Be Near Me (16 page)

'Amen,' he said.

'Please don't.'

'Well, just gub it down,' he said.

I came back later to fetch water and looked at the hob. Mrs Poole's pan of black rhubarb was sitting there from the day before. A morning had never seemed lighter or more accessible through the kitchen window; I wanted to walk through the garden touching the goodness of wood and leaves, sipping the atmosphere. Not in a long time had a day proved so becoming to the night before, and I drank the water and felt loose in my limbs, secure in my thoughts, in tune with the rhythm of certainty that poured from the garden light and swelled with the perfect-sounding music from the next room. I felt I could drink all the water in the tap. I rubbed rhubarb dust on a finger and touched my tongue, tasting the burntness. My head was racing and the taste seemed to flood me with adrenaline and memory.

'I'm fucked up,' said Mark.

He was dancing between the armchairs with a smile on his face and with his large eyes all inclusive. The sound from the radio had come to seem quite sensible. I'm not a dancer, but I felt it would be okay to dance just then, the loud repeating music seeming to involve everything it reached. I swayed a little in front of the mirror and Mark danced up to me and patted my chest softly in time to the music. I don't know how long we stayed like that, but my legs got tired eventually and Mark asked me to put out my tongue and placed another pill there. After a while I drank more water and thrived with interest for the pattern in the carpet. He seemed a little less jagged in the morning light. With his nodding head he seemed for the first time vaguely compassionate.

'It's my turn to choose the music,' I said.

'Nuttin crappy,' he said. 'You've got the Beatles. I'm cool with that.'

'Hold on.'

I went deep into the CD drawer and found Delius. Mark groaned but then said it was fine, and we sat down on the couch and the horns seemed incredible to both of us. We just sat on the sofa drinking from the tumblers of water and the bell sounded in the piece and the room was lathered with strangeness. 'This music would do your nut in,' said Mark, and he laughed into the glass.

'He was born in Yorkshire,' I said. 'Delius.'

'Good for him,' said Mark. He was smoking a joint and tapping his knees out of time, still tapping to the other music most probably. He flicked his ash onto the carpet. 'What does it matter where anybody's from?' he said. He said this rather compliantly, as if he were offering a concession, so I didn't ask him to square it with his views about foreign countries or the progress of his football team. The thought entered my head and left it the same vacant way.

'It matters,' I said.

'Top skunk,' he said. 'Want a puff?'

We closed our eyes and
Brigg Fair
turned into something more courageous before melting into the
Florida Suite.
I could see the long passage of my old school, boys in blazers rushing outside wearing bicycle clips, their fresh smiles, their sandwiches in an old leather bag, and I saw dozens of bicycle wheels, their silver spokes turning at speed and catching the sun on the way to the Gormire Bank.

I put my head on his shoulder and asked him if he minded terribly, and he said no, it was no bother. 'Knock yourself out,' he said. So I leaned over and kissed him. I drew my lips along his cold, smooth cheek, feeling on my tongue the pulse of his jaw and detecting a faint scent of medicated soap. I went further and kissed his mouth.

'Cut it out,' he said.

'By all means,' I said.

Delius played across the sitting room and unwelcome daylight began to burn at the edges of the curtains. I took his hand. 'This is mental,' he said, and I said yes, you are right, that is what it is, and the music swept through me with confidence as I registered the fact that Sunday Mass was looming.

'Mental,' I said. He turned his reclining head and we lay there laughing like innocent boyfriends, each drawing colour from the other's eyes. I don't know how long we lasted like that. Everything else seemed a mile away. Even the front door and the shadow passing through the glass, the key scratching at the lock, the soft click as the door closed and Mrs Poole walked across the hall to begin her Sunday shift. When she opened the sitting-room door she saw us on the sofa and sighed into the worn air of the room before dropping her plastic bags and leaving the house.

