Sucking Sherbert Lemons

by Michael Carson

“Absurd?”

  “Yes, you could say that.”

  Clitherow clapped his hands together and then turned and placed them on Benson’s shoulders. “Read Sartre!” he said.

  “How do you spell it?”

  Clitherow told him. Then he said, “You’re homosexual, aren’t you, Benson?”

  “Who, me?” asked Benson. “How dare you!”

  “Please don’t shy like that! I’m not Hepher. You are, aren’t you?”

  “I think I may be. Yes,” answered Benson after a pause.

  “Good. That wasn’t too difficult, was it? I am too, though I also have a fondness for women.”

  “Are you really? Gosh.”

  Clitherow held out his hand to Benson and shook it. “I must be going now. I have my school dinner to eat. You see, I am not beyond doing penance. We must meet again soon. Read Sartre!”

  And Clitherow weaved his way across the playground towards the dinner room leaving Benson in a state of cheerful confusion.

  That evening Benson was quizzed about the bruise on his cheek. He lied and told Mum and Dad that he had got it while playing football in the playground. Dad seemed pleased that his son was indulging in rough physical pursuits. Mum was less convinced. However, after a short barrage of questions had been successfully rebuffed by her son, she let the matter drop. Benson went into the front room to do his homework.

  Christmas came and went.

  Benson went to Midnight Mass as usual and fell in love with his Friend again under the spell of ritual and soft sermons full of love and sacrifice.

  Although Dad did not mention anything more about his departure from St Finbar’s, Benson frequently felt embarrassment and guilt when he was with him. He longed for the holidays to end so that he could go back to school and be around Clitherow again.

  At school things were better. His classmates showed him a new respect; Clitherow became a fast friend. He went for long walks with him and discussed Sartre and a man called St Genet, who, Clitherow reckoned, was as alienated as Benson; his work was going well and he seemed to be getting the hang of the required method for writing essays, and there had been no repetition of the bullying tactics of Brother Wood. Life, on the whole, was definitely picking up.

  Clitherow had been correct about religion. The hole in the dyke of Benson’s faith was daily becoming bigger. On some days he felt it was large enough for him to see through it to a calm sea that stretched uneventfully towards the horizon. And there on the horizon there was a white town full of people like Clitherow who would help him make sense of his life. Jean-Paul Sartre was there and told him to jump into the dark and take decisions, while his wise wife nodded and their friend, Genet, put his arm around him and said he understood; Joan Baez was there singing of lost loves and poor black people clubbed down in the Southern States of America; Bob Dylan was there singing about changing times and the lonesome death of Hattie Carroll. And among these luminaries walked Benson, expecting to find ‘Dearest Him who dwells ... Alas! Away!’ behind each palm tree. Benson took long walks with Jean-Paul and told him of his sufferings. Sartre nodded and smoked the briar pipe he held on the back cover of La Nausée. When Benson had finished his tale, Sartre said, ‘Act!’ and Benson said he would have a go. Then Jean-Paul took Benson home for tea. His lovely wife, Simone, made wonderful jelly.

  But at other times it seemed that the dyke of faith was intact. He would visit a church, kneel down and watch the altar. A feeling of being home and in the presence of God filled him up and made him weep. Then it would seem incredible that he could ever have doubted. He began, at such times, to see Clitherow as bad company; Sartre as a bad writer who wrote books that would pull poor souls like Benson into the pit.

  But the arguments against Catholicism, Benson’s stock of ammunition, were daily becoming larger. Before he knew it he had stockpiled a large arsenal, which, for good or bad, he would fire off whenever tempted back to the Church.

  The Sixth Form at school was doing its prescribed job. It had started Benson on the path of thought. He questioned everything: bath and bathwater were subjected to great scrutiny and thrown out. For a while he held on to the baby, protecting it and singing it holy songs by way of reply to the arguments of his peers. But not for long. Soon he was holding on to the baby of faith more and more loosely. When he actually threw it away, he hardly noticed it was gone. He only knew that his arms were open to embrace, free at last, his own nature, needs and inclinations.

  For some time Benson had not been able to get back in touch with Andy. He rang his number repeatedly from telephone boxes but it was never answered. He was always extremely disappointed when he heard the rings going on and on. There was a quality to them which told him the room was empty, but it did not stop him from letting the telephone ring.

  Then, on two occasions, he went and stood outside Andy’s house hoping that he would come out. If he had, Benson would have pretended he had just been passing. He thought he saw lights in the attic window on one occasion, but did not dare to go up to the front door and knock.

  One evening, about a month since he had last met Andy, he went to the library to find another book by Jean-Paul Sartre. The two he had read since being introduced to him by Clitherow had mystified him rather. He read both diligently and gained some satisfaction from the fact that he could go back and tell Clitherow that he had done so, but he did not really understand what the author was going on about most of the time.

  “Well look who it isn’t!” It was Andy standing behind him.

  “Hello, Andy! Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been here.”

  “I’ve called you a few times but you’ve never answered the phone. I was a bit worried.”

  Andy flicked his left eyebrow. “Well you know how it is, dear.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I’ve had other fish to fry.”

