Andrew Hurley - The Loney

‘This is The Loney, isn’t it?’ I said, surprised that he remembered it at all. It had been years since we’d been there and Hanny rarely drew anything that he couldn’t see right in front of him.

He touched the water and then moved his finger to the camel hump dunes, over which hung a great flock of birds. Hanny loved the birds. I taught him all about them. How you could tell if a gull was in its first, second or third winter by the mottle of its plumage and the differences between the calls of the hawks and terns and warblers. How, if you were very still, you could sit by the water and the knots would move around you in a swarm so close that you could feel the breeze from their wings on your skin.

I’d copy the cries of the curlews and the redshanks and the herring gulls for him, and we’d lie on our backs and watch the geese high up in a chevron and wonder what it would be like to part the air a mile above the earth with a beak as hard as bone.

Hanny smiled and tapped the figures on the painting.

‘That’s you,’ I said. ‘That’s Hanny.’

Hanny nodded and touched himself on the chest.

‘That’s me?’ I said, pointing to the smaller of the two and Hanny gripped my shoulder.

‘I’m glad you’re home,’ I said, and I meant it.

Pinelands didn’t do him much good. They didn’t know him. They didn’t care for him like I did. They never asked him what he needed. He was just the big lad in the tv lounge with his paints and crayons.

He held me close to his chest and stroked my hair. He was getting stronger. Every time I saw him he looked different. The puppy fat that had been there at Christmas had slipped from his face and he had no need to fake a moustache with a piece of burnt cork anymore like we used to do as children. It seemed unimaginable, but Hanny was becoming an adult.

I think he sensed the strangeness of it too, albeit dimly. The way one might feel there was something different about a room but not be able to say what. Was there a missing picture, say, or a book shelved in a different place?

Sometimes I caught him looking at the span of his hands, the nest of black hairs on his breastbone, his hard oval biceps, as though he couldn’t quite understand what he was doing inside this man’s body.

***

As we had always done in the past, we left for Moorings at first light on the Tuesday of Holy Week.

Once everyone had gathered at Saint Jude’s and stowed their bags on the minibus, Father Bernard went to get into the driver’s seat. But before he could start the engine, Mummer touched him on the arm.

‘Father Wilfred usually led us in prayer before we left,’ she said.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Father Bernard and he got down and started on the sign of the cross.

‘We tended to go around the corner, Father,’ said Mummer. ‘And pray with Our Lady.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Father Bernard. ‘Yes, of course.’

We gathered at the foot of the little Alpine rockery on which the Virgin stood and bowed our heads as Father Bernard made an impromptu prayer of intercession, asking her for a safe journey and a successful pilgrimage. After the Amen, we took it in turns to go to the railings, lean forward and kiss Mary’s feet.

Father Bernard made way for Mrs Belderboss, who lowered herself slowly to her knees and had Mr Belderboss hold her by the shoulders as she leant over. Once she had kissed the Holy Mother’s toes, she closed her eyes and began a whispered prayer that went on so long Father Bernard began to look at his watch.

I was to be the last to go up, but Father Bernard said, ‘Leave it, Tonto. Otherwise we’ll be sitting on the North Circular all day.’

He looked up at Mary with her expression of vacancy and grief. ‘I’m sure she won’t mind.’

‘If you say so, Father.’

‘I do,’ he said and jogged back to the minibus, making everyone laugh with a quip that I didn’t catch as he climbed up the steps to the driver’s seat.

I hadn’t seen them all so happy for months. I knew what they were thinking. That this time it would be different. That Hanny would be cured. That they were on the cusp of a wonderful victory.

***

We drove out of London, heading north through the East Midlands and across Yorkshire to Lancashire. I sat in the back with Monro wedged under my seat and slept on and off as a dozen counties went by. Every so often I woke up with the feeling that I was repeating parts of the journey. But then England is much the same all over, I suppose. A duplication of old farms, new estates, church spires, cooling towers, sewage works, railway lines, bridges, canals, and towns that are identical but for a few small differences in architecture and stone.

The sunlight that, as we left, had begun to creep over the London suburbs, disappeared the further north we went, returning only momentarily on the shoulder of a yellow hill miles away or picking out a distant reservoir in a second or two of magnesium brilliance.

The temperature dropped and the clouds darkened. The road steamed in driving rain. Shreds of mist hung over the cold lakes and woods. Moorland turned the colour of mould and becks coursed in spate down the peaty slopes, white and solid-looking from a distance, like seams of quartz.

No one had mentioned it — hoping presumably that it would go away of its own accord — but for the last few miles the minibus had been making an awful racket, as though something was loose in the engine. Every time Father Bernard changed gear there was a loud shuddering and grinding and eventually it refused to shift at all and he pulled in to the side of the road.

‘What is it, Father?’ said Mr Belderboss.

‘The clutch, I think,’ Father Bernard replied.

‘Oh, it’ll be the damp, it gets into everything up here,’ said Mr Belderboss and sat back satisfied with his assessment.

‘Can you fix it, Father?’ Mrs Belderboss said.

‘I certainly hope so, Mrs Belderboss.’ Father Bernard replied. ‘I get the impression that you have to rely on our own ingenuity out here.’

He smiled and got out. He was right, of course. In every direction there was nothing but deserted, muddy fields where seabirds were blown like old rags.

The rain battered onto the windscreen and ran down in waves as Father Bernard lifted the bonnet and propped it open.

‘Go and help him,’ Mummer said to Farther.

‘What do I know about cars?’ he replied, glancing up from the map he was studying.

‘You could still give him a hand.’

‘He knows what he’s doing, Esther. Too many cooks and all that.’

‘Well, I hope he does manage to get us going again,’ said Mummer, looking out of the window. ‘It’s only going to get colder.’

‘I’m sure we’ll survive,’ said Farther.

‘I was thinking of Mr and Mrs Belderboss,’ Mummer replied.

‘Oh, don’t worry about us,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘We’ve known cold, haven’t we, Mary?’

‘I should say so.’

They started to harp on about the war and having heard it all before I turned to Hanny who had been tugging at my sleeve for the last five minutes, desperate for me to share his View Master.

Hanny grinned and handed me the red binoculars that he’d had stuck to his face for most of the journey, clicking through the various reels he took out of his school satchel. It had been Mountains of the World until we stopped at Kettering for a toilet break, then Strange Creatures of the Ocean , and Space Exploration until Mummer had finally persuaded him onto Scenes from The Old Testament , which he now urged me to look through again. Eve with her private parts delicately blotted with foliage, Abraham’s knife poised over Isaac’s heart, Pharaoh’s charioteers tumbling in the Red Sea.