by C K Williams
“I’d rather not talk about it right now, Sean,” Kate says.
“Course not,” Sean says. “Let me know whenever you’re ready. I’m already asking around if anyone saw a car they didn’t know, or a stranger after nightfall or loitering somewhere during the day, all that.”
“Would that not be best left to the police?” Daniel asks.
“I am the police,” Sean says with a distinct note of pride.
“You’re riot control,” Kate points out.
That was not what Sean wanted to hear. “Do you have somewhere you can stay?” he asks Kate.
“My house?” she replies.
Sean’s expression turns unhappy. “All on your own?”
“If you need a place to stay, the rectory has a perfectly cosy guest room,” Daniel says. His voice is shaking a little, and his smile is tender, not simply friendly.
Kate shakes her head, sounding bemused. “All I want is to go to sleep in my own bed, Father.”
“Let me drive you at least, Kitty,” Sean says.
“I can drive,” Kate says. There is some steel in her voice.
“I know you can,” Sean says. “It’s just that I don’t want you going home on your own. It might be dangerous.”
“If you keep an eye on the church later, Sean, I can drive her,” Daniel suggests.
“Nobody’s driving me,” Kate says sharply.
“You shouldn’t be on your own, I agree with Sean,” Daniel repeats. “None of us should be alone tonight.”
I take a step forward. “I’m staying with Kate,” I say.
Now it’s Daniel’s turn to look unhappy, whereas Sean’s expression brightens. He extends his hand: “Didn’t see you there. Sean. O’Doherty. Police.”
I shake it. “Jannis. Advertising.”
Sean grins. “Like Janice Joplin?”
“First time I’ve heard that joke,” I answer, not losing the smile. Of course, my name is not actually pronounced anything like Janice, but I’ve gotten used to it.
Sean claps me on the shoulder. “It’s fine, not your fault your parents gave you a girl’s name.”
I decide not to correct him.
“See,” Kate says to Daniel, “perfectly safe,” going for a smile, then interrupting herself, putting on a serious expression instead. She seems lost. Such a strong woman, lost. “I’d just like to light a candle,” she finally says.
I veer off towards the statue of St Brigid while Kate moves over to the votives. Leaning against the wall, a little way down from Tessa, I reach for my phone, checking if Anna has texted, if the meeting went well.
There does not seem to be any signal in the church, however. I put the phone away and go back to observing the congregation. There’s something very odd about this gathering. The stillness.
Then I catch sight of something. There is a long thin object leaning against the wall right opposite me. I squint. It looks very much like a rifle.
Since when were rifles allowed into a church?
Noises from the front pew. The young man and the young woman. They have risen to their feet. He is still clinging to her. “I am so sorry,” he whispers, but it resounds in the quiet church. “I’m so sorry, Betha.”
What has that young man to be sorry for, then?
Something appears in my line of sight.
A cigarette.
“Want one?”
It’s Tessa’s arm, stretched out towards me. She is still looking straight ahead, but I’m the only one she is currently offering a fresh cigarette to, so she must be talking to me. “I don’t think that we’re supposed to,” I say quietly.
“Didn’t think you’d be the guy to care.”
Well. If she would like to picture me as some sort of devil-may-care rake, who am I to object?
I take the proffered cigarette, glancing at the door, but the young couple has already left. Expecting Tessa to hand me a lighter next, I stretch out my hand, but all she does is pass me her cigarette. I light my own on the tip of hers.
“We shouldn’t, really,” I say, even as I inhale the first drag. Sort of shattering the James Dean impression, I am sure.
“Well, they shouldn’t have murdered a seventeen-year-old girl, but they didn’t give a damn, did they?”
I take another drag. It has been a while. This isn’t the first time that I have come back to the nicotine after promising myself I was finished with it for good, so I already know what to expect. The acrid taste, and the smell even worse. “This really isn’t very nice, is it?” I ask her, lifting the cigarette so that she knows what I’m talking about.
