The Healing Place

by Clare Nonhebel

CHAPTER 56

  When Pat broke his silence and began to talk, it was not about Franz’s confession but about Father Seb the Indian priest, Rachel’s ally who used to tell her, ‘We coffee-coloured people must stick together,’ and who let Franz visit his father at the presbytery.

  Ella felt Pat was changing the subject, ducking the real issue. But as he talked she could see Franz start to relax, and she reminded herself again that this man had known Franz a long time.

  From there, Pat went on to talk about Father Eamonn, who had ignored Franz and his mother Maria until the day he arrived on their doorstep and handed them a baby to take into their home, caring nothing about the effect this would have on them.

  ‘I know people who don’t have a good word to say about priests or anything to do with the church,’ Pat said, ‘and yet they’d probably accept that any human being or institution has some good quality, however thoroughly hidden or rarely used. But Father Eamonn – I never saw anything good in him whatsoever, and to my knowledge neither did anyone else. He had an iceberg for a heart, that man.’

  Is Pat working up to something? Ella wondered. She had the impression that, far from being random memories, these comments were setting the context for something Pat wanted to say to Franz. She yawned suddenly, wishing she wasn’t so tired. Her eyelids kept drooping, although she wanted to stay awake.

  ‘Then there was Groper George,’ Pat continued, ‘who couldn’t keep his hands to himself, and Father Aidan who couldn’t keep off the booze, and Father O’Rourke who held the record for the longest and most boring sermons of all time, until the contest was held. You remember the Boring Sermon Contest, Mick?’

  Franz smiled and told Ella, ‘Pat’s a born entrepreneur. He organized this contest, getting all the kids in the area to time the different sermons in each church, over a month, and give each priest marks out of ten on length, subject and content, and he took bets on the result.’

  ‘I made a fortune,’ said Pat. ‘See, I weighted the odds,’ he told Ella. ‘There was no point in leaving it to chance; there was a seriously cool watch I had my eye on in my ma’s catalogue and I hadn’t a hope in hell of ever affording it, unless I won and didn’t have to share the winnings with too many others.’

  Ella laughed. ‘How do you rig a Boring Sermon Contest?’

  ‘You study the form,’ said Pat solemnly. ‘Now Father O’Rourke was the undisputed favourite: the man could bore bats out of belfries. But I’d noticed one thing about Father Sean – he was the parish priest where Mick was living and half the time I was over Mick's place on a Sunday and went to Mass with him and Maria and Rachel, so I got to know this fellow’s style.

  ‘He was the nervous type and very meticulous. His sermons were always thoroughly prepared and written down and he’d stand up there and read them out like an essay, word for word. If he ever got interrupted by a child crying or an old person coughing, he’d stop and lose the thread of what he was saying and then when he started again he’d go back a paragraph, in case anyone missed any vital connection.’

  Franz smiled, despite himself.

  ‘So, the contest was up and running,’ Pat continued, ‘and all the votes and the bets were coming in nicely. The rules were that the entrants had to write down the name of the priest, the date when he preached the longest and dullest sermon, the time it took and the subject he spoke about, and that had to be verified by another voter who’d been there at the same service.

  ‘Well, the closing date was the last Sunday of the month and Father O’Rourke was way ahead in the lead. Nearly every child in the neighbourhood was voting for him. Some were even going to his church when it wasn’t their own, to make sure of getting a share of the winnings when Father O’Rourke hit the finishing line.’

  ‘This was a huge operation Pat was running,’ Franz told Ella. ‘Mass attendances were way up, the month of the contest. Children who’d made every excuse not to go to Mass were begging their parents to take them, and most of them wanted to go to Father O’Rourke’s. The man thought there was a religious revival coming.’

  ‘Now, Mick was known as a wealthy lad compared to the rest of us,’ Pat said, also addressing himself to Ella, who sat upright and tried to follow the details of this account, feeling that Pat had some reason for introducing it. ‘He did paper rounds seven days a week so he had serious money coming in, while most of the other kids were dependent on handouts when the mother slipped them a few coins. So the kids were trying to find out which priest he was betting on, but Mick wouldn’t tell.’

  ‘Because Mick didn’t know till the last minute,’ Franz said, laughing. ‘Because the bookie here had promised him a hot tip and then wasn’t forthcoming.’

  ‘I hadn’t quite worked out my strategy,’ said Pat. ‘I had to be sure it would work, because Mick was a working man, though he gave nearly all of his earnings to Maria …’

  Here Franz shot Pat a suspicious look, then a quick glance at Ella, but if Pat had some agenda he didn’t acknowledge it but continued unconcerned, ‘So I didn’t want to waste his hard-earned dosh. Also, unbeknown to him, little Rachel had emptied out her piggy-bank and brought the whole lot to me to put on Father O’Rourke …’

  ‘You never told me that!’ said Franz accusingly.

