St Peter sat at his desk, idly chewing on the quill made from a feather he'd long ago plucked from Beelzebub's departing wing. On the parchment before him a single name waited to be ticked off. The saint sighed. Lord, how time could drag in eternity.
He heard a faint echo, and cast his eyes down the long, winding marble staircase. Far below, a distant female figure, frantically scrambling up the steps, had dropped something. "That'll be the lighter," murmured St Peter. The woman tottered downwards to retrieve the fallen object.
She began to teeter upwards again, but then turned to recover something else. "Now it's the cigarettes," he sighed. "Yes, it's Jennie Macdougald all right."
At length the newcomer, a woman of middle years in tight jeans and high heels, staggered up to his arrivals desk, and stood there wheezing, one hand on the table to support herself. "Cripes, I'm bloody shagged," she gasped.
"Late, as always," observed the angel, dryly. "Ah well. You always lived as if time was something you put on lamb, Jennie, and punctuality a misfortune that happened to tyres. No matter. The Boss wants to see you."
"The Boss? God The Father? Bloody hell, am I in trouble already? That calls for a fag." She fumbled inside her bag and took out a cigarette and was about to light it when she looked up. "Sorry. Am I allowed to smoke?"
St Peter smiled. "Of course you are. After all, isn't that the reason you're here? And no, you're not in trouble. The Boss was hoping you could do something about your old man's bloody menagerie. I told Mac when he arrived - what? just over a year ago - listen, you're not getting in here with that lot, not after Noah's crowd. Did no good. He just charmed his way past me, with his entire bloody zoo trailing behind him."
St Peter suddenly reached under his armpit and plucked out a hamster. "There! You see what I mean! Last night I had to share my bed with a pair of crocodiles. So, the Boss was hoping you'd get your old man to keep the animals in order. If you're admitted, that is."
Jennie looked wan. "I probably won't be, considering how I lived my life."
St Peter smiled. "Well, you certainly kept us on tenterhooks, with your various capers. Is there a business you didn't dabble in? Shark-wrestling and deep-sea welding, perhaps, but you certainly tried just about everything else. Hairdressing, restaurants, jewellery, the lot. None of them worked, not really, did they?"
Jennie Macdougald looked truculent. "The jewellery was a goer," she declared stoutly.
"Oh, with you running it, sooner or later things would probably have gone bottom-up. Who else in the world would have lit up a cigarette while she was filling a petrol canister at a pump? Or tried to change a fuse while sitting in the bath? Or climbed a roof in her mini-skirt and high heels to erect a television aerial during an electrical storm?"
"I never did any of those things!" she cried.
"That's right, you didn't, and you know why? Because your guardian angels always stopped you in the nick of time. We've got an entire ward of angels who gibber and stick straws in their hair who were reduced to utter lunacy trying to protect you from the next Jennie-made disaster. You were a one-woman San Andreas Fault, Jennie."
Jennie Macdougald looked crestfallen. "You mean you don't want me?"
St Peter stared steadily at her. "Heaven is not for the lucky, or the successful, or the shrewd, Jennie. Consider. You were easily the most beautiful girl of your generation, until that car crash in your teens almost destroyed your face. Did you complain? Never. Life dealt you blow after blow after blow, yet you carried on undaunted. Did you have vices? Oh yes, Jennie, you did indeed, if kindness is a vice and charity a sin. You were compulsively generous. You had a heart of milk pudding. Your knack of finding and minding lame ducks, of either sex, was uncanny.
"You loved a good time, and your ribald, filthy laughter brought smiles to any company fortunate enough to have you in its midst. Luck repeatedly dealt you the two of clubs, and you always yodelled with raucous joy as if you had a royal flush. You were mad, to be sure, as mad you must have been to have smoked, even though you had asthma, and that's probably why you're here now. But otherwise, how did you fill your days, Jennie Macdougald? You lived in the shadow of your famous veterinarian father Mac, and your even more famous sister Suzanne. Did that prey upon you?
"Not for a second. You filled your life with love and decency and humour and an incredible, unswerving, bubbling courage. You raised two fine children, Nick and Rebecca, who like Mac in heaven, and Suzanne and your dear mother Alice on earth, adored and adore you, with all your chaos, and all your anarchy and all that crazy, irresistible Jennieness.
"Listen, Jennie: consider what you were and are. Were you not brave, and strong, and true? Did you not give all that you had to whomever came your way, without a selfish thought ever entering that scatty, mad brain of yours? Oh, go on through, my girl, go on through: this day, thou shalt join The Lord Our God in paradise.
"But on one condition only," St Peter added warningly, as he removed a ferret from his ear. "That you have a word with your Da about those bloody animals of his."