Lonie41

‘Whoa, hing on a minute Father.’ Lonie scratched at his head. ‘Ah smoke about 100 fags a day and drink like a fish, so Ah’m always in mortal dangers. Ah don’t mind that. In fact, if you want to hear my confessional; Ah rather enjoy it.’ A note of anxiety crept into his voice. ‘But do me a favour and keep Audrey out of it.’

Father Campbell’s hand crept up and he made the sign of the cross with two fingers in the air beside Lonie. ‘I would if I could, but I can’t. It’s out with my hands and in the hands of God. You are both at a crossroads in your life. What way you go…’

He looked tired. Lonie could see that. The bleeding seemed to have stopped, but by his reckoning he’d lost about a pint of blood. Some of it was seeping into the clean white blankets he was lying on. He stretched his legs, stood up and picked up the towel Lorna had left lying at Father Campbell’s feet. His fingers wrapped round the towel like mitt and danced and dabbed at the crust of blood round the priest’s forehead. ‘Ah’m just hopin’ Ah don’t get a negative image on this like The Turin Shroud.’ The priest’s eyes were closed, but he smiled up at him. ‘Look Father, Ah know you mean well…And I appreciate it. But there’s nothing but crossroads in my life. Ah don’t like swearing, but it’s tiring being so fucked-up, but there’s always another fuck-up round the corner. Ah’ve got to make the best of it. Cause, to be totally honest, you and your prayers cannae make it any better, or any worse.’ He pushed Father Campbell’s head to the side with the towel, as if giving him a haircut and patted at a little dried blood behind his ear. His eyes were open studying him, but he was satisfied with the job he’d done and dropped the towel on the pillow, near the headboard. He sat down slowly, unsure whether to leave or stay.

Father Campbell took a deep breath. ‘I was a bit like you.’

Lonie laughed. ‘No, you werenae.’

He smiled back in reply. ‘I wasn’t sure what I was doing with my life. Most people thought I was doing well. In fact, better than well. They thought I’d made it. I was a doctor working in a hospital…’

Lonie cut in. ‘Well Father, you’re still workin’ in a hospital, but Ah don’t think you’re daeing that well.’

‘…I wasn’t doing well. I wasn’t doing well at all. My life was running past me and I was scrambling to hold on. I lived and worked in the hospital. Patients came and went. Many of them died from disease, from negligence, from gross stupidity on the part of us, the people that should have been helping them, but I just looked on and did nothing. I was numb. Then I transferred to a position in the psychiatric wards close to here.

‘There were a variety of patients in the wards I attended to – young and old, psychotic, schizophrenic, deeply depressive – a mixed bag. The consultant psychiatrist that nominally oversaw my work, a Mr Gibson was a nice man, more interested in smoking his pipe and being left in peace than his patients, but after the chaotic existence of general medical it was a God send. He left me to it. As he explained to me on my first day “We’re not in the results business. Many of our patients will be with us for days, months and years. Some of them have been here most of their life. We’re the family they never had. Let’s make their stay as comfortable as possible.”

‘Fuck,’ said Lonie. ‘Ah don’t like the sound of that. It sounds like days turned into months and years. It sounds to me like when you were in -- you didnae get back out again.’

He expected Father Campbell to disagree with him, but that wasn’t the case. He puckered his lips and nodded in agreement. ‘Yes,’ he finally said, like a sigh which asked for understanding.

Lonie got up to to go quietly. Father Campbell’s eyes were closed and his breathing regular. He didn’t want to waken him. But the priests hand shot out and grabbed at the cuff of his shirt. ‘Can you not stay a while longer?’ Father Campbell’s bruised hand lay on the side of the bed curled up and pitiful looking.

‘Sure.’ Lonie flopped back into the chair. He looked about him more closely. ‘Ah know it’s a disgusting habit, but you don’t happen to have any fags lying about, do you?’ He yawned.

Father Campbell covered his mouth as he yawned in return. ‘No. But I do have a packet of mints.’ He smiled at the expression on Lonie’s face his suggestion was met with. ‘Top drawer,’ he suggested. A Polo-mint clacking against his teeth was his reward. He sucked on the mint. ‘Where was I?’

‘You were locked up in a psychiatric ward and they’d flung away the key? Just like now. Only you were playing at being a psychiatrist so they could let you out?’ Sucking on the mint reminded Lonie of his childhood and perennially pestering his mum for sweets, with shouts of “mum, mum, mum,” and “Ah want, Ah want, Ah want,” and he knew he was doing the same now with his childish response to a lack of nicotine. He took a deep breath. He’d rather have a fag than the memory. ‘Tell me this.’ He helped himself to another mint. ‘Is this your room? Have you no’ got a parish house outside or something?’ He looked about him. Didn’t want to say outright, it was shabby the way the church had treated him.

