'Valpolicella,' I said.
'Is that wine? Oh please. Just a swig.'
I gave him the bottle and he glugged until I pulled it away from him. Then he started dancing and fooling around. 'Telling you, man,' he said. 'When I start earning some money, I'm gonnae smoke Dutch Masters and drink Cristal till it runs out. I'm talkin' me driving the lowriding Lexus. That's how it's gonnae be when Chubb and me are your superstar DJs.'
Lisa was near the edge and I told her to come back. Then she screamed and said it was horrible.
'What's the matter?' I said. She came running back over the crags. Her face was red but I couldn't hear what she was saying for the noise of the gannets. Her eyes were full of tears when she reached us, and she struggled to get her words out.
'Horrible,' she said. 'Over there. At the bottom of the rock where the nests are. There's rats! I saw one of them with a tiny bird in its mouth, a puffin or something.'
'What is it with you?' said Mark. 'It's a bloody bird sanctuary. All about nature, Lisa. What did you expect?'
'Shut it,' she said. 'I don't expect fucken rats to be eating birds right in front of me. Baby birds.'
'Give her a slug of booze, Father,' said Mark. 'She's got her finger on the trigger. Give her a few slugs.' I passed her the cup, and she smiled into it and took a sip and said it was okay. I could see Mark had smoke coming from his hand, the one he held down the side of the rock.
'I can smell that,' I said. 'Mark, I'm not stupid. Put it out or there'll be trouble.'
'It's only a wee joint, Father,' he said. 'Come on, it's our day out. Nobody's bothered.'
All I said was that I refused to argue, and I told them I was going up the top to get the view. It was stunning up there with the breeze coming up a thousand feet from the water, the light now sparkling for miles in every direction. I could hear the young people laughing and shouting just below. 'You're great, Father,' one of them shouted over the grass.
'Whatever,' I said.
To the west one could see Belfast Lough and the coast of Ireland rising up in the clear afternoon, and on the other side, Scotland was quiet and complicit, its blue hills sheltering Ballantrae and massing southwards to circle Loch Doon. Further off, there were greyer hills and one could see the grades of distance, how the clouds seemed smaller and lower by degrees, until the smallest hung over England, I suppose. I sat down to take stock, while the voices of the young people came nearer over the grass. I looked back and saw Mark walking with Lisa, his arm crooked round her neck, and he bent down and kissed her with practised ease as they walked.
Above our heads, the gannets shrieked and cut through the air in their many hundreds, small feathers falling on my hands. I sat there and could feel the heat of the youngsters behind me. 'Oh, Father,' said Mark, his voice all cracked and ready for experience. 'It's totally mad up here. Look at the water. You can see the fishing boats. It's mad. Everything looks so wee from up here.'
'It's all perspective,' I said.
I could taste the wine in the corners of my mouth. As the young people darted over the grassy summit, laughing, teasing, smoking and speaking their important nothings, I thought back thirty years to Lake Bracciano. In the summer months, we used to gather our togs and travel out from Rome to the mineral hot springs, the English seminarians spouting water from their mouths and dodging eels. You could see medieval castles on the lakeside. I remember the one at Anguillara Sabazia and the sense of a noble, unchanged world radiating through the town with its high scent of rosemary to reach us out on the lake.
On the summit of Ailsa Craig, I left the young people in a huddle with their mobile phones. They were pointlessly texting each other, and I smiled over my shoulder and made my way down to the water. Heather burst through the rocks, and my hair was thick with air as I leapt the last metre to the beach. A life is a long time not to think of oneself undressing for another person, and the vividness of the thought held me back for a moment at the edge of the sand as I took off my shirt, my trousers, my socks. The water was very cold. Even now I can feel its slimy wetness burning my legs, inching over my private parts and hugging my waist. Then I dived, the water engulfing me in a shocking, sacramental way. Every part of me loved it. I was no longer cold, merely excited and refreshed by everything, the lifting sea and my love of it, the immense generosity of the waves as I swam out from the shore. And swimming there, I wished suddenly that I could give some of this water to my dead father, let it flood through the doors and windows of our former house, diluting the water from the pipe that burst the night he died and giving fresh life again to the rooms and all our things. There was nothing frozen about the water and everything about it signalled life. I plunged down and opened my eyes to see the blackness there, and for a second it frightened me and I wanted to cry out in the private dark. But instead I swam further down and seemed to master the moment with its strange miracles of thought.
