“You lads want the test?” he throws at us.

“I’ve already had it…didn’t go too well,” I say, suppressing the tears. “This guy, however…”

We both look at the Duke.

At this, the prophet hurries off to get someone, a free body able to execute the test.

A video screen on the wall runs what looks like an infomercial, soft focus and blocky graphics the order of the day. More posters grace the wall, small icons dwell in the spaces between them. Glossy leaflets look up from tables. Cheap DVDs and CD-ROMs garnish an empty chair set against the wall. Had Paul been pushing his Christian wares these days this is surely the sort of tactics he would have got up to. Gaudy merchandise lining every corner of the holy place – holy places lining every corner of the high-street.

Yet, where Jesus and Co. had literary merit and artistic credentials to balance the inherent nonsense of it all, the Scientologists have only monotony for a shield. Glimmers of poetic merit don’t seem to burst forth from Dianetics. Despite many criticisms to be fired at the Bible -- a conflation of historical fact and literature, the foremost — nevertheless, the passages and tales deserve a respect, even if this respect is fired only by admiration for the prose or recognition of the subsequent gems of writing indebted to it. Recall the touching scene in Crime and Punishment where tortured Raskolnikov has righteous Sonia read him the fable of Lazarus; now imagine the latter fable were one involving giant Psychlos beating Johnny Goodboy about the balls, calling him ‘craphead’ and such like – doesn’t have quite the same effect, I think you’ll agree.

Best thing Scientology’s gifted us, as far as aesthetic and artistic worth is concerned, would be Tom Cruise jumping across Shanghai skyscrapers in Mission Impossible III. Although, in retrospect, that was pretty damn cool, perhaps there’s something in this Scientology malarkey after all.

Duke De Mondo

“Sufferin’ fuck,” says I, “I’m stressin’ something wicked over this stress test. Where the blazes is that bastard?”

Sir Fleming surveys the area, nudging me then, guiding my line of sight towards a fella with yellow palms stood grinning a fart’s width away. “I hear you’re Irish,” he says to me.

I nod.

“Dublin?”

“No. Up North.”

“Up North…” He looks at me like I just pissed a dozen emus. As if to say - there are other places? And people live in them?

“I was hopin’ I could perhaps get a stress test.”

He shrugs and says “Certainly” in an accent somewhere between New Jersey and the house at the end of our street.

Clamping the mits about the silver cylinders, observing his tinkering with the doohickey perched atween us -- tapping too-long fingers off the side, glaring at the needle, stroking the chin -- I find myself thinking of things I might be stressed about.