Crooked Vows

by John Watt

  They swing into the next verse. With my hand on your heart, what have you here? This is your rubberneck, oh my teacher dear. Each has a hand inside the collar of the other’s shirt, and the giggling reaches new heights.

  The game stops abruptly, cut off by a piercing voice from a classroom window.

  ‘You two! Stop that! Get your hands away from each other’s bodies.’

  The pair jump apart, look around, eyes wide with fright, and eventually locate Sister Agatha glaring out of the end window.

  ‘Now don’t move so much as an inch.’

  The pale accusing face disappears from the window and within half a minute the nun is sweeping out of the building and down the few steps, her habit trailing behind. She stands tall over the children. Her eyes are wide. Her face, what can be seen of it that is not concealed by the constricting head-dress, is an even starker white than usual. She is directly in Thomas’s view.

  ‘Stand up! What do you think you’ve been doing?’ She grabs each by an ear, pulls them upright, and hauls them around, turning back towards the school building. The boy makes no sound, but the girl whimpers.

  ‘We’ll have none of that here. You can stand at the back of my classroom until lunch-time. I’ll deal with you then.’ She marches them, both flinching, towards the school steps.

  Thomas gathers his courage together into a decision and steps out from behind the shelter shed.

  ‘Sister Agatha.’

  The nun swings around.

  ‘Surely Sister, there’s no need to be so harsh. Those children, they’re hardly more than babies. I’ve been watching them. Listening. They’ve only been playing. Doing no harm.’

  She stares at him for some time without responding. Then she snorts.

  ‘No harm. Is that what you’re telling me? You’ll excuse me I hope, Mr Riordan, if I point out that I’ve had more experience with children than you. Original Sin, Mr Riordan. I’m sure I don’t have to explain it to you. Young doesn’t mean innocent. The triple concupiscence: the three sources of temptation to sin. The world, the flesh and the devil. Especially the flesh.’ Somehow she manages to inject a tone of disgust into that last word.

  ‘It’s never too early to nip that sort of thing in the bud. Sins against holy purity. Next year they’ll both be eight, the age of reason. Capable of mortal sin. Good Catholic parents don’t send their children to good Catholic schools to learn behaviour like that.’

  Sister Agatha sweeps around again and off towards the school door. Thomas stands by the shed. His initiative has achieved nothing. But at least he has stood up and tried. He hears the yelps of the children as they are dragged up each step. Then the three disappear into the building.

  From the church comes the sound of the bell. The Angelus: the midday call to prayer. Father Kevin is going through the motions, as he put it, doing what’s expected. Probably repeating the habitual sequence of words. Angelus domini … The angel of the lord declared unto Mary; and she conceived by the Holy Ghost … Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. The traditional plea for help. But what if there is nobody out there to hear it?

  Startled, Thomas focuses on that unpremeditated thought. What if there is nobody there to hear? Is it possible that the ritual words are projected out into a void where there is nobody listening? Where has this shocking question come from? Why does it break through into his consciousness at this moment? He tries to push it out of focus and back into a corner where it can be ignored, at least for the present. But he knows that it has found a foothold. However hard he tries to redirect his attention, it will be back sooner or later, demanding that he confront it.

  He turns to wondering what thoughts might be moving in the small priest’s mind under the tolling bell and the unthinking words. Surely he must be filled with anxiety about the previous afternoon and the possible looming consequences. More than anxiety. Fear. How can he be slipping into the familiar daily routine as if nothing significant has happened? Surely he has some sense of the enormity of what he was seen doing. Waves of nausea overtake Thomas as the scene witnessed through that front room window comes back to him. He realises that he’s been avoiding the issue—trying to focus on other things. But he is also aware that the time for decisive action is looming. How many times has the Regan boy been subjected to that outrage? And how many other defenceless little boys?

  The Angelus bell rings on towards the end of the ritual sequence. Thomas imagines the short, ageing man standing on the porch, pulling the bell-rope, his lips moving as he mouths the ritual words. Another disturbing thought intrudes. He imagines himself in ten years, twenty years, thirty. Will his life, like Father Kevin’s, be centred on going through the ritual motions, repeating the ritual words? Is this really what God wants of him? The question is immediately overwhelmed by the other terrifying question. Is it possible, is it even thinkable, that there is really no God to hear, to see, to want anything of him?

  Can it be, that he has been living inside a complicated edifice of myths and rules and rituals, without any foundations? An intricate fabrication? And perhaps not altogether an innocent one. What did Macpherson say? An inhuman streak. And sometimes perverted.

  Perverted. How far might Thomas himself drift in the same direction as Father Kevin if he continues to allow the same current to carry him along? He recalls his memory of the young naked girl in the changing shed—his horror at the thought that he has floated even a short distance that way.

  A huge wave of questions is breaking over his head. And he is floundering among them; drowning in challenges that demand to be confronted. He suddenly feels a dizzying sensation of vertigo as if he were spiralling down into empty space.

