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frozen and shocked. I dig my fingernails hard into Asunción’s skin— don’t stop just because she’s a woman – and get her to release the tissue.
    “Joe!” Malachi rips his microphone off his lapel. “Joe!” He puts a hand on my arm, so close I can smell his face powder. He tries to turn us away so our backs are to the audience and he can talk confidentially. He’s sweating now. Looking at what’s in my fist and sweating. “Leave the stage now, Joe,” he goes, licking his lips and putting his fingers out, itching to grab the tissue off me. “Give me the tumour and leave the stage. Whatever your problem I’ll speak to you off stage. Just give me the—‘
    He makes a move for my hand but I shake him off. ‘ Listen, you little shit ,“ I hiss. I turn and put my face close to his. ”I’d like to kill you. If I could get away with it, I’d kill you. Remember that.“
    And that’s it. I’m off, striding out of the hall with my prize, joined by Finn in the aisle. Outraged little black women hit us with their navy blue handbags as we go.
     
     
    The tumour turns out to be a putrefying chicken liver. “Probably been left to rot for a coupla days,” says the Environment Department in Santa Fe. “Where the hell did you boys get this little beauty?” It’s such a great story I’m over the fucking moon. We’ve got him. Pastor Dove is ours.
    But funny how life goes, isn’t it? because Finn, the one who started the Albuquerque crusade, the one who was going to be a journalist, suddenly goes cold on it. He loses his heart to some girl he’s met in a tequila bar, follows her home to Sausalito, California, and spends the next couple of years as a surfer dude. He gets himself sun damage and a phoney West Coast accent. When he comes back to the UK he publishes a surf mag for a while and ends up a literary agent in London. Turns out I’m the only one with a hard-on for getting Pastor Malachi Dove knobbed.
    I take up my university place in London, and start casting around for a mag to take the chicken-liver article. But before I can place it, a rumble comes out of the New Mexico desert. The Psychogenic Healing Ministry is in crisis. The IRS are reviewing its tax-exemption status; Malachi Dove is admitted to hospital, suffering from manic depression. And then the proverbial shit hits the fan. The dominoes really start to fall: he’s under suspicion of torching the house of a state trooper who’s given him a speeding ticket; some of his female disciples go to the press—he banned them, they say, from bringing sanitary towels into ministry headquarters. He says feminine hygiene products are medical intervention; they say he does it to humiliate them, that he’s a misogynist.
    “I asked myself difficult questions when I was at my lowest,” Dove tells a journalist on the Albuquerque Tribune , when he gets out of hospital. “I asked the Lord if He would, in His grace, take me to be by His side. The answer was no, but what was revealed to me was that I will control my death. My death will be significant to the human race.”
    “We’re talking about suicide,” goes the journalist. “The Bible says it’s a sin.”
    “No. It says , ”Thou shalt not kill.“ The translation is faulty. The Hebrew says, ”Thou shalt not murder.“‘
    “I didn’t know that.”
    “Well, now you do. Every Sunday I will pray. I will ask if my time is here.”
    “And when the time comes, how will you do it? Hanging?”
    “Not hanging, and not jumping. As a Christian those methods have connotations of guilt for me. Relating to the death of Judas Iscariot.”
    “Pills?”
    “I don’t take medication of any sort.”
    Probably at this point he’s sussed that whatever method of suicide he comes up with, it’s going to put his manifesto under the glass, because after that he changes the subject. Ends the interview. There’s a photo of him attached to the article and he looks fucking appalling. He’s piled on weight and