by Ray Connolly
‘I want to stay here with you,’ interrupted the boy.
Father Michael shook his head, and looked around the room. ‘No. You wouldn’t like it here, not one little bit. It’s a lonely life. Sometimes it seems like a pointless life. Your place is at home with your mother and sister.’
‘No.’ Paul slumped further down under the sheets. Father Michael looked at him, frail and defenceless, injured and afraid, lying huddled up, his right hand clasped firmly closed, his eyes pleading. The priest knew he could not afford, for the boy’s own sake, to give him what he wanted.
‘Young people can be very intolerant. All your life your mother’s had a hard time, staying in at night, helping you with your homework, doing everything for you. And when once, just once, she does something to upset you, something which you should never have known about, you want to turn your back on her. You know, that doesn’t seem very fair to me. You might not be able to see it now but you’ll get over all this in a few days. I’m not saying you’ll forget. Sometimes it isn’t easy to forget, but as time goes by it won’t seem as important as it does now. So, come on, get dressed and I’ll take you home.’
Paul did not move. ‘I don’t want to go.’
The priest ignored his reply. ‘Here, she brought you these things to wear. We’ll wash your pyjamas and you can pick them up after mass tomorrow.’
‘Why can’t I stay here with you?’ asked the boy.
Within him Father Michael began to feel the impatience he had experienced as a teacher. ‘Paul, this is silly talk. Now do as you’re told and get dressed.’
‘But why?’
‘Just do as you’re told.’
Paul had moved again to the brink of tears. He shook his head violently into the pillow. ‘I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to see her ever again. She’s dirty.’
‘No, Paul, she isn’t dirty. Not your mother. Not dirty at all. And don’t you ever say that about her again. Now come on.’
Again Paul shook his head. His refusal had now become sullen.
Father Michael gazed at him for a very long moment, fixing him with eyes which seemed to freeze in his head as he spoke again. He knew he had no alternative. He had to hurt, to disillusion the boy. ‘Can’t you see what I’m saying to you,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t want you, Paul. I’m going away. I’m going to take up travelling before it’s too late. I’m going to see the world. I don’t want you tagging along behind. You’d cramp my style. Do you understand? I just don’t want you any more. You’re going home. Now get dressed.’
This time Paul did not protest. Instead he lay there in broken astonishment, as the brutal words clubbed into him.
Curtly Father Michael got up from the bed and, drawing the curtains to let in the late afternoon sun, went to the door. ‘I’ll see you downstairs in five minutes,’ he said and went out.
Paul stared after him. His world was now truly shattered.
Outside on the landing the priest fought back a tear. He had been as firm with the boy as he ever could be. He had lied, a good lie. The boy had to go home, and he had persuaded him in the only way Paul would now respond to.
‘All right now?’ Father Vincent was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs.
‘I don’t know. I hope so.’
Father Vincent put a hand of comfort on the younger priest’s sleeve. ‘Good man,’ he said. ‘I know it must have been very difficult for you.’
Father Michael nodded. He found now that his voice was shaking. ‘Father, I think perhaps it might be better if I requested a move. Another parish. Perhaps somewhere up north. I think I’ve allowed myself to become too involved.’
Father Vincent reacted without surprise. ‘Whatever you think,’ he said sadly. ‘Perhaps a change of scenery would be for the best. I’ll miss you Michael. Yes I’ll miss you and your … your music.’
Music. For the first time the older priest had conceded that rock and roll was music. Father Michael smiled wanly.
‘Perhaps we could have a drink together later,’ added Father Vincent.
‘That would be very nice.’ Michael turned as he heard a foot at the top of the stairs. Paul, now dressed, walked slowly down. ‘Well, Paulie, we’ll be off, shall we?’
The boy did not answer. Without looking at Father Vincent he crossed the hall and went out of the front door.
‘Would you like to sit in the back or in the passenger seat?’ Father Michael asked him as he unlocked his car door.
Without a word the child chose the passenger seat. Climbing in alongside him Father Michael started the car and began the short journey to Paul’s home. Paul stared blankly through the passenger door window, his head turned away from the priest.
