The Loney (2 page)

He raised his hand and shook his sleeve down. A red seam ran from his wrist to his elbow, threading its way through tattoos of daggers and melon-chested girls.

‘D’you know how I got that?’

I shook my head. Hanny stared.

‘Fell off a roof. Bone ripped right through it,’ he said and used his finger to demonstrate the angle at which his ulna had protruded.

‘Have you got a spare fag?’

I shook my head again and he sighed.

‘Bollocks. I knew I should have stayed at Catterick,’ came another non-sequitur.

It was difficult to tell—and he looked nothing like the ruggedly handsome veterans that popped up in
Commando
all the time—but I guessed that he must have been of an age to have fought in the war. And sure enough, when he doubled up in a coughing fit and took off his beret to wipe his mouth, it had some cockeyed metal, military insignia on the front.

I wondered if that was what had set him onto the booze, the war. It had done strange things to some people, so Farther said. Knocked their compasses out of whack, as it were.

Whatever the reason, Hanny and I couldn’t take our eyes off him. We gorged ourselves on his dirtiness, on his brutal, alien smell. It was the same fearful excitement we felt when we happened to drive through what Mummer considered a
bad
part of London and found ourselves lost in a maze of terraces that sat shoulder to shoulder with industrial plants and scrap yards. We would turn in our seats and gawp out of the windows at the scruffy, staring children who had no toys but the bits of wood and metal torn off the broken furniture in their front yards where aproned women stood and screeched obscenities at the men stumbling out of corner pubs. It was a safari park of degradation. What a world without God looked like.

Billy glanced at Mummer and, keeping his eyes on her, he reached down into the plastic bag by his feet and brought out a few tatty bits of paper, which he pressed into my hand. They had been ripped out of a dirty magazine.

He winked at me and settled himself back against the wall. The bus appeared and Mummer stood up and held out her hand to stop it and I quickly stuffed the pictures away.

‘What are you doing?’ said Mummer.

‘Nothing.’

‘Well, stop messing about and get Andrew ready.’

I started trying to coax Hanny into standing so that we could get on the bus, but he wouldn’t move. He was smiling and looking past me at Billy, who by this time had fallen asleep again.

‘What is it, Hanny?’

He looked at me and then back at Billy. Then I understood what he was staring at: Billy wasn’t holding a potato, but his penis.

The bus stopped and we got on. The driver looked past us and whistled at Billy but he didn’t wake up. After another go, the driver shook his head and pressed the button which drew the door closed. We sat down and watched the front of Billy’s trousers darken. Mummer tutted and peeled our faces away from the window to look at her instead.

‘Be warned,’ she said, as the bus pulled away. ‘That man is already inside you. It won’t take more than a few wrong choices to bring him out, believe me.’

She held her handbag on her lap and looked straight ahead. I clutched the dirty pictures tight in one hand and slipped the other inside my coat and pressed my stomach hard with my fingertips, trying to find the kernel of badness that only needed the right conditions of Godlessness and depravity for it to germinate and spread like a weed.

It happened so easily. Drink quickly possessed a man and made him its servant. Father Wilfred always said so.

When Mummer told him about Billy later that evening, he simply shook his head and sighed.

‘What can one expect of a man like that, Mrs Smith? Someone so removed from God.’

‘I said to the boys that they ought to take note,’ said Mummer.

‘And rightly so,’ he said, taking off his glasses and looking at Hanny and me as he polished them on his sleeve. ‘They should make it their business to know all the poisons that Satan peddles.’

‘I feel rather sorry for him,’ said Mrs Belderboss.

‘So do I,’ said Farther.

Father Wilfred put his glasses back on and raised a brief, condescending smile.

‘Then you’ll be adding to his already brimming store. Pity is the only thing a drunk has in abundance.’

‘Still, he must have had an awfully hard life to have got himself into such a state,’ Mrs Belderboss said.

Father Wilfred scoffed. ‘I don’t think he knows the meaning of a hard life. I’m sure Reginald could tell you as many tales as I could about real poverty, real struggle.’

Mr Belderboss nodded. ‘Everyone had it tough in Whitechapel,’ he said. ‘No work. Kiddies starving.’

