Lonie20

Father Campbell held his hand up in acknowledgment of the phone ringing and smiled at Lonie. He carefully put his cheroot in the ashtray nestling next to Lonie’s fag-end before he answered the phone.

‘Hallo,’ Father Campbell said into the receiver, before turning away from Lonie.

He spoke again in what sounded like quick rapid fire Italian. Lonie wondered whether he should leave his office to give him some privacy on the phone. But he wasn’t sure. He didn’t speak Italian and it was a secure unit. They probably wouldn’t want him to start wandering about the place. But unlike the other wards he didn’t feel threatened in this block. There was the pervasive smell of wood polish, burnt toast and a mixture of cigar and fag smoke. He wouldn’t have been surprised to hear someone hoovering and shouting down, like they did in the tenement blocks, ‘it’s time for you to come in.’ He brought out his fags, putting the Woodbine packet and matches on the table in front of him and toying with the packet. Turning it over and over like a child playing with a coloured block. He looked up on the wall at a small print of a bleeding boy, a youth, whose naked body was punctured with small arrows.

‘That’s Botticelli’s Saint Sebastian.’ Father Campbell had hung the phone up and he was watching Lonie.

Lonie tapped a fag out of his packet to give his hands something to do. ‘He looks bored, as if he’d been hanging about street corners and people were takin’ pot shots at him with their bows. And even though they were hittin’ him. It looked like that bored him too.’

Father Campbell laughed. ‘An interesting interpretation.’ He scraped the chair back to sit down and face Lonie. ‘He was an early Christian boy-martyr.’

Lonie studied the print more closely. ‘He looks a bit like Marc Bolan.’

‘Who’ s Marc Bolan?’

‘T.Rex.’ Lonie lit a fag, his neck arching back, his body adjusting itself around the smoke.

‘And who’s T.Rex?’ There was a pale, slow gentle-eyed, movement of mockery in Father Campbell’s face that registered in his voice.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Lonie, ‘but Saint Sebatian looks as if he could play a mean guitar.’

Father Campbell spoke slowly, deliberately, to show he was expressing an opinion. ‘Well, I suppose it’s meant to represent the ecstasy of martyrdom.’

‘Ah prefer non-martyrdom myself.’ Lonie sucked greedily on his fag.

‘Quite.’ Father Campbell smiled at him and slapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’m sure we’ll make a martyr of you yet.’

‘Hope no’.’ Lonie held his breath. He’d almost said Fucking hope no’. And the way he’d been brought up that would have brought a swift slap. ‘Shouldn’t he no’ have some kind of giant halo, or somethin’ round his heid?’

‘He has,’ Father Campbell leaned across and his index finger traced a three-quarter circle around the boy in the picture’s head. ‘It’s just this is not a very good print.’ His finger fell away and he leaned back in his chair, his hands crossed in his lap. ‘I’m sure Lorna would be able to tell you more. She can see auras, or haloes as you called them. I’d be interested to hear what spectrum of colours she could pick out of yours.’

Lonie’s fingers tapped on the desk. ‘Sorry, Ah don’t believe in all that rubbish.’

‘Well I think there’s a difference between believing in something we can see and something we can’t see. But in well documented cases of synaesthesia some people experience numbers as colours, tastes and exceptional cases even smells. They can see… They can experience what you cannot. Does that make their experience less valid than your own?’

Lonie puffed out his cheeks and let out a long sigh. ‘Ah don’t mean that.’

‘Well, what do you mean by haloes? What about the haloes of sub atomic particles, dark matter, with little or no mass that permeate the universe, helping hold the lights of planets in place and galaxies from tearing themselves apart, yet rarely interacting with what is considered normal matter.’ Father Campbell slapped the composite chipboard of the desk to show what he meant by normal matter. He spoke quickly and precisely, studying the changes in Lonie’s face.

‘Ah don’t know.’ Lonnie looked uncomfortable, but he conceded, ‘you seem to know what you’re talkin’ about.’

‘Well, I should, for one thing I can read.’ Father Campbell joshed Lonie with his sudden laughter. ‘And another thing is I trained for seven years to become a doctor and later specialised in psychiatrics. My calling was, however, to the priesthood of Christ.’

Lonie began making notes. ‘So tell me what you mean by your calling. How did that come about?’

‘Well, I suppose, if you read any of the lives’ of the Saints or the biographies of social reformers you’ll find one thing. They do it because of belief and they do it because they have to.’ Father Campbell spoke as if the words were wrung out of him. ‘That’s the paradox. God is behind them. God is in front of them. God is pulling and pushing them, but they always had the free choice to say no. But to say no would be a betrayal of who they were or could become. We’re all unfinished clay in God’s hands.’ He looked across at Lonie’s notes and laughed.

Lonie had quickly doodled a little teapot with eyes as he spoke.

‘I’m sorry. I’m not very good at explaining things. Don’t worry,’ Father Campbell, patted him on the arm. ‘God doesn’t need to go in for high drama. I’m pretty sure he’d be happy being a little teapot if that what it takes to reach you. I’m sorry. You want some more tea. No trouble. The kettle will still be warm. It’ll only take me a few minutes.’

