It became a corrupt kind of power, a power I wielded lethally, like a weapon.
A samurai sword that I used to slice through every sinew of conscience. “I have responsibilities,” he’d murmur against my lips, and I’d use my tongue to lick the words into silence. I mistook that power for something else, as I so often have.
His desire was predictable; there was no cunning needed. A shorter skirt. A higher heel. The deeper plunge of my neckline; the moist, pearly lustre of lip sheen, glistening like the juice of blood oranges on my lips. I thought I was in control, didn’t realise until it was too late that I was playing with my own emotions as well as his. I could have loved him. He wasn’t worthy of it, but who said love was worthy?
He couldn’t contain his desire to get into bed but he couldn’t wait to get out of it. Before he had even withdrawn from inside me he was cutting the emotional ties that might have bound us, till all that was left was a sad, tattered heap of lost possibilities.
He never held me afterwards. His first instinct was always to move away from me. I cried the first time he stood at the hotel window, two sharp bitter tears of humiliation. He stood there so long he never knew. And I never cried again. I learned to watch him coolly, dispassionately, waiting for him to turn towards me. As he always did. He’d come over to the bed finally and lie for a few minutes, against my shoulder, wrapped in a blanket of his own self-pity.
“I can’t do this,” he said once, murmuring against my shoulder, waiting for me to comfort him, absolve him. Absolution, that’s the thing. Confession. And after confession, familiar temptation. “I think you just did,” I said. This time, I did not lift my arm to hold him. He half sat, twisting onto his elbow. “My God, Rebecca, you’re hard,” he said bitterly.
Why couldn’t I understand? Things were so complicated. He had another life, a life quite separate from me that couldn’t include me. So choose, I said, with a carelessness I didn’t feel. He looked at me then like he hated me. He probably did.
I don’t think he ever took responsibility for what happened; he wouldn’t admit it but he blamed me. I was a woman and I was strong and I should have been strong for him. He despised himself for wanting me, but he despised me more for making him. And I despised myself for being with a man like him.
So many broken promises, he said once. Broken vows. I had to help him.
Leave him. Move away. And when he called, I asked? What then? Should I refuse to talk to him? Because he would call. Even he knew he would.
Sometimes he called my mobile late at night. He liked to call when I was in bed.
Sometimes, he didn’t say anything for a full minute but I always knew it was him. I couldn’t go to his house, obviously. And he couldn’t come to mine. So he had to make do with connecting to me by a telephone line. It suited him best, engagement at a distance.
Whatever the pattern of his remorse – the cold shame of his head against the wall, or the pleading need for understanding – there were always tears. He would sit by the desk with his head in his hands, or he’d come over to the bed and turn into the firm curve of my upper arm and sob, the warm drip of bitter tears running down my breast and ribcage onto the sheets. I would hold him loosely then, stroking his hair lightly, or circling my thumb gently over his arm.
“I’m sorry,” he would sob. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” Sorry for who, I would think, looking up at a small patch of damp spreading from the light rose.
Sometimes I would look down on the dark hair and try to pretend he was Tariq, imagine what it would have been like to be with Tariq. It’s the biggest betrayal I can think of, to make love to someone while pretending they are someone else. Somehow, I could never feel guilty. There was so much pretence between us that a little extra didn’t seem important. Every lover I have ever had, I’ve imagined was Tariq.
It must end, he would say. I would kiss his tears then, but in a half-hearted, desultory kind of way. Even as I tasted them, I knew we would be back here next week, back in this room with the magnolia woodchip walls, and the desk with the dusty globed lamp, and the fusty smell of a shower sprouting mould in the grout between the tiles. We were caught in a cycle of guilt and recrimination and desire, and the most powerful of those was desire. Even at the very height of his protests about how this must never happen again, I knew for certain it would. There would be confession in between, of course.
That’s the way it is with Catholic priests.
