The Loney (14 page)

The worse the torment, the more God was able to make Himself known, Mummer said, invoking the same branch of esoteric mathematics Father Wilfred used in his sermons to explain why the world was full of war and murder—a formula by which cruelty could be shown to be inversely proportionate to mercy. The more inhumane the misery we could inflict upon one another, the more compassionate God seemed as a counterpoint to us. It was through pain that we would know how far we still had to go to be perfect in His eyes. And so unless one suffered, Father Wilfred was wont to remind us, one could not be a true Christian.

In the vestry after Mass, if it wasn’t chastisement over one thing or another, it was a lesson on a particular saint that he considered to be an encouragement for young boys to seek the opportunity of hardship, though it was hard to tell the difference between the two sometimes when he used the saints like a birch rod.

When Henry turned up late for Mass one Sunday, Father Wilfred thrashed him with the Blessed Alexandrina De Costa—the Portuguese mystic who had leapt from a window to escape being raped, had crippled herself in the fall, but still managed to come to Mass every Sunday on time. Even when she decided to devote her life to God and ate nothing but the Eucharist and each Friday had the blessed joy of experiencing the agony of Our Lord on the cross, she was still there at church before everyone else. It was the least Henry could do, even if his bicycle had developed a puncture on the Edgware Road.

‘I’m sorry, Father,’ Henry said. ‘I’ll pray to Saint Christopher,’ he added in a moment of inspiration.

‘Idiot boy,’ Father Wilfred said. ‘We pray
with
the saints, not
to
them. The saints intercede on our behalf and petition God to help us.’

‘Oh, yes, Father.’

‘Will you remember that, McCullough?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘But how will you remember it, McCullough?’

‘I don’t know, Father.’

Father Wilfred looked on the desk and picked up a metal ruler. He grabbed Henry by the wrist and before Henry could flinch he brought the edge of the ruler down on his knuckles, splitting them open.

‘Will that help you to remember, McCullough?’

Henry gripped his bleeding hand tightly and moved backwards and sat down on a chair.

‘Well?’ said Father Wilfred.

‘Yes, Father,’ said Henry. ‘I won’t forget.’

Father Wilfred looked at him and after a moment he went to the sink and handed Henry a paper towel with a look of contempt.

I suppose I took it for granted that Henry was one of those children that adults dislike—there are children like that—but quite why Father Wilfred despised Henry so much I didn’t know. Perhaps it was because Henry was rich when he had been so poor. The Poor, after all, were Father Wilfred’s favourite yardstick. They were the caste by which all things had to be measured and in doing so he made every small enjoyment an affront to their dignity. We were to think of The Poor when we reached for a second helping of cake. We were to think of The Poor when we wished for presents at Christmas, or when we coveted the new bicycle in the shop window. Father Wilfred had never had enough to eat. Never enough clothing to keep him warm in the Whitechapel slums. He had never possessed anything other than an old tyre which he used to knock along the road with a stick, trying to keep it from falling into the gutter.

It wasn’t simply out of some obligatory moral stance demanded by scripture that he felt for The Poor so much, it was the core of his calling. Everyone was disappointed, but perhaps not surprised, that he chose in the end to give up his plot in Saint Jude’s churchyard and requested that he be interred with his mother and father and his dead brothers and sisters in the Great Northern Cemetery instead.

But it seemed that there was more to it than that. We Smiths were better off than the McCulloughs by a long way and Father Wilfred never berated me the way he did Henry. Henry just seemed to rile him for some reason.

Father Wilfred turned to me suddenly, aware that I was staring.

‘Carry on, Smith,’ he said.

I went back to winding the handle of the spirit bander that was copying the parish newsletters. It was something I did on the first Sunday of the month and always tried to hold my breath as much as possible to stop the methylated spirits from raking out the back of my throat.

‘Why were you late, McCullough?’ said Father Wilfred, folding his arms.

‘I told you, Father,’ he said. ‘I got a puncture.’

Father Wilfred nodded. ‘Yes, I know that’s what you
said
.’

He went to a bookshelf, pulled out a Bible and dropped it into Henry’s lap.

‘But I’m not convinced that it is necessarily the truth. Psalm one hundred and one, verse seven,’ he said.

