Be Near Me

by Andrew O'Hagan

  A smell of pine came from the corridors. The cleaners were knocking off for the evening and the janitor came with his grumpy face and his chain of keys. 'Got to lock the doors now, Father,' he said. 'It's been a long day. Don't let these ones keep you.'

  Maybe I felt refreshed by their badness; maybe I knew them all along, those two, and fell out of step with myself in recognition, knowing they might keep me from boredom with their loose talk and their chaos. The boy rose from the desk and eyed me, then he yawned. I later noticed that Mark would begin yawning every time there was a pause of more than two seconds in his adventures. He was never attentive to anything that didn't involve himself directly and had no sentiment beyond that relating to the fortunes of Celtic Football Club.

  'You're a good laugh,' he said. 'You don't get eggy over a bit of chat. No' like them dicks.' He nodded out to the corridor and the invisible teachers now home in their kitchens.

  'Thank you,' I said. 'It's rather diverting for me to hear the opinions of young people. Especially on current affairs.'

  'Diverting, is it?' he said, grinning. 'You're awesome.'

  The only American poet I cared for in my childhood was Wallace Stevens. He wasn't terribly Christian, not like the others I read, but I loved the colour of his thoughts, the way the earth was to him a paradise of green umbrellas and red weather rather than a place of obscure punishments. My mother gave me Harmonium for my twelfth birthday and I don't suppose I understood the poems at the time, but I've been thinking about them ever since, and I begin to see that the search for happiness is all we have. To sit in a park and listen to the dogs barking; to sit in a park and hear church bells: are we not always present, always human and always religious according to our faith?

  Those poems are made for the earth-loving young. I remember my delight at what they suggested, the world outside with its stars and palaces, its teacups and oceans, and my mother and I chuckled over his titles: 'Stars at Tallapoosa'—'there is no moon, no single, silvered leaf—and 'Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion':

  You dweller in the dark cabin,

  To whom the watermelon is always purple,

  Whose garden is wind and moon.

  Of the two dreams, night and day,

  What lover, what dreamer, would choose

  The one obscured by sleep?

  It was Mark and Lisa and me. We laughed in the car on the way to the Blue Star garage. The young people were so completely themselves that they wasted no time on reserve, and so we drove round the edge of the town as if we'd been companions for years, and it seemed right that I was with them and not with anybody else or thinking about the past.

  That was my folly: the past was actually present in every word and grin.

  'Call me David,' I said.

  'Call me Cardinal,' said Mark.

  Lisa was tapping out a rhythm on the back of the headrest. In the car park of the school, in the light coming from the houses, we had seen Mr McCallum, the headmaster, throwing up beside his car. He was partly hidden by the trees, but we saw him bending down and we stood back.

  'Did you see that?' said Mark. 'Fuck-Face was puking down the side of his crappy Volvo. What a pisshead.'

  'Don't,' I said. 'You must have pity.'

  'He's just an old tosser,' said Mark. 'Hates me anyway. They all hate me. Don't they, Lees?'

  'Aye, they hate him,' said Lisa. 'But he is horrible, though. Don't you think so, Father?'

  Mark laughed. 'You are trippin', baby.'

  I just laughed too. 'Don't be listenin' to her,' he said. 'The only thing she knows aboot is hip-hop and she's a crack whore.'

  'A what?'

  'The original Scottish coochie,' he said. 'Nasty!'

  'Ignore him,' she said. 'You don't even get crack round here. He's just talking rubbish. He thinks he's a Jamaican hip-hop gangster.'

  'Steady on,' I said. Mark rapped on the dashboard and laughed and gave me a soft punch on the arm.

  'Steady on,' he said. 'You're cool.'

  I asked them both if they'd really had such a difficult time on the visit to the mosque. 'Damn right,' said Mark. 'Those people just want to hurt people. They's mad as shit.'

  'They hate our way of life,' said Lisa.

  'You definitely got that from the telly, bitch,' said Mark, turning round in his seat and smacking Lisa's head.

  'Bite me,' she said.