Mrs Belderboss touched her husband’s arm in sympathy. Father Wilfred sat back and wiped his mouth with a napkin.

‘No, a man like that is the worst kind of fool,’ he said. ‘He’s thrown everything away. All his privileges and opportunities. He was a professional, I believe. A teacher. What a terrible waste.’

***

It’s odd, but when I was a child there were certain things that were so clear to me and their outcomes so inevitable that I thought I had a kind of sixth sense. A gift of foresight, like that of Elijah or Ezekiel, who had predicted drought and destruction with such unsettling accuracy.

I remember Hanny once swinging over a pond on The Heath and knowing,
knowing
, that the rope would break, which it did; like I knew that the stray cat he brought back from the park would end up minced on the tube line, and that he would drop the bowl of goldfish he’d won at the fair on the kitchen floor as soon as we got home.

In the same way, I knew after that conversation around the dinner table that Billy was going to die soon. The thought came to me as an established fact; as though it had already come to pass. No one could live like that for long. Being that filthy took so much effort that I was sure that the same merciful God who sent a whale to save Jonah and gave Noah a nod about the weather, would put him out of his misery.

T
hat Easter was the last time we went to the Loney for several years.

After the evening when he’d set us straight about Billy Tapper over supper, Father Wilfred changed in a way that no one could quite explain or understand. They put it down to him getting too old for the whole thing—after all it was a long journey up from London and the pressure of being shepherd to his flock during such an intense week of prayer and reflection was enough to wear out a man half his age. He was tired. That was all.

But as I had the uncanny knack of sensing the truth about things, I knew that it was something far more than that. There was something very wrong.

After the conversation about Billy had petered out and everyone had settled in the living room, he’d walked down to the beach and come back a different man. Distracted. Rattled by something. He complained rather unconvincingly of a stomach upset and went to lie down, locking his door with an emphatic swipe of the bolt. A little while later I heard noises coming from his room, and I realised he was crying. I’d never heard a man cry before, only one of the mentally disadvantaged lot that came to do crafts at the parish hall once a fortnight with Mummer and some of the other ladies. It was a noise of fear and despair.

The next morning when he finally rose, dishevelled and still agitated, he muttered something about the sea and went out with his camera before anyone could ask him what was wrong. It wasn’t like him to be so offhand. Nor for him to sleep in so late. He wasn’t himself at all.

Everyone watched him walking down the lane and decided it was best to leave as soon as possible, convinced that once he was back at Saint Jude’s he would quickly recover.

But when we returned home, his mood of fretfulness barely altered. In his sermons he seemed more worked up than ever about the ubiquitous evils of the world and any mention of the pilgrimage cast a shadow over his face and sent him into a kind of anxious daydream. After a while no one talked about going there anymore. It was just something that we used to do.

Life pulled us along and we forgot about The Loney until 1976 when Father Wilfred died suddenly in the new year and Father Bernard McGill was relocated from some violent parish in New Cross to take on Saint Jude’s in his stead.

After his inaugural mass, at which the bishop presented him to the congregation, we had tea and cakes on the presbytery lawn so that Father Bernard could meet his parishioners in a less formal setting.

He ingratiated himself straight away and seemed at ease with everyone. He had that way about him. An easy charm that made the old boys laugh and the women subconsciously preen themselves.

As he went from group to group, the bishop wandered over to Mummer and me, trying to eat a large piece of Dundee cake in as dignified a manner as possible. He had taken off his robes and his surplice but kept on his plum-coloured cassock, so that he stood out amongst the browns and greys of the civilians as a man of importance.

‘He seems nice, your grace,’ said Mummer.

‘Indeed,’ the bishop replied in his Midlothian accent that for some reason always made me think of wet moss.

He watched Father Bernard send Mr Belderboss into fits of laughter.

‘He performed wonders to behold in his last parish.’

‘Oh, really?’ said Mummer.

‘Very good at encouraging the young folk to attend,’ the bishop said, looking at me with the specious grin of a teacher who wishes to punish and befriend in equal measure and ends up doing neither.

‘Oh my lad’s an altar boy, your grace,’ Mummer replied.

‘Is he?’ said the bishop. ‘Well good show. Father Bernard’s quite at home with the teens as well as the more mature members of the congregation.’

