by Adam Thorpe
There are no two faces exactly alike. He knows this is the same face. A toothy coppernob angel with freckles spattered over her nose like flicked ink.
His angel.
The whole world goes suddenly quiet.
It’s already mostly quiet here: WE LIVE IN SILENCE shouts from the gate. That very first time, threading out for their Sunday stroll – the one time in the week they’re allowed to natter – it sounded as if everyone was bellowing. There was a familiar roar and they all looked skywards: the Red Arrows were practising rollbacks. Unfortunately, the presence of a silent monastic house far below has never been enough to make the Arrows change their route.
‘Bless them,’ a brother murmured, still wincing at the noise. That was very impressive. In the outer world it would have been Fu-uck off!
It was Easter Sunday, the monastery closed to visitors. They had kept the vigil from well before dawn, and celebrated the Eucharist. He had, he supposed, been plunged into the holy deep end. The stone was rolled away from the tomb. He was reborn with a bloom of Pinot Noir from Surrey in his mouth. He had only arrived on Thursday, just in time for the Mass of the Lord’s Supper.
Everything felt different. Two suitcases like starting boarding school. Plus a rucksack, which felt adventurous. Yet only ten days earlier he had been scouting locations in Lincoln prior to doing Morocco with Emily. Joey and Flo not coming, for the first time ever. Eighteen, post-A levels, Oundle finished with at last, doing their own thing before uni. Then it all changed.
He bought a book in that nicely messy second-hand place.
Oh, and that huge domestic with Emily in the car a week or so earlier – on the fast lane of the M4. ‘I want happiness,’ she said. ‘You have just one life in which to achieve happiness. Right now I’m sad. I’ve been sad for years. Look at this shit. This is me, heading down the congested, totally depressing motorway of life. So I want a new start. I want to come off. I want a divorce.’ He protested; she began to shout. To weep. To have hysterics. So they came off at Membury for a Starbucks cappuccino. Welcome Break. ‘Last time I was here,’ he said, trying to keep it light, ‘it was for a shoot back in 2003. A year in the life of a motorway services cleaner. Remember? It hasn’t improved.’ She went hysterical again. Everyone looking. His mobile pinging away.
Bad timing, the whole thing. No way could he have taken so much as a day off work: panic emails flooding his phone all Sunday. So it was straight back early on Monday to their stupid new open-plan office in Hammersmith. Nigel Hunter red-flagging everything, talking about meltdown on the upcoming shoot in Romford. A Year in the Life of a toilet service driver. ‘Never call him a portable-toilet cleaner, OK? He’s uber-sensitive.’ No time to sort out the catastrophic domestic problems, oh no. The two-year contract terminating soon, as it had terminated so many times before. Always voluntarily renewed. Stupid system, the T V world. This time he’d only be renewing himself. Cultivating silence.
Emily thought it a great idea. Or pretended to. Her reaction was a shock at first. She wanted him out of the way.
No more Nigel at least, sitting up very straight in his swivel chair, fussing at this and that. Camp twiddles of his fingers, the nails clipped with millimetric precision, like his jawline beard, not a curl of his horribly home-bleached hair out of place. All the time plotting, plotting, plotting! Tight-arsed: the man could hold an ice cube between his buttock cheeks without it melting.
‘So long, Nigel. It’s been a pleasure.’ Get thee behind me, Satan.
A parley with the twins about his planned ‘retreat’. They scoffed, secretly found it cool. ‘You’ll be back in about three months, Dad.’ Joey working in Pizza Hut towards his Himalayan journey, planned for April. Flo to do a newspaper internship in Madrid. A very big hug.
It was the beginning of a process that will only end in the golden light of the Godhead: total absorption, as Father Jeremy puts it, in the centre of immensities. So much better than the term death. He can imagine no better end for his body than to be tucked up in the little cemetery, facing the woods and the distant fields where the original pre-Dissolution brothers were also laid to rest, apparently, before the smash-up.
However. Right now he is looking at an angel called Fay Sheenan. He feels he’s been whisked back to Go. Base camp. Pre-shoot panic. Massive bump onto solid concrete. Way, way off-piste. He has to lean on the van for support.
