And I am a fool. There is an equality of dependence — we both want each other, if in different ways, in that hour of nakedness — but the encounter is a lie. If I realized at the time that I was paying for an abstract sensation then that sensation would disappear. The only thing the boy wants from my trousers is the contents of my wallet. But for the encounter to work I have to put on an emotional mask and believe that if he doesn’t find me sexy or exciting now that this could change any second. Suck in that stomach; yawn some colour into those cheeks; push your fingers through that thinning hair. Repulsion to attraction — how fickle the fuse! For me too. The excitement which flares to the madness of craving — erection straining every vein, heart spraining towards cardiac arrest — can disappear with one sarcastic, sibilant word, one large mole sprouting hair, one tooth missing, one gum-line of furred white plaque.
I know the most I can hope for is a fondness from the boys, and professionalism, but my fantasies remain, and not just physical ones. The young ones who are my regulars, fully grown but not fully mature, I imagine guiding gently to wisdom. ‘I have a reading list for you. I have tickets for the theatre. We’re going on a trip to Paris, an afternoon in Oxford, a summer weekend in Norway. Oh, the fjords. We’ll glide on a boat into the twilight and beyond, into the dark, water-rippling hours, your head in my lap, your eyes fixed on mine.’
Stupid illusion! Remember Ian? You took him on a weekend trip to Malaga but his eyes were on the boy standing at the bar. Do you remember? They exchanged glances, a lowering of the eyelids, a smile out of the corner of his lips, a too-slow sip of the bottle of Heineken. I tried to break the mood: ‘Let’s go for a walk in the old part of town, Ian. There’s a beautiful Gothic church which looks so lovely at night-time.’
I could see him weighing it up. I could see he didn’t want to join me. I could see him glance at the other boy again. I could see that he realized that I was paying for this holiday and for his flight home. I could see his resentment, then its calm, pragmatic replacement with resignation.
‘Let’s just have another drink here,’ he said, lifting the lip of the beer bottle slowly, casually to his mouth, with another glance towards the boy at the bar.
‘But there’s a lovely pub near the church, Ian. We could get an ice cream too.’ I could hear the whine in my voice, my stupid voice, my pathetic, old-man routine of ancient buildings and the romantic walk to find them, shaking out a crumpled map and moving the tip of my nose up and down to find the correct angle for my bifocals. And a bloody ice cream! Strangely I even sensed a trickling away of sexual energy along with my social impotence. I looked at him and suddenly felt a kind of revulsion. Why was I here? Why was I exposing myself to such humiliation, hiding in the half-light of dingy bars with my puffy face and wheedling smile? I knew my hair was greasy and thin (we’d walked up the hill and I was sweaty), and my eyes were tired, and my neck was like an old towel, and my ears full of sprouting hairs. I knew I was wearing an outfit which was slightly too small and slightly too young for me. Beige shorts over fat, sunburnt legs, a frontal hump under my new turquoise polo shirt. I felt a heave of sorrow.
‘I’m going for a pee,’ he said, standing up and walking past the bar with another heavy glance. It took four seconds for the boy to put down his wine glass, wipe his mouth, stand up, adjust his belt and saunter over in the same direction, to the men’s room. He didn’t even look at me, to register my jealousy. Perhaps he didn’t even think about it, couldn’t believe that we might be ‘together’. I saw the door of the bathroom open for the second time before it was fully at rest from its first swinging. What could I do? Join them? Leave? No, I just sat there, looking at my drink, looking at my fingers holding on to the glass which contained the drink, my jaw slack and my back sore. It was more than three minutes before the boy appeared again and swivelled back into his seat at the bar to continue his drink. Maybe they had not spoken or communicated in any way. Maybe Ian had been taking a shit in a cubicle. Maybe they’d been blowing each other in a cubicle. Ian finally came out and walked back over to me, smiling.
‘OK, let’s go now. I’m kind of tired,’ he said. Why did I know that somehow later the two of them would meet up and would batter against each other’s bodies in frantic lust in some cheap room with rattling air-conditioning, clothes strewn on a dirty floor, clawing in passion until the final spray of ecstasy spilled over threadbare sheets?
