The Loney

by Andrew Michael Hurley

  Father Bernard brandished the book at me.

  ‘And what would he know by reading this? How could the ramblings of some poor devil who’s clearly lost his mind ever be anything to do with the truth? The best thing you can do is put it on the fire. I’m serious, Tonto. Wrap it in newspaper and burn the bloody thing.’

  ‘And leave Mr Belderboss in the dark?’

  ‘And leave him happy. You saw him inside. He’s certain his brother’s in blissful peace. Why the hell would you want to try and convince him otherwise?’

  He calmed his voice and then spoke again.

  ‘Tonto, the truth isn’t always set in stone. In fact it never is. There are just versions of it. And sometimes it’s prudent to be selective about the version you choose to give to people.’

  ‘But that’s lying, Father. You said so yourself.’

  ‘Then I was being as naive as you. Listen, I do have a bit of experience in these things. It’s why I was sent to Saint Jude’s in the first place.’

  ‘Experience of what?’

  ‘Managing the truth. You see, that’s what your mother didn’t understand about me. I wasn’t trying to expose anything about Wilfred, I was trying to help them keep the rumours on a short leash. But I couldn’t do that if everyone was determined that I should be kept in the dark, could I?’

  ‘Then you do think he killed himself?’

  He thought for a moment.

  ‘You remember you once asked me what Belfast was like?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you. It’s like an ants’ nest,’ he said. ‘An ants’ nest that’s always being rattled with a stick. People scurry here and then they scurry there. Then the stick comes out again and everything changes.

  ‘The Protestants move out of The Bone to Ballysillan and the Catholics in Ballysillan move back to The Bone. There are too many Catholics in The Bone but they’d rather sleep two to a bed than live in a Protestant street where there are empty houses. So they go across the Oldpark Road to Ballybone and the Protestants in Ballybone go back to the houses that the Catholics wouldn’t take. And on the roads that are the fault lines between the estates, they pack up all their stuff, cross the road, swap houses and shout at each other from the other side of the street instead. A street that’s probably changed its name half a dozen times, mind you. It’s madness.’

  ‘What is The Bone, Father?’

  It was strange, he’d mentioned the place so many times, and I’d never asked him where it was.

  He made a rough shape with his fingers, something like a pentagram.

  ‘Flax Street, Hooker Street, Chatham, Oakfield and Crumlin. But that’s just my opinion. Ask someone else and they’ll give you a different answer. No one knows where the hell they are in Belfast half the time.’

  He looked at me and when it was clear I didn’t really understand what he was saying, he sighed and laughed a little.

  ‘See,’ he said. ‘When you’re a priest, you hear all kinds of things. And when you’re a priest in Belfast you get told all kinds of things. And when you’re a priest in the Ardoyne you wish you didn’t know anything. There’s always rumours flying around about who’s done what to whom and why. Who’s an informer. Who’s with the Provos. Who’s not. Whose son’s in the jail. Whose daddy keeps a pistol under his pillow. Who’s your friend. Who’s your enemy. And they’d look to me to give them the right answer. And that’s the trick, Tonto. Making them believe that you know what the right answer is. God knows if I’d been honest about what I knew, the whole place would have gone up in flames. They shouldn’t call us priests. Not when we’re really firemen.’

  He looked back to Mummer and Farther and the others.

  ‘I’m sure they know that you were only trying to help them,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe, but it doesn’t look as though they need it anymore. I don’t suppose anyone’s going to think badly of Wilfred now this has happened.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘You saw them in the kitchen, Tonto. He’s come back and blessed them all. I don’t think they really care how he died.’

  ***

  They couldn’t say for certain. It may have been the loose handrail—after all it had come apart in the young policeman’s hand when they’d gone up to the belfry. It might have been a simple misjudgement of the first step in the gloom—the bulb over the top of the stairs had blown. It might have been the old floorboards that had warped away from the joists. It might have been all three. It might have been none of these things. The only thing that seemed obvious, or easiest, was that it was a tragic accident.

