My pleasure came to a sudden halt. The cap was knocked from my head and a bare-chested man stood in front of me. He had an Indian-ink tattoo on his neck. It was a broken blue line and the words said: 'Cut Here in Case of Emergency.' Like men of that sort, he seemed excessively aware of the crowd's presence and he played to it. 'You're that paedophile cunt of a priest! Ya dirty bastard.'
'Steady on,' I said.
'Dirty Fenian scumbag,' he said. There was a brief moment of hesitation and the man swayed before me; it seemed he was weighing the exact measure of violence to deploy, and he flexed his terrible fingers, as if beckoning the crowd's assent.
One never buys a house or pays school fees. One sleeps in a single bed. One lives like an orphan in a beautiful paternalistic dream. As a priest one may never grow up. In a sense, one lives as an infant before the practical trials of reality, and I never in my life felt old before standing in that field and facing that young man, the sun uncommonly warm. But the young man was grinding his teeth like an expert, his crimson face and his shocking vitality bare before his neighbours, making me old, making me unsteady on my legs and far from reason. I had travelled a long way to this field and the terror of his unholy face. His mouth was moving. I imagined he was another species from me. His eyes were like a bird's, and so were those of the crowd: in that instant they were like ospreys, their spiked hair tearing away from their skulls full of gel and motion, their eyes sharp with murderous intelligence as I put out my hands to stop him.
I heard a moan in the crowd and I found myself numb on the grass. I think I closed my eyes, then eruptions of panic and weakness and embarrassment filled the moment. I could feel a trickle of blood running down my cheek and it entered my mouth, salt and metal stopping my tongue as the man reached down to slap me. I could feel him tearing at my shirt and poking an iron finger into my chest. 'Fucken no-use peedo bastard. I'm gonnae waste you for what you've done.'
'Get off me,' I said.
'Dirty English cunt.'
'That's bang out of order,' a voice said at the young man's side. 'Come on, Sammy, son. You're gonnae get into bother here.'
'Jeest leave him,' said a girl.
'Ah, Sammy. That's enough. He's an old guy.'
I got to my feet and saw the young man was surrounded by a group of people clutching drinks.
'Thank you,' I said to them.
'Thank fuck all!' said the man. 'I hope you burn in hell, ya dirty fucken beast. I hope you swing for this, tamperin' wi' weans.'
A man had me by the arm. I could smell drink on him and I dusted grass off myself before turning. It was Mr Poole. 'Come on,' he said. 'You better get away frae here.' One of the girls handed him a baby's bib, and he used it to wipe the blood.
'Just keep it,' said the girl. I could see through my good eye that she curled her lip as she said the words, backing away.
Mr Poole drove the car back to the rectory. He was any number of times over the limit, having trouble at first with the automatic gearbox, but I was too upset to question him. 'It's all right,' he said, over and over. He kept shaking his head as he drove and he drummed his nicotine-stained fingers on the steering wheel. 'Everything's all right.' When he pulled to a stop on the gravel outside the chapel I felt a twinge in my eye.
'Jesus Christ,' he said. The glass on the rectory door was cracked and someone had sprayed 'PEEDAPHILE' on the path.
'Good Lord,' I said.
Mr Poole handed me the car keys. His hands were shaking but he wouldn't come into the house.
'No, you're awright,' he said. 'You'll be okay from here.'
'You've been very kind, Mr Poole,' I said. 'Are you sure you won't come inside? I could make some tea.'
He looked sadly at the broken door.
'Not at all,' he said. 'That's...' He paused. 'That's where Anne goes to work. It wouldnae be right. I've never been where she works. She wouldnae like it.'
'Well, thank you ever so much.'
The situation seemed to make him shy. He wanted no part of it. He shook his head outside the car and wiped his mouth, as if to still himself and still what others might say. Eventually, he nodded goodbye. 'It's a rough business,' he said. Then he walked down the side of the chapel and vanished at the corner where a rose bush hung in ruins over the garden wall. There was only the sound of birds twittering in the lane. From there I stepped into the house and locked the storm doors behind me.
