The Final Retreat

by Stephen Hough

  So let me think, if I’ve been going for my fuck-fix once a week for about five years then that’s almost three hundred... no, surely not. How could there be so many? Well, there are repeat visits of course, but still I’m astonished by the arithmetic. So many faces and bodies, few of which I can remember. What’s mad is that I actually sympathize with the Church’s teaching. I know what I’m doing isn’t good. You can’t rewrite the moral theology textbooks to include the sanctification of casual sex. Although maybe you can — and who cares about those wretched manuals anyway? I’ve prayed many times for a man who was peeling off his body-hugging underpants, Superman stretched over the bulging crotch then cast down on the floor. I’ve reclined on a strange bed, sheets drenched with semen and sweat, mine and his, and felt my heart reach out with compassion and tenderness. I’ve wanted to stand up and preach the love of God with a used condom rather than a crucifix in my hand.

  I’m addicted to the pleasure, of course. The big bang of orgasm. Then the vague hope of a tenderness which will give that orgasm a bigger bang. A hit, they call it, when heroin floods the vein — brain to dick in an arterial shoot. But beyond the neurological fact of my firing dopamine cylinders I’ve also become addicted (this is sick) to the degradation itself. The Gethsemane of the barbed-wire fence through which I drag myself time after time after scar after scar — emotional wounds hardened yet still scratched to blood. The search for meaning on a scrambled screen, then the dazed, delirious glare at the jumbled letters and their empty message. I’ve grown to love the wrench of fake caresses, a bulimic abuse which heaves my stomach inside-out in a nausea of lust. I wallow in that post-coital interlude — shot, sucked-dry, the penis’s limp repose, the flaccid seconds ticking away until it can be aroused to rigidity once more and teased up to the tipping point of another orgasm.

  My loneliness itself ends up being a comfort, a clarity in the mist. Pain’s truth too, emotional pain but also the red-raw rash where intercourse scratches me dry. Impaled. Sinking lower as he pushes deeper. A gouging of spirit, my anus an eye socket scraped empty of sight.

  49 Fake

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  My whole life is a fake, so much dishonesty, so many lies. A living lie in fact. Nothing is authentic. There have been days when every word out of my mouth was false, all sawdust and broken glass. No one really knows me. I act the whole time. I bend down to play with children but I dislike children. I smile at people but I’m full of distaste for them. I explain the miracles in John’s Gospel to the secondary school assembly but I don’t believe they happened. I go to a parishioner’s home after a funeral and select comforting words as someone might select a tie to match a shirt. Everything’s a sham. I’m waterproof. A hurricane of distress around me but making sure I remain dry. Is everyone secretly like this? Surely there have to be people who live authentically, whose gestures and words have a ring (lovely word) of truth about them. Repentance? I can’t even stay pure during Confession: ‘Bless me, Father. I have sinned. In my last Confession I had no contrition or purpose of amendment. And I’m not sure I’m sorry now that I wasn’t sorry then.’ A terrible, dizzy circle of mendacity. ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ But how? Administer the last sleeping pills? Cut out the cancer of the heart which is life itself?

  If I said all of this to a sympathetic priest he could probably bring some comfort. ‘Father Joseph, I’m not going to tell you that these are temptations because you know that. I’m not going to assure you that nothing can come between you and the love of God, or that nothing is beyond hope and healing, or that a mere glance in the direction of Christ is enough, or that it is at this very point of darkness that you are being offered the light of grace. You know all of these things, Father.’ Of course I do, I can write the script for that priest. I am doing it now. That’s the problem, I know the answers to my own questions.

  Nevertheless, despite my anger and frustration here at Craigbourne, at least I’m trying to remove some of the varnish and strip down to the grain — despite the risk that when one’s whole life is a veneer there may be no grain left to uncover. Sanding down and down... worn down, a pile of dust mounting at my side and the edifice that is me slowly reduced to nothing.

  But has my life really been so useless, so unremittingly depressing as these notes suggest? Father Neville asked me yesterday to make a list of positive things that have happened since I became a priest, blessings received from God as well as blessings I’ve shared with others, ways my ministry has made an impact in my parishioners’ lives. This is harder for me to do than cataloguing my sins. I’m used to self-examination meaning what’s wrong rather than what’s right. I remember a priest in Confession once asking me what I’d done over the past month about which I was proud rather than ashamed. My immediate reaction, after a wince of embarrassment, was that I could think of nothing; and then as things popped into my mind I was too shy to mention them. It seemed so crass to talk about my flimsy virtues, to try to list the paltry good deeds I’d done with such mixed motives, like a sort of pathetic self-justification: ‘I held the balls of Dimitri as his cock was pressed against my tonsils but... oh yeah, I did hold the hand of that frightened woman in the hospital bed the night before her amputation. Both legs.’

