Sucking Sherbert Lemons

by Michael Carson

  O’Gorman did so, muttering under his breath, “Dirty postcards! Get them here! Rude as anything!”

  The card was a holy picture. It showed a handsome young Brother standing in the middle of a half-harvested wheat field. Lots of cheerful boys, newly harvested, were playing in the field and the Brother gestured with his right arm towards the unharvested side of the field as if to say, “We need help! Come and join us in the harvesting of souls!” With his other hand the Brother pointed past the frolicking boys to the horizon where Jesus and His Mother sat, somewhat precariously, atop a rising sun. Some of the boys in the picture had noticed the vision of Christ and were gazing at it blissfully. One appeared to be wringing his hands. Overprinted down the right side of the picture was a poem.

  “I’d like one of you boys to read what you see on the picture in his best reciting voice,” said Brother Kay.

  Benson put up his hand. He liked reciting.

  “The well-made boy at the back!”

  The class turned to look as Benson stood up and began to read:

  “I found a lump of modelling clay

  And fiddled with it one fine day.

  I pulled it out. I crushed it in.

  It changed and softened to my whim.

  I found it again when days were o’er

  But I could change its shape no more.

  “I found a lump of living clay

  And lovingly moulded it day by day.

  I filled it with Truth and Virtue and Art –

  A young boy’s soft and willing heart –

  I returned again when years were gone.

  A good Catholic man I looked upon.

  The form I had given him he still bore.

  And I could not change him any more.”

  Benson sat down. He had read the poem without error, and, he felt, not without expression. He glowed as the Vocations Brother said, “You know, boys, I have heard that poem read many times in the course of my travels, but never have I heard it read with such expression. What is your name, young man?”

  “Benson, sir.”

  “Thank you, Benson.”

  Brother Kay continued to smile seraphically at Benson for a long moment. Then he reached into the pocket of his jacket and produced his glasses-case. He took off the pair he was wearing and put on another pair, these ones with gold rims, which Benson, basking at the back, thought he would almost prefer to the rimless pair. Then the Vocations Brother re-read the poem. He paused and, removing his glasses and gazing mistily out of the classroom window, began:

  “You know, boys, our lives are short. Our lives are like the blinking of an eye, or like a clay pot. The clay pot is made by the potter and then sold. It is used for a while but after its useful life is over it is broken and thrown away and returns to the dust from which it was wrought. Our lives are like that, boys, and, like a pot, we often get ourselves into hot water; we often get filled up with all sorts of strange things. Our journey through this vale of tears is fleeting but it is also difficult and complicated. Now you know that I am the Vocations Brother. I have come seeking souls who... “

  Benson sat, as still as a pot on a shelf, listening to Brother Kay. His attention was diverted from the Brother’s words from time to time by the sight of Rudge, now seemingly fully recovered from his ordeal with Brother Hooper, chalking ‘Kick me please! I like it!’ on the back of Hepher’s blazer. But the Vocations Brother’s words struck a chord in him, filled him up with enthusiasm. For Brother Kay was describing him. He was not looking for strong souls, he said. No, he was looking for souls who would be easily broken in the world, souls who could not keep themselves from becoming chipped and scratched by temptation. Benson knew that Brother Kay was describing him. Had he not come out freshly glazed from the kiln of Confession that very morning? Were not stains and cracks already appearing? It would only take another meeting with Bruno to completely shatter his brittle virtue! Perhaps God was telling him that the only way to save his soul was to become a Brother!

  Benson felt himself rising from his seat with enthusiasm and happiness when Brother Kay went on to describe the life of a Brother:

  “When You join the Brothers, you have a family made up of all the other Brothers throughout the world – Brothers all united by a common purpose to save their souls and to make of their lives a living sacrifice to Jesus Christ and His Holy Catholic Church. However, if a wife is what you want – if a wife is what you need – the Brother’s life is not for you. But if, on the other hand, you love Jesus and want to serve Him, then today may change your life.”