As I write this all down so many years later, I can see how bad it sounds. Secrets rarely make pretty reading. I think I felt a vague shame even back then, when it all tumbled around inside my head on that lonely car journey north. That’s my memory. A sense of embarrassment that if Da did still exist in some way, he might now know what I had been up to. It was a strange turning of the tables. First I read his love letters to my mother, then he found out about my affair.
I did not need to ask if he disapproved. I knew the answer too well to even consider asking the question. But I wanted him not to think too badly of me. I am not a bad person. A priest, yes, but he was the priest, not me. His collar, his cloth, his promises to a God I couldn’t share.
The convent schoolgirl in me thought it was the worst thing I could do, but another part of me took a perverse satisfaction in that. Perhaps it was just another sign of my instinct for self-destruction. This God Father Dangerous had devoted his life to had taken Tariq, so I took him. One of mine for one of His. Maybe part of me was prepared to burn to have even a second’s revenge.
CHAPTER FIVE
The miles flashed by. Newtonmore. Kingussie. Miles eaten by memories. I don’t know which of us used the other more. Father Dangerous was screwed up about sex because of his vocation; I was screwed up about love because of Tariq. Sometimes you make do with one and pretend it’s the other. But in my heart, I know the difference. I never had sex with Tariq but he taught me the difference.
And the others, well, there were not so many. A few. A few who for a week, a day, an hour, made me feel there was something in me that was worth having. I think, deep down, I felt that if I had been worth anything, Tariq would have lived. Those who came after were nothing, nothing at all. It didn’t make me a bad person. There were worse things, I told myself as I drove into the night. It wasn’t unforgivable, was it? It’s wasn’t like I killed anybody.
It was Da who introduced me to him, the new, dynamic young parish priest. I think maybe he thought he’d lead me back to the Church. As I suppose he did, just not in the way Da thought.
I’d go to mass with Da sometimes that winter. I was old enough not to have to rebel any more. I kept him company, though later, for obvious reasons, I wouldn’t go near the place.
The first time I saw him, he was down the bottom of the church steps as I came out. He was saying goodbye to someone and he turned and walked up the steps, meeting us halfway. I wasn’t aware of much of a frisson on his part; perhaps his eyes held mine a little longer than necessary, but nothing more. But later he would say it was instant. I saw him a few times after that before I started dropping into morning mass. I don’t know what I was hoping for. It was deliberate but not calculating.
I came in late once. The door slipped from my hand when I opened it, swinging back noisily. He said he would have seen me anyway, that the moment he walked on the altar he knew if I was there or not. His eyes would pick me out at the back from the sea of old biddies and young mums with noisy toddlers. If I wasn’t there, he would feel the cut of disappointment. And if I was there, he was on fire. That’s what he said. On fire.
Even I was shocked by that. You think when a man puts on his priest’s robes, he transcends his humanity. No masculinity. No troublesome sexuality. But it doesn’t work like that. In the end, I saw through those vestments. I saw his nakedness. The more fervent his sermon on that altar, the more anguished his prayer, the more I knew he burned.
He was disappointed that day I was late, began the mass with sullen heaviness. Then the door banged
and it was like a match hitting petrol. I felt, rather than saw, the effect, the connection blazing silently between us from him on the altar to me at the door. It wasn’t that he faltered; there was no hesitation, no stumble in his words. But I saw the awareness ripple through his body. Every tiny movement, every gesture, every almost imperceptible glance, became like a series of dots and dashes in our own personal Morse code. He knew I was there. And I knew that he knew.
We died together slowly. It took a year all in, from start to finish, though it was only after six months that we started renting the hotel room. In those early months when he needed to be held, I held him purely. Wanting more but expecting nothing. Sometimes, I thought he almost enjoyed the anguish of it, the torture. Suffering was grace.
We ended up in bed together for the first time only when he came back from Peter Gallacher’s house, after Peter’s wife Eva passed away. She was thirty-five. She left four kids under ten and Peter just sat there looking bewildered while the youngest screamed for a bottle. Father Dangerous said it was only when he got up to go that Peter had looked at him properly for the first time since he came into the house. “Will you pray with me, Father?” he said.
