Be Near Me (6 page)

'Stop it,' I said.

'You've got to answer,' said Lisa.

'I'm not answering,' I said.

'Come on,' said Mark. 'Get over yourself.'

'Get over myself? Is that another one of your American television phrases?'

'Right. Whatever. Come on, Father. Is it yes or no? Have you ever had sex in your whole life?'

'You're very disrespectful,' I said. 'And I'm not in the business of answering a question like that.'

'That's awesome, man. He has!' said Lisa.

'I know he has,' Mark said. 'If he hadn't he would just have said "no". You're busted, Father. It's "yes".'

'Don't be so idiotic.'

'Don't sweat it, Father,' he said. 'We're all human.'

'I have my doubts about that,' I said.

'That's right,' he said. 'Like Arabs.'

We talked about other things, or they talked and I nodded, the young people's views proving less interesting to me than the liveliness with which they were able to express them. It all left me doubting my basic honesty but also feeling giddy and hopeful and slightly breathless.

During my time in Dalgarnock, it had begun to cling to me: not faithlessness, which I haven't suffered since leaving Oxford, but a large private sense of wanting to depart from the person I had always been. I could see it happening: one sort of world was colliding with another, and that evening I wanted to join their world and embrace their carelessness. That's what I wanted to do. I wish I could say I knew their kind and beheld all my errors, but what I knew about that pair, Mark and Lisa, was only what I wanted to know. They were very young and ready for life.

A smell of pine came from the corridors. The cleaners were knocking off for the evening and the janitor came with his grumpy face and his chain of keys. 'Got to lock the doors now, Father,' he said. 'It's been a long day. Don't let these ones keep you.'

Maybe I felt refreshed by their badness; maybe I knew them all along, those two, and fell out of step with myself in recognition, knowing they might keep me from boredom with their loose talk and their chaos. The boy rose from the desk and eyed me, then he yawned. I later noticed that Mark would begin yawning every time there was a pause of more than two seconds in his adventures. He was never attentive to anything that didn't involve himself directly and had no sentiment beyond that relating to the fortunes of Celtic Football Club.

'You're a good laugh,' he said. 'You don't get eggy over a bit of chat. No' like them dicks.' He nodded out to the corridor and the invisible teachers now home in their kitchens.

'Thank you,' I said. 'It's rather diverting for me to hear the opinions of young people. Especially on current affairs.'

'Diverting, is it?' he said, grinning. 'You're awesome.'

The only American poet I cared for in my childhood was Wallace Stevens. He wasn't terribly Christian, not like the others I read, but I loved the colour of his thoughts, the way the earth was to him a paradise of green umbrellas and red weather rather than a place of obscure punishments. My mother gave me
Harmonium
for my twelfth birthday and I don't suppose I understood the poems at the time, but I've been thinking about them ever since, and I begin to see that the search for happiness is all we have. To sit in a park and listen to the dogs barking; to sit in a park and hear church bells: are we not always present, always human and always religious according to our faith?

Those poems are made for the earth-loving young. I remember my delight at what they suggested, the world outside with its stars and palaces, its teacups and oceans, and my mother and I chuckled over his titles: 'Stars at Tallapoosa'—'there is no moon, no single, silvered leaf—and 'Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion':

You dweller in the dark cabin,
To whom the watermelon is always purple,
Whose garden is wind and moon.

Of the two dreams, night and day,
What lover, what dreamer, would choose
The one obscured by sleep?

It was Mark and Lisa and me. We laughed in the car on the way to the Blue Star garage. The young people were so completely themselves that they wasted no time on reserve, and so we drove round the edge of the town as if we'd been companions for years, and it seemed right that I was with them and not with anybody else or thinking about the past.

That was my folly: the past was actually present in every word and grin.

'Call me David,' I said.

'Call me Cardinal,' said Mark.

Lisa was tapping out a rhythm on the back of the headrest. In the car park of the school, in the light coming from the houses, we had seen Mr McCallum, the headmaster, throwing up beside his car. He was partly hidden by the trees, but we saw him bending down and we stood back.