  ‘Will you wait?’ Pat demanded. ‘She brought me the money – and I told her I wasn’t going to place her bet until I got the consent of her big brother, being as how it was Mick who gave her the pocket money each week.’

  Again, Franz gave Pat that quick glance and Pat took no notice of it.

  He’s reminding Franz of the good things he did for the family, Ella thought. He’s not trying to convince him that he didn’t let Rachel and his father down; he’s just setting that one incident in context, the context of a whole lifetime of caring about them.

  ‘Of course I wasn’t waiting for Mick’s consent at all,’ Pat said unrepentantly, ‘knowing full well he was so protective of his kid sister he’d never let her risk her piggy bank money even on a dead cert like Father O’Rourke. And if I let her put her money on Father O’Rourke and she lost it, Mick would have my guts for garters. You have to appreciate the delicacy of my position there,’ he appealed to Franz.

  ‘The man is a natural con artist,’ Franz told Ella.

  ‘Natural genius,’ Pat corrected. ‘See, I’d done my research. Now, I was never the keenest of altar servers and nobody wanted to do the early service but although it wasn’t my church, I volunteered for Father Sean’s eight o’clock Mass,’ Pat said. ‘I was there bright and early every Sunday of the month that the contest ran. And by the final Sunday – the deadline for entries – I had my plan. I slipped the word to Mick to put everything he had on Father Sean, and I threw away Rachel’s entry form, which I hadn’t registered, and wrote out another one in her name, to read Father Sean instead of Father O’Rourke.’

  ‘You didn’t!’ said Franz.

  ‘See, there’s things about me you’re only just finding out, Micky Finn,’ Pat triumphed.

  ‘I knew you doctored the sermon,’ said Franz, ‘though you never admitted to it.’

  ‘Doctored is a bit strong,’ Pat said. ‘I merely collected it from the pages of the big missal where he put it the previous week. He’d write it a week in advance and then while he was preparing for weekday Masses he’d read it through and add or subtract a few lines. The pages were pasted up with these added or cut up bits.

  ‘All his old sermons were filed in a box in the sacristy, so all I did was extract a few paragraphs here and there from them and keep them by me. Then early Sunday morning I pasted them into that day’s sermon and put it back in the missal ready for him. By the Sunday itself he’d always finished tinkering with the sermon; he would run it through the photocopier without a second glance and take it up on the altar with him.’

  ‘And he didn’t notice?’ asked Ella.

  ‘Not till the last minute, when he was up there reading it out to the congregation. It threw him a bit; I was sittin
g up there beside the altar and I saw him keep turning the pages back and forward but he was never one to improvise, you see, so he read what was written there. He stumbled over it a few times and that slowed him down a bit.’

  ‘And it was enough to make him beat Father O’Rourke?’

  ‘Not in itself. There was the fact that I’d also dusted the church before everyone came in.’

  ‘Dusted?’ said Ella.

  ‘It was a routine I’d developed throughout that month – checking the pews for dust and chewing gum that the cleaning team might have missed. Father Sean was very impressed with my diligence. But this time, I dusted the pews with sneezing powder.’

  Franz started to laugh.

  ‘There was an unusual number of people with sneezing fits in the congregation that week,’ Pat remembered. ‘And every time someone sneezed, Father Sean repeated the last paragraph of his written sermon in case the congregation had missed it due to the interruption.

  ‘From where I was sitting in my altar server’s seat, I could see Mick and Rachel and the few other children checking their watches – though most of the kids were headed over to Father O’Rourke’s for the ten o’clock.

  ‘When Father Sean was nearing Father O’Rourke’s current record, even he got bored with the sermon and said he thought he might skip the next few points, but then I got this unfortunate coughing fit. So he repeated the last point he’d made and was about to round off his sermon again, when didn’t Mick get the same coughing fit I’d had, and he had to go back and go over the last few paragraphs again. Boy, were we rich!’ Pat exulted.

  ‘You got your watch?’ Ella asked.

  ‘And a radio and a new pair of trainers,’ Pat said. ‘And Franz pooled his winnings with Rachel’s and bought her a swing,’ he added smoothly.

  ‘It was for me as well,’ said Franz quickly.

  ‘And painted it pink,’ Pat continued, still addressing himself to Ella, ‘and spent hours pushing her on it, and all her hordes of little friends who came round to go on it as well. Oh, that was a good win; we made a killing, I’m telling you.’