Here again: the fortifying thrill of solitude. The house was silent. The most refreshing shade could be found in the bathroom, where I swabbed my eye with antiseptic and cleaned my face. Then I brushed my teeth and turned on the radio, the sound travelling through the house like a cool and edifying breeze, Radio 4, an announcer with humour in his voice and a regulating tone of seriousness. 'The American Army Surgeon General announced an investigation,' he said, 'into the deaths of two soldiers in Iraq. This comes on the heels of news that a further hundred in the region were hospitalised with severe pneumonia. It has been argued that the soldiers' exposure to the US military's anthrax vaccine may be the cause of the fatalities.'
Downstairs, when I poured boiling water into the cup, the teabag flopped and released its flavours in a dark effusion. The radio played upstairs but the voices were muffled by carpets and doors. Everything seemed to be passing to another place, the professional voices on the radio retaining their tone but none of their meaning as they travelled into the woodwork and fibres of a desecrated house.
The garden. It was a mercy the flowers had gone. The months had marched on and only a few roses were left, but these had been ripped and kicked apart, the remaining white petals gone dark with stomping. I lifted the teacup and walked out among the broken bushes, and, sitting on the bench against the wall, I absorbed for a while the ruin of peace and the rising scent of lunacy. I caught again the sound of the radio upstairs. My great failures were not diminished by the terrible climate in which the people enjoyed them, by the way they could say I had met their worst fears and prejudices. It was a trap which time had set for me, not them. They knew of the scandals involving Catholic priests, and now they had one too, their very own, and forgive me for feeling the riot of execration in that place was tinged with a sense of wonderful achievement, for the crowd now had its bogeyman and its spot on the news. There is no pleasure in seeing how the badness of one's nature may give rise to a tribal fulfilment no prettier than its cause. But I would be stupid to ignore it, just as I had been stupid to ignore those parts of myself which brought the young people to my door in the first place.
My tea was cold when the telephone rang.
'It's Gerard,' he said, with an undertow of the River Clyde.
'Good afternoon, Bishop.'
'How are you?'
'Quite chipper,' I said. 'For someone who was charged yesterday.'
'But you're all right?'
'Not a hundred per cent. But don't worry, Gerard. I won't be inflicting any further wounds.'
'Don't be daft, David. This is a serious matter. Father Brendan tells me you're refusing counsel.'
'I'm not guilty. I didn't assault anybody. I'm not apologising to the families and hanging my head before the tabloids.'
'David,' he said, more in anger, 'the boy was in the rectory at seven o'clock in the morning. There were bottles on the table. Drugs were involved. He's given a statement. So have others.'
'It wasn't assault. Not to my mind.'
'And what is your mind?' he said, his anger now charging down the line with a mitre of authority. 'I took a chance bringing you to this diocese. I went against advice to bring you from England. You know what, David: the Bishop of Lancaster gave you a questionable reference. He said you'd spent twenty years being an excellent administrator and a poor pastor. He said you'd organised a cabal—that was his word—of classical-music lovers and wine tasters. Wine tasters! That's what your ministry at Blackpool consisted of in the mind of your Bishop.'
'So why didn't he fire me?'
'For the same reasons I didn't,'
he said. 'Because he thought you were intelligent and because we're short of priests.'
'I'm grateful.'
'No,' he said. 'God strengthen us. I don't think you are. All those years ago in Rome, when I met you, David, you were full of zeal for the Church. Things were changing. It was our time, and you had the character to meet all the challenges. Is that not right? And what happened to you? You end up frittering away your vocation, reading paperbacks and cooking fish?'
'I never had the character, Gerard,' I said. 'I was just a lonely young man. I think you knew that.'
'Don't tell me what I knew! You had a calling. You had faith in God. And I had faith in you. How dare you deny that now?'
'Nevertheless,' I said, 'my faith was built on the wrong foundation. It was built on ... the wrong things.'
'There are no wrong things to build faith on.'
'I'm sorry, but there are.'
'What are you saying?'
