by Michel Faber
McNair covered his eyes and sighed deeply as a harsh cwuk! sounded through the phone.
‘He hung up,’ said Robbie superfluously.
‘Let me handle this,’ said McNair, motioning for the mobile.
McNair rang Barra back, explained who he was, translated the situation into officialese, mentioned the half-million pounds. Dressed up in this way, McNair’s conversation with the Catholic priest managed to last many seconds longer than Robbie’s. It might even have lasted a whole minute.
‘No Virgin Marys, eh?’ Robbie enquired when it was over and McNair was tapping his fingers dolefully on the table.
‘He says they may be Catholics,’ McNair said, ‘but they’re Scottish Catholics.’
‘Which means what? They do without?’
‘No, it means they make do with the one Virgin Mary they’ve got. No spares.’
The men sat in silence for a minute, gloomy. Outside, a vehicle pulled up, the rusty church gate creaked, the worm-eaten church door groaned, and a fragment of ceiling fell into the aisle. McNair suggested that Robbie go and see to the visitor and leave the Virgin to him. As a contractor of many years’ experience, he had lots of contacts when it came to specialised bits and pieces. There was a place in Cornwall which was brilliant for supplying crenellated moulding, for instance, and another one in Morpeth which was pretty much cinquefoil city.
Robbie went out to talk to a joiner who had just arrived with two dozen lathe-turned balusters for the gap-toothed balustrades upstairs. McNair took the opportunity to ring his old friend Alistair at Glasgow Cemetery Supplies and asked him what he had knocking around in the religious statues line.
‘I’ve got quite a few graveyard angels, all sizes,’ offered Alistair.
‘Any that could do for a Virgin Mary?’
‘I dunno. The Virgin Mary hasnae got wings, has she?’
‘Wings could be knocked off. The important thing is the dimensions and … em … the expression.’
‘What sort of expression?’
McNair thought hard.
‘Like … like those women in advertisements for instant coffee, just when they get to sit down and have their first sip. Except more serious.’
‘I’m with you, I’m with you,’ Alistair assured him.
Months went by. Painfully slowly but impressively surely, St Hilda’s began to come good. Sealing and retiling the roof made a big difference, of course, especially to what was left of the half-million pounds.
Meanwhile, in the outside world, Robbie met the girl from the disco again in the Invergordon supermarket. She worked there as a checkout assistant.
‘How’s the church coming along?’ she asked him as she scanned his paltry basketful of bachelor groceries.
This time he didn’t downrate himself or St Hilda’s, but told her a little about the challenges and how he was solving them. The girl had a lovely smile and looked quite pretty even in a supermarket uniform. Her name was Catriona. Unfortunately, she finished scanning Robbie’s groceries in hardly any time at all, and had to ask him if he was saving coupons for the tartan teddy bears. He said no and before he knew it he was outside on the street. A good problem-solver when it came to stonemasonry, Robbie was at a loss here: he couldn’t very well buy his groceries twice, could he? He supposed that meant it was all over between him and Catriona.
Back at the church, a stone angel had arrived which Robbie was turning into a Virgin Mary. He’d knocked the wings off no bother, sanded and polished her back, fixed her firmly to the pedestal. The angel had come without a few of Mary’s trademark features, but Robbie was adding these himself.
The missing cord around her waist was easy: Robbie merely cut a length of thin rope, soaked it in cement fondue, tied it on and let it dry. Adding a veil to the angel’s bare head was more difficult. Despite several attempts involving underwiring and gauze to give the cement-soaked fabric a full and flowing shape, it still looked as if the Virgin Mary had been flipping a freshly rolled pizza base in the air and it had landed on her head. Every few weeks Robbie had to admit his veil was rubbish, knock it off the statue’s head and try again. All around the Virgin, the church of St Hilda was emerging from the rubble, but the veil refused to come good. Evaluating his latest attempt with a frown, Robbie wondered: how would a real Italian like Michelangelo have done it?
