This Mortal Boy

by Fiona Kidman

  Faith or not, they have arrived at the door of St George’s Church. It isn’t her own St Anne’s, but because of the war and the restoration (and here she pauses to shudder; even now, all these years later, the memory of the Blitz scalds her brain), it is a church that comforts her, with its sandstone exterior and Corinthian portico, and inside it the tiny jewel-like stained-glass windows and ancient paintings. The walk along High Street always makes her think of the River Farset that flows under the pavement, the water completely shrouded on its journey towards the junction with the River Lagan. She has never seen this river, it was covered over long before she was born, but just the idea of it there in the dark beneath her feet makes her imagine things that lie below the surface, things that people know and don’t know about each other. She will see now what her own people have to say about the plight that has befallen her family.

  At the door they are met by a vestryman she knows slightly from earlier services. ‘Mr Russell, a word if I might,’ she says. And she tells him of their trouble and what she has planned. If the minister approves, she would like it announced that she will be standing at the door collecting signatures to send to the New Zealand High Commissioner in London, appealing for clemency for her son who, so far as she knows, has never done a worse thing in his life than lose his father’s prize marley up until the day he acted to protect himself from a violent attacker. This is what Albert told her in his first letter from the prison after he was arrested, and she prays to God that this is the truth he has told her.

  The vestryman says that he will have a word, and it is all a little unusual but a mother’s affection and wish to protect her child is a very Christian attitude, so he will put her case to the minister and it might well be that her petition will get the church’s blessing. As she kneels at the communion rail, she thinks that the minister pauses for a longer moment than usual, murmuring the familiar words the body of Christ. She lets the wafer rest on her tongue, swallows, and then, after the cup has been passed, rises unsteadily to her feet and makes her way back to her pew. The church seats five hundred and today it appears full.

  Then the minister addresses the congregation and, in a blur, she hears him speak her and her husband’s name, and more than that, speak well of their son who had gone to seek the new world and found himself betrayed by it.

  At the door, she and her husband stand side by side, and Daniel, looking like one of the choirboys, with his white shirt collar and scrubbed face, stands beside them. He knows, after all, she thinks. She can see it now, the startled child’s expression, wide-eyed and growing serious. Kathleen holds out the pad with the pencil attached by a string.

  ‘Mrs Black, a sad thing, we’ve read it in the newspaper. Terrible, what they do out there, New Zealand’s a savage place,’ a woman says, taking the pad from her. Soon the congregation is queuing up, so that the minister is getting lost among them as he stands to shake hands with the departing flock.

  ‘You need to get more pads,’ a man says. ‘I’m going out to Antrim tomorrow, to the market at Ballylagan. Sure and I can gather some signatures there. I’ll pick up a pad at the stationer’s on my way out.’

  ‘The market, that’s the story,’ another says.

  And before they know it, the pad is full and promises are being made, and someone has put in a pound for the purchase of more pads and pencils.

  When they get home and Bert puts the kettle on, because he can see that his wife has started something and needs all the help she can get, she counts the signatures. Over four hundred, and the minister’s signed too, as well as Mr Russell the vestryman. She counts out money that has been pushed into her hand: there are twenty-two pounds.

  ‘Perhaps I could go to New Zealand after all,’ she says, wistful. ‘Not that it would take me far.’ And besides, she knows that it is a country where she is not wanted, a place where Albert should never have gone.

  ‘You should have a rest,’ Bert says.

  ‘Well, no,’ she says, ‘because I’ve decided to write to the Queen. I’m going to ask her, mother to mother, to exercise the royal prerogative of mercy.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ he says. ‘The Queen has enough troubles of her own right now.’

  ‘Her sister? Poor girl. But that’s all fixed now that Margaret’s said she won’t marry Townsend.’ The princess had renounced marriage to her lover just days earlier.

  ‘Only because the Archbishop of Canterbury came down so hard on her. There are a lot of people who feel very upset with the Queen and her lot.’

  ‘All the more reason for her to show some mercy to our boy.’ Kathleen’s face is set with determination. ‘It will show she has a heart.’