  I looked over towards the shore as we pulled into the garage and could see only darkness stretching across the water, the lighthouse on Ailsa Craig blinking its cold warning over the bay.

  'America is out there somewhere,' I said.

  'At least in America they have good music,' said Lisa.

  'Too right,' said Mark.

  'And films.'

  'Too right,' he said.

  I gave the pair some money and they went into the garage shop to buy things. I could see them inside, larking about in the aisles and picking up stuff they didn't need. Mark shook hands in an elaborate way with the guy at the cash desk: his colleague, I presumed, as Mark had already said he worked in the garage at the weekends.

  I saw myself in the rear-view mirror. What was I doing? What was I doing here? My hair was grey and my eyes tired. It's amazing how you wake up grey. We start by thinking grey hair is somebody else's story, a crowning jest in the lives of the contented and the wise. Then you wake up grey yourself, realising you happen to be neither contented nor wise, and that grey hair is nature's revenge on the complacency of lustre.

  What was I doing?

  The kids were chuffed and preening in the confectionery aisle, gagging for fizz, keen for trouble, scenting the latest chance, each one a selfish fool made charming by the power of the moment and the yellow strip-lights. The car wash was idle. I wound down the window and looked through it, feeling the sea air.

  Grosvenor Square. The people linked arms in the afternoon and the horses charged forward, police helmets flying. A hippy offered a bunch of flowers to one of the officers and was beaten to the ground, and we sang our songs and the future was a dream.

  Mark and Lisa were laughing into the garage's microwave oven. In their arms they held slabs of chocolate, bottles and magazines, and I watched them for a while from the car and saw myself at the blurred edge of their existence. This was the great present: maybe the saddest place of all.

  'Goodnight then,' I said, the sense of Easter as real to me as their laughing eyes and the condensation on the windows of the Blue Star garage. I drove off before they could see I was gone.

  Each man has his own way of betraying himself. For so long I had known myself only in prayers, in silent shadows and in dreams. Say I was longing for disaster. Say I was a victim of the moment, the perpetual now. But driving along the coast road I began to feel less obscured by those years of determined avoidance. I felt alive. There was no moon up there to manage the occasion, no stars to make a feast of the sleeping shore, but I know I felt peaceful as I drove the car over the bridge and past the abbey with its wrong clock faces marking the night.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mr Perhaps

  MY MOTHER WAS SOMEONE who enjoyed the paradoxes of experience. 'Children like the taste of sweets,' I once said to her in the garden at Heysham. 'Of course,' she said. 'But do sweets like the taste of children?' She met my father when he was working at the Eastern General Hospital in Edinburgh and was immediately, she said, in love with his moral beauty, the kind of thing that Edinburgh girls of her class and generation were educated to look out for.

  'Didn't you just fancy him?' I said years later, after another florid retelling of the story.

  'No,' she said. 'He fancied me. I fancied spending my life with someone of that sort of quality, which isn't the same thing.'

  She said she knew all about the Anderton ancestors. The whole business appealed to her passion for history's approval; she wanted to feel included in the great debates and sacrifices of the past, and I suppose the burgeoning romance-writer in her had an instinct for material. When he got the job
at Lancaster Infirmary, and his own past loomed to swallow us up, the past of England and his own people, as well as daily life in the small village of Heysham, she thought it could only be a good thing.

  'Honestly,' she said. 'Your father was the only person I'd ever met who truly knew how to live his life. He wasn't perfect. But he knew what it took to be happy. He used to walk down that Lancaster canal as if it were one of life's unbeatable pleasures. He'd carry a guide-book. He'd check the provenance of chimneys. That's your father. He knew what to do.'

  'But did you love him?' I asked.

  'I miss him every day,' she said.

  There came a time in Dalgarnock, in May or so, when my friendship with those reckless young people suddenly deepened. On Lisa's sister's wedding day I was thinking of my mother and father while arranging my vestments. The patter of rain was heavy on the sacristy roof, but none of the great elements could damp down the noise of laughter and bawling coming from inside the chapel, where the families had gathered for the service. Babies cried out in the pews, folded in young arms, both parents and children rather pink, compact engines of untold wants.