‘Sorry, Father?’

‘Find it, McCullough.’

‘But I’ll get blood on it, Father.’

‘You won’t.’

Henry carefully flipped through the book, trying not to bleed onto the pages.

‘Well?’ said Father Wilfred.

‘I can’t find it, Father.’

‘Psalms, McCullough. Between Job and Proverbs. It’s not difficult.’

At last Henry found the right place and started reading.

‘“He that worketh deceit shall not dwell in my house; he that telleth lies shall not tarry in my sight.”’

Father Wilfred repeated what Henry had said in a slow, measured way, pacing up and down the office.

‘God hates liars, McCullough,’ he said, nodding to the Bible on Henry’s knee. ‘It’s in there a thousand times over. Proverbs, Romans, Jeremiah. When you lie, McCullough, you are brethren with the serpent in the garden. You forfeit your place in heaven. God has no time for deceivers. I’ll ask you again. Why were you so late?’

Henry looked down at his bleeding knuckles.

‘You were too lazy to get out of bed weren’t you?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘And too overweight to make up the lost time.’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Yes, Father,’ he repeated. ‘Psalm fifty-five, verse twenty-three. Quicker this time, McCullough.’

Henry sped through the pages and traced his finger along the line.

‘“But thou, O God, shalt bring them down into the pit of destruction; bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days.”’

Father Wilfred held out his hand for the Bible.

‘Do you know what the most terrible torment of Hell is?’ he said.

Henry passed it to him. ‘No, Father.’

‘The worst torment, McCullough,’ he said. ‘Is not being able to repent of the sins you have committed.’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘In Hell, it is far too late.’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘You must come and see me in confession, McCullough.’

‘Yes, Father. I will.’

‘And then at least we may stand a chance of saving your soul.’

T
he butterflies dispersed as the rain returned and began the next washing of the land. Stone walls shone like iron. The trees bowed and dripped. The sullen countryside disappeared behind condensation and for a long time we could have been going anywhere until a low spire appeared on the other side of a cattle field, barely rising above the trees that surrounded it.

The Church of The Sacred Heart was an ancient place—dark and squat and glistening in the rain like a toad. The large front door was green with moss and over the years long sinews of ivy had wormed their way around the tower.

We crowded under the lych-gate to wait for a particularly heavy burst of rain to pass. Water leaked through the canopy onto the stone seats that had been worn into scoops over the years by the backsides of countless pallbearers or by people like us simply sheltering from the rain.

The churchyard itself was small but well stocked with the village dead—a second, more populous settlement bordering the first—all of them lying east-west as though the wind had combed them that way over the centuries. Gravestones listed against one another under the shade of several huge, dripping yew trees, one of which had been blasted by lightning at some point and had a new stem growing out of the blackened split.

‘What do you think, Father?’ said Mummer, nodding towards the church itself.

‘Very atmospheric, Mrs Smith.’

‘Fifteenth-century,’ said Farther.

‘Is that right?’ Father Bernard replied.

‘Some of it anyway. The stonework inside’s all Saxon. They managed to escape the Reformation.’

‘How’s that?’

‘I don’t think they could find it, Father.’

The rain shower ended as suddenly as it had come. Water poured off the slate roof and along the lead flumes to spew from the mouths of gargoyles that had been weathered to lumps of stone. Father Bernard held open the gate and everyone went quickly up the path to the church before the rain came back, but Hanny stood looking up at the mangled grey demons, trying to pull his face to match theirs.

Inside, we took up a pew towards the back, shuffling along as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the silence. All around the church, the statues of saints had been covered up for Lent, like ghosts half hidden in the shadows of the alcoves. Now and then their drapes shivered in a draught. The wind was getting in somewhere and whistled like a seabird around the rafters.

Hanny held my hand.

‘It’s alright,’ I said.

He glanced nervously at the nearest shrouded saint, the Archangel Michael by the sword sticking out of the sheet.

‘Just don’t look at them.’

Once everyone was settled, Farther inclined his head to Father Bernard.

‘See the windows in the clerestory,’ he said, pointing at the tiny arches high up on the wall, each of them letting in a trickle of red light. ‘Look at the thickness of the mullions. And the glass, that’s Romanesque.’

