Joseph and his brothers had been walking on the desert road all morning until finally the horizon had scraped together some mean, low-lying hills for them. It was not a relief to find the road rising up above the desert – the climate was just as airless and the same colourless powder still lay everywhere that Joseph looked. The boulders that increasingly greeted them did so in the same parched hue. These rocks had no more known the splash of water than they had felt wine being poured on to them. It was as if the whole landscape was desiccated mummified flesh, so that if you scratched any part of its surface with a fingernail it would crumple luxuriously into yet more dust.

“There is water,” his brothers were shouting. They could hear it somewhere ahead and they were scampering over the rocks, disappearing like deer.

The thirst rested in Joseph’s mouth like a hard stone. It was blaring over his thoughts as deafeningly as the pain from a wound or a fracture. As he walked, the pain pushed at his back and pulled him onwards, so that he was conscious only of his steps as his legs searched for water.

His brothers were still yelling ahead of him but they had surely gone too far. Joseph had walked blindly around a large boulder and surprised the water splashing merrily in front of him, in great jets that jumped almost to the height of his waist.

The water was darting in the air as amazingly as semen does. But Joseph did not run forward to drink and bathe his hands and face. He stood motionless, aware that this spring was speaking to him in a clear voice and that it was the voice of a young adult male. He instantly forgot everything of his own thirst.

“Joseph son of David,” the spring announced brightly, splashing thicker and richer. “Do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.”

Joseph awoke to the normal darkness of his bedroom. There was a pitcher of water beside his bed but he had no thought of drinking and, sitting up, he looked at it almost with resentment.

Mary was meant to be a virgin. Was she? Joseph’s mind felt slightly too clear and he was irritated that every thought to come to him in this state seemed too rapid or spurious to properly stick. His mind tumbled. He lay back in his bed and tried to reflect more sensibly. “What is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” He got out of the bed, went over to his desk, and by the thin moonlight from the window he wrote down the spring’s words as he remembered them. He twisted his beard in his fingers, thoroughly puzzled.

Was it possible that the Holy Spirit could have impregnated his bride without puncturing her virginity? How? By what means? And had she enjoyed it?, he wondered with growing envy.

***

By the end of the next day, Joseph’s consternation had taken a dire, wild plunge, into the choking panic of a nightmare. It appeared that there were important regions of his future wife’s mind that were simply not sane. Rather than confiding in him alone about her problematic pregnancy, she was advertising it all around the town. A pale, visibly hoarse figure, no longer audible now from the backs of the delighted crowds, oblivious to the town’s sarcasm and bemusement, chanting that she was pregnant out of wedlock and that it was a miracle.

Joseph was unable to set foot out of doors. Some friends came to commiserate, all of them wearing very plain, blinking faces, all of them dismayed by this disaster that had befallen him. Nobody could quite look him in the eye. He and Mary had seemed like such a pleasant couple – the sort who it is good to collect as respectable friends. Their wedding was supposed to have been an occasion to look forward to. And now this humiliation had wiped everything away, like a fire sweeping through a happy farm.

Finally Mary’s father, Joachim, came to see him. He looked a hundred years older than when the last time he and Joseph had met. The shine had gone off Joachim as though he was a bruised apple; his hair and beard were practically greying on his head as he spoke to Joseph. “We have to get her out of here,” he raged. “Marry her – make out that you had sired this bloody brat all along…”

“I didn’t,” Joseph said sadly. “I haven’t. She’s still a virgin.”

Joachim glared at him in disbelief, as though Joseph had just told him that his daughter was an octopus. “I had a dream too,” Joseph added apologetically, “and it was confirmed to me that she was impregnated by the Holy Spirit.”

“Listen!” Joachim wagged a testy finger at him. “You’re the one with the common sense! I am relying on you! Just marry her and bust her out of here!”

Joseph agreed to the wisdom of this. There was due to be another census of the Roman world and it required every citizen to return to the town of their birth to register. This was a formality that nobody ever typically bothered with – you could submit a small fee and a helpful civil servant would amend your birth certificate for you. Joseph nonetheless seized upon the census as the best available excuse to evacuate to Bethlehem.

***

Four miles south of Nazareth and Joseph’s donkey suddenly bolted. Joseph had climbed off to urinate behind a palm tree and, looking up at Mary’s yelps, he had seen the unattended donkey scurrying away down the road with an energy that he had hitherto never suspected of it. Fortunately, Mary had remained sitting on her own donkey and it could only tremble in furtive solidarity with its colleague.