‘Perhaps you’d like a few of my old albums,’ Father Michael desperately attempted to rebuild at least some kind of bridge of communication between the two of them. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll have space for them on my travels. They’re collectors items some of them, you know.’
It was too late. Paul did not even react to the sound of his voice. Nervously the priest patted the boy’s still clasped fist. Paul moved it away.
Sadly Father Michael drew the car to a halt outside the Caseys’ home. Without a word Paul unfastened his seat belt.
‘Paul …’ began Father Michael.
But the boy would not listen. Opening the car door he stepped out on to the pavement. For a moment Paul hesitated. Then with a deliberately casual gesture, vicious in its theatrical carelessness, he suddenly opened the fist that had been closed and, without a word, tossed his Roman coin on to the passenger seat. Then turning he slammed shut the car door and went up the garden path.
Mary emerged from the house, and moved tentatively a few steps down the path to greet her son. She had been waiting for him all day, rarely venturing more than a few paces from the sitting room window, but now that he had arrived she did not know what to say to him.
‘Hello. Are you all right?’ she murmured. ‘We were worried about you, Cathy and me.’
At the sitting room window stood Cathy, a telephone in her hand as she gave a running commentary to Suzie.
‘I’m all right,’ said Paul blankly, walking past her.
Mary swallowed a sob. ‘Yes,’ she said. In the road Father Michael stood by his car. Mary looked at him for the last time and then turning followed Paul into the house.
‘Hi, Babes. Where’ve you been?’ Ignorant of the events of the preceding night, aware only that Paul and her mother had had some kind of row, Cathy tried to brighten the afternoon with smiles, as she hung around the sitting room door into the hall, the telephone cable strung out behind her.
Paul ignored her and began to climb the stairs.
‘What’s going on?’ the girl persisted.
Without warning Mary exploded. ‘Just get off the phone, Cathy, just for once in your life. Go and do some homework or something.’
Mystified, Cathy retreated into the sitting room gabbling an apology to Suzie, as Mary, struggling to contain herself, tried to climb back into her suit of normality. ‘Golly, is that the time. I’m supposed to be on duty in half an hour,’ she said, choking back emotion. ‘I can’t afford to lose my job, can I?’
23
December 1962
Michael went to become a priest just before Christmas, and just before James returned for the vacation. It was not a sudden decision and he did not consider it an irrevocable move when he went. Of course his mother wept to have her son adopted by Holy Mother Church, but there were tears of joy, too. God could bestow no greater gift on a woman than that he take her son for the priesthood. All the same Michael considered the venture very much of a trial that he could, and would, withdraw from should it prove to be intolerable. It did not.
The days and weeks after the cricket club dance had been filled with torment and self-loathing, in which his only companion had been Brother Amedy, a kind and generous man who, though he understood little of the temptations of the flesh, compensated with salving wo
rds and staunch friendship. Michael had not seen James again. The day after the dance he had returned to work at the farm, and thrown himself into a body mortifying routine, as he tried to expiate the wrong he had done. Now that his friendship with James was finished he no longer wished to go to university in London and he wrote a short polite note withdrawing his name from the University College enrolment list.
He was a boy who had always had a strong sense of the religious, and like most Catholic boys the notion of the priesthood had at some point occurred to him, but only from the chasm of despair had he begun to take those fancies seriously. Without James he had felt as though he had been shorn of all will and direction. He had not known what he wanted any more, nor where life should lead him. And into this vacuum had stepped the Church. Although he could not forgive himself for his act of betrayal, some comfort had been offered him by the eternal forgiveness of God.
During those first weeks news had come to him of James through his mother who, refusing to accept that the boys had had anything more than a falling out, had taken to telephoning James’s mother or talking to her when they met at mass. And from her he had discovered that James had never returned to work at the petrol station, but instead taken his money and gone off on a hitch-hiking tour of Europe until it was time to go to London.
Only once had Michael seen Maureen again. That had been in church the weekend before she went off to university at Bristol. He had known that Maureen and Alison regularly went to ten thirty mass on Sunday mornings, and had made a point of always going to another service. But on the last Sunday in September Maureen had broken with her routine, and found herself queuing alongside Michael to receive Holy Communion. Neither of them had allowed their eyes to register anything, but Michael noticed that she had fled the church before the end of mass, keeping her head down, her gaze to the floor.
