by Ray Connolly
At his end of the table Paul thought he saw a row brewing. ‘Can I get down now?’ he asked.
‘When you’ve finished your supper.’
Sensing her mother’s aggravation Cathy turned to Paul: ‘Babes, Suzie wants to know if you can get them to do something tonight that isn’t absolutely prehistoric.’
‘She needn’t come if she doesn’t like it.’ Paul was instantly defensive of Father Michael.
‘She likes it all right, she just wonders if a change isn’t possible.’
‘What sort of change?’ demanded Paul.
‘Anything, so long as it isn’t Chuck Berry.’
Paul looked at her with derision. ‘You’re crazy, you and Suzie. Don’t you know that “Johnny B. Goode” is so important that American scientists have transmitted it into outer space just in case aliens on other planets want to know what it’s like here on earth.’
Cathy smothered her smiles: ‘Oh, that’s good to hear, isn’t it, Mum? It should put the Martians off invading us for ever.’
Paul gave up. His sister could be particularly stupid when she chose to be. ‘Telling her anything’s like talking to a dead camel,’ he said, getting up from the table. ‘Can I go now?’
‘All right. Just run and clean your teeth and Cathy and I will see you later,’ said Mary, beginning to clear the table as Paul ran out.
Cathy watched him fondly: ‘He’s crazy, completely crazy.’
‘Not really,’ said Mary.
In the bathroom Paul prepared himself for the evening ahead. Rinsing his comb under the tap he ruffled his mousey hair with his hand, and then very carefully began to comb it back off his forehead. Even Father Michael combed his hair differently on Friday nights he had noticed. Going into his bedroom he pulled on a new sweatshirt and jeans which he kept specially for such occasions. Then slipping into his new trainers he was ready for the evening. Carefully he slid his guitar into its plastic case. It had been a present from his mother for Christmas. Cathy had bought him a Simon and Garfunkel songbook complete with easy guitar chords.
The journey from his home to the church hall was nearly a mile, along well-lit residential roads. As always he ran all the way there. He didn’t want to be late for Father Michael.
The parish hall lay just across the gravestones from the church. On nights such as this, when it was cold and windy, he would scurry past the graveyard, anxious to get into the welcoming warm light of the hall. But tonight there was no light. The hall lay in darkness. He slowed down as he approached it. It was already turned seven, surely Father Michael had started setting up by now, he thought. Cautiously he opened the great doors of the hall and slipped into the outer-lobby. It was in darkness. Feeling his way forward he reached the inner doors. He was now beginning to feel alarmed. Supposing someone had come and murdered Father Michael, cut his throat from behind, and was still wandering around, or hiding behind the gravestones outside waiting to pounce on his next victim. Very delicately he pushed open the door of the main hall. Again there was darkness. Paul stepped forward a few paces. If there was a lunatic around he was probably safer in the middle of the dancefloor where he might be able to dodge the killer, he reasoned. His trainers squeaked on the polished dancefloor.
At that moment the darkness was broken by hundreds of blobs of light moving in unison around the large hall, dancing across the floor and climbing around the walls and ceiling. He looked up. A ball of tiny mirrors was hanging revolving from the ceiling, with a spotlight trained on it from the back of the stage.
‘Well, what do you think of that, Paulie?’ The reassuring voice of Father Michael cut through the boy’s bewilderment. He was standing at the edge of the stage admiring his new toy.
‘It’s great, Father. What is it?’
Father Michael climbed down the steps to greet him. ‘What is it? It’s a glitter ball. I thought you were a man of the world, Paulie. Ten quid in a junk shop. Not bad, eh?’
Paul looked at the glitter ball with what he hoped was a suitably admiring look. His earlier fears now embarrassed him. ‘Is this what they had in the fifties?’ he asked.
Father Michael laughed: ‘And sixties, and seventies and eighties. This is Palais de Luxe stuff. The 706 hits the big time tonight. It’s major league now for us.’
Paul smiled at the priest’s enthusiasm. Now that he knew what it was he remembered seeing similar devices in television pop music shows.
