êîíêóðñ ïåðåâîä÷èêîâAndrew Michael Hurley While they were going out, a man who was demon-possessed and could not talk was brought to Jesus. And when the demon was driven out, the man who had been mute spoke. The crowd was amazed and said, ‘Nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel.’ But the Pharisees said, ‘It is by the prince of demons that he drives out demons.’ Matthew 9:32-34 Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Yeats It had certainly been a wild end to the autumn. On the Heath a gale stripped the glorious blaze of colour from Kenwood to Parliament Hill in a matter of hours, leaving several old oaks and beeches dead. Mist and silence followed and then, after a few days, there was only the smell of rotting and bonfires. I spent so long there with my notebook one afternoon noting down all that had fallen that I missed my session with Doctor Baxter. He told me not to worry. About the appointment or the trees. Both he and Nature would recover. Things were never as bad as they seemed. I suppose he was right in a way. We’d been let off lightly. In the north, train lines had been submerged and whole villages swamped by brown river water. There had been pictures of folk bailing out their living rooms, dead cattle floating down an A road. Then, latterly, the news about the sudden landslide on Coldbarrow, and the child they’d found tumbled down with the old house at the foot of the cliffs. Coldbarrow. There was a name I hadn’t heard for a long time. Not for thirty years. No one I knew mentioned it anymore and I’d tried very hard to forget it myself. But I suppose I always knew that what happened there wouldn’t stay hidden forever, no matter how much I wanted it to. I lay down on my bed and thought about calling Hanny, wondering if he too had seen the news and whether it meant anything to him. I’d never really asked him what he remembered about the place. But what I would say, where I would begin, I didn’t know. And in any case he was a difficult man to get hold of. The church kept him so busy that he was always out ministering to the old and infirm or fulfilling his duties to one committee or another. I could hardly leave a message, not about this. His book was on the shelf with the old paperbacks I’d been meaning to donate to the charity shop for years. I took it down and ran my finger over the embossed lettering of the title and then looked at the back cover. Hanny and Caroline in matching white shirts and the two boys, Michael and Peter, grinning and freckled, enclosed in their parents’ arms. The happy family of Pastor Andrew Smith. The book had been published almost a decade ago now and the boys had grown up — Michael was starting in the upper sixth at Cardinal Hulme and Peter was in his final year at Corpus Christi — but Hanny and Caroline looked much the same then as they did now. Youthful, settled, in love. I went to put the book back on the shelf and noticed that there were some newspaper cuttings inside the dust jacket. Hanny visiting a hospice in Guildford. A review of his book in The Evening Standard. The Guardian interview that had really thrust him into the limelight. And the clipping from an American evangelical magazine when he’d gone over to do the Southern university circuit. The success of My Second Life with God had taken everyone by surprise, not least Hanny himself. It was one of those books that — how did they put it in the paper? — captured the imagination, summed up the zeitgeist. That kind of thing. I suppose there must have been something in it that people liked. It had bounced around the top twenty bestsellers for months and made his publisher a small fortune. Everyone had heard of Pastor Smith even if they hadn’t read his book. And now, with the news from Coldbarrow, it seemed likely that they would be hearing of him again unless I got everything down on paper and struck the first blow, so to speak. Chapter Two If it had another name, I never knew, but the locals called it The Loney — that strange nowhere between the Wyre and the Lune where Hanny and I went every Easter time with Mummer, Farther, Mr and Mrs Belderboss and Father Wilfred, the parish priest. It was our week of penitence and prayer in which we would make our confessions, visit Saint Anne’s shrine, and look for God in the emerging springtime, that, when it came, was hardly a spring at all; nothing so vibrant and effusive. It was more the soggy afterbirth of winter. Dull and featureless it may have looked, but The Loney was a dangerous place. A wild and useless length of English coastline. A dead mouth of a bay that filled and emptied twice a day and made Coldbarrow an island. The tides could come in quicker than a horse could run and every year a few people drowned. Unlucky fishermen were blown off course and ran aground. Opportunist cocklepickers, ignorant of what they were