I should return to prayer, I thought. I should take out my musty breviary, become pure, walk reverently up the cold marble steps to the altar, hands together, thumbs crossed, eyes down, lips kind but firm. I was resolved. A new path would not be that difficult to take. But then, the humid walk back to our hotel, cicadas chirping, washing hanging out of the windows, dogs licking at scraps in dark corners, a distant guitar strumming — Andalusia’s hot breath. We arrived, then up to our room, then shoes off, then Ian plunged his tongue deep inside my ear. It was all I wanted.
16 Silver jubilee
______________________
I look back over my priesthood — twenty-five years, my anniversary is next year. How pointless it all seems, as if I had sailed to a desert island after my ordination and begun to live some weird fantasy life there about which no one knew anything or cared. My memories are like shells, dry and empty and dead, the tide creeping in and out and slowly reducing them to sand. Blank squares in a out-of-date diary.
What did I think my life would be after I was ordained? I’d lived around priests since infancy so I knew the public face, but I didn’t know about the private failures and the sheer monotony of their lives. Failure: ‘the omission of expected or required action’, as one dictionary puts it. Interesting that it’s defined as a passive fault... omission. Jobs have goals, the achievement of which is their very definition. To be a pilot is to fly a plane. To be a bricklayer is to lay bricks. Priesthood is infallibly ‘effective’, so the theologians tell us (we consecrate, forgive, bless, and it always works), but underneath theology’s theoretical confidence is the constant undertow of practical failure. We fail to lift spirits or heal souls. We answer big questions with little lies. With a few exceptions (Father Damien with his lepers, Don Bosco with his urchins) we fail to make a difference, week after week. Omission is the invisible footprint behind every step.
Then there are fewer and fewer of us as every year passes. Countries where we sent missionaries in the 19th century now send missionaries to us. We have four foreign supply priests here in the Altrincham diocese, two from India, one from Brazil, and Father Chiwetel, the young, handsome Nigerian. They have tremendous energy but their enthusiasm is more dispiriting to me than contagious. It’s too easy somehow. (Although with Father Chiwetel of course I was later to make an astonishing, disturbing discovery.)
And monotony. There are many monotonous jobs — workers on assembly lines or underground train drivers — but the priest lives with monotony of the soul. The liturgy’s ring of words circling each day is made worse by the expectation that it should be uplifting or life-changing. This is a monotony which carries responsibility on weary shoulders. To say the same words every day. To walk out and say the same words, often to a gathering of three old women in a cold church. To dress up and light the candles and say the same words the same words the same words... and then not to believe them. Savour-less salt smarting in the cut.
My Silver Jubilee and my 50th birthday in the same year. Silver-haired jubilee, silver chest hair, silver pubic hair. Twenty-five years of half-mast, half-assed service. I’ve been sodomized at the very moment that a parishioner was gasping for a last breath in a hospice. I’ve gagged on the meat of a stranger’s penis whilst my flock was being ravaged by wolves. I’ve joined the pack of wolves and buried my head deep into their tick-infested fur. Judas was paid thirty silver pieces for his betrayal. Five more to go...
17 Wounded healer
______________________
The wounded healer appellation (from Jung, I think) is an attractive one for a priest. No pries
t is not a sinner. But there are times when the full extent of my moral decrepitude is suddenly made clear to me, as if I am handed a pair of strong binoculars and see with absolute horror of what my life truly consists. I’m terrified. It feels as if I wield an unsheathed knife, that I slash my way through my days, harming everything in my path — a wounder not a healer.
Occasionally when I’m travelling and the opportunity arises and I’m in the mood I will slip into a Confessional. Usually the priest is kind, brief and encouraging: ‘Try to do better, Father’ is about as far as it goes. But once on a trip to London I joined the queue at one of the bigger city churches. Finally it was my turn. I knelt in the shadows, and then the priest came at me like an enraged pit-bull terrier:
‘Do you realize, Father, the damage you are doing living your priestly life as you are? The opportunities left unused, the graces cast aside, the hungry souls you could feed and to which instead you deny nourishment. Worse, you are contaminating the very food you are meant to distribute. You are a priest! Consecrated to God! And you’re living like a spiritual slob. And having sexual encounters with all those people... what on earth do you think you’re doing?’
