Lonie 5

‘Goldenwell Hospital will close, but, God willing, not in the immediate future.’ Cardinal Robbins sat back in his chair, putting his fag in the ashtray and pushing his spectacles further up his nose as he surveyed Lonie and Audrey and the effects his words had.

‘When will it close?’ Audrey leaned forward.

‘Your Eminence, you don’t mind if I take some notes?’ Lonie pulled a ratty notebook out of the inside pocket of his jacket and a stylish silver metal pen.

‘No. No. Go right ahead.’ Cardinal Robbins reached across and picked up his fag from the ashtray, his eyes narrowing a little as he looked at them anew through a miasma of smoke.

Audrey lifted her bag from the floor and she too brought out a notepad and black plastic Bic pen. She reached across to Lonie, grasping him by his jacket cuff, and whispered, ‘it’s ok, I’ll take the notes.’

Lonie turned towards her and shook his head, as he shook off her suggestion. He saw no need to whisper. ‘I take my own notes.’

‘Do you do shorthand?’

‘Kinda.’ He looked over at His Eminence whose lips were tight around a smile and he smoothed out the wrinkled pieces of paper before him.

‘When will it close?’ Audrey asked again.

‘We’re still in talks with the National Health Service and the Health Secretary Val Kilmerr.’ His Eminence smiled benignly.

Lonie looked across at him, his gaze unflinching. ‘Wasn’t the project dogged by controversy, spending overruns and questions being asked by MPs about a Catholic mafia?’

Cardinal Robbins adjusted the way his spectacles sat on his nose, his finger poking and wiping at the corner of one eye and sniffing as if clearing his nostrils. ‘Those allegations were unfounded, part of conspiracy to discredit Mother Church.’

‘A conspiracy?’ Audrey sat straight back in her chair, as she closely watched the Cardinal, her hands barely moving, translating his words into the squiggles and bumps of shorthand.

Across from her Lonie sat leaning into his notebook, with one word inscribed with the heavy tread of : ‘conspiracy’, underlined three times.

Cardinal Robbins looked wistfully at his cigarette as he stubbed it out in the ashtray diagonally across from his desk and next to Lonie. His elbow was on the desk as he pushed himself forward focussing his attention on Audrey. ‘Let me tell you something Little Miss. When people say conspiracy they start talking about UFOs and their eyes go all glazed.’ He made whistling noises and thumb and forefinger shot up to his temple making circling motions to indicate crazy talk.

‘Or Virgin Births,’ said Lonie helpfully.

His Eminence seemed to grow taller. He bit down on his jaw, and spat out at Lonie, ‘hell and damnation are never full.’

‘You should know.’ Lonie wrote the quotation down in full and smiled down at his notebook.

‘Have you got another cigarette?’ Cardinal reined himself in and smiled back at Lonie like he was his affable uncle.

‘Sure.’ Lonie delved into his pockets, pulling out a packet of cigarettes and lighting a fag from the lit end of his own, passed it across the table to His Eminence.

‘Where were we?’ Cardinal Robbins yawned, covering his mouth over and taking a deep drag.

‘Virgin Births,’ said Lonie.

‘Conspiracy,’ said Audrey.

‘I don’t think we have time to debate the Virgin Birth.’ His eyes twinkled from behind his glasses. This other thing you refer to “conspiracy”, he shrugged.

‘You refer to,’ said Audrey, her eyes nailing him.

He shrugged again. ‘What else would you call a judicial system that has different registers and speeds depending on your religion and social class? What else would you call an education system that excludes so many because of their beliefs? What else would you call an employment system that differentiates one from another not on their ability, but on the sound of their names and what school they went to? Mr Lonnigan what would you call it?

‘I’d call it what you call it. That’s what I’ve been trained to do.’ Lonie matched the Cardinal’s gaze, ‘but £180 million pounds seems an awful lot of public money for the refurbishment of an existing hospital.’

‘Especially, if you’re going to close it,’ added Audrey.

‘The talk of closure is, as I’ve said, premature.’ The Cardinal foot- tapped away his frustration about such talk and he crouched in his throne, but with a conscious effort he relaxed his posture and voice. ‘We’re having consultations. That’s all I’m willing to say.’

Lonie put his fag in the ashtray, and flipped back a page in his notebook. ‘How did we get from a projected budget of £27 million in 1968 for the refurbishment of Goldenwell and an estimated completion time of two years and, here we are, five years later and it’s still not completed and we’re up to £180 million.’

‘£180 million is such an arbitrary figure.’ Cardinal Robbins’s face screwed up. He sounded as if it pained him to make such an admission.

‘What wouldn’t be an arbitrary figure?’ asked Audrey.

‘Well, we’re probably nearer to £150 million, but legal fees probably add about another £30 million.’

‘That’s a lot of spondolooks,’ whistled Lonie, ‘for some suits to get you a “Not Guilty” verdict. What crime do you commit?’

‘No crime,’ laughed Cardinal Robbins, ‘other than this Government should honour its commitments.

