by Adam Thorpe
Seated in a leather-spined niche of the library, he wrote Joey a long letter, each penned word pulsing with love, the whole thing blotted carefully. But it was difficult, and not just because he hadn’t used a quill pen in years. He’d never really had time to feel fatherly, and the kids were only at home in the holidays. There was no reply.
Then came a spell of simple interference, of snow on the screen, of hiss.
Up to then he would scrub pots or unload the antique dishwasher in the scullery – his least favourite jobs – with a song in his heart, transposed from the key of grudge into celebration. Even working in the fudge room with plump Brother Barnabas – no ventilation, sickly-sweet sludge – was converted to gladness. The observorship finished and his mind made up, he was barely a fortnight into his postulancy when a brown envelope full of treeware arrived: forms. Emily was filing for a divorce on the grounds, not of incompatibility, but of his decision to become a monk. Unreasonable behaviour and desertion. But his decision to become a monk was spurred by the unhappiness of their marriage, by Emily wanting a divorce: she’s distorting it all! She can’t bear ever to be in the wrong! If the forms weren’t filled in and returned, it would be assumed that he agreed with the proceedings, and the divorce would go ahead smoothly through the decree nisi and on to liberation.
A burr in his chest, a deep rankling that she had made out that the slow-motion car crash of their marriage was all him at the wheel. But that was old thinking. That was Chris Barker 1. Chris Barker 2 was free of retribution or remonstration. Chris Barker 1 knew full well that Emily would never acknowledge the mote in her own eye, that it was always everyone else’s fault, that her world view did not include personal humility, that she’d been brought up that way by his dreadful Tory in-laws, both of them surgeons who had never approved of him. But Chris Barker 2 knew something else: that he couldn’t do anything about it, and that letting go was the sensible option, combined with prayer and meditation.
That way lay internal peace. He had no more need of material wealth, of status, of gross things: the double-fronted house in Balham with the plum tree and pond, the nippy Honda Accord coupé, the Quad speakers in his study, his K2 Apache Crossfire skis with only a couple of seasons’ use, his Tecnifibre Carboflex 130 squash racket with its purple wrap grip barely stained by sweat. The kids would inherit his vast collection of videos, half of them only playable on antique machines. They would curse him for it, probably. Books too. His precious Hornby Dublo 1930s electric train set that had belonged to his father. Yes, a slight twinge of pain, but no true sacrifice is painless. Everything to be sold or given away the moment he became a full monk. In six years’ time. By then he wouldn’t care.
Joey and Flo: adults, now. On their own paths. Quarrelling finished. They would visit him from time to time, their weirdo dad, from their respective unis. Quality moments. Skyping was out of the question, though.
He filled in the divorce forms at his cell’s wooden desk. There were days when he was all but back in his T-shirt, his hand-stitched jeans, his Zanotti red leather Hi-Tops, his splash of Serge Lutens Fumerie Turque, saying things like, ‘I’m all over it, guys.’ Today was one of those days. What was he doing dressed in this party robe? Who was he, a drag queen? He’d eagerly entered into the treasure house within him, he had seen the things that were in Heaven, as Isaac the Syrian had put it long ago, and now there was a dark screen yanked in front.
Back in the fudge room, he reflected on his name, Chris: its genial banality, the longer form hopelessly posh. The day he became a novice, in under two years’ time, he would change it. Brother Barnabas had been Des once. Des from Nuneaton. Chris fancied Gideon. Or something exotic like Theophylaktos. Or French, like Matthieu. Brother Matthieu. He’d probably adopt a slight French accent too. All long-game stuff, obviously.
Then a sudden flash of panic in the stifling air, worse than the crisis in his cell: who am I? What am I doing here? The molten fudge, bubbling as it boiled, was the laval pits of Hell. What a terrible death that would be. He deserved it. Chris, you’re a selfish git. That was Emily. Neat rows of fudge squares cooling on greaseproof paper. Ready to be packaged. Ready to be gobbled up, rotting out strangers’ teeth. He was hungry, but he was sickened at the thought of all this edible pleasure. A great surge of sexual longing out of the blue. Sweet, edible Emily. He had to sit down on the bench. Brother Barnabas glancing over from the packaging department. They couldn’t talk to each other! At least, it wasn’t recommended. The Rules of St Benedict. Lots and lots of them. Fifteen hundred years old!