It turned out that Catriona was a bit of an expert on Michelangelo. Robbie knew this because … well, he’d seen her a few times lately. At the supermarket, and also at her mum’s house. Catriona’s dad was actually an artist but, due to lack of work opportunities in the Highlands, he’d moved to Edinburgh, and seemed to have forgotten to take his wife and daughter with him. He’d left his art books behind, though, and Catriona knew these intimately. With eyes closed, she could picture the Sistine Chapel ceiling better than her own bedroom, she said, then blushed.
In time, Catriona asked if she could come and see him working at St Hilda’s some time. He said he’d discuss it with his boss, though in truth it was his own shyness which prevented him taking her along right away. There was a particular expression workmates had told him he wore when he was concentrating, a sort of dumb intensity, which he wasn’t sure he wanted her to see. Also, he’d be covered in dust and glue and God knows what else, whereas when he visited her he always spruced himself up.
And so, putting off Catriona’s visit a little while yet, he returned to St Hilda’s and worked like a slave. McNair was impressed with the wonders his apprentice managed as the year wore on. Only the veil remained, frankly, crap.
One day, about eight months into the project, Dr Prosser came to visit the church and, in due course, he stopped to appraise the renovated Virgin.
‘Her eyes are supposed to be closed,’ said the good doctor.
‘Closed?’
‘Closed!’
‘Well … she’s got to open them some time, has she not?’
‘Also, she looks as if a pancake has fallen on her head.’
‘No bother, easily fixed,’ grimaced Robbie, pulling his mallet from a loop in his belt. ‘It was a … an interim measure, like.’
He tapped the statue’s headgear gently but firmly with the mallet, and it fell away in shards.
By winter St Hilda’s was sound structurally; the weather proved it by raining and hailing down on it night and day without getting in. The floors were smooth and solid, if uncarpeted, and the aisles were symmetrical with repaired pews. The windows were sealed with wire mesh and ordinary glass: an interim measure. As a whole the place looked impressive but cold and rather bare. Resting at the end of a working day, Robbie and McNair drank coffee and discussed St Hilda’s finer potentials.
‘You know,’ mused Robbie, ‘I’ve been looking at them old Italian churches. Fellows like Michelangelo did some cracking stuff there, you know. Huge great paintings on the ceilings and all.’
‘Yes, well,’ said McNair, ‘Michelangelo’s passed on a few years ago now.’
‘I thought mebbe there might be some painters living around here who might like to have a go at these ceilings,’ persisted Robbie. ‘You know: job creation.’
‘I’ll raise it with Dr Prosser next time he comeS round.’
Robbie thought McNair was being sarcastic, but a few weeks later it turned out that McNair had raised it with the bureaucrat. Word came back that when the basic renovation of the church was finished, in 1999, the board might then consider the possibility of commissions ‘Of an artistic nature’.
‘It’ll be the next century by then,’ objected Robbie.
‘A millennium project,’ grinned McNair. ‘They might get Lottery funding.’
It was late November before Robbie found the courage to invite Catriona to the church. McNair was away for the day, of course.
Catriona stood in the transept, enchantingly back-lit by one of the big portable tungsten lamps. She had walked all around the aisles, shyly explored the chancel, but she kept returning to this spot, standing perfectly still, looking up at
the ceiling.
‘What are those?’ she asked Robbie softly, not pointing with her hands, which hung at her sides as if she’d forgotten she had any. Robbie followed the line of her pale throat up through the air until he, too, was staring straight up.
‘You mean those ornamental panels sunk into the ceiling? They’re called coffers.’
‘They’re beautiful,’ Catriona murmured.
‘They’re about the only decorative part of this place that’s still in good order,’ sighed Robbie. ‘Everything else needs work or replacing.’
‘Oh, but you’ll do it, won’t you Robbie?’ she asked him.
‘Sure,’ he laughed, a little unnerved, because she sounded as if she was asking him to make some sort of solemn vow.
Noticing his discomfiture perhaps, she pointed at some vaulted arches converging above the transept and asked what the curvy bits underneath were called.
