school photos 63

John waited until the front door opened and slammed shut, the sound of a car choking and flooding into life, before he shuttled out of bed and ventured into the hall. He wanted to tell someone, anyone, about his dream.  But with Mum slumped like an out-of-date parcel in the chair beside the fireplace, it seemed childish.  Slipping into the cosy warmth of the kitchen, the radio on the window sill a low murmur, Auntie Caroline made him a cup of tea and a nice bit of toast, just the way he liked it, slathered in margarine and with a tang of orange marmalade. She briefly told him about finding Allison’s anorak, before changing tact. ‘Hurry up and finish that or you’ll not be able to go to Holy Communion.’

    His back molars stuck together on a burnt crust and he spluttered, ‘I’m not goin’ to Mass. I’ve no’ been for years’.

A shake of her head showed her disappointment, but she snapped back, ‘your mother’s not well enough. And we need all the prayers we can get’. Her eyes caught his. ‘Don’t we?’

His head slumped. ‘Aye,’ he said, voice flaring, ‘but I’m no’ goin’ to Communion’.

‘Suit yourself.’ She picked up a dishcloth and turned her back to him, hummed along with Doris Day Que Sera, Sera from the radio, dried the dishes and stacked them away in the cupboard.  

He consoled himself with the thought, nobody went to nine o’clock Mass, but decrepit oldies, because it was too early. He set the pace, not waiting for Auntie Caroline’s toddling along.  As they got closer to the Kerr’s hedge he slowed, waiting for her to catch up. ‘This was where I first spotted Lilly.’ He slanted his head away from her, talking as if it didn’t matter. They stood close together, feet pointed inward, away from the road. Her long winter coat protected her from the light rain. He jammed his hands into the side pockets of his jacket.  The Venetian blinds in the Kerr house were dubbed down, locked tight.  Behind the straight-lined rooftops, shimmying through clouds, a rainbow and sunlight strayed, finger-painting the flat-roofed council houses. A cutting wind pushed them closer together. The leaves on the privet shone as if polished, forming a cut-down windbreak. A woman with a buggy pushed between them, the child under a protective bauble of plastic sheeting, sitting as far forward as buckles  would allow, peered out at them, turning her head as she passed, ready to jump out in her red wellies and claim the world.

‘We’ll be late,’ Auntie Caroline reminded him, touching his elbow in consolation. They began walking, closer together. ‘Did she ever say anything?’

‘Nothing much.’ Although there was no traffic, he let her take his arm as they crossed Duntocher Road. They were almost the same height.  ‘Just something about big people not being able to understand.’ He slipped loose of her grip when they reached the pavement, turning sideways on the congested thoroughfare, allowing a middle-aged couple to pass them. A few churchgoers had set themselves against the brick wall outside the grounds sneaking a final fag before going inside. His gaze drifted towards St Stephen’s school a few hundred yards behind the church, where Alison’s jacket had been found. ‘Any idea what in the hell Lily meant?’

‘I’d need to consult Gloria.’ Auntie Caroline sounded slightly out of breath. ‘But I’d guess that as we get older the world becomes a much smaller place. The sap stops running. Our beliefs harden. Certainty alone makes us more and more uncertain. We grow so scared we’d rather—’. A stout bearded man wearing a long plastic raincoat swished between them. The opening bars of the entrance hymn from the church organ spilled out.  Cigarettes dropped from open mouths and were stepped on, single-file smokers and non-smokers fell into line, filtered into the hallowed grounds and enclosed foyer.  

The church held the all-year round smell of beeswax-polish and incense. John automatically dubbed his fingers in the font at the door, dabbed his forehead with Holy water and dashed off on his stomach and shoulders the sign of the Cross and, in the time it took to shake a stranger’s hand, a litany of ‘In-the-name-of-the-Father. And-of-the-Son. And-of-the-Holy-Ghost-Amen’.  Auntie Caroline, in front of him, did the same. With a crooked smile she negotiated her way past two men in suits, pass-holders wielding collection plates, and bumped through the double doors into the nave of the church.

Celebrants rested hymn books on top of the pews in front to them. Some of the pages were wedged open and the livelier church members were singing. Others mimed, hiding behind organ accompaniment and the church choir’s rendition of ‘Walk with Me Oh My God,’ and back-seat renegades whispered messages to each other. Everyone, but the smallest child, knew the drill, eyes front, talk out of the side of the mouth.

 John followed his aunt with growing dread. She skipped past the back seats, didn’t even look at the freed up spaces beside the pillars that held the whitewashed canopy of the roof sixty-feet above them and kept going until she’d found an empty slot in the front row, close to the side altar, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the place where all the holy-holies of parishioners liked to congregate in the penumbra of Canon Martin preaching from the pulpit.   

No chapel-going boy, like John was brought up to be, forgot his origins. The past overshadowing the present. He knelt, and sat, and stood, and sang, and listened to Canon Martin hectoring them to pray more, to do more, to put more money in the plate or the Catholic Church would fall round about them like wet paper. The likelihood of that, to John, seemed slim. St Stephen’s was modern red brick. Clear glass framed the choir stall above the entrance and flooded the seats below. Stained-glass in the conventional arch shape, was an add on, staining light, pictorial stories for those sitting at the two side altars to decipher. But holiness was allowed to skitter out the two side-doors abutted to the minor altars.

John let his mind drift during the long sermon after the gospel. God was keeping an eye on them. That was usually how it went and Canon Martin’s was no different. Distilling their dirty thoughts and deeds with something called grace. Presenting them with a new sin-proof suit to wear and walk around in, with a shiny new self, cloaked in hope. Nodding off, his ears filled with a buzzing sound. He recalled the first reading, Old Testament, which was quickly skated over.  Jacob in his tent, then by a river, wrestling with an angel, day after day.  An angel that was flesh and blood and not straw wings and feathers plucked for a children’s play. Jacob’s mortal body sweating and fighting, grunting, pushing hard against a body shaped by joy, struggling against the void of nothingness, finding eternity’s weight in a hip, and weak spot in an ankle, so he could put the angel on its back and hold it down, make it submit. He waited until Holy Communion and sneaked out the side door. He wasn’t sure how to find Lily, but he knew he had to try. That way he’d find Allison.