‘Go on then.’ Lonie handed Father Campbell his cup. He waited until Father Campbell had passed the outside window, going towards what Lonie took to be the kitchen area, before he jumped up from his seat. Father Campbell’s desk was quite tidy, but Lonie had a quick shifty of the notepad where someone had scribbled something indecipherable. He guessed it was in Latin. He’d like to have had time to go through the filing cabinet in the corner, but thought he heard the footsteps of somebody coming. He quickly flung himself back in the chair he had been sitting on facing the print.

Father Campbell placed Lonie’s mug on the desk in front of him. He sat opposite, his knee up angled out over his leg, holding his ankle and sipping coffee. ‘So where were we?’

Lonie took advantage and engaged Father Campbell with a stern eye. ‘You were goin’ to tell me about school and how you moved from being a Kirk going Protestant to becoming a Catholic priest?’

‘Was I?’ Father Campbell put his cup down and rubbed his hands together, before picking it back up again and taking a sip of black coffee. ‘Ok, school. I went to the local primary school, Gavinburn. It was about a ten minute walk from my house. My father was home by that point, but he went back to work as a draughtsman in John Brown’s shipyard. My father was a few months younger than my mum, but he always seemed much older. She was the dynamo, always cleaning or cooking or sewing or visiting or shopping. He seemed happiest sitting in a corner reading a book. He like biographies and, in later years, books about the war, in particular books about the battles for El Alamein. He never talked about it, but I think he had a rather romantic view of himself as some kind of undernourished Desert Rat. If he appears unfavourably in comparison to my mum that was because I never really thought about him much. I had mum and granddad and he got on much better with my older brothers and sisters.

‘For most of my pals school work was a sweat and a slog and something to be avoided, but I found it fun and quite easy. My parents weren’t religious. They avoided church and refused to send me to Sunday school or even the children’s service. My granddad was the opposite. He liked to sit in the church and listen. And, of course, I went with him. Nothing would have stopped me. I think it was through him that I got my sense of the mystery of God. Maybe it was also from him I got my brains. I ended up Dux of my school and was enrolled for the local grammar school in Clydebank.

‘Academically, I flourished here. I think, in part, this was because none of my friends from Old Kilpatrick went there. They went to vocational schools. And in a way they were like my extended family. I didn’t think of it in these terms but I was shy and introverted, not much interested in football or sports, so I learned to keep myself to myself as my granddad would say. At the end of four years by some miracle I had the grades to go to university to study medicine. This was a big thing then. None of my brothers or sisters had been to university, neither had my mum or father. The only one I could get any advice from was my granddad.

‘And here’s the funny thing. I thought he’d be overjoyed.’

‘But he wisnae,’ said Lonie, looking up from his notes and cutting in.

‘Exactly.’ Father Campbell nodded in agreement. ‘He asked me what I wanted to be a doctor for. And you know I’d never really thought about it. As far as I was concerned you could only be a doctor, a dentist or a lawyer. And I didn’t fancy looking down people’s throats all day. And I wasn’t much of a public speaker. So by default that left medicine. Well, it wasn’t just by default. I quite fancied myself as the suave young medic, making rounds in my new car, curing sick people and them whispering behind my back…’ He began laughing at his own pomposity: ‘…there goes that young Dr Campbell!’

Lonie eyebrows lifted, as he imagined the scene
and he laughed with him.

‘My Granddad asked me one question. “What does God want of you?” And I couldn’t really answer him.’

‘But you did become a doctor?’ Lonie asked.

‘Yes. Yes. I’m getting to that. Granddad helped pay my fees.’

‘What university?’

‘Glasgow. Granddad said it was closer to home, if things didn’t work out.’

‘And did it?’ Lonie tapped his pen against his pad.

‘Yes and no,’ Father Campbell said enigmatically. ‘I was bottom of the class in my first year and every year that followed. Had to re-sit every subject. If the Professor of Anatomy asked me what part of the body he was pointing to on a model, invariably I’d get it wrong. I literally couldn’t tell my arm from my leg. And I’d developed an almost pathological shyness. If anyone asked me a question my face became scarlet with embarrassment, my throat began to close and I developed a stutter. It didn’t help, of course, that I didn’t have the right kind of clothes, and the wrong kind of accent. You can’t imagine…’

Lonie cut in. ‘…Oh, Ah can imagine all right.’

‘Well, to cut a long story short,’ Father Campbell said, ‘I told my granddad that I was leaving at the end of the first year. I didn’t think it mattered as I was sure I’d failed my re-sits anyway. But in his quiet way, he told me to wait and see. And I passed. And he said I should maybe try another year, because it would become easier and things would become easier. They never did, of course. But then in the last few years he started talking about waste. How it would be a waste to leave now that I’d done three years. How it would be a waste to leave now that I’d only one year to go. How it would be a waste no to apply to hospitals for specialist training. And he was right, of course, but not in the way he meant. With my track record the only hospitals that would give me any sort of consideration or training were the old mental hospitals.’