  While it was still dark, there was a phonecall from Mrs Belderboss, and even before Mummer had finished speaking to her I knew that Father Wilfred was dead.

  Everyone was at the church, she said. Something terrible had happened.

  Mummer and Farther and I went and joined the group of people gathered around the doors in the snow. They had taken Father Wilfred away in an ambulance and there was no real reason for us to stand there. But no one knew what else to do.

  A policeman was on the steps preventing anyone from going inside. He tried to look intimidating and sympathetic at the same time. A police car was parked at the side of the presbytery. I saw Miss Bunce sitting in the back seat with a policewoman. She was nodding and dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

  ‘Poor Joan,’ one of the cleaning ladies said. ‘Finding him like that.’

  Mummer nodded with as much compassion as she could muster, but I knew she was put out by all the attention that was being lavished on Miss Bunce. And for what? The silly girl had gone to pieces.

  She had come as usual at breakfast time and, worried that he was nowhere to be seen in the presbytery and that his bed was cold and unused, Miss Bunce had gone looking for Father Wilfred in the church. She searched the vestry and the sacristy and as she made for the book cupboard by the main doors—thinking his recent obsession for tidying and cataloguing might have taken him there—she came across him almost by accident at the foot of the belfry stairs. He was staring up at her, his head broken on the edge of the bottom step and an old sword lying a few feet away from his outstretched hand.

  ***

  It was an open and shut case. It was, as they had first thought, an accidental death. An elderly priest had tripped and fallen. The sword? Had he been trying to defend himself against an intruder? There was no evidence of anyone else having been there. The church was locked from the inside. But then there was the bell that people had heard tolling around midnight. It was strange, certainly, but they had no grounds on which they could grant it any significance. Bells were often rung in churches. The sword and the bells proved nothing and were dismissed. They led nowhere useful.

  The funeral took place the day the winter snow began to thaw. The parish turned out in black and stood under the dripping trees in the Great Northern Cemetery before heading back to the wake at the Social Centre.

  Nobody stayed very long. Miss Bunce couldn’t bring herself to eat anything. Mr and Mrs McCullough sat by the cardboard crib the Sunday School children had made, giving Henry accusatory looks between mouthfuls of pork pie, as though they suspected it was all his fault in some way. And the Belderbosses were worn out with the endless condolences offered by the other churchgoers who had turned up to pay their respects—not quite as grief stricken as they, but nervous and bewildered all the same about the ripple that been sent across their pond. What would become of Saint Jude’s now?

  They shook Mr Belderboss’s hand and kissed Mrs Belderboss on the cheek and went off to sit in huddles in their coats, eating their sandwiches quickly and letting their drinks go flat.

  In the end, Mummer, Farther and I were the only ones left, and uncertain what else we could do, we started to clear away the plates of uneaten sandwiches and half empty glasses of beer. Once the tables had been wiped clean, Mummer draped the dishcloth over the tap in the kitchen, Farther switched off the lights and we went out into the slush. It seemed an absurd en
ding to a life.

  ***

  While the bishop was arranging Father Wilfred’s replacement an ancient priest came to Saint Jude’s for a few weeks to plug the gap. He was functional and nondescript. I can’t even remember his name. Michael. Malcolm. Something like that. He had no responsibility other than to take Mass and receive confession, and perhaps feeling a little insignificant because of this he took his role as caretaker rather literally, sending us altar boys out to weed the beds in the presbytery garden or touch up the paint in the vestry.

  After Mass one Sunday, he dispatched me to the belfry to check that there were no pigeons nesting there. He had had a great deal of bother with pigeons nesting in the belfry at a church in Gravesend, he said. Their muck played merry hell with the mortar on these old buildings. If pigeons were found, he would have to inform the bellringers to ring Erin Triples. Only Erin Triples would shift them. He was quite mad.

