‘Look first,’ he had told him. ‘And then see. Be patient and you will notice the workings of nature that most people miss.’
It was a piece of advice that he had taken as it was meant—as a metaphor for focusing on the interdependencies of God’s world, yes, but also one that he could apply practically in his role as a priest.
He had learnt to watch his parishioners closely, to monitor their progression through the sacraments so that he was better able to correct any deviation from the road that would lead them to heaven. It was his duty. It was the fulfilment of his calling. Their road was his road also. If they found peace at last, then so would he.
He watched and waited and began to see the way the grass moved in the wind, the way the wind came with all the subtleties of a voice. He started to see how the colours of the sea changed as light followed shadow across its vast surface. Turquoise, cobalt, slate, steel. It was quite beautiful. As was the natural geometry of the horizon as it bisected the sea and the sky and invited the eye to be drawn along its length—from the distant industry spiking out of the Fylde peninsula to the south, across to Coldbarrow with its empty heath and its empty house—across to the Furness shipyards faint and grey.
There were the genteel seaside towns full of white houses further away up the coast, and beyond them the Cumbrian mountains rose in severe crags that bared their teeth in the lowering sun.
It was the gulls that made him look back to the beach. He hadn’t noticed their noise before. In fact he hadn’t been aware of them at all. He had startled them away, perhaps, as he blundered up the sand dune and now that he had been standing there for a few minutes and they knew he was no threat they had returned to feed on the stuff that had rolled in with the seaweed and driftwood and marked the stretch of the tide. It was going out now. Little by little. With each break and foam and hiss it lost its grip on the land and slipped further back. It had been a high tide, he noticed. It had come as far as the old pillbox and left a skirt of wetness around its base.
They were stupid creatures, seagulls. There was something vile about them. As there was with brattish children. The way they screeched and fought over the same scraps, even though the place was an embarrassment of riches.
They were like the people who lived in that esurient underworld, from which he had separated Saint Jude’s and its congregation successfully enough for it to seem a place of vivid contrast. The people of that Other world were not the same. They walked in darkness. They were to be pitied. And shunned if they would not change.
He carried no guilt about such defensiveness. In Romans, Paul talked about associating with the lowly, but it seemed like idealistic nonsense now. Paul’s world had gone for good and had been replaced by a vacuum. The sinful no longer worried that they would be punished by God, because God to them did not exist. And how could they be punished by an absence? Wrath and fury, when they came, were no longer attributed to any kind of divine retribution but to natural freakishness and bad luck—and so it was up to him to interpret and judge the world as it truly was. Not to play God—never to do that—but to make it clear for his parishioners that God was still present and in authority by drawing divisions between their world and the Other.
In their world, cause and effect continued. If they sinned, they confessed and were absolved. If they performed good deeds they would be rewarded in heaven. In the Other world there was nothing but inconsequence. Oh, there were people jailed and so on—he had, in his younger days visited them all: rapists and murderers and incorrigible thieves—but for most it was only a temporary withdrawal of their liberty. They cared little, if at all, about their eternal freedom or incarceration. A manila file of forms in an office somewhere to be pulled out at the next offence was the only legacy of their sins. No heed did they pay to the entry that had been added to the greater book of reckoning.
It had been Paul’s decree that neighbour should love neighbour and this he stuck to—but only within the world he had created at Saint Jude’s. The people of the Other world would care little if he loved them or not, if he rejoiced with them or wept with them or pitied them. Paul had warned of the dangers of judging others—that only God was fit for the task—but those in the Other world needed to be shown up for what they were. And he felt qualified to judge them; they had made it easy for him to do so. Despite what Paul said, his sins—such as they were—were not like theirs. Their sins came from a greater depth entirely.
He had never left a child to die in its own filth as a mother had done in one of the high rise estates not long ago. He had never poured petrol through a pensioner’s letterbox and tossed in a match for fun. He had never come stumbling out of a vice club at four in the morning. He had never stolen anything, destroyed anything. Nor had any of his flock. He had never lusted after anything or anyone, as people in that Other world seemed to encourage and applaud.
He knew what such people would think of his relationship with Miss Bunce. She couldn’t be his housekeeper without being his lover also. It was impossible that he would have no carnal desire for her, she being so much younger than he and at his beck and call. He loved her, yes, but not in the way that the Other people understood it, for whom love could not be separated from intercourse.
Galatians, Ephesians, Peter and John. He could have picked a weapon from a vast arsenal to defend himself and show them that it was possible, an act of devotion in fact, to express God’s love in the loving of a brother or sister in Christ.
She was the most pious girl he knew. She was a beacon of light in the presbytery. She was untainted by the world that lay outside, and the proof that he had made a difference.
Indeed, all his parishioners deserved to feel like Miss Bunce. Different, loved, guided and judged. It was their reward for being held to ransom by a world that demanded the right to engage in moral brinkmanship whenever it pleased.
