Be Near Me

by Andrew O'Hagan

  I caught sight of myself in the mirror as I stood up from the table, the old dog collar feeling rough and my suit too warm for the day. Something in my discussion with Mrs Poole had stirred me, as if I might find a way to dispel boredom and burn my routines. Was I hoping for something the minute I stood up? I reached down the side of the piano and opened a rosewood box that lived there, finding hymn books and loose sheet music, materials from my old parish, much of it dusty. I leafed through the music, took a few sheets out and placed them in a folder before turning again to Mrs Poole.

  'Have you got everything?' she said.

  I checked my pockets, feeling an assortment of pens and mints and small notepads. My breast pocket had a secret fold containing a duplicate of my mother's credit card. I tapped the pocket and knew it was there. Mrs Poole stood by the sofa rubbing her hands together against the non-existent cold, and I tried to look casual.

  She laid a round basket filled with bottles of Baby Bio on the sofa. 'These are for the rubbish,' she said. 'You keep sneaking bottles in and the plants don't need fertiliser.'

  'I'm sure it's very evil, Mrs Poole.'

  'Too right,' she said. 'Evil. Those chemical companies are trying to turn everywhere into Kansas. I saw a thing on the telly.'

  'Maybe you should be putting all the TVs on the rubbish tip.'

  'You can laugh,' she said.

  'I have no opinion.'

  'That's right. You have no opinion. TV's all right in moderation. Maybe if you watched the odd bit of TV you'd know more about the world.'

  'I'm sure you're right.'

  'You'll say anything to keep me quiet,' she said. She rattled the small bottles in the basket and pursed her lips. 'It wouldn't do you any harm at all. But I have to grant you, books are more friendly.'

  I waited a second or two.

  'It's good that you come here,' I said.

  I saw something, a momentary stiffness, perhaps, that seemed at the time like a grade of panic, and I thought to cancel it by placing a friendly hand on her shoulder.

  'None of that now,' she said. 'No banalities, please. It's not the house for that sort of thing.'

  'Right you are,' I said.

  She grinned and I saw the good nature return to her face, though her hand was trembling as it reached out for a tin of polish.

  'Film music,' she said.

  'Oh, shush,' I said. 'Go about your business, woman.'

  'Au revoir,' she said.

  Mrs Poole put the polish under her arm and said nothing more as she walked across the carpet. The day was very fine. She chewed a fingernail as she reached the back of the sitting-room, and she paused there, looking out through the large window at the rose garden and a blackbird drinking from the sundial.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Mouth of the River

  DALGARNOCK IS A JUNCTION PARISH on the Ayrshire coast, about thirty miles outside Glasgow. The river now goes to the sea, but when St Ker first arrived there in 682 AD, the river went in the opposite direction, flowing through Ayrshire's bracken woods towards the lowlands of Lanarkshire, where the tributaries of several Scottish rivers gather in green, heathery lochs, and where home-remembering salmon and handmade arrowheads can still be seen glinting in the shallows.

  St Ker was a monk on Iona and the famous annals say he left the Abbey consumed with gout and the whisperings of God. He is thought to have journeyed into the Irish Sea and crossed the inland dark in a skin-covered boat. Arriving in the night to find nothing thereabouts, and half-starved, he cursed the river at the place of Dalgarnock, but the river changed course to outwit the curse and has flowed ever since to Irvine Bay.

  An empty explosives factory marks the skyline of Dalgarnock, but the better part of the town seems to be given over to black and white council houses with windows the size of bibles. Behind the houses there are shops and schools and a wasteland of gorse crowding yellow to the sea. At the furthest edge of the town, next to the late-night petrol station, a graveyard is filled to the edge of a quarry with Protestant bones. You pass the graveyard and its plastic flowers if heading by road towards the old commercial centres of Irvine and Prestwick, Ayr and Kilmarnock, the town where Robert Burns published his first work.

