Contact

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘And then?’ I prompted him.

  ‘Then what?’ he said, scanning the skies to left and right, as if on the lookout for something.

  ‘You found her, and then—?’

  ‘It was cool,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’ I said, with what I hoped wasn’t too strong an ingredient of scepticism.

  ‘Sure. It was cool,’ he said again. Then, after a pause, he cackled to himself and said: ‘Not absolutely cool right away. Of course not. I mean, you couldn’t expect her to be overjoyed when the little bastard comes looming out of the mists, could you? It wasn’t exactly going to be “Glory Hallelujah, my boy is back – thank you, Jesus,” was it?’

  ‘Might have been,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I don’t think so, in the circumstances,’ he said, shrugging. ‘She was mixed up about it. She felt bad about what had happened, but she wasn’t going to pretend she’d been pining for me all these years. She was honest about it. I liked that. She shouldn’t have had the kid, and the kid was better off with someone else. She hadn’t been eating herself up about it. But there I was and she was glad to see me. It was cool. I felt a lot better. I did. I felt better right away,’ he said. He seemed to have talked himself out, and not to require any response from me. A melancholy cast came over his face. For a minute or two we drove without talking, then he said, softly, as if waking me up: ‘This is it.’

  The church was a plain old building with a stocky bell-tower and walls of pale sandstone. From the road a path of stone slabs rose over the flank of the low hillock on which the church stood, curving in an arc towards the dark wooden door. A dilapidated wooden gate opened onto the path, and the wall into which the gate was set was crusted with bright lichen. Ivy almost covered two of the church’s side windows. A gnarled old yew filled a corner of the graveyard, which was an expanse of undulating grass, on which the gravestones leaned at all angles, like sails at sea in a gale. It looked like a film set, I thought, and then Sam stooped to set down the flowers he’d brought, and I was standing at the grave of Quentin Williams and his daughter.

  When Sam had told me that Sarah was dead, I had believed him. There was no reason, that I could think of, for him to be lying. There were moments, later, when I wondered if anything that Sam said could be believed absolutely, but when he offered to take me to see where she was buried, I knew that any last vestige of doubt had gone. So I’d known for some time that Sarah was dead – but until now I’d known it as a proposition, which was a different kind of knowing from what I experienced as I stood before the upright slab of limestone, reading its inscription. At the top was the name of her father:

  QUENTIN WILLIAMS

  BORN FEBRUARY 2ND, 1926

  DIED OCTOBER 2ND, 2002

  Below came a gap, where his wife’s name would one day go. The inscription resumed at the base of the stone:

  SARAH CLEMENTINE WILLIAMS

  BELOVED DAUGHTER OF QUENTIN & ISABELLE

  BORN JUNE 12TH, 1956

  DIED AUGUST 13TH, 2008

  What did I feel as I stood there? I can’t honestly say that it could be described as grief. What I felt, I think, was something like what you’d feel if the ground suddenly fell away in front of you and you found yourself standing on the brink of a vast pit. There was a sensation – a sensation strong enough to make me light-headed – of an immense emptiness right in front of me, and also a flush of fear. This does not reflect well on me, but it is what I felt – afraid, for myself. She was younger than you and now she’s dead; soon it will be you. That was the idea that quickly became strongest: soon it will be you. Regret, too, was part of what I was feeling – and not regret solely because of the situation that had now descended on me. I regretted that we had become involved with each other, that I had deceived Aileen. I suppose that, as I stood tracing the letters on her stone over and over again, I was apologising to both of them, pointlessly. Grief, however, would not be the right word for what was going on in my head.

  A squat stone vase stood in the grass at the foot of the gravestone. A wilted bouquet had been in the vase when we arrived; Sam had removed the dead flowers and carried them to a bin by the churchyard wall, then he’d taken the steel insert out of the vase, replenished it at a nearby stand-pipe, and now was trimming his flowers with a penknife. He snipped each stem at precisely the same angle, and when the flowers had been arranged he carried the pile of trimmings to the bin on an upturned palm. Every action was performed with a strange gentleness and precision – like some sort of ritual, it struck me. Back at the grave, he knelt on the grass and bowed his head; his hands were joined loosely in his lap. It appeared he was praying, and when at last he spoke again, his voice came out in a murmur that sounded reverential, but for only for a fraction of a second, because what he was saying was: ‘“Beloved daughter” my arse. Makes you want to go round and tip the old coot’s wheelchair over, doesn’t it?’

