Missing Fay

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘What kind of problems?’

  ‘Just don’t go there,’ the monk advised with a kind of simper.

  The cross was a statement of confidence, or maybe defiance, funded by ‘sympathisers’ in Ireland and America. Chris didn’t go there, no. Instead, he commented on the golden froth of gorse blossom spreading beyond the upright. Nature is always a safe bet.

  He’s been here nearly five months. It’s nothing, and it’s everything. It’s not a sabbatical. It’s a rendering up.

  So many peak moments. For instance, hoeing between the broad beans in the vegetable garden a few weeks ago with Brother John. The usual peaceful silence. No need to make conversation, to juggle with status, to oil the wheels with chit-chat. The ferocious complexity of beetles and ants. He watched a worm wriggle in his hand, its little body surprisingly chill. I am a monk, he repeated to himself. This fact has a clapperboard crispness. Astonishing and ordinary. Clack. He took a deep breath, sucking God’s eternal breath out of the early summer air and into his soul. He’d never thought of it like that in the old days – before Easter, in other words. He’d never even thought about breath, or breathing.

  If you like broad beans, his mother would say, you’ve achieved adulthood. He adores broad beans: their flat, earthy ordinariness.

  Hoeing was good. Three afternoons of it. He’d stay in his smock while Brother John kept to his tunic and scapular. It was a medieval scene. The uprooted weeds quickly went limp and dry. Of course he thought of the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13), where Jesus suggests that he’ll be personally sending his troops of angels to deal with the human weeds sown by the Devil, casting them all into the furnace of fire. Nice. Ah, but even weeds are merely wild flowers excluded by our agricultural arrogance. His hoe churned away, heartsease and speedwell and goosegrass biting the sod. Farming is mostly a branch of the chemical industry, so the Lord must be in goggles and white suit, spraying Roundup over those deemed sinful. He glanced at Brother John, who would never have thoughts like these. Bland and smooth as a choirboy.

  The ordinances. Not to nurse a grudge. Not to hate anyone (even Nigel Hunter). To have no jealousy or envy. It occurred to him that his dream angel may have been demonic, tempting him into arrogance. She planted a thorn of pride that is now infected; either it was a divine test or he’d let his defences down. As Nigel would have said, looking disdainful, you’ve bigged the whole thing up.

  He’s sweating as he picks and plucks now, wondering why the basket isn’t filling quicker. Go with it! The berries are warm, come away easily. There are rustlings under the brambles: voles or field mice or birds. No one treads lightly on this earth. Heaven will be weightlessness. Could be a bit dull.

  The thing is, there was such intent in her face. In the dream. Staring at him. Such intent.

  Ouch.

  There is a small musty room in the oldest wing called the Conversation Room. It has a couple of frayed floral easy chairs with toothpick legs and an electric kettle. The decoration consists of a faded poster showing a cathedral’s portico: possibly Santiago de Compostela. The previous abbot introduced the idea in the 1970s: when two monks have a relational problem, and the weather is too unpleasant for a walk outside, they can ask the abbot for permission to go to the room and vocalise rather than bottle it up.

  Few do these days, but Chris sat in it one day last week and pictured surly, sardonic Brother Lawrence in the other chair, down to the round medieval-style specs, the cadaverous cheeks, the lupus (or whatever serious skin condition) that has pocked and rutted the man’s face. The room smelt of mice and stale coffee. Brother Lawrence has taken to hiding inside his scapular whenever they pass in the corridor: pulling the black hood forward, the face disappearing into shadow, he is like a medieval Death figure. A sightless spectre sometimes, because the round glasses catch the light. God’s aide! He would be permanently on his mobile if they were allowed them.

  He imagined sitting down with Brother Lawrence and getting things sorted. But he was afraid to. So the conversation was held with his kids instead. It went quite well. He even pretended to make them coffee.

  Now he imagines sitting down there with Fay Sheenan. Why did you fool me with your great wings, Fay? To lead me by your small hand into illusion and pride? The lake element. Yes, why the lake? Jungian perhaps. He can’t remember his Jung, it’s been so long. Whatever, she says. Duh. It’s easier to land on water, yeah? He studies his inky fingers.