  ‘I’d be surprised if she got to see the letter.’

  ‘Bert, we can’t give up now. You’re not giving up our boy, are you?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ he says, his anguish raw again. ‘Write the letter, Kathleen.’

  CHAPTER 21

  November 1955. Since Paddy’s death sentence, Des Ball has disappeared. Paddy is surprised to find that he misses him. He had got used to Des and the meanness of his tongue. It is almost as if they had got to liking each other. At least, they understood each other. Wherever he goes inside the prison walls now, Paddy is watched. A man called Knowles has taken over his hourly supervision. Whereas Des was small and wiry, Knowles is a heavy, burly man, thick meat round the back of his neck, and fingers coated with fur. Knowles is different in every way, not so much mean as a bit of a sleeveen when there is nobody listening. ‘I’m supposed to keep you from topping yourself,’ he says the first day they’re together. ‘We can’t let you escape the noose, that’s not justice.’

  ‘I’m not dead yet,’ Paddy says. He and Knowles will have to get along. He’d heard that it was Knowles who stuck his fingers in Frederick Foster’s eyes when he tried to resist his hanging, the one who had fought to the last. He vows, inwardly, that he won’t give Knowles the same satisfaction. There is no explanation for Des’s absence, although Horace Haywood muttered something about him needing time off. ‘We don’t like our warders to carry the burden of your sentence,’ he’d said, as if in some way Paddy were responsible for Des needing a rest. Not, apparently, that this burden applies to the prison superintendent, whose task it is now to counsel and console the prisoner. It is Haywood who arrives at Paddy’s cell bearing a telegram.

  ‘At your service,’ he says, trying to make light of his visit, ‘now that I’m your delivery boy, your postal service as it were.’ He hands over the buff envelope.

  ‘Perhaps I should tip you, sir,’ Paddy says. ‘But at the moment I’m clean out of cash. Next pay day, if you can wait that long.’

  ‘Ha. Ball always said you had a quick tongue in your head. Lie down with the knives, did you?’

  ‘No good making a fuss, sir.’

  ‘Seriously, lad, you know what’s ahead, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t need to be reminded, sir.’

  ‘All right then. You’re seeing the priest now, I believe?’

  ‘I am, sir, his visits are a great benefit to me. Thank you for arranging for me to see Father Downey.’ He glances at the envelope he’s been handed, anxious to view its contents.

  ‘If there’s anything I can do.’ Haywood stands on one foot and then the other, as if it were he who is in trouble. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it.’

  Paddy is momentarily disappointed. The telegram might have been from the girl, but it’s from Peter Simpson: ‘Albert, I am so dreadfully sorry to hear about what has happened and the family here in Naenae is very upset. I am going to try and get some time off work so that I can come to Auckland and see you. Your friend always, Peter.’

  It comes flooding back to him then, the days high in the hills above Wellington, blue days when the sun shone, high winds and rain that had sometimes scared him up in the pine trees as he watched the distance between him and the ground, the children at the little state house and kind Rose who had fed and cared for him and with
whom he had been almost in love, or would have if she had been more a girl than a woman growing into middle age. More like a mother, he supposes. Thinking about them all, he is filled with shame and sudden self-loathing, the emotion he has been holding at bay. It is true he has killed a man, never mind whether he meant to or not. They were good people who had housed a convicted murderer in their midst. They will be ashamed, and so is he. Perhaps this is what religion does to a man.

  This is not the first letter Haywood had delivered. Earlier, one morning, he had appeared at the door bearing another. Paddy was surprised that he would perform such a menial task.

  Haywood had handed over a pale-mauve envelope bearing small neat handwriting. ‘You’d better read it,’ Haywood said, averting his face. All the mail was read before it was delivered to the prisoners to make sure there were no plans for escape outlined in their contents.