  I opened the window above the sink and watched the rain. It brought the smell of other parts of Scotland, bogs and glens and open fields, the parts of Scotland I had read about in my mother's books, where history occurred and ruined cottages still stood to account in a smirr of rain.

  White chasuble, I thought. White stole.

  I put the garments over my head and wetted a comb under the tap. With the teeth of the comb I sought my parting and trained my hair into neatness. Looking in the mirror, my body heavy and stately with the old priestly stuff, I saw a child: myself as a child in my first dedication to the performing arts. My eyes' blueness was undiminished, stronger even, but the light in them was dimmed just then, as it might always be, by the knowledge of what could hardly be seen. I had got to the ridiculous age when one looks to see what one has found in the universe. That Saturday in the sacristy, the day of Lisa's sister's wedding, the noise of future happiness touched the glossy walls and slipped through the gap under the door, and I gazed into the mirror and saw something frozen and not quite resolved. The young lady and the man from Kilbirnie were soon to be married, and good for them. They meant to be happy. Even their stupidity was brave. I saw my own eyes and how old they seemed. Those eyes had looked on many things, but I couldn't be sure they'd ever seen oneness.

  Yet there had been moments. There was Florence. I stood once at the window of a hotel on the Piazza Santissima Annunziata, the Duomo very clear and Giotto's clock tower puzzling and beautiful in the haze of the morning sun and the honey-glut feeling of the hour. I remember everything one could see from that window: a cypress tree in a lone garden, a house with green shutters, a bicycle parked against an ancient wall. The church bells sounded out in great, intemperate rondels, and birdsong—chirrupy, urgent, nervous for events—rose up from invisible places. The sound of all this made a mystery best suited to that exact time and place. It was simplicity too, like the Fra' Angelicos that filled the former monastery of San Marco round the corner from the hotel, their lightness, their spirituality, carrying at the same time the reality and the unreality of life, offering the young a perspective on belief.

  That morning in Florence there was a wedding down below. I saw them coming through a door in the old wall, past the bicycle, through the fog of bells; they all seemed to be wearing greens and yellows, most of them talking and laughing. Then came the old men wearing straw hats and children silent in short trousers, one of them climbing on the bicycle, waving, smiling. The bride and groom had become one person and one force for good under the green shutters. I saw him kiss her and nothing was absent. Not just then. Above the clock tower a dozen swallows were tumbling and circling the peaks, and my eyes fell from the birds to the young couple kissing in the courtyard. The beautiful day would dress them and the night undress them. Music played in the distance. And just then, at the open window, a hand touched my shoulder and I reached up for it without turning, and I knew he was speaking Shakespeare through a smile, as he often did in that summer of love.

  Blame not this haste of mine. If you mean well,

  Now go with me and with this holy man

  Into the chantry by: there, before him,

  And underneath that consecrated roof

  Plight me the full assurances of your faith;

  That my most jealous and too doubtful soul

  May live at peace.

  People want to applaud in church nowadays. One simply lets them. ('Pragmatic, pragmatic,' Bishop Gerard says.) The boy marrying Lisa's sister stood at the altar with wet-looking, gelled hair and bore, together with his best man, a mischievous smirk dabbed round with aftershave. They had the sort of cosmetic freshness that follows hard on the heels of debauchery, and the congregation buzzed that morning with repressed jokes. There were giggles when I asked for any reason why this marriage might be put asunder, and the service ended with applause and cheering of a sort that might be thought, on a rainy day, to have taken too little account of the perpetual suffering of Christ, whose journey to Calvary was depicted at intervals on the walls of the chapel. At the rear of the line of tanned youths coming to Communion was Mr Savage, the old communist, who shuffled towards me with his plastic bags. This time he asked for two hosts, one after the other. 'I can't do that. You're not hungry, are you?' I whispered.

  'No,' he said. 'Just tired.'

