Our Fathers

by Andrew O'Hagan

  It was the day of my Holy Confirmation. I was taking the sacrament late. My father had twice set light to the form. Hugh and Margaret took the whole thing over. It was important to them that I followed the faith, and somehow it mattered to me as well. I wanted it more as my father did less. I went in the morning to the high flat at Irvine. Margaret fed me porridge oats dusty with salt. She sang me her hymns as she unwrapped a new white shirt. ‘St Michael’s’, it said on the label. Hugh came into the kitchen with his own talk of saints. He said he had given it some thought.

  ‘Alexander,’ he said. ‘I think your Confirmation name should be Alexander.’

  He said his mother would have liked that. And there was the end to it. None of us thought it a bad name. Margaret drove me down to Affleck, down to St Joseph’s, in her sweet-smelling car. ‘You’re an angel among us,’ she said. ‘Give your confession first to the priest. We’ll be back along in time for the Bishop.’

  St Joseph’s was a modern chapel. The roof slanted way to the floor. Everywhere was concrete and pine; the lights were electric. The faces on all the statues were odd. A crooked mouth, a bold eye. None of them was smooth or hallowed or ancient, none like the saints we’d seen in books. They looked like people we knew. They were not mighty faces, in just repose, or caught there purely, in serene rapture. They were faces cut with modern woe, or fixed with some current passion. The statues were all sharp lines. Long-fingered, large-haloed, bleeding from all the small wounds. And Mary was not like the Queen of Heaven – she looked like the girls in supermarkets, with her hair gathered up in the regulation way, and worry all over her face. But the smell in the church was the smell of old time. The electric lights hung apart from the candles, which burnt the last of their wax, under the altar’s canopy. They were wagging tongues of flame. The yellow fire just licked at the air and was gone. A new candle was placed on the altar as I stood at the door.

  Father Timothy took confession in a room. We knew him from school. He was young for a priest. A wave of hair rolled over his forehead, a glade of Scots pine stood green in his eyes. He was in love with the boys. We all knew that. He would kiss you at confession and nobody worried too much. You would sometimes find yourself kissing him back, and opening your mouth, and liking it then, when his tongue was warm and spreading all over your lips. At other times you would think it was bad. There was no alarm in the thing for me. You just sat on the chair, saying your sins, and he touched his body in a soft-seeming way, your act of contrition going out for the both of you. But it never felt like harm with Father Timothy. Not to me anyhow. He always smelt so nicely of soap. The kissing was nothing much: a quick lie-down in the laughing grass. And many a thing could be worse. There were worse things than being secretly kissed in the small afternoon by a young priest shaking with nerves.

  ‘Don’t say to Father Healy,’ he said, his pupils black as the Calvary sun.

  I don’t know. Father Timothy was kind and bad all at once. But at least he was kind. His nice way with words made me open my mouth. And sure as all that I had wanted susceptible hands on my face. For years he always had two or three boys he called special.

  ‘I haven’t been to mass since Christmas.’

  ‘I smashed a crate of milk bottles into the burn.’

  ‘I called Mrs McIntosh an old fat cow.’

  ‘I said fannies and tits to the janitor.’

  And often enough he’d say that was all right.

  ‘That’s all right. Take off your tie.’

  And he’d kiss your neck a dozen times and lay his head on your shoulder. Often enough my arms went around him. I’d pull him in closer.

  ‘Everything’s all right,’ I’d whisper. ‘Everything’s fine.’

  Father Tim was there the day of the confirmations. He sat in his room with his clean smile. His face was glowing with hard prayers and lust.

  ‘You’re the elderly boy here today, Jamie,’ he said. ‘And how’s tricks at home?’

  ‘My Confirmation name’s Alexander,’ I said. ‘Is that not a good one?’

  ‘Good as any,’ he said. ‘But that’ll be later on. Let us start with your Prayer Before Confession.’

  He drew his head in close. ‘James Alexander …’ he breathed.

  I didn’t want his kissing today. I picked up the sheet with the Order written on it.