dealing with, drove their trucks onto the sands at low tide and washed up weeks later with green faces and skin like lint. Sometimes these tragedies made the news, but there was such an inevitability about The Loney’s cruelty that more often than not these souls went unremembered to join the countless others that had perished there over the centuries in trying to tame the place. The evidence of old industry was everywhere: breakwaters had been mashed to gravel by storms, and wooden jetties reduced to rotten black struts way out in the sludge. And there were other, more mysterious structures — remnants of jerrybuilt shacks where they had once gutted mackerel for the markets inland, beacons with rusting fire-braces, the stump of a wooden lighthouse on the headland that had guided sailors and shepherds through the fickle shift of the sands. But it was impossible to truly know The Loney. It changed with each influx and retreat of water and the neap tides would reveal the skeletons of those who thought they had read the place well enough to escape its insidious currents. There were animals, people sometimes, the remains of both once — a drover and his sheep cut off and drowned on the old crossing from Cumbria. And now, since their death, for a century or more, The Loney had been pushing their bones back inland, as if it were proving a point. No one with any knowledge of the place ever went near the water. No one apart from us and Billy Tapper that is. *** Billy was a local drunk. Everyone knew him. His fall from grace to the bare floor of failure was fixed like the weather into the mythology of the place, and he was nothing short of a gift to people like Mummer and Father Wilfred who used him as shorthand for what drink could do to a man. Billy Tapper wasn’t a person, but a punishment. Legend had it that he had been a music teacher at a boys’ grammar school, or the head of a girls’ school in Scotland, or down south, or in Hull, somewhere, anywhere. His history varied from person to person, but that the drink had sent him mad was universally accepted and there were any number of stories about his eccentricities. He lived in a cave. He had killed someone in Whitehaven with a hammer. He had a daughter somewhere. He thought that collecting certain combinations of stones and shells made him invisible and would often stagger into the The Bell and Anchor in Little Hagby, his pockets chinking with shingle, and try to drink from other people’s glasses, thinking that they couldn’t see him. Hence the dented nose. I wasn’t sure how much of it was true, but it didn’t matter. Once you’d seen Billy Tapper, anything they said about him seemed possible. We first met him in the pebble-dashed concrete bus stop on the one road that skirted the coastline from Morecambe down to Knott End. It would have been 1973, when I was twelve and Hanny sixteen. Farther wasn’t with us. He had gone out early with Father Wilfred and Mr and Mrs Belderboss to look at the stained glass in a village church twenty miles away where there was apparently a magnificent Gothic Revival window of Jesus calming the waters. And so Mummer had decided to take Hanny and me to Lancaster to stock up on food and visit an exhibition of old Psalters at the library — for Mummer never missed an opportunity to instruct us on the history of our faith. It looked like Billy was going the same way from the piece of cardboard strung around his neck — one of the several dozen that made it easy for the bus drivers to know where he was supposed to be going. ~ 1 ~ Ñëåäóþùàÿ ñòðàíèöàThe other places he’d either been to or might need to visit revealed themselves as he stirred in his sleep. Kendal. Preston. Manchester. Hull. The last being where his sister lived, according to the square of bright red card that was attached to a separate shoestring necklace and contained information that might prove invaluable in an emergency, with his name, his sister’s telephone number and a note in block capitals that he was allergic to penicillin. This particular fact intrigued me as a child, and I wondered what would happen if he was given penicillin, whether it could possibly damage him any more than he had damaged himself already. I’d never seen a man be so unkind to his own body. His fingers and his palms were shattered with filth. Every crease and line was brown. Either side of his broken nose his eyes were twisted deep down into his skull. His hair crawled past his ears and down his neck which had turned sea-coloured with dozens of tattoos. There was something faintly heroic about his refusal to wash, I thought, when Hanny and I were so regularly scrubbed and towelled by Mummer. He slumped on the bench, with an empty bottle of something evil lying on its side on the floor and a small, mouldy-looking potato in his lap that comforted me in a strange way. It seemed right