  The bride's mother saw the old man coming out of nowhere and she looked confused and then faintly repelled. I saw her examine the back of his raincoat and then point him out to a group of the men, as if to ensure that he couldn't harm the proceedings. She did it swiftly with a single painted finger, as if she recognised his type and hated his coat. I watched him for a second over her shoulder as he walked to the door and stood in the shadows. 'That was just beautiful, Father,' she said, staring at me somewhat manically for a second. It occurred to me she looked like someone who had taken lessons in smiling. Her face was orange and her hair quite yellow. 'You gave oor Helen a great send-off. Okay. Now. You'll come to the reception, won't you? We've set you a wee place at the table.'

  'I don't think so, Mrs Nolan. It's very kind of you, but I have a great deal of parish business to get on with.'

  'Oh, away ye go,' she said, giving me a gentle shove. 'It's a Saturday. You'll certainly be coming along. Are we no' good enough for you, Father? I'll have none of that nonsense now. Come to the reception and have a wee dram. I know we're no' your type. But just for me. It's no' every day a person sees their oldest lassie getting married.'

  As she spoke her plump words, I caught sight of Mark and Lisa over her shoulder. Mark was wearing a black tie. He saw me looking up and made a quick, friendly nod, as if proposing that I acquiesce to whatever Mrs Nolan was asking of me. 'Of course,' I found myself saying. 'Of course I'll come. That would be splendid.'

  Rice was sticking to the umbrellas and pinches of confetti floated in the puddles. The faces of small children appeared; they had different haircuts, the children, but the same eyes, and their voices rose in anticipation of a challenge and an opportunity.

  'Scramble!' they shouted.

  I watched them from the tinted dark of a hired limousine, the best man throwing handfuls of silver and the children diving onto the gravel to pick up the coins.

  'Look at the state ae them,' said Mr Nolan, the bride's father. 'A buncha piranhas. You'd think they'd never seen a coin in their lives.'

  'It's one of your Scottish traditions?' I said.

  'A good one,' he said. 'When I was young, we used to scour the town looking for weddings, just to get in on the scramble.'

  The car moved off down the lane with a beep at the crouching kids and a squeak of upholstery. 'You were born in Dalgarnock, Mr Nolan?'

  'Born and bred,' he said. 'And I'll tell you something for nothing: it's no longer the place I grew up in.'

  'How so?'

  'I'll tell you how,' he said. 'T
here used to be plenty of work about here. Good jobs. Coal mining for one, and a big steelworks over the river. That ICI place used to employ thousands, making paint, and, before that, it was Nobel, making explosives. Men worked in those places for forty years and at the end of it the Jobcentre was trying to turn them into Avon ladies.'

  Mr Nolan was a youngish man, still in his forties I'd have said, but his delivery was hardened and wise seeming, his attitude somewhat elegiac, as if life had already shown him its uselessness.

  'Is that right?'

  'You're damn right it's right,' he said. 'Humiliating. That's yer global economy for ye, Father. Experienced tradesmen start working in pet shops, and that's the lucky ones. Half of them have never worked since they got their apprenticeship papers. And these younger ones leaving school? Well, they wouldn't want jobs even if there were jobs to give them. Talk about lazy.'

  The car was being driven up the coast road, the other passengers cooing about the bride's dress or things being nice, but Mr Nolan seemed to grow more surly as we passed the dual carriageway and the new houses. 'This was all fields,' he said. 'Now would you take a look. It's all houses for people who aren't even from here. Incomers, Father. People from Glasgow or England or worse. Interlopers. You know they're even packing those bloody asylum seekers into those boxes?'

  'Places do change, don't they, Mr Nolan?'

  'Aye, well. I'll tell ye, this place has changed for the worst.'

  'Oh, for heaven's sake put a smile on your face, Dominic,' said Mrs Nolan. 'You'd put years on a person, the way you talk.'

  'Well, it's all true,' said Mr Nolan. 'He's as well to know the truth. This used to be a good place to rear children. Now, it's just an open-air asylum. People used to have sports days and Highland games or whatever else out on that grass. Scottish country dancing. You name it. Now it's all Indian restaurants and Christ knows what else, and no jobs for the locals.'