Be Near Me (3 page)

'So what are you saying?' she said.

'Nothing,' I said. 'That I like music with a sigh in it, that's all. The Nocturnes are hymn-like.'

Mrs Poole lifted a pencil from a pot on the bookshelf. It was idly done, how she examined the pencil, stroked its length and then pressed the point into the fold of flesh between her left thumb and forefinger, before licking another finger and erasing the mark.

'Oh, who cares?' I said. 'It's all just a way of going on.'

'Lovely!' she said. 'I've got you going now, haven't I?'

'Yes, you've got me, Mrs Poole. But I won't argue with you today. I'm in too good a mood and I've got tasks.'

She smiled. 'That's right,' she said. 'Tasks. But I'm glad we have time for our wee conversations.' She wiped a spot from the table. 'I won't say I very often agree with you.'

My father always said one wasn't a man and knew nothing of life until one could read the local newspaper from cover to cover and find every item interesting. Everything from the church news to the prices of used cars, from the legal notices to the births, marriages and deaths. I was very small, but I clearly remember him reading the
Lancaster and Morecambe Citizen
with a bone-handled magnifying glass, enlarging the specimens of print—even in the house he showed his love of science, his capturing eye—to discover the inner pattern and the secret of life.

Yet I can't quite see his face. It appears to me in dreams sometimes, like my own face but tougher, his high forehead signifying an easy and proud domination of family routines as well as some unspoken understanding of the world's troubles. My father was a surgeon and he took a surgeon's interest in what might be called the near certainty of outcomes. He was an educated man of his generation: more interested in habits than in character, more given to thought than declaration. Such men are apt to remain a mystery to their sons, but I know my father believed in preparation, he believed in the professional approach, and, when it came to the consideration of life's priorities, he liked to quote Samuel Johnson on the notion that there was nothing too small for such a small thing as man. That was his unbending rule.

He hated chaos and impropriety. People who failed to make their beds in the morning were reprobates to him, and those who failed to pay their taxes were worse than murderers. One had a duty to polish one's shoes and give up one's seat. It was crucial to know when to shut up and when to tell the truth about oneself. His standards were not especially high, just especially precise and rigid, giving one the impression that a netherworld existed beyond shoe-polishing and bed-making, a region he had come to know about in his life's travels, a terrible hell for people who did not know how to live and who had no gratitude. He doubted the arts and anything remotely 'airy-fairy,' content to live, as he did, in a world of concrete objects and brown English likelihoods. I'm sure he would have come to find my mother and me quite intolerable. He wanted simple proof of everything, the weather, for instance, or the existence of God, and my going into the priesthood would have seemed to him, like my mother's novels, a grand and unnecessary bid for an idealism too proud to accommodate the facts.

Yet he wasn't morose. He was excited by his life. He enjoyed getting up in the morning and kept a woodpecker clock by the bed, a Swiss contraption that shocked him out of sleep at 5 a.m. He had leather carpet slippers ready on the floor, which he wore for the journey to the bathroom, a gleaming place where everything waited in good order, foreign soaps, tooth powder, his shaving things and a bottle of cologne. Every small element of life fascinated him and he wanted to get it right. The kitchen was a laboratory and so was the garden. It was always clear to me, even as a boy, that my father was the type to believe that human beings, even if not capable of it, should be ready to have an influence on everything around them and be conscious all the time of how to live and what to do.

Once a swallow's nest fell from the eaves of the house. My father gathered us together in the front room. He made us sit quietly by the window, watching the unfolding drama, seeing if the chicks inside the nest would be rescued or abandoned or stolen. In the end it was all too much for him. He brought the nest inside and taught me how to feed the chicks with a dropper. Two of them died, but one survived, and he put everything into the life of that bird. He took a pencil and pointed to the bulging purple skin that seemed to cover the bird's eyes and he showed me the place where its heart was beating.

'We have interfered,' he said. 'But that is what people are meant for—interfering. That is what we must do.'

'Why?' I said.

'Because we are human beings. Speed the plough. Search the galaxies. Find a cure for smallpox. That is us.'

'Will the bird live?'

'It may do,' he said. 'It may fly to South Africa with our help, if we can fix its bastard wing.'

I smiled, but that's what it's called: the bastard wing.