  Bishop Gerard was a friend from my seminary days in Rome. Some years older than me, he worked back then for the English-speaking section of the Congregation of Bishops, and I still recall with some nervousness those Glasgow words and phrases murmured through the grille of a confessional box at the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, a Gothic construction next to the Pantheon. Gerard came from the Calton area of Glasgow. People said he was tough, dutiful, harsh even, and he certainly had a fund of stories about the Connollys of Drum—his Irish progenitors, a race apart—and would take second place to no man in his admiration for Celtic Football Club. But my experience of Gerard was different. To me he seemed continually buoyed with plain spiritual grace and a love of the sacred, and he never held my childhood in England against me, not in any very serious way, though I recall that he chose not to visit the English College in the via Monserrato and never failed to scoff at our considerable fondness for cricket.

  'They say you English seminarians walk differently from other people,' he said. 'The Romans can tell you a mile away, before you open your mouths, just by how you walk. They call it il passo nordico.'

  Once he was back home and Vicar-General of the Glasgow diocese, Gerard wrote me frequent letters about what he called, with no particular respect for reality, 'the steady progress of holy matters in the land of footballing excellence'. He never failed to keep me in mind whenever he found impertinent jokes against French wine or English literature. As was intended, I spent my pastoral career in Lancashire, most of it in Blackpool, and by the time I wanted the transfer to Scotland my old friend was the Bishop of Galloway. When I petitioned him for a parish, Gerard seemed to think long and hard before offering me Dalgarnock, a decision, I like to think, made mainly in order to present a challenge to my liking for freshly cut violets.

  I wonder if he knew what he was doing. It would be fair to say the town had a suspicion of strangers. No matter. It was the beginning of a new life. Driving over the moor at Auchentiber that first October evening, I saw Dalgarnock Abbey and the town below it emerge out of the darkness like burning matter in a dream of constant renewal. I tasted sea salt coming through the open window, I turned off the radio, and immediately thought of the Balliol drinking song. Versions of myself fanned out and danced before the headlamps, and I pursued them, these furies, the window open to the ancient world and the town glowing orange and alive down there at the centre of its own embers. I turned off the headlights to see the place better and then turned off the engine, rolling down with the handbrake off to a town that appeared to know its own past.

  It was the ruined abbey that struck me most. You could see it from every point in the town, each face of the clock tower telling the wrong time and the stones underneath heaped together in memory of a Reformation that had never stopped. The south transept was nine hundred years old. It was broken down but still powerful, magisterial, emboldening. Even the moss on the fallen stones had dignity. The tower was erected in the nineteenth century after the original collapsed in a storm. My first day in the town, suitcases still unpacked, removal men on the way, I went into the tower and climbed up to the open top. The stone steps were covered with the remains of dead birds, skeletons lying in their sprigs of feathers. Death had made the birds into their own tombs, each like a nest, their departed selves now shaped like their former dwellings.

  We come from a long line of Catholics. It still feels vaguely presumptuous to speak of 'our' ancestors. I think of them as my father's people, the Andertons, those Lancashire monks and martyrs whom my father admired less for their undying faith than for the commanding way they had tried to take hold of life. He would speak of John Rigbye, son of Margaret Rigbye née Anderton, who was hanged, drawn and quartered in London in the year 1600 for refusing to join the state church.
'He was better than a saint,' my father said. 'He knew the things he had to do.' Then there was Thomas Anderton, Prior of St Edmund's in Paris between 1668 and 1669, who wrote The History of the Iconoclasts. 'These people had learning,' my father would say. 'They weren't afraid to get up in the morning.'

  Their names were everywhere in my childhood. They fell like unsettled dust from the roof beams and attics of ancient memory. There was Laurence Anderton who wrote The Protestant's Apologie under the pseudonym John Brerely. There was Robert Anderton, a student at Brasenose College who acknowledged Elizabeth I but said he would not oppose the Pope and was later executed for his trouble on the Isle of Wight. The Anderton name is often to be found on the recusancy rolls, and when I was five or six my father would sometimes take me by the hand through the graveyards of Wrightington, Ince Blundell or Hindley. I can still see dragonflies hovering over the grass and darting between the stones.