  Along with the cemetery and its open view, the lake is one of his favourite spots. There was that Sunday stroll around it just the week before last, in the solid waking world. They gathered on the cloister lawn, less sharply mown these days for ecological reasons and thickly sprinkled with daisies and buttercups, soft with clover, popular with butterflies – mostly orange tips and small whites. Chris wouldn’t have had a clue what their names were in his former life; at least that’s a gain.

  The weather was glorious, for a change. Everyone except Chris the postulant was in tunic and scapular, a black-and-white procession with a grey note. They had a look at the vegetable garden first, the cucumbers ready to be mashed for Our Lady of Grace’s best-selling body cream (which provoked a few jokes). Brother Odilo, ex-biology teacher in Middles-brough, pointed to various spots and moulds due to the wet weather. Then outside the walls for the orchards, the hives, the greenhouses, the near-lightless mushroom sheds and the cabbage field. They contemplated the huge wheat field beyond the hedge. A problem: the farmer uses foliar feed, herbicide and fungicide and there is overspill. This year was terrible for fungus so the farmers didn’t hold back on the chemicals. ‘Nathan Dobson is his name,’ said Brother Odilo, pulling a face. ‘And the Dobsons are not to be meddled with. They’re very proud of their high yields.’

  ‘Working against nature,’ sighed the abbot mournfully, shaking his head. Chris, who had never given it a moment’s thought while in London, nodded in sympathy. The ripe wheat was ready to be harvested: it swayed like liquid in the summer breeze, looking pure and innocent. It was, he now knew, thoroughly toxic. How on earth do you tell the good from the bad? But he was learning so much!

  They headed down to the lake. Out of the trees’ shadow the water was a glittering aquamarine and there were oohs and aahs of admiration. Dragonflies and mayflies darted and swooped: he could now tell the difference. Great lace doilies of elderflower. Brother Odilo spoilt it somewhat yet again by saying that there were several invasive species of waterweed flourishing in there, helped by the chemical run-off from the fields. They would have to be yanked out at some point.

  Sometimes we know too much. But it makes no difference. We do not do evil in ignorance.

  Straggled out into smaller groups, they circled the lake on the narrow towpath. To his alarm, Chris found himself next to Brother Lawrence, all hooded halitosis, with Brother Eustace – Italian expert, fine baritone singer, built like an ox – making up the rear. The conversation, circling around the frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel and then expanding into a general overview of the Quattrocento, was way over his head. He began to feel thick. Their even voices, in which Italian names bobbed like lost holidays, lulled him into a rancorous sleepiness.

  He contributed absolutely nothing, not a word. A degree in history, and then he’d languished in the crap telly world for over two decades. Well, it was hip at the time, back in the Blairite 90s. Popular was in, it was classless. Saying you were a producer on Have You Got My Size? went down better at dinner parties than if you said you were with Panorama or Arena. Shifting to Viper’s Bugloss Productions, A Year in the Life revealed fans even among his own circle, perhaps because it was not yet trash, but falling ratings at the end of the 90s meant they had to drag it down into silliness, daft stuff, cash prizes, audience votes and shamelessly giggling presenters. The show’s founder, Ricky Thornby, was horrified, but he’d been sacked years ago in a crafty buyout and restructuring. And Chris had learnt everything he knew from Ricky, before the guy moved to Texas. Audience skew got older and older: som
etimes he reckoned it was mostly rest-home residents, staring at it vacantly over a milky cuppa and stale digestives.

  Twenty years of his life! The last five or so were dreadful. Checking the TARPs (variable target, withering audiences, declining ratings), working at weekends, hire-and-fire, the old two-hour lunch breaks in a pub whittled down to a deskbound pasta salad out of a foam clamshell. A Year in the Life hanging on to its teatime slot by its fingernails, the chasm of the 9.30 morning death slot ever yawning. Tight-arse bastards like Nigel Hunter keeping you on your toes while executive mothers doing ten-hour days, their young kids fraying them to a pair of dark circles around the eyes, spat at you in emails. He didn’t even go out on shoots very much when he became a full producer. Any personal opportunities opening up and you still had to be in there like swimwear or you’d lose out, be cast adrift, die of mortgage strangulation. When A Year got the Daytime Television Award in 2008, Nigel – the man who’d plagiarised every single one of his ideas – got a full page in the Sunday Times. No mention of Chris Barker. Not a squeak.

