Be Near Me (11 page)

'Right,' I said. 'I'm sure you'll have that.'

Lisa stroked her shiny leg with a marigold and smacked her lips. She suddenly looked up at me as if she hadn't seen me before. 'Father,' she said, 'you have wasted your life, haven't you?'

The island was real to me in the way that memory is real, a place almost too solid and transfixing. 'I don't think so,' I said. 'I believe in God. That has been my life.'

'It can't be,' she said. 'You could have been having a good time and you've wasted it.'

'That's not true, Lisa. Not from my point of view. We have different names for it, but I've lived according to my faith.'

'What is your name?'

'Sorry?'

'Your real name. What is it?'

'David Anderton.'

'So what's wrong with just being him?'

I stood up and spun a stone across the loch to make it jump. 'It must be quite boring,' she said, 'being Father somebody and having to go on like you're good all the time. Nobody else does. And then you end up here, in Bumble-fuck, UK.'

'I am him,' I said, and I knew my voice was quiet. I was searching to say something permanent. 'Faith and good works,' I said. 'It's not
your
idea of a life, but it is mine.'

'Whatever,' she said. By that time the others had run over the verge and were panting beside us. 'He believes in God,' said Lisa, with a wide smile on her face.

'That's freaky,' said Mark. 'Him a priest as well.' I made a comedy face and put out my hands to him, advancing like Frankenstein's monster.

'God is the supreme Spirit,' I said, 'who alone exists of Himself, and is infinite in all perfections.'

'Call the cops!' said Mark, backing off. 'That is some scary shit.'

'God had no beginning,' I said. 'He always was, He is, and He always will be.'

'Get off,' he said. 'He's freaking me out.' We laughed and made our way over the rock, and we saw a cormorant rise from the reeds in the middle of the loch and fly off.

'He's a good laugh,' I heard Mark say behind me.

'He's wasted his life, though,' said Lisa.

'Don't say that,' said Mark.

'Why not?'

'Just don't.'

'Oh, bite it,' said Lisa.

Up there, west of the summit, a pillar of basalt rock called Kennedy's Nags conceals a cave once popular with smugglers. We found a path leading down to it, and I laid the rucksack at the mouth of the cave. The young people were shouting football slogans and other stuff into the darkness. They were startled to hear their voices coming back, and some of them ran inside. 'The walls in there are thick with bird shit,' said Mark.

'And markings,' said Lisa. 'Did people live here?'

'Some people tried to,' I said.

'What?' she said. It was hard to hear each other's voices for the screeches of gannets overhead. Thousands of them, swooping and perching with their yellow eyes troubled. 'The markings on the cave wall are quite ancient,' I said. 'People tried to live here. Apparently, two stone coffins were found in there several years ago.'

Apparently,
he said,' said Mark. Lisa giggled.

'You're so posh,' said Mark. 'The way you speak. The stuff you come out with. It's right posh, the way you go on.'

'Do forgive me,' I said. 'Perhaps I should annihilate my aitches and start saying "ken" instead of "know" or talking like one of your hip-hoppers.'

'See what I mean?' he said. 'You're a riot.'

We could still hear some of the others hollering into the cave and shouting oaths. 'Come on!' I said. 'Lunch.'

'What in Christ's name is that on there?' said Lisa.

'Roasted pepper,' I said.

'You must be joking,' she said. 'I'm not eating that.'

Mark and the others ate the food I'd prepared, lifting it out of the rucksack with pained but silent looks. Then they started agitating about a small apple-juice bottle filled with red wine. 'What is it?' said Mark.

'Valpolicella,' I said.

'Is that wine? Oh please. Just a swig.'

I gave him the bottle and he glugged until I pulled it away from him. Then he started dancing and fooling around. 'Telling you, man,' he said. 'When I start earning some money, I'm gonnae smoke Dutch Masters and drink Cristal till it runs out. I'm talkin' me driving the lowriding Lexus. That's how it's gonnae be when Chubb and me are your superstar DJs.'

Lisa was near the edge and I told her to come back. Then she screamed and said it was horrible.