  Brother Kay stopped speaking and closed his eyes. He clenched his hands together, placed them in front of his mouth, and continued.

  “Boys! Close your eyes. Think carefully about your lives. Are you good? Are you pure? Are you happy? Listen. See if the Lord has anything to say to you. Only listen!”

  Benson listened.

  There were two voices at work. One voice said that he ought to be a Brother. The other told him that he had not done his Maths homework. The second voice won, and for most of the rest of the time of silence Benson wondered how he would get through Brother Wood’s double Maths without abject pain and humiliation.

  At the end of five minutes the Vocations Brother lowered his hands from his face and gazed out over the class.

  “In a few minutes I will ask any boy who thinks he might have heard the Call to be a Brother to put up his hand. Any boy who does so I will take with me to the Brothers’ Parlour for a talk about what a Brother’s life entails. Do not think that by raising your hand today you will have made an irrevocable decision. No, you will just be saying that a little voice is telling you something. Now will somebody please read the poem again.”

  Nobody volunteered, so Brother Kay chose Dexter, whose mother, Benson’s mum said, was a snob.

  As the poem was being read, totally without expression, Benson thought, by Dexter, he decided that he would put up his hand. It would no doubt cause him to be ridiculed later by the rougher elements in 3B, but Jesus too had been ridiculed. Also, by putting up his hand, both voices would be satisfied and he would be spirited off the dissolving cliff that lay between him and the yawning chasm of double Maths.

  When the recitation was over, Brother Kay elicited from the class the meaning of the poem. As the bell for the end of the second period rang, he was pointing out to O’Gorman how O’Gorman was living clay – a metaphor the rest of the class had tumbled to some minutes previously.

  The Vocations Brother consulted his watch. “Tempus fugit, boys!” he cried. Then he looked out over 3B as if it represented some grand vista which he again found himself overjoyed to be viewing, after many years away and many times imagining.

  “Hands up anyone who wants to be a Brother!”

  Benson put up his hand. Heads turned to look at him. Benson made his eyes go out of focus so that the staring boys became a blur.

  “So it’s the bonny poet at the back! Come with me, son!”

  Benson stood up and walked to the front, looking straight ahead.

  The Vocations Brother put his arm round his shoulder and led him from 3B.

  Two hours later Benson telephoned Mum from the Brothers’

  Parlour.

  “Is that you Mum? It’s me.”

  “I thought it was your dad. What’s wrong, son?”

  “Nothing’s wrong, Mum. You know I told you that the Vocations Brother was visiting the school today? Well he wants to come home with me and have tea and a nice chat with you and Dad. Is that all right?”

  “A nice chat. Why does he want a nice chat?”

  “I want to be a Brother.”

  “Oh, you do, do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you wanted to be a TV Personality.”

  “No.”

  “Did the Vocations Brother ask if he
could come and see us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, all right, son. But I don’t know what your dad is going to say, I really don’t.”

  “Thanks, Mum! See you later!”

  Benson put back the receiver and turned to Brother Kay, who was smoking a cigarette in an easy chair near the fire.

  “Mum says it’s all right, Brother!”

  It was lunchtime by now and Benson cheerfully walked back to 3B, bathed once more in Divine Light and a feeling of relief at having avoided double Maths.

  3B was transformed by thermos flasks, lunch wrappings, yawning Oxo tins and about twenty boys all talking with their mouths full. Benson’s appearance caused a momentary silence to descend.

  Then Eddie Rudge shouted, “It’s Brother Wobbles!” and the class laughed hard. Benson sucked in his stomach and strode, a fine specimen of Christian manhood at bay, to his safe corner beside Vincent. He unpacked his lunch and started eating.

  Drury turned round, but before he could speak, Benson asked him with a gleeful smile, “Double Maths OK?”

  “Didn’t have it,” replied Drury. “Brother Wood had to go to the dentist. We had the whole time free to catch up on our homework.”