  ‘James,’ he breathed again. There was a smell of aftershave on him.

  He pressed his face down into my neck. ‘Don’t,’ I said.

  But there had been other days when I’d held him there. I remember the first time it went further. He was kissing me in the way that he did. I let him loosen my tie and kiss my neck. The slow seconds caused a change of some sort. A moment’s heat. And then, with no less care than command, I placed his hand on the front of my trousers. He took down the zip. He brought me out. With tenderness, with a steady hand, he began to stroke me there in the room. I wanted to laugh. I thought I would cry. I pushed the hair out of my eyes. I wasn’t sure of the room that day. But I didn’t move, and the father went on, and to fill the silence I read out the prayer from the Order, and strained away from the young man’s kisses, but let him go on with my cock in his hand, and the words growing louder, my eyes going up to the brightening window. My faltering breath. I read what I could.

  ‘… behold me, O Lord, prostrate at Thy feet to implore Thy forgiveness. I desire most sincerely to leave all my evil ways, to forsake this region of death where I have so long lost myself …’

  My breath was filled with worry. It came out in shorter and shorter gasps.

  ‘… and to return to Thee, the Fountain of Life. I desire, like the prodigal child, to enter seriously into myself, and with the like resolutions to rise without delay and go home …’

  His eyes were closed. The light from the window fell on his hair. ‘God,’ I thought. ‘God almighty. What am I doing here?’

  ‘… to my Father, though I am infinitely unworthy to be called His child, in hopes of meeting with the like reception of His most tender mercy. I know Thou desirest not the death of a sinner, but that he may be converted and live.’

  But on my Confirmation day I held him back. I didn’t feel threatened by Father Timothy; I just felt there were other things to be thinking about. I was getting older. Things were sad at home. And this was the day of my Confirmation.

  My grandmother was my sponsor. She was certain I knew what I had to know, and was ready for the Church.

  ‘It’s only a life of total commitment, being of the Catholic faith,’ she said.

  Hugh sat at the front rail as I walked up. He smiled at me in his black tie.

  ‘Alexander,’ I said.

  The Bishop touched my face.

  ‘God be with you,’ he said.

  A small smell of after-shave hung about the air. James Alexander. Walking back to the kneeling bench I was pleased with God and myself.

  *

  Our house at the Ferguson school had become all damp. Water rose up through the floorboards; blackening fungus crawled over the walls.

  A house of paper and powder and weeds.

  It smelt of dead carpet. You could watch your breath in every room. It went to the ceiling in corpulent puffs. Woodlice nested in the skirting boards. Slugs would drag along the bathroom floor, trailing their vestments of brown slime. Every room in the house at Saltcoats was thick with alien spores. Nature had come inside.

  The net curtains were planets of watery growth. The Japanese lightshades hung from the ceilings, spinning with cold, greenly alive. Spiders made caves in tiny brass ornaments, and fieldmice licked at the kitchen-damp fruit, wild mushrooms and fungal berries, which bled poison from the soaking plastic of the plug sockets. I didn’t like the cold there, but the daily encroachments that came in with the cold, and rose with the water, were fine with me. The chaos of plants added some grace to that house of disaster. The animals were vile.

  On Confirmation Night my father went over the edge. The house got robbed. I was lying there i
n my bed; all the bulbs were cold. Darkness crept over us. But for all that dark there was something of the moon. A glow that came down over the trees, and picked at the burn, and spilled through my bedroom window. For hours I lay there awake. The damp patterns on the wallpaper held me there, bright-eyed, unsleeping. The patches looked like the shapes of countries. There was India. Japan and France. The whole of Ireland a black furry smudge. Dublin dense on the paper’s seam. The North blinking out as the ceiling meets the sea.

  A run of Crete on the far side. A dipple of Falkland Islands. I lay there not sleeping for hours.

