Turbulent Priests (Dan Starkey 3) (7 page)

‘So where did you learn to be a teacher?’ Patricia asked.

‘Derry,’ he said.

‘But you came back here after you trained.’

‘Yeah. That was always the plan. My dad was teacher here before me. It was kind of expected of me.’

‘I think that’s nice.’

‘Well,’ he said, and nodded once. His gaze lingered on Patricia.

My gaze often lingers on Patricia, but that is my right. I’ve paid the licence fee.

He turned to me. ‘I thought maybe you could come along and read something of what you’ve written to the kids,’ he said.

‘You think they’ll be into sex and drugs and rock’n’roll?’

‘Oh,’ he said flatly, and looked at the table.

‘Dan . . .’ said Patricia.

I shrugged.

‘He’s only teasing,’ Patricia said. ‘You’ll have to get used to his sense of humour.’

Duncan nodded slowly. His eyes returned to me. ‘So what are you writing?’

There are two ways to go when you get into a mood. You go with what comes naturally. Free flow. Stream of consciousness. Honesty. Say it with passion. Stuff the consequences. Or you can be polite. Sometimes you don’t know until you open your mouth.

‘I’m talking to Spielberg about a screenplay.’

Patricia tutted.

‘It’s an examination of the drink-sodden later years of Oskar Schindler. It’s called
Schindler’s Pissed
.’

‘Dan . . .’

‘I don’t think that’s funny,’ Duncan said quietly. He didn’t look at me. He looked at his tea. He stirred it slowly. With a spoon.

‘I do.’

‘You shouldn’t make fun of a subject like that. Six million Jews died in the war.’

‘Ach, lighten up,’ I said and flicked my empty can at the waste bin in the corner. It missed. I went and retrieved it. Then I placed it carefully in the bin.

‘He’s right, Dan,’ Patricia said, ‘there’s no need . . .’

‘I have a close affinity to the subject,’ I said. ‘My dad fought in the war. While he was killing Germans, Spielberg was taking it easy in someone’s womb.’

‘Spielberg wasn’t born until 1946,’ said Duncan.

‘It was a long pregnancy,’ I countered. We were silent for a moment. Patricia looked daggers at me. Duncan continued to stir. So did I. Sometimes, once you’re started, it’s difficult to stop. You get in the groove. ‘Sure how would you know anyway? There’s not even a bloody cinema on the island.’

‘I read a lot.’

‘About movies?’

‘Sure.’

‘That’s like reading about music.’

He stopped the stirring. He blew a rush of air out of his nose. Then he stood abruptly, knocking the chair back and over. ‘I’m not going to apologise to you for life on this island,’ he growled. ‘You’re the one who wanted to come here.’

He reached down and righted the chair. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quickly to Patricia. ‘Anyway. I must be off. I’m sure you’ve lots to do.’

‘Nonsense, you . . .’ Patricia began, but he was already turning for the door.

‘I was only raking,’ I said, belatedly. He nodded. I was starting to calm down. The little burst of temper helped.

Patricia walked him to the door.

I sat where I was. I felt a little stupid. I heard him say, ‘I’m sorry, I get a bit defensive about this . . .’

‘Don’t say a word, Duncan, he hasn’t been well. Just on
a short fuse. We’ll see you again, soon I hope. Why don’t you come for dinner one night?’

I didn’t hear a reply. A shake or a nod.

The door closed.

‘What do you mean I haven’t been . . .?’

Patricia came back in and slapped me across the back of the head. ‘What did you do that for?’ she snapped. There was a squall on her face.

‘I’m sorry. I just . . .’

‘Why are you always so nasty to nice people?’

I bit at a lip. I rubbed the back of my head. ‘I’m not comfortable with nice people. Nice strangers. You know that.’ She was shaking her head. ‘I think it’s a self-confidence thing.’

‘It’s a bad manners thing. There’s no excuse for it. You’re like a child who won’t share a toy. You were awful to Tony when you first met him as well. You tried to punch him.’

‘He was sleeping with you, for Christ’s sake!’

‘He wasn’t
then
, Dan.’

‘Oh.’

‘Your plain bloody nastiness drives people to extremes, Dan. Don’t you know that after all this time?’

I shrugged.