  “Have you?”

  “Yes.”

  Benson could see that Andy was restless and did not want to talk. “Can I come and see you?” he asked him, quietly.

  “No, I don’t think so, dear.” He came closer to Benson and whispered, “You see, it’s a bit difficult. You’re under age and I’d be for it if we were found out.”

  “But that didn’t worry you before!”

  “That was before.”

  “I see.”

  Andy wandered away soon after that, leaving Benson to wonder what it could all mean. He tried to remember why he had come to the library in the first place but for a long time could not remember, his brain being so full of confusion brought on by Andy’s rejection.

  Then he remembered that he had read a review of a new novel by an American writer, James Baldwin. It was called Another Country. He had decided then that he would try to find it on the library shelves.

  He looked under B but found nothing. Then he went over to the catalogue drawers and saw that the library did indeed stock the book but that it had a red star, which meant that it was in the permanent reserve and had to be asked for, the book being considered too risqué to be put out on the open shelves.

  Quaking a little, Benson approached the librarian and asked her for Another Country. She disappeared through a door into a room at the back and then returned carrying a thick novel. This Benson took eagerly and checked out. He looked round for Andy but he was nowhere to be seen. He left and walked home through the cemetery.

  Another Country opened Benson’s eyes.

  He read it closely at a slow pace. He rationed himself to a few pages a day in order to make the feast last as long as possible and then, when he had completed the book, he turned back to page one and read it again. He wept for the death of Rufus, the black hero, who jumped off a bridge in New York because he was unloved and messed up by America and had not been touched by Vivaldo, his white friend, who, though sometimes sharing a bed with Rufus, had been unable to reach ac
ross the divide of conventional morality and touch his friend when Rufus needed an embrace so badly. Had Benson been Vivaldo he knew he would have been able to reach out. If Benson had been Vivaldo then Rufus would not have leapt to his death.

  One segment of the novel dealt with the relationship of Eric and his French friend, Yves. There was an idyll in which the two lived in Chartres and made love within sight of the spire of Chartres Cathedral and Benson read this part over and over again. The scales fell from his eyes and he realised that not only was he not alone but that love between men had possibilities for beauty. This was the first time he had ever seen such a portrayal and it completed the sea-change in him brought on by Andy.

  He missed Sunday Mass for the first time, taking Another Country to the cemetery and reading favourite parts. He went home and, bold as brass, made up an account of the sermon he had heard at Mass. He felt no guilt. He was intoxicated. He had jumped into the dark. He had made his decision. He was going to be a happy homo.

  At school Benson joined the intellectual set, along with Clitherow and others. He was at the forefront of the group of Sixth-Formers who argued about religion and questioned the rectitude of everything.

  Clitherow introduced him to Bach’s cello works and Tom Paxton and Benson introduced Clitherow to ‘War Requiem’ and ‘Missa Luba’. It was a time when a new book made his heart race, when a song could change his perspective and beat away niggling doubts. His heart opened to everything and he dreamed of a famous future.

  He and Clitherow would go into the city to study at the main library. Once over the ferry and on the city streets, both boys felt that they were at the centre of things, in the midst of all the possibilities that life could hold out.

  The library itself was a distraction for Benson. There were lots of foreign students there, studying for their degrees at the university.

  Benson would look at the studious African and Arab faces, wondering if one of them could be ‘Dearest Him’.

  Sometimes they would look up and notice him watching them. They might smile. They might not. But they did not give any look or recognition in the way that Andy had.

  One night he followed an African student home from the library. The student carried a briefcase and walked across the city to a tenement near the Anglican Cathedral. He disappeared into the wretched place without once looking behind him. Benson went home and wrote his first poem.

  And one day soon after, in the art gallery next to the library, Benson found himself face to face with his old friend, the soldier in ‘Faithful Unto Death’.

  He stood looking at the painting, amazed at how well he had remembered it from the brief look he had been allowed during Brother O’Toole’s lesson all that time ago. But now he interpreted the painting in a different way. The guard was looking life straight in the eye. He did not flinch from its cruel, burning realities. He saw the bubbling cauldron of wickedness. He saw the inquisitions of Catholicism; the death of Viola Liuzzo and Medgar Evers in the South; the cruelty of war; the indifference of rich nations towards poor ones; the complications of life, and man’s ever-erring reaction to it all. The guard knew it all and stood to attention, steady and still. The guard was his own man, an individual who had taken his decision and was sticking by it, no matter what anguish resulted.

  Benson bought a postcard of ‘Faithful Unto Death’ on his way out of the art gallery and kept it inside his paperback of ‘Iron in the Soul’ like a Holy Picture in a missal.

  *

  And so, as Catholicism ebbed out of him, new enthusiasms and guilts took up their places in Benson’s soul. He shivered to Martin Luther King’s sermons; wept at the sight of the American police brutality on the freedom marches in the South; ranted against George Wallace and the colonial sins of Britain; worried Mum and Dad to distraction by being either monosyllabic towards them or venting his spleen on aspects of Catholicism.

  Mum went scuttling back to the Psychology shelf at the library. Once again she was able to put a word to her son’s ailment. Back home she went and announced, “It’s adolescence. He’s growing up, becoming his own man. That’s the problem.”