“No, not really,” Tessa answers. We are speaking in low voices. “I just needed something to do. To make me look upset. Figured smoking in a church would do it.”
I stare at her. At her yellow cardigan, the dotted green blouse, the jeans worn high around her waist. Her face, the lipstick on her mouth and the deep lines on the back of her hands and throat. “You aren’t upset, then?”
“Of course I’m bloody upset,” she says. I can see her swallow. “But it’s not enough, feeling it, is it? They’ve got to see it, too.”
She motions at the people in the pews, by the votives. I lift the cigarette back to my lips, even though the taste is beginning to make me feel sick. “Is that so?”
“Course it is. Take yourself, for example. You wanna know what they’ve been saying about you ever since it got out that you’ve flown all this way to bail her out?”
She looks at me shrewdly.
“I can barely contain my curiosity,” I say, not taking another drag.
“That you and Kate are fucking. Must have been for years, actually.”
I can feel a thin smile cross my face. What I want to say is: have they not noticed she is sleeping with their priest, then? But I am much better at keeping secrets than His Holiness. Besides, she is making me angry. You see, Kate has been nothing but a pillar to this community ever since she moved here. I didn’t get it, being a city kid, how she could move out here, into the middle of nowhere, no matter how beautiful the scenery. But she wanted to help. She said, I studied medicine to help those who need it. I’ll go where no other doctor wants to go.
And this is what she gets in return? “I get it,” I reply, perhaps a bit more hotly than I should have. “Life in the countryside must be so boring.”
If Tessa was hoping to startle me into a confession one way or another, she doesn’t let it show. I look at my cigarette. Consider stubbing it out against the soles of my shoes. Then I realise I am no longer twenty-two and my shoes are a little too expensive, really, to serve as ash trays. Tessa sighs and lifts her own leg, worn rubber boots.
“I couldn’t,” I say.
“Can’t stand on one leg for very long,” she informs me.
“Fine,” I say, pushing out the cigarette against her boot. Her stance is sturdy.
“Listen,” Tessa says. “Just a piece of advice, ’cause you never got on my nerves with a lot of chitchat when I’d had to drive you somewhere. Sure, dismiss this, that’s up to you. But people see you and think you’re on her side. And she was the one the police found with Alice Walsh’s bloody clothes. That’s all I’m saying.”
I start. It does not escape her. Still those shrewd eyes are on me. “Didn’t tell you that, did she?”
I say nothing. Of course she did. I just don’t know how this information got out, and I don’t like that it did. Not one little bit.
Now they’re suspecting her, too?
Kate? Kate of all people?
Before I can ask any more questions, Kate is coming over to join us. “Tessa,” she says, but Tessa interrupts her before she can say any more: “Don’t ask about the bloody hip.”
Kate lifts both hands to placate her, smiling again. She cannot help it, it seems. “It’s my job,” Kate says.
“Be a GP in your practice,” Tessa says. “Or am I asking if you want a single or a return ticket? And stop smiling, love.”
Kate wipes all traces of
mirth from her face. No matter that Kate and I are in our forties, to Tessa we will always be brats. Tessa puts out her own cigarette. “Well, no hard feelings, kids, but I’ll go stand over there.”
And then she simply leaves us standing there. Goes to join her mother, eighty-one years old, and put an arm around her shoulder. Elizabeth most decidedly does not look as if she needed an arm around her shoulder. Instead, she looks at Kate with an expression of such righteous contempt that I almost recoil.
Kate glances at me, then asks under her breath: “Did she just run away from me?”
“And advised me to do the same,” I say. “Apparently, everybody is saying that you and I have been sleeping together for the past nineteen years, and that you murdered Alice Walsh and I helped you hide the body.”
Kate isn’t very good at hiding her emotions. Her expression immediately twists into one of poorly veiled fury.
“I know you said you didn’t care what they thought,” I say “But Kate, why is an eighty-one-year old lady staring at you as if she would be happy to see you burn at a stake? No, don’t look,” I add, but it is too late, Kate has already turned towards Elizabeth.