‘I don’t know, Father. I... ’
He interrupted, ‘How many of these... p-prostitutes have you paid for over the past year for instance?’
‘I really can’t say, Father. This week it’s been two but... ’
‘This week! You are a disgrace to the Church. A poisoner of souls. You need treatment. You need to undergo serious penance. Get yourself a regular spiritual director, Father. Have a plan of life. Say the rosary.’ He sighed but not now with anger or irritability. I could tell he had begun to calm down.
‘This isn’t the time or place to go into this but phone me and we can arrange to meet outside and talk at greater length. You really do need help, Father. Anyway, for your penance I want you to ... ’ He paused as if to think of something suitable. ‘The rosary. Say all fifteen decades every day for the next month, on your knees, in front of the Blessed Sacrament. And now I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father... ’
I agreed with his assessment in a way but the wrath, the impatience, the vexation in his voice, the sense that he had his life in order and therefore was able to help me sort out mine, destroyed any possibility of repentance for me. And, of course, he was the last person I would phone in a crisis. Maybe he was just tired that day — it can be exhausting sitting hour after hour in one of those airless boxes — but was he not also wielding an unsheathed knife? I’ve wounded people in my priestly life but so has he, in a different way, maybe worse. My lesions were legion but they were mostly superficial, scratches of passion, of weakness, of indulgence. He dug the blade deep. He was a surgeon without sutures.
18 Roses and thorns
______________________
Oh how I hated the rosary! I prayed five decades a day throughout my childhood and the ache of its monotony was a torture. The words seemed like metal in my mouth, the twenty minutes an endless yawn — no, not a yawn because I was wide-awake with exasperation. And on the rare occasions when I forgot: ‘Have you said the rosary today, Joe?’ Seeing my hesitation and my reluctance to lie about something so sacred, my mother would gently reprimand me: ‘Could you not give even twenty minutes of your day to Our Lady? Never go to sleep without saying the rosary. It’s your duty to our Blessed Mother. It makes her smile to see her children calling on her in this way? I wasn’t convinced but it was easier to do it than not. Out of bed I’d roll, on to my knees, the beads pulled one by one through my fingers. My not-so-blessed mother would smile and quietly leave the room. I’d finish the Litany of the Saints and imagine carving another notch on my bedpost of sanctity, another soul released from Purgatory’s flames.
In the early years it felt good. A lot of traditional Catholic devotion is built on a kind of inoculation process: you make people sick with guilt, then supply the antidote; you inflict a wound and then, lo and behold, you have the magic ointment; you create a freezing room, watch people turn blue with theological hypothermia, and then turn on the heat. ‘Your sins are forgiven. Go in peace? And they do. Rosy cheeks warm. With a smile of joy. If a placebo cures the patient shouldn’t the doctor be happy?
Then there were the public recitations of the rosary, after or before Mass. The little idiosyncrasies of each reciter: Blessed art thou among women or amongst women. Where to place the stresses or the pauses? And then those who would canter through the words in a blur, or begin the next ‘Hail Mary’ when we were still saying ‘at the hour of our death, Amen’. I wanted to scream. When we reached the seventh bead I would feel a sense of relief: one more decade would soon be over.
Related to the rosary was the scapular. If you died wearing the brown scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel you would be released from Purgatory on the first Saturday after your death, the Sabbatine Privilege. My mother was never without her scapular and encouraged me to wear one too, a stringy thing with two brown patches worn like a yoke over the shoulders. It never stayed in place but rode up, tangling around the neckline in a semi-strangulation. The cloth became sweat-impregnated and dandruff-dusted so I used to wash mine once a week under the hot tap with a drop of shampoo. I knew I couldn’t launder away its sacred properties but I was concerned that I might lose its benefits should I die when it was drying on the doorknob and not actually draped around my neck.
