There that February morning Bruno led Benson.
On the way Bruno took Camp on Blood Island out of his pocket.
“Here, you have it. It’s good stuff,” he said, offering it to Benson.
“Did you pinch it, Bruno?”
“Course I did! You want it or don’t you?”
“No, thank you. Look, Bruno, maybe I should go home now.”
“We’re nearly there.”
They walked under a railway bridge and turned on to the rough land. Bruno seemed to know where he was going and Benson followed meekly.
The two boys went down the steep stairs that led to a corridor under one of the huge canyons which pointed out to sea, a sea from which no enemy was any longer expected. They walked along the corridor until they came to a dead end.
Then Bruno stopped.
“In Camp on Blood Island this Japanese officer falls in love with one of the women prisoners and he does her every night. He gives her chocolate to keep her strong and healthy for him. The other prisoners are not strong and healthy, you see... “
“What happened to you, Bruno?” asked Benson, suddenly losing patience.
“In the end the other prisoners kill the girl on page forty-two.”
“What happened to you, Bruno?”
“One of the prisoners gets his head chopped off! It’s dead good!”
Benson screamed at Bruno: “What happened to you?”
The sound of his voice, amplified by the steel cladding of the chamber, startled both boys. They looked at one another.
“It happened here, but don’t tell anyone,” whispered Bruno.
“But you said... “
“I know what I said,” interrupted Bruno pedantically, “but what I said and what happened aren’t the same thing.”
“You lied to your dad?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
Bruno shrugged. Then he said, “I didn’t want to get him into trouble.”
“Who?”
“The man.” He looked around the steel chamber. “He comes here every night.”
“Who does?”
“The man.”
“So how did your mum and dad find out?”
“I told them.”
“Why?”
Bruno shrugged.
“What did he do to you?”
“I’ll show you.”
Benson struggled with Bruno for a while. The dank smell of the place both attracted and repelled him. Bruno was stronger than Benson. He made him get down lower than he had ever had to get down in the scrum. Bruno hurt Benson but the pain abated when he stopped fighting him and accepted his place beneath the bigger boy’s weight. Benson closed his eyes tight, and in the stars that formed, and in the echoing grunts from Bruno, he found, in the midst of pain, that all soul-searching and worry had momentarily been cast out.
He ran all the way home then straight upstairs to the bathroom. There he ran himself a bath and while the tub was filling he stared at himself in the mirror.
“I am lost if I stay in the world!” he told his reflection.
Then he lay in the bath quite still, looking down at the part that was wrecking him.
He looked a little too long. It stared right back at him, demanding attention. Then, when attention was paid and Benson’s mind crowded full of steel walkways, dank odours and faceless men with gaping trousers, it repaid the attention by doing what Bruno had been able to do for quite some time.
He scoured and scoured the bath. He would go to Confession and make everything all right. This time everything would stay all right too! But only if he left the world! He had to leave the world!
He was sulky at lunch, and when Mum asked him what the matter was, he told her that he was upset because he had told her a lie the day before. He did have a vocation after all, he said. He had only said he hadn’t to please her.
Mum didn’t say anything, just nodded.
Benson flicked through the Catholic Herald and a few minutes later Mum came back to the table and said, “Your dad will be pleased.”
Benson fidgeted away the afternoon and then went for a walk down to the back of the Prom.
A week later a parcel addressed to Benson dropped on the mat. It was the Ball Massager. Benson took it straight up to his bedroom and slowly, reverently, undid the package.
Opening his wardrobe door he gazed at the plaster statue in the alcove altar. Then he stripped himself naked and commenced rubbing his flesh with the massager.
He continued until he drew blood.
Part Two
Joachim
“I’m going to be a saint before I’m thirty,” Brother Henry whispered to Benson through a hell of steam and crashing plates.
“But you may still be alive when you’re thirty, Brother,” Benson whispered back. He picked up a stack of cereal plates which had been newly released from the ordeal of a dunk in Brother Henry’s sink full of impossibly hot water. He dried the top of each plate with a rapid circular motion while tickling the bottom of the stack with a wipe that also supported the stack. Then he shuffled the top plate to the bottom, and, being careful to remember that he would have to go through the procedure eight times in order to come back to the first one again, he wiped the top of the next lucky plate.
While Benson was thus employed, Brother Henry, a devout personal ejaculation, seen but unheard, upon his quivering lips, plunged his hands deep into the scalding water. His mouth opened wide. The blood drained from his taut, stretched, thin lips. His eyes rolled heavenward in anguish, his hands poached as they searched, frantic as any hands at a January sale rummage counter, to retrieve the submerged dishes before his flesh fell off the bone.
“Why don’t you add some cold?” asked Benson, though he knew the answer.
Brother Henry replied, his whisper amplified to a strangled shriek by the soundbox of his tumescent mouth, “I have to mortify my flesh, Brother. If I don’t mortify it, it will mortify me.”
