowing robes and long flowing headdresses, and were currently suffering from a conflict of signals. Humans suffering from a conflict of signals aren’t the best people to be holding guns, especially when they’ve just witnessed a natural childbirth, which definitely looked an un-American way of bringing new citizens into the world. Also, they’d heard that there were missals in the building.

Mrs. Young stirred.

“Have you picked a name for him yet?” said Sister Mary archly.

“Hmm?” said Mr. Young. “Oh. No, not really. If it was a girl it would have been Lucinda after my mother. Or Germaine. That was Deirdre’s choice.”

“Wormwood’s a nice name,” said the nun, remembering her classics. “Or Damien. Damien’s very popular.”

ANATHEMA DEVICE—her mother, who was not a great student of religious matters, happened to read the word one day and thought it was a lovely name for a girl—was eight and a half years old, and she was reading The Book, under the bedclothes, with a torch.

Other children learned to read on basic primers with colored pictures of apples, balls, cockroaches, and so forth. Not the Device family. Anathema had learned to read from The Book.