‘That’s a lot of commitment.’ Audrey looked up from her notepad. Her notes had descended into doodles of repetition. ‘Isn’t there some kind of mental hospital attached to Goldenwell?’

‘We don’t call it that.’ Cardinal Robbins puffed on his cigarette and waved away such notions.

Lonie tried to bite back his words. ‘What do you call it, a rest home for psychos?’ but they were out of his mouth before he could. He looked across and Audrey was shaking her head at him, which was never a good sign.

‘We call it a rehabilitation station for those with mental health difficulties.’ Cardinal Robbins seemed quite happy with the faux-pas. ‘That was one of our problems. The secure units were, how should I put it, not secure enough. And we had problems with asbestos. All the old buildings were riddled with it. And that costs.’ He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together as a sign for money.
‘
Yes, but even taking that into account.’ Audrey looked at her notes. ‘From £27 to £180 million and still counting…?’

‘Mother Church is, if you’ll excuse the phrase, just a middle man. Inflation doubled, tripled, and quadrupled the cost of labour and raw materials.’ Cardinal Robbins looked quite pleased with that. ‘The West End is a very sought after area. Land prices went up by a factor of ten to twenty.’

Lonie flipped through his notebook. ‘But doesn’t the church own the land?’ He flipped another page, ‘and aren’t many of the building firms employed Irish in origin and there has been stories of kickbacks such as a church built in Springburn another in Dalmuir and several in Lanark in which little or no invoices were submitted or expected?’

‘Let’s get one thing straight.’ Cardinal Robbins stubbed out his fag. ‘There are some professions with a preponderance of Roman Catholics. One of these is construction. The reason for that is exclusion. Our members found themselves doing the kind of dirty and menial jobs that no one else wanted to do. They didn’t get good at it by some kind of happy accident. Look at the Scottish hydro projects after the war. Hundreds of millions of pounds were spent. Irish and Roman Catholic men were dynamiting tunnels through mountains and tunnelling under rivers. I worked as a parish priest in Pitlochry at the time and I should know. People were being killed on a regular basis. Murdered because of a lack of safety precautions and the need to keep the job moving. There was no outcry. No tears. Good riddance to bad rubbish was the general consensus. Yet if a Roman Catholic dares to ask for the market rate, there’s an outcry.’ His Eminence slumped back into his chair. ‘As for that other thing. Churches and charity go together. The men working in the Hydro project built a church and equipped it in their own time. Nobody kicked up a fuss about that. They’re good men, doing a good job. And if there is a mafia, it’s a mafia of the similarly inclined.’

Lonie stubbed out his fag, without making a note, whilst Audrey scribbled it all down in shorthand. ‘Well,’ said Lonie, finally, after allowing time for His Eminence to catch his breath. ‘Let’s look at it another way. Let’s suppose the church owns the land. Let’s suppose the church owns the buildings. Many of the staff are priests, nuns or religious lay people so effectively the church employs the staff that runs Goldenwell.’ Lonie glanced down at his notes. ‘Even allowing for the inflationary figure you have given and even allowing for its charity status, what’s in it for the church? Let me put it another way, how much does the church charge the Government per annum for the use of its services and how does it compare with a comparable hospital in the secular sector?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t have the figures to hand.’ A smile played on Cardinal Robbins lips.

‘But you could get it?’ Audrey asked.

‘Even if I did that would be confidential commercial information.’ Cardinal Robbins sounded apologetic. ‘But I’m sure that we could and can compete with our friends that run the secular hospitals. We have a history of treating the whole person of looking after a person’s soul and not just their body.’

‘I guess that means prayer, prayer and prayer again?’ suggested Lonie.

‘We’ve a different philosophy from the mainstream mental hospitals. But remember when they were treating people with mental health problems as if they were performing monkeys on sticks that could be viewed as a form of entertainment, we treated them as whole human beings, human beings that might have lost their faculties, but human beings none the less. When the mainstream hospitals were drilling holes in their head and inducing comas by massive injections of insulin we did none of these things.’ Cardinal Robbins wheezed out the last few words started coughing and looked suddenly ill and frail.

‘But you only treat Catholics? Right?’ Audrey said it quietly, when his coughing fit had subsided.

Cardinal Robbins held his hand up and he leaned forward as if he was in pain or going through a bowel movement. ‘No. We treat anyone that is willing to abide by our faith. Even you. People think we are being discriminatory, but let me tell you young lady we run our own school and hospitals for one simple reason.’ He pulled a handkerchief out of his drawer and mopped his head and wiped at his glasses. ‘We run our own schools and hospitals for one simple reason.’ He seemed to lose track of what he was saying. ‘We run them…’ his hands folded into prayer as he looked into the middle distance. ‘We run them because Protestants did not want Catholic children educated and if they did have to be educated they didn’t want their sons or daughters sitting at the same desk as them. And they certainly didn’t want to waken up in the next bed to a Catholic!’

‘That’s all very well, but you’ve got a secure unit, with some of the most dangerous men and women in Scotland.’ Lonie studied His Eminence closely. If he was going to die now would be a good time. In his head he’d already fixed the headlines and the by-lines. ‘I wouldn’t say those people want to be there. I’d say the best place for them would be Barlinnie or Carstairs but you insist on treating them, even if they are not Catholics. Why is that? Why are they not in mainstream hospitals or prison?’