BY THE SECOND SATURDAY
in August, some of the roses were into their second flowering and the back of the garden appeared like a red contagion of the eye, while inside the rectory I had grown accustomed to keeping house. I suppose the place had become rather dustier since Mrs Poole gave up the job, but I spent the better part of that morning clearing the surfaces and polishing the cutlery until it seemed new. It was warm outside, Scottish warm, which meant there was no rain, and Dalgarnock's beer gardens began to fill up with people enjoying the weather. I saw them when I drove out past the edge of town, familiar faces, young mothers hooting with laughter at the garden tables, each table crowded with bottles of fluorescent alcohol, their sugary rims kissed with lipstick.

Mrs Poole had a private room in Crosshouse Hospital. It was up on the top floor, the private ward, with a dinner menu, a telephone by the bed and a window that looked towards the Isle of Arran. At first she said she wouldn't take the room; she thought it wasn't my concern and her husband Jack said she wasn't a charity case. But she relented when I said my mother was paying. I told her she had put some money aside from the foreign sales of her books to help women, and with that, and a whole lot of objection from Jack, she finally said all right. 'I'm saying yes,' she said, 'but only because I don't want to offend your mother's kindness.'

'Look at you,' I said. 'You're the Queen of Sheba.'

'A normal ward would be good enough for me. It was good enough for everybody else I've ever met, before you came along with your obnoxious politics. Now look at me.'

'It's not about politics,' I said. 'It's a nice view. And the National Health Service won't crumble just because you have the option of ordering a sandwich when you want one.'

'It is crumbling,' said Mrs Poole, 'in case you haven't noticed. It's crumbling all right, thanks to people like me sitting here with my big bowls of grapes.'

She was on the phone when I arrived that day, and I tried to ignore the fact that her hair was gone as I placed the newspaper on the bed. 'I have to go,' she said into the receiver. 'It's him.'

Illness had made great and small modifications to Mrs Poole's face during those months. There was a certain shine in her cheeks, just where the bones pressed at the skin, and her lips were chapped. 'Have you no music?' I said.

'I'm just scunnered,' she said. 'Fed up with music.'

'That's a pity.'

'I've got this,' she said, pointing to a small unit shaped like an egg. The words 'Sound & Nature' were printed on the front. She twisted a grey knob and pressed a button: the sound of waves came surging into the room, water trickling onto sand, surf lapping over itself and gulls yelling above the waves. It suddenly felt absurd to hear these things amid the medical smells and signals of hospital efficiency. 'Sometimes you want to cut to the chase,' she said. 'These are natural sounds. I've been playing them through the day. At night too, sometimes, when I wake up and can't sleep. It's a very handy object. It makes me think of outside.'

The machine offered choices. The one we were listening to—the sea surf with urgent gulls—was called 'Ocean Beach', but one could also have 'Mountain Sunrise', a cacophony of singing birds and forest scrapings, or 'Gentle Stream', a noise to encourage the notion that one was idling beside a babbling brook. Mrs Poole leaned over and pressed the fourth button, 'Soothing Heartbeat', which seemed to suck all the action of the outside world into a single cell. 'This one is good at night,' she said. 'It just keeps going. It helps me think.'

I continued hearing the sound after she had turned it off. It played in my head like a stunning essay on the real and the imaginary. 'It's been a busy time in the parish,' I said.

'How's that?'

'Weddings,' I said. 'The parents seem to spend more and more money on outfits and dance bands. You should see the length of the limousines they hire. I was up at some of the houses, and all they ever talk about are the photographs and the cars.'

'Typical,' said Mrs Poole. 'You should put your foot down on that. You should tell them holy sacraments aren't about big cars. Plus they're wasting good resources and using up petrol. They all live within walking distance of the chapel. Why put out emissions for no reason?'

'Mass attendance is down, though.'

'That's right,' she said. 'They'll hire yer fancy photographers but they won't take their children to Mass. That's because the people round here are more interested in their mantelpieces than they are in their souls.'

'They have their moments,' I said. 'There was a great concert up at the Arranview Hospice. I led the prayers and some of them are very responsive. A very old lady—not in the best of health—wanted me to bless her room with holy water and say a decade of the rosary with her.'

'To improve her health?'

'No. She said it was in aid of her granddaughters, who are working the season in Jersey. She's worried about them. After the prayers and a cup of tea, the lady asked me to explain a word in her prayer book. "Manifestation".'