'Did you see that?' said Mark. 'Fuck-Face was puking down the side of his crappy Volvo. What a pisshead.'

'Don't,' I said. 'You must have pity.'

'He's just an old tosser,' said Mark. 'Hates me anyway. They all hate me. Don't they, Lees?'

'Aye, they hate him,' said Lisa. 'But he is horrible, though. Don't you think so, Father?'

Mark laughed. 'You are trippin', baby.'

I just laughed too. 'Don't be listenin' to her,' he said. 'The only thing she knows aboot is hip-hop and she's a crack whore.'

'A what?'

'The original Scottish coochie,' he said. 'Nasty!'

'Ignore him,' she said. 'You don't even get crack round here. He's just talking rubbish. He thinks he's a Jamaican hip-hop gangster.'

'Steady on,' I said. Mark rapped on the dashboard and laughed and gave me a soft punch on the arm.

'Steady on
,' he said. 'You're cool.'

I asked them both if they'd really had such a difficult time on the visit to the mosque. 'Damn right,' said Mark. 'Those people just want to hurt people. They's mad as shit.'

'They hate our way of life,' said Lisa.

'You definitely got that from the telly, bitch,' said Mark, turning round in his seat and smacking Lisa's head.

'Bite me,' she said.

I looked over towards the shore as we pulled into the garage and could see only darkness stretching across the water, the lighthouse on Ailsa Craig blinking its cold warning over the bay.

'America is out there somewhere,' I said.

'At least in America they have good music,' said Lisa.

'Too right,' said Mark.

'And films.'

'Too right,' he said.

I gave the pair some money and they went into the garage shop to buy things. I could see them inside, larking about in the aisles and picking up stuff they didn't need. Mark shook hands in an elaborate way with the guy at the cash desk: his colleague, I presumed, as Mark had already said he worked in the garage at the weekends.

I saw myself in the rear-view mirror. What was I doing? What was I doing
here
? My hair was grey and my eyes tired. It's amazing how you wake up grey. We start by thinking grey hair is somebody else's story, a crowning jest in the lives of the contented and the wise. Then you wake up grey yourself, realising you happen to be neither contented nor wise, and that grey hair is nature's revenge on the complacency of lustre.

What was I doing?

The kids were chuffed and preening in the confectionery aisle, gagging for fizz, keen for trouble, scenting the latest chance, each one a selfish fool made charming by the power of the moment and the yellow strip-lights. The car wash was idle. I wound down the window and looked through it, feeling the sea air.

Grosvenor Square.
The people linked arms in the afternoon and the horses charged forward, police helmets flying. A hippy offered a bunch of flowers to one of the officers and was beaten to the ground, and we sang our songs and the future was a dream.

Mark and Lisa were laughing into the garage's microwave oven. In their arms they held slabs of chocolate, bottles and magazines, and I watched them for a while from the car and saw myself at the blurred edge of their existence. This was the great present: maybe the saddest place of all.

'Goodnight then,' I said, the sense of Easter as real to me as their laughing eyes and the condensation on the windows of the Blue Star garage. I drove off before they could see I was gone.

Each man has his own way of betraying himself. For so long I had known myself only in prayers, in silent shadows and in dreams. Say I was longing for disaster. Say I was a victim of the moment, the perpetual now. But driving along the coast road I began to feel less obscured by those years of determined avoidance. I felt alive. There was no moon up there to manage the occasion, no stars to make a feast of the sleeping shore, but I know I felt peaceful as I drove the car over the bridge and past the abbey with its wrong clock faces marking the night.

MY MOTHER WAS SOMEONE
who enjoyed the paradoxes of experience. 'Children like the taste of sweets,' I once said to her in the garden at Heysham. 'Of course,' she said. 'But do sweets like the taste of children?' She met my father when he was working at the Eastern General Hospital in Edinburgh and was immediately, she said, in love with his moral beauty, the kind of thing that Edinburgh girls of her class and generation were educated to look out for.