that he should only have a raw potato. It was the kind of thing I assumed down-and-outs ate, nibbling at it bit by bit over weeks as they roamed the highways and byways looking for the next. Hitching lifts. Stealing what they could. Stowing away on trains. As I say, vagrancy wasn’t entirely without its romance to me at that age. He talked to himself in his sleep, scrunching his pockets, which, like everyone said, sounded as if they were full of stones, complaining bitterly about someone called O’Leary who owed him money and had never given it back to him even though he owned a horse. When he woke up and noticed we were there he tried his best to be courteous and sober, offering a grin of three or four twisted black teeth and doffing his beret at Mummer, who smiled briefly but, as she managed to do with all strangers, got the measure of him instantly, and sat in a half revolted, half fearful silence, willing the bus to come by staring down the empty road. Like most drunks, Billy by-passed the small talk and slapped his bleeding, broken heart into my palm like a lump of raw beef. ‘Don’t get taken in by the demon drink, lads. I’ve lost everything ’cause of this stuff,’ he said as he held up the bottle and swilled the dregs. ‘See that scar?’ He raised his hand and shook his sleeve down. A red seam ran from his wrist to his elbow, threading its way through tattoos of daggers and melon-chested girls. ‘D’you know how I got that?’ I shook my head. Hanny stared. ‘Fell off a roof. Bone ripped right through it,’ he said and used his finger to demonstrate the angle at which his ulna had protruded. ‘Have you got a spare fag?’ I shook my head again and he sighed. ‘Bollocks. I knew I should have stayed at Catterick,’ came another non-sequitur. It was difficult to tell — and he looked nothing like the ruggedly handsome veterans that popped up in Commando all the time — but I guessed that he must have been of an age to have fought in the war. And sure enough, when he doubled up in a coughing fit and took off his beret to wipe his mouth, it had some cockeyed metal, military insignia on the front. I wondered if that was what had set him onto the booze, the war. It had done strange things to some people, so Farther said. Knocked their compasses out of whack, as it were. Whatever the reason, Hanny and I couldn’t take our eyes off him. We gorged ourselves on his dirtiness, on his brutal, alien smell. It was the same fearful excitement we felt when we happened to drive through what Mummer considered a bad part of London and found ourselves lost in a maze of terraces that sat shoulder to shoulder with industrial plants and scrap yards. We would turn in our seats and gawp out of the windows at the scruffy, staring children who had no toys but the bits of wood and metal torn off the broken furniture in their front yards where aproned women stood and screeched obscenities at the men stumbling out of corner pubs. It was a safari park of degradation. What a world without God looked like. Billy glanced at Mummer and, keeping his eyes on her, he reached down into the plastic bag by his feet and brought out a few tatty bits of paper, which he pressed into my hand. They had been ripped out of a dirty magazine. He winked at me and settled himself back against the wall. The bus appeared and Mummer stood up and held out her hand to stop it and I quickly stuffed the pictures away. ‘What are you doing?’ said Mummer. ‘Nothing.’ ‘Well, stop messing about and get Andrew ready.’ I started trying to coax Hanny into standing so that we could get on the bus, but he wouldn’t move. He was smiling and looking past me at Billy, who by this time had fallen asleep again. ‘What is it, Hanny?’ He looked at me and then back at Billy. Then I understood what he was staring at: Billy wasn’t holding a potato, but his penis. The bus stopped and we got on. The driver looked past us and whistled at Billy but he didn’t wake up. After another go, the driver shook his head and pressed the button which drew the door closed. We sat down and watched the front of Billy’s trousers darken. Mummer tutted and peeled our faces away from the window to look at her instead. ‘Be warned,’ she said, as the bus pulled away. ‘That man is already inside you. It won’t take more than a few wrong choices to bring him out, believe me.’ She held her handbag on her lap and looked straight ahead. I clutched the dirty pictures tight in one hand and slipped the other inside my coat and pressed my stomach hard with my fingertips, trying to find the kernel of badness that only needed the right conditions of Godlessness and depravity for it to germinate and spread like a weed. It happened so easily. Drink quickly possessed a man and made him its servant. Father Wilfred always said so. When Mummer told him about Billy later that evening, he simply shook his head and sighed. ‘What can one expect of a man like that, Mrs Smith? Someone so removed from God.’ ‘I said to the boys that they ought to take note,’ said Mummer. ‘And rightly so,’ he said, taking off his glasses and looking at Hanny and me as he polished them on his sleeve. ‘They should make it their business to know all the poisons that Satan peddles.’ ‘I feel rather sorry for him,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘So do I,’ said Farther. Father Wilfred put his glasses back on and raised a brief, condescending smile. ‘Then you’ll be adding to his already brimming store. Pity is the only thing a drunk has in abundance.’ ‘Still, he must have had an awfully hard life to have got himself into such a state,’ Mrs Belderboss said. Father Wilfred scoffed. ‘I don’t think he knows the meaning of a hard life. I’m sure Reginald could tell you as many tales as I could about real poverty, real struggle.’ ~ 2 ~Mr Belderboss nodded. ‘Everyone had it tough in Whitechapel,’ he said. ‘No work. Kiddies starving.’ Mrs Belderboss touched her husband’s arm in sympathy. Father Wilfred sat back and wiped his mouth with a napkin. ‘No, a man like that is the worst kind of fool,’ he said. ‘He’s thrown everything away. All his privileges and opportunities. He was a professional, I believe. A teacher. What a terrible waste.’ *** It’s odd, but when I was a child there were certain things that were so clear to me and their outcomes so inevitable that I thought I had a kind of sixth sense. A gift of foresight, like that of Elijah or Ezekiel, who had predicted drought and destruction with such unsettling accuracy. I remember Hanny once swinging over a pond on The Heath and knowing, knowing, that the rope would break, which it did; like I knew that the stray cat he brought back from the park would end up minced on the tube line, and that he would drop the bowl of goldfish he’d won at the fair on the kitchen floor as soon as we got home. In the same way, I knew after that conversation around the dinner table that Billy was going to die soon. The thought came to me as an established fact; as though it had already come to pass. No one could live like that for long. Being that filthy took so much effort that I was sure that the same merciful God who sent a whale to save Jonah and gave Noah a nod about the weather, would put him out of his misery. Chapter Three That Easter was the last time we went to the Loney for several years. After the evening when he’d set us straight about Billy Tapper over supper, Father Wilfred changed in a way that no one could quite explain or understand. They put it down to him getting too old for the whole thing — after all it was a long journey up from London and the pressure of being shepherd to his flock during such an intense week of prayer and reflection was enough to wear out a man half his age. He was tired. That was all. But as I had the uncanny knack of sensing the truth about things, I knew that it was something far more than that. There was something very wrong. After the conversation about Billy had petered out and everyone had settled in the living room, he’d walked down to the beach and come back a different man. Distracted. Rattled by something. He complained rather unconvincingly of a stomach upset and went to lie down, locking his door with an emphatic swipe of the bolt. A little while later I heard noises coming from his room, and I realised he was crying. I’d never heard a man cry before, only one of the mentally disadvantaged lot that came to do crafts at the parish hall once a fortnight with Mummer and some of the other ladies. It was a noise of fear and despair. The next morning when he finally rose, dishevelled and still agitated, he muttered something about the sea and went out with his camera before anyone could ask him what was wrong. It wasn’t like him to be so offhand. Nor for him to sleep in so late. He wasn’t himself at all. Everyone watched him walking down the lane and decided it was best to leave as soon as possible, convinced that once he was back at Saint Jude’s he would quickly recover. But when we returned home, his mood of fretfulness barely altered. In his sermons he seemed more worked up than ever about the ubiquitous evils of the world and any mention of the pilgrimage cast a shadow over his face and sent him into a kind of anxious daydream. After a while no one talked about going there anymore. It was just something that we used to do. Life pulled us along and we forgot about The Loney until 1976 when Father Wilfred died suddenly in the new year and Father Bernard McGill was relocated from some violent parish in New Cross to take on Saint Jude’s in his stead. After his inaugural mass, at which the bishop presented him to the congregation, we had tea and cakes on the presbytery lawn so that Father Bernard could meet his parishioners in a less formal setting. He