  And you’re telling him he was a good brother to Rachel and a good son to his mother, Ella thought. Which just leaves one. The main man. The father whose paternity test he publicized to a whole parish and beyond. Get him out of the guilt of that one, Pat, if you can.

  Drifting in and out of sleep, curled up on the kitchen sofa, she listened to the different cadences of the two men’s voices, Franz occasionally mingling an Irish phrase or intonation with his now London accent.

  Pat didn’t seem to be trying now to convince Franz of anything. He didn’t mention Father Francis or Ireland but talked about his life since coming to London and asked Franz a lot of questions about his work at The Healing Place and his and Ella’s plans for their future life.

  At one point she became aware of Franz lifting the quilted throw from the back of the sofa and tucking it round her and she smiled at him, half-waking, only to fall more deeply asleep again.

  She was woken later by the sound of Pat’s voice raised in song. He sang well, she thought drowsily, with no self-consciousness. It was only when Franz joined in, a smoother voice blending well with Pat’s gravelly one, that she realized she had never before heard him sing.

  Ella had no recollection of getting up and going to bed, yet in the morning she woke up in their own room, fully clothed but under the covers, with the whole bed to herself. Getting up and going into the kitchen, she found the two men sitting side by side on the sofa, Franz with his head down on his chest and Pat with his head thrown back, both fast asleep.

  She left them there and went to have a shower then came back and made increasing levels of noise, putting the kettle on and washing the glasses from last night, to wake them. Groans behind her confirmed that the strategy was working. She made toast while Pat went for a wash and then Franz had a shower. Both looked slightly less bleary-eyed but were disinclined for conversation at the breakfast table.

  Ella made herself ginger tea to remedy her morning nausea and offered some to Pat, who shuddered and said he’d settle for ‘the real stuff.’

  Franz went out to buy the newspaper and Pat continued eating toast mechanically, fuelling himself for the day’s work ahead.

  ‘You can have eggs if you like,’ Ella offered.

  ‘This is fine, thanks. The lads usually take a break around eleven and go for a fry-up in the café.’ He leaned back and stretched. ‘That was a good night! You won’t ask me for supper again in a hurry, Ella, if I’m still here for breakfast, will you?’

  She laughed. ‘You’re welcome. It’s nice to get to know you, and you got Franz to open up last night and talk about what’s been weighing on him all this time.’

  Pat exhaled loudly. ‘Poor bastard,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think he’ll ever forgive himself?’ Ella asked. ‘About Father Francis?’

  Pat was silent for a few moments, considering. Then he said, ‘I don’t think you or I or anybody else will get him to do that. There’s only one man who’d persuade him that it wasn’t the ruin and the end of their relationship.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Father Francis.’

  Ella grimaced. ‘And it’s too late because he’s dead.’

  ‘I wouldn’t underestimate the man,’ Pat said. ‘Father Francis wouldn’t let a little thing like death stand in his way, if there was something he could do for his son. I don’t think Mick, even now, has any idea of how the man loved him.’

  They left together for work, Pat and Franz, both being early starters. Ella, still officially on holiday, went back to bed for an hour, feeling slightly nauseous despite the ginger. She woke feeling fine and phoned Maz to say she was back and to offer to go in to work if necessary.

  Maz was delighted to take her up on it. Her niece hadn’t turned up this morning and she really needed to be out all day to catch up on an overdue delivery run. She asked about Ella and Franz’s holiday in Ireland and the reason for their early return but was happy with a concise answer, that it had been good but circumstances had cut short the time.

  ‘Oh yes, the bomb scare,’ Maz said, assuming the explanation. ‘Are things all right now at The Healing Place?’

  ‘As far as we know, but Franz had to go in yesterday to check everything over.’

  ‘Of course. Well, I’m sorry it had to happen but it’s good timing for me, Ella, that you came back when you did. Are you sure you don’t mind coming into work? Thanks, then; I owe you one.’

  At work, Ella found herself thinking about the prospect of helping out with the disabled children’s project that this doctor, Jake, had set up and Pat was helping with, and felt excited about it in a way she had never managed to feel about running the health shop with Maz. If Franz got involved with raising funds or providing facilities for the project, it would be a new venture for them both. And when the baby was born, she could bring it along.

  Lost in daydreams, she hadn’t noticed the customer standing the other side of the counter, a heavily built middle-aged man in a duffle coat and a deerstalker hat with the flaps pulled down over his ears.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, smiling at him.

  ‘I’ve got delicate skin,’ he said belligerantly. ‘My wife’s sent me in for some of that Hello Vera cream.’