‘Oh, them? They’re called the … ah … groins,’ Robbie said, then blushed.
Desperate to salvage the moment, Catriona asked another question, the first one that came to her.
‘Don’t you think the Virgin Mary looks as if a big pancake’s fallen on her head?’
It was coming up to Christmas when the bad news came through from Dr Prosser. Regrettably, funding had not been approved for a further year’s work. There had been changes ‘at the top’ and the whole project had been put ‘on hold’.
When Robbie found out, he had to sit down; he felt as if someone had spiked his coffee with something fast-acting and maybe fatal. McNair, embarrassed, shrugged his shoulders as if to say it was just one of those things, but Robbie had come to love St Hilda’s. He didn’t care what denomination it was, didn’t even care if he or anyone else ever attended it. He just felt he owed something to St Hilda’s as a building.
On the last day of the contract, McNair and Robbie cleared out the last of their equipment, packed up the last of their tools. The church would be locked up until next year, waiting for another half a million. In the meantime, they could only pray it was weatherproof and vandal-resistant. McNair left, and Catriona arrived an hour later. Dolefully she and her man wandered around the premises one last time. Robbie tossed a protective sheet over the Virgin Mary’s still veil-less head. Shrouded entirely, she looked like a Halloween ghost.
To finish with, Robbie went upstairs and locked the doors to the balconies. When he returned to escort Catriona out, he was annoyed to find that the sheet he’d thrown over the statue seemed to have half fallen off. He stopped, had a good look and gasped in shock. The sheet had in fact been elaborately rearranged with deft folds and tucks, and now framed the Virgin’s face in an elegant drape: a veil worthy of Michelangelo.
‘Did you do this?’ Robbie demanded of Catriona.
She looked up at him in disbelief, then covered her mouth with her hands and suppressed a little splutter of laughter. Robbie, calling upon his highly developed skills of estimation, confirmed she couldn’t be taller than four foot eleven. The Virgin’s head was almost seven feet off the ground.
‘You’ve got a lot to learn about women,’ Catriona smirked as she led him to the church door.
Resisting her for one last second, Robbie faced the statue squarely and pointed an authoritative finger.
‘Don’t move,’ he spake unto her, ‘until I get back.’
The Red Cement Truck
UPSTAIRS, A STRANGE man was going through her things.
She could hear the drawers of her dresser being slid open and shut, the awkward little groans of wood against wood.
‘At least he didn’t rape me,’ she thought.
Upstairs, there was a clatter: the contents of her jewellery box. Her senses were so heightened she could distinguish the sound of her engagement ring from that of her mother’s brooch, and so on.
And on and on: the clattering went on and on: he must be trying to sort through the jewellery, to find the valuable pieces. What an odd thing for him to be doing! Why not just take everything and pick through it later? She almost wanted to go up and help him, to tell him that her ex-husband had had all the jewellery valued for insurance purposes, and that the estimates were listed in a little notebook under the stationery in the dining-room cupboard. Always the rational one, she found it difficult to be tolerant of how irrational this man was being, wasting time trying to guess the relative value of rings and pendants in her bedroom when the police might come bashing at the front door any minute.
After all, there had been a gunshot.
His footsteps thudded down the carpeted stairs; she heard the rustle of his soft leather jacket as he rounded the corner on his way to the kitchen. Evidently he was thinking straighter now. Many people kept a stash of money in their kitchen, in a jar or a drawer. She didn’t, but many people did. She could hear him beginning to look, and was surprised to be able to perceive the difference between the scrape of her stainless steel saucepan across the shelf and the smoother shove of the cast-iron one next to it, or between the tangled clatter of forks and the meshing of spoons. Was she imagining it when she felt she could even hear the infinitely muted click of his fingernails on the plastic of the cutlery tray? Surely she must be! And yet – wasn’t that the sound of the serrated Swiss knife she used for onions and tomatoes, being removed from among the others? In his hands, that knife was a deadly weapon. Was he going to come back in here and stab her?
Unlikely. After all, he had already shot her.