Benson nodded but said nothing. There was really nothing to say and, even if there had been, now was not the time to be saying it because it was still only 7 a.m. And the Great Silence did not end until 8 o’clock. But he allowed himself to think, and in his thoughts he chided Brother Henry severely for his ostentatious piety. Had he not a week ago put a piece of holly down his underpants and gone to the washroom with a couple of leaves sticking out? The Novice Master, who always supervised washtime, could not have missed it. Benson had certainly noticed and had decided then that Brother Henry needed to take himself in hand and not let his left hand know what his right hand was doing. But then Benson recalled himself and tried to rein in his own uncharitable thoughts. Who was be, anyway, to judge? Was not he, like Brother Henry, a miserable Son of Adam?
He smiled benignly at his companion as his red hands emerged from the scalding dishwater without any dishes in them. Brother Henry waved his hands about while he screamed a whispered, “Jesus! Mary! I love you! Save souls!” again and again.
Benson waited patiently.
Once again Brother Henry plunged into the water and fished around frantically for the cooking plates. Once again he emerged red-handed but plateless.
“Please, Brother! I’ve got my housework to do still! We’re already late. You know what Novvy’s like. Can’t you just add some cold?”
Nodding his head sadly, Brother Henry turned on the cold water. “You know, Brother Joachim, denying oneself self-denial for the sake of others may also be a short cut to sanctity.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” replied Brother Joachim.
“Yes, perhaps I’m right. One can never be sure. The only thing I’m sure of, Brother Joachim, is that it is not easy.”
“What isn’t easy, Brother?”
“Sanctity.”
“I know, Brother,” said Brothe
r Joachim. And he did.
Benson was now sixteen and had been away from home for fourteen months. He had spent a year at St Patrick’s Juniorate and had then, armed with O levels, been moved to St Finbar’s. Almost three strange years had passed since he had first decided to become a Brother. His slowness in leaving home had been caused largely by his own on-and-off vocation. It had been as if God’s Call of “Follow Me” was constantly being interrupted and fiddled with by a satanic jamming set as it made its ethereal way from heaven to Benson’s soul. His urge to serve the Lord was the ‘heads’ of his desire, the ‘tails’ being his sexual desires, on the rack of which he had continued to languish as thirteen turned to fourteen.
Mum and Dad had not known what to think. They shook their heads, prayed about it, consulted Canon Preston. Mum had even been seen deserting Frances Parkinson Keyes in the library and making a quick, self-conscious dart to the Psychology shelf. There she leafed through book after book, trying to find out if her child had any precedent in the annals of behavioural science. What she found there consoled her somewhat and she was able to go home and respond with confidence when Dad asked what had got into the boy.
“It’s puberty.”
“It’s what?”
“Puberty. Everything in the lad is changing.”
“I wasn’t like that.”
“He’s sensitive.”
“Well I’m sensitive too, lady! I like to know where I stand and I don’t know where I stand with him. This vocation of his. He’s blowing hot and cold and I don’t like it.”
Mum decided it was time to drop her bombshell. “Siblings,” she said, flatly.
“Siblings?” asked Dad.
“Yes, siblings. The lad never had any siblings.”
“What’s a sibling, lady?”
“Brothers and sisters.”
“Well why didn’t you say so?”
“I thought you’d have known what a sibling was, being a policeman and everything,” Mum replied archly.
Dad had gone all silent, humphing round the kitchen disconsolately in a way which told Mum that he would rather be in the greenhouse. But Mum was not going to let him off the hook that easily.
“I think,” she stated, “that our son is too much alone, and you know what the Bible says.”
“What?”
“The Bible says that it is not good for man to be alone. I think that’s his trouble all right. No siblings to keep him on the straight and narrow.”
“It’s not my fault he hasn’t got any bloody siblings! It was your insides that got jammed, don’t forget!”
Mum grimaced and reached for a cigarette. She blew blue smoke between herself and Dad before saying, “Well I’m for making him wait. If he has got a vocation to be a Brother it’ll do him no harm to have to hang about a bit.”
“I suppose you’re right but I do want him to get good O levels and Brother Kay said that he’d be brought on wonderfully if he went to the Brothers. Individual tuition, he said.”
“Yes, but... “ continued Mum.
The upshot of the conversation was that Dad and Mum decided to inform Brother Kay that they would give their consent to Benson becoming a Brother, but not until he had spent another year at St Bede’s. If he still felt he had a vocation then, he could go away with their blessing. Brother Kay had tried his hardest to protest this decision. He argued that the Call was only made the once and that one could not expect the Lord to hang around on the offchance that an unworthy vessel like Benson might deign to be filled at some future time. The Lord simply did not work like that.
When this line of argument did not cut any ice with Mum and Dad, Brother Kay repeated his pitch about the wonderful results achieved by students at St Patrick’s Juniorate. Dad had come close to caving in then, but Mum remained adamant. Brother Kay, seeing at last how the land lay, bowed to the inevitable. Benson’s vocation was put on hold.
For Benson, his parents’ decision ushered in a period of great indecisiveness, a cake he filled and decorated with turpitude. He was becoming more and more convinced that he was abnormal. At times he was of the opinion that this abnormality was a good thing: that he had somehow been blessed, singled out, was in possession of a destiny. But more usually it was his abnormal interest in male bodies, and in particular, male appendages, which, he knew, singled him out for the Mark of Cain.