Mrs Poole looked at me with a second twinge of impatience. 'You've been doing some work in your parish, then,' she said. 'Well, at least that's something. I hope you didn't baffle the old woman with science.'

The quiet in the room was very different in texture from the quiet we used to enjoy in the rectory. Also different in meaning.

'I brought you a book,' I said.

'What is it?'

'An old one of my mother's. A
Parliament of Crows
'

'What's it about?'

'Oh, the usual. Everything and nothing. It's about the lengths people will go to in order to remain unhappy.'

'Stop it. Your mother's good at what she does.' She turned the book in her hands and examined its cover.

'Indeed,' I said. 'It's a novel about the last years of Fanny Osbourne, the woman who married Robert Louis Stevenson. He was the one with the famous stories, of course, but Fanny had her stories too, secret ones. Her life was in some ways more interesting than his, according to my mother.'

Mrs Poole looked at me and licked her lips, as if to lubricate them out of her practised silence. Her face was pale. I poured some barley water into a glass and swigged it as she inspected the front page of the newspaper. 'It's a horrible world we're living in,' she said. 'I'll be glad to read the book rather than all this stuff.'

'The paper,' I said. 'No, it's not cheering.'

'Bloody shambles,' she said. 'Why don't we just leave people in peace?'

'Because some people don't know what peace is.'

'And you a good socialist as well.'

'Oh, that old chestnut,' I said. 'I'm just praying that things turn out well for everyone.'

'That'll be useful,' she said.

'Don't be sarcastic.'

'Well, don't be shallow. I'll tell you, Father David, I think you are getting more like those warmongers by the second.'

'No,' I said. 'Just by the decade.'

She tossed the paper further down the bed and I felt a slight tremor in the atmosphere as her mood changed. The more ill she got, the more eager she became to run me down on moral grounds. There was no longer an imagined life we could easily sustain together. 'You have more faces than the town clock,' she said.

I walked to the window and back and felt the sudden burden of her feelings towards me, her rising dislike, as if she imagined that I myself were master of all the world's wrong-doings. 'I think you expect too much of me, Mrs Poole,' I said. My words appeared to extinguish a light in her eyes, as if a person with bad breath had just blown out a candle.

'You are repulsive,' she said.

'I beg your pardon?'

'You are a coward. A hypocrite.'

'Mrs Poole, please...'

'What do you know of the world? Where have you been? Had you any life at all, ever?'

'I've had some.'

'You had none! None. I am nothing to you. We are all nothing to you. What do you care now for people? Oh, you had your five minutes of being the big man of action. Where was that? At Oxford University? Don't make me laugh. You told me about it yourself. You were the sort of person who had a chandelier when you were a student.'

'I've never spoken to anybody about my life.'

'And no wonder,' she said. 'There is no life. Nothing. It's all invisible with your kind. You had a good way of thinking once. Just once. How long did it last? A month? A year? And now you're like those warmongers, believing whatever it suits you to believe.'

'Mrs Poole,' I said, 'you're not well.'

'Aye,' she said. 'But I know what my illness is. What is yours?'

'Mrs Poole.'

'You talk about morality. What morality? I tried to do the right thing and Jack knows that. But everything is just lies. People just lie about who they are and you are just ... you are just part of it.'

I said it was just the way she was feeling. I was a priest and that was what priests were here for, times of crisis. 'Oh, please,' she said. 'Don't make a hero of yourself every time.'

'The house misses you,' I said.

'No,' she said. 'You. It misses you. At least I'm there in my head.'

'Mrs Poole, let me help you.'

'I saw you with him. You
desecrated
that house. And I loved it there.'

'Yes,' I said. 'I loved it too.'

'The garden,' she said.

'It will always be there,' I said, and she turned her eyes to me, her eyes filled with tears and full of pity.

'You are a fool, Father,' she said. 'And I feel sorry for you. I really do. You don't know what you've done.'

I rubbed my hands with the alcohol cleanser by the sink, and it dried very cold on them. 'You know so much,' she said from the bed. 'Except loyalty. You know nothing about loyalty, Father.'