One day, a week into his postulancy, returning to his cell at dawn after Vigils, the sky was full of rooks like flecks of soot, cawing, chuntering and squeaking – there are rookeries in the belt of ash trees fringing the monastery lake. It was reassuring. Praying for all those fearful of the coming day, you forget you might be fearful too. He’d had an awful dream that night and woken up sweating despite the cold; the stove had gone out, but the bells had not yet rung. Two o’clock? Two thirty? The short-wave static was his stomach. All those lentils.
Sleep was out of the question. He slipped out of bed, fumbled with the Danish stove and prayed. The indivisible One, awake at all hours. No answer came before the bells.
He read Psalm 42 again at his little desk: Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me.
He went back to bed. He was flying over the fields for an aerial shot. The helicopter was a Sikorsky, piloted by Nigel Hunter, naked in a hooded cowl. The blades wouldn’t fit between the trees. Nigel howled triumphantly.
Chris woke up with a yelp and a full-on erection. The nightmare had left greasy black deposits on the walls of his mind. He was scrubbing them dutifully with an oven pad when the bells of Vigils gained on his reverie at the border of sleep and scattered it, his alarm tinging in sympathy. Maybe he’d slept when he’d thought he was awake. Maybe you can actually dream that you’re awake, fooling your own mind.
He remembered what Father Jeremy had advised him during his first counselling session: You are God’s idea, not your own idea. Like a character in a T V series. God the screenwriter.
He swept out the boiler room after the office of None with mindful concentration. Even a cuppa had become meaningful. The glazed brown mugs from the pottery studio are two-handled, medieval-style – or like an infant’s mug, reminding them to retain the faith and humility of a child. A friend once said to him, years ago, that faith and religion are two quite different things.
That evening he decided to adapt the well-known Sortes Vergilianae method of divination and opened his Bible at random. His finger fell upon a verse in Ecclesiastes: ‘Better is one handful with quietness, than both the hands full with travail and vexation of spirit.’
He slept very well that night. He considered he was over the glitch.
There have been several other glitches before today. The first happened at the end of his observorship: writing an email to the monastery, replying to the vocation director’s positive decision, he ended it with a chatty Wonderful! His finger missed by millimetres on the last letter, but he only realised once he’d sent it off. The vocation director? Brother Lawrence.
Wonderfuk!
Hunger was a major issue, especially for the first month or so. He’d crave the granola lumped in the chunky stoneware bowl, but there was never enough. When, every other day, a fresh loaf appeared on the platter before him, still warm, he could barely resist grabbing the bread knife. He even yearned for the tinned tuna with overboiled gnocchi. Cooking fudge, however, put him off fudge. Cold was another preoccupation, in the spring months. The wood-burning stoves in the cells, despite being the latest thing from Denmark, struggle to make their mark: the ration of fuel is too small. The rest of the place has no heating at all. And he still shifts on his jogger’s damaged knees as he prays with the others. Some too old even to bend at the knees, though their heads are permanently lowered by their corkscrewed spines.
These are all physical problems. The two latest glitches are not. They are deeper.
Joey, and Fay Sheenan. Let’s work it out. Clarity and chronology.
A
trio of visitors crunch over the gravel, returning to their vehicle. Not this vehicle, though. Bleep-bleep of car doors, remote unlocked. Nasty sound. A posh young voice saying, ‘It’s fairly niche, isn’t it, as an excursion?’
He glances again at the face on the poster and then walks away abruptly, off towards the brambles. Salvation comes through labour.
Fay Sheenan. Her eyes are following him. It’s all so incredibly wrong.
To reach the blackberries, he has to cut a path with the sickle through a swash of six-foot flowering nettles that sting his exposed wrists now and again, sweating in the sun’s blaze. He’d always thought nettles to be a painful nuisance, but they are wonderful, full of nutritional benefit, essential for other friendlier plants and for insects such as the butterfly. As good as broad beans! But not in late summer. Now it is mushrooms, nuts and hedgerow fruit. The sloes, for instance, have never been better. So he was told by Brother Odilo.