Cupping a hand over his flapping penis, Joseph tried to waddle after the donkey in pursuit but it was hopeless. He returned to behind the palm tree and resumed his former position.

“What are we going to do?” Mary wailed. “My dowry was in the saddlebag!”

Great heavens, she was right! Joseph was once more waddling uncomfortably after the donkey but there was barely a speck left in the road to chase. Once again, he returned and took his familiar place behind the tree.

“They train them to run back to them,” he shouted in explanation to Mary over the sizzle of impatient urine. “The donkey dealers. I’ve never understood how they do it.”

He and Mary would not have a solid meal for the rest of the trip. They would have to sleep in doorways and beg for scraps.

***

Mary’s total lack of discretion continued to madden Joseph. All along the road she maintained loudly, to every chance person who they met, that she had been made pregnant by the Holy Spirit rather than by her own flesh-and-blood husband. Soon the news had raced far ahead of them. At each new inn, they were met with curious, mirthful faces and sometimes downright insolence.

“So your wife had sex with a ghost?,” one innkeeper asked Joseph, gloating and with his mouth frozen in a malicious curve.

“With the Holy Ghost,” Joseph corrected him patiently. He had by now cultivated a pitch that he would repeat over and over again to uninterested listeners, as though he was a street vender with an unsold surplus of some dubious herbal remedy.

“But how do you know it was a ghost?” the innkeeper pursued. “How do you know that her uncle didn’t follow her to the dung heap and do her, you know, there?”

“We can only have faith,” Joseph replied. “How can we know anything? How do you know the mind you woke up with this morning is the same one you had yesterday?” The innkeeper frowned at him, with suddenly no comeback to hand. Joseph knew that this defence was a bit too clever. His wife rejoiced with those who were openly contemptuous of her. Stridently, she entreated them to join with her in songs of praise. She was becoming a little scary.

Joseph was realising that he didn’t actually like his wife very much. When she was a virgin – a real virgin, that is – she had been as sweet as fresh hay. He had spent hours lying on his bed in a stupor, dreaming of kissing her and making love to her. At the moment her small belly was ballooned up with the pregnancy and the rest of her body looked unduly frail and wizened. He sometimes flinched with anger at the liberties she was taking, this milk-faced young scold who screeched orders at him from the top of her donkey. And he was yet to even lay a finger on her.

One night, he had begged passers-by for a couple of black coins to pay for a room in a hostelry. He was constantly begging these days and he was sick of the sound of his own voice as it did this in its painfully artificial new note. The bed that they were given was cold and at least two feet too short for an adult and Joseph had to grip on to Mary’s arm to stay in. Her arm was so rigid that it felt somehow hostile. “Did you enjoy it?” he asked her in a fury.

“Enjoy what?”

“The conception. The time that you…”

“I did very much,” she answered primly. “But it is not something I can really describe to you.”

“Mary…?” He decided to make a last-ditch appeal. “Is it really such a huge thing if we consummate our own…?”

“I have already been very clear to you about this. My womb has been the site of a miracle. You cannot disgrace yourself in this sacred site. Imagine if you disgraced yourself all over the Ten Commandments.”

“Disgrace myself? I have needs, Mary, real world needs. And can’t you see that having your hands all over my body would be more real, more beautiful, for us than having a spirit beam a seed into your insides?”

“We are not discussing this, Joseph. I have already made myself clear. And I am going to tell you something: when I give birth, it will be the most important event in the whole of the history of the world, and you are not going to let everybody down by moaning like a silly boy! I will not have it! This is all that I have to say. Goodnight!”

And with this Mary turned over, with such hippopotamus emphasis that it almost destroyed the bed. Joseph realised that he was clinging on to nothing and then he was snatching at gossamer bedsheets as he plummeted to land with a shock on the cold cement floor.

***

When Joseph looks back on that scene around the manger, it is with a shudder.

Mary was already going into labour by the time that they reached Bethlehem and Joseph was anxious to house her somewhere inconspicuous. The last two days had been unbearable, with crowds congregating in the streets to jeer and throw stones at them. He was worried that people would come to abuse Mary during the labour or even to steal the baby and parade it about out of ridicule. There were presently inn rooms going at discount rates throughout Bethlehem because the census had forced most habitual travellers to stay at home. But Joseph had spotted a stable, a little out of the way, which might be more suitable for them to hide in.