  He half closes his eyes and lets their focus drift out past Saint Brigid’s to bring up from his memory the reassuring image of the real church that stands behind it. And a trace of it is still there: at least, a very hazy outline of the splendid structure of pale golden stone, with soaring spires, fanciful gargoyles and saints looking out from the carved niches and the stained glass of the windows. But it’s much further away, the details much vaguer than when he last conjured it up. The image is fading. Whatever music is perhaps being sung inside is far beyond his hearing.

  Children’s voices from the end classroom come to him again. Today or tomorrow, say the bells of Saint Sorrow. ’ Thomas senses the approach of another thought. It’s nothing sharply defined, only the hazy outline of a realisation away in the distance. But with it comes a feeling that he is caught up in a different current that is inevitably drifting him in a new direction, sweeping him closer to an idea not yet properly in sight, bringing that thought, in time, more clearly into view. The realisation that someday soon, today or tomorrow, or perhaps next week or next month, he will search his memory and the image will be gone. And with it, the whole elaborate fantasy that lies behind this fading image of the spires, the saints’ statues, the brilliant windows—all gone.

  Melted into air, into thin air. Where did that line come from? Shakespeare again, probably. The rector was very determined about Shakespeare. About literature in general. Though he never seemed to get any pleasure from it. Or from anything else either.

  Into thin air. And there will be nothing left except that ugly grey shed of a church and Sister Agatha hauling children around by their ears, and Father Kevin going through the motions and harrying his flock about the parish debt, and much worse. And if there’s nothing else left, what then? Perhaps there will be something else after all, but for the moment he can’t see what it might be.

  Thomas turns away to the problem of the moment. What about Father Kevin and the Regan boy? The unavoidable conclusion emerges ready-made from the recesses of his mind. Like the unexplained disappearance of a young lady, this is not the archbishop’s business; it is police business. The archbishop might, in spite of Father Kevin’s fears, simply move him on to another parish, as the previous incumbent had done, several times. Of course Thomas must go to the police with his story. And of co
urse the consequences for Father Kevin will be dire, with an adult eyewitness testifying to what he saw. He can see the tears spilling down the old man’s cheeks. But there is no possible alternative.

  The consequences for Thomas himself, these are more difficult to think about. Going to the police will surely be seen as treachery. He will be cutting himself off from the world he has lived in for years. But that world of the imagination, with its spires and saints and stained glass and Latin plain-chant, has already faded. For him it will be completely gone soon, he realises, no matter what he does about Father Kevin. And he will have to look for another world. He has no idea what else he is likely to find there.

  He wanders past the church towards the presbytery, and beyond it, the boundary of the church property. There is that shrub leaning over from the other side of the fence. Apple blossom hibiscus. Pink flowers covering it. So many have fallen that there’s a fading carpet of blossom covering a patch of the otherwise barren ground. To have a shrub like that would be worth something. It wouldn’t last forever; but perhaps nothing does.

  17

  Another World

  Tom wakes again suddenly, out of the same dream. It has been waiting for him in ambush for weeks, emerging at least once, sometimes twice a night; one night it came three times. In the dream he is swimming in a huge expanse of dark water. He sees her in the water, too. He is conscious in the dream that it is some time since she was with him, but she is there, a long way off, and swimming steadily towards him. He sets out to swim to her, to touch her, to hold her. They approach closer and closer until both are stretching out arms to each other and their hands are almost touching. And he wakes, stretching out his arm to touch her, hold her, finding again her absence in the empty bed.

  Sleep has become even more difficult. He goes to bed every night afraid of the dream hiding there in wait for him, and the desolate awakening. What sleep he gets seems to leave him feeling more exhausted than before.

  Everyone has good advice to offer. Time, they say, will make it easier; they don’t explain how much more of it is needed. Time moves at its own pace.

  Try to remember the good times—that is another piece of advice that he hears everywhere. He thinks of a good time. Calls up a cherished memory of her walking towards him naked out of the water on a secluded beach. One of their many camping trips. Tears come to his eyes with the thought that a time like that will not come again.

  She laughs, asks him whether he ever imagined himself naked on a beach with a naked woman during all those years when he was studying to be a priest. She’s never understood how he could have given even a moment to considering that as a plan for life. Even if he was only thirteen or fourteen at the beginning. He must have wanted to feel important. Like all those priests up there in pulpits, telling everyone who’ll listen about how to live their lives. How on earth would they know, when they’ve cut themselves off from most of life? Like men and women coming together, as he and she have done. And feeding the kids and giving them a hug at bed-time, and getting up in the middle of the night to change the baby’s nappy. Things like that keep the world turning, as everyone who’s involved in them would know. Not spires and church windows and imaginary angels and saints and chanting in a language hardly anyone understands. How could he be taken in by that fantasy for so long?

  She could be like that—confronting him with forthright, challenging questions while standing naked on a beach. He could find no response that satisfied her. Or that really satisfied him either. How is he going to live from this time on?

  Behind her, behind the memory of her standing on the beach, appears an image of another beach, even more remote in time and space, with, away in the distance, another human figure. Another young woman. And waves breaking on a reef of dark rock, and a channel of water sheltered by the dark reef with a line of foam running through it.