  But now I think about it I suppose I can recall moments of self-giving in my life (this is so hard for me to write down). I do visit my parishioners regularly, especially if they are in hospital. Yes, three times a week for a couple of hours in the evening I am there at Altrincham General, going from bedside to bedside, listening to the woes of the patients, trying to lift spirits. I continue to visit the nursing home where my mother was living until her death and spend some time talking to the residents. I put aside some money every week for an orphanage in India. I clean and tidy up a bit before my housekeeper arrives so she will have less to do. I’m good with older women, those facing hard times after bereavement or marital breakdown. I never turn away anyone who knocks at the presbytery door. I give up my seat on the bus to the elderly. I’m nice to supermarket check-out girls. I smile at babies in prams... God! The descent into banality. My greatest virtue must be to feel a surge of nausea in my gut as I write down this saccharine shit.

  I’m sorry but there’s something obscene about raking around for scraps of gold amongst our daily dross, even if it’s still worse to rake around in order to probe the dung — and then to be disappointed when it no longer stinks, like missing a scab that’s healed and which can no longer fascinate as we pick at its crust. Self-forgetfulness is the ideal, which treads both virtue and vice underfoot as it walks towards another’s needs. The luminous good works of patience and kindness are like music which you can’t see or hold or possess — vibrating for a while, then remaining only in the memory. Virtues never belong to us. They are always beyond our grasp.

  50 Serpents, poison, sickness

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  I came across these words of Christ in St Mark’s Gospel just now: ‘Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. These signs will accompany those who believe: they will handle serpents; if they drink poison it will not harm them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.’

  Serpents, poison, sickness... wait a minute! This simply isn’t true. People today, believers or not, are not unharmed if they drink arsenic or grasp cobras. Nor do Christians go around laying hands on the sick and watching them recover. I know people claim such healings take place (and the jury’s out for me on Lourdes) but that’s not what the Gospel is saying anyway. It doesn’t suggest that these things can happen, it claims they will happen, as a matter of course. And, moreover, not only that these things will happen but that these are the very signs which will distinguish those on their way to Heaven from those on their way to Hell. The context makes that clear.

  So if the claims about serpents, poison and sickness are untrue then perhaps the claims about being saved and damned are untrue too, or at least not quite
so clear. Maybe ‘believe’ is a broader concept than we think — and perhaps there are other ways to think of the three witchdoctor acts than might at first be apparent.

  ‘Believing’ in Christ is to ‘put on the mind of Christ’, as St Paul puts it, not simply to affirm him or to accept a dogma. I can see my mother’s eyes rolling at this liberal bending around the plain sense of the words but I never saw her swallowing bleach, nor could she bring my father back to life as he lay pulped under the bus on their honeymoon.

  To condemn is to be condemned: is this the infamous ‘unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit’? The guilt of one who maintains there is an unforgivable sin in the first place, who fails to condemn the very idea of condemnation. Surely such a person has indeed failed to ‘put on the mind of Christ’?

  — Handling serpents: subduing violence and hatred, overcoming them with love.

  — Drinking poison: absorbing the venom around us, keeping our peace then sharing that peace.

  — Laying hands on the sick: touching others with kindness beyond words, a balm for those whom medicines cannot reach.

  51 Death and hell

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  I’ve always been afraid of dying; yet on other days, in the blear between sleeping and waking, I actually long for death. Not (if only!) like confident St Paul: ‘To live is Christ, to die is gain.’ For me to live is emptiness when it’s not panic, and to die would be to be finished with both. As I half-wake from my narcotic dreams I want instantly to return to them, a soggy crouton sunk deep-down under a thick pea soup. Sleep as permanent hibernation with no seasons to arouse me, dark as a pillow pressed into heavy eyelids.

  On other days, more decisively, more chillingly, I realize I could choose never to have to fear death again. I could choose to extinguish my life like a candle, to make a final exit from the stage, to release the safety curtain’s catch one last time as the audience crowds away from the theatre to the laughter and comfort of their homes. Lights low. Temperature cooling like a corpse. I could turn off the refrigerator one last time, empty out the last pot of marmalade, the last wedge of dried-out cheese, the last shrivelled carrot, the last curdling carton of milk, and move the dial to off for ever. No more of life’s groceries, life’s queueing up to pay, life’s schlepping shopping home, life’s diminishing supplies constantly in need of replenishing. Switch off, then the swish of a gently-closed, vacuum-sealed door.

  But there are some good days, energetic days, when there is heartrending regret at the thought of eventually having to part for ever from life’s jubilant feast, the dread of dying as a physical flinch, as an ache of longing. The fridge is full, its shelves are bowed: ‘Let’s have a party!’ The sheer celebration of mere existence: every tree’s branches outflung with joy; every surge of floral colour; the giggle of surf at the ocean coast; the smile of sun on dipping sea.

  However, when death does come, on the other side of its final door there awaits the Christian judgement, Heaven or Hell, the most serious seriousness. No escape. I’ve reached the last Dead End. And then it begins. Anfangen! All the things God forbade us to do to others he permits to be done to us... without ceasing. The endless pain, the excruciating torture, the extinguished hope, the vanquished compassion, the closed ear. ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive the one who sins against me? Seven times?’ ‘Not seven times but seventy-seven times,’ said Christ. Yet now we find ourselves accused of a seventy-eighth sin. No, it can’t be. The dead end has to have an exit.