People talked about a permissive society, but, as he knew it, permission was something one asked for. No, this was what it was—an assault. They were being beaten into submission by morals that were the reverse of their own. He had lived a long time and had seen the world regressing. With each year that went by it seemed that people were no better than children in their petulant demands.
And children themselves were changing. Youth still had the natural rebelliousness that had been there since the time of Moses, but it seemed to have had something added to it, or forced into it—a fearlessness. No, more a detachment. He had seen it in the youngsters he had caught one evening smashing gravestones with bricks they had knocked out of the churchyard wall, a kind of emptiness in their eyes. They had looked at him as though he wasn’t quite real, or what he was saying wasn’t quite real. They had been no more than eight years old.
These weren’t just the jittery fears of an aging priest, it was a genuine feeling that all goodness and simple humility—for who on earth was humble nowadays?—had been excised from the hearts of men. He alone, it seemed, had noticed the apparent descent from depravity to depravity that had taken that Other world to a place that was unique and irreversible. There was no darkness now that couldn’t be explored or expressed.
Only a few weeks ago had he watched them all coming out of the Curzon at midnight from some horror film that the paper said involved jack hammers and acid. They were laughing. The girls with their hands in the back pockets of the men.
It had been the same night a homeless lady had been kicked to death under Waterloo Bridge. And while the two things weren’t connected in any literal sense, he felt certain that they occupied the same pool that had formed when the wall between sick imagination and the real world came down.
It was against this potent mixture that they protected themselves at Saint Jude’s and could, ironically, practise the very freedoms the Other people claimed to enjoy, the freedoms that were bandied around as being somehow the looked-for end result of millennia of social cultivation. At Saint Jude’s they were free to think; they were free to examine the meanings of love or happiness, unli
ke the Other people, for whom happiness was the accumulation of objects and experiences that satisfied the simplest of desires.
The Other world had equality now, they said, but what they meant was that everyone had the means to exhibit their own particular unpleasantness. There had been people shot dead in Londonderry and women blown to shreds in Aldershot in the name of equality. And they were always marching. He had seen men marching for the right to sleep with other men. He had seen women marching for the right to rid themselves of their unborn children without reproach. He had seen them marching to Trafalgar Square with their heavy boots and their Union Jacks. Oh, the black shirts might have been hidden under suits and donkey jackets but they were same men who had infected the place where he had grown up.
Equality. It was laughable. It wasn’t equality at all. Not what he understood by the word. Only in the eyes of God were people equal. In the eyes of God each person had the same opportunity to be rewarded with everlasting peace, even the most hardened sinners. They could all walk the same path together if the people of the Other world would only repent. But they never would.
He detested leaving Saint Jude’s or the presbytery and dreaded any meeting that would necessitate the use of the Tube, which at rush hour really did seem to be a place from Hell.
The only way to cope was to think of himself as Dante, documenting evidence of this Other world’s iniquities to share with his flock on his return. That way, as he was swept along in its currents, he might lift himself out of the tide of filth that pressed up against the doors of the train, the way the gulls were pressing against one another now to get at whatever it was that had become such a prized catch.
***
At first it was an old fishing net rolled up by the sea into a cocoon; no, a beached seal, he decided, when a gull lifted off and he caught a glimpse of pale skin.
But then he saw the boots tumbling in the edge of the water.
He went down the dune, slipping and almost falling, grasping the marram and feeling it hold firm for a moment before it came loose in his hand. At the bottom he took his shoes from around his neck and started across the sand, running for the first time in years, shouting and waving his hands, scattering the gulls.
It was as he had feared. The man was drowned. The thought that he might yet be saved had crossed his mind as he ran towards him, but it was far too late for that. The gulls had pecked deep holes in his neck and slit the tattoos there, but had drawn no blood.
The man’s hair was half covering his face, but when he knelt down and bent his head close to the sand he could see that it was the old tramp they had been talking about at the dinner table. The wretch he had seen asleep in bus shelters and leaning against the gates of cattle fields, his body limp with drink, his eyes slow to follow what was passing. Well, now his eyes were as blank as mushrooms.
A fresh wave broke and surged up the beach and washed under the body, leaving little bubbles in the tramp’s hair and in his beard as it ebbed away.
So this was death. A brief, salty sousing and it was done.
The next wave came soon after and as it retreated again the sand gave way and broke into little runnels, the grains pouring down into the gouges.
He looked around, but there was no use in calling for help. Not here. There was no one. He thought about going back up the dune and waving his arms to try and attract their attention back at Moorings, but it was unlikely they would see him. He would seem a tiny figure to them, obscured to shadow by the sun. And if they did see him what would they think? Would they come? If they came what use would they be? There was nothing they could do now. And was it fair to compel them to see what he had found? The women especially. It would cast a shadow over the whole trip.