Kate’s face falls even further. She looks so very exhausted. In a way that she didn’t when we were younger.
“Do you want to go home?” I ask.
“Aye,” she says, shaking her head. “Let’s just… Maybe…” She glances at me. “Maybe say a prayer before we go?”
I am almost ready to gape at her. Then I close my mouth again and nod, offering her my arm. We walk to a pew further towards the back, closer to the entrance, evading at least some of the curious glances. I slide into the pew first, then kneel.
“Our Father?” Kate asks.
“A classic,” I say, and then we both start whispering the words. Even though it has been years, it is so easy, even comforting to fall back into the script. To go through the motions, to fold my hands just so and close my eyes and bring back the words. Words that are here for me, without even having to think about them, without having to work for them. She says them in English while I speak them in German. It’s the same with Disney songs; whatever I learned at an early age in German I tend not to know how to say in English. So I hear her speak next to me, the familiar lilt of her voice a calming presence in the oppressive silence. “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”
While I speak the same words in another language, “Vater unser im Himmel, geheiligt werde dein Name…”
And then I have to think of Alice Walsh. I don’t know whether she was religious. Whether she believed in an afterlife. Did she even think about death yet? I remember the moment I realised that I would have to die one day, and it was not at seventeen. At seventeen, I still felt invincible.
To my right, I hear the sound of the church doors opening once more. I keep murmuring the words to the prayer even while I glance to my left, towards the door.
It is not the young couple.
“It’s Alice’s parents,” Kate whispers. She must have looked up, too.
The silence that descends is so heavy. I watch them as Kate and I start over with the Lord’s Prayer. Patrick Walsh, of whom I know only that he became a father so late in life, who is seventy years old now by Kate’s report but looks ninety-nine. His narrow face and high cheekbones and thin skin, a man as slim and tall as a birch who spent all his life working on construction sites. And Megan Walsh, small but stout, always dressed in cardigans for as long as I’ve come here, blue in the winter, green in the summer, a woman who watches all the rugby matches in the pub, gets happily drunk and then shouts at the players, alternating between telling them to get a fucking move on and how bloody hot they are. Kate told me she laughed all the time when she fell pregnant at forty-one and would tell everyone who wanted to hear it that hers was closer to a miracle pregnancy than even the Virgin Mary’s.
Father Daniel is meeting them in front of the altar. Sean is with them, so are William and Florence O’Rawe. They speak in low voices.
Then Megan Walsh turns to look straight at us.
Her stare makes my blood freeze.
Then she turns back to Father Daniel, and it looks as if she may be hissing at him. Father Daniel looks incredibly uncomfortable, as if he is valiantly trying to talk her out of something. Sean O’Doherty’s feet are firmly planted behind Megan, an arm around her shoulder. Patrick Walsh is standing off to the side, openly crying, facing not the altar but one of the narrow stained-glass windows. William O’Rawe is standing by his side, trying to offer comfort. They go way back, if I remember correctly. Rumour has it they go back far enough to have been in the IRA together.
I watch Daniel’s shoulders slump. He begins making his way towards us. Slowly, I rise to my feet. There is something about the way he moves. In this church and its stark shadows cut into slices by flickering strips of candlelight, it almost looks like there is a demon coming down the aisle.
I meet him at the end of the pew. His expression is full of discomfort.
“I need a word with Kate,” he says, trying for a collected tone, but there is more to his voice than sorrow. There is also anger.
Interesting.
“She’s praying,” I say.
“What are you, her bodyguard?” he asks.
My eyebrows shoot up. He takes a deep breath. Looks down. It seems as if he is actually ashamed of himself. For losing control.
And suddenly, it physically hurts how much I can relate to that.
“What’s the matter, Father?” I ask, gentler than either of us expected.
“I’d much rather tell her,” he says.
“I bet you’d much rather not tell her at all,” I say.
He gives me a pained smile.