‘Well if he comes on your recommendation, your grace, I’m sure he’ll do well,’ said Mummer.

‘Oh, I don’t doubt it,’ the bishop replied, brushing crumbs off his stomach with the back of his hand. ‘He’ll be able to steer you all through safe waters, make good around the capes, as it were.’

‘In fact my sailing analogy is quite apt,’ he said, looking into the middle distance and awarding himself a smile. ‘You see, I’m rather keen on Father Bernard taking the congregation out into the wider world. I don’t know about you but I’m of the opinion that if one is cosseted by the familiar, faith becomes stagnant.’

‘Well, if you think so, your grace,’ said Mummer.

The bishop turned to Mummer and smiled in that self-satisfied way again.

‘Do I detect that there may be some resistance to the idea, Mrs …?’

‘Smith,’ she said, then, seeing that the bishop was waiting for her to answer, she went on. ‘Perhaps there might be, your grace, among the older members. They’re not keen on things changing.’

‘Nor should they be, Mrs Smith. Nor should they be,’ he said. ‘Rest assured, I rather like to think of the appointment of a new incumbent as an organic process; a new shoot off the old vine, if you like; a continuum rather than a revolution. And in any case I wasn’t suggesting that you went off to the far flung corners of the earth. I was thinking of Father Bernard taking a group away on a retreat at Easter time. It was a tradition that I know was very dear to Wilfred’s heart, and one that I always thought worthwhile myself.

‘It’d be a nice way to remember him,’ he added. ‘And a chance to look forward to the future. A continuum, Mrs Smith, as I say.’

The sound of someone knocking a knife against a glass started to rise over the babble in the garden.

‘Ah, you’ll have to excuse me, I’m afraid,’ said the bishop, dabbing crumbs from his lips. ‘Duty calls.’

He went off towards the trestle table that had been set up by the rose bushes, his cassock flapping around his ankles and getting wet.

When he had gone, Mrs Belderboss appeared at Mummer’s side.

‘You were having a long chat with his grace,’ she said, nudging Mummer playfully in the arm. ‘What were you talking about?’

Mummer smiled. ‘I have some wonderful news,’ she said.

***

A few weeks later, Mummer organised a meeting of interested parties so as to get the ball rolling before the bishop could change his mind, as he was wont to do. She suggested that everyone come to our house to discuss where they might go, although Mummer had only one place in mind.

On the night she had set aside, they came in out of the rain, smelling of the damp and their dinners: Mr and Mrs Belderboss, and Miss Bunce, the presbytery housekeeper, and her fiancé, David Hobbs. They hung up their coats in the little porch with its cracked tiles and its intractable odour of feet and gathered in our front room anxiously watching the clock on the mantelpiece, with the tea things all set out, unable to relax until Father Bernard arrived.

Eventually, the bell went and everyone got to their feet as Mummer opened the door. Father Bernard stood there with his shoulders hunched in the rain.

‘Come in, come in,’ said Mummer.

‘Thank you, Mrs Smith.’

‘Are you well, Father?’ she said. ‘You’re not too wet I hope.’

‘No, no, Mrs Smith,’ said Father Bernard, his feet squelching inside his shoes. ‘I like the rain.’

Unsure if he was being sarcastic, Mummer’s smile wavered a little. It wasn’t a trait she knew in priests. Father Wilfred had never been anything other than deadly serious.

‘Good for the flowers,’ was all she could offer.

‘Aye,’ said Father Bernard.

He looked back at his car.

‘I wonder, Mrs Smith, how you’d feel about me bringing in Monro. He doesn’t like being on his own and the rain on the roof sends him a wee bit crackers, you know.’

‘Monro?’ said Mummer, peering past him.

‘After Matt.’

‘Matt?’

‘Matt Monro,’ said Father Bernard. ‘My one and only vice, Mrs Smith, I can assure you. I’ve had long consultations with the Lord about it, but I think he’s given me up as a lost cause.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Mummer. ‘Who are you talking about?’

‘The daft feller mooning at the window there.’

‘Your dog?’

‘Aye.’

‘Yes,’ said Mummer. ‘Well, I suppose that’ll be alright. He won’t, you know, will he?’