A Perfectly Good Man (38 page)

Carrie eventually reached him through Facebook and winkled a mobile number and an e-mail address from him in exchange for a solemn promise never to pass them on. When he finally dared to mention the graffiti incident she said that the matter had never been discussed since, or not in her presence. This he found frankly terrifying.

He had apologized to her in one of his e-mails, not least for having effectively turned her back into an only child, with all the burden of responsibility that implied, but he could not apologize to their parents. He was coming to realize that this was partly because he could not have been sincere since he remained angry with them. Only that anger was distanced from him now, muffled, like a wasp in a jam jar, by his reinvention of himself.

Twice now he and Carrie had tried to meet, first at her instigation, then at his, agreeing on Truro as a safely neutral midway point. However on both occasions he had taken fright at the last minute. The first time he had not even gone, convinced as he was she would bring Barnaby and Dot along, whatever her assurances to the contrary, because she loved them all so wanted them to love each other. The second time he had gone but then just watched from a safe vantage point in a surf shop across the way, like a coward on a blind date, as she waited trustingly on the steps of the Royal Cornwall Museum. He watched her send him a text, of course, saying
Where RU?
Then she waited a few more minutes, scowling this way and that behind her sunglasses before she rang him. And he pressed Ignore, bought overpriced shirts for all four boys in a compensatory flurry, then started to cry and was brought a chair and a glass of water by a kind sales assistant.

He couldn’t hide this morning, though, because he had foolishly let Fern know about it and Fern would be thrilled finally to meet the mysteriously influential sister hot on the heels of the fuss over the suicide and inquest. Carrie had not tried ringing him since the second time he stood her up. He knew she’d be angry about it but also accepting and that her withdrawal and ignoring his subsequent
sorry
text was her way of showing that anger.

‘Phuc? We’re going to be late,’ one of the boys called.

‘Shit. Sorry,’ he shouted back. ‘Miles away.’

He drove Flynn to the St David’s station car park, where one of the ominously named Football Dads was waiting by his already laden people-mover. Phuc was only an in-a-way dad and was never going to be a football one. Flynn was nominally obsessed with the game, dutifully supporting Exeter City, wearing their red and black strip to bed and sticking monotonously posed pictures of its star players on his walls where they grinned over his slumber, so many carefully groomed, unreliable saints. But he only ever seemed apprehensive on these Saturday mornings when he actually played, and grew breathless with fear if any of the household suggested coming to watch from the touchlines.

Then Phuc drove Thomas on to the disused Methodist chapel that was home to his no less competitive drama club. The oldest and brightest of the boys, he had landed a scholarship to the cathedral choir school when he was little and had not adjusted well to the shock of life in a big, co-ed comprehensive afterwards, seemingly painfully shy. Like the other parents involved, Fern had thought the drama club was a handy way of inculcating confidence while fostering regular healthy contact with the opposite sex, including plenty of useful relationship role play. It seemed to Phuc that Thomas made friends with all the girls all too easily, constantly analysing and recalibrating each friendship as they did, while remaining wary or self-protectively scornful of boys whose friendship he really craved. Surprisingly in someone for whom liberalism was effectively a professional qualification, Fern had yet to notice her eldest was probably gay and Phuc was not going to be the one to point it out for her.

As if to maintain the fiction that the club was genuinely about drama rather than sex education, an exhausting three shows a year were put on, which, unlike Flynn’s football, nobody was allowed to miss. Poor Thomas bought into the fiction entirely and was a passionate believer in his talent. He despised their coach’s taste for rock-based musicals and had been lobbying for several weeks, raising consciousness among the ranks with the acuity of a born politician, for a production of
West Side Story
or
Merrily We Roll Along
.

As he drove the short distance across town, Phuc talked with both boys, parrying their teasing about his choice of music, defending each from the other’s habitually barbed comments, grateful for the slightly manic opportunity their company briefly gave him to avoid thinking about his other family. But then he handed Thomas over to his troop of possessive girlfriends outside the drama club and he was left alone with his thoughts.