  The belfry stairs had been made safe. The handrail had been replaced and a new bulb screwed into the light fitting. A heavy rug had been thrown down over the buckled floorboards while they waited on a carpenter.

  There were no birds nesting there, of course. It was completely silent. The bells hung motionless in their frame. I went to look out through the small grimy window that faced south for the light. It was February. The snow had been washed away by the rain and the streets all around were slick with it. It being Sunday the roads below were quiet. A car would occasionally go down the street with its lights on but that was all. Beyond, there were other streets, houses, low-rise flats, belts of diffused greenery and then the grey monoliths of the taller buildings in the city. I was struck by the sudden thought that my future lay amongst all that somewhere.

  I was about to go back down when I noticed the stack of colour in the corner. Father Wilfred’s robes. The purple that he wore at Lent, the red for Pentecost, the workaday green, and the white he had latterly put on for Christmas. The police hadn’t noticed them. I suppose they looked like the kind of junk that ended up in belfries, which were only really loud attics when all said and done. But the robes hadn’t been dumped. They had been neatly folded, the creases smoothed away. His crucifix was lying on the top along with his Bible and his white collar. And his diary.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Everyone was starting to go inside the house. Farther came down the path to where Father Bernard and I were sitting.

  ‘Will you come, Father?’ he said. ‘Andrew’s going to read for us.’

  ‘Aye, of course, Mr Smith,’ Father Bernard replied.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ said Farther and shook Father Bernard’s hand again before he went back to the house.

  A train rushed past, leaving a skirl of litter and dust, and then the rails returned to their bright humming. In the scrubland beyond, the swifts were darting over the tufts of grass and the hard baked soil with its beetroot-coloured weeds. We watched them turning on their hairpins deftly as bats.

  ‘You will get rid of that book, won’t you, Tonto?’ said Father Bernard.

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Then we’ll be all square, won’t we?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘We’d better go,’ he said and waved back to Farther who was beckoning us to hurry.

  ***

  I knew that Father Bernard was right and that I ought to get rid of the diary for Mr Belderboss’s sake, but I didn’t, and I never have.

  I’ve read it so many times that it has become inked onto my brain like a well-known fairy tale, especially the day that everything changed for him.

  It began like any other at Moorings. There was the usual carnival of weather. The gathering for prayers in the sitting room. The various shades of gloom moving about the house like extra guests. But after supper an unexpected burst of evening sunshine had drawn him out of the house and he had been taken by a sudden urge to go down to the sea.

  For a number of reasons, he noted, he had never been there before. He had always been rather put off by the local stories about the vagaries of the tides and in any case to reach the sea meant traversing the marshland by a road that seemed to be barely there, inundated as it was by overspill from the rain-swollen pools. And when he got to the shoreline, what would he find? Surely there would be little of interest. Only sludge and what the sea had left behind. He feared it would be a waste of time, which led him to consider the other main reason why he had never gone. Time was his gift to his parishioners when they stayed at Moorings and it wouldn’t be fair of him to take it back. It was important that he was on call, so to speak.

  But, the compulsion to go to the sea wouldn’t leave him. It felt as strong as any demand he had ever had from God. There was no option, then, but to put on his coat, take his notebook and go and answer Him. It was, he supposed, the mere fact that he had never been there before that made the call so powerful. For wasn’t it the responsibility of Christians to seek, to move forward, to be missionaries? Not to take God with them to new lands like a trading commodity, but to make Him manifest there. To raise Him out of the land. God was already everywhere. People needed only to notice Him.

  He was sure that God would walk with him on the sand, give him His guidance and explain the lessons he needed to take back to Saint Jude’s. He would tell him what he needed to put into the spiritual alms boxes of those who hadn’t been able to come on the pilgrimage and had missed out on the special attention God had conferred upon those who had made the effort. Surely for the good of the parish, his fellow pilgrims wouldn’t begrudge him an hour alone. They would understand the importance.

