Forever Young

by Ray Connolly

  ‘I’m only warning you,’ Luke insisted wickedly, trying to do a wheelie on his BMX. ‘Because they’re priests everybody trusts them, and then they turn into raving sex monsters, like scout masters and men ballet dancers. Some of them become murderers, too. They can’t help themselves. It’s because they lead unnatural lives.’

  Paul cycled on. He had learned that the best way to handle Luke’s taunts was to ignore them. He didn’t know much about any other priests but he did know that Father Michael was none of the things Luke liked to suggest. But then Luke was a year older, he remembered. Perhaps that made him more cynical. He changed the subject. ‘What shall we do now?’

  Luke shrugged and cycled deliberately through a puddle so that he had to raise his feet suddenly to prevent his legs being spattered with muddy water. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘We could go to the stream,’ Paul suggested tentatively.

  Luke pulled an expression of supreme disinterest: ‘Why not?’ he murmured with bored resignation.

  ‘I’ll race you,’ shouted Paul, suddenly standing on the pedals and swerving off the road and along a cart track towards the woods.

  To Paul the stream represented the embodiment of both mystery and hope. Popular local legend insisted that a hoard of Roman coins had once been unearthed from its banks, and ever since generations of treasure-seeking boys had made pilgrimages to the site armed with shovels and sieves, and more recently metal detectors, in the hope of finding further treasure. Occasionally rumours would run through the small town claiming that a further coin had been found, but no one ever seemed to know who exactly had been blessed with such good fortune.

  Part of the problem was that no one actually knew where the digging should be carried out, it was so long since the original find. Consequently the banks of the stream had been attacked along quite a considerable distance over the years, each occasion leaving new mounds and craters from which reeds and nettles had sprouted.

  Paul and Luke had been coming here for some weeks without success. Luke had never expected that there would be any coins, and came simply because Paul was so insistent. But to Paul it was inconceivable that they would not eventually be rewarded with a discovery.

  ‘Sometimes I think it’s all a legend, and that the Romans never came here at all,’ said Luke as they dropped their bicycles at the edge of the wood.

  Paul walked ahead of him through the long grass, sliding on his tummy under the barbed wire which divided the fields. ‘Of course they did. They built the bridge in town, didn’t they?’ he retorted.

  ‘But here, in this field, in this stream … where’s the evidence that they ever came here?’

  Paul looked around the empty flat fields through which the stream snaked. Behind a hedge a group of cows lay down on the sparse grass. ‘Father Michael knows someone who found a denarius here. An Augustus Caesar,’ he said quietly.

  Luke kicked some earth into the stream, clouding the shallow water. ‘Ten years ago,’ he mocked.

  This time Paul was ready for him: ‘What’s ten years in the life of a Roman coin?’

  Luke didn’t answer this time. Paul scrambled down the bank to the edge of the water and, balancing on stepping stones conveniently placed by other treasure seekers, surveyed the curve of the stream. It was about six feet wide, and rarely more than eighteen inches in depth, and marked a natural boundary between the gloomy plantation of pine woods to the north and the open fields and pastures to the south. ‘They’re here somewhere, I know it,’ he insisted, kicking with his shoes into the soft earth. ‘They’re about the size of a one p, but thicker and not shiny when you find them. And they’re silver, too.’

  Luke remained unimpressed: ‘If we find them.’

  ‘We will, you’ll see. We’ll start early tomorrow … nine o’clock. I’ll meet you here. I’ll bring the things.’

  ‘If it isn’t raining.’

  ‘If we’re in the stream you’ll get wet anyway.’

  Luke turned away awkwardly. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘My dad said he might take me bowling.’

  ‘Bowling!’ Paul was aghast. It was at times like this that he wondered why he bothered to stay friendly with Luke.

  They rode home in silence, Paul’s scorn hanging heavily over them both. If that was the sort of stupid thing that fathers did with their sons then Paul was sure he was better off without his.