Faster and faster the sand was liquefying around the tramp’s body, running away from under him and making him turn slowly on to his side. A larger crack appeared, running out of the top of his head to where Father Wilfred was kneeling. The water filled it on the next wave and widened it so that a great cake of sand broke and the body suddenly rolled and fell and floated. He hadn’t realised it until now, but the tramp had been lying at the very edge of a deep trench.
What made him reach out and grab the shirt, he wasn’t sure. It was instinctive, he supposed. He caught a sleeve and taking it firmly in his grip he dragged the body towards him, feeling for the first time—and with a shock that made him take hold with his other hand as well—the strength of the sea as it was pulling away from the land.
As the water in the trench lowered, the walls became apparent. They were made of a grey substance that was neither sand nor mud. He slipped down, dug in his feet, and slipped further. The outgoing water was moving apace, its speed increasing as it neared the narrowing bottom of the gulley, where he now found himself up to his knees. A section under his foot gave way and disappeared and he fell and ran the side of his face down the wall, tasting the gritty sulphur of the sludge. He let go, floundered, felt the water sucking him, tried to regain his grip, but the body was hurried away. He pushed himself upright and waded after the body a few paces before it was clear that it was pointless and although it was washed back towards him a few times as the tide engaged in its last ebb and flow, it was with the same mockery as a child who holds out a ball for its playmate only to snatch it away. Eventually the body sank out of sight.
He got out of the water and went up the beach and crossed the line of weed. He leant against the pillbox and wiped the mess off his face and stared at the sea, wondering if anything might reappear. But already it seemed that what had happened was unreal. That only minutes before he had been clinging to the sleeve of a corpse. There was no evidence of the old tramp at all now. Even his boots had gone.
It was shock, he supposed, the cold that was making him shiver, but he was terrified. He had almost been dragged into the sea, yes, but it wasn’t the sea that he was afraid of.
He felt alone.
More alone than he had ever felt in his life. It was a kind of nakedness, an instant disrobing. His skin prickled. A cold eel slithered in his stomach. Feelings that he thought he had left behind in childhood on those nights he had cried himself to sleep over another dead brother or sister surfaced and spread and overwhelmed him.
Was it pity? No, he felt nothing for the tramp. He was from the Other world and had got what he deserved. Wasn’t that so?
Why, then, did he feel so altered? So abandoned?
It was the place itself.
What was it about this place?
And then it came to him.
He had been wrong about everything.
God was missing. He had never been here. And if He had never been here, in this their special place, then He was nowhere at all.
He tried to dismiss the thought as quickly as it had come, but it returned immediately and with more insistence as he stood there watching the gulls flocking for the crustaceans left behind, and the clouds slowly knotting into new shapes, and the parasites swarming in the carcass of some thing.
It was all just machinery.
Here there was only existence coming and going with an indifference that left him cold. Life here arose of its own accord and for no particular reason. It went unexamined, and died unremembered.
He had fought with the sea for the dead drunk’s body with the same futility with which Xerxes had flogged the Dardanelles with chains. The sea had no concept of quarrel or possession—he had only been a witness to its power. He had been shown the perfect religion. One that required no faith. Nor were there any parables to communicate its lessons, because there were none to be taught. Only this: that death was blank. Not a doorway, but a wall, against which the whole human race was mounded like jetsam.
He felt like a drowning man himself, flailing about for something to hold onto. Just one thing that might help him stay afloat a little longer, even if it was bound to sink in the end.
After what seemed like an age, he put on his shoes, and walked for an hour back and forth, as the dusk settled,
from one end of the beach to the other, searching the dunes, the rock pools, the deep channels.
Finding nothing.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Mummer had corralled everyone into the sitting room to listen to Hanny read. The elderly folk sat on the sofa. The rest stood behind them. The armchair that Father Bernard had been given that rainy night when we’d first decided to go back to Moorings, was now set out for Hanny instead. He sat down and Mummer kissed his face and handed him our Bible.
Hanny smiled and looked around the room. He opened the Bible and Mummer knelt down at his side.
‘There,’ she said, turning a few pages and pointing.
Hanny looked around at everyone again. They were all waiting for him to begin.
He stared down and put his finger on the page and began to read. It was from the end of Mark—the passage that Father Wilfred often branded onto our mortal souls as we sat in the vestry after Mass.
The disciples had refused to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead, but we were not to be like them. We could not be afraid to see Him in all his glory.
‘“These signs will accompany those who believe,”’ Hanny read. ‘“In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”’
As Hanny spoke, a murmur of excitement ran through the room, and they knew that God was among them. Mummer was sobbing. Farther went over and put his arms around her. Mr and Mrs Belderboss had their heads bowed and were praying quietly, encouraging others to do the same. Miss Bunce and David stared as Hanny read slowly and carefully, but never once faltered on a single word.
Father Bernard glanced over at me. One day I thought I might be able to explain to him, to everyone what had happened, or have to, but what I would say I didn’t know. I would only be able to give them the facts as I remembered them, as I’m writing them now.
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