  One of my last memories of my father is on such a day, at a graveyard outside Wigan. 'You see,' he said, bending down at a grave and scraping the stone with his fingernail. 'Anderton. Cotton-mill worker, it says.'

  'Not the one that got executed in London?'

  I remember him making a friendly frown and his blue surgeon's eyes swallowing me and the graveyard, its trees and its toadstools too. I can see him so clearly with his good hair and the pale sun at his back, my father reaching out for my wrist and squeezing—it seems now—for all the years that he wouldn't know me.

  'We didn't only die for God,' he said.

  The Mother Lodge stands in Main Street. It is a rather gaunt building of reddish local stone. Dalgarnock people call it the 'Number Nothing', for it houses the oldest Masonic establishment in Scotland, Lodge No. o. Members are wont to defend the title against the claims of the Edinburgh lodges with reference to compelling medieval hearsay and land rights going back to the foundation of the abbey.

  My first winter in the town, a group of men were standing outside as I passed. Some of them had grey hair fairly shining with pomade, and they chewed gum and wore training shoes, each man seeming to be in preparation for some kind of cardiovascular event. They began to laugh as if to communicate how stupid it was for a Catholic priest suddenly to waft past them in the street wearing his dog collar, but their smiles turned sinister when I lifted my hand to wave back and return the smile, as if war songs suddenly echoed in their blood at the sight of my insulting friendliness.

  The men at the door of the Mother Lodge made me feel as if the sight of me was hurting their eyes. Some younger ones came out of the door behind them and froze. I stared for a few seconds. 'Good day,' I said, and though I seldom really hear the tone of my own voice, I heard it then, sounding, I'm sad to say, not unlike the Lord Privy Seal.

  'On yer way!' said one of the youngsters.

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'Away ye go, ya papish scum.'

  The older men retreated to the top of the steps, as if the matter was now out of their hands and out of their league. But one of them, a rather distinguished-looking gentleman, seventy-something I'd have said, a venerable statesman with white hair and ruddy cheeks, leaned forward and winked at the younger fellow. 'That'll do fine,' he said. 'We don't want any kinda trouble here.'

  'Don't worry, auld yin. I think he's got the message.' He looked again. 'That's right, I'm talking aboot you, ya English bastard.'

  He glared at me. He was wearing a Rangers football top. I was surprised by what he said and how he said it, but I suppose my surprise would have insulted them further. The older men seemed friendly with the younger ones but also somewhat embarrassed by them. It seemed possible to me that something had changed lately in terms of how those people inhabited their great beliefs and prejudices. The younger men growled like people rather sure and rather proud of their injuries, and this man in the football colours—his drunk eyes, his thin, begging laughter—appeared instantly to assume the wisdom of common authority. The younger men had an eager proximity to violent action, as they sometimes do, and this alone was enough to crowd the old men's moderation into silence.

  'Go on,' said the blue top. 'Fuck right off. We don't want you here.'

  I felt so mortified I almost laughed, just as one might when a mood of contentment gives way to sudden embarrassment. No one had ever spoken to me like that before: a priest gets used to being respected and sometimes pitied, but never in my life had anyone made me feel so vulnerable and so disliked. Something in the man's face had seemed to represent ancient grievances, and his hard eyes and his balled-up fists had spoken of some vast and unknowable capacity for rage. I swear it was new to me in that narrow street, and I walked back to the chapel feeling hurt and disjointed and confused, thinking perhaps I knew less about other people and less about Dalgarnock than I ought to know.

  The Church of St John Ogilvie stands at the top of a lane opposite an abandoned railway station. They built the chapel in the 1930s to appease Irish labourers who had come to work at the local iron foundry, and their own schools followed soon after. During those first months in the town, I suppose it shocked me how lazy the Catholics were, especially given the efforts of their industrious ancestors, but then, in such matters, the tribal element will often eclipse the spiritual. It turned out that Dalgarnock's small community of Catholics—much like their opposites—were enslaved to the denominational impulse: few of them regularly attended Mass, none sent their boys into the priesthood, yet they loudly swelled with sectarian pride. Northern Ireland was just across the water, and what Dalgarnock had was a briny dilution of Ireland's famous troubles, without the interest in votes, assemblies or breakable guns. Hidden in the trees across from my church, smothered in part-time grievances, there stood a windowless hut painted royal blue, in which the band of the Dalgarnock Orange Order chose to rehearse each Sunday morning.