  As they reached Luke’s house, a modern detached villa in a private road on the outskirts of the town, the kind of house befitting his estate agent father, Luke returned to the theme of Father Michael. ‘I’m not saying he is a burglar, not a complete one, anyway. But you’ve got to admit he is a bit weird.’

  ‘I don’t think he is,’ said Paul.

  ‘My mother says it isn’t right for a priest to sing with a group,’ said Luke.

  ‘Your mother doesn’t know anything. She’s as dumb as your father. Does she go bowling, too?’ came back Paul.

  ‘All right, suit yourself. See you Sunday.’ Luke smiled to himself, aware of the little victory in making Paul lose his temper.

  ‘See you,’ said Paul and began to ride away.

  ‘See you,’ replied Luke, before adding shyly. ‘And a pax vobiscum and et cum spiritu tuo to you, too.’

  Paul ignored him. Luke didn’t understand. No one did. Father Michael wasn’t like any ordinary priest. He was his best friend: someone who understood what it was like to be eleven years old. None of the teachers at school did. Father Michael had told him that he had once been a teacher and pretty rotten at it, too. Paul couldn’t believe that. In his eyes Father Michael couldn’t be rotten at anything.

  The back door key was waiting in its hiding place for him, beneath the third plant pot from the left in the garden shed. He had once told his mother that since she was never there when he got home he ought to be allowed to have a front door key like his sister Cathy. But for reasons of her own his mother had refused the request, saying that he was too young to be trusted with a key. So daily he went through the routine of searching under the plant pot, opening the door and immediately replacing the key for the following day. Once home Paul’s first act was to make himself two pieces of toast, more from habit than hunger since, this being a half-day holiday, he had eaten lunch only a couple of hours earlier at school. He hated coming home to an empty house, and inwardly regretted that his mother was never able to be home to greet him. Luke’s mother was always there, waiting with tea and toasted buns.

  He looked around the empty house, munching his toast. When he had been smaller he had been afraid to arrive home by himself and had often waited outside in the garden until his sister arrived, pretending he had things to do out there. Now he was no longer nervous but still he looked forward to the companionship which she provided. He looked at his watch. It wasn’t yet four, and she had drama lessons on a Friday after school. She wouldn’t be home for ages.

  Upstairs in his bedroom Paul looked out across the gardens as the winter light began to fade, turning all colours to shades of grey. His home was a solid Edwardian semidetached house in a road of many other such houses, which in the summer, when the horse chestnuts were heavy and green, looked cool and inviting, but which in mid-winter were draughty and creaky. Paul’s room was at the back of the house. Often he would sit at his desk doing his homework, watching the lights on the houses whose gardens backed on to his own, nurturing comic fantasies of one night putting on a Hallowe’en mask and suddenly appearing at those windows, leering hideously in on mothers preparing supper and other children doing homework. Today, however, no fantasies amused him. He was aggravated about what Luke had said about Father Michael.

  Lying down on his bed he stared at his ceiling. In common with many children of his age he had recently passed through a collage craze, and his ceiling bore witness to not only his wide interests but also the many hours spent cutting out pictures from magazines. With satisfaction his eyes traced a route across the ceiling montage: tennis stars leapt over racing cars and football
ers scored penalties against rock stars. In one corner there was an old fashioned picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus while right alongside Jabba the Hutt fought for space with a left-over from an earlier age, Fungus The Bogeyman. Paul viewed his work with satisfaction. Right above his head a black and white newspaper cutting caught his eye. It showed a photograph of himself with his mother, Cathy and Father Michael taken at a summer féte the previous year. He liked to think about that day. It had been hot and he had helped the priest run the bingo. It was the first time he had ever been able to help a man do anything. That was the day he had decided he wanted to become a priest.

