Andrew Hurley - The Loney

‘Well,’ said Miss Bunce quickly, glancing at David who nodded encouragement. ‘There’s a place called Glasfynydd.’

‘Where?’ said Mummer, giving the others a sceptical look that Mr and Mrs Belderboss returned with a grin. They had never heard of the place either. It was just Miss Bunce trying to be different. She was young. It wasn’t her fault.

‘Glasfynydd. It’s a retreat on the edge of the Brecon Beacons,’ she said. ‘It’s beautiful. I’ve been lots of times. They have an outdoor church in the wood. Everyone sits on logs.’

No one responded apart from David, who said, ‘That sounds nice,’ and sipped his tea.

‘Alright,’ said Father Bernard after a moment. ‘That’s one idea. Any others?’

‘Well, it’s obvious,’ said Mummer. ‘We should go back to Moorings and visit the shrine.’ And buoyed on by Mr and Mrs Belderboss’s murmurs of excitement in remembering the place, she added, ‘We know how to get there and where everything is and it’s quiet. We can go at Holy Week and take Andrew to the shrine and stay on until Rogationtide to watch the beating of the bounds, like we used to do. It’ll be lovely. The old gang back together.’

‘ I’ve never been before,’ said Miss Bunce. ‘And neither has David.’

‘Well, you know what I mean,’ said Mummer.

Father Bernard looked round the room.

‘Any other suggestions?’ he said, and while he waited for a response he picked up a custard cream and bit it in half.

No one said anything.

‘In that case,’ he said. ‘I think we ought to be democratic about it. All those who want to go to South Wales …’

Miss Bunce and David raised their hands.

‘All those who want to go back to Moorings …’

Everyone else responded with much more vigour.

‘That’s that then,’ said Father Bernard. ‘Moorings it is.’

‘But you didn’t vote, Father,’ said Miss Bunce.

Father Bernard smiled. ‘I’ve given myself the right to abstain this time, Miss Bunce. I’m happy to go wherever I’m led.’

He grinned again and ate the remainder of his biscuit.

Miss Bunce looked disappointed and shot glances at David, wanting his sympathy. But he shrugged and went over to the table for another cup of tea, which Mummer poured with a flourish, as she relished the prospect of going back to The Loney.

Mr and Mrs Belderboss were already describing the place in minute detail to Father Bernard who nodded and picked another biscuit from his plate.

‘And the shrine, Father,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘It’s just beautiful, isn’t it, Reg?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘Quite a little paradise.’

‘So many flowers.’ Mrs Belderboss chipped in.

‘And the water’s so clean,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘Isn’t it, Esther?’

‘Like crystal,’ said Mummer, as she passed the sofa.

She smiled at Father Bernard and went to offer Miss Bunce a biscuit, which she took with a thankyou that could have drawn blood. Mummer nodded and moved on. At Moorings, she knew she could beat Miss Bunce and her Glasfynydd hands down, being on home turf as it were.

She had grown up on the north-west coast, within spitting distance of The Loney and the place still buttered the edges of her accent even though she had long since left and had lived in London for twenty years or more. She still called sparrows spaddies, starlings sheppies, and when we were young she would sing us rhymes that no one outside her village had ever heard.

She made us eat hot pot and tripe salads and longed to find the same curd tarts she had eaten as a girl; artery-clogging fancies made from the first milk a cow gave after calving.

It seemed that where she grew up almost every other day had been the feast of some saint or other. And even though hardly any of them were upheld any more, even by the most ardent at Saint Jude’s, Mummer remembered every one and all the various accompanying rituals, which she insisted on performing at home.

On Saint John’s day a metal cross was passed through a candle flame three times to symbolise the holy protection John had received when he went back into his burning house to rescue the lepers and the cripples staying there.

In October, on the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, we would go to the park and collect autumn leaves and twigs and fashion them into crosses for the altar at Saint Jude’s.

And on the first Sunday in May — as the people of Mummer’s village had done since time immemorial — we would go out into the garden before Mass and wash our faces in the dew.

There was something special about The Loney. To Mummer, Saint Anne’s shrine was second only to Lourdes; the two mile walk across the fields from Moorings was her Camino de Santiago. She was convinced that there and only there would Hanny stand any chance of being cured.

Hanny came home from Pinelands at the start of the Easter holidays, bristling with excitement.

Even before Farther had turned off the car engine, he was running down the drive to show me the new watch Mummer had given him. I had seen it in the window of the shop where she worked. A heavy, golden-coloured thing with a picture of Golgotha on the face and an inscription from Matthew on the back:

Therefore, be aware. Because you do not know the day or the hour.

‘That’s nice, Hanny,’ I said and gave it back to him.

He snatched it off me and slipped it on his wrist before handing over a term’s worth of drawings and paintings. They were all for me. They always were. Never for Mummer or Farther.

‘He’s very glad to be home, aren’t you, Andrew?’ said Mummer, holding the door open for Farther to bundle Hanny’s suitcase through the porch.

She tidied Hanny’s hair with her fingers and held him by the shoulders.

‘We’ve told him that we’re going back to Moorings,’ she said. ‘He’s looking forward to it already. Aren’t you?’

But Hanny was more interested in measuring me. He put his palm on the top of my head and slid his hand back towards his Adam’s apple. He had grown again.

Satisfied that he was still the bigger of the two of us, he went up the stairs as noisily as he always did, the banister creaking as he hauled himself from step to step.

I went into the kitchen to make him a cup of tea in his London bus mug and when I found him in his room he still had on the old raincoat of Farther’s that he had taken a shine to years before and insisted on wearing whatever the weather. He was standing by the window with his back to me looking at the houses on the other side of the street and the traffic going by.

‘Are you alright, Hanny?’

He didn’t move.

‘Give me your coat,’ I said. ‘I’ll hang it up for you.’

He turned and looked at me.

‘Your coat, Hanny,’ I said, shaking his sleeve.

He watched me as I undid the buttons for him and hung it on the peg on the back of the door. It weighed a ton with all the things he kept in the pockets to communicate with me. A rabbit’s tooth meant he was hungry. A jar of nails was one of his headaches. He apologised with a plastic dinosaur and put on a rubber gorilla mask when he was frightened. He used combinations of these things sometimes and although Mummer and Farther pretended they knew what it all meant, only I really understood him. We had our world and Mummer and Farther had theirs. It wasn’t their fault. Nor was it ours. That’s just the way it was. And still is. We’re closer than people can imagine. No one, not even Doctor Baxter, really understands that.

Hanny patted the bed and I sat down while he went through his paintings of animals and flowers and houses. His teachers. Other residents.

The last painting was different, though. It was of two stick figures standing on a beach littered with starfish and shells. The sea behind them was a bright blue wall that rose like a tsunami. To the left were yellow mountains topped with mohicans of green grass.