He could not get over his stupid impulse to look at Carrie’s text in front of Fern. Had he kept quiet he could either have made excuses and hidden yet again or at least kept the meeting private. Now Fern knew she would make it happen, if not turn the whole thing into a big production. And she would be sure to analyse it exhaustively afterwards.

She had been hungry for every detail of the Lenny Barnes assisted suicide drama, and could not understand either why Phuc didn’t take the excuse to visit his parents or how he and Carrie could bear to do all their communicating about it by texts, not even by e-mail.

‘I prefer texts,’ he told her. ‘Texts keep things nice and cool. If we emailed I’d start ranting and if we talked she might cry or I might and we’d both get upset.’

‘And we can’t have that, can we? What is it with your family?’

‘Carrie’s like me.’

‘Scared of feelings, you mean?’

‘Just … Just calm. She’s steady. Not dramatic. She’s getting enough drama dealing with her dad. She doesn’t need any from me too.’

But of course he had been far more concerned and involved than he let on. Carrie’s initial text had vibrated into his pocket during a consultation with a particularly paranoid homeless man and his social worker. Phuc broke all his rules and glanced at it while the social worker was looking something up in the client’s voluminous file. It read simply,

Dad just helped young parishioner top himself. I think. Just back from police station. Later. Cx

Phuc was then unable to concentrate for the rest of the session. He began to ring her as soon as he was free then opted for text in case she was with Barnaby when she answered and obliged father and son to talk.

The story hit the local headlines and television news that night and was picked up nationally the day after that. Nobody, not even Fern, knew he was in any way linked to the story and he was tempted to leave it that way. He didn’t, of course, and then had to work hard to buy her silence on the matter with full and frank disclosure and regular updates.

He remembered the dead boy’s rather sexy mother only vaguely. Pottery did not interest him. What he chiefly remembered was her being Australian. Foreigners who chose to live in the parish were unusual and he was naturally attuned to their presence, even the white ones, unconsciously collecting evidence that he wasn’t the only one. She looked a bit like Julie Christie with sun damage. He certainly didn’t remember the boy’s accident, as it had happened long after he left home, but he knew exactly the sort of warm-hearted fuss it would have caused in the local press.
Local rugby hopeful in sporting tragedy
. The sort of coverage that equated paralysis with death, which could not have helped the boy’s psychological rehabilitation one bit. Sure enough, just as he could have predicted, that sentimentality had fuelled coverage of the boy’s suicide and Barnaby’s part in it, and turned rapidly toxic.

It was so entirely like Barnaby not to defend himself independently but to trust in honesty and the law to do it for him. It would have been a comfort to take refuge in cynicism, to assume that he relished the unexpected opportunity for a kind of martyrdom. But Phuc knew that was not how it was, that Barnaby’s impulses might have been misguided but that they stemmed entirely from the good.

And now Barnaby was rewarded with a kind of celebrity on Facebook. The spectacle of the unimportant Cornish parish priest quietly but firmly defending the power of prayer and the existence of immortal souls had struck a chord. Christians with small and large Cs and even increasing numbers of interested Muslims, enshrined his short speech at the inquest on their Facebook pages, usually with the photograph of Barnaby emerging blinking into the sunlight outside St John’s Hall and hundreds, then thousands of cyber friends had clicked on the Like button or copied the speech in turn and illustrated it with doves, flowers, crude crucifixes or garish sunsets.
I do know I can pray for a dying man’s eternal soul and I am confident that prayer will offer comfort to the dying and be heard with kindness by God.
It was probably already being made into laminated bookmarks and extra-large tee-shirts for selling at church bookstalls and Faith Fayres.