  Paddy read it through, and then again, the girl’s message short and plain, but he trembled as he absorbed it. He thought he could catch her scent from the paper, but his imagination played all kind of tricks on him these days. He understood now why she had sat there at the back of the court and wept when his sentence was passed. He understood in a terrible way why she had not spoken to him that night he flirted with Rita. It was coming at him. He saw so much, how things might have been, the way they could have been different.

  ‘Do you want to talk about this, Black?’

  He had shaken his head. ‘Not really.’

  ‘She says she wants to come and see you.’

  ‘Yes sir, I see that.’ There was nothing at all he could do for her. ‘I suppose I should see her.’

  ‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to. Did you like this girl?’

  ‘Oh yes sir. I liked her very much. I’d have married her.’

  ‘You were planning to marry? You’re very young.’

  ‘Oh no, I hadn’t proposed, nothing like that.’ He held up the letter. ‘But I would, if you see what I mean. And I’d have been glad about it.’ Catholic, she was a Catholic, he remembered that.

  ‘So why don’t you want her to come and see you?’

  ‘She’s too good for this place, I can tell you that. She’s beautiful and, well, what can I do but make it worse?’

  Haywood had become agitated too. ‘You could talk to her, be kind to her at the very least.’

  ‘Sir, I would like to see a priest if I may.’

  ‘A priest? You’re down as a Protestant.’

  As if Paddy didn’t know that and more. His whole life he had understood that the two were like water and chalk, they wouldn’t mix. You could speak in a civil way to a Catholic girl, but that was as far as it went. You couldn’t smile with a glint in your eye, you couldn’t kiss, you couldn’t fondle, you couldn’t marry. His parents had reminded him of this, that last Orange Day Parade. There were stories of girls from the Shankill who had mixed it with the boys over in the Falls and they led their whole lives not spoken to by their mam and da; they had wheeled their prams up and down the edge of the street and nobody had turned to speak to them. He could see it for what it was, just plain wrong.

  ‘It’s a priest I need, sir. Isn’t there a Father who comes to see some of the men?’

  ‘Father Downey? Yes, if you’re sure.’

  The priest, when he arrived, was a dark, middle-aged man who shook Paddy’s hand as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Paddy half expected to feel scorched, never having shaken hands with a priest before. He found the hand warm, holding his a moment longer than he expected.

  ‘I’m about to die soon, Father,’ he blurted.

  ‘So I’ve heard, lad. That is a cruel thing.’

  Paddy didn’t know what to say next. He had an idea that death looked different the Roman Catholic way. When his grandparents died — his mother’s parents, that was — there were simple closed coffins with flowers placed on top, his mother and aunts sniffing tidily into their handkerchiefs, and a service with a plain-speaking eulogy. Afterwards, there was a cup of tea and nicer cakes than they had as a rule, at the house of one of the aunts. He remembered that he had been considered too young to go to the burial, and so he had stayed home to be comforted by Clodagh.

  He’d been to Clodagh’s house in Sandy Row when her father died, and that was another thing altogether. Paddy’s mother had been called by Clodagh in the desperate minutes after the unexpected passing. (Well, Clodagh should have been prepared, Kathleen told Paddy, he was a very old man, but Clodagh wasn’t ready, she just wasn’t.) Paddy tried to explain this to Father Downey. ‘All the clocks in the house were stopped at the exact moment our neighbour’s da died. They drew the blinds and covered the mirrors with white cloth. There was black crêpe paper taped across the front door and the windows were left wide open in the first hours.’

  ‘Why did they do that, Paddy?’

  ‘I thought you’d know that, Father. Clodagh told my mam the window had to be left open for her father’s spirit to make its way out. It was a right freezing night, the wind whistling through, but Clodagh said it would take four hours at least before it was safe to close. When my da and I were called on to pay our respects at the house, I saw Clodagh’s father, lying for all to see, and he was dressed in a sacred robe. A great noisy sobbing there was going on.’ He stopped, remembering his father’s face, long as a Lurgan spade. ‘You should have seen my da. It was as if he were expecting the Devil to appear any moment. Everyone crossing themselves and all, he couldn’t get out of there fast enough.’