His schoolmates were obsessed too. Tits and twats had taken them all by storm. Conkers were left to rot into the ground as Benson’s contemporaries lusted and longed and told one another what they would do to the girls from Maria Assumpta if only they could get them alone for a minute or two. Benson, as a result of hours of covert study of his schoolmates’ finer features, could judge what the girls would be subjected to – and quaked for them – but he had no sexual siblings in whom he could confide.
Desperately, he tried to excite himself with thoughts of girls – girls he knew – but it did little good. Then he tried the exotic girls from films and television. He cavorted with Deborah Kerr, Gwen Watford, Ann Shelton, Lucille Ball and Rosalie Crutchley. But he always remained frustratingly flaccid. While he might start on the normal path, he invariably ended his walk through the phosphorescent perfumed garden of nightly fantasy by discovering John Wayne or Man Friday or Long John Silver behind some tree. Sometimes he would be squeezing a woman’s softer parts. Enthusiasm flagged and he was only saved from sleep by the entrance of a man who, after a moment of shock, would show Benson how it was really done. Then the woman would make an excuse, go out to see if the jelly had set, leaving Benson and the man to squeeze one another. Of all men Desi Arnaz was his favourite and it was usually Lucy who went out to see if the jelly had set. Then, all passion spent, the three of them would sit round the kitchen table and eat the jelly. Maybe Fred and Ethel would drop in and if sleep would not come Fred would say that he had left his hanky in the bedroom and Benson would go in to help him find it ...
All this convinced Benson that he was a homo without hope. The idea of becoming a Brother always waxed as his virtue fell into the mud. It seemed like the only thing that could possibly save him.
When, a year later, he was called into the lounge by Mum and Dad for a final talk and was asked if he still wanted to go, he said he did. Had they asked him a scant twenty-four hours before, he would have answered no. He had managed a full month without a sexual lapse. But that night, in a toilet near the library, a man had shown Benson his large erect penis and played with him until he ejaculated his excitement into the sewers, and unbearable excitement was in a trice replaced by unbearable depression, fear and self-loathing.
“Fair enough,” Dad had said.
Benson took Brother Joachim as his religious name. The name appealed because it had an unusual and exotic ring to it. It might have been Indian or Tahitian. All the prospective novices were permitted to write down three choices for names. Whether they got their choices depended on whether there were any other Brothers with that name in the Order. So, for instance, there was little chance for anyone who wanted to be John or Peter. There was a good chance for someone who wanted Henry, Dunstan, Ninian or Egbert. Neither was Joachim in great demand, so he put the name down as his first choice.
St Joachim, apart from sporting an exotic name, also enjoyed the undoubted benefit of being the grandfather of God – on His Mother’s side. He had been the husband of St Anne, the mother of Mary. Not mentioned at all in any of the Gospels, he did have a Gospel all his own which, however, had not been accepted as Holy Writ. This bothered Benson a little, but only a little. After all Mary had to have had a father and it was inconceivable that the father of our Blessed Mother would not be holy. And it was also obvious that, as father of Mary and grandfather of Jesus, St Joachim would have a great deal of ‘pull’ with the Family, more than enough to pull Benson out of the abyss. Anyway, thought Benson, St Joachim would be grateful to him for having taken his name and there
by in some small way having spread it among men.
Some disappointment had followed for Brother Joachim on the day when the Superior General of the Order came to the monastery to bestow the habit and religious names onto the ten novices. Benson had always assumed that Joachim was pronounced Joachim. But, as he approached the altar in his long black cassock, the reverse collar biting into his throat, the Superior General was heard to say, “I welcome you, Brother Joachim, to the Order. May you endure unto death.” Benson had gulped at the name. If the Director General had said it like that it would surely stick. But it did not sound right somehow. It offended his sense of aesthetics. Had he thought that the name could be so manipulated he would have chosen something else. Joel had been a possibility. Raymond had also appealed.
He tried to see the bending of his new name as a heaven-sent opportunity to puncture his petty vanity. But it did not come easily. For sure, the road to sanctity was going to be tough.
Brother Joachim left Brother Henry rinsing the sink and yelping like a pinioned St Sebastian. He made his way along the corridor which led from the kitchen area to the main building of St Finbar’s. He kept carefully to the left, eyes cast down, and worked his hands up the sleeves of his cassock to ward off the cold. As he walked he passed other Brothers but no greetings were exchanged.
The area Brother Joachim was leaving was a recent addition to the building, which had until the late forties been the family home of an aristocratic English family, the forefathers of whom had played a part in the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket. Built of Bath stone, the building was a nineteenth-century Gothic structure, and aped a medieval monastery. A central garden was surrounded by a cloister with flagged floors, separated from the garden on all four sides by peculiarly secular stained glass which seemed to depict the life of Jane Austen. The rooms of the manor house on the ground floor all gave onto this cloister and were matched on the first floor by similar rooms, now divided by curtains and plasterboard into bedrooms and bathrooms for the Brothers. Atop the building, facing east, was a high, square tower into the side of which was set a statue of Henry VIII.
Sucking Sherbert Lemons Page 11
