by Iain Scarrow
The Fern House
(Part 2)
4
The pastor of the Grass Market Mission of the Lost wiped his hands on his grubby white apron, picked up a ladle and used it to stir a big pot of lentil soup.
“You are going to write something good about the mission, aren’t you?” he said to the reporter standing off to his side. “Money doesn’t fly down from heaven in cash ready notes, you know. We rely on the charity of human beings for that.”
The reporter was Mark Hansson.
Hansson nodded.
He would do his best.
In truth Hansson was out of work and trying freelance. The local paper was practically paying him peanuts for doing this story. But he’d said he’d do it. And doing it he was.
“Could you get me that?” The pastor asked pointing at a carton of salt on the back shelf.
Hansson went over to the shelf, grabbed the carton and feeling strangely resentful somehow, dumped the salt carton into the pastor’s hand.
The pastor said thanks and poured salt into the big pot of soup and stirred it in.
“This stuff hardly has any flavor,” he said, nodding at the pot, “good wholesome food that it is.”
Bacon and onions fried on a pig-iron skillet. And a dented aluminum pot of potatoes threatened to boil over on a gas ring raging full blast at the other side of the metal worktable.
The pastor handed the salt back to Hansson.
Hansson dumped the carton back on the shelf with a thud.
Volunteer workers darted in and out the swing doors, clattering down empty plates, soup bowls and cutlery.
“At least we know the food isn’t rotten,” the pastor said to Hansson. “It might be past its sell-by date, sure, but not past its eat-by date. And those homeless guys out there will swallow it down faster than wolves after a fast. All of it free from the local markets around here. We just step in-between the back doors of the food stores and their trash toughs in the alleys to be honest. It seems like it anyway. The stores don’t like it though. If word got out about what the mission here was doing their paying customers just might end getting the same idea and stop buying when they can get it for free. So we keep quiet about it. Stop me if I’m talking too much, won’t you.”
A plate smashed on the floor at the other side of the swing doors.
There was a cheer.
The pastor rolled up his eyes and clasped his hands together as if in prayer before going back to stirring the pot.
“At least it’s something for them to cheer about,” he said. “It would be cheaper using paper plates, of course. But then we’d have the environmental mob on our backs about how many trees we were killing to make them with. But what they don’t want to know is that ceramic plates cost us a lot more than paper ones. So it’s a compromise between doing the right thing by Blessed Mother Earth and the harsh reality of money, or the lack of it. But then again, I can’t see soup being served on paper plates anyway, can you?”
Hansson said nothing.
The pastor stopped stirring. Sweat ran down his jowls.
“What do you want to know about us?” he asked. “I hope you’re not hoping for something interesting, because there isn’t.”
Hansson had been poised with his notebook, his pencil aimed at it but doing nothing except doodling thick and thin lines of grey into a stretched oval, almost like he remembered doing as a kid when he’d found his dad’s old Spirograph toy.
“Human interest,” Hansson mumbled without looking at the pastor.
“Real human interest, huh, in vagrants?” The pastor asked. “Well I’ll be damned. Not many people are interested in reading about the gutter men, as the public see them. Transients they claim who are polluting the streets of their crime ridden city. Most people would like to see these guys swept away with all the other trash.”
Hansson smiled. But it was a plastic, put on, a false smile that strained his facial muscles to the point of near collapse.
He at least wanted to appear sincere.
Still, he knew he was lying, and that’s what was making this whole charade so difficult to keep up.
So Hansson suspected did the pastor. A man who’d probably had a lifetime of liars pass through the doors of his chapel over the years, and who was by now probably a walking talking lie detector.
But then the pastor shouldn’t be telling tales, either, Hansson thought, which kind of made it a little easier. It was a mutual case of scratch my back and I’ll tickle yours.
The pastor looked doubtful.
“You’re right,” Hansson said. “I’m not going to write about this. It’s not what I came about.”
He gave up on the pretense, stopped doodling in his notebook, and dropped it into his pocket.
The pastor lifted his apron and rubbed the sweat off his face.
Then they just stood there facing each other as the pots boiled around them, and the noise of cutlery scraping on plates came in at them from the other side of the doors, a noise that suddenly started to sound like an angry swarm of glass-brittle bees.
“I wish it was true what I read in the bible, of feeding the forty thousand,” the pastor said, letting his apron drop.
He cleared his throat.
“Ernie?” he shouted.
“What?” a skinny guy chopping onions at the other side of the worktable called back.
“Do something for me, will yah?” the pastor said.
Ernie, a skinny volunteer cook, hobbled in around the side of the worktable, and wiped his sweaty hands on the tea towel dangling from his waistband.
The pastor took his chef’s hat from his head and dropped it on the table where it collapsed like a hollow mushroom.
“I need five minutes,” the pastor said to Ernie. “Take care of this for me,” he said, pointing at the soup bubbling and popping like thick molten lava.
Ernie grabbed the ladle and stirred the pot.
“It’s quieter out the back,” the pastor said, turning to Hansson.