I faced the shore with the sun in my eyes. There was no citadel, no church bells or Lazio evening, but I saw the young people clambering down the rocks and shouting the odds. I couldn't hear what they were saying but I could hear them laughing and see Mark jumping up and throwing my shirt into the air. The beach was all light and Ailsa Craig was a great thing at the young people's backs. They stood waving their arms, and with their hands around their mouths, they shouted their loudest over the water. I floated on my back, an orchid of the sea, my breath quick and my heart calling out to the sky before I turned again, swimming down through the water like a person escaping his skin, becoming again a boy with splayed fingers, feeling my way through the beautiful world of salt.
CHAPTER FIVE
Schoolboy on an Elephant
IT WAS WINTER when my father died. I could hear voices downstairs, the voice of my mother, my father saying something in reply, the kitchen cupboards opening and closing. Frost glittered on the windowpane; I worried about a teddy bear's ears taking in the cold and took him down from the ledge. My mother brought a hot-water bottle and she kissed the tips of my fingers: that was our code for going to sleep. Comfort has a smell. It has a sound. Something then like roasting chicken and a voice on the radio talking about Berlin, the sound of my parents laying down cutlery. Before closing my eyes, I placed the bottle between my legs and saw a Spitfire diving through the darkness on a yellow thread.
They think my father's heart must have given out on the landing. There was certainly no shout and in the morning they came to the house and covered him with a grey blanket. I saw the latter stages from Mrs Ainsbury's flat above the Post Office; she brought Bourbon biscuits and told me to come back from the window. She kept saying, 'Everything will sort itself out,' but I knew it never would. My mother was away for hours and I was still holding the hot-water bottle in my lap from the last hours of my previous life. It turned very cold, and eventually she came back and walked slowly up the Post Office stairs. 'Your father was good at mending other people's hearts,' she said. 'But he couldn't mend his own.'
We weren't finished with my father. I had barely even begun with him and I had questions too, things he could tell me about bikes and God and enzymes and the Himalayas. My mother tried to stroke away my perplexity with a hand both soft and heavy. In my memory, those hands are a portrait with a gallery of their own: they trembled for months when she opened a letter and shook when she lifted a cup of tea, her soothing drink, each sip appearing to water and brighten her eyes. We couldn't go home for weeks after that because of the burst pipe and stayed in the spare room at the Post Office, my mother crying most nights, a long clock ticking in the hall and me sitting on the carpet turning a coin from one finger to another. It was a half crown given to me by Mrs Ainsbury: 1950, it said. George VI in profile. His straight nose was cut into the coin and I could inspect his jaw, his neat ear and his beautifully combed hair, all handsome, all silver, all mine.
One saw the larks in the spring of that year in Dalgarnock, climbing the sky above the rape fields that edged the town. I was taking confessions in
the chapel as people from the Legion of Mary performed their cleaning tasks among the pews. A copy of the catechism sat next to me on the wooden bench. It was coarsely worded, I thought; all the better I had Cowper's poems on my lap.
I sometimes think myself inclined
To love Thee, if I could;
But often feel another mind,
Averse to all that's good.
How frugal and true a sentiment for a Saturday morning, when the church smelled of faded incense and a familiar boredom had taken up residence in the fibres of the carpet and along the empty pews. I find my lips move more when I read nowadays, and my distinguished educators would blush to see me over the tattered poems. As this thought occurred, the curtain on the other side of the confessional went back and I knew it had to be them, Mark and Lisa. I knew it from the rapid swish of the curtain, the joke silence, the dunt and clump of heavy shoes.
'Please forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,' he said. 'It's been a hundred and fifty years since my last confession.'
'Go on.'
