Gosh, I’ve only been here a few weeks! If they’re asking me to mentor someone, they must be really overloaded with new fish! Pete leans back and, while directing his eyes at Andy, tries to build up a picture of Alex using only his peripheral vision. The wallflower is braced against the side of the filing cabinet. Pallid skin, dark hair, the remains of what must have been a hideously embarrassing adolescent acne attack barely visible on his jawline. If he had better fashion sense he could make a pretty run-of-the-mill goth, but he’s dressed head to toe in M&S office weeds, and hasn’t even discovered the if-everything-you-wear-is-black-it-always-matches trick. He’s seen the type before—they’re all too common on Divinity degree courses: otherworldly, head stuck in a cloud of theory and trainer laces tangled together at ground level. Someone ought to take him in hand, but Pete is brutally aware that with a parish to get back to and the responsibilities of impending fatherhood he just doesn’t have the spare energy for the job. “That’s interesting,” he says to Andy. “What does the mentoring job entail?”

“Well, you’ve been finding your way around the department for the past month but you’re new enough that the frustrating and disorienting stuff is still fresh in your memory, so I was hoping you might be better able to build a rapport with Alex, here. You’re still learning, too, so perhaps if you approach it as a team, with myself and Bob to fall back on . . .” Andy trails off, his pitch delivered, and waits expectantly.

Well, this might not be so bad. Pete looks directly at Alex. “What do you think, Alex? Are you happy to share a web design and public relations outreach job with a vicar?”

Alex stares at him for precisely three seconds, then says: “I’m a vampire.”

As non sequiturs go Pete has heard worse. In parish work you periodically have to deal with young, slightly alienated gay teens whose overly concerned parents drag them in for a talking-to by the vicar—there’s something strange about Harry. Part of Pete’s job (as he sees it) is to talk them down from the ramparts of militant anti-Christianism, explain that no, the entire Church does not hate them, and then point them at the nearest LGBT youth counseling service. With luck, in a few years’ time they’ll be happy and stable, and remember you when the last of the reactionary ’phobes have finally flounced out of the General Synod.