ingratiated himself straight away and seemed at ease with everyone. He had that way about him. An easy charm that made the old boys laugh and the women subconsciously preen themselves. As he went from group to group, the bishop wandered over to Mummer and me, trying to eat a large piece of Dundee cake in as dignified a manner as possible. He had taken off his robes and his surplice but kept on his plum-coloured cassock, so that he stood out amongst the browns and greys of the civilians as a man of importance. ‘He seems nice, your grace,’ said Mummer. ‘Indeed,’ the bishop replied in his Midlothian accent that for some reason always made me think of wet moss. He watched Father Bernard send Mr Belderboss into fits of laughter. ‘He performed wonders to behold in his last parish.’ ‘Oh, really?’ said Mummer. ‘Very good at encouraging the young folk to attend,’ the bishop said, looking at me with the specious grin of a teacher who wishes to punish and befriend in equal measure and ends up doing neither. ‘Oh my lad’s an altar boy, your grace,’ Mummer replied. ‘Is he?’ said the bishop. ‘Well good show. Father Bernard’s quite at home with the teens as well as the more mature members of the congregation.’ ‘Well if he comes on your recommendation, your grace, I’m sure he’ll do well,’ said Mummer. ‘Oh, I don’t doubt it,’ the bishop replied, brushing crumbs off his stomach with the back of his hand. ‘He’ll be able to steer you all through safe waters, make good around the capes, as it were.’ ‘In fact my sailing analogy is quite apt,’ he said, looking into the middle distance and awarding himself a smile. ‘You see, I’m rather keen on Father Bernard taking the congregation out into the wider world. I don’t know about you but I’m of the opinion that if one is cosseted by the familiar, faith becomes stagnant.’ ‘Well, if you think so, your grace,’ said Mummer. The bishop turned to Mummer and smiled in that self-satisfied way again. ‘Do I detect that there may be some resistance to the idea, Mrs …?’ ‘Smith,’ she said, then, seeing that the bishop was waiting for her to answer, she went on. ‘Perhaps there might be, your grace, among the older members. They’re not keen on things changing.’ ‘Nor should they be, Mrs Smith. Nor should they be,’ he said. ‘Rest assured, I rather like to think of the appointment of a new incumbent as an organic process; a new shoot off the old vine, if you like; a continuum rather than a revolution. And in any case I wasn’t suggesting that you went off to the far flung corners of the earth. I was thinking of Father Bernard taking a group away on a retreat at Easter time. It was a tradition that I know was very dear to Wilfred’s heart, and one that I always thought worthwhile myself. ‘It’d be a nice way to remember him,’ he added. ‘And a chance to look forward to the future. A continuum, Mrs Smith, as I say.’ The sound of someone knocking a knife against a glass started to rise over the babble in the garden. ‘Ah, you’ll have to excuse me, I’m afraid,’ said the bishop, dabbing crumbs from his lips. ‘Duty calls.’ He went off towards the trestle table that had been set up by the rose bushes, his cassock flapping around his ankles and getting wet. When he had gone, Mrs Belderboss appeared at Mummer’s side. ‘You were having a long chat with his grace,’ she said, nudging Mummer playfully in the arm. ‘What were you talking about?’ Mummer smiled. ‘I have some wonderful news,’ she said. *** A few weeks later, Mummer organised a meeting of interested parties so as to get the ball rolling before the bishop could change his mind, as he was wont to do. She suggested that everyone come to our house to discuss where they might go, although Mummer had only one place in mind. ~ 3 ~ Ïðåäûäóùàÿ ñòðàíèöà Ñëåäóþùàÿ ñòðàíèöàOn the night she had set aside, they came in out of the rain, smelling of the damp and their dinners: Mr and Mrs Belderboss, and Miss Bunce, the presbytery housekeeper, and her fianc;, David Hobbs. They hung up their coats in the little porch with its cracked tiles and its intractable odour of feet and gathered in our front room anxiously watching the clock on the mantelpiece, with the tea things all set out, unable to relax until Father Bernard arrived. Eventually, the bell went and everyone got to their feet as Mummer opened the door. Father Bernard stood there with his shoulders hunched in the rain. ‘Come in, come in,’ said Mummer. ‘Thank you, Mrs Smith.’ ‘Are you well, Father?’ she said. ‘You’re not too wet I hope.’ ‘No, no, Mrs Smith,’ said Father Bernard, his feet squelching inside his shoes. ‘I like the rain.’ Unsure if he was being sarcastic, Mummer’s smile wavered a little. It wasn’t a trait she knew in priests. Father Wilfred had never been anything other than deadly serious. ‘Good for the flowers,’ was all she could offer. ‘Aye,’ said Father Bernard. He looked back at his car. ‘I wonder, Mrs Smith, how you’d feel about me bringing in Monro. He doesn’t like being on his own and the rain on the roof sends him a wee bit crackers, you know.’ ‘Monro?’ said Mummer, peering past him. ‘After Matt.’ ‘Matt?’ ‘Matt Monro,’ said Father Bernard. ‘My one and only vice, Mrs Smith, I can assure you. I’ve had long consultations with the Lord about it, but I think he’s given me up as a lost cause.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ said Mummer. ‘Who are you talking about?’ ‘The daft feller mooning at the window there.’ ‘Your dog?’ ‘Aye.’ ‘Yes,’ said Mummer. ‘Well, I suppose that’ll be alright. He won’t, you know, will he?’ ‘Ah no, Mrs Smith, he’s well house trained. He’ll just doze off.’ ‘It’ll be fine, Esther,’ said Farther and Father Bernard went out to the car and came back with a black Labrador that sneezed on the doormat and shivered and stretched out in front of the fire as if he had always lived at our house. Mummer offered Father Bernard the single armchair next to the television, a threadbare thing somewhere between olive and beige that Mummer had tried to pretty up with a lace-edged antimacassar, aligned using Farther’s spirit level when she thought no one was looking. He thanked her and wiped his brow with a handkerchief and sat down. Only when he was settled did everyone else do the same. Mummer clicked her fingers and shot me a look that was the equivalent of a kick up the backside. As with all social occasions at our house, it was my job to distribute the opening round of tea and biscuits, and so I knelt by the table and poured Father Bernard a cup, setting it down on top of the television which had been covered with a starched cloth — the way all the crucifixes and statues were at church now that it was Lent. ‘Thank you, Tonto,’ Father Bernard said, smiling at me conspiratorially. It was the nickname he’d given to me when he arrived at Saint Jude’s. He was the Lone Ranger and I was Tonto. It was childish, I know, but I suppose I liked the idea of the two of us fighting side by side, like the pals in the Commando stories did. Though fighting what, I wasn’t sure. The Devil, maybe. Heathens. Gluttons. Prodigals. The kinds of people Father Wilfred had trained us to despise. Listening to the armchair groaning under him as he tried to make himself comfortable, I was struck once again by how enormous Father Bernard was. A farmer’s son from Antrim, he was no more than thirty or so, though he looked middle-aged from years of hard graft. He had a solid, heavy face, with a nose that had been bashed flat and a roll of flesh that bulged over the back of his collar. His hair was always well groomed and oiled back over his head to form a solid helmet. But it was his hands that seemed so out of place with the chalice and the pyx. They were large and red and toughened to leather from an adolescence spent building dry stone walls and pinning down bullocks to have their ears notched. If not for the dog collar and his wool-soft voice, he could easily have passed for a doorman or a bank robber. But, as I say, everyone at Saint Jude’s liked him straightaway. He was that sort of person. Uncomplicated, honest, easy to be with. A man to other men, fatherly to women twice his age. But I could tell that Mummer was reserving judgment. She respected him because he was a priest, of course, but only as far as he more or less replicated Father Wilfred. When he slipped up, Mummer would smile sweetly and touch him lightly on the arm. ‘Father Wilfred would normally have led the Creed in Latin, Father, but it doesn’t matter,’ she said after his first solo mass at Saint Jude’s. And, ‘Father Wilfred would normally have said grace himself,’ when he offered the slot to me over a Sunday lunch that it seemed Mummer had arranged merely to test him on such details. We altar boys thought Father Bernard was fun — the way he gave us all nicknames and would invite us to the presbytery after Mass. We had, of course, never been asked there by Father Wilfred, and even to most of the adults in the parish it was a place of mystery almost as sacrosanct as the tabernacle. But Father Bernard seemed glad of the company, and once the silverware had been cleaned and put away and our vestments hung in the closet, he would take us across to his home and sit us around the dining table for tea and biscuits and we’d swap stories and jokes to the sound of Matt Monro. Well, I didn’t. I let the other boys do that. I preferred to listen. Or pretend to listen at least and let my eyes wander around the room and try to imagine Father Bernard’s life, what he did when no one else was around, when no one was expecting him to be a priest. I didn’t know if priests could ever knock off. I mean, Farther didn’t spend his free time checking the mortar on the chimney stack or setting up a theodolite in the back garden, so it seemed unfair that a priest should have to be holy all the time. But perhaps it didn’t work like that. Perhaps being a priest was like being a fish. Immersion for life. *** Now that Father Bernard had been served, everyone else could have their tea. I poured out a cup for each person — finishing one pot and starting on the next — until there was one mug left. Hanny’s mug. The one with a London bus on the side. He always got a cup, even when he was away at Pinelands. ‘How is Andrew?’ Father Bernard asked, as he watched me. ‘Fine, Father,’ Mummer said. Father Bernard nodded and pulled his face into a smile that acknowledged what she was really saying, beneath the words. ‘He’ll be back at Easter, won’t he?’ said Father Bernard. ‘Yes,’ said Mummer. ‘You’ll be glad to have him home, I’m sure.’ ‘Yes,’ said Mummer. ‘Very glad.’ There was an awkward pause. Father Bernard realised that he had strayed into private territory and changed the subject by raising his cup. ‘That’s a lovely brew, Mrs Smith,’ he said and Mummer smiled. It wasn’t that Mummer didn’t want Hanny at home — she loved him with an intensity that made Farther and I seem like we were merely her acquaintances sometimes — but he reminded her of the test that she still hadn’t passed. And while she delighted in any little advancement Hanny seemed to have made — he might be able to write the first letter of his name, or tie a bootlace, say — they were such small progressions that it still pained her to think of the long road ahead. ‘And it will be a long road,’ Father Wilfred had once told her. ‘It will be full of disappointments and obstacles. But you should rejoice that God has chosen you to walk along it, that He has sent you Andrew as both a test and guide of your soul. He will remind you of your own muteness before God. And when at last he is able to speak, you will be able to speak, and ask of the Lord what you will. Not everyone receives such a chance, Mrs Smith. Be mindful of thatThe cup of tea that we poured for Hanny that went cold and grew a wrinkled skin of milk was proof that she hadn’t forgotten. It was, strangely, a kind of prayer. ‘So,’ Father Bernard said, putting down his half empty tea cup and declining Mummer’s offer of more. ‘Does anyone have any suggestions about where we ought to go at Easter?’ ‘Well,’ said Miss Bunce quickly, glancing at David who nodded encouragement. ‘There’s a place called Glasfynydd.’ ‘Where?’ said Mummer, giving the others a sceptical look that Mr and Mrs Belderboss returned with a grin. They had never heard of the place either. It was just Miss Bunce trying to be different. She was young. It wasn’t her fault. ‘Glasfynydd. It’s a retreat on the edge of the Brecon Beacons,’ she said. ‘It’s beautiful. I’ve been lots of times. They have an outdoor church in the wood. Everyone sits on logs.’ No one responded apart from David, who said, ‘That sounds nice,’ and sipped his tea. ‘Alright,’ said Father Bernard after a moment. ‘That’s one idea. Any others?’ ‘Well, it’s obvious,’ said Mummer. ‘We should go back to Moorings and visit the shrine.’ And buoyed on by Mr and Mrs Belderboss’s murmurs of excitement in remembering the place, she added, ‘We know how to get there and where everything is and it’s quiet. We can go at Holy Week and take Andrew to the shrine and stay on until Rogationtide to watch the beating of the bounds, like we used to do. It’ll be lovely. The old gang back together.’ ‘I’ve never been before,’ said Miss Bunce. ‘And neither has David.’ ‘Well, you know what I mean,’ said Mummer. Father Bernard looked round the room. ‘Any other suggestions?’ he said, and while he waited for a response he picked up a custard cream and bit it in half. No one said anything. ‘In that case,’ he said. ‘I think we ought to be democratic about it. All those who want to go to South Wales …’ Miss Bunce and David raised their hands. ‘All those who want to go back to Moorings …’ Everyone else responded with much more vigour. ‘That’s that then,’ said Father Bernard. ‘Moorings it is.’ ‘But you didn’t vote, Father,’ said Miss Bunce. Father Bernard smiled. ‘I’ve given myself the right to abstain this time, Miss Bunce. I’m happy to go wherever I’m led.’ He grinned again and ate the remainder of his biscuit. Miss Bunce looked disappointed and shot glances at David, wanting his sympathy. But he shrugged and went over to the table for another cup of tea, which Mummer poured with a flourish, as she relished the prospect of going back to The Loney. Mr and Mrs Belderboss were already describing the place in minute detail to Father Bernard who nodded and picked another biscuit from his plate. ‘And the shrine, Father,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘It’s just beautiful, isn’t it, Reg?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘Quite a little paradise.’ ‘So many flowers.’ Mrs Belderboss chipped in. ‘And the water’s so clean,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘Isn’t it, Esther?’ ‘Like crystal,’ said Mummer, as she passed the sofa. She smiled at Father Bernard and went to offer Miss Bunce a biscuit, which she took with a thankyou that could have drawn blood. Mummer nodded and moved on. At Moorings, she knew she could beat Miss Bunce and her Glasfynydd hands down, being on home turf as it were. She had grown up on the north-west coast, within spitting distance of The Loney and the place still buttered the edges of her accent even though she had long since left and had lived in London for twenty years or more. She still called sparrows spaddies, starlings sheppies, and when we were young she would sing us rhymes that no one outside her village had ever heard. She made us eat hot pot and tripe salads and longed to find the same curd tarts she had eaten as a girl; artery-clogging fancies made from the first milk a cow gave after calving. It seemed that where she grew up almost every other day had been the feast of some saint or other. And even though hardly any of them were upheld any more, even by the most ardent at Saint Jude’s, Mummer remembered every one and all the various accompanying rituals, which she insisted on performing at home. On Saint John’s day a metal cross was passed through a candle flame three times to symbolise the holy protection John had received when he went back into his burning house to rescue the lepers and the cripples staying there. In October, on the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, we would go to the park and collect autumn leaves and twigs and fashion them into crosses for the altar at Saint Jude’s. And on the first Sunday in May — as the people of Mummer’s village had done since time immemorial — we would go out into the garden before Mass and wash our faces in the dew. There was something special about The Loney. To Mummer, Saint Anne’s shrine was second only to Lourdes; the two mile walk across the fields from Moorings was her Camino de Santiago. She was convinced that there and only there would Hanny stand any chance of being cured. Chapter Four Hanny came home from Pinelands at the start of the Easter holidays, bristling with excitement. Even before Farther had turned off the car engine, he was running down the drive to show me the new watch Mummer had given him. I had seen it in the window of the shop where she worked. A heavy, golden-coloured thing with a picture of Golgotha on the face and an inscription from Matthew on the back: Therefore, be aware. Because you do not know the day or the hour. ‘That’s nice, Hanny,’ I said and gave it back to him. He snatched it off me and slipped it on his wrist before handing over a term’s worth of drawings and paintings. They were all for me. They always were. Never for Mummer or Farther. ‘He’s very glad to be home, aren’t you, Andrew?’ said Mummer, holding the door open for Farther to bundle Hanny’s suitcase through the porch. She tidied Hanny’s hair with her fingers and held him by the shoulders. ‘We’ve told him that we’re going back to Moorings,’ she said. ‘He’s looking forward to it already. Aren’t you?’ But Hanny was more interested in measuring me. He put his palm on the top of my head and slid his hand back towards his Adam’s apple. He had grown again. Satisfied that he was still the bigger of the two of us, he went up the stairs as noisily as he always did, the banister creaking as he hauled himself from step to step. I went into the kitchen to make him a cup of tea in his London bus mug and when I found him in his room he still had on the old raincoat of Farther’s that he had taken a shine to years before and insisted on wearing whatever the weather. He was standing by the window with his back to me looking at the houses on the other side of the street and the traffic going by. ‘Are you alright, Hanny?’ He didn’t move. ‘Give me your coat,’ I said. ‘I’ll hang it up for you.’ He turned and looked at me. ‘Your coat, Hanny,’ I said, shaking his sleeve. He watched me as I undid the buttons for him and hung it on the peg on the back of the door. It weighed a ton with all the things he kept in the pockets to communicate with me. A rabbit’s tooth meant he was hungry. A jar of nails was one of his headaches. He apologised with a plastic dinosaur and put on a rubber gorilla mask when he was frightened. He used combinations of these things sometimes and although Mummer and Farther pretended they knew what it all meant, only I really understood him. We had our world and Mummer and Farther had theirs. It wasn’t their fault. Nor was it ours. That’s just the way it was. And still is. We’re closer than people can imagine. No one, not even Doctor Baxter, really understands that. ~ 5 ~ Ïðåäûäóùàÿ ñòðàíèöà Ñëåäóþùàÿ ñòðàíèöà
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