'It may die,' he said.

'Oh,' I said. 'Is that possible, after all the time we've spent? And you're here. Not many birds have their own surgeon.'

'It's possible,' he said. 'But, David, haven't we learned a great deal about what it takes to keep a thing living?'

***

Mrs Poole gathered a heap of newspapers in her arms and carried them outside to the recycling bin by the front door.

'All these trees,' I heard her say. 'Some day people will open their eyes to what they're doing to the world.'

Sitting at the table, I thought of an old man who had come to ten o'clock Mass that morning with his usual bags. He was a town councillor years ago, apparently, but now he just came to Mass every other day with bottles of sweet cider secreted in plastic bags along with a number of newspapers and library books. He always wore a raincoat that was faintly charcoaled with age and he sat in one of the side chapels, under the crucifix, reading the
Morning Star.
Once I saw him at a table towards the back of the Lite Bite, a café down the road. The bag containing the cider was jammed under the formica table and a dish of lasagne sat going cold at the centre of his papers and his scribbles.

I spoke to him that morning. His name was Mr Savage. He often seemed ready to be spoken to, though few people went near him, leaving him alone with his scribbling and his tea. He was one of only two people, the other being Mrs Poole, who told me to watch out for myself in that town. I just smiled at his comments. He seemed like an aged version of some people I had known in my youth, and I liked him for that. He told me he took holidays twice a year with a company called Progressive Tours, always to places like Cuba or Vladivostok or Dresden.

He came up to me after Mass.

'Why no altar-servers?' he said.

'We seem to have lost them all,' I said. 'My predecessor, Father McGee, hadn't taken on any new altar boys for a while. We had an elderly gentleman who was serving morning Mass but he's not in good health.'

'I've seen him, yes.'

'Young people are busy, I suppose.'

'You know what they're like now,' said Mr Savage. 'They'll want a few quid before they'll agree to do anything.'

He smiled and I saw he had the most perfect teeth. I wanted to ask him if he'd had them done in Poland, where all the dentists are said to be cheap and where Progressive Tours might still go.

'It's the dictatorship of the proletariat,' he said.

I asked him if he was a Marxist.

'Naturally,' he said.

'And yet you come to Mass?'

'It's the auld alliance. Uncle Joe and Jesus Christ.'

'Oh,' I said. 'I've not heard that view expressed for years. It was something we used to play with in my youth.'

'Aye, well,' said Mr Savage. 'There's them that plays and them that stays. You're missing half your theology, Father.'

I caught sight of myself in the mirror as I stood up from the table, the old dog collar feeling rough and my suit too warm for the day. Something in my discussion with Mrs Poole had stirred me, as if I might find a way to dispel boredom and burn my routines. Was I hoping for something the minute I stood up? I reached down the side of the piano and opened a rosewood box that lived there, finding hymn books and loose sheet music, materials from my old parish, much of it dusty. I leafed through the music, took a few sheets out and placed them in a folder before turning again to Mrs Poole.

'Have you got everything?' she said.

I checked my pockets, feeling an assortment of pens and mints and small notepads. My breast pocket had a secret fold containing a duplicate of my mother's credit card. I tapped the pocket and knew it was there. Mrs Poole stood by the sofa rubbing her hands together against the non-existent cold, and I tried to look casual.

She laid a round basket filled with bottles of Baby Bio on the sofa. 'These are for the rubbish,' she said. 'You keep sneaking bottles in and the plants don't need fertiliser.'

'I'm sure it's very evil, Mrs Poole.'

'Too right,' she said. 'Evil. Those chemical companies are trying to turn everywhere into Kansas. I saw a thing on the telly.'

'Maybe you should be putting all the TVs on the rubbish tip.'

'You can laugh,' she said.

'I have no opinion.'

'That's right. You have no opinion. TV's all right in moderation. Maybe if you watched the odd bit of TV you'd know more about the world.'

'I'm sure you're right.'

'You'll say anything to keep me quiet,' she said. She rattled the small bottles in the basket and pursed her lips. 'It wouldn't do you any harm at all. But I have to grant you, books are more friendly.'

I waited a second or two.

'It's good that you come here,' I said.

I saw something, a momentary stiffness, perhaps, that seemed at the time like a grade of panic, and I thought to cancel it by placing a friendly hand on her shoulder.