  Benson felt greatly let down but he did not comment. The time in the Brothers’ Parlour with Brother Kay had set him on fire and the fire could not be doused by such a small reversal. He was ‘called’. He was going to a special Brothers’ school in Lancashire to take his O levels and then to a monastery in Wiltshire to become a novice and train to be a Brother. He would take vows and milk cows. He would meditate, and cast out the Old Man of sin. He would put self to death and save souls and die in the odour of sanctity. And he would escape temptation and bad companions and not become a homo.

  Just at that moment Bruno’s face intruded. Then Bruno’s thing shooting stuff. Benson stopped chewing his sandwich.

  “Lord, when temptation comes I break like a clay pot! Please put me up on a high shelf out of the reach of searching hands and things!”

  After lunch he went out into the still-wet playground. He had threepence to spend but did not fancy approaching Eddie Rudge or his gang in the tuck shop, so he sat on the railings outside the gymnasium and watched the boys playing football with a tennis ball. They shouted to one another, cursed and bellowed. He could never understand why they did this. He looked down at his fat thighs ballooning against the bar of the railings he was sitting on and idly compared his wobbly self with the long, thin legs of his schoolmates.

  He had been the only one to volunteer to read. He had been the only one who wanted to be a Brother. He was the only one who wanted to make stuff when he saw Bruno’s thing. Why?

  “I am different from other boys,” Benson told himself. “I am strange and mysterious.”

  But the thought did not fill him with any joy.

  *

  By the time Dad came home at seven, Benson and Mum were a little tired of the company of Brother Kay. He had gone on and on about the Brothers and his own vocation and his childhood growing up in Ireland during the Troubles. He had also eaten vast quantities of sandwiches and cake, even wolfing down the only Jap Fancy on the plate, which was Benson’s favourite.

  The Vocations Brother had wrongly assumed that Mum was Irish and that she would relish all his fireside banter about the Old Country. He talked of his life in England as an old colonial might speak of the peculiar world in the dark beyond the range of his fans and electric light, where drums beat out irritating rhythms and people worshipped idols and would not be told that they had got hold of the wrong end of the cultural stick.

  “Sure isn’t the Protestant religion a glass of warm water, Mrs Benson?” he said. “Imagine the Queen of England appointing bishops and the like! And all the mixed marriages there are! To my way of thinking Old Nick is laughing all the way to Hades when he surveys England. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred would rather jitter about to Helen Shapiro records than darken the doors of a church! Sure, the whole place is going to the dogs!”

  He did not seem to notice that Mum was pursing her lips and saying little, but Benson noticed Mum’s reaction and that Brother Kay was cutting little ice with her.

  It was with a sigh of relief that both of them greeted Dad’s return.

  The whisky bottle was produced and, while Dad ate his tea, it became clear that he had taken to Brother Kay and that the feeling was reciprocated. Dad did have Irish blood and far more respect for anyone in a clerical collar than Mum.

  Then Brother Kay said, quite out of the blue, “It will be a very noble sacrifice to give your only son to be a Brother.”

  “Early days,” said Dad.

  “Quite right. But that’s what I’m here to talk about. Perhaps I could talk to you both alone for a while.” He turned to Benson. “I’m sure you’ve got a lot of work to do for tomorrow.”

  “Yes, I have,” admitted Benson, relieved that he was not going to have to participate further.

  Mum, Dad, and Brother Kay went off to the lounge, leaving Benson with the dishes.

  He put too much Tide into the water and the bubbles were soon in danger of overflowing the bowl. Then he sank the plates and cutlery beneath the clouds, hoping to bury his own anxieties with them.

  Things were progressing at a pace he was not at all sure he approved of. Had not Brother Kay said that he had only to think he might have a vocation prior to putting up his hand? It was as if the Vocations Brother wanted to wrap up his vocation in a neat parcel and present it to him as a gift prior to his departure. But then he consoled himself with the thought that Mum and Dad would know best and either consent or refuse as was appropriate. Then Benson would merely have to drift along like a leaf blown by the wind of his parents’ decision.