If only childbirth was not so infuriatingly noisy!

Joseph oversaw the birth alone, aside from some cattle who had watched sulky and glassy-eyed from their wooden stalls. He rescued the baby from its slime, slapped it to make the first dry cry come to its amphibious lips, and cut the cord. The baby had a tiny grumpy purple face; Joseph held it up and its scrawny limbs still swam in the air so that it looked like an outlandishly sized frog.

Yet the nativity was far from over. As soon as Mary had slumped back against a wall to rest, a great swarm of shepherds had found them and descended upon the stable. “Are you the guy whose wife had sex with a ghost?” they chattered.

“Nope, not us,” Joseph told them with an empty laugh. Instinctively, he had shoved the waving frog behind his back. Unfortunately, its mewing soon gave the game away.

Still the shepherds pressed in around them, jabbering questions and reciting every imaginable witticism in turn about the family. “You are the…?” the young shepherd smiled shyly, unable in the end to say the word “cuckold.” He instead dipped forward and put wiggling fingers against his brows to make the horns. Joseph glared – the nativity scene was on the verge of becoming a punch-up. Just give us peace, he wanted to plead. We are not a freak show, just give us peace! But maybe they were a freak show, for Mary was already stirring in the straw and struggling to sit upright. She no doubt wanted to rejoice and sing praises again.

Where was the baby? Oh, it was being brandished over there – they were trying to run off with it. “Please! Give it back!” Joseph hissed at them. He plonked the baby in a handy manger, where he could keep an eye on it.

“What shall we call him?” another shepherd asked. “Spooky?”

“His name is Jesus Christ, son of God,” Mary insisted over the resulting spike in hilarity.

It seemed that they really were a freak show for all at once three magi, or whiskered wizards from the east, had appeared bobbing on camels at the stable door. They had probably heard of the birth whilst passing through one of the local taverns and they had come to stare. They were ugly customers, with their weird turbans and gaudy ostrich plumes, but even this bunch regarded Joseph’s family as a freak show.

After an hour of questions and poking at the baby, the magi tipped Mary for the free entertainment with some gold, along with a couple of other baubles. Now Joseph could afford a proper hotel. Wearing as appreciative a smile as he could muster, he ventured that, “well, we must wrap this up for the night. We have to be rolling along.” Soon the magi had left in a cloud of glitter and camel odour, and mercifully the shepherds did not hang around for long either.

Up at the main road, with Mary on one arm and the baby Jesus tucked under the other, Joseph had an altercation with a lingering official. “You’re ticketed mate,” the official snapped. “You can’t tie your donkey up here after 6pm.”

“Man, please, I’ll move it double-quick…”

“Too late mate. You’re ticketed.”

***

It was dawning on Joseph that the shame of Jesus’ birth was not something that he could ever come back from. It would chase him like dogs to the grave. There would never be a time when he could relax for a few minutes and forget that he was the man who had been cuckolded by a being that didn’t even have any sexual organs. Indeed, it was he who had been reduced to something like a eunuch. His shame had become the central fact of his identity – there could be no forgetting, no relief.

One day on the roads that wended on towards Joseph’s grave, he had stopped for a moment, with the child on his arm and Mary perched up beside him on the donkey, to view a slave who had been crucified on the adjoining verge.

The slave’s head lolled stiffly on his shoulders, with dust printed on his face and lips. The long, obligatory stain of urine on his lower tunic was still damp. Glowing blood trailed inconsequentially down one leg – maybe they had stabbed him somewhere to try to hasten his end. This slave had died alone even as crowds had pressed in all around him, jeering and wisecracking with their insufferable detachment, with the smug dryness of men who have not been splashed by a drop of the tragedy that is in front of them. Men who moved easily and lightly on their feet, since every last thread of understanding between themselves and the crucified slave had been cut.

Even so, he had died quickly, Joseph saw, or as quickly as men usually died. The experience had not lasted for years or for a whole lifetime. And in his brimming self-pity, Joseph thought: I would trade places with that man.

Perhaps wisdom would come to Joseph in the end, or else history would have to tidy his foolishness out of the nativity scene. When the ancient editors were compiling the Bible, they were unimpressed with the quality of Joseph’s contribution. His gospel was spoken about for a while as a possible appendix and then it was quietly dropped.