Gradually Michael had begun to rebuild his life, but now around the Church. During the autumn he had taken a relief job helping in the local library, and then at the beginning of December he had heard that he had been accepted for training in the priesthood. He had been relieved to leave the town before James came home.
On his last day before entering the seminary he had paid one last visit to the coffee bar where he and James had known so many happy hours. He had taken with him a handful of sixpences to play the juke box, the mighty Wurlitzer 100, but when he got there he had found a little note stuck inside the glass dome advising customers that it was broken. Sadly he had fed the coins into a box for the blind which had stood, ignored, on the counter for as long as he could remember. Then sitting in a window seat he had stared out at the High Street, dressed now in its festive glitter.
Childhood was now no more than a memory for him, yet it would be with him always: and he had remembered some lines of Wordsworth, lines studied and learned by heart in other times.
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.
24
Paul stood in the centre of his room and looked about him as a stranger might. Nothing he saw held any affection for him. He was in a foreign place. Throughout his whole being he felt a terrible cold: a complete emptiness. He was friendless. On his dressing table lay the simple band of white cardboard he had used as a make-shift priest’s collar. He did not now recognize the boy who had played such games. How could he ever have wanted to be a priest, he thought, picking up the cardboard. He had thought they were special, had thought of Father Michael as a saint, but now he could see him for what he was, just as untrustworthy as anybody else.
Very carefully he tore the corner off the strip of cardboard and allowed it to fall to the floor. Then another corner joined the first, and so on until the carpet was littered with a confetti of cardboard as he put the Church behind him. The tearing, destructive motions had given him a peculiarly satisfying sensation. Climbing on top of his bed he reached up and grabbed hold of the picture of Father Michael with his mother and sister which had been pasted above his head. It ripped as it came away from the ceiling and brought with it a photograph of Daley Thompson and the front half of a Lotus Elite sports car. Again he felt the peculiar thrill of the vandal. Reaching up he pulled away a bigger section of the collage, revealing the faded white emulsion beneath the pictures. Then again and again he pulled, ripping down the heroes of his childhood until they lay scattered and wretched across his bedroom, leaving in their place only a terrible barrenness. Then without stopping he turned on the walls, slashing in half his posters of Roman coins, Vikings, dinosaurs and British monarchs, all of which had once been carefully applied for, and stuck to the walls with painstaking care. Lastly he turned on his toys, remembrances of other days. With a swipe the Space-Lego moon buggy and satellite station were sent hurtling across the room. A Scalectric car, its front wheels torn away from its chassis, followed.
He looked around for something else. Zipped inside its case his guitar lay propped behind the door. Peeling open the plastic he lifted it out. His fingers caught the strings making a discordant, ugly chime. When his mother had bought him the instrument at Christmas he had believed every sound to come from it to be wondrously melodious. Now, as he held it in his hands, he saw nothing but a cheap contraption of nylon strings and varnished wood. Laying it down on his carpet he considered it for some moments. Then with cool deliberation the boy drew up his leg and in one swift crushing movement brought his heel sharply down. With a loud crack the guitar broke in two.
Very gradually, as though exhausted by his destruction, Paul sank to his feet among the debris of his room. In front of him lay the newspaper picture showing Father Michael with his mother and her children. Picking it up he detached the sportsman and the sports car. The photograph was only a few months old, but already he thought his mother seemed older, more worn. He looked at himself in the picture. He was staring up at the priest with undisguised adoration. He had been happy then, he thought. They had all been happy. Very slowly a tear seeped from under his eyelid and ran down his cheek, followed by another and another, until with a series of convulsions he broke down and began to weep, crying not for his current state, but mourning the loss of his infancy.
For Beatrice Amelia Phillips
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London
WC1B 3DP
Copyright © Enigma Productions Ltd 1983
First published by Pan Books Ltd
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ISBN: 9781448207503
eISBN: 9781448207190
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