Cardinal Robbins confounded Lonie by sitting up that bit straighter. ‘I think the best thing you can do is “taste and see” as they say in the good book. I think you should meet a very good friend of mine, Father Patrick Campbell. He runs the secure unit. He’s also qualified to practice medicine, his specialisation being psychiatry. He has a doctorate in psychology and his papers on abnormal behaviour appear in a number of respected journals. I’m sure he would be very glad to answer any questions you may have.’

Lonie head fell forward and he groaned.

‘Is he quite all right?’ His Eminence asked Audrey.

‘Must have been something he ate,’ suggested Audrey, ‘he may be unwell, but I’m perfectly happy to meet with Father Campbell.’

‘I’m not sure a young lady should be going to such places alone.’ Cardinal Robbins looked at Lonie fixedly.

‘Well, I can’t say I know much about the place.’ Audrey spoke quickly. 'But I do know that a Carol Peters is held there. After what she did she is rather notorious. The thing is she’s about the same age as me. And she’s female. It seems rather contradictory not to let a woman reporter into a secure unit, because she’s a woman, but the secure unit already has a woman in it.'

Lonie held his hand up as if he was back at school and was asking for permission to speak. ‘I’ll go,’ he said, ‘but I just don’t like being locked up.’

Cardinal Robbins laughed. ‘Well, there’s no way round that. Unless, of course, you want to invite the patients into your home, for a nice cosy chat. The phone on his desk rang. He reached across to pick it. ‘Hallo,’ he said and listened. Then with fingers over the mouthpiece he asked, ‘to be given a minute’.

Lonie and Audrey glanced at each other. ‘Maybe it’s the Pope,’ whispered Lonie and raised his eyebrows in mock horror. He knew the interview was over and figured Monsignor Something-or-other had been instructed to make the call.

The room door opened and Monsignor Something-or-other stood in the doorway before soft shoeing into the room and standing, with one hand on the back of the chair, behind Lonie. His Eminence was still on the phone, so Lonie imagined that there was nobody on the other end, the church was cloning copies of Monsignor Something-or-other, or it really was the Pope.

‘If you’ll just excuse me,’ His Eminence half rose, still clutching the phone, and slumped, exhausted, back into his seat. He made the sign of the cross with his right hand. ‘Monsignor Arthur will see to all your needs.’

Monsignor Something-or-other-Arthur tried on one of his false smiles again. Audrey gathered her bag and Lonie made sure he had his notebook and pen. They tip-toed on the deep pile of the carpet behind Monsignor Arthur whose face changed back to normal when he was outside His Eminence’s office. He saw them straight to the door. As a parting gift he handed Lonie a white business card with the Cardinal’s crest.

‘Phone me,’ Monsignor Arthur said, ‘and I’ll put you in touch Father Campbell at Goldenwell.’

Lonie sat in the Hillman staring absentmindedly at the purple crown on a rhododendron. Audrey clicked her seatbelt on. He put a fag in his mouth. She snatched it out, just as quickly and flung it still with a ring of lip salvia attached into his lap. ‘Funny that,’ he said as she pulled out of the driveway, ‘how he knew about Father Campbell and Goldenwell.’

Audrey kept her eyes on the road. A Ford Escort pulling a caravan was in front of them and she was looking for a clear stretch of road to get past. ‘Maybe the Cardinal told him,’ she said distractedly.

‘No. It wasn’t possible. He never had time. We were always with him.’ He was pushed back into his seat as the Hillman hit its top speed of 48 miles per hour. ‘I think he must have some kind of listening device.’ They passed the caravan on the wrong lane and quickly got back in front of it, the Ford tooting it horn in disgust at being overtaken by an Imp. ‘And if they’ve got a listening device they must be making tapes of all the Cardinal’s meetings.’

‘Why would they do that?’ Audrey said.

Lonie rolled the unlit fag round and round in his fingers. ‘I’m not sure, but the Cardinal gets lots of visitors. Some of them may be inclined to be making promises they can’t keep. The Cardinal has always had the reputation of playing the long game. If he can pick out a tape that takes him back twenty years that’s power. And if he can listen in to their confessions that’s dynamite and would help explain how he rose so quickly through the church hierarchy.’

‘A priest isn’t meant to do that kind of thing.’ Audrey slowed as they passed the cottage-type houses.

‘Priests aren’t meant to do a lot of things,’ spat out Lonie. ‘They’re meant to be Holy Men, but I think we can all see through the guff now.’

‘We’ll be late getting back. Where do you want me to drop you?’ Audrey said.

‘It’s still early. You heard what the fatman said, he wants to see us in his other office as soon as we get back.’

Audrey glanced at the watch and the car swerved towards the pavement.. ‘But he’ll be away home.’ Her voice sounded small and tired.

The fatman’s only got one home and that’s The Press Bar. And the fatman never sleeps. You heard what he said. He’ll get us in his other office. He'll get us in the lounge.