'None of that now,' she said. 'No banalities, please. It's not the house for that sort of thing.'

'Right you are,' I said.

She grinned and I saw the good nature return to her face, though her hand was trembling as it reached out for a tin of polish.

'Film
music,' she said.

'Oh, shush,' I said. 'Go about your business, woman.'

'Au
revoir,
' she said.

Mrs Poole put the polish under her arm and said nothing more as she walked across the carpet. The day was very fine. She chewed a fingernail as she reached the back of the sitting-room, and she paused there, looking out through the large window at the rose garden and a blackbird drinking from the sundial.

DALGARNOCK IS A JUNCTION PARISH
on the Ayrshire coast, about thirty miles outside Glasgow. The river now goes to the sea, but when St Ker first arrived there in 682
AD,
the river went in the opposite direction, flowing through Ayrshire's bracken woods towards the lowlands of Lanarkshire, where the tributaries of several Scottish rivers gather in green, heathery lochs, and where home-remembering salmon and handmade arrowheads can still be seen glinting in the shallows.

St Ker was a monk on Iona and the famous annals say he left the Abbey consumed with gout and the whisperings of God. He is thought to have journeyed into the Irish Sea and crossed the inland dark in a skin-covered boat. Arriving in the night to find nothing thereabouts, and half-starved, he cursed the river at the place of Dalgarnock, but the river changed course to outwit the curse and has flowed ever since to Irvine Bay.

An empty explosives factory marks the skyline of Dalgarnock, but the better part of the town seems to be given over to black and white council houses with windows the size of bibles. Behind the houses there are shops and schools and a wasteland of gorse crowding yellow to the sea. At the furthest edge of the town, next to the late-night petrol station, a graveyard is filled to the edge of a quarry with Protestant bones. You pass the graveyard and its plastic flowers if heading by road towards the old commercial centres of Irvine and Prestwick, Ayr and Kilmarnock, the town where Robert Burns published his first work.

Bishop Gerard was a friend from my seminary days in Rome. Some years older than me, he worked back then for the English-speaking section of the Congregation of Bishops, and I still recall with some nervousness those Glasgow words and phrases murmured through the grille of a confessional box at the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, a Gothic construction next to the Pantheon. Gerard came from the Calton area of Glasgow. People said he was tough, dutiful, harsh even, and he certainly had a fund of stories about the Connollys of Drum—his Irish progenitors, a race apart—and would take second place to no man in his admiration for Celtic Football Club. But my experience of Gerard was different. To me he seemed continually buoyed with plain spiritual grace and a love of the sacred, and he never held my childhood in England against me, not in any very serious way, though I recall that he chose not to visit the English College in the via Monserrato and never failed to scoff at our considerable fondness for cricket.

'They say you English seminarians walk differently from other people,' he said. 'The Romans can tell you a mile away, before you open your mouths, just by how you walk. They call it
il passo nordico.
'

Once he was back home and Vicar-General of the Glasgow diocese, Gerard wrote me frequent letters about what he called, with no particular respect for reality, 'the steady progress of holy matters in the land of footballing excellence'. He never failed to keep me in mind whenever he found impertinent jokes against French wine or English literature. As was intended, I spent my pastoral career in Lancashire, most of it in Blackpool, and by the time I wanted the transfer to Scotland my old friend was the Bishop of Galloway. When I petitioned him for a parish, Gerard seemed to think long and hard before offering me Dalgarnock, a decision, I like to think, made mainly in order to present a challenge to my liking for freshly cut violets.

I wonder if he knew what he was doing. It would be fair to say the town had a suspicion of strangers. No matter. It was the beginning of a new life. Driving over the moor at Auchentiber that first October evening, I saw Dalgarnock Abbey and the town below it emerge out of the darkness like burning matter in a dream of constant renewal. I tasted sea salt coming through the open window, I turned off the radio, and immediately thought of the Balliol drinking song. Versions of myself fanned out and danced before the headlamps, and I pursued them, these furies, the window open to the ancient world and the town glowing orange and alive down there at the centre of its own embers. I turned off the headlights to see the place better and then turned off the engine, rolling down with the handbrake off to a town that appeared to know its own past.