  Getting up from his bed Paul kicked off his shoes and, crossing the landing, entered his mother’s bedroom. In the bottom drawer of her dressing table he found what he was looking for, a long white nightdress. Next door in his sister’s room, as luridly decorated as his own, he looked through the wardrobe. A plum coloured cape caught his eye. That would do perfectly. Taking it from its hanger he returned to his own room where he quickly pulled the nightdress over his own clothes. He looked at himself in the mirror. Not bad, he thought. With the cape hung around his shoulders he looked even better. Then going to his bedside table he opened the top drawer and took out a thin white strip of cardboard which he stuck into his collar. Another glance in the mirror satisfied him. Kneeling down in front of his dressing table he took a conker on a string in his hands, and swinging it backwards and forwards, imagining that his room was filling with incense, he began to sing in a high clear voice: ‘Benedictus, benedictus, in nomine Domini.’

  In St Theresa’s casualty ward Paul’s mother, Mary, arranged her duty’s outstanding yellow cards in order of urgency to be given to the nurse who relieved her at five. It had been a routine day of broken arms, bad cuts, minor heart attacks, phantom pains, grit under eyelids, strained ligaments and motorcycle accidents. No deaths, no drugs and no back street abortions to clear up. She looked around the waiting room. There was no one there who couldn’t just as easily have made an appointment with his own doctor, excepting a small boy called Kieron in grey uniform and blue scarf who was suffering from a ricked neck. An ingrowing toenail, an attack of mouth ulcers and a sprained wrist were not, in her opinion, what a casualty ward was for, as she had pointed out when the patients presented themselves. In a busy period they would have been sent on their way, but on slow evenings even the most hopeless malingerers stood a better than even chance of having a fully qualified doctor chastise them for wasting valuable National Health Service time, space and resources.

  She looked down the corridor for her replacement. She wanted to get off before any emergency necessitated her having to work on.

  ‘Hello, how are you today?’ Father Michael was standing by her. He must have entered through the side door after visiting the wards.

  ‘Looking forward to getting home,’ said Mary.

  The priest smiled and moved to the noticeboard beside the filing cabinets.

  ‘I thought I’d bring next week’s poster while I was on my rounds,’ he explained, and began unrolling one of his recently finished advertisements. To Mary it looked little different from the poster already on the board, but as that had become disfigured by graffiti and half-obscured by more recent cards and announcements she understood the priest’s motive.

  ‘It’s very nice,’ she said, more out of loyalty than enthusiasm.

  ‘You don’t think it’s too garish? Not too loud?’

  Mary shook her head firmly. ‘No. I’ve seen louder advertisements for tea dances at the Christadelphian Hall.’

  Father Michael laughed, reassured. ‘Will you be coming along with Paul tonight?’ he asked, after a moment’s hesitation.

  ‘I wouldn’t dare try to get out of it. He’s obsessed.’

  ‘Ah, he’s obviously destined for great things.’

  Mary nodded: ‘If being able to play the introduction to “Not Fade Away” is what you consider “great” then I suppose he is,’ she said. ‘I was rather hoping he might become a second Julian Bream or Rodrigo. John Williams at the very least.’

  ‘Well now, I never took you for a musical snob. Don’t you know Schumann would have been proud to have composed “Good Golly Miss Molly”.’

  Mary smiled. It might have been her son talking, so closely had Paul identified with the priest. She was about to make some riposte when the banter of their conversation was broken by a young nurse who broke into the waiting room at an ungainly gallop.

  ‘Father, you’re wanted urgently on Ward 8,’ the girl gasped.

  Father Michael’s levity fell away from him like a mask. Without a word he hurried from the room ahead of the breathless girl.

  Mary watched him go with not a little admiration. He was so unlike any other priest she had ever known, so seemingly wrapped up in his competitions, parties, raffles, and rock and roll dances, and yet his religion was never more than a moment away. And she considered, not for the first time, that his personality seemed to be made up of two conflicting parts, both apparently of equal weight, but both predominating in his personality as different moods were called upon.