  Dad looked at Mum through a haze of cigarette smoke. He listened to the Dansette in the front room playing ‘Blowing in the Wind’ too loud.

  “I can’t see what he sees in that fellow’s voice. He sounds like a bull’s death rattle.”

  “That’s Bob Dylan,” replied Mum. “He dotes on him, he does.”

  Mum had taken the time to ask Benson about the man whose records littered the front room. They mostly belonged to Clitherow.

  “Well, I don’t know which was worse, his religious mania or this. At least he kept a civil tongue in his head when he was religious. Listen to that racket!” said Dad.

  Benson was now playing Britten’s ‘Missa Brevis’. He had bought the E.P. with his Christmas money and played it every day. He loved it loud. The boys’ choir had a piercing edge to it and the organ echoed and amplified the shrieking quality of the choir and pierced Benson to the heart.

  As he listened he was busily engaged in learning Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ by heart. Arnold’s poetry was one of his set books. ‘Dover Beach’ was his favourite. He felt that his ‘sea of faith’ was withdrawing to the accompaniment of the ‘long, withdrawing roar’ of Britten’s ‘Missa Brevis’. He repeated the poetry and listened to the music, and his spirits soared into a merry melancholy which was becoming his most abiding quality.

  He shared his feelings with Clitherow alone. Clitherow understood. But the hapless parents in the kitchen were left, shut out. In the dark.

  At school, Benson had managed to move from his place at the back to the desk next to Clitherow at the front.

  Since the incident with Brother Wood, Benson found that he was treated by the rest of the class with a new respect. This was undoubtedly helped by the fact that he was Clitherow’s friend and that his work was winning acceptance among the staff.

  Both Clitherow and Benson considered themselves set apart in the school and did nothing to ingratiate themselves to either staff or fellow students. Several of the teachers were rather frightened of the sharp precociousness of the pair at the front.

  Brother O’Toole had soon returned to teach them Religion and Benson, though sorely tempted to argue with everything the Brother said, could not bring himself to do so. He remembered Brother O’Toole with affection from the days when the Brother had taken him for English before he had gone off to be a Brother. And, since his return, Brother O’Toole had never been anything but decent to him, had never mentioned anything about his reasons for leaving the Brothers, though Benson knew that Brother O’Toole must have been privy to all the gossip.

  But, if Brother O’Toole’s Religion lessons kept Benson quiet, they did not inspire him to return to the Faith. The books and music and feelings that stabbed his heart daily and made him wild with excitement had far more power over him than anything Religion could offer.

  Suddenly, it seemed that everything Benson touched added to the arguments against Catholicism. History books detailed the wickedness of Renaissance popes; newspapers told him about the world’s population problems and the way the Catholic Church stood out firmly against all effective forms of contraception. Benson was confused by all this but he now took Hamlet as one of his heroes and saw him as a kindred soul, likewise confused by all the conflicting information that the world and circumstance had thrown at him.

  But once a week Benson allowed himself to let his doubts about Catholicism have full head. A priest came to give the class a Religion lesson. The priest was so pious and traditional that he opened himself up to the contemptuous comments of the Sixth-Form sophisticates.

  One day, the priest came in and said that he wanted to talk to them about the saints as patrons and intercessors.

  “The Church is all-embracing,” began the priest. “There is a saint for everyone. Any job
you take in life you will have a saint to help you out. For example, butchers have three saints: Adrian, Anthony and Luke; barbers have Anthony of Padua and Louis; bricklayers have Stephen; hopeless cases have St Jude.” He looked up at the class. “Now who is the patron saint of porters?”

  The class was silent.

  “St Christopher.” The priest answered his own question. “And who is the patron saint of shepherds?”

  The class was still silent. Clitherow yawned.

  The priest noticed the yawn and frowned. “St Drogo.”

  Benson put up his hand. “Who is the patron saint of women in labour, Father?”

  “I don’t know offhand, but I can look it up.”

  “I know!” said Benson.

  “Tell us then.”

  “St Anne.”

  The priest smiled wanly. “Well, yes. I suppose that makes sense.”

  “And who is the patron saint of women in difficult labour?” asked Benson.

  “Not St Anne?” asked the priest.

  “No, not St Anne. You’d be barking up the wrong tree if you were in difficult labour and went to St Anne for help. She’d direct you to St John Thwing.”

  “Would she now?”

  “Yes,” continued Benson. “You’ve got to get the right one for the right job. You see, St Gabriel is the patron saint of television workers but St Claire of Assisi is the patron saint of television. You’ve got to be pretty accurate, you see.”

  “Well I don’t think you do. Our Lord understands and...”

  Benson interrupted. “So what’s the point of it then? Who do you go to if you’re a prostitute or a mother living on a rubbish tip in Lima with ten children to feed and no way of limiting your family? Who do you go to if you’re being beaten and shot and lynched by wicked whites in Selma, Alabama, or if you are a teapicker in Assam being exploited by Brooke Bond? Who do you go to if you are beyond the pale, if you are sexually different through no fault of your own? Who do you go to?”