Andrew Hurley - The Loney

I sat next to Hanny and he smiled at me and put his fingers on his lips where Else had kissed him. I took hold of his hand and moved it away.

‘Leave it, Hanny,’ I said and gave him a look that made him lower his head. I didn’t mean to scold him like that. It wasn’t his fault after all. It was just that I didn’t want Mummer to see.

That was what I told myself anyway. There was another feeling that I didn’t want to recognise at the time but seems rather obvious now. I was jealous. But only in the way I was jealous of the boys at school whose sexual exploits had elevated them above the playground proles.

It wasn’t that I particularly wanted their experiences — my God, I would have been terrified — only to be in their club, where membership guaranteed that you didn’t have your gym shoes rammed down a toilet pan full of muck and urine or your ribs blackened by discerning elbows in the corridors. The sex stuff didn’t really matter. I didn’t care about that.

I suppose I was jealous because that kiss had been wasted on Hanny. It didn’t matter to him or to his peers at Pinelands. What I could have done with that experience back at school. To have had the ears of the changing room as I described it all in lurid detail, to have been thought of in another way, if only for the final term, might have made all the difference. I don’t know.

Hanny touched his face again. There were still faint traces of lipstick on his chin that Leonard hadn’t managed to get rid of. I wondered if Mummer might notice, as she noticed every small difference in Hanny’s appearance, but she had her back to me and was watching silently out of the window like everyone else.

No one spoke at all, in fact, until a few miles further on when Mrs Belderboss patted the back of Father Bernard’s seat.

‘Stop, Father,’ she said and he pulled into the side of the road. ‘Look.’

Everyone peered out of the windows as a swarm of bright red butterflies spun over the field in a flexuous shape, twisting and spiraling as one entity.

‘Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?’ said Mrs Belderboss.

‘What are they doing out? It’s too early in the year for them,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘They’ll die before the day’s done.’

‘’Tis God’s world, Mr Belderboss,’ said Father Bernard, smiling. ‘I’m sure He knows what He’s doing.’

‘I think it’s a sign,’ said Mrs Belderboss to Mummer and put her hand on hers. ‘That God will be with us when we go to the shrine.’

‘Yes,’ said Mummer. ‘Perhaps it is.’

‘I’m sure of it,’ Mrs Belderboss replied.

After all, signs and wonders were everywhere.

Father Wilfred had told us time and time again that it was our duty as Christians to see what our faith had taught us to see. And consequently Mummer used to come home from the shop with all kinds of stories about how God had seen fit to reward the good and justly punish the wicked.

The lady who worked at the bookmakers had developed warts on her fingers from handling dirty money all day long. The Wilkinson girl, who had visited the clinic on the Finchley Road that the women at Saint Jude’s talked about in hushed tones, had been knocked down by a car not a week later and had her pelvis snapped beyond repair. Conversely, an elderly lady who came into the shop every week for prayer cards and had spent much of the previous decade raising money for Cafod, won a trip to Fatima.

Mummer would tell us these tales over the dinner table without a flicker of doubt that God’s hand was at work in the world, as it had been in the time of the saints and martyrs, the violent deaths of whom were regularly inflicted upon us as exempla of not only the unconditional oath we had to make to the service of the Lord but of the necessity of suffering.

The worse the torment, the more God was able to make Himself known, Mummer said, invoking the same branch of esoteric mathematics Father Wilfred used in his sermons to explain why the world was full of war and murder — a formula by which cruelty could be shown to be inversely proportionate to mercy. The more inhumane the misery we could inflict upon one another, the more compassionate God seemed as a counterpoint to us. It was through pain that we would know how far we still had to go to be perfect in His eyes. And so unless one suffered, Father Wilfred was wont to remind us, one could not be a true Christian.

In the vestry after Mass, if it wasn’t chastisement over one thing or another, it was a lesson on a particular saint that he considered to be an encouragement for young boys to seek the opportunity of hardship, though it was hard to tell the difference between the two sometimes when he used the saints like a birch rod.

When Henry turned up late for Mass one Sunday, Father Wilfred thrashed him with the Blessed Alexandrina De Costa — the Portuguese mystic who had leapt from a window to escape being raped, had crippled herself in the fall, but still managed to come to Mass every Sunday on time. Even when she decided to devote her life to God and ate nothing but the Eucharist and each Friday had the blessed joy of experiencing the agony of Our Lord on the cross, she was still there at church before everyone else. It was the least Henry could do, even if his bicycle had developed a puncture on the Edgware Road.

‘I’m sorry, Father,’ Henry said. ‘I’ll pray to Saint Christopher,’ he added in a moment of inspiration.

‘Idiot boy,’ Father Wilfred said. ‘We pray with the saints, not to them. The saints intercede on our behalf and petition God to help us.’

‘Oh, yes, Father.’

‘Will you remember that, McCullough?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘But how will you remember it, McCullough?’

‘I don’t know, Father.’

Father Wilfred looked on the desk and picked up a metal ruler. He grabbed Henry by the wrist and before Henry could flinch he brought the edge of the ruler down on his knuckles, splitting them open.

‘Will that help you to remember, McCullough?’

Henry gripped his bleeding hand tightly and moved backwards and sat down on a chair.

‘Well?’ said Father Wilfred.

‘Yes, Father,’ said Henry. ‘I won’t forget.’

Father Wilfred looked at him and after a moment he went to the sink and handed Henry a paper towel with a look of contempt.

I suppose I took it for granted that Henry was one of those children that adults dislike — there are children like that — but quite why Father Wilfred despised Henry so much I didn’t know. Perhaps it was because Henry was rich when he had been so poor. The Poor, after all, were Father Wilfred’s favourite yardstick. They were the caste by which all things had to be measured and in doing so he made every small enjoyment an affront to their dignity. We were to think of The Poor when we reached for a second helping of cake. We were to think of The Poor when we wished for presents at Christmas, or when we coveted the new bicycle in the shop window. Father Wilfred had never had enough to eat. Never enough clothing to keep him warm in the Whitechapel slums. He had never possessed anything other than an old tyre which he used to knock along the road with a stick, trying to keep it from falling into the gutter.

It wasn’t simply out of some obligatory moral stance demanded by scripture that he felt for The Poor so much, it was the core of his calling. Everyone was disappointed, but perhaps not surprised, that he chose in the end to give up his plot in Saint Jude’s churchyard and requested that he be interred with his mother and father and his dead brothers and sisters in the Great Northern Cemetery instead.

But it seemed that there was more to it than that. We Smiths were better off than the McCulloughs by a long way and Father Wilfred never berated me the way he did Henry. Henry just seemed to rile him for some reason.