He was rummaging through the spice racks now, the coffee things, packets of spaghetti. Getting irrational again. Would he be on his knees, pulling long-unused baking dishes from the shelves below the oven, when the police arrived? It was pathetic, but she couldn’t help him. Her body, so overdue for a change of position, perversely refused to move. Her pelvis, knocked 90 degrees askew from her ribcage by the impact, seemed to have settled in to its new orientation. Worse, one of her eyeballs was almost, almost touching the fibrous tips of the carpet pile. The carpet was actually swelling up with blood, raising its pile by fractions of a millimetre.
To be honest, she didn’t think she could stand the sensation of nylon fibres tickling her eyeball, and she was right. The instant it happened, she was out of there.
Naked, she padded to the door of the living room and listened through the crack. He had left the kitchen now and gone into the bathroom. Of course he wasn’t looking for money in there; he was using the toilet. She could smell the sudden stench of his anxious diarrhoea, and understood, with a sort of poignant fascination, that he hadn’t meant to kill her.
The queer thing was, she felt more alive now than she’d ever felt before: even the stink in her nostrils seemed to be vibrating hundreds of tiny cilia on its way up through an intricate maze of sinuses. Experimentally, she pinched her nostrils shut with her fingers: the pressure of flesh against flesh, the awareness of untrimmed nail and porous skin, was startlingly immediate. Next, she reached out to the door handle, but before she could grasp it, the door swung open, as if blown by a draught. At the same time, just outside the house, the sound of a large vehicle pulling up at the kerb made her wonder if police or ambulance had finally arrived. If so, who would they take away?
The curtains of the living room, which had preserved the privacy, the intimacy, of her encounter with the man now suffering upstairs, rolled aside at a gesture of her hands, flooding her living room with light. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and the world out there was brilliant with sunshine after a rainy start earlier on. The vehicle which had parked in front of her house, little more than arm’s length from her window, was a cement truck so massive that only a section of it could be viewed, as if it were an absurdly enlarged detail from a painting, or a huge close-up filling a cinema screen. The enormous metal barrel was painted deep red, textured by corrosion, aged and weirdly organic. It revolved slowly, glistening with raindrops.
It was easily the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
Next, a workman in red overalls stepped
between the truck and the window, his back to her, almost brushing against the window-pane. With a ballet dancer’s grace he slow-motioned his arms in arcs through the air, to guide the great red cement truck through her narrow street, on its way to somewhere else. She was alarmed, for the first time since hearing the gun go off. He must not walk away, this red-cement-truck man, without seeing her! Urgently she knocked at the window, or thought she did – at any rate, there was a sound of knocking on the glass, causing the workman to turn around. He squinted into her living room, staring straight through her nakedness at vacant furniture, looking down through her legs in case an animal might be trying to get his attention. He saw nothing. Her dead body was out of sight, below window level; her living one was invisible to him. Turning again, he continued his balletic motions, ambling sideways as the truck rolled on past, its barrel slowly twirling. Wherever its secret load of cement was going to be poured out, it wasn’t here.
Achingly, unbearably lonely all of a sudden, she turned to her old self and considered being dead. But slipping back into that body was such a distasteful challenge: it would be like trying to put on a dress that was ill-fitting, torn, soaking wet and slimy. She put a finger in, nevertheless, wondering if she could cope with the cold.
A key screwed in a lock: it was him, leaving. On impulse she ran through the house, silent as a torch beam, and joined him at the back door.
He seemed to have changed since she’d seen him last, through other eyes. The hulking psycho who had fired a bullet into her unexpected presence as if by instinct, had shrunk to a round-shouldered fumbler with a lost expression, like a visitor left responsible for a crying baby with a dirty nappy. The gun which had seemed such a natural part of him as he pulled its trigger was in his jacket pocket now, a misshapen lump clacking against her jewellery – Christ! hadn’t he even brought a bag? And she could smell, too, that he hadn’t flushed the toilet – Who was this man, to have killed her like this? How had he won the right to be the last man to touch her?