“They want us to go, don’t they?” I ask.
He nods.
My chest constricts. I step out of the pew, to let him in to talk to Kate. As I move past him, I realise that his thin body is thrumming with suppressed energy. For no more than a moment, I close my eyes and enjoy the sensation.
Then Daniel moves into the pew and sits down next to Kate. He lets her have a few more moments, then he gently touches her shoulder. She looks up. The tender smile he gives her almost makes me jealous. I cannot remember when the last time was that anyone looked at me with anything akin to love.
Then Daniel leans in close to speak with Kate. I watch her face fall. She glances at Patrick and Megan Walsh, but neither of them is looking our way anymore.
Sean O’Doherty is, though. And the slim veneer of concern has vanished entirely from his expression. I wonder if the news of Alice Walsh’s bloody clothing has only just reached him.
I stand a little taller, just to make sure he sees. “You coming, Kate?” I ask.
Kate nods. She trails after me as we leave the church. I’m relieved to get out of here. Churches are so quiet. So heavy. They are crammed with memories, stacked so tightly I hardly find any space to squeeze through. Knobbly knees on the pews, the scent of incense in my hair and clothes, a boy faced with boredom and silence and oppression. Rules on all sides, like the pews, sitting for them standing for them kneeling for them.
We’re silent as we get into the car. She starts the engine and pulls out into the road, leaving North on Moyad Road to go to her house that sits on the very edge of Annacairn, in a last stretch of tall dark trees before the slopes of the mountains turn naked and bare. The land once used to belong to Elizabeth Adams’s family, before they had to sell it off, and with her house two miles off, on the other side of the wood, the old woman is still the closest neighbour.
We’ve headed down the road for a mile or two and one of us has yet to say a word. Since Kate has had a nightmare of a day, I take the duty upon myself: “Are you sleeping with the priest?”
That shocks Kate out of her sulking. “Man, you have no tact.”
“I don’t know whether to find it amusing or infuriating how he is trying and failing to be subtle about it.”
“Well, he isn
’t really supposed to, is he?” she says, focusing back on the road. “Vows of chastity and all that. I try to comfort him when I tell him that studies have shown that 80 per cent of priests had broken their vows of celibacy on at least one occasion, and that 40 per cent of priests are sexually active, if you include sex with both men and women.”
“Is that so?” I ask, surprised.
“There was an article in the Telegraph,” she replies. “There was the case of Father Mossy back in the late 2000s, and the case of a bishop ten years before. I mean, it isn’t surprising, is it? Did you know that priests and nuns, living like husband and wife, is known unofficially as the third way in the Church? They preach compulsory celibacy, but very few are living it.”
“And is this something Daniel takes lightly?” I ask her. “His oath of celibacy?”
She looks even more exhausted then. “No,” she says quietly. “Actually, not at all.”
“Poor sod.” I am still looking at Kate. “Is it true love, then?”
Kate closes her eyes for a moment.
“Kate, the road,” I say urgently. She opens them again.
“Not so much, I guess,” she answers.
“Does he know this?” I ask. “Or is he of the impression that it is?”
“I’ve had enough interrogations for one day, Jannis.”
“I didn’t mean for it to be an interrogation. I’m trying to find out whether I need to be nice to him even though I don’t feel like it.”
That startles a laugh out of her. I knew it would, which is why I said it. “Doesn’t hurt to be nice, Jan.”
“Ah, but it’s less fun. You should try it, too.”
Some of the tension drains from her shoulders. “I actually should. God, can you believe those fuckers?” She seems torn between amused exasperation and real anger. “Did you see how Sean and Dan rounded on me in there?”
I do my very best impression of Daniel’s dulcet tones. “You could stay at mine, Kate, it’s much safer. A beautiful parish guest room, and have I told you of the conveniently large double bed that they were kind enough to put in…”
I make her laugh. She shoves me into the passenger door. “It doesn’t hurt to be nice, Kate,” I mock whine.