It touched him that, the simple faith of it. His own faith wasn’t simple; it was a tangled web of love and devotion and doubt and insecurity. He’d come back from Peter’s changed somehow. He saw how fragile life was. I think that night he was frightened he would die without knowing what it was like to be with a woman. He phoned me and asked me to meet him in a pub in town. It was the first time he had ever turned up not wearing his collar. His collar was his guard; I knew immediately the significance of its absence.
He greeted me with a kiss, held me close. Reckless he was that night, and it was I who burned then. His lack of caution made his desire for me seem so intense that I mistook it for love. I had imagined this relationship so often that when it finally happened, it seemed more important than it really was. To be that wanted, that needed, that important; it was everything. But it never lasted. The heat of his recklessness was always followed by a cold shower of guilt and remorse. Even that first night.
I told him in the end to choose, because I knew he never would unless I made him. It took me a while to make the ultimatum because inside I always knew what the choice would be. I had to make him say it. But he never could. Not even at the end. I gave him a date and told him he had until midnight to phone.
I lay in bed that night, my phone lying on the bedside table and switched to vibrate. At two minutes to midnight, the phone began to buzz, moving slightly on the cabinet top with the vibration. I picked it up and said nothing. The caller said nothing. We sat in silence for a while.
“Rebecca,” he whispered finally, and then his voice broke.
I looked at the phone in the palm of my hand for a moment before gently pressing ‘end call’. I switched the phone off so that it couldn’t ring again, then flicked the bedside light, and lay staring into the darkness until my eyes adjusted to the lack of light, and I saw things the way they really were.
CHAPTER SIX
Aviemore. Only thirty miles to go to Inverness, and then the search for Lochglas. It is a fast stretch of road from Aviemore, takes little over half an hour to Inverness. Almost a hundred and eighty miles I have travelled. Miles and miles and miles of memories, laid like a motorway from Glasgow to Inverness. I had saved the most painful to the last but I didn’t feel strong enough to examine it. It would have to wait.
I can see a pinky-orange glow of lights in the sky above Inverness before I reach the top of the hill, as if there is a space ship hovering somewhere behind the bank of cloud. On the outskirts of town, the lights from the Kessock Bridge shoot into the sky like red antennae and I stop the car at a lay-by before crossing, and look again at Pa’s map. Not far. Twenty minutes maybe. Fatigue has seeped from my body right through to my brain. My eyes are stinging, partly with hayfever and partly with tiredness. I look at my watch. Ten to four.
Lochglas when I reach it is a one-street town, spread out in a meandering main street lined with hanging baskets. I slow right down and peer out. A Spar shop, a chemist, a Post Office and, up the far end, a butcher. The village is built on a slight incline and there is a lay-by at the top end, overlooking a bay. I park the car with relief and open the window. The air is warm and sweetly perfumed with the flowers from the hanging baskets. It is too late to get a room anywhere and anyway, I don’t have much money and it will be one less night to pay for. I pull the lever of my seat back and close my eyes.
I doze fitfully for an hour and then wake with my head lolling off the edge of my chair, my neck stiff and sore to move. I clamber sleepily into the back seat, stretching out as best I can, and don’t wake again until shortly after seven. My leg is in cramp, and I open the door and jump out. There is a garage across the road that I hadn’t noticed in the darkness. I am desperate for a shower and a change of clothes but it is too early to book in anywhere. I lock up the car and walk down to see if I can see Bayview anywhere, the address on mother’s letter. I walk through the whole village before returning to the car and realising that there is a path leading down from the lay-by towards the loch below, and that a house sits in against the hillside just under me.
I scramble down the gorse-lined path towards it. The dawn has long disappeared into morning but the sky is still pristine with the promise of a new day, the horizon streaked pink above the loch. A small boat sits unmoving on the surface, the water clear blue, still and glassy beneath. It is going to be another scorcher. I reach the house and look at the wooden gate, a faded sign hanging by a single rusty nail. Bayview.
