Be Near Me (7 page)

Blame not this haste of mine. If you mean well,
Now go with me and with this holy man
Into the chantry by: there, before him,
And underneath that consecrated roof
Plight me the full assurances of your faith;
That my most jealous and too doubtful soul
May live at peace.

People want to applaud in church nowadays. One simply lets them. ('Pragmatic, pragmatic,' Bishop Gerard says.) The boy marrying Lisa's sister stood at the altar with wet-looking, gelled hair and bore, together with his best man, a mischievous smirk dabbed round with aftershave. They had the sort of cosmetic freshness that follows hard on the heels of debauchery, and the congregation buzzed that morning with repressed jokes. There were giggles when I asked for any reason why this marriage might be put asunder, and the service ended with applause and cheering of a sort that might be thought, on a rainy day, to have taken too little account of the perpetual suffering of Christ, whose journey to Calvary was depicted at intervals on the walls of the chapel. At the rear of the line of tanned youths coming to Communion was Mr Savage, the old communist, who shuffled towards me with his plastic bags. This time he asked for two hosts, one after the other. 'I can't do that. You're not hungry, are you?' I whispered.

'No,' he said. 'Just tired.'

The bride's mother saw the old man coming out of nowhere and she looked confused and then faintly repelled. I saw her examine the back of his raincoat and then point him out to a group of the men, as if to ensure that he couldn't harm the proceedings. She did it swiftly with a single painted finger, as if she recognised his type and hated his coat. I watched him for a second over her shoulder as he walked to the door and stood in the shadows. 'That was just beautiful, Father,' she said, staring at me somewhat manically for a second. It occurred to me she looked like someone who had taken lessons in smiling. Her face was orange and her hair quite yellow. 'You gave oor Helen a great send-off. Okay. Now. You'll come to the reception, won't you? We've set you a wee place at the table.'

'I don't think so, Mrs Nolan. It's very kind of you, but I have a great deal of parish business to get on with.'

'Oh, away ye go,' she said, giving me a gentle shove. 'It's a Saturday. You'll certainly be coming along. Are we no' good enough for you, Father? I'll have none of that nonsense now. Come to the reception and have a wee dram. I know we're no' your type. But just for me. It's no' every day a person sees their oldest lassie getting married.'

As she spoke her plump words, I caught sight of Mark and Lisa over her shoulder. Mark was wearing a black tie. He saw me looking up and made a quick, friendly nod, as if proposing that I acquiesce to whatever Mrs Nolan was asking of me. 'Of course,' I found myself saying. 'Of course I'll come. That would be splendid.'

Rice was sticking to the umbrellas and pinches of confetti floated in the puddles. The faces of small children appeared; they had different haircuts, the children, but the same eyes, and their voices rose in anticipation of a challenge and an opportunity.

'Scramble!' they shouted.

I watched them from the tinted dark of a hired limousine, the best man throwing handfuls of silver and the children diving onto the gravel to pick up the coins.

'Look at the state ae them,' said Mr Nolan, the bride's father. 'A buncha piranhas. You'd think they'd never seen a coin in their lives.'

'It's one of your Scottish traditions?' I said.

'A good one,' he said. 'When I was young, we used to scour the town looking for weddings, just to get in on the scramble.'

The car moved off down the lane with a beep at the crouching kids and a squeak of upholstery. 'You were born in Dalgarnock, Mr Nolan?'

'Born and bred,' he said. 'And I'll tell you something for nothing: it's no longer the place I grew up in.'

'How so?'

'I'll tell you how,' he said. 'There used to be plenty of work about here. Good jobs. Coal mining for one, and a big steelworks over the river. That ICI place used to employ thousands, making paint, and, before that, it was Nobel, making explosives. Men worked in those places for forty years and at the end of it the Jobcentre was trying to turn them into Avon ladies.'

Mr Nolan was a youngish man, still in his forties I'd have said, but his delivery was hardened and wise seeming, his attitude somewhat elegiac, as if life had already shown him its uselessness.

'Is that right?'

'You're damn right it's right,' he said. 'Humiliating. That's yer global economy for ye, Father. Experienced tradesmen start working in pet shops, and that's the lucky ones. Half of them have never worked since they got their apprenticeship papers. And these younger ones leaving school? Well, they wouldn't want jobs even if there were jobs to give them. Talk about lazy.'