  The priest had sat in silence, waiting for him to finish. ‘Well, there may be some who have brought their ways from the old country. I haven’t seen it quite like that here. Maori people are more eloquent in their expressions of grief when a person dies.’

  ‘I know,’ Paddy told him. ‘I was here when Te Whiu died. I heard his people crying, it was something terrible. The end. But I can’t imagine death, it doesn’t seem real.’

  ‘It is a modest end, here in this prison.’ The priest hesitated.

  ‘We’re buried within the walls, I know. We’re not allowed in the yard where the other ones lie.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘I would have liked to see my mother once more.’ Paddy bit his lip. He had resisted tears up until then. His father would have told him that a decent Ulster spud didn’t cry. ‘And what happens afterwards, Father? Can you tell me that?’

  ‘We can talk about that,’ Father Downey said. ‘We will need to talk about it, if I’m to minister to you. But I don’t think that is why you wanted to see me today.’

  ‘I’d like to become a Roman Catholic. If the Church would take a sinner like me.’

  ‘That is a big step for a Protestant lad. There is a reason?’ It was as if he knew already. Well, he probably did; there were no secrets in the prison when it came to the contents of a letter. Haywood would have told him.

  ‘There’s a girl,’ Paddy said. ‘It seems I’m to be a father. Well, if I were alive, that is.’

  Father Leo Downey nodded. ‘You will be the father, for all time. That can’t be taken away from you.’

  ‘So she’s a Catholic girl. Can you forgive her for sinning with me?’

  ‘Only God can forgive sin, and she must ask that for herself.’

  ‘And truly repent?’

  The priest sighed and folded his hands in front of him. ‘Who are you asking this for, Albert? The girl or yourself? This girl will suffer, regardless of what I or any priest says. Perhaps God will see this. Her suffering will be absolution in itself.’

  ‘It would be like a gift for her and the baby if it were to have a Catholic father.’

  ‘What about you? Converting to another faith needs to be for oneself as well.’

  ‘Ah Father, you’d have to be joking about that. The girls in Sandy Row who’ve had to turn in order to give their children a daddy. Protestant girls, they have to turn if they’re to be wed. Your Church collects them up fast enough and not too many questions asked.’
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  ‘I’ll overlook that.’

  ‘Apologies, Father, no offence meant. I want to do this thing. It’s all I can offer her and the baby. Like a blessing.’

  ‘Well then, you have some time on your hands. You’ll need to do some reading, starting with the Catechism. Will you tell your parents about your conversion?’

  ‘I will tell them that I am to change my religion, yes. My mother will pray for me, no matter what. My father? I don’t know, he has always held me in some suspicion. I lost his best marley once, the one that stood for him being in the war. There are so many things I don’t know, so little time.’

  So it has been a while now; the trial has been and gone, he has learned the Catechism and soon he will be received into the Church.

  Haywood turns up one morning when Albert is not expecting him. Well, he never does. The routine of prison goes on the same day in and day out, and any break in it is bound to be the unexpected. ‘I’ve to tell you there is going to be an appeal,’ he says. ‘And Paddy, I pray it succeeds. You’re not a bad lad. I can’t bear to think you’ll swing.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re supposed to say that to me, sir,’ Paddy says. He has a strange light-headed desire to laugh.

  ‘This system, lad, it’s intolerable.’ Haywood’s nose is covered in fine purple veins. Paddy can smell musty Johnnie Walker on the superintendent’s breath.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ he says. And without his bidding, hope comes flooding over him. He thought he had conquered that. ‘What do I have to do?’

  ‘Your lawyer has an appointment to see you tomorrow.’

  When Haywood leaves his cell, Paddy sits down and writes two letters, the first to the girl. He has written four letters to her since hers first arrived, but so far she hasn’t replied. Just given him the biggest bombshell and retreated to wherever it is she has gone. The address she had written from was that of her parents’ farm in the south but she wouldn’t be staying there for long; soon she would be living in a home for people like her, unmarried mothers. She had said she wanted to see him, but now she has disappeared.