The tussocky field is full of frantic clouds of midges. The wood’s hem casts the patch into shade, tricking his eyes that it’s actually black until his pupils widen and the rhodopsin levels return. The air is heavy with the satiated vegetal perfume that the word Amen gives off. He ought to be feeling very, very good. He takes off his gloves and begins to pick the inky berries, sneezing and coughing in clouds of pollen dust off the nettles, dropping the fruit gently in the deep wicker basket. When he tries to pick more than two or three at once, they end up squashed. The key is patience. Right now he’s rushing it. The thorns are vicious. They snag on his sleeves, inject his fingers with their needles. Imagine a crown of them slammed down onto your head, ripping into your veined temples.
Fay Sheenan!
And things were going so well too. Better and better. The peckish angle, for instance: his wooden spoon no longer scours the bowl for the gold of a last bran. Now, when a lay brother brings a fresh jug of water, Chris ignores his thirst and denies himself a second cup until the others have helped themselves. He even refrains, after washing in the chill stone basin along the refectory corridor, from drying his fingers on the roller towel, leaving it less soiled for the others. He’s retained the generic postulant expression, which is somewhere between mild curiosity and gentle wonder. The new-guy gene, as it was known in his former life.
The absence of sex is an issue of course: sublimation, wet dreams. Dreams involving Emily’s smooth, bared shoulders, his hands slipping over their coolness and down, down. Burying his face in her hair. But she’s never his actual wife in the dreams; it’s always an affair. The fiendish subconscious. This will improve! He’s praying it out of him, as it were.
Even the day’s exhausting schedule has turned out to be manageable, in the end. He thinks of the seven communal prayers in the huge abbey church as ripple marks on the broad beach of the day: firm against the bare soles of your feet. The rhythm keeps you going. Nothing comes and tears it all up, as work used to do, or family cohabitation. You just follow the bells. And the summer has been lousy: not much sun, unseasonally wet and registering extremes of temperature either way. ‘You know it’s bad when the weather forecast says “partly cloudy” and your heart lifts,’ remarked one of the jollier monks as they set off for their communal walk one grey Sunday. To be honest, his heart has been lifting almost every day. Until now.
Accumulation. You have to watch out for accumulation. The fragile eggs piling in the bowl.
There have been other shocks as opposed to simple glitches; it’s not quite true to say that it’s all been plain sailing apart from hunger, cold and exhaustion. Let’s not talk it up into a dreamworld, guys.
During Terce one morning at the end of April (he’d been here barely a month) the great chapel shivered to a clap of thunder like an explosion. They stopped singing. The sky turned so black it might actually have been night again. An obviously faked curtain of rain stretched on and on over the fields. A colossal amount fell – a month’s worth in twenty-four hours – and the accompanying gale left a hole in the roof of the chapter house, part of which dates to the fourteenth century (nothing much else does, thanks to Thomas Cromwell). The lake overflowed into the adjoining meadow and drowned the cabbages in the field beyond.
Following the monastery’s mud-splattered Mitsubishi jeep carrying ninety-five-year-old Brother Felix, they picked their way up the main track through its ruts and puddles to have a look. The monastery lake had brimmed several yards over its banks, the trees now paddling in their pinafores; a dirty brown gush was obliterating the little waterfall at the outflow end. The stream was so swollen and full of leafy, broken branches that it was more a cove. The whole place smelt like an intertidal mudflat: he expected to see starfish or crabs. The press called the gale a tornado, with clips on YouTube showing it twisting over the fields as if Lincolnshire was Kansas.
A number of significant trees had succumbed, showing their uprisen root balls, tearing down others on the way. At least the rookeries were more or less intact. The whine of a chainsaw began. When the water level had lowered itself sufficiently, the fitter monks helped clear the stream, white habits or even black scapulars swapped for dungarees and wellies. Chris enjoyed this teamwork, for all its discomfort. A sharp shout from near the outflow: the others made the mistake of hurrying over. Lying in the shallows was the most horrific sight Chris had ever seen in his entire life: a white-fleshed, bloated form with patches of fur and the grinning expression of a disfigured pig showing large pointy teeth, empty eye sockets writhing with worms.