Monotheistic religion, he muttered to himself, is one of the stupidest inventions of the human race. Christianity, Islam, Judaism. Almost as stupid as T V. Or cars. But even more murderous. And here I am in the thick of it. Obedient as ever.
The thought of Joey in his undies, staring at the screen, manically thumbing the game controller; it was overwhelming.
A hand on his shoulder. Brother Barnabas, that broad and friendly seen-it-all face, terrible teeth but never mind, softly saying, ‘The end sanctifies the means.’ As if he’d understood. Trappist telepathy. Happens all the time. Chris nodded, apologised in a whisper and girded his rebellious loins to carry on making fudge for the good of the community. Waitrose were stocking it in all their East Midlands branches, and they could barely keep up the supply.
Brother Barnabas opened the window and birdsong scattered its joy. One of the community’s cockerels was crowing over and over as if it was dawn … along with the tarp clapping loose on the chapter-house roof.
In the solitude of his postulant’s cell, in his sacred desert, Chris prayed so hard that his knuckles showed teeth marks. He had to pull on a skin-tight mask of merriment. Keeping awake to God’s mystery meant he would nod off during Vespers, finding the usual nap at midday impossible. Since posting the forms in May there had been the sense of some transcendent curve having been casually broken. ‘Let nothing be put before the work of God’: Rule of St Benedict, Chapter 3. After all, God sacrificed his only begotten son to save us from eternal death. From our sins. The greatest sacrifice of all, as a recent sermon from Father Jeremy reminded them. That’s the real work of God. And he was putting his own domestic concerns before it.
Smoking heaps of resentment, lit by spite.
Emily had mentioned that her husband was undersexed on her desertion statement, as if becoming a monk was the result of a dysfunctional libido! How far from God’s purpose can you get? She knew this assertion would hurt him, which is why she included it. It was all lies, again. She would push him away, turn her back on him, regularly banish him to the spare bedroom. Not a word about his idiotic fling years back with that pretty intern of the delicate neck, because her own occasional flings would have been exorcised. Him in T V, her in fashion. They were always grown-up about it. Back in January, during an overnight stay in Lincoln for that Babylonian orgy on televisual ways of saving the whales, or whatever it was, he got very, very high on uppers and alcohol and was found passed out by the cops down an alleyway. She laughed. Now she’s mentioning it in evidence. That was his final binge too, after a year or two of chemical exploration. There were some very pleasant moments. Tapping into the planet’s life force just the other side of the smoked glass we call the daily grind. But it was stupid and pathetic, really.
Please, Lord, help me work through my acrimony and out the other side.
Soon after this crisis came the vision-dream. According to Father Jeremy, dreams are closer to the spiritual realm: they momentarily constitute reality and that mental reality is far more ‘elastic’. This dream started realistically enough, though: no Dali component, no melting watches. The brothers were walking in the fields on their weekly outing, when nattering is permitted, but in the dream they were in complete silence. They were returning to the abbey by way of the lake. It was black with silt in the dream, as if the scouring storm had never happened. Brother Felix was on his feet, spry as a gazelle.
It was a sodden, miserable June in the
real world, but the dream’s weather was bright and cloudless. As a postulant you are only permitted a grey hooded smock and white trousers, but in the dream he was a proper monk in voluminous white habit, hood right up like the others. The whole dream was non-diegetic, anyway: he kept getting shots of stuff he couldn’t have seen himself, like a wide-angle of the whole group, tiny in front of the water. Then all of a sudden their habits began rippling and shaking and lifting, until they were billowing out like laundry on a line, each brother struggling to press the cloth to his thighs.
Where were the fierce gusts coming from? The soaring ash trees were breathlessly still; the corn in the adjoining field likewise. They looked up at the sky together, as if at a signal.
The black dot of a lark.