The car was being driven up the coast road, the other passengers cooing about the bride's dress or things being nice, but Mr Nolan seemed to grow more surly as we passed the dual carriageway and the new houses. 'This was all fields,' he said. 'Now would you take a look. It's all houses for people who aren't even from here. Incomers, Father. People from Glasgow or England or worse. Interlopers. You know they're even packing those bloody asylum seekers into those boxes?'

'Places do change, don't they, Mr Nolan?'

'Aye, well. I'll tell ye, this place has changed for the worst.'

'Oh, for heaven's sake put a smile on your face, Dominic,' said Mrs Nolan. 'You'd put years on a person, the way you talk.'

'Well, it's all true,' said Mr Nolan. 'He's as well to know the truth. This used to be a good place to rear children. Now, it's just an open-air asylum. People used to have sports days and Highland games or whatever else out on that grass. Scottish country dancing. You name it. Now it's all Indian restaurants and Christ knows what else, and no jobs for the locals.'

'Just ignore him, Father,' said Mrs Nolan. 'He's always in a bad mood when he knows he has to part with a shilling.'

'I'm sure that's not the case,' I said.

'Oh, it's true all right,' said Mr Nolan.

'I'm sure you've heard all the great sayings about the Scots, Father Anderton,' said Mrs Nolan.

'I simply ignore them,' I said.

'Well, you shouldnae,' said Mr Nolan, 'because they're all deserved. I'm getting more tight-fisted by the week, is that not true, Denise?'

She just laughed at the window and clouded it. She thought her husband and I were deep in conversation, but I saw her lift a finger and draw a heart on the cloudy window and then wipe it clean.

'And I love a drink,' he said, disarmingly. He stared into the fairy lights around the edge of the car's interior. 'I can honestly say I like a good drink more than I like any of my children.'

'Dominic!'

'Well, it's a fact.'

'Today of all days!'

'Never mind,' he said. 'The Father doesn't mind a wee bit of the truth, do you, Father?'

The hotel had tartan carpets and too many balloons. Each table in the reception suite carried several bottles of Frascati surrounded by net bags full of sugared almonds. Mr Nolan gave a speech saying he wasn't losing a daughter but gaining a son. The best man gave a speech saying the groom had lost his virginity round the back of a disco called Caspers, to a bus conductress twice his age. The groom's riposte included the observation that the best man was a 'bammer', whatever that is, along with the point that he first came to admire his new wife because she was a 'mentalist'.

In my own, unscheduled speech, I tried to get into the swing of things by quoting Robert Louis Stevenson on the idea that marriage was a sort of friendship recognised by the police—titters into coffee cups—and then used scripture to argue that matrimony was a sacrament that deepened the couple's union with Christ—yawns—before raising one of the toxic glasses and taking my seat to cries of 'Ole, Ole, Olé.' A certain Auntie Mary was sick into a bag of wedding gifts. A certain Uncle Alan threw a punch in the direction of a certain Uncle Stuart, which missed but instead hit a curtain and cracked the panel of light switches behind it. Mrs Nolan complained to the hotel's function manager that the galia melon hadn't been cold. The bar ran out of ice just before the Guinness taps went down, but by then the band had appeared at the edge of the dance floor and the newlyweds were dancing to a song called 'Three Times a Lady'.

'Enjoying yourself, Father?' said Mark.

'I wouldn't go
that
far,' I said.

'This party's great, man,' he said. 'Totally mad.'

'Is that good?'

He cuffed my shoulder with the knuckles of one hand.

'It's cleared up out there,' he said. 'The rain's off. We were just outside. Have you seen the bogs in here? Right fancy. We bought these.'

We were on the carpeted stairs next to a fire extinguisher, and people were pouring up from the downstairs bar. I remember looking at him and thinking how sharp he looked, his tie loose and the skin on his face so clear and fresh. He was showing me a handful of square packages: red-coloured condoms. 'Check them out,' he said. The stairs were cloying with the smell of aftershave and dry smoke. I reached my hand down behind me and felt the cold, soothing roundness of the fire extinguisher.

'Are you trying to shock me, Mark?' I said.

'Do you know what they are?'

'No,' I said, 'but I have a suspicion they might be very evil indeed.'

'McNuggets, stop ribbing him,' said Lisa, coming up from behind and leaning on both our shoulders.