'Didn't you just fancy him?' I said years later, after another florid retelling of the story.

'No,' she said. 'He fancied me. I fancied spending my life with someone of that sort of quality, which isn't the same thing.'

She said she knew all about the Anderton ancestors. The whole business appealed to her passion for history's approval; she wanted to feel included in the great debates and sacrifices of the past, and I suppose the burgeoning romance-writer in her had an instinct for material. When he got the job at Lancaster Infirmary, and his own past loomed to swallow us up, the past of England and his own people, as well as daily life in the small village of Heysham, she thought it could only be a good thing.

'Honestly,' she said. 'Your father was the only person I'd ever met who truly knew how to live his life. He wasn't perfect. But he knew what it took to be happy. He used to walk down that Lancaster canal as if it were one of life's unbeatable pleasures. He'd carry a guide-book. He'd check the provenance of chimneys. That's your father. He knew what to do.'

'But did you love him?' I asked.

'I miss him every day,' she said.

There came a time in Dalgarnock, in May or so, when my friendship with those reckless young people suddenly deepened. On Lisa's sister's wedding day I was thinking of my mother and father while arranging my vestments. The patter of rain was heavy on the sacristy roof, but none of the great elements could damp down the noise of laughter and bawling coming from inside the chapel, where the families had gathered for the service. Babies cried out in the pews, folded in young arms, both parents and children rather pink, compact engines of untold wants.

I opened the window above the sink and watched the rain. It brought the smell of other parts of Scotland, bogs and glens and open fields, the parts of Scotland I had read about in my mother's books, where history occurred and ruined cottages still stood to account in a smirr of rain.

White chasuble,
I thought.
White stole.

I put the garments over my head and wetted a comb under the tap. With the teeth of the comb I sought my parting and trained my hair into neatness. Looking in the mirror, my body heavy and stately with the old priestly stuff, I saw a child: myself as a child in my first dedication to the performing arts. My eyes' blueness was undiminished, stronger even, but the light in them was dimmed just then, as it might always be, by the knowledge of what could hardly be seen. I had got to the ridiculous age when one looks to see what one has found in the universe. That Saturday in the sacristy, the day of Lisa's sister's wedding, the noise of future happiness touched the glossy walls and slipped through the gap under the door, and I gazed into the mirror and saw something frozen and not quite resolved. The young lady and the man from Kilbirnie were soon to be married, and good for them. They meant to be happy. Even their stupidity was brave. I saw my own eyes and how old they seemed. Those eyes had looked on many things, but I couldn't be sure they'd ever seen oneness.

Yet there had been moments. There was Florence. I stood once at the window of a hotel on the Piazza Santissima Annunziata, the Duomo very clear and Giotto's clock tower puzzling and beautiful in the haze of the morning sun and the honey-glut feeling of the hour. I remember everything one could see from that window: a cypress tree in a lone garden, a house with green shutters, a bicycle parked against an ancient wall. The church bells sounded out in great, intemperate rondels, and birdsong—chirrupy, urgent, nervous for events—rose up from invisible places. The sound of all this made a mystery best suited to that exact time and place. It was simplicity too, like the Fra' Angelicos that filled the former monastery of San Marco round the corner from the hotel, their lightness, their spirituality, carrying at the same time the reality and the unreality of life, offering the young a perspective on belief.

That morning in Florence there was a wedding down below. I saw them coming through a door in the old wall, past the bicycle, through the fog of bells; they all seemed to be wearing greens and yellows, most of them talking and laughing. Then came the old men wearing straw hats and children silent in short trousers, one of them climbing on the bicycle, waving, smiling. The bride and groom had become one person and one force for good under the green shutters. I saw him kiss her and nothing was absent. Not just then. Above the clock tower a dozen swallows were tumbling and circling the peaks, and my eyes fell from the birds to the young couple kissing in the courtyard. The beautiful day would dress them and the night undress them. Music played in the distance. And just then, at the open window, a hand touched my shoulder and I reached up for it without turning, and I knew he was speaking Shakespeare through a smile, as he often did in that summer of love.