'I'm afraid my mother and me, we killed my father last night. She smoked him with a gun right in front of me. And then I put a few slugs in him, just to make sure. He refused to get out of his chair and we had to do it. We killed him and we ate him for dinner. There's plenty of him left. He's in the fridge. Anyhow. I ask for God's forgiveness and promise not to eat any fat bastards again. Also, Father: I had sexual intercourse with a bus. It was very frightening.'
'It was a single-decker,' she said.
'Yes, Father, a single-decker. It was giving me the come-on for ages. Big red bus. Brazen it was. Well. Eventually I gave in to temptation and had it off with the bus in broad daylight. God forgive me.'
'You're very silly,' I said.
'How many Hail Marys for shagging a bus?'
'At least a thousand. And another thousand for ganging up on your dad. You must learn to suppress your appetites.'
'We're bored,' said Lisa. I could hear the smack of chewing gum and smell something like hairspray.
'I've got house visits,' I said.
'Bite it,' said Mark.
'Aye,' said Lisa. 'Can we no' go on a wee drive up to Glasgow? Come on, let's go up to Princes Square. Totally awesome. Mark's fed up. He had a fight with Chubb last night.'
'A fight?' I said. 'What about?'
'Just stuff,' said Mark. 'I got burned. He's a thievin' bastard.'
'Aye,' said Lisa. 'He is so.'
They could talk. Later that day I saw Lisa stealing soap from a cosmetics shop on Buchanan Street and Mark had watches in his pockets. 'Don't steal when you're with me, Mark,' I said. 'If I see you stealing, then I'm leaving you here and that's the end of it.'
'That's hardcore,' he said.
'I mean it.'
'You won't leave,' he said, casually.
'What makes you so sure?'
'You're not the leaving type,' he said, leaning into my arm and putting his hand on the small of my back.
There were protesters wearing gas masks in George Square. I sat on one of the benches to watch them for a while. They stood under a statue of Robert Peel, and my eyes got lost in the style of them and the chants they were making.
'What you staring at?' said Lisa.
'Shut it, bitch,' said Mark.
'Fuck you, nigger,' she said.
'He's just watching all the mad hippies and their daft protest. Those people just want Saddam Hussein to run the world.'
One of the banners said: 'Say No To Religious War.'
'Don't be stupid,' I said to Mark. 'They have every right to protest if they don't agree with what's going on.'
'What do you care?' he said. 'You hate Arabs just as much as me.' As he spoke, he was lighting matches from a box and flicking them over the back of the bench.
'I don't hate anybody, Mark. And let me tell you something: you don't know the first thing about me.'
'Awright,' he said. 'Keep your wig on.'
'You don't know me. Why would you say I hate Arabs?'
'Because you let us talk nasty about them.'
'That's got nothing to do with me.'
'Right,' he said. 'Just fuck off then. I'm starvin'.'
He put a lighted match inside the box and the box flared up before he closed it. After a second, he opened the end of the box again and sucked out the smoke, inhaled, then blew it out of his mouth before chucking the spent box into a puddle. He walked off.
'He's angry,' I said.
'Naw,' said Lisa. 'Don't worry about him. He flies off the handle all the time. Let's go to Burger King.'
I looked for a second or two at the people in the masks and their colleagues giving out leaflets by the stone lions.
'It's a bit pathetic, isn't it?' said Lisa. 'For a protest.' I said nothing and stood up to go off and find Mark.
'Let's go back to Fraser's after this,' said Lisa, spinning a line of chewing gum around a purple fingernail. 'My mother works in there on Saturdays and I love stealing from the places she works.'
I handed her a five-pound note. 'Here,' I said. 'The two of you can go back to Dalgarnock on the train. This is not what I had in mind for a day out. You're going to have me strung up.'
'Don't get eggy,' she said. 'We're just havin' a buzz.'
I felt vaguely humiliated and unstable as I walked to the car park, and I stood for a while in the concrete stairwell, urging myself to be brave and leave them behind. Then eventually I walked back to the burger place where they sat at a table sucking on straws.
'Hiya,' said Mark.