Equally characteristic had been Barnaby’s refusal to pander to the attention, to accept invitations onto the
Today
programme or
Question Time
or to grant a single interview. Phuc saw a
Times
piece in which a journalist, visiting on the assumption that he could persuade the reluctant celebrity to talk, had wrung so little out of him he had printed the quote in full.
The Reverend Johnson would say only, ‘Our community has lost a much loved and valued young man in terrible circumstances. Please respect its need to grieve and leave us in peace.’
Obliged to dig, they had unearthed nothing, not even a rumour of Phuc’s estrangement; whatever the local feelings against assisted suicide might be, they were stronger against outsiders attempting to rake muck. The internet conversation continued but the local fuss had abated as swiftly as Barnaby surely knew it would. No doubt the Evangelicals who briefly invaded the parish had found their instant hero’s sermons too modest and old-fashioned, his services too High, his churches insufficiently modern.

Phuc wilfully took the busiest route home, playing for time, and stopped off to do recycling, collect the day’s newspaper and buy petrol. Saturday morning was the worst time to leave his home parking space abandoned so he then had to drive around the block a couple of times before chancing on a neighbour who was just leaving for the weekend. He could simply stay there, he thought childishly, hunched down in his seat. Carrie and her friend would come, meet Fern, satisfy curiosity on either side and then go. He need play no part.

Then he saw Carrie’s reflection in one of his side mirrors as she came along the pavement. She seemed transformed somehow. Her look was no less boyish, her hair no longer, her face still unmade up. Perhaps it was just that she was in summery clothes, rather than the sawdusty work things in which he habitually pictured her. In his mental image of her she was either driving her van or holding her vast tool box or carrying a plank. Doing none of these, being completely unencumbered, would normally have left her shy and exposed-looking but she seemed uncharacteristically relaxed and happy in her skin. She was wearing new sunglasses, he noticed, old-style ones in a yellowish tortoiseshell that might have been their granny’s. She laughed. Carrie hardly ever laughed. Then suddenly she was out of view, then she was crossing the street to Fern’s house, their house, and he could see the very striking friend who was with her. It was nobody he knew. She was tall, honey-haired and in a simple summer dress the colour of tinned mandarins.

He hadn’t forgotten she was bringing a friend along but he had imagined it would be one of her lame ducks, some hypochondriac whose particular need lent her a sense of purpose or some wan divorcee who, with the unconscious meanness of the survivor, had chosen Carrie as someone who was no threat and would make them feel better about themselves.

He watched as Carrie double-checked the house number on her mobile, then rang the bell and was let in by Fern with an audible hello. Fern glanced up and down the street with a little grimace before closing the door again. He sat on, aware his heart was racing, counting his breaths to centre himself as he had been taught. His mobile chirruped. It was a text from Carrie:

So we’re here – where TFRU?

Hiding, he typed in then pressed discard and opened the door of the car. As he let himself into the house, he could hear laughter – including the louder, higher laugh Fern produced when she was meeting strangers.

They were in the kitchen. Carrie came straight over and gave him a bear hug.

‘I’ve missed you,’ she murmured in his ear. She held on fractionally longer than felt comfortable, then he remembered to hug her back, which seemed to relax her, and she released him.

‘You’ve met Fern, then?’ he said.

‘Of course,’ Fern said. ‘At long bloody last!’ She had put the kettle on but was in the process of uncorking a bottle of white wine. He spotted several bags from the delicatessen she sometimes visited when there was something to celebrate or they could be sure none of the boys would be around to wolf the food or reject it half-eaten.

‘And this is Morwenna,’ Carrie said.

‘Hi,’ Phuc said, shaking the bony hand she offered him. With the sharpened instincts of a recovering addict, he thought he recognized a fellow troubled soul; not a lame duck, perhaps, but a troubled one. ‘I’m Phuc.’

‘I like your name,’ she said. ‘It means Lucky, doesn’t it?’

‘How’d you know?’

‘I worked alongside a Vietnamese boy in Toronto. He taught me to pronounce it like foot with a silent p instead of a t. You know? As opposed to rhyming it with luck.’

‘Yeah. Right.’

‘Morwenna means sea virgin. Wishful thinking, I reckon.’ She grinned at Carrie.

‘Just like Phuc, then.’ They all laughed. ‘My whole name means
lucky-sea-unicorn
. But the circumstances were pretty desperate.’

‘Your surname means unicorn?’