'They are
ribbed,
' said Mark, howling with laughter. 'That's what it says on here.'

'Father, are you having a nice time?' asked Lisa. 'That was cool, what you did today. My sister's a bitch actually.'

They both laughed.

'Well, she is. But never mind. It was nice. Now I've got a room to myself, that's all I care about, so it is. And I keep the stereo.'

'Excuse me, Lisa,' said Mark. 'If you don't mind, I've just been showing Father Anderton these rubber johnnies.'

'Oh, yes,' I said. 'I was very shocked.'

Lisa took a condom from him and pressed it into my hand. 'Now he's holding one!' she said. In that second I saw there was something a little vicious about Lisa; she didn't really care what happened in the world around her, so long as she found something to thrill her. 'I've got the key to their honeymoon suite,' she giggled.

'Hey, motherfucker,' said Mark, 'stop telling everybody.'

'We're going to put loads of johnnies all over their bedroom. Do you think that's a good idea, Father?'

'Very good,' I said. 'Just don't tell the Bishop.' I dropped the thing onto the carpet and didn't look down.

'Or the Pope!' said Mark.

A group of boys came up holding pints. 'Check them out,' said Mark. 'Ties and everything. Totally fucked up.'

The lagered boys seemed unsure what to do at a wedding. Each just stood around in his shiny black shoes. Their way of talking kept jolting me back to another time: they spoke like redneck Yankee soldiers from the 1960s or film mobsters, or was it black people they'd never met except on music videos? Two of the boys nodded to Mark, and he turned to me and lowered his voice. 'Don't go yet,' he said. 'See you out the front in half an hour.' One of the boys spoke into Mark's ear and then the whole group disappeared into the Gents.

I went to the bar in the reception suite. I'd noticed there was a general apartheid at this sort of wedding: men drank at the bar while women sat with other women at the tables, passing cigarette lighters back and forth and occasionally squirting perfume on one another. The noise level seemed to grow and the night leaned backwards.

'Look, Tommy,' said one of the men. 'There's your Jean. Holy Christ. They're all up for the Slosh.'

'What's that?' I asked.

'Your man here doesnae know the Slosh,' said a man with razor burns down his neck and a sodden tie.

'It's a dance that women do at weddings,' said Mr Nolan. 'Don't worry yourself, it's a Scottish thing.' He looked up as he said this and a slight gleam of hostility showed in his eyes.

'A Scottish country dance?' I said.

They laughed.

'Not really,' said a bald man with glasses. 'It's a west coast of Scotland thing. Or maybe an American thing. This side of the country is closer to America, Father. We've got their Trident missiles. We've got their air bases. We've got their telly programmes. And we've got their dances.'

'It's no' American,' said Mr Nolan. 'It's a Scottish dance. It's a working-class kind of a thing.'

'Oh, I see,' I said.

'But I don't suppose you know very much about the working classes now, do you, Father?' he said.

'I'm a product of the 1960s,' I said. 'We assumed we knew everything about the working classes.'

'Aye, Father,' he said. 'But you don't know your authentic Scottish
pro-le-tariat,
do you?' He said this through half-gritted teeth.

'Well, Mr Nolan. My life hasn't perhaps been as sheltered as you may think.'

'Oh, "perhaps",' he said. 'Look, fellas. It's "perhaps". Perhaps his life hasn't been quite so sheltered. Hey, Mr Perhaps, maybe your life's not been so sheltered as we think.'

One of the men handed me a glass of whisky and I put it to my lips and fed off the fumes for a second or two.

'People like you,' said Mr Nolan, 'people that talk like you. Posh arseholes from England...'

'Come on now, Dom, that's out of order,' said the man with the glasses. 'You don't talk to a priest like that.'

'No,' said Mr Nolan quite calmly. 'It's just us talking in private here. Forget everybody else. You don't mind a wee heart-to-heart discussion, do you, Father?'

'Carry on, by all means.'

'By all means,' he said. 'Perhaps I will.'

He took a long drink from his pint and looked up. 'Middle-class arseholes from England, pardon my French. You think Scotland is a playground for shootin' and fishin'. You think it's all fucken kilts and haggises and crap like that. You think it's folk songs and single malts and Hogmanay and the fucken Isle of Skye. Well, it's nothing like that. And it's no' hairy-arsed warriors wantin' to die for freedom either.'