My mother's life became solitary after my father died, and the solitude was productive. She said she didn't have the gift to make other people's lives orderly, and I think I understood that, keen in my own way to emerge from my father's death as a changed person. She began to write her best books. At first, she rented a farmhouse on the outskirts of the village, turning it slowly into the kind of place that better suited her own talents. The other house had really been all about my father, everybody happy to live by his clock and be instructed by his taste, yet my mother had always possessed her own more colourful vision of how to furnish and decorate her life, everything in time growing exuberant, her books no less than other things. As for me, I was always a secondary husband, a little adult, and after his death she took my complications for granted, allowing me to go in whatever direction I chose so long as it didn't put a drag on her own dear plans for survival. I hope I don't sound bitter. We each had a right to our share of bitterness, but we didn't go along with much of that, simply ordaining one another with the freedom thereafter to live whatever lives we were capable of imagining.
I asked to go away to school. It was my decision, and I think it saved our friendship. My father's higher selfishness had put a check on my mother's more local kind, and I don't think we could have been happy playing house together. The way we managed things, her eccentricity grew in step with mine, and we came quite to admire one another's jokes and to save parts of ourselves up for one another in a way that has never changed. There was never any of that weeping at the end of the holidays. She didn't go in for those displays of devoted motherhood or the guilty bursts of attentiveness that so characterised the holiday antics of my school chums' mothers. We would each have been instantly embarrassed by anything of that sort. 'Darling,' she said, 'you've been very entertaining. You've got your bags packed. Off you go to Yorkshire now.'
'Goodbye, Mrs,' I'd say.
'Okay, then. Off you go,' she'd say. 'And don't make me use up any clichés. I need them all for my books.'
We'd laugh. And that was that.
My childhood gave me a strong sense of unreality, of stories and myths being better than facts. I suppose this made me a natural Catholic but a less than natural person. Anyhow, I admired the miracles and rituals, the business of the Assumption. It all seemed to give texture to life and to the hunt for goodness, and I loved the stories and thought they were beautiful—the Last Supper and the pieces of silver, the raisin
g of the dead, the loaves and the fishes and the water into wine. I liked the Galilean weather and I liked the feel of old England too, the England of martyrs and illuminated manuscripts. The lives of the saints were my myths of adventure and transformation, my Hercules and Achilles, my Apollo, my Minerva, not stories so much as ethical testaments, consummate portraits of suffering, death and redemption, to enlarge the soul and brighten my daily efforts.
I stood at the library window and could hear the sound of plainsong traversing the halls and spreading out there in the fields. The school to me was a community not so much of excellence as of total sufficiency. But most of all it is the tone of the monks that remains, for me, an idea of exactitude and sportsmanship and continuity with the medieval world that seeped by hours and by years through the older buildings to change the character of the boys. We are supposed to have had it tough. But I don't think so. It was the world outside that seemed tough to us.
There is said to have been abuse at Ampleforth, and the newspapers can now produce individuals who recognise the gleam of lust on every friendly face from the past. I'm sure the individuals are right: there was evidence that some of the monks were troubled and troubling in that particular way, and early Masses in the crypt may have been difficult for some of the boys. But I cannot give in to the notion that the school was a hotbed of abuse, partly because 'abuse' did not have the currency in our minds—perhaps in anybody's mind—that it now enjoys on a worldwide scale. I would never seek to excuse the hurts that lonely men are known sometimes to enact upon their juniors. Yet the school was paradise to me, a heaven spotted with frailty. I can't bear witness to the horror stories because, to me—perhaps another of my blindnesses—Ampleforth was a merciful place and a truthful one. It gave me the means of forgiving others before I sought to be forgiven myself.
I was in St Thomas's House, and if you were brisk enough to ask the housemaster, Father Victor, what one was expected to learn at Ampleforth, he would go quiet, gently refuting suggestions about maths or Latin, concealing his hands in the sleeves of his black habit—we called the monks 'crows'—and smiling at the suggestion that it was our purpose there to learn to love and serve God. The crows were always rather sedate. 'You are here to learn to behave beautifully,' Father Victor would say. The library was my lair of choice: I liked the books, certainly, in which the elements of life coalesced with the beauty of language, but I also liked the desks and the chairs, the great, wooden solidity of the school furniture, each item carved by a venerable carpenter called Thompson, whose signature, discernible everywhere, came in the form of a small oak mouse.
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