‘I don’t need very much. I’ve got everything I need here. I say mass every day and I’ve got the Holy Sacraments.’

‘You’re a prisoner too then.’

‘That’s true. We’re all prisoners in our own way.’ He looked over at Lonie working his way through his packet of mints. ‘You’re a prisoner to cigarettes and alcohol.’

‘Nah, the difference is Ah’m a free man choosing to get drunk and fill my lungs with smoke. Nobody’s makin’ me do it.’

Father Campbell scratched at his head, the scabs falling onto the bed like dandruff. ‘We’re all free in different ways. As I found out through my work in the hospitals. The novelty of working in a psychiatric ward soon wore off. I assiduously met patients, prescribed medication, did injections and I’m sorry to say assisted Mr Gibson in electro-shock therapy. It was routine then, but I can still see the terror in the patient’s eyes before we threw the switch; them biting down on the rubber pad in their mouth and the buzz and burning smell before they were lifted from a gurney and flopped down again; their muscles unwrapping themselves and relaxing into a bed of normality. Mr Gibson liked to do about fifteen patients on a Friday. It was my job to find suitable candidates.’

‘Fuck sake.’ Lonie face screwed up, as if he too had been hit with a jab of electricity. ‘You were frying people every week, like fish on a Friday?’ His voice dropped. ‘You know, of course, Ah’ll need to find those people. Their stories need to be told.’ Father Campbell looked as if he was listening, but Lonie wasn’t sure he understood. ‘You’re reputation will be trashed.’

‘God has brought you here for a purpose.’ This was Father Campbell’s enigmatic reply.

‘So how long did you do it for?’

‘Too long.’

‘Ah like to be more precise than that, weeks? Months? Years?’

‘Probably about three or four months. I can’t be any more precise than that.’

‘Why did you stop?’ Lonie was tearing at him, needling him, but couldn’t help it. This was the kind of scoop the fatman was looking for.

‘I got sick. I started hearing voices. Threatening voices Dark spiral shapes began to appear on my peripheral vision and I’d be terrified waiting for them to swoop down on me.’ Father Campbell shook his head in disgust. ‘I hid all of this. Everyone thought I was doing so well. Mr Gibson wanted me to stay on and specialise in psychiatric medicine. For the first time in my adult life I was deemed a success, even though I was a failure.’

Lonie had run out of mints and looked for something to do with his hands. He scratched at the back of his head and picked at his nose. ‘So how did you get caught out?’

‘I didn’t.’ Fear dislocated Father Campbell from the present. His eyes drifted inward to that place where success was failure. ‘I went on a routine visit to the other psychiatric wards run by Catholics. I thought their education and religion generally inferior.’ He paused with a self-conscious laugh. ‘In truth I thought them inferior. But it’s hard to explain. The exteriors: the building, the wards, the fixtures and fittings, were much the same, but there just seemed so much more hope. The air itself seemed lighter. What really grabbed me, however, was their success rate was sixty-percent higher than ours. I didn’t see how that could be possible. I started spending more and more time in the Catholic wards: imbibing their philosophy that there was more to a body than just a mind. There was a soul at the centre of each man’s existence that needed to be fed and nurtured by prayer. Father Bankier, whom I liked, was the resident psychiatrist at that time. He took me into his office one day and in his usual blunt manner told me I was under constant spirit attack. I asked him what he meant and he looked over my head to my right hand side, as if seeing something. “You’ll be having dreams,” he said. “Hearing voices, I’d imagine. The devil’s angels will appear in your waking hours to rip you from your body and mind. Because you have turned your back on the Lord; the Lord will not be with you.” And that is exactly what happened. I don’t know how he knew about my dreams, but the voices in my head, began to gain ground. They’d tell me things about people, cruel things, shocking things, things that would turn a man’s stomach. Then the dark angels began to appear in their multitudes, a great swarm of darkness that blotted out the sun. My career finished I ended up back in the hospital I was working in. The pads were round my head and I didn’t just smell the burning of electroshock therapy, I felt it as my body jerked on the table where I’d flung the switch a few months previously. For a few short days that terrible treatment worked and I was free of those infernal pests. But it was not to last. They clawed at my stomach and body and I could feel them eating my entrails. There was no relief. It was then that I decided to hang myself.