  Now Chris Barker is picking blackberries in Lincolnshire. No one’s telling him how he can do it better.

  So what did Nigel reply to one bright lad eager as a puppy for an unpaid internship, the CV over-gilded with achievement, the photo bursting with enthusiasm? You look pretty shit. Have a nice life eating out of bins.

  Chris knows now how the lad must have felt.

  At least he knew what the Quattrocento was; it was just the detail that had gone. Two decades-worth of obliterating trash! The lake’s water was so clear, shafted into by spot beams of intense sunlight, that he could see the waterweed (there was certainly a lot, good or bad) and drowned boulders, lazy flickers of fish, countless water boatmen. He reckoned he’d have to make regular visits to this very spot, drinking from its beauty. His sort of place. No wonder he’d dreamt about it, or rather no wonder God had tendered him such a dream.

  He allowed the two monks to get ahead a little, and he was the last in the line. The front lot were already on the opposite bank, chatting and gesticulating against the belt of ash. A guffaw, stirring the ducks.

  The sun on his face, kicking up off the water in sparkles and flares. He let the art-history symposium move out of earshot.

  There was a shiver over the water, and another, shadows canoodling with sunlight in the summer breeze. Puffs of old man’s beard sailed past, the feathery tufts still dry. A brother had told him that old man’s beard was once used to weigh souls. He could imagine that. He remembered taking Joey and Flo to sail their toy boats on that huge pond on Clapham Common, where the sleek vessels would sway and lean and be attacked by pirates. Pure fun.

  Then the breeze dropped and the lake was absolutely still. Only an impression of stillness: picked out by an intense beam, a dense ripple of waterweed streamed out a few feet off from the bank, more dark red than green, and fixed under a rounded boulder as pale as bone; then the air brushed across it again, and the surface took over, dimpled like glass in a bathroom window.

  This was the precise view he’d had in his dream, he realised. The angel had touched down on the lake somewhere between where he was standing and the far bank.

  He took a deep breath and stepped back on to the path, walking faster so as not to give the idea that he wanted to keep his distance. Brother Eustace, unhooded like the other normal brothers, swivelled his head as Chris approached, the thick fifty-year-old neck bulging with muscle.

  ‘Ah, the prodigal son returns,’ said the monk in his velvet baritone. ‘Did we bore you stiff?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  Brother Lawrence didn’t even deign to look, the pointed hood firmly pulled forward. Chris felt he was scuffling along in their wake, a kind of spiritual and intellectual dwarf. This will improve.

  He pops one or two blackberries into his mouth. Pure succulence. You cast your own shadow. The great cross of suffering casts a shadow. It is not about ridding yourself of the shadow, it is about asking questions of the light. Big questions. Remember, as his dad used to say to him: it’s not all about yourself.

  Ask the right questions, the right answers come.

  His hand jerks all by itself: reaction to a sudden thought. The flash of a thought. An answer! Snared in the complex curves of the brambles, pulled out too fast, the skin is lacerated just where the veins bulge by the kuckles. Not really lacerated, but a handsome and painful rip that he sucks on. The basket is almost full, after a slow start: a decent poundage.

  He covers the fruit with the cloth and walks briskly back, crossing the car park again. Sweat is trickling down his spine. The camper van has gone, leaving only ruts in the gravel. He returns the gloves, sickle and secateurs to the greenhouse tool room and deposits the basket on the table in the empty kitchen, the vaulted space poised in its own shadowy calm and smelling of damp sponges, Ajax, interminable simmerings of lentil soup. His heart is thumping; he needs to take a deep breath and slow down. He might be having some sort of breakdown. The dog. That bloated vision from Hell. How could he have forgotten?

  As he gingerly washes his hands (rip superficial), he counts the big pans and skillets hanging in a row against the limewashed wall. They are so sensible, so real, so weighty, so gratifyingly enduring and reliable. So ancient. Whenever he helps with the cooking, he can barely lift the largest of them onto the Rayburn.

  He has dedicated his life to the ephemeral.

  He slips out of his work gear and into his postulant smock and sandals, the overalls joining the others on a row of pre-industrial iron hooks, the boots shelved at knee level. Everything shared, and it works.