‘Is that good?’ said Father Bernard.

‘It’s about seven hundred years old.’

Father Bernard looked impressed.

‘They should open this place for a museum,’ he whispered to Farther. ‘They must have kept everything they’ve ever owned.’

It was true. Nothing, it seemed, had ever escaped the oak doors or the castle-thick walls. Any light that had entered through the windows had been held captive and absorbed into the wood. Over the centuries the pews, pulpit and misericords had blackened to ebony like the beams which supported the roof—each one made from the fork of a huge oak tree, giving the congregation the sense of being inside an upturned boat.

The smells of benedictions and snuffed candles remained as steadfast as the gravestones that floored the central aisle. The doors to the aumbrey opened on hinges that had been forged at a time when they still dunked witches and died of plague. It was a place where wafer ovens, alms boxes and rush-holders remained as working tools; where there was a sanctuary knocker, a parish chest carved out of a single trunk of walnut, and a Table of Consanguinity attached to the wall above the font as a ready-reckoner to prevent interbreeding amongst the ignorant poor. Though I suppose by the time the child was being dipped into the water, it was rather too late.

At the end of pews were effigies of the Seven Deadly Sins, smoothed almost to anonymity by the countless hands that had gripped them during genuflection. But one could just make out Sloth curled up like a dormouse, and Gluttony vomiting on his own beard and Wrath beating his brother man with the jawbone of an ass.

Between the nave and the chancel, the church still had its rood screen with its painted melange of saints at the bottom and the crucifixion at the top. Above it was part of a Doom painting, and though much of it had flaked off it was still a considerable size and sprawled like dark rot across the stone.

‘It’s the only one I’ve ever seen north of Gloucester,’ said Farther, leaning close to Father Bernard again and pointing up to it. ‘I mean it’s got nothing on the ones at Patcham or Wenhaston, but still.’

‘I wouldn’t have it on my wall,’ Father Bernard said.

‘I don’t know,’ said Farther. ‘It has a certain charm.’

‘Rather you than me.’

When I was a child and I believed all that Father Wilfred said about Hell and damnation, the Doom gave me no end of sleepless nights at Moorings. I suppose because, in a sense, I already knew the place it depicted and that meant it might just be real.

It reminded me of the school playground with its casual despotism and the constant anxiety of never knowing which traits in a boy might be punishable with instant violence. Too tall, too small. No father, no mother. Wet trousers. Broken shoes. Wrong estate. Sluttish sister. Nits.

Hell was a place ruled by the logic of children. Schadenfreude that lasted for eternity.

In the painting, the damned were forced down through a narrow crack in the earth, crushed against one another, swimming headfirst through the soil, before they tumbled in a naked landslide towards the clutches of lascivious black-skinned demons who grasped their hair and drove red hot knives into their flesh. Yet, this was only the initial punishment. They had merely fallen on the welcome mat, where some of the old lags of Hades had gathered to pray for the souls of these newcomers in the vain hope of their own redemption, their faces upturned, their mouths wide open and desperate, like blackbird chicks.

From here, the wicked were collected in enormous cauldrons to be cooked for Satan, who squatted like a sort of horned toad and dipped into the pots with a fondue fork, impaling the squirming human worms and swallowing them down whole, presumably to slither through his bowels and out the other end to begin the whole process once more.

In other parts of Hell were tortures so vile they bordered on being funny, which in turn worried me even more. The mockery of Hell, I thought, would result in an even worse punishment if I ever ended up there.

In one dark corner a demon had its arm down a man’s throat so far that it came out of his backside to throttle the woman cowering beneath him. People had their limbs torn off and were hung upside down by hooks through their privates. Some had their tongues nailed to trees and their bellies slit to feed the slavering dogs that obediently attended the devils. Eyeballs were pecked out by things that looked like oversized starlings. Boiling lead was funnelled down throats. Severed heads were emptied of blood to irrigate the paddy fields of black weeds that grew up the sheer rock walls of Hell and broke through into the lush green pastures of the living to ensnare the sunflowers and the lilies growing there. It was all Father Wilfred had promised us it would be.