He cocked his head in the direction of the fire exit door set in the back wall of the kitchen and headed off towards it.
Hansson reached into his pocket, took out his notebook again, and followed the pastor out the door.
Once outside the pastor extracted a pack of Marlborough Lights from the top pocket of his chef’s jacket, lit a cigarette, then leaned against the crumbling back alley wall.
“And you can put that thing away for a start,” he said, pointing at Hansson’s notebook.
5
“He dresses in rags,” the pastor said, blowing a stream of smoke into a beam of sunlight that had somehow found a way down between the rusting fire escapes at the back of the buildings. “His pants are held up with string, and he walks around barefoot most of the time, no matter the weather. We’ve only just managed to persuade him to start wearing shoes, at least some of the time anyway. But he hates them. You can see that he hates them.
“He’s the kind of vagrant that washes in streams and disappears for weeks at a time. Then he comes back, out of the blue, as if there’s been no time lost in between, and visits soup kitchens, like this one, where he helps out sometimes as a way of paying something back for what we give him.
“We wouldn’t let any of the other guys help us out like that. We don’t know what kind of diseases they might be carrying. Not that any of them would do anything to help out anyway. But this guy’s pretty clean. And then he just ups and disappears again.
“He’s fit and he’s healthy enough, at least physically, but his mental state? That’s kind of hard to tell. He has his way of doing things, and the rest of the world around him has its way of doing things. We don’t ask him anything; nothing that you might call real questions, i
f you get my drift. And he doesn’t tell us anything in the way of real answers in return, either. But I’ll get back to that.
“He will talk, but never ask him to talk. By that I mean don’t question him about the validity of what he saying.”
“What happens if anyone does?” Hansson asked.
“He clams up,” the pastor sighed flicking ash. “He stonewalls. The other guys might say things, anything to get themselves out a tight corner. But John, he just shuts right up as if you never existed in the first place to even doubt what he has to say.”
Hansson nodded.
“He never complains,” the pastor went on, “though God knows why, because he has a lot of bad history to complain about. He’s not like the other guys that come here who are always moaning about their feet, their hearts, their teeth, their skin. You’ve never seen so many cases of psoriasis like these guys have. Alcohol doesn’t help them with that condition. It makes it worse. But physically, John is fine. He’s thin, but in comparison to guys like me,” the pastor said, slapping at his paunch, “John would be classified as anorexic. Only John isn’t anorexic. He just looks that way. Standing next to me I’d make anyone of normal weight look like a bag of bones”
The pastor reached into his pocket and took out his pack of cigarettes again.
“Sorry,” he said. “I should have asked. Want one?”
Hansson shook his head.
“No thanks,” he said. “I gave up a year ago.”
“Wish I could,” the pastor said pushing the pack back into his pocket. “Started as a kid and I’ve been regretting it ever since.”
He looked at Hansson.
“I’ve tried that,” he said.
“Tried what?” Hansson asked.
“Praying,” the pastor said, looking up at the sliced sunbeams cutting though the rusting metalwork of the fire escapes. “Please God stop me now, you know, stuff like that?”
He looked at Hansson again.
“Or maybe I’m losing my faith in the power of God at the same rate as I’m losing my parishioners.”
Hansson said, nothing, kept his face straight, only blinked.
“Actually,” the pastor said, “I feel selfish about praying; that I shouldn’t be praying for myself, but for others. And I do, of course, for this place for instance. Then you turn up, Mr. Hansson, the rookie reporter, who jumps in out of the blue asking for a story. So maybe praying does work. Or does it? But in my experience a prayer answered rarely turns out to be exactly what you prayed for in the first place. There’s always some quirk, some wrinkle in the rainbow that makes things not turn out in quite the way you asked for them to turn out.”
He took a drag of his cigarette, plucked it out of his mouth, rolled the tip between his fingers and looked at it.
“Maybe I’m meant to die young,” he smiled. “But that doesn’t seem to be happening either.”
“The guy?” Hansson asked.
“Oh yeah,” the pastor said. “The guy you came here to find out about. John’s not in trouble is he?”
Hansson shook his head.
“And you’re not a cop either, right? You are a real reporter.”
“You’re right,” Hansson said. “I’m not a cop either. I’m not even a working reporter. But I am registered, and I do know how to ask the right questions. I’m just interested in this tramp guy, John, that’s all.”
“Then why not just talk to John yourself?”
“Because,” Hansson said, “sometimes the full frontal approach just doesn’t get you what you want.”
The pastor thought about it for a second.
“You’ve been laid off, huh?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.
“But not down and out, yet,” Hansson said. He shrugged. “Look, as I see it newsrooms these days are shrinking to size of bedrooms that are shrinking to the size of an atom. Guys like me, who believe in beating the streets to go after a story, a real story, are a dying breed. Modern day reporters rely on amateurs who can’t even spell. I mean, we have machines to sort out the spelling for us, so why bother, right? It’s what the internet is all about. Everything is in hyperspace now, whizzing along in the form of electrons at the speed of light. Everything that is, except for people. People get in the way. Look, my heroes are guys like Seymour Hersh, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, real investigative journalists who knew how go out and find a story.”