  I said I’d find it hard to imagine a nicer place to be buried. The setting was beautiful, and the gravestone was beautiful as well. Nowadays, I remarked, you don’t often come across a stone that had been properly carved. I pointed out where the lettering showed that it had been incised by hand.

  Sam considered the lettering, as though taking mitigating circumstances into account. ‘Nice if you’re a Bible basher,’ he said. ‘Which she wasn’t. And her old man was about as much of a Christian as Attila the Hun. Same goes for the old woman. Not a Christian bone in her entire fucking body. Arseholes, the pair of them.’

  I conceded that he might well have a point regarding the parents’ Christian principles, or lack of them, but we should look at the grave simply as a grave. It was in a nice spot. It was tasteful. There weren’t any angels on it, or quotes from the Bible. It didn’t even have a cross on it.

  ‘Yeah, but it’s got “Beloved daughter” on it, which is a lie, and it’s got her father in it,’ he answered. ‘And any day now the old bitch is going to be joining them. That’s not what Sarah wanted. She didn’t want to be tucked up with those two until the end of the fucking universe. She hated the bastards, didn’t she?’ I was going to suggest that perhaps she hadn’t hated them, but I thought better of it when he started muttering to himself: ‘It’s not right. It’s not right. It’s not right.’ At the last repetition he shook his head so violently I thought for a moment that he was trying to fend off a wasp. He started sweeping invisible dirt off the top of the gravestone.

  ‘But it’s not such a surprise, is it, not really? It’s what people do,’ I said, and I would have said more, had Sam not cut across me.

  ‘I tell you what,’ he said, scanning the graveyard as though he saw a hostile crowd there and was prepared to take them on, ‘I fucking hate religion. All of it. I do. I fucking hate it.’ He told me that when he first arrived in Belfast he thought it was a place just like home: ‘a bit of a dump, in other words. But it wasn’t anything like home. It was a madhouse. I’ll tell you how mad it is,’ he said, standing up. He planted his feet far apart and shook his shoulders, as if steadying himself prior to a martial arts routine, then he told me about the afternoon, in his first week in Belfast, when his patrol had gone up to the top of a hill overlooking the city. ‘This is right on the edge of town, OK? The hill’s here, the houses start here,’ he said, chopping at the joints of his outstretched fingers. ‘And if you put your hand out and stick up a thumb,’ – he did that, lining up his thumb with my face – ‘you’re covering two enemy camps. Shankill here, Falls there. Side by side. Neighbours who fucking hate the sight of each other. And why? Because of this bollocks,’ he said, indicating the church and its environs with a sweep of his arm. ‘People carrying on like the seventeenth century happened last week, and it’s all because of religion.’

  He seemed to have finished what he had to say, so I remarked, quietly, that the situation in Northern Ireland was perhaps not quite as simple as that.

  Sam reacted as if he’d been crushingly patronised. ‘I know it’s not as simple as that,’ he snapp
ed. ‘I’m not a total fucking moron. I can read, you know. I did talk to people. I wasn’t just stomping around telling the Micks to go fuck their mothers. I know it’s not as simple as that. It’s the economics; it’s the politics. I know. But this shit is what’s at the heart of it. This is where it all comes from, in the end. Catholic or Prod – it comes down to that. And I’m just saying I can’t be doing with it. Not the Catholic shit, not the Protestant shit, not the Muslim shit. Iraq, right? Same fucking crap. What are you: Sunni or the other fucking crew? And if you don’t get the answer right, we’ll pull the eyes out of your head and piss in the sockets and then we’ll burn your fucking house down and throw you in it. And if you’re a woman, tough fucking luck either way, because the word of God round these parts is that you lot will do what you’re fucking told. Speak when you’re spoken to, cover your face, and walk ten yards behind your lord and fucking master. I hate it, all of it. It’s total fucking bollocks.’ He’d half turned away from me, and was rocking from one foot to the other, gazing at the ground and rubbing his neck as he did so. He had the look of a man who had a friend beside him, telling him to calm down. ‘Chuck the fucking Pope in the slammer, that’s what I’d do,’ he growled. ‘And make him share a cell with a couple of ayatollahs and a gang of fucking rabbis.’ He kept rubbing at his neck; after several deep breaths he smiled at the turf and said: ‘Maybe the Buddhists are on to something. I don’t know.’ When he looked at me he was blinking exaggeratedly, as if coming out of a fit.