‘Dog,’ said one of the brothers. ‘And I don’t think it drowned yesterday.’
‘This is why we are advised not to swim in the lake,’ commented Brother Lawrence sternly, turning to Chris as if he’d been doing nothing but splashing about since he’d arrived.
He had to back away, apologising because the stench seemed to be pulling his features down to a deep pool of nausea, saliva rising in his throat. A brief debate about what to do with it. They decided to bury the poor creature on the edge of the beech clump to the south of the monastery, where the earth was soft and loamy, and say a little prayer. A lay brother fetched a sheet of plastic and rolled the corpse in with the help of a spade. Chris left them to it. He now knew what a demon would look like, and how it would smell. The teeth were yellow, with huge curving canines. Pump in smoke and screams and a red flickering, have it up on hairy goat legs and cloned ad infinitum, and you’d beat Hieronymus Bosch hollow.
A mongrel dog.
Months later Chris’s stomach still gives a sympathetic lurch. Blood on his hands from tiny stingy punctures and scratches, clusters of blackberries tempting him to overreach himself. Why did God make thorns? Evolutionary protection device, blah blah. The better question: why did He make blackberries? The pads of his fingers are stained a dark grey. As when he’d churn out agitprop on the Roneo machine at uni, type his mediocre essays on his portable Olympia. All wiped out by computers the moment he joined Granada: first rung on the greasy ladder.
Cause and effect, that’s the thing.
No, clarity and chronology, the two key words in his former life. PowerPoint simple. That’s why his presentations were sought after, even in the seen-it-all T V entertainment world. Clarity and chronology, guys.
That rainy spell subsided and it was suddenly hot for a few days, as if the divine caretaker had returned from an extended break and thrown the switch. The ooze and slop of plastery mud in the huge fields grew snakeskin scaly, while the lake was still high but scintillant and much clearer. The brothers had to admit that their main water feature looked rather grand and lovely. A few ducks and moorhens patrolled and dippers perched on broken branches, curtseying in their stark white bibs. Someone suggested installing a giant fountain, another felt a stone pagoda would be suitable, as at Stowe. They were not being serious, and everyone laughed. Laughter is very much part of the monastery’s soundtrack.
A meeting in the library: the accounts were laid bare by Brother John, the community’s official bean counter. He had done the calcs. N
ot good. An astonishing estimate for repairs to the chapter-house roof earned a general gasp; the competent carpenters among them offered their services.
Chris cleared his throat. ‘Look, speaking from my former swim lane, if I may,’ he said, ‘I suggest a video clip for the website. Better than photographs. A talking head with a brother or two, some chanting in the chapel, a glimpse of a cell, a few exterior wide shots? Finishing in the gift shop, close-ups on products?’
He seemed to have talked for ages, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute or so. An apologetic tone full of humility. The white hoods – it was cold in the library – didn’t seem to have budged. He felt suddenly illish.
‘A take,’ echoed Father Jeremy, scratching his close-cropped snowy beard.
‘Oh, several,’ Chris said without irony. Emily would have to bubble-wrap the camera and send it, he realised. Would she do that for him? ‘I’ve seen it on some other monastic websites. Especially the American ones. Those weeny embedded fifty-second clips too.’
The hood containing Brother Lawrence stirred. ‘Adverts. I can see the faithful instantly hammering at the door.’
There was a chuckle from the others. The word adverts might as well have been a well-sharpened hatchet. He was back in nursery school, being patiently told the difference between his shorts and the loo.
‘Now what did that new feller say?’ shouted Brother Felix, less gaga than he looks.
Whether encouraged or not by this humiliating episode, the deepest shadows descended around the middle of May. The first stinger was a letter from Gillian, his nicer sister-in-law, the previous week. Joey had stopped all his sporting activities and cancelled his gap-year plans and was stuck in his room most of the time, smoking skunk and playing video games in his undies. Emily had made no mention of this. Gillian implied Joey was in depression because his dad had become a monk. Too ‘freaky’ for him. Chris felt the tentacles of the outer world rippling towards him. Joey may well have got depressed anyway as a result of the upcoming divorce. Or because he was in transition. Between stations. No mention at that stage of the anorexia.