‘Say the rosary, wear the scapular,’ the constant message from the three children of Fatima to whom Mary had appeared in 1917. Interest in such apparitions was dying out by the time I entered the seminary, but my mother’s generation was devoted to Lourdes and Knock and Loreto and especially to Fatima. ‘Souls go to Hell because there is no one to pray for them,’ said one of the seers. What can you reply to that except to get on your knees? Nothing wrong with prayer, but such an admonition so easily becomes a pathological source of obsession. It was for my mother. She awoke every morning to a cruel taskmaster, a God of calculations, a moneychanging tyrant who required her Hail Marys to persuade him to prevent souls from tumbling down to the abyss. She hadn’t learned that any calculator God might have to measure our shortcomings perpetually resets to zero.
19 Stripped youth
______________________
The terror of the morning. The brain’s sudden brightness before the dawn. Bright with dark thoughts. Consciousness blindingly alert. Life’s total irrelevance, its pinprick length a backdrop to the monstrous importance of every needlepoint moment. That sudden wake-up vision, sleep rubbed from eyes, the unavoidable face of the day. Is faith’s bleakest black hole at this hour a clarifying (the magnifying mirror of grace) or a distortion of the truth? Is truth trees or the wood in which they grow? I turn over in bed, a rotting leaf in that forest, a lost child in that wilderness.
Lost childhood memories. The morning. Burrowed into bed. A shiver of delight. Safe in the tomb. Hideout. Scent of farts and hormones. I must not touch, mustn’t even name it. I hear my mother downstairs. In the kitchen. She knows and sees everything. Holy purity. Sex. Outside of marriage not a thought not a word not a glance not a hint is permitted. St Francis rolled in the snow, another saint flung himself into a bramble bush, ‘sticky as tar’ said another. I feel my pyjamas stretch. I burrow deeper, darker. My pyjamas stiffen still further. Footsteps up the stairs. Door flung open. Bedclothes ripped aside, whimpering body, nowhere to hide, furious face glowering, slash of belt or palm’s vicious smack. Downstairs toast is burning.
The winter day begins. The windows are caked with frost. I leap out of bed. To the cold bathroom. I can’t pee until I lose my erection. The morning hard-on: Satan’s salute. Frigid splash from the tap. Scooped-up to pat-down haystack hair. Unwashed dressing gown, grubby pockets, marmalade on sleeves. Three new pimples. Acne’s spots on top of earlier scars. Squeeze to red blotch. Pimples still unexploded. Pick nose clean of night’s mucus. Twist arms through creased school uniform. Yesterday’s shirt’s filthy collar. Slurp Nescafé from a b
eige mug. Freezing milk bottle’s condensation. Butter-smeared knife in the slosh of cold, unsoapy water. Unfinished homework. Undigested breakfast. Cramp of constipation. Greasy hair still sticking up. Satchel on shoulder then dash to school.
How clearly I remember those cruel, youthful mornings, the mood of which seems destined to repeat like clockwork up to the wind-down of life’s final, futile evening: coals to clinkers to dust in the slumbering, ashen grate.
20 Slippery slope
______________________
When my mother began to lose her memory I began to lose my inhibitions. Her decline was steep and I followed her down the slope. I was at her house one afternoon when I realized in the course of our conversation that nothing I said was registering, everything was slipping through the fingers of her mind, her attention was completely unfocused. She said some wildly irrational things during my visit and twice lashed out with bizarre, vicious remarks. For the whole of my life until that moment it was as if she had been standing next to me, watching everything I did. Now, as her mind began to soften, I felt like she was out of the room, out of earshot. It was disturbing and liberating in equal measure.
The back pages of a free newspaper picked up by chance in the dentist’s office: ‘Manchester City Centre, M4M, 23, sensual massage, student’, along with a phone number. It wasn’t the first time I’d been tempted to try some casual sexual activity, but my sense of disorientation after my mother’s deterioration opened a door for me. In losing her grip on herself she was losing her grip on me. I suddenly felt reckless. Massage? Why not! My shoulders were tight. It was sensual not erotic, probably just physical therapy really. An unregistered osteopath. I didn’t need to do more than I felt comfortable doing. I wonder what he looks like? My heart began racing.
The Final Retreat Page 5