‘It’s lucky I love you,’ she continued, ‘because you’re a self-centred arrogant pig, and you’ve nothing to be self-centred or arrogant about. That poor man went out of his way to bring us a cot, his own cot for God’s sake, and all you can do is try to be smart – and fail.’ Suddenly she slapped
the table. The surprise crack of palm on wood jerked me back. ‘You’ll go after him right this minute, and you’ll apologise,’ she snapped.

‘I will not.’

‘You will.’

Patricia can stare without blinking for longer than anyone in this part of the universe.

‘Okay,’ I said.

Patricia went into the bedroom to feed and change Little Stevie. Or change and feed. I hadn’t quite got to grips with the running order. She closed the door behind her.

I wrote her a note.
I’M SORRY. I LOVE YOU. I KNOW I’M STUPID. FORGIVE ME. DUNCAN SEEMS ALL RIGHT. IF I’M STUPID AGAIN, I’LL SHAVE MY HEAD
. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t a great threat, but then Patricia knows how much I value my hair. I would have nightmares about it not growing back. Or growing back ginger.

8

It was getting towards dusk, a beautiful autumnal dusk with the sun slowly drifting down beyond the lazy waves, when I drove up the hill towards the school. I gave the pub a lingering look of regret as I passed. There was probably beer still locked up in there. If the owner had suddenly got religion, I couldn’t imagine him having a closing-down sale. It might warrant further investigation if things got really bad. I laughed. I didn’t really need it.

The shops on the Main Street, shiny in the heat, were closing up. I nodded at a couple of men. They squinted at the unfamiliar car for a moment, then nodded back. One smiled. One waved. I felt pretty good. The apology to Duncan was a bit of a bother, but I’d get that out of the way soon enough. Maybe he could help me suss out where the drink was. Then I could get settled into some serious writing.
Perhaps the great Ulster novel wasn’t entirely beyond me. Maybe it just needed me to get away from the temptations of the city, from the familiar distractions of friends and news and troubles. Wrathlin, a little paradise off the coast of frightened, bickering Ireland.

I parked in the school yard, a dusty little garden of feet-hardened and sun-baked mud. There wasn’t much to the school. A room, just. I peered through the window. Desks. Chairs. A blackboard. Simplicity itself. It could have been my own primary school thirty years before, a time before video, a time before computers, a time before you could stab your teacher through the heart if you disagreed on a point of arithmetic. By the door there was a small cardboard box; toes of trainers poked out. Ah yes, that brought it back. The communal plimsole box, once a fixture of every school but outlawed since the great verruca epidemic of ’71. On the desk at the front there was an upright wooden box containing half a dozen recorders, and beside it a bottle of Dettol. The instruments would be passed from child to child, dutifully dipped in the antiseptic fluid each time to clear out any lingering spit. The herpes epidemic of ’78 had seen to that one too. It was like I’d passed through the Time Tunnel. Chalked on the blackboard, I noted, was the sign of the cross.

There was a small unevenly whitewashed bungalow behind the school, as if the paint had been applied by dozens of little brushes. And it probably had. There was space for a car, but no car. I rapped on the front door. No reply. Through the window: spartan lounge – sofa, one armchair, a foldaway
desk with exercise books piled upon it. No TV. I turned from the window. The apology would have to wait.

I stood in the yard and looked down the hill over the town, serene, and out over the water to the mainland, now just a hazy blue line, like a distant fence keeping the troublemakers in. I looked up the hill towards the church, lonely, but confident, standing guard over the island. Perhaps subduing it. I started up through the long grass. There’s no time like the present is a phrase which rarely enters my vocabulary. Any time but, is much more likely. Yet it was a pleasant evening, all was quiet, all was well, and if Father Flynn wasn’t there there was the off-chance I might be able to locate some communion wine.

I was more than slightly out of breath when I got to the top of the hill. I would have to get back to the gym. Once I had enough strength to get the doors open. Luckily the church doors
were
open. As they should be. Once, years before, Flynn had offered me sanctuary in his church in Crossmaheart. It wouldn’t have deterred any of the various shades of killer pursuing me at the time, but it was a nice gesture. Now I was spying on him.

Or not spying on him. There was no one about. I stood in the doorway and stared down the aisle.