‘I hope it’s safe up there,’ said Father Michael, affecting a worried expression. ‘It would be a terrible tragedy if it fell down on someone’s head during the “Tell Laura I Love Her” excuse-me, wouldn’t it?’
As if to emphasize his point the sound of a falling crate of bottles announced the arrival of Bert, the caretaker, who, with a muffled oath floodlit the room by turning on the ceiling lights. ‘Good evening, Father,’ he intoned, as, picking up the crate, he began to make his way across the floor to prepare the bar.
‘Hello, Bert,’ shouted the priest. ‘Come along, Paul, we’d better start work, too.’
They moved away from the older man, aware that his eyes were on them. As they reached the stairs they heard a derisive ‘God’s teeth.’ Bert had evidently just discovered the glitter ball.
Climbing on to the stage, where Father Michael had cleared a space for the band, Paul whispered in the priest’s ear.
‘He thinks you’re a looney, Father. He told me.’
The priest picked up his guitar, and pulled the strap over his shoulder, his expression full of mock indignation. ‘Does he now?’ he said. ‘Well, perhaps he’s right. Perhaps that’s what the 706 Union is, a sanctuary for loonies who were born too late. The Pony Tails, 1958.’
And as Paul giggled, the priest played a loud, reverberating chord on his guitar.
6
January 1962
‘Why was I born too late.’ The two boys harmonized the end line and strummed the last chord on their guitars feverishly to punctuate the end of the song.
‘Not bad.’ Michael sounded depressed. ‘It would be better if we could do something more like that tenor sax Billy Vaughan sound that the Pony Tails have at the end of the record.’
James nodded and putting down his guitar tried to relight for the fourth time a tiny cigarette stub. His efforts were fruitless and he tossed the butt into the fireplace, where a coal fire smouldered damply.
Idly Michael turned to their game: ‘What was on the flip side of that?’
‘What? “Born Too Late”? I don’t know. “White Knickers and a Blue Tattoo”?’
‘Dandruff baby, you know I love you,’ sang Michael. ‘Wrong. One point to me. That makes me seven hundred and thirty three and you eight hundred and one. I’m catching up.’
‘Clever boy,’ nodded James, with just a hint of patronization. While Michael had the slight edge on him when it came to remembering tunes James was better on the facts and figures of their hobby.
It was a Wednesday afternoon and, the playing fields being too frozen for games, the sixth form had been told to spend the afternoon revising in the library under the supervision of a student teacher new to the school. To Michael and James this had seemed an opportunity too good to throw away. Instead of making their way to the library they had slipped out of a back door, through the hole in the fence and hared away down the road for an afternoon of unpoliced idleness. Since the student had not known how many were in the class to begin with he was hardly likely to know if two didn’t turn up.
Such abandoned moments were not exactly unusual to the two boys, who had been perfecting ways of sneaking free afternoons since they entered the sixth form eighteen months earlier. And although they had occasionally been caught out their work was of such a consistently high standard that they escaped the punishment which less gifted pupils would undoubtedly have suffered.
On this afternoon they had chosen the sitting-room of Michael’s home as their base since his mother had gone on a day trip to Matlock. The room was large and square, and dressed in the
appropriate manner for a lower middle-class family in this northern market town, being light and airy, with an assortment of orange paperbacks on the shelves which ran along one side of the modern tiled fireplace, a picture of horses prancing through surf, a small souvenir painting of Our Lady of Lourdes over a mahogany upright piano, and photographs of Michael and his elder brother John, who had already left home and was studying medicine at Edinburgh. A stern picture of Michael’s father, the headmaster of a local primary school, and his mother, a pious-looking woman, taken on their wedding day in 1939, held the central reservation on the mantelpiece. Michael’s father prided himself on being a fair man, who put the happiness of his family life, his own relative career success, and the academic achievements of his sons down to a good marriage.
Michael tightened the strings of his guitar, and then crossing to the piano, checked the strings for their tune.