  Having scrubbed his face for a few seconds, he nodded towards a grave to his left. ‘One of the clan, what’ll you bet me?’ he said. I read the inscription: it was another Williams – John Jeremy Williams, born on an illegible day in July 1884, died April 22nd, 1916. ‘Who the fuck was he, eh?’ said Sam. ‘Who the fuck were any of them?’ he said, scanning the cemetery, smiling in commiseration with the dead. ‘Once your grandchildren have gone, that’s it,’ he said – ‘that’s when you’re finally, utterly, totally dead. Once the last person who knows what your voice was like, who heard you talk and saw your face – once they’ve gone, you’re finished.’ Pointing to the stone of John Jeremy Williams, he launched a monologue about the men who had fought in World War I, about how none of them will be left in a few months from now, and then nobody will know what that war was really like. ‘As soon as those old men have gone, that human link,’ he said, ‘that’s when it all becomes history.’ He gave me a long and solemn look, by which I was to know that this was a subject to which he was accustomed to giving deep thought. ‘And eighty years from now, ninety, nobody’s going to know what Iraq was like. There’ll be hours and hours of films, and loads of books and all that – but what it really was, that’ll die with us. What’s in here,’ he said, giving his head a knock with his fist, ‘that’s what true. And you can’t get it all out. It’s not possible,’ he said. ‘What you know, what’s in here—’ he began, jabbing a thumb against his brow, but he abandoned the sentence with a rueful half-smile. Then he asked me: ‘You ever seen a corpse?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘When you get to my age, it’s inevitable.’

  He carried on as if he’d heard ‘No.’ He told me he’d seen a lot – ‘and I mean a lot,’ he emphasised. He asked me if I knew what a corpse was, and told me immediately what it was. ‘A broken machine,’ he said, severely, in a tone of rebuttal. ‘You understand? A broken machine. It’s not something that’s no longer whole. It’s not the mortal remains, and soul of the dear departed has flown away. Nothing’s flown away. That’s all there is, and it’s broken. Same as a TV. Same as a computer. When a computer breaks, you don’t think it’s lost its soul. All the parts of the machine are there, but they just don’t work. And that’s what it is with a dead person. It’s a broken machine. Do you get what I’m saying?’

  I replied that I did indeed get it, but his eyes were searching mine, failing to find evidence that I had truly understood.

  ‘Can I have a few minutes on my own?’ he asked abruptly, putting a hand on the gravestone as though for support.

  The church door wasn’t locked, so I went inside. Filtered by the ivy, the light in the nave was an easeful pale green; it was so quiet, all I could hear was the scratching of leaves at the glass, and the gushing of my pulse in my ears. The latter was louder – I’d been alarmed by Sam’s outburst, and could still feel a fluttering in my chest. I was intrigued by him, and somewhat frightened too. And although I wasn’t convinced that he was who he said he was, I became aware, as I sat in the cool high-ceilinged church, with its comforting green light and its smells of rising damp and whitewash and furniture polish, that I was coming closer to an acceptance of the idea. The impossibility of it had become diluted, as it were. I wondered what I would do, should we arrive at the day on which the last piece of doubt was dissolved. I had no idea what I would do. I imagined myself telling Aileen, but could get no further than the arguments that would follow. Seeking distraction, I studied the flower-heads that had been carved at the end of the pew. They were not in any way remarkable, but I managed to pretend to myself that they were fascinating. As I was working my way from pew to pew the church bell began to ring; the sound was an unmusical clanging, like a strip of scrap iron being hammered. I heard Sam laughing raucously outside, and went out to see what was so funny, which was clearly what he wanted – the laugh had the tone of a call.