I wasn’t particularly familiar with the interior of any church, but I was particularly unfamiliar with the inside of a Catholic church. I grew up in a part of Belfast where there was very little cross-community activity. Just two cross communities. The one time I’d been inside a Catholic church was for a
christening. There’d been a bunch of us, all branded Protestant by geography and parental affiliation, rather than religious fervour, but nevertheless we all clustered warily near the exit from the alien environment, ready to make a quick getaway if trouble flared. Throughout the ceremony – actually more spiritual than the Protestant version, a fine point to an atheist/ agnostic – my friend Tommy Nailor had kept up a whispered running commentary. ‘He’s lifting the baby now . . . he’s lifting the knife . . . he’s slitting the throat . . . he’s sucking it dry . . .’ We were laughing so hard, bent double, that when the priest made the sign of peace and instructed everyone to turn to their neighbour and shake hands we’d thought we were being set upon and had bunched up ready for a scrap. Funny. Yeah. Someone had burned down the church a couple of weeks later, although we all had alibis.

I walked down the aisle. Pleasant. Cool. A half-dozen candles flickered. Christ was on the cross. The Madonna. Their fiercely Anglo-Saxon faces. Christianity wouldn’t have got so far if Christ had looked like Yasser Arafat.

I couldn’t see any wine. Couldn’t smell any. I walked back up the aisle. I stopped for a moment by the font. I dipped my hand into the water. Cold. I bent and sipped some up. Nice. Stony. I wiped my mouth and looked up into the eyes of a child standing stock-still in the doorway, his head back-lit by the last rays of the sinking sun.

My heart skipped a beat.

He couldn’t have been more than five. His hair was blond, clipped short. He wore a white T-shirt and blue shorts. He
had plastic sandals on bare feet. We held each other’s gaze for a minute. His eyes were deep blue, his stare intense.

‘Hello,’ I said.

He didn’t react at all. I gave him a little smile. He didn’t give it back. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he demanded.

I relaxed. Probably not the Messiah.

‘I’m looking for Father Flynn. Have you seen him?’

He shook his head warily.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘What’s it got to do with you?’

He had a world-weary surliness not fitting for one so young. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I thought we could be friends.’

‘Pervert,’ he said, and turned on his heel.

I followed him back out onto the hill. He strode purposefully towards the long grass I had previously tramped through. As he reached it, three more boys rose slowly. They watched me sullenly as their young companion rejoined them, then spoke together in hushed tones. My young friend wagged a finger at me. ‘We’re telling on you . . .’ he shouted as they turned and walked slowly down the hill.

I started. I really did. ‘I was only . . .’ I began, and then stopped myself with a silent curse. I was trying to justify myself to a bunch of elves.

I stopped at a small grocery store at the foot of the hill. The owner, a big woman in a starched apron, smiled and welcomed me to the island. I said I was glad to be there.
She said they were glad to have me. I said I was glad they were glad to have me. It could probably have gone on for ever, but I broke the circle by asking about the availability of mainland newspapers.

‘I’m afraid we don’t get them any more,’ she said.

‘None at all?’

She shook her head. ‘No demand.’

I bought some cured ham. She looked pleased. I wasn’t so sure. It still looked a little sick, but we had to eat. There were fish, of course, but we were a couple used to fish that came in fingers – indeed fish fingers that were charred black on one side and frozen on the other are a delicacy you can get in few other houses in Belfast – and I wasn’t of a mind to buy fish as God had probably intended them. They lay on a metal tray, staring up at me. The woman did her best. Caught that morning. Absolutely beautiful fried in a little butter. I should have asked her to bone them, to poke their eyes out and cut their heads off, she could have done it without a second thought, but the first thought of it made me feel sick. As I turned to leave she tried to tempt me with a rabbit. It was no temptation.

When I arrived back at the cottage the Land-Rover was parked outside again.

Or not, as the case may be. It seemed to be the same vehicle as I approached it out of the growing dusk, but in the light from the front room I could see that there were subtle differences only the trained eye of an international reporter could detect. The front headlamp was smashed and the bonnet badly dented.

The front door opened before I could put the key in the lock. ‘Thought it was you,’ said Patricia, Little Stevie in her arms, a welcoming smile on her face. ‘Visitor,’ she said, a little quieter.

‘Who?’ I mouthed.

‘Knows you,’ she whispered.

I walked into the lounge. Father Flynn was sitting in the armchair, a cup of tea in his lap. He had the black shirt, the dog collar. For some reason I’d expected that he might have worn civvies. Or to have long flowing robes and a wooden staff.