Then something bigger, probably a buzzard. Then, impossibly, a swan with huge sun-gilded wings. But it wasn’t a swan; the neck wasn’t long enough. And where the swan’s head should be was a girl’s face, maybe even a young woman’s – at any rate of an unearthly gentleness and beauty but at the same time completely individual. This shot was really close in, and he remembers worrying about nose shadow, that they had forgotten the eye light. Green eyes too. Glowing? It was all wrong! The wind machine kept coming into shot. He could feel the stress mounting. This was the take of a lifetime and had cost an arm and a leg to set up.
The faery wings slowed (she was, in fact, somewhere between angel and faery) and she started her descent towards the water, like a hang-glider pilot ready to land. She had a small freckled nose and dark red hair that rippled upwards. She tucked her wings right behind her, then spread them out again wide and made a graceful landing feet first on the very surface of the lake, barely puncturing its blackness, the reeds unmoved. She was squinting. The lights were too close, Chris wanted to yell at someone, but the entire crew were off on tea break and there was something about the gaffer having broken his wrist.
There was a loud click, a shiver and a shake, then she gave them all (a clumsy hand-held zoom onto the face) a toothy and totally endearing grin, turned her head to the left and soared away with – to his huge surprise – a massive cross that surged out of the water vertically with a great whoosh. It swung beneath her feet like some outsize prey dangling from an eagle’s claws. And then she vanished, breaking up through the sudden lid of cloud.
The monks’ cries turned into a post-wrap discussion about the technical aspects of the visitation, about speed and velocity, about the very powerful grip of an angel’s toes and so on, during which he shouted, ‘We need silks!’ The effort woke him up.
An early morning dark. His night light wavered. He was hungry of course. Remembered every detail of the dream. When he was in it, it was real. Wrote it all down in his diary, as they are encouraged to do. The Faith diary. Ups and downs. Little things. Observations of flowers, birds, light.
If it actually was a dream. It was more like a message. A vision. A visitation. The cross was identical to the one that stands in the rough grass beyond the main gate, erected in the 1950s: a massive upright of oak beam, with an equally thick crosspiece attached by a shiplap joint. But why should the angel carry away their holy cross?
And why pull it out of the lake?
Monastic history is strewn with visions. They are, in some ways, what keeps the whole show on the road. Chronic hunger helps, although Merton himself warns against starving yourself in return for glimpses of Heaven.
He did not go back to sleep.
A mere postulant granted a vision. Or even a visitation! He told no one. It would not have gone down well. Monks are human beings, not saints. After twenty years of office politics, he’s learnt a thing or two about envy.
The angel had done away with the interference, however. His screen was needle-sharp. Full colour. The clouds of depression and doubt were scattered. Blue sky only.
In the days following he allowed himself to drift into the seamless ocean of chants and prayers in the duskiness of the church, every brother looking somehow nobler in the soft candlelight. Ad te clamamus exsules filii Hevæ, Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes … On chillier days the others would come in white, in full hooded cowls instead of the black scapulars, looking as if they were carrying laundry over their arms. A gathering of Druids. Comedy, almost. As though pushing the boat out for laughs. ‘Our loving prayers penetrate to the depths of Hell,’ Father Jeremy told them in a sermon, ‘and to the furthest reaches of the cosmos.’ That puts broadband into the shade, thought Chris, apologising with a prayer. He was cocky, almost. Dangerously near the smug zone.
Once, during the blissful smoky murk of Compline, his gaze caught on Our Lady’s face in painted wood, full of compassion in the lone candle’s glare. The dream-angel’s face was real, like flesh. Why would an angel be so endearingly toothy? Don’t they have orthodontists in Heaven? He was chanting without listening, his mind adrift. Jesus was said to have been a redhead. There are red-haired angels in paintings. With freckles, maybe, like Flo. Ssssh.
The silence.
Every time, after the moments of the Eucharist, there is a silence such as he has never known silence in all his life. The silence begins after the last prayer and holds firm until Lauds almost seven hours later. Silence and stillness that, as they all fan out from the sweet-fumed cavern of a church to their separate cells on a whisper of leather soles, moves towards him with the open arms of complete freedom.