'What's the matter?' I said. She came running back over the crags. Her face was red but I couldn't hear what she was saying for the noise of the gannets. Her eyes were full of tears when she reached us, and she struggled to get her words out.

'Horrible,' she said. 'Over there. At the bottom of the rock where the nests are. There's rats! I saw one of them with a tiny bird in its mouth, a puffin or something.'

'What is it with you?' said Mark. 'It's a bloody bird sanctuary. All about nature, Lisa. What did you expect?'

'Shut it,' she said. 'I don't expect fucken rats to be eating birds right in front of me. Baby birds.'

'Give her a slug of booze, Father,' said Mark. 'She's got her finger on the trigger. Give her a few slugs.' I passed her the cup, and she smiled into it and took a sip and said it was okay. I could see Mark had smoke coming from his hand, the one he held down the side of the rock.

'I can smell that,' I said. 'Mark, I'm not stupid. Put it out or there'll be trouble.'

'It's only a wee joint, Father,' he said. 'Come on, it's our day out. Nobody's bothered.'

All I said was that I refused to argue, and I told them I was going up the top to get the view. It was stunning up there with the breeze coming up a thousand feet from the water, the light now sparkling for miles in every direction. I could hear the young people laughing and shouting just below. 'You're great, Father,' one of them shouted over the grass.

'Whatever,' I said.

To the west one could see Belfast Lough and the coast of Ireland rising up in the clear afternoon, and on the other side, Scotland was quiet and complicit, its blue hills sheltering Ballantrae and massing southwards to circle Loch Doon. Further off, there were greyer hills and one could see the grades of distance, how the clouds seemed smaller and lower by degrees, until the smallest hung over England, I suppose. I sat down to take stock, while the voices of the young people came nearer over the grass. I looked back and saw Mark walking with Lisa, his arm crooked round her neck, and he bent down and kissed her with practised ease as they walked.

Above our heads, the gannets shrieked and cut through the air in their many hundreds, small feathers falling on my hands. I sat there and could feel the heat of the youngsters behind me. 'Oh, Father,' said Mark, his voice all cracked and ready for experience. 'It's totally mad up here. Look at the water. You can see the fishing boats. It's mad. Everything looks so wee from up here.'

'It's all perspective,' I said.

I could taste the wine in the corners of my mouth. As the young people darted over the grassy summit, laughing, teasing, smoking and speaking their important nothings, I thought back thirty years to Lake Bracciano. In the summer months, we used to gather our togs and travel out from Rome to the mineral hot springs, the English seminarians spouting water from their mouths and dodging eels. You could see medieval castles on the lakeside. I remember the one at Anguillara Sabazia and the sense of a noble, unchanged world radiating through the town with its high scent of rosemary to reach us out on the lake.

On the summit of Ailsa Craig, I left the young people in a huddle with their mobile phones. They were pointlessly texting each other, and I smiled over my shoulder and made my way down to the water. Heather burst through the rocks, and my hair was thick with air as I leapt the last metre to the beach. A life is a long time not to think of oneself undressing for another person, and the vividness of the thought held me back for a moment at the edge of the sand as I took off my shirt, my trousers, my socks. The water was very cold. Even now I can feel its slimy wetness burning my legs, inching over my private parts and hugging my waist. Then I dived, the water engulfing me in a shocking, sacramental way. Every part of me loved it. I was no longer cold, merely excited and refreshed by everything, the lifting sea and my love of it, the immense generosity of the waves as I swam out from the shore. And swimming there, I wished suddenly that I could give some of this water to my dead father, let it flood through the doors and windows of our former house, diluting the water from the pipe that burst the night he died and giving fresh life again to the rooms and all our things. There was nothing frozen about the water and everything about it signalled life. I plunged down and opened my eyes to see the blackness there, and for a second it frightened me and I wanted to cry out in the private dark. But instead I swam further down and seemed to master the moment with its strange miracles of thought.

