"Eleven," he writes, deliberately, in a tidy scrawl with only the slightest hint of a shaking hand. A priest who's losing his faith and seeing red carefully sets down his pen, drops to his knees and looks up at a canvas green sky, in a desperately comical display.
"When I first donned this collar, I had every intention of saying last rites only a handful of times, you know."
He wonders if God knows what He's playing at.