  And it does! Back to the beginning. The foundational story. Abraham and Isaac. Just as it was utterly impossible that God would really want Abraham to kill his son (sit with the concept, see beyond the words on the page), so the idea of God creating a universe in which going to Hell is possible is... impossible. Impossible! Ah, but that’s it! That’s the solution to the ancient problem. That internal rebellion, the wrenching ‘no’ inside Abraham’s heart to the command to kill his son was what God wanted to hear. The supreme test. ‘If you choose to oppose me rather than do this dreadful thing then we can really be friends. It’s a game, don’t you see! I didn’t ask you to kill your son to prove your obedience to me. I asked you so that in refusing to obey me you would prove that you understood something of who I am. That I am not like the other gods. When you cry “no” to such an abomination you speak with my voice.’

  Christians have not played along with God’s game. We were never meant to accept the idea of Hell. We were meant to fight against it, with breaking, outraged hearts. ‘Impossible! I simply refuse to accept this teaching. It’s not worthy of you, Lord. It goes against everything we know of you. It’s monstrous!’ And then God will clap his hands with glee (are you smiling yet?): ‘Bravo! If you’ve learned anything about me over the past six thousand years let it be this: I could never allow anyone to go to Hell.’

  To believe anyone ends up in Hell (inexplicably some people actually want others to be there) is perhaps the only sin in the universe.

  52 William

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  It started in the usual way: the website, the chessboard of faces or torsos, the profiles underneath, aprons of titillating information. But there was something unusually striking in William’s mugshot, as if caught on the wing, as if he was not really trying, as if he was busy with other things... as if he was somehow out of my league. His eyes were not looking into the lens of the camera but were still clear in the image, sparkling, pool-blue, a Hockney-splash into which I wanted to dive deep. Rent boys want to be rented, but William seemed unconcerned. This excited me. Then the more revealing photos were stunning. I zoomed to maximum so I could count every mole on his stomach, until his nipples were like planets filling the night sky of my computer screen.

  He was hard to contact. I wrote immediately with trembling, sweaty fingers but I had to wait two weeks to get a reply. But then in his message he was friendly and fun and gave me his phone number straightaway. I left at least three voicemail messages before he got back in touch again. I was being teased and I was getting hooked. We set up a date and he gave me his address.

  When I first visited his flat in Chorlton I was instantly taken aback by the soft piano music playing on a CD in his bedroom — a melancholy waltz by Chopin. Sex with prostitutes usually takes place with background music but it’s either soft, soft-centred pop or a kind of flutey New Age wallpaper. Even if the guys have acid rock shattering speakers on arrival they tend to switch over to something bland and soothing before proceeding to intimacy. But never classical music. What would it be like to have sex to the rising crescendo of Rachmaninov’s 2nd Symphony? A distraction actually. It is better to have the murmur of electronic vacancy which has the decency to look away from the scene of action with half-closed eyes. Rachmaninov would have shared the bed and taken up most of the space.

  William’s musical tastes were not sophisticated — ‘Romantic Piano’ was the title of this compilation — but it made him more alluring to me, as if his caresses and thrusts came from a sensitive soul. As if he meant it, I suppose I mean. Classical music looks you in the eye. It also cancels out the age gap in some way. There were around thirty years between William and myself but nearly 200 years between both of us and the Chopin waltz.

  So intense was the sex we had that I returned to him again and again. And it wasn’t just sex. I began to feel a sort of closeness, a desire to protect, a desire to know him more deeply. We would lie on the bed for at least ten minutes after we’d finished, talking about his family, his sister who was a nurse, his mother who, like mine, had become a widow early in life. He’d dropped out of Manchester Technical College and was basically supporting himself through prostitution, though he occasionally helped out a friend who managed a nightclub in Manchester’s Gay Village. He was garrulous and happy to talk, which made it easier for me to say little. I just liked watching him, the crease in his cheek as he spoke, the lurch of his body as he stretched out lazily for a cigarette, the sweat on his chest which I had caused.


  I wanted to make believe I was the only one who reclined in the curve of his naked body, but occasionally I would ask him about his life as a hustler. He always backed off: ‘Oh, I never get involved. Just jerk ’em off and then take the cash. In and out. Easy money.’ I was different. I had convinced myself of that. One day I bumped into one of his other customers by mistake. William had booked us too close or we had talked for too long and as I was leaving I passed a man standing downstairs at the front entrance. I saw his finger pressing the familiar buzzer. Younger than me, good-looking, tough, confident. I felt a terrible twinge of jealousy to think of him upstairs, writhing and grinding and panting and groaning on the same bed, my William’s sweat all over his body. No wonder William drew back from an orgasm with me. Would the Chopin waltz be spinning once more?

  53 Magnetism

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  William had tremendous charisma. It’s hard to describe but the first time he greeted me at the door of his flat my entire being suddenly burst ablaze, flooded with radiance, like rainbow crayons colouring in the grey pencil shapes in a children’s book. It wasn’t so much his face, his eyes, but an overall magnetism, a pull impossible to resist. His body had the lean, muscular grace of a dancer and on the bed he moved in choreographed seduction, no second exactly the same as the last, except when he found some spot of unspeakable pleasure and repeated the detonation of its explosion in an ecstatic loop.