  He shakes his head, trying to dissipate the black fog that has settled over him. Realising that something more decisive is needed to break the mood, he decides to walk down to the beach for an early morning swim.

  It’s a short walk, only a quarter of an hour at the sort of brisk pace he needs to set in order to get a bit more life and light into his legs and his thoughts. Tom finds himself thinking about the couples in the houses he passes on the way, in bed still, most of them, at this time of the morning, pressed against the comfort of each other’s bodies. Not all of them, he supposes. He and she had been lucky. In most ways.

  The beach is deserted. The tide has retreated, leaving a strip of sand washed clear of yesterday’s footprints. His own prints are the first of the new day. There is a small pleasure in that. He drops towel and thongs on the sand and wades into the water.

  It’s another windless morning. The sun has not long cleared the horizon and the glare is reflected off the glassy surface, dazzling him when he looks back. There is still nobody else on the beach. He turns away from the harsh light and plunges in, swimming away from the shore.

  He’s unfit and out of practice. It’s not as easy as it used to be to control his stroke and his kick and his breathing into a steady rhythm. He can already feel the strain in muscles that have not had enough use for months, for years. But he swims on.

  He’s panting when he slows his pace and stops for a rest, treading water as he looks back towards the empty beach. How far? Maybe a couple of hundred yards. Probably a bit less. He turns away again from the sun.

  Underwater, the ocean is dark. At such a shallow angle, the sunlight is barely penetrating the surface. He can make out the indistinct mass of a reef about ten or twelve feet down, and on the seaward side of it, a drop-off into deeper water. The surfaces of the reef are covered with a dense growth of seaweed like a dim, shadowy forest.

  He lifts his head to breathe, thinking about the wretched priest standing on the edge of the wharf at Fremantle, looking down into dark murky water, taking a breath while he can, and then another, holding off the unthinkable moment when breathing will stop, trying to build up enough courage for the final plunge. Did he regret the decision later? A pointless question; he was not there later to regret it. What was left of him was buried, of course, in the Catholic section at Karrakatta Cemetery. Was that really Father Kevin? He had simply ceased to exist. He was nowhere. He had surely been right about that when he had finally got around to looking hard at it: no resurrection, no life everlasting, either for punishment or reward. Macbeth comes back into Tom’s mind. A dark play. Duncan is in his grave. After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.

  Father Kevin is in his grave. Does he sleep well? Tom is not sleeping well. It’s his sleep, not his waking, that’s fitful, interrupted, filled with disturbing dreams, haunted by the fear of waking to the pain of loss. The priest will not wake at all, of course. Nobody else will either. But who would want to wake to more pain? A deep dreamless sleep without any looming fear of waking, ever—the image does something to blur the sharp edges of reality. There must be millions of tombstones in thousands of cemeteries inscribed with the words Sleeping Peacefully. The living softening the thought of the death of someone they have loved, making it a little more bearable. And perhaps, unconsciously, looking towards their own deaths through the same consoling lens . Sleeping Peacefully. In the end what else could anyone look for?

  His legs are beginning to feel chilled, stiff from the cold and the unaccustomed exercise. It’s time he was heading back to the beach before they begin to cramp. Instead he decides to swim a little further out to sea before turning back. He doesn’t examine the quick decision to ask himself what it means.

  He swims out slowly but steadily. There’s another fragment of verse stirring in a back corner of his memory, but it’s not coming into view yet.

  He thinks about a conversation with her, many years before, fairly early in their marriage. He can picture her standing at the kitchen table sketching out on a piece of cloth a part of the tiny nightie that she was making for the baby who was due two months later.

  They had b
een talking about Father Kevin’s end, and about the man who had taken exactly the same way out only a few months before him. She wanted to know what the Catholic Church had to say about suicide. As a recent and well-informed ex-member, he was ready with an answer. Suicide was classed as a major sin. Possibly the gravest sin of all. And when she asked about sins, he produced the school catechism definition of them as offences against the law of God.

  Her reaction was surprisingly quick and passionate. That’s all nonsense, isn’t it? Beside the point. What harm would suicide do to God, for him to have made a law banning it? That is assuming that there is a God. The question is, what it does to the people who are left behind. With someone like that miserable priest, maybe that wasn’t a problem. Did anyone cry at his funeral? There might have been a few people who were pleased to know that he’d gone, from what she’s heard about him. The other fellow, he was a different case. He had a wife. He’d promised to love her. There were probably children, too. What was he doing to them? He was walking out on all his commitments. All his promises. Pure selfishness. Surely nobody needs to imagine a God to see what’s wrong with that.

  All these years later, he can still picture her turning back to her task, picking up the pattern book, smiling down at the baby in the illustration—imagining no doubt, her own baby dressed in the tiny garment she was making.

  He has stopped swimming, holding the memory close, thinking about what she said. Walking out on all his commitments. He’s promised to go to his daughter’s for tea tonight—the same daughter for whom that tiny nightie was being made over forty years ago. And he has made a commitment to look after her dog for a few days next month. Other things too, for other people. Trivial promises maybe; the time for the big promises that shape a life is long gone. But there are still small fragments left of what keeps the world turning.