Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

Adrian Sherd had always been content to visit America three or four times a week. When he had tried it more frequently, his female companions always seemed listless and unco-operative and even the landscape was uninspiring. But he had to see whether Seskis was talking sense.

He reached a score of five consecutive nights. On the sixth night it was like torture. He arrived at a desert playground in Arizona. He was so jaded that he had brought two carloads of women with him instead of his usual two or three favourites. Jayne, Marilyn, Kim, Susan, Debbi, Zsa-Zsa — anyone who might come in useful was there.

He had to order them around like an army sergeant. He told one squad to strip off at once. A second squad had to take their clothes off slowly, dawdling over each item. Another group had to hide among the rocks and be ready to give in to him if he stumbled on them during the afternoon.

The fun and games dragged on for hours. The women began to complain. Sherd tried to think of some mad perversion that would bring everything to an end. The thing that finally did the trick was so absurd that he almost apologised to the women when it was over. He told them he didn’t want to see any of them for at least a week. Then he flung himself down in the shade of a giant cactus and fell asleep.

The next day was Sunday. Adrian rode his bike to seven o’clock mass instead of going with his family on the nine o’clock mass bus. He told his parents he preferred the early mass because it left him the rest of the day for mucking around. But in fact he was tired of staying in his seat while his parents and brothers looked curiously at him as they climbed past his knees on their way to communion. He thought his father would surely guess soon which sin it was that kept him away from communion for weeks on end.

It was the Third Sunday of Advent, the last Sunday before school broke up for the long summer holidays. Inside the church, Adrian joined his hands and bowed his head slightly and looked at the people around him. He knew it was no use trying to pray unless he had some intention of giving up his sin in future.

The sermon was about repentance in preparation for the great feast of Christmas. The priest said, ‘This is the season when we ought to remember all the ways we’ve offended Our Blessed Saviour during the past year.’

Some of the people near Adrian lowered their eyes and tried to look sorry for their sins. Adrian wished he could shout, ‘Hypocrites!’ in their faces. What did they know about sins? God saw into their hearts. He knew the year’s total of mortal sins for everyone in the church. According to the records kept in heaven, the worst sinner, by a margin of at least a hundred, was a young man in the back row. He was pale and weary, as well he might be. Young and slightly built though he was, he had outscored people twice his age. More remarkable still, he had restricted himself to breaking one commandment, whereas they had the whole ten to choose from.

At communion time Adrian sat up to let the sinless ones past. A young woman’s stocking brushed against his knee. The taut golden fabric shrank back from the drab grey of his school trousers. Adrian kept his eyes down. The champion sinner of Our Lady of Good Counsel’s parish for 1953 was not worthy to set eyes on a pure young woman approaching the communion rail.

While the long queues of communicants moved slowly towards the altar, Adrian opened his missal at the page headed Making A Spiritual Communion and tried to look as if he was making one. If a person was not in a state of sin, but could not go to communion because he had eaten a meal or drunk a glass of water that morning, that person could unite himself in spirit with Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. If the owner of the golden stockings noticed Adrian when she returned to her seat, she would probably see the heading on the page of his missal and think he hadn’t gone to communion because of a mouthful of water he swallowed while he was cleaning his teeth that morning.

The owner of the stockings turned out to be a girl in a school uniform. The skirt and tunic were a rich beige colour. On the tunic pocket was a snow-covered mountain peak against a bright blue sky. A circle of gold stars and a gold motto hung in the sky. It was the uniform of the Academy of Mount Carmel, in the suburb of Richmond. The girl seemed no older than Adrian, although he knew already that her legs were heavy and rounded like a woman’s.

Coming back from communion, the girl kept her eyes lowered. Her lashes were long and dark. She must have felt Adrian staring at her as she settled herself in her seat. She looked at him for less than a second. Then she knelt down and covered her face with her hands like all good Catholics after communion.

Adrian thought about the glance she had given him. She was utterly indifferent to him. If he had somehow reminded her that a few minutes earlier their legs had brushed together, she would have slapped his face. And if she could have seen the filthy state of his soul she would have got up and moved to another seat.

Adrian looked at the girl again. Her face was angelic. She had the kind of beauty that could inspire a man to do the impossible. He turned towards the altar and put his head in his hands. Slowly and dramatically he whispered a vow that would change his life, ‘For her sake I will leave America forever.’

Adrian had often knelt outside a confessional and prayed the words from the Act of Contrition, ‘And I firmly resolve, by the help of Thy grace, never to offend Thee again.’ He had always known (and God had known too) that before a week was over he would be back in America again with his film stars. But in the back seat of his parish church, within a few feet of the girl in the severely beautiful uniform of the Academy of Mount Carmel, he felt strong enough to keep his promise.

He conducted an experiment to prove it. He looked the girl over, from her ankles to her bowed head. Then he closed his eyes and summoned Jayne and Marilyn. He ordered them to dance naked in front of him and to shake their hips as suggestively as they knew how.

The experiment was a complete success. With his beige-clad angel beside him, the naked film stars looked obscene and revolting. Their hold over him was broken at last.

He tried one more experiment. It was an unpleasant one, but he had to do it — the fate of his soul for all eternity might depend on it. He stared at the girl’s jacket and tried to imagine himself taking it off. It would not budge. He looked at her skirt and thought of the white underwear just beneath it. His arms and hands were suddenly paralysed. The lust that had ruled over him night and day for more than a year, his mighty lust, had met its match.

Riding home on his bike after mass, Adrian sang a current hit song. It was called Earth Angel. He sang the words slowly and mournfully like a man pleading with a woman to end his long years of misery.

He made his plans for the future. That very night, and every night after that, he would fall asleep thinking of a girl in a beige school uniform with a pale haughty face and dark eyelashes. He would shelter in the aura of purity that surrounded her like an enormous halo. In that zone of sanctity no thought of sin would trouble him.

On the following Saturday he would go to confession and rid himself for the last time of the sin that had threatened to enslave him. Every afternoon until school broke up, he would catch a different train from Swindon to Accrington and try to meet up with his Earth Angel on her way home. When school started again in February he would catch her train and see her every day.

On the last Monday morning of the school year, the boys in Adrian’s form were all talking about the holidays. Stan Seskis explained to his friends a competition he had worked out in case they got bored in the long weeks away from school. All of them, Seskis, Cornthwaite, O’Mullane and Sherd, would keep a careful count of how many times they did it. They would be on their honour not to cheat, since they all lived in different suburbs and had no way of checking on each other. When they came back to school in February they would compare totals.