It is clearly abandoned; whoever owns it now has left it to rot. The house stands at an angle, as if deliberately turning its shoulders from the village to look out over the bay. It is half hidden, trees and bushes grown tall on neglect straggling across the gate, scratching across the window panes and down over the peeling façade of the painted porch. Only the upstairs windows are clearly visible through the greenery, like two watchful eyes peering through a curtain of unkempt hair.
The air is warm and thick with the heavy sweetness of honeysuckle, pale creamy flowers falling against my knees as the gate pushes a pathway through. The paint on the porch is faded green and flaking, washed almost colourless with the rain and hail of many winters, and seared by the summer heat. Shards of glass lie splintered on the narrow windowsills, and above, there are gaping holes in the window panes with jagged, crocodile’s-teeth edges where stones have been lobbed through the glass.
I can feel my heart hammering as I walk up the path, the shattered glass crunching beneath my feet. For the first few years of my life I must have lived here. I want desperately to dredge something out of my memory bank. There must be a whole page of the mental photograph album devoted to this place, but I cannot find it. Did I play once in this overgrown garden? Were the lawns neatly cut and the bushes trimmed? Perhaps there was a swing over by that bush there. Perhaps I stood at that window with the faded green curtain and waved to Da as he dug in the garden.
Through the window I can see an old three-piece suite, the sofa toppled over on its back like a beetle turned on its shell and unable to get back onto its legs. It looks like one of those large floral prints from the 1960s and although years of sunshine have seeped the colour from its cushions, there are still flashes of yellow and orange visible. Yellow and orange. Did my sticky, chocolate-covered toddler hands grab hold of that sofa to haul me to my feet when I was taking my first steps? I remember nothing.
The door handle turns easily, the lock broken. To the left of the front door is the room with the suite, a light and spacious room with an open fireplace and a bay window. That must be where mother wrote her letter to Da all those years ago. The kitchen, with its yellow Formica-topped table and a rag of striped, washed-out curtain still hanging at the window, is at the back of the house. Broken bits of crockery lie on the work tops and the sink; half a saucer, a cup handle, a chunk of plate. W
hite with yellow spring flowers. I have a vague feeling I have seen those cups before, a half-memory, the closest I come to recognition in the whole house.
The kitchen is the strangest room of all to go into. There is even a rusting old kettle still lying on top of the cooker, as if someone has just made tea. It reminds me of Flannan Isle, the story of the three lighthouse keepers who just disappeared without trace leaving a half-finished meal and an overturned chair. There is no meal on the table here but there is certainly a feeling of interruption, of a life that suddenly stopped mid-flow and simply never resumed.
At first, I am frightened of climbing the stairs in case the wood of the steps and the bannister is rotten and gives way beneath me. Carefully, I stand on every second step, testing gingerly before putting my full weight down. It seems solid enough. Upstairs there are only two bedrooms. There is an old bed with an iron bed head and a slashed mattress, half on, half off the frame. Up here, I am above the line of the overgrown bushes and trees in the garden and the view across the water is breathtaking. Why did Da move us from here to a cramped two-bedroom council house in Glasgow after mother died? Who would ever leave this place voluntarily? But I suppose if you love someone, memories can weigh heavily in the place where you loved them.
Memories can follow you around too. I always felt with Da that there were times he carried a load with him. It was strange the way his mood swung sometimes. There would be nights when we would be sitting late at night, yawning, winding down before bed, when he would suddenly say, “Becca, let’s go out somewhere,” and we’d take the car and drive to the airport and have a coffee and watch the late-night planes. Or we’d go to the twenty-four-hour supermarket where Da would buy an exotic fruit he’d never tried before, or a packet of continental biscuits, or a new cheese. He loved spur-of-the-moment, unexpected trips.
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