  ‘Says it all, doesn’t it?’ he shouted as I emerged from the church. He was sitting on the wall, near the gate, and pointing up into the tower, where the bell was hanging, motionless, as the clanging went on. ‘It’s a recording, isn’t it? They can’t be arsed to ring the bell, so they’ve got a tape instead. And a fucking crappy recording at that. I mean, if you’re going to fob us off with a CD, at least give us the bells of Westminster Abbey or something half fucking decent. Not a monkey in a breaker’s yard.’ He pushed himself off the wall and came over to me. ‘You OK?’ he asked, as though I’d been distressed and had gone into the church to get a grip on myself.

  ‘Fine,’ I told him.

  He asked if I wanted any more time here and then, being told that I was happy to set off, he suggested a walk. There was a nice path, he said, that went from near the church down to a small reservoir, through a bit of woodland. It would take us forty minutes there and back, that’s all. He was asking a favour of me, I thought, and so I agreed. It was indeed a pleasant stroll, even though the path deteriorated into thick mud in a couple of places. Sam led the way, holding back any branches that might have obstructed me. We didn’t talk much. Two or three times he asked me to identify a particular tree; growing up in the Midlands, he said, he had learned to identify any make of car from a range of two hundred yards, but he still didn’t know his trees as well as he should. At one point, as Sam was leading us on a detour around a tract of swamp, he started and turned sharply to his left. ‘We’re not alone,’ he whispered, aiming a finger through the foliage. I’d heard nothing and for several seconds could see nothing in the thicket into which he was pointing, but then I made out a man in a Barbour jacket, and, a few moments later, a golden retriever. Sam winked at me and said: ‘Good, eh? Ears like a bat, eyes like an eagle. I’m the man.’ He was making a joke of it, but it was nonetheless meant to impress me, and it was quite impressive, I have to admit, even if it was something of a performance, a display of soldierly prowess – and I could tell that he saw that he’d achieved something of the desired effect. A short distance further on, as the reservoir came into sight, he plucked a hornbeam leaf and asked me what it was – having demonstrated his special competence, it seemed, he now felt it necessary to invite me to show mine. The reservoir wasn’t interesting – just an irregular oval of water, as motionless as lacquer except in the middle, where the breeze raked a bit of movement into it. Last time he was here, said Sam, he’d seen a kingfisher on the opposite bank.

  We waited for five minutes, but no kingfisher appeared. We did see something remarkable soon after, though. On the way back we took a differ
ent path, a path that went right through the heart of the wood, whereas the one we’d followed to the water had taken us close to the boundary. When we were more or less in the middle, Sam began murmuring, in a rising voice: ‘Fuck – fuck – fuck – fuck.’ And then, smiling with delight, he directed my attention to what he’d seen: an expanse of bluebells, twenty yards away, like a small bank of radiant blue fog, or – as Sam put it – a patch of blue summer sky lying on the ground. ‘That’s just amazing,’ he kept saying, as we stood on the edge of the clearing that the bluebells filled. He stood with his hands on his hips, nodding and grinning, as though someone had put the flowers there to astound us and had succeeded spectacularly. ‘Incredible. Absolutely fucking incredible,’ he said, and it appeared to me that his joy was genuine, rather than something that depended on his having me for an audience.

  On the drive home I found myself talking to him in a way I hadn’t done before – by which I mean that I did more than merely react to whatever Sam said. In other words, we had a conversation. I told him about the vicar who’d asked us – my father and me – to make a cross for him. The cross was to be huge – about twenty feet high – and would stand outside the vicar’s church, which was out in the middle of nowhere, but within sight of the train line to London. The idea was that the weary commuters, catching sight of the magnificent cross, would be prompted to consider the vacuity of their lives and turn back to God. Father Gorman was the vicar’s name, and we hadn’t warmed to him: a smug little zealot, my father thought he was. The mighty wooden cross, my father said, was the sanctified equivalent of the Bentley parked in the drive. It wasn’t a commission that we wanted to take, but we might have taken it had the vicar not jibbed at the cost and tried to persuade us to donate our labour in the name of the Lord. In relating this episode to Sam, I failed to make it clear that the cash had been the sticking point. Instead, I implied that we’d turned down the vicar on principle. And the reason I misrepresented the situation to Sam, I think, was that I knew that Sam would be more receptive to this slightly skewed version than to a truer one. This seems obvious now, and seemed obvious later that day, but at the time it didn’t occur to me that I was courting his approval.