  A bark from my father’s dog downstairs. A door is closed. I can hear my mother and father asleep as I move across the landing. The living-room window is open. I stand in front of it. My feet in a squelch of sodden carpet. The curtains are disarranged, and my mother’s ornaments are smashed on the floor. Her glassy swans, her porcelain peasants, the plastic flowers that are held in arrangement, the base of their stems well trapped in a crumbly sponge.

  When I look out the window I see in the grass a golden-painted Buddha. From its bed of green blades it smiles a smile of uncomprehending calm. The moonlight is there. It is down among us. I close the window and go up the stairs. Everything is wrong. Nothing makes sense any more.

  I was frozen in bed. Scared to death. And up the stairs I could hear him coming. Footfalls deep in the other room.

  I could hear my parents breathing as they slept. More noise came from the landing. My lips were exhaling milk-clouds in the dark. And then, with some gentle, inevitable sound, the door of my bedroom swung towards me. He walked to the table beside my bed. It was my friend Berry. He looked at me. His hair was blond at the ends and black at the roots. Different hair. His eyes were somewhere else. He put a finger up to his lips. Noiselessly he said the word no. He held my eye. I didn’t move. He opened a plastic bag and began putting things in. Small binoculars off the table. He took a penknife. A clock in the shape of a tree. He took some football boots I’d never worn. He put it all in the bag. I remember the Indian ink on his hands. The smell of gas; his presence.

  He turned to me just as he reached the door.

  There was a far-away smile on him. It said goodbye. And it said other things too. ‘Who cares?’ ‘So what?’ And it somehow said that I’d never see him again. I put up my hand before he turned, and bent the fingers into the palm. ‘Bye, Berry,’ I whispered.

  In the morning my father went mad. Someone had torched the boiler room at the school. And our house was robbed. The police thought it must have been the same person. My father couldn’t believe we hadn’t heard an intruder walking the carpets at night.

  ‘We could all have been murdered in our fucking beds,’ he said over again.

  I just sat on the sofa with a book. ‘You sure you heard nothing?’ he shouted. I looked in front of me, shook my head. The fire brigade stopped an explosion at the school. ‘Has no fucker you know been in and out the house?’ he shouted again. ‘They took stuff out of every fucking room. Think!’

  There was nothing to do but shake my head. After the firemen left, and the police took fingerprints, my mother went about with a damp cloth, picking up ornaments, wiping them off. (The house might have been damp, a blackness of spores, but my mother was always trying to keep it tidy. She liked an ordered surface. Tidy meant much more to her than clean.) My father stood in the middle of the room. He was white all round his mouth. A bottle of vodka stood on the telly, and every time he broke from the shouting, every time he paused for breath, he would reach for the bottle and take another slug.

  ‘Fucking hell!’ he kept saying. ‘I’m going off my bastarding head here.’

  I sat there all day. I tried to keep thinking of the words in the book. Reading the same line over and over. ‘Sleep no more,’ and ‘Sleep no more.’ Sleep no more.

  My father beat up the dog in the kitchen. It screamed and yelped the morning away. The dog was first for the blame. It had failed to bark. It had let itself be shut in a cupboard. He beat it sore, until it peed the carpet. Then he beat it some more for that.

  ‘People are trying to drive me off my fucking head!’ my father shouted.

  They stood at the top of the stairs. I was below when my mother asked him to calm himself down. He just slapped her hard, sudden hands hammering at her face. She put up her arms to cover herself, and asked him, so quietly, to stop.

  ‘Don’t, Rab. Please.’

  Some horrible thing happened inside. At the bottom of those stairs, me standing full-eyed, the dense tinder of a dozen years and the spark of two strange days flew suddenly together. I was off the spot, and up the stairs, two at a time, and ready at the top with something of a punch, a roar of hatred, so mad to crush my father’s bullying rage. A glass table overturned. A vase full of peacock feathers smashed to the floor. I beat at his face with two small fists. I spat at him. I booted his stomach once he was down. Tears and spittle flying towards him. My mother screaming between us. I could hear my own voice. It was out in the distance.

  ‘I’ll fucking kill you!’