‘How do you know the piano’s in tune?’ asked James, as Michael slightly slackened the fifth string.
‘I don’t. But at least I’ll be consistently out of tune,’ came back Michael. Both of them had always used this piano for tuning. ‘Come on let’s try “Honey Bee”.’
‘Honey Bee, you’ve been cheating with your honey, Honey Bee,’ sang James. This was the first song they had tried to write themselves, more of a fragment really, and lifted in shape from the blues singers they admired.
Outside it had started to snow, fine, dry flakes which blew across the neat front lawn and settled on the hard earth beneath the precision-clipped privet hedge. Michael started to play by himself, a simple, pretty tune with a Scottish lilt. It was his first proper melody and he was justifiably proud of it. James listened quietly for a moment: ‘I’ve written some words to that. Shall we try them,’ he said shyly.
‘You sing and I’ll play,’ said Michael, as James opened his schoolcase and took a sheet of paper from the back of his English poetry file.
‘Springtime lovers, warmed with kisses, Garlanded with blossoms hung,’ sang James, the influence of Keats lying heavily across the lines. ‘If you promise not to leave me, We will stay forever young.’
That was nice, thought Michael, this was a true collaboration. Now they were really on their way.
All that afternoon they practised and harmonized, James’s words perfectly fitting Michael’s melody, until by the end of the day they arranged the song for two guitars and two voices in the style of the Everly Brothers: it was their first real song.
Springtime lovers, warmed with kisses,
Garlanded with blossoms hung.
If you promise not to leave me
We will stay forever young.
Daisy chains in summer meadows
Buttercups of sunshine
If you tell me that you love me
You will be forever mine.
Misty autumn tears are falling
Broken pledges trip your tongue
If you leave me and deceive me
You will be forever mine.
Now I’m older, yes, and wiser
All my songs to you are sung
Still I’ll keep you in my memory
Where you’ll stay forever young.
Where you’ll stay forever young.
That afternoon was, thought James as he pedalled home on his bicycle that evening, one he would remember for the rest of his life. It was the way he wanted to spend the rest of his life.
7
Mary gazed critically at her face in the dressing room mirror: it was the face of a pretty woman of thirty-five, a strong face of good symmetry. But to Mary it was the face of a mum, hair tied back with a view more to function than attraction, and skin almost bare of make-up. She had been pretty once, before she was married. Now she was neither pretty nor plain. She didn’t need to be. That part of her life had ended years ago.
‘Mum, aren’t you ready yet?’ Cathy poked her head around the door, her eyes etched with eyeliner, her cheekbones prominent and deepest pink. She was wearing a pair of tight jeans and leg warmers and an outrageous bright pink extra-large man’s sized sweatshirt, bearing a copy of a Picasso matchstick man driving his sword into the head of a bull. She looked wonderfully pretty and suddenly much older than sixteen.
‘Haven’t you got too much eye make-up on?’ Mary had to say something.
Cathy looked in the dressing table mirror, a picture of hurt innocence. ‘What? That’s hardly any at all. You should see the girls at school. Suzie wears much more than this …’
‘All right, all right. If you want to look like Boy George or whatever his name is … I can’t imagine what Father Michael will say.’ Mary secretly applauded herself on managing to think of someone roughly contemporary. The children’s idols changed so rapidly that it was impossible to keep more than vaguely up to date.
‘Father Michael’s a priest. He won’t even notice. And anyway he isn’t supposed to be looking at young girls.’
Mary raised an eyebrow. It would be almost impossible for any man, priest or whatever, to see Cathy and not look at her the way she was dressed tonight. Standing up she spun around on the sole of her tennis shoes. ‘How about me for Debbie Reynolds?’
She could feel Cathy’s condescending eyes on her. In her jeans and check shirt she looked, she had to admit, like a matronly Gidget.
‘Was she Burt Reynolds’ mum?’ asked Cathy blithely, and then broke up at her own joke.
‘You’re not funny, you know,’ said Mary, and, shooing her daughter out of her bedroom, went down the stairs.