'I'm saying I think I used the Church. It was a beautiful hiding place. I'm sure it has been for others.'
'You're having a crisis,' said Bishop Gerard. 'I've seen it before. You need to retreat and examine your faith. I've seen it before in my life, with other priests. You need a holiday.'
'My life has been a holiday,' I said. He coughed down the phone and the anger lengthened through his voice.
'And you bring this to my door?'
'I'm sorry for that. I truly am. Please believe that, Gerard. And I am sorry to the parishioners and to God.'
He sighed. 'I remember you coming to see me at Santa Maria sopra Minerva. The Dominicans worshipped you. You were full of ideas in Rome and you were holy, David. I won't hear any different now. I was thinking about it this morning: maybe you always had a touch of the victim. I remember showing you around the chapel and the room where Galileo was interrogated. The house next to the church. You wanted to stand there for ever, you said. You were full of all your Oxford University questions. Book questions. Faith questions. I remember that.'
'I've always been interested in the telescope,' I said.
'No, David. I remember your actions. You were playing the part of Galileo. One of the old friars was telling us about the Dominicans' suspicion of Galileo and their interrogation of him, and you were transfixed, mouthing the words along with him. You've always been an actor, David. An actor will always want to play the part.'
'My confusions were genuine.'
'But why now?' he said. 'Why has it all come back now? Our troubles are behind us, and we've all had troubles.' He sounded personally defeated, and I hated to think of that.
'Our lives are liable to catch up with us, Gerard.'
He was silent for a moment. I felt there was great intimacy in the silence, as there used to be those years ago at sopra Minerva when he heard my heartfelt and selective confession. 'This is only egotism,' he said. 'The great destroyer.'
I didn't mention the Bishop's own doubts, the walks we used to take along the Appian Way, the feeling once expressed by my proud Glaswegian friend that the Church might offer a refuge against temptation, somewhere to exist as a noble animal in the struggle against the nights, to bed down on ancient stone like the cats in the Coliseum. Gerard was silent about most things—silence being oxygen to men like us—but I knew there hadn't been six months together in his adult life when he wasn't in love and when he didn't go to sleep wanting to be loved.
'We can fix this,' he said.
'How?'
'Inside the Church. We have experience and we can solve the problem in our own way. That is our strength.'
'It is a criminal matter,' I said. 'That is how it will be fixed.'
'Don't misunderstand me,' he said, protecting himself. 'I have already asked the police if it was okay for me to speak with you. I am not interested in covering anything up.'
'Heaven forfend.'
He ignored me. His voice softened, and I recalled how vivid and consoling a pastor he used to be. 'You are not considering your parishioners. Their faith is in your hands and we cannot suffer this to happen. David, think again. Cleave to the love of the faithful. You have never loved them. You took your role seriously, but only as a role.'
'I didn't set out to possess their hearts.'
'That is a wicked statement. Is that one of your aesthetic defences? Because art will not defend you now.'
'Sadly not,' I said. 'But I had a beautiful garden. We managed to destroy it together, them and me. I will face it now.'
'Don't do this,' he said. 'You're not thinking straight. No matter what you say, the public will crucify you.'
'I appreciate all the efforts you have made for me, Gerard. But I am my own Judas. My own Pontius Pilate. I kissed the boy and will fight the matter in my own way.'
'It will all be politics and newspapers,' he said. 'And you're bad at politics. You know nothing about the papers up here. You don't understand what people will try to make of this.'
'I must take my chances.'
'I will cut you adrift,' he said.
'As you must.'
'You don't know where you are heading.'
'Then I quote Seneca,' I said. '"If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable."'
He coughed again into the phone. 'That is the kind of remark that will destroy you,' he said.
Someone had been thumping again and again on the front door. I stared at the sideboard as Gerard spoke—Ampleforth in watercolours, a bottle of Haut-Bailly 1999—and slowly the caring flavour departed from my old friend's voice as he turned bureaucratic.
'What happens now?' I said.