  He thought of himself as a shepherd in one of those pre-Raphaelite paintings, drowsing under the dapple of an ancient tree, his thoughts taken away by the flowers and the dancing insects to higher things or nothing. His sheep down the hillside out of his immediate protection but safe enough to roam the pastures for a time unattended. Yes, they would understand.

  But if it was God’s will that he should go to the sea, what was that apprehension that still dogged him as he started off across the marsh road? It was the feeling that he had disturbed something. The growing unease that the marshes were somehow aware of his presence. It was, he wrote, a dark and watchful place that seemed to have become adept at keeping grim secrets; secrets that were half heard in the whispered shibboleths that passed from one bank of dry reeds to the other.

  It reminded him of an illustration of the Styx in the book of Greek history and legend he had had as a boy—his only book, fatter than the family Bible on the mantelpiece. And what stories he had found between the pasteboard covers. Perseus, Theseus, Icarus. What about Xerxes the Persian king, who had tried to bridge the Hellespont in order to crush the Greeks? Or Narcissus kneeling by his woodland pool? Or Charon, the pilot of Hades? He would have felt at home here, old Charon. Drifting through the marshes in his coracle.

  He inspected his feelings again—that was, after all, why he had come—and found that he was not actually afraid, nor was it really apprehension. It was more a nervous excitement. Whatever lay in wait here, watching him, was nothing so malevolent. It was evidence of God. He scribbled down a quote from Psalms that came to mind.

  Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;

  let the sea roar, and all that fills it.

  There was nothing here that should make him wary, only glad. This corner of England was theirs, something they alone had discovered and had been blessed in the finding. In the springtime God was in the wheatfields and the pasturelands; He was in the rain and in the sunlight that followed and glossed every dripping leaf and branch. He was in the cry of the lambs and in the little cups of life the swifts built in the eaves of old barns. And down here on the beach, even though it was bleak and deserted, God was still at work. Here was the wild God who made nature heave and bellow. The violent shadow that followed Jesus through his tender ministry and could test men in an instant with water and wind. But if the weather should turn, there was nothing to be afraid of. There
would be a goodness in His purging. A better world made from the wreck of the old.

  Once he realised this, the marshes seemed to let down their guard. He noted the birds that he would not normally have seen up at Moorings, and never in London. Coots. Shelducks. An egret, brilliantly white dipping for the water snails he had seen clinging to the bullrushes.

  Further out over the marsh, he saw a cuckoo being mobbed by a squabble of little brown birds. Reed buntings, most likely. He had read that cuckoos liked to use their nests most of all for their arch deception, secluded as they were and woven so beautifully into soft chalices that kept the eggs from the worst of the weather.

  As it turned out, the road was not nearly so flooded as it had looked from the house. The water had only washed across the surface and it was clear and still, like a thin mirror reflecting the icy horseheads of cumulus above him, their edges crisp against the blue. If he stood still long enough, he observed, one had the sensation of looking down into the sky, with infinity under one’s feet. A strange sense of vertigo that he disturbed after a moment by breaking the puddle with his toe and moving on.

  The shadow cast by the dunes was lengthening and he found himself walking in shade well before the tarmac give way to sand.

  There must be something about sand that invites a person to put themselves directly into contact with it. To walk on it in boots or shoes seems a waste almost. He saw fit to make a note of the fact that he had taken off his shoes and turned up the bottoms of his trousers anyway.

  Picking a route that wound through the sprouts of marram grass, he climbed up the slope, feeling the wonderful collapse of it under his feet. The burn it put into his thighs. The coldness of the sand when he broke the surface. He was seventy-three years old, but he felt like a child again.

  When he reached the top, he was quite worn out with the effort and stood catching his breath and taking in the panorama. He recalled the instruction given to him years before by his tutor at Saint Edmund’s College—a keen amateur naturalist, like him.