  I blamed Mrs Poole's soup for the heartburn. I felt an empty, dyspeptic scorch as I drove to the school, like a rising argument at the centre of my chest, and I found there were no Rennies in the glove compartment. Then I thought maybe it was the white wine, a nightmare for heartburn, though you couldn't fault the freshness of a good and well-made Alsace, the taste of Easter and crushed flowers.

  The headmaster at St Andrew's, Mr McCallum, was a God-fearing alcoholic of the old stamp. The pupils called him Fuck-Face. He drank in his office and seemed to live in fear of the changing times, also in dread of the nuns who taught geography and French. Generally speaking, he would display the defensive meekness of the professional drunk, but now and then his disorder would express itself in a wonderful display of bad temper. But McCallum was kind, asking me if I'd like, as a historian, to give the occasional lesson, an offer I found obscurely flattering. I never taught the curriculum, of course, the curriculum being useful only for the halfhearted cultivation of barely obedient idiots, so I took the chance to talk about Pugin and William Byrd to the senior students. They seemed to enjoy it well enough, so long as you let them drink their fizzy drinks throughout the lesson and didn't give them homework.

  One got the impression the staff believed very strongly that education was a matter of bitter entrenchment as opposed to any sort of managed revelation, and they seemed in cahoots with the children when it came to the sorry victory of rights over responsibilities. Stupid children are always aware of their rights, and so are stupid teachers: they share a belief in the supreme relevance of what they think themselves and wield these opinions like home-made weapons in the war against self-improvement. The staffroom at St Andrew's was worse than the playground, the domain of idle bullies, a place of pecking orders, where the ignorant and the disappointed daily stalked the carpet tiles, fully in love with their petty jealousies and three sugars. The classrooms were both garish and dirty, which doesn't aid the spirit when one is leading on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

  It should've been a holiday, but it seemed most parents would do anything to avoid having their children at home an extra day, including sending them to the Kissing of the Cross.
I bumped into Mr Dorran at the edge of the sports wing. Dorran was Head of Music and very short, always wearing needlessly ugly ties over his junior shirts. Not for the first time, I wondered if he had become a teacher in order to feel like one of the world's naturally tall people. He certainly swaggered among the pupils as if his chance to be big had finally come. I also noticed he had the beginning of a moustache.

  'Ah, just the man,' I said, placing the crucifix and some other things on the register table.

  'Hello, Father David,' he said, trying to dodge me with an armful of violins. 'I'm awful busy. This was supposed to be a day off.'

  'Of course,' I said. 'Just a word in your small ear.'

  (I see now that in many ways I was not wise. Dorran smarted.)

  'If it's about the music, you must spare me.'

  'Not a bit of it, Mr Dorran,' I said. 'I made a request of you at the beginning of Lent. Let us not have any more of these rubbishy hymns. There is no one else to whom I can address these remarks. You are the man in charge. Rubbishy hymns, horrible words. What are these hymns about sunny days and being happy? Where do they come from? In the new term, can we not progress a little to ... well, to proper music?'

  'Excuse me, Father,' he said. 'Those hymns have been used in Scottish schools for quite some time. They are very popular. The pupils like to sing them.'

  'They also like to sing Eminem, Mr Dorran, and we shan't be introducing that to the Mass just yet. I gave you the music. I didn't hear any of it at the Mass for the beginning of the Easter holiday. Could you not manage "Cross of Jesus"? It being Easter. "Cross of Jesus"?'

  'I don't know it.'

  'Music by John Stainer, 1841–1901,' I said. 'Words by William Sparrow-Simpson, 1860–1952.'

  I squeezed some sheet music between his instruments.

  'Please don't do that, Father. I won't be patronised in this way every time I see you.'

  'Mr Dorran, I'm not asking for the "Stabat Mater".'