'I must place you on administrative leave,' he said. 'You will leave the rectory by midday tomorrow. We could arrange a place for you at the Dirrans Monastery.'
'That won't be necessary.'
'Look, David,' he said, 'think about what I'm saying. He that yields to reproof shows understanding. A little humility would help you now.'
'It's a little late in the day for that, is it not?'
I rang off and placed the phone back in its cradle. Thirty years of friendship liquidated just like that, in a lather of busted proprieties and self-defences. I wondered what habit had said of us; what Church conventions had revealed of Gerard, what they had hidden. It seemed to me his anger was inseparable from a threatened sense of himself, and I could not blame him for that or for anything worse.
A voice purred at the letterbox. 'We only want to get the facts right,' said the person. 'Listen. Yer gonnae have the chance to put your ane side of the story. Hello. Father Anderton. It's jeest to get the facts. It's in yer ane interests to speak to me.'
They sounded like cattle. I could hear them and smell their pleasure. Who could be sure if the photographers were there for the people or the people there for the photographers, but the noise they made was a lustful and carnival sound and it grew closer, madder, like the sound of drums approaching from the distance to deafen the sinful. I turned off the radio on my way past the upstairs loo and positioned myself in the bedroom, the edge of the curtain between my fingers.
'Come oot, ya child molestin' bastard!'
'Paedophile!'
'Beastie!'
'Come on, ya English bastard!'
Dead flies lay on the windowsill, crisp in the sun. Some of the people down there held placards daubed with hideous words, and they laughed into each other's faces, women holding onto themselves with mirth and a younger one jigging on the spot. I saw a young girl cup her hands around her mouth for increased volume. 'Scumbag!' she shouted.
A man held up a rope, and another one was smoking and digging the air with his finger as he spoke to a reporter. A photographer climbed onto a gravestone to get a better picture of the crowd. Every face was white, and I knew a number of them. The people weren't churchgoers, but they had been to weddings and funerals, and I knew them by their haircuts and their piercings. I'm sure several children were eating ice cream and taking pictures with their phones. It was that kind of day. It was that kind of
atmosphere. It was Marymass, after all. And in the middle of the crowd stood the father of Mark McNulty.
He had a certain sleepy menace. A depressed look. I kept hold of the net curtain but tried not to let it move. Mark's father was the dead centre of the crowd and I could see people stroking and patting his arms. The women kissed his cheeks, soothing some terrible feeling. One of them, very plump, wore a turquoise tracksuit and had crimson hair, and she fluttered around the main man like a green-winged macaw. They gave Mark's father the role of chief mourner at a funeral, except they looked towards him for an heroic action.
I could see him taking breaths, each deeper than the last, each denser with the feeling of the crowd, until he heaved in his chest one last time and charged towards the storm doors. I'll always remember it, the look of confusion and hatred on his face and the inward rush, his sudden vanishing from my field of vision and then the thunder at the door.
'Fucken beastie!'
'Paedophile!'
The people. Watching them from the window, I noticed, for all their ferocity, how easy a communion existed between them. A sense of loyalty to one another—the idea of one another—was powerful down there in the lane among the colours and the fizzy drinks. Some of them were Protestants, and a generality of historical dislike and dark heresies must have informed their anger, but I feel most of them were decent in themselves and wanted some sort of improved life, a life in which religious leaders could be trusted and children could be safe. Even to my eyes, there was something objective about the warriors outside the door. I didn't really know them; I didn't know what it might be like to live so certain of togetherness. We each have our rights to idealism, and theirs was theirs, thwarted again by a man in a collar who stood behind the curtains that day, protecting himself from all they could be and all their supposed decencies.
Leave a man to his fate. Let the moments of his life speak either for or against the goodness of his heart. The pillow was cool like nothing on earth. I put my head there, summer, autumn, winter and spring, and was sure as I lay down and felt a twinge of pain in my eye that all might be well and that some old friend might come to my aid. It was not my father, and not yet the distant and distancing music of Chopin. It was not Conor. He passed for a moment through my thoughts, only to tell me he could never help me. None of this world was the world we shared.
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