  It works. Just take your time. A proper breath. Reach in carefully, don’t grab. All his life he’s grabbed. He’ll miss the kids as they accelerate (or maybe drift) out of adolescence. Will they miss him? He tries not to worry about Joey. Trust that everything will turn out fine. Don’t grab.

  A monk passes him on the way out through the cloisters. Chris catches the flash of a single circular lens as the face swivels to glance at him from deep inside the scapular’s black hood. He shouldn’t have been hurrying. Of course the monks do rush about sometimes, especially the lay brothers, but hurrying is not the done thing here, it’s as alien as adverts. Stupid to have hurried.

  He glances back once again from where the little path to the lake begins: the curving track is empty, the monastic buildings patchily visible to the left, the great black cross now out of sight beyond spreading branches massed with leaves. He slips down the path like a felon.

  The lake looks different. The sky is veiled with thin cloud, one massive soft box, diffusing the light to an evenness that flattens everything, including personal mood. The water is no longer a sapphire blue but a molten pewter, reflecting the sky with no Rembrandt lighting to probe the depths. And it’s the morning, not the afternoon: the angles are all different. The air is heavy and full of midges that fancy his sweaty neck above the smock’s collar.

  His sandals scuff the path’s complex surface of shed leaves, berries, twigs, repeating last week’s circuit through the tussocky grass. He thinks he’s near the spot where he paused, but it’s hard to be sure: it looks the same all the way along. The green sward, the patches of wild growth, the waterside bushes and trees still with Tibetan prayer flags of plastic and cloth caught on their branches from the flood …

  He stops and looks out over the lake, trying to recall the view opposite. It’s as if the actual place is obliterating the memory of it. It could have been anywhere along a hundred-yard stretch. He squints: the haze of cloud has thinned. He moves his head to get out of the glare zone, but everywhere’s a glare zone. The white sky angles off the water with a tungsten intensity.

  This is ridiculous. He needs to get himself sorted. There’s not enough distance between his inner mind and the outer stuff. Get a grip on the giant skillet. Then he notices, after advancing a few yards, a cluster of reeds up against the bank, an alder trailing its lower branches in the water and a spray of white
parsley-like flowers he doesn’t know the name of. He checks the grouping of the tall ash trees opposite with a trio of raggedy Scots pines to the right: the memory plays tricks, the trees seem less tall for all their bulk, although without the little human figures in front there’s no scale to play with.

  This is it. This is where he saw it, just ten days ago. That long ripple of redness, the pale lump.

  He approaches the grassy edge and peers in, sitting on his heels to get closer. The alder shields the sky’s obliterat-ing whiteness, which helps, and he begins to see below the pewter surface, beyond the mirrored alder leaves. Or perhaps the light has changed, the great titan arc in the sky stronger. He makes out nothing at first but a muddle of pebbles, drowned branches and twigs, a suspended something coated in silt, dark green waterweed – long stems but a different type of leaf, curly, not even reddish. Tiny creatures darting, feeding, all feelers and minute busying legs. A trout investigating, a relaxed and superior giant. Minnows nibbling at the algae on a large drowned rock, but it’s not got the same roundness as the one before. The world down there is miraculous, alien. Why does Brother Lawrence despise him? Or is that just a projection? What is Emily doing right now? Why is Joey hunkering down in his room, not eating, wasting away? Has anyone tried talking to the lad?

  He sighs. He has so far to go. He can smell incense off his sleeves. The sweetness seems opulent and strange among the background odours of vegetal life and the faint whiffs of silt and decay off the metallic water. The incense gets in everywhere, especially the ancient floorboards, where it sticks, apparently, in the wax. The cloths, the tassels, the curtains. Soaked in it. Orange peel, cloves, pine sap.

  Something long and wavering, not much more than the suggestion of a shadow, a few feet out into the lake.

  He shifts along the bank a yard or two closer and kneels, leaning out as far as he can, but the current over the decades has worn away the bank around the alder roots and he can’t get close enough. Anyway, wasn’t the reddish waterweed nearer to the edge? Or was that just an illusion stemming from the underwater clarity, lit up by the sun last week? Or his faulty memory? He traces the shadow along its length but there’s no sign of the pale boulder with its hollows and cranial smoothness, unless it’s that lighter blur there. Could be, yes.