  And now, despite being in a state of Grace, he felt uneasy. Nobody had mentioned Bruno since the night before, but the matter could not be over, and who was to say what shocking revelations were about to come from Bruno’s mouth? And Eric! He would deflate like a balloon on the thirteenth day of Christmas before the gentlest interrogation. And interrogations there were sure to be!

  “The Devil made me do it but he’s gone now,” Benson saw himself saying to the massed inquisition of Church and Lounge. “Yes, I confess that I was moved by the sight of Bruno’s thing but it is over now. It was just a passing enthusiasm like Hula-Hoops. Now I realise that it was wicked. I am now wedded to Christ and His Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and have cast off the Old Man of Sin and Depravity.”

  But had he? Could he? A scant twenty-four hours had passed since he was last immersed in the cesspool of irregular motions of the flesh, and the thought of it excited him even now. Would the temptation ever leave him? He tended to think not. He did not know why he thought not. Other sins had faded and lost their appeal. He no longer drank down whole tins of condensed milk. Neither did he any longer cut up worms or steal pennies from the Bishop Mumby collection box by the telephone. But no sin had ever been as totally compelling as this one. Every pleasurable feeling he had ever felt combined at the sight of Bruno’s thing, catapulting him towards it with no possibility of avoidance. He could not conceive of the day arriving when, confronted with Bruno’s thing, he would ever be able to pass by and observe, “That’s Bruno’s thing,” as if he were saying to Mrs Brown, “Your monkey is a bit dusty today,” and pass on to something else, unmoved.

  As he dried the dishes and stacked them on top of Mum’s new twin-tub, he looked at himself in the dark kitchen window.

  “I’m fat and I’m a homo,” he told himself.

  A Catechism question and answer occurred to him:

  Question: “What sins commonly lead to the breaking of the sixth and ninth Commandment?”

  Answer: “The sins that commonly lead to the breaking of the sixth and ninth Commandment are: Gluttony; Drunkenness; Intemperance; and the Neglect of Prayer.”

&nbs
p; He knew he wasn’t given to drunkenness. He didn’t think he was given to intemperance (whatever that was); but a glutton he most definitely was. If he weren’t a glutton he wouldn’t be fat. And he was idle. And he sought out bad company. There would be no bad company in the monastery, that was for sure. There would be no time for idleness either. There would be fasting. No Mars Bars in the monastery. But the trouble was that he would miss Mars Bars. Mars Bars were nice. Yes, he would most certainly miss Mars Bars. He would also miss fruit gums, sherbet lemons, bubble and squeak, fish and chips, egg and chips, after-dinner mints, bacon sandwiches, Scotch pancakes with butter on, sherry trifle, Rose’s Lime Juice, cream soda, dandelion and burdock ... all these things he would miss.

  But in return Jesus would give him His Friendship. Benson would become Jesus’ slim friend, chiselled down through prayer, sacrifice and fasting. He would never be alone. Temptations would come but they would bounce off his spiritual muscles like gamma rays off Flash Gordon. Of course, he knew that there would be times when Jesus might seem to turn away to test his faith, to put him through a Deep Night of the Soul, like St John of the Cross and Gwen Watford were always having. But Benson would know that it was all like a game between friends and would prove to his Friend that he could take it.

  He took the clean dishes and put them away in the morning-room dresser. Then he looked at the picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall beside the dresser. He approached it, gazing at it intently. The eyes were filled with love for Benson. The lips seemed to be moving – did they move? – to form the words:

  “Follow Me!”

  Benson bowed his head, adoringly and unblinkingly, until tears came to his eyes.

  “My Lord and my God! Thy Will be done!” prayed Benson. He leaned over the picture and kissed the bearded Face reverently. Then he went into the pantry and wolfed down all the left-over scones.

  Shortly afterwards Dad summoned him back to the lounge. There sat Brother Kay in Dad’s chair. Mum was seated on the far end of the settee. She looked a little dazed and was using her puffer energetically.