That was how it remained for weeks after his dream. He was happy being a silent conduit, a kind of satellite dish. His dream was not a conventional visitation: the Virgin did not appear on the cloister lawn or in the vegetable garden – as had happened to more than one brother, according to the monastic diary – her sandals glittering between the lettuce, her slender finger raised. No, it was an angel, a seraph. Gifted with love. Filled with ardour. Pure light.
He had recommended his spirit unto God. And he had been rewarded. Was there just the teeniest crumb of pride?
Now, in the troubling season of late summer, never his favourite time – a time when you realise that everything you had been anticipating for months is as illusory as the sunlit England of the adverts – he sees that the salvatory angel with the gift of love is only a face mentally recorded off a poster, stored and forgotten.
Recorded when? She’s a local, a Lincolnshire girl. Background of old house-beams, suggesting a middle-class upbringing. He made two trips to Lincoln early in the year, a few uppers swirling in his head. The first visit was at the end of January, for the conference. Around the time she went missing. There may well have been posters up already. The second visit was in March, scouting locations. The town would have been full of posters by then. His vision was a trick of the mind, card-flicking memories. The cross was the mind recalling … no, not her death. She’s only missing. He sneezes in the pollen-rich air, blows his nose. Missing, presumed dead. Or not. Groomed by some evil bastard, then abducted. Or not.
He so needs some foot-on-the-ball time!
He attacks a swathe of nettles obstructing a waterfall of blackberries glistening with ripeness. O, the joys of the sickle, the need to regularly whet the blade. Who needs a lawnmower, a strimmer? Death’s sickle must need plenty of whetting, hitting all that bone and muscle over and over. Death with huge, strangler’s hands would be more likely. The last, fought-for breath. The rattle.
A sudden claustrophobic panic seizes him. He might never leave here for years. He’d always wanted to see New Zealand. The Galapagos Islands. Sleep in a bamboo stilt house. Go trekking to Angkor Wat.
The angel dream suddenly feels confused, distant, a jigsaw you can’t pick up without it buckling into fragments. He’s not even sure that the dream happened, that he’s not inventing it. It’s as if his memory cells are breaking up as well, turning opaque like the surface of the lake brushed by a breeze. But this is ridiculous because he wrote it all down in black and white in his Faith diary. Time is no longer a chronological line, emerging from nothing and travelling on into nothing, but space itself. He ca
n stretch out his arms and touch time with the tips of his fingers: it’s like a roomy, clear plasticity all around him. Behind him, before him. The dream itself is both in front and behind, as is Emily and the job and his childhood and the kids and everything.
He sends up a little plea for help, but God is busy on the other line. There are problems in Syria and Egypt that need urgent attention. Neil Armstrong has just died, floating up to the moon like a tuft of old man’s beard before the welcome in Heaven. Chris mutters a prayer for the missing girl. Dear Lord, please let Fay be found alive. Watch over her, wherever she is. Huddled in the mouth of the Tube with her mongrel dog. Hell’s mouth, which he would enter every weekday in his old life, ignoring the homeless.
Wipe that. Fade up a small mound of earth, a rough, home-made, matter-of-fact cross.
A cross. Each buried monk has his own identical cross. Take up your cross daily until it stands on your grave. He turns his head away from the blackberry cascade and towards the monastery. The top of the great wooden cross is just visible. He doesn’t like it. It’s too broadbrush, too heavy. We don’t need it. It shouts. There’s not even a suffering Son of God nailed up there. Passing under it on the return from their Sunday walk recently, he asked Brother Simeon – former secondary teacher in Woolwich, expert on the abbey’s history – how old the cross was. ‘Nineteen fifty-seven. It was erected at a difficult time for the brothers, I’m afraid.’ Chris didn’t probe too deeply, but the difficulty involved a nearby school for young Catholic delinquents set up by the abbey in the 1890s, which provoked all sorts of ‘problems’. The school was finally closed down in the 1960s, the brothers on the staff taken on by St Bartholomew’s RC Grammar, an excellent school which was expanding at the time ‘and which still goes on rising in the league tables’, added Brother Simeon.