“Hey, whoa there. I don’t do open air confessionals,” the pastor said, holding up his hands. “I believe you. Young guy old school. That’s worthy in my book. Difficult, but worthy.”
Hansson took a breath. “I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize to me,” the pastor said.
“Right,” Hansson said.
“Right,” the pastor said, “so the guy you’re interested in…”
“Yeah?”
“I just think that if things had been different for him that the outcome would have been different. Vagrant, tramp, homeless, I’m not sure if any of those really fit what he is. He’s pretty intelligent for a guy who’s had little to no schooling. He can read. His writing’s a bit wild. But the words he uses are in the right order. Maybe he would have made a great investigative journalist. It makes for fascinating reading. That is if you ever get the chance to read any of what he writes. Except that whatever he does commit to paper turns out to be as ephemeral and transient as he is, and disappears into thin air as much as he does.
“He doesn’t possess much except for this little tin full of odd buttons, bits of thread, a couple of little pictures of his mother, pins, a little silver chain for a locket, but I’ve never seen it with a locket. And I haven’t had a real good look inside that tin of his either, just glanced over his shoulder once or twice when he’s taken it out to look for something, maybe when he’s needing to fix a button or something.
“He was young, he was lost, he was alone and seven years old when they found him. They were surprised he even managed to survive for that long.
“Anyway, after a while in care, he would open up a little and tell anyone who would listen that he used to live in a monastery with monks. That he had worked in a garden, that healers would arrive on horseback, and that they would buy herbs and plants from the monks in order for the healers to go out and help their sick patients.
“Of course there are no monasteries around here. And there are no monks. But they did wonder if maybe he was talking about a commune, or God forbid, some kind of cult, a Waco thing. But no, what John was talking about was something that doesn’t exist, and hasn’t existed for a very long time. Not in this century anyway, and not in this country either
“They put his story telling down to his upbringing, called them flights of fantasy, a kind of defensive mechanism, escapism I guess.
“His mother and father were alcoholics and took drugs on top of all the booze. There was even a suggestion that they’d given him, their own son, drugs, though no one ever found out for sure. But anyway, by the time the authorities knew that John even existed, all they could say about him was that his birth was never registered, that he was unschooled, that he was feral, and that he was living in squalor.
“After the social services took him into care he never saw his folks again since neither one of them wanted him back.
“He was a troubled kid and he ended up being fostered out from one family to another. But each foster family couldn’t keep a tight hold on him. They said he always disappeared. And whenever they did eventually find him, he would come out with these outrageous stories of monks and monasteries, herbs and cures for God knows what, never mind him blabbering on about what sounded like the Garden of Eden and Paradise.
“He was always getting into fights at school, none of them his fault, apparently. But he could handle himself, all right, and he was bright too. Still is bright. But he always just seemed to be not there. He never sat one test, not even an SAT. Said he didn’t need ‘em.
“And still he would come out with these weird stories of his
, where he’d been, what he’d seen. I’m not just talking about walking down the street and him telling everyone what he saw when he looked around the corner. He was talking about being in other countries, other times, most of them in the past. None of them could have been true, of course. He didn’t have any kind of money to get to those places anyway, sometimes not even enough time. And, of course, no one can travel backwards to things in the past. I mean, he’s bright, but John’s not Einstein. But then again, if I met Einstein and he told me about the theory of relativity, I wouldn’t understand him either. So who knows what kind of brain John has. Maybe he’s a genius and no one can understand him simply because he is a genius.
““He’s sane,” the psychiatrists declared. “He just has an overactive imagination”. Some doctors put his behavior down to hyperactivity. So they tried Ritalin, an amphetamine, because they thought it would slow John down. It should have slowed him down. It works with other kids they want kept under control. It has a tranquilizing effect on their hyperactive behavior and turns them into compliant little zombies, which keeps their frazzled parents happy no end.
“But John just kept on disappearing no matter what they did to him. And as he’s gotten older and free of the authorities, he’s started to disappear more times than ever.
“His foster parents tried to humor on him. And when that didn’t work they lost patience with him. They tried grounding him in more ways than one. They even tried the silent treatment – “Only talk to John when he’s talking sense. If John’s not talking sense then ignore him, treat him like he’s invisible. That way he’ll come around.”
“He didn’t.
“He started talking to poker plants in the garden. He didn’t call weeds what other folks called weeds. He saw a beauty in them. A beauty no one else ever could. Gardeners see weeds as pests and attack them with Roundup. John talks to weeds and insects as if they’re long lost relatives of his. He whispers up close to them, nurtures and tends them. Bugs for Christ’s sake!
“So, John the kid was obviously mad. Well, that’s what they said. Until the day he was old enough to go it alone. And when he was, he was gone before they could even wish him well and say good riddance.