I faced the shore with the sun in my eyes. There was no citadel, no church bells or Lazio evening, but I saw the young people clambering down the rocks and shouting the odds. I couldn't hear what they were saying but I could hear them laughing and see Mark jumping up and throwing my shirt into the air. The beach was all light and Ailsa Craig was a great thing at the young people's backs. They stood waving their arms, and with their hands around their mouths, they shouted their loudest over the water. I floated on my back, an orchid of the sea, my breath quick and my heart calling out to the sky before I turned again, swimming down through the water like a person escaping his skin, becoming again a boy with splayed fingers, feeling my way through the beautiful world of salt.

IT WAS WINTER
when my father died. I could hear voices downstairs, the voice of my mother, my father saying something in reply, the kitchen cupboards opening and closing. Frost glittered on the windowpane; I worried about a teddy bear's ears taking in the cold and took him down from the ledge. My mother brought a hot-water bottle and she kissed the tips of my fingers: that was our code for going to sleep. Comfort has a smell. It has a sound. Something then like roasting chicken and a voice on the radio talking about Berlin, the sound of my parents laying down cutlery. Before closing my eyes, I placed the bottle between my legs and saw a Spitfire diving through the darkness on a yellow thread.

They think my father's heart must have given out on the landing. There was certainly no shout and in the morning they came to the house and covered him with a grey blanket. I saw the latter stages from Mrs Ainsbury's flat above the Post Office; she brought Bourbon biscuits and told me to come back from the window. She kept saying, 'Everything will sort itself out,' but I knew it never would. My mother was away for hours and I was still holding the hot-water bottle in my lap from the last hours of my previous life. It turned very cold, and eventually she came back and walked slowly up the Post Office stairs. 'Your father was good at mending other people's hearts,' she said. 'But he couldn't mend his own.'

We weren't finished with my father. I had barely even begun with him and I had questions too, things he could tell me about bikes and God and enzymes and the Himalayas. My mother tried to stroke away my perplexity with a hand both soft and heavy. In my memory, those hands are a portrait with a gallery of their own: they trembled for months when she opened a letter and shook when she lifted a cup of tea, her soothing drink, each sip appearing to water and brighten her eyes. We couldn't go home for weeks after that because of the burst pipe and stayed in the spare room at the Post Office, my mother crying most nights, a long clock ticking in the hall and me sitting on the carpet turning a coin from one finger to another. It was a half crown given to me by Mrs Ainsbury: 1950, it said. George VI in profile. His straight nose was cut into the coin and I could inspect his jaw, his neat ear and his beautifully combed hair, all handsome, all silver, all mine.

One saw the larks in the spring of that year in Dalgarnock, climbing the sky above the rape fields that edged the town. I was taking confessions in the chapel as people from the Legion of Mary performed their cleaning tasks among the pews. A copy of the catechism sat next to me on the wooden bench. It was coarsely worded, I thought; all the better I had Cowper's poems on my lap.

I sometimes think myself inclined
To love Thee, if I could;
But often feel another mind,
Averse to all that's good.

How frugal and true a sentiment for a Saturday morning, when the church smelled of faded incense and a familiar boredom had taken up residence in the fibres of the carpet and along the empty pews. I find my lips move more when I read nowadays, and my distinguished educators would blush to see me over the tattered poems. As this thought occurred, the curtain on the other side of the confessional went back and I knew it had to be them, Mark and Lisa. I knew it from the rapid swish of the curtain, the joke silence, the dunt and clump of heavy shoes.

'Please forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,' he said. 'It's been a hundred and fifty years since my last confession.'

'Go on.'

'I'm afraid my mother and me, we killed my father last night. She smoked him with a gun right in front of me. And then I put a few slugs in him, just to make sure. He refused to get out of his chair and we had to do it. We killed him and we ate him for dinner. There's plenty of him left. He's in the fridge. Anyhow. I ask for God's forgiveness and promise not to eat any fat bastards again. Also, Father: I had sexual intercourse with a bus. It was very frightening.'

'It was a single-decker,' she said.

'Yes, Father, a single-decker. It was giving me the come-on for ages. Big red bus. Brazen it was. Well. Eventually I gave in to temptation and had it off with the bus in broad daylight. God forgive me.'

'You're very silly,' I said.

'How many Hail Marys for shagging a bus?'

'At least a thousand. And another thousand for ganging up on your dad. You must learn to suppress your appetites.'