Outside, Cathy continued her mischief as she and Mary made their way towards the church hall. ‘D’you fancy him, mum?’ she asked as they hurried through the sharp February wind.
Mary pretended not to understand: ‘Fancy who?’ she asked blandly.
‘You know, Father Michael.’
‘Oh come on, don’t be so silly.’ For anyone to have even suggested fancying a priest when she was Cathy’s age would have seemed sacrilegious.
It was a question which Mary had long ago decided never to answer, but tonight Cathy was persistent, as though wondering how far she could press her mother. ‘When you and Dad were married …?’ She went off on a tack which Mary had not anticipated.
‘We’re still married as you very well know,’ replied Mary sharply, trying to cut off that line of conversation before it got properly started.
‘Yes, well, all right, when you and Dad were together then, was he ever jealous of you?’
‘Now what would I ever have done to make your father jealous?’ said Mary, almost too glibly.
‘I don’t know. People get jealous for all kinds of reasons. Particularly men. Othello was jealous of Desdemona, wasn’t he?’
‘This may come as some surprise to you Cathy, but your father wasn’t … isn’t,’ she corrected herself, ‘a Moorish Prince.’
Cathy wasn’t quite finished. ‘But don’t you ever fancy anyone? You know, not just a bit?’
‘No, I don’t know.’ Mary’s tone ended the conversation, ‘and you ought to know by now that your father is something we don’t ever talk about.’
‘But why not?’ persisted Cathy, as they turned into the churchyard. Her question fell on deaf ears.
‘As we’re early I suggest we go to confession, young lady,’ said Mary. When she was cross her daughter always became her young lady.
Instantly Cathy’s voice turned to a whine of dismay: ‘Oh no, why?’
‘Because I say so,’ said Mary firmly with all the illogic of a grumpy, outpointed parent.
‘But nobody goes nowadays.’
‘Really? I wonder what happened to all the sinners in the world. Come on. We still go …’ she said and marched resolutely up the church steps – although had Cathy been able to hear she might have heard a voice in her mother’s head murmur ‘… sometimes.’
The church was empty other than for Father Vincent whose presence was signalled by the low light shining in his confessional box. There were two times for repentance at St J
oseph’s. Father Vincent took Friday evenings until eight o’clock, while Father Michael did Saturdays at the same time. In these days when the psychiatrist has taken over many of the functions of the old father confessor Father Michael would be lucky if he heard half a dozen confessions on an ordinary Saturday evening. Father Vincent considered himself fortunate to get two.
‘Pray Father give me your blessing for I have sinned,’ said Mary as she knelt down inside the tiny confessional box. Through the screen she could see the outline of the older priest, back-lit by his lamp. She had seen him close a book as she had entered, and she wondered idly what it had been.
Despite her sharp words to Cathy confession was, even for Mary, a very rare occurence these days. As a child she had been taught to go every Saturday and had enjoyed the feeling of relief which repentance had brought her, although the misdemeanours she thought she had committed wouldn’t even have got a rating on any reasonable scale of wickedness. But, as fashions had changed, she had not brought up her own children to fear hellfire, and they rarely confessed more than once a year. ‘It is about six months since my last confession, and these are my sins,’ she continued.
Suddenly the sound of an electric guitar howled across the graveyard and into the church. Father Michael had turned up his amplifiers. For a moment Mary went silent, as she listened to the music, surprised at its volume.
‘Yes?’ a peevish voice enquired from behind the grille.
Mary hesitated. Whatever she had intended to confess had been quite driven from her mind. The occasional lapses of patience and little selfish acts had been blown away by the soaring electronic sounds coming from the church hall. ‘I’m sorry, Father, this may seem silly, but I can’t think of anything to confess.’
From the other side of the grille came an impatient rustling. ‘Oh really! And I wonder why the Immaculate Conception would wish to pay me a visit.’
‘I mean I can’t think of anything, Father,’ said Mary suppressing a smile at the priest’s sarcasm. ‘Well, nothing serious, no proper sins.’