Lonie75

In her bathroom, on the day of Father Campbell’s funeral, Audrey used an orange Bic razor to shave the fuzz off her legs. She didn’t know why she bothered. Under a thick pair of black tights it wasn’t as if anybody would be seeing them. But she did it anyway. Once more she made sure there was no fluff on the collar of her black coat, hanging on the door hook and her black skirt was long enough to cover most of her legs, but not too long so that she seemed hippish or an old woman. This was how it felt to be getting old, she thought, looking in the bathroom mirror, rubbing face cream into cheekbones and making jawing motions to check out how much elasticity her skin had lost, missing out on parties, and going out only to go to funerals. She mock scowled and smiled at the mirror and it seemed like much the same thing to her.

Lonie was waiting for her outside the car park in High Street. That was the closest they could get to the Cathedral on Clyde Street. With the Necropolis nearby it seemed somehow an appropriate place to meet.

‘Hi-yah.’ Lonie flicked his fag into the gutter, torrential rain, washing it down the cobbled lane. ‘Nice day for it.’ He looked over at her and smiled.

Audrey checked through her bag one last time, and made sure she had her car keys, before they set off. Lonie stuck his arm through hers. They walked down High Street, joined at the hip, pulling and pushing, this way and that, as they battled through the high winds whipping them together and ducking their heads down as they passed the few other scurrying pedestrians. He’d made an effort, was clean shaven, and had that musty smell of a man trying too hard, of carbolic soap and aftershave that had been dragged backwards through fag smoke. More people joined them in Clyde Street. It was more hustle bustle, picking their steps more carefully, slowing, all of them moving like a great beast in the same direction. Lonie clutched at her arm more tightly.

‘It that it there?’ Audrey could have bit her tongue. It seemed a stupid question. There was no bell tower, but it was a neo-Gothic monstrosity of sooted vaulted stone glooming over the Clyde.

‘Aye, that’s it.’ Lonie drew Audrey in sideways to the other pedestrians as he lit up a fag. ‘Sorry,’ he apologised, ‘but they won’t allow you to smoke when we get in there.’ He looked up at the Cathdral. ‘Aye, it is a bit of a pile.’ He sucked in fag smoke. ‘Ah suppose that’s the kind of thing they built in them days.’ He sniggered. ‘Not much has changed. Took twice as long to build as they first thought and cost three times as much.’ He pulled her in closer, his body a buttress against the wind and rain. ‘Vandalism,’ he explained, ‘as quick as they could build it up, during the night marauding gangs of Protestants came to knock it down. They had to post security guards. Many of them were given severe beatings for their audacity and for being Catholic. The only way round it was to employ Protestant security guards.’

‘I never knew.’ Audrey apologised, although she didn’t know why. She dipped her shoulder to let a woman holding the hand of a small boy pass.

Inside the cathedral gloom the smell of clothes drying out and hot bodies pressed too close together was overpowering. An organist up above them was warming up, bellowing out, leaving notes hanging overripe in the air, until they crashed down on those below. Audrey kept hold of Lonie’s hand. He pushed and pulled her through the throng. The crowd was doubling back on itself as concierges wearing a V-shaped purple silk bands over white shirts, directed those attending into the side church and along the walls inside the nave and then eventually upstairs into the stalls of the choir. With all these filled they started asking people to leave. Lonie was stopped by a red faced concierge with a flushed face.

‘I’m sorry. You can’t go in there sir. There’s no room.’

Lonie looked over his shoulder. Only the main aisle of the nave was free of people. The coffin stood robed in white, pointing at the altar. When the organ stopped suddenly, there was a humming sound in the air as the congregation moved about and whispered to each other, as if they were bees inside a catacomb. ‘Ah don’t suppose it would be any good showing you these?’ Lonie delved into the side pocket of his big coat and pulled out the two letters that Cardinal Robbins had given him.