  Again and again the voice roared out. All the time it was me. My father lay in the corner among the glass. His mouth was cut. And I’ll never forget that look in his eyes. It was seethingly calm. It was calm, but the gleam of murder was there. And it was with me as well, my father’s son.

  Coldly he lifted a part of the broken vase.

  ‘I’ll be waiting for you,’ he said. ‘Your sparrow’s punches are nothing to me. I’ll be waiting.’ And he jabbed the sharp edge into his arm.

  On the vase, on the wallpaper, gouts of blood.

  My mother screamed but I couldn’t hear her. Everything slowed to a pulse. There was nothing there but my own heart’s sound in my ears. My own heart pounding. My father’s blood all over the broken glass. My father mad in a pool of blood. My own heart’s sound in my ears. I ran down to the garden and threw up.

  It’s the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil.

  *

  For weeks after the robbery my father would hide in the bushes. After dark, with a bowie knife, he’d sit and wait for the thief to return. Concealed there, alone with the vodka, his rabbit’s eyes all pink-rimmed and ready, and no one came to vindicate his mood. He would never get over it. They had come into the house with us all asleep. He didn’t believe that I knew nothing of it. The robbery affronted him. My father thought himself smarter than that. To be robbed in your bed. What an insult. That was the sort of thing that happened to other people.

  ‘To cunting idiots.’

  He himself would hear the latch if it was lifted. But no he didn’t. Berry was next to his bed. And the thought broke him in two. It was one of the odder things about my father when he was younger: he was a threat to us all those years, and yet he couldn’t tolerate the thought of others threatening us. We were his to threaten. We were family. And we were his. We belonged to him. Didn’t we? It drove him mad to think of a stranger standing next to our beds at night, and him asleep. It drove him mad.

  The Ferguson List ‘D’ School for Boys was a failure then. For some of those years I had thought it might hold off the crack-up. But at the time, with my dad as he was, there might have been no such place on earth. The school fairly helped him at first – imagining those boys thought well of him – but he knew that our house must have been robbed by one of them. He knew that. Only boys like the ones at Ferguson could carry off such an affront. Nothing, though, nothing at all, had let him believe they could do it to him. But one of them did. And his own son helped him.

  Although I was soon to run from all this, from the Ferguson school and my father’s sickness, I won’t now stand apart from those days, and say I did well, and made proud, and think him the only bastard. In one way or other we all did badly then. And the school was a rotten world in itself. The searchlights kept us all bleached and lonely. We all cried some from our windows. Behind the trees, the dark water flooded its mucky banks, the castle stood behind fences, its dungeons
a lesson in history. At the end we were all so small-voiced, so lost. I don’t know how it happened. That season of mirk would take years to thin out.

  The rain came hard on the red-ash field one night. The water lapping under our beds. I walked out the front with my slippers on. I put my hand in the bushes. ‘Come on, Dad,’ I said. ‘Come inside, it’s raining.’ And how he trembled as I drew him away by the hand, and how he spoke to himself. His raw rabbit’s eyes. Yes I know that too. Robert went up to his bed that night and slept the coldest sleep of us all.

  All my life I have dreamed of the sea. Our waters. And the long walk around the coast of this island. I feel the difference in the rocks; I see the sand and its glinting deposits, the play of weather on land and sky and spray. They live in my memory: the colours of Scotland and England. With a bucket and spade I walk the length of Hadrian’s Wall in a silver shower. Salt on the lips. My sandals wet. Every stone broken and loose. A fresh song rises to nowhere and nothing. I make my way to another beach.

  My thirst for the sea. I know of a home I have never known. A liquid bed by some easy beach. I know it well in my sleep. The coast is unclear. The landmarks are ruined or new. Yet water knows nothing of nations. It is called after them – is claimed by them – but water is only itself. The pure green sea in my dreams is all the world I have ever known. And yet I have never been there. It is only water. It is only a dream. And still I drown there each night in my sleep. And still I look out for the coast as I wake.