  He was a handsome man. She had been struck by that the very moment she first saw him when she had gone to the children’s ward to collect Paul. And she had heard some of the less respectful younger nurses passing less than sacred comments about what they would like to do with him, should the occasion arise. But to her he was a man without sexuality, as, she would tell herself, he should be in his position. There was, she thought, something lonely about him, almost arid on occasions. She wondered if the music had become a front to hide an inner unhappiness. With her he had always been attentive and jolly, and with Paul never less than kind. But occasionally she would catch sight of him when he thought he was unobserved, and she would become aware of a seeming impenetrable bleakness. Once she had ventured to ask him about those sudden black moments, but he had been so surprised at her question, so dismissive of the idea that he might indeed have an inner world of sorrow, that she had not pushed the matter further.

  She knew what the dashing student nurse would have wanted. It was virtually the only thing anyone in a hospital ever wanted a priest for urgently. Someone was dying, more likely as not a Catholic who had not been to mass in half a lifetime; but now faced with the loneliest of journeys he or she was seeking the companionship of the Church. She had seen it so many times, and she wondered whether she would want a priest to be with her when her turn came.

  In Ward 8 Father Michael gently murmured the words of absolution over the frail figure of a very old man, his face as white as his hair, stubble growing in patches from the niches in his skin that the nurses had overlooked in shaving him. A male nurse stood alongside, watching with a callousness born out of familiarity. The student nurse hung back, unsure whether she wanted to be present at the end of a life.

  A dribble of saliva oozed from the old man’s lips as the priest prayed over him. With quick, thoughtless efficiency the male nurse stepped forward and wiped the froth away with a cloth. Father Michael went silent in irritation.

  ‘He’s been rambling about his childhood again,’ the nurse broke in, probably assuming by the priest’s silence that he had finished his prayers. ‘He was asking to see some puppy dog he got for his eighth birthday. Can you believe it?’

  Father Michael waited until the nurse had stopped talking and then completed his absolution. He could indeed believe such a request. He knew just how much a man is the sum of his earliest memories and emotions. And kneeling for a few minutes he added some extra prayers of hope that God would ease this last crisis for the man lying before him.

  When he had first become a parish priest the frequency with which he encountered death had disturbed him, although most people he was called to were old and accepting of the inevitable. But, not unlike the male nurse, he had with familiarity developed an attitude which compartmentalized his feelings, and when he left the hospital after watching the old man die he carried with him no particul
ar sentiments of sadness or indeed piety. He had done his job as well as he knew how. His thoughts once again turned to earthly matters.

  Quickly he drove across the small town, pulling off the elegant facade of the eighteenth-century high street into an ugly little modern shopping precinct. Then taking his roll of posters he hurried down the street to a rundown back alley.

  ‘I came as soon as I heard,’ he smiled at Ian Panton as he entered the small, plump man’s shop, the Revive Forty Five. ‘What is it?’

  Surreptitiously the shopkeeper slid a copy of Playboy under the counter. He was an oily little man, with a very established beer paunch behind his large, buckled cowboy belt. Father Michael would not have described him as a friend, but he was fond of him. For Ian time had stopped on New Year’s Eve 1959. He was, he would happily admit to anyone incautious enough to strike up his acquaintance, caught in a time loop, and his whole life, together with those of his wife Brenda and their son Gary, was devoted to the propagation of the myth of the noble savage as seen through the eyes of a late fifties rocker. How he made a living in such a small town out of a shop which dealt only in second-hand records and obscure American import albums, Father Michael could not begin to imagine. But he supposed that with both Brenda and Gary working at the biscuit factory the shop need do no more than cover its costs to keep its proprietor happy.

  Ian’s eyes gleamed mischievously as Father Michael waited for an answer. ‘I don’t know, I can’t do it to you,’ he said at last, like a man who’s conscience has finally got the better of his baser motives.

  Father Michael eyed him coolly. Ian always went through this routine, but it bored neither of them. ‘You can. And you will,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know. It isn’t fair to tempt. Not with you being a man of the cloth.’

  ‘Go on. You’ve got me. I give up,’ said the priest, anxious to get to the point of the encounter.

  Slowly Ian turned to the rack of rare albums behind him, and delicately teased a cellophane crisp record from the shelf. ‘It’s pure gold, Father.’ He held out the record for the priest to see.