‘Mrs. Mrs’. The concierge tugged back an elderly woman that tried to slip past him. ‘There’s no room in there. Please make your way outside. We’re trying to organise a set of speakers so that you can hear the mass.’ He quickly scanned the letters and moved sideways and waved them through. ‘Fourth seat in the front row on your right. Mrs. Mrs...’ His eyes darted towards the old woman.

Audrey kept behind Lonie. She wasn’t sure what to do or how to behave. Walking down the central aisle was like walking onto a stage. Hundreds of pairs of eyes followed her. Light filtered in through the stain glass windows and the church seemed to broaden out at the front as if someone had blown down a metal pip and fashioned the building like a light bulb. For a second she panicked, thinking Lonie was playing some kind of joke and was going to keep walking right up onto the altar - where priests and altar boys were set out like a medieval mystery play. But then he put his hand on a pew, near the coffin and genuflected. Her hand tightened on her bag. She wasn’t sure if she should do the same thing. She compromised and did a sort of curtsy before the coffin. A sweating fatish man lifted the kneeler to let them past and into the seat in the pew beside him. He knelt down on the padded board, his head bowed in prayer. Lonie’s hand slipped into hers and he squeezed her fingers.

The great organ sounded out, and they stood up, with the thundering of one kneelers being thrown back. The fatish man beside them picked up a hymn book and joined the choir and hundreds of other voices in singing: ‘Holy God we praise thy name. Lord of all we bow before thee…’ Audrey followed Lonie’s lead when to sit down and when to stand up. Sometimes she got caught out and was left sitting when she should have been kneeling and standing when she should have been sitting. It was like a children’s game of statues, but with more complicated rules and a service that seemed to drone on and on. Cardinal Robbins eventually got up into the pulpit to say a few words about Father Campbell’s life. He started off with a biblical text and segued into something a little more personal.

‘Jesus said, Not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without our Father knowing it. But most of us that know the biblical text better, like Father John here…’ Cardinal Robbins laughed and turned towards one of the officiating priests sitting to the left of the altar and his captive audience laughed with him. ‘They will remember that the biblical price of two sparrows for an offering was a penny. How much then was Father Campbell’s life worth? A pound? Ten pounds? One hundred pounds. A million pounds?’ His voice dropped. ‘There’s no way of knowing. His life's work was himself, but he was God’s work. His humanity stretched out to those on the margins of society. Those that are regarded as worthless, but he chose not to think so. We too have that choice. And we face it every day. I, personally, find it distasteful that one of the richest societies this world has ever seen cannot, chooses not to, care for the sick and the dying. But that is me speaking as a Cardinal and as a politician. Father Campbell was the kind of priest that I sometimes wished I’d become. There is a kind of perversity in the saying that old people bury the dead, and young people bury their smiles. But you know what? Father Campbell would not want us to be sad at his passing. He is more fully reunited with Jesus. Father Campbell’s beating heart is at peace, but his soul lives on, as does his life’s work. My Father has many rooms…he has returned home.’

Audrey was sure the Cardinal smirked and he looked directly down at her and Lonie. The silence was broken by the clanging of chains as the chief altar boy passed the brass incense burner to the lead priest filtering off the altar. An aromatic cloud filled the air in and around Audrey. ‘Why do they do that?’ She whispered out of the side of her mouth to Lonie.

‘They only do that if they like you.’ Lonie whispered back. ‘And it helps if you’ve died.’

Audrey and Lonie followed the Cardinals and the bishops, the prelates and altar boys and down the central aisle and out of the church. All around them the hymn ballooned out, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I’ll not want; he makes me down to lie…’ Somehow this outpouring of love and words of regret, yet hope, worked into Audrey’s bones, so that she choked up and felt tears running freely down her cheeks.

Outside the Cathedral Lonie held her hand and she felt a bit better.

‘You want to go for a drink?’ Lonie asked.

Audrey nodded. ‘No. I’ll just go home. I need to think some things over.’ She kissed him on the lips, a quick peck, but it was enough. He went right down Clyde Street and into the town. She went left, up towards High Street, where her car was parked.