Andrew Hurley - The Loney

It had been Paul’s decree that neighbour should love neighbour and this he stuck to — but only within the world he had created at Saint Jude’s. The people of the Other world would care little if he loved them or not, if he rejoiced with them or wept with them or pitied them. Paul had warned of the dangers of judging others — that only God was fit for the task — but those in the Other world needed to be shown up for what they were. And he felt qualified to judge them; they had made it easy for him to do so. Despite what Paul said, his sins — such as they were — were not like theirs. Their sins came from a greater depth entirely.

He had never left a child to die in its own filth as a mother had done in one of the high rise estates not long ago. He had never poured petrol through a pensioner’s letterbox and tossed in a match for fun. He had never come stumbling out of a vice club at four in the morning. He had never stolen anything, destroyed anything. Nor had any of his flock. He had never lusted after anything or anyone, as people in that Other world seemed to encourage and applaud.

He knew what such people would think of his relationship with Miss Bunce. She couldn’t be his housekeeper without being his lover also. It was impossible that he would have no carnal desire for her, she being so much younger than he and at his beck and call. He loved her, yes, but not in the way that the Other people understood it, for whom love could not be separated from intercourse.

Galatians, Ephesians, Peter and John. He could have picked a weapon from a vast arsenal to defend himself and show them that it was possible, an act of devotion in fact, to express God’s love in the loving of a brother or sister in Christ.

She was the most pious girl he knew. She was a beacon of light in the presbytery. She was untainted by the world that lay outside, and the proof that he had made a difference.

Indeed, all his parishioners deserved to feel like Miss Bunce. Different, loved, guided and judged. It was their reward for being held to ransom by a world that demanded the right to engage in moral brinkmanship whenever it pleased.

People talked about a permissive society, but, as he knew it, permission was something one asked for. No, this was what it was — an assault. They were being beaten into submission by morals that were the reverse of their own. He had lived a long time and had seen the world regressing. With each year that went by it seemed that people were no better than children in their petulant demands.

And children themselves were changing. Youth still had the natural rebelliousness that had been there since the time of Moses, but it seemed to have had something added to it, or forced into it — a fearlessness. No, more a detachment. He had seen it in the youngsters he had caught one evening smashing gravestones with bricks they had knocked out of the churchyard wall, a kind of emptiness in their eyes. They had looked at him as though he wasn’t quite real, or what he was saying wasn’t quite real. They had been no more than eight years old.

These weren’t just the jittery fears of an aging priest, it was a genuine feeling that all goodness and simple humility — for who on earth was humble nowadays? — had been excised from the hearts of men. He alone, it seemed, had noticed the apparent descent from depravity to depravity that had taken that Other world to a place that was unique and irreversible. There was no darkness now that couldn’t be explored or expressed.

Only a few weeks ago had he watched them all coming out of the Curzon at midnight from some horror film that the paper said involved jack hammers and acid. They were laughing. The girls with their hands in the back pockets of the men.

It had been the same night a homeless lady had been kicked to death under Waterloo Bridge. And while the two things weren’t connected in any literal sense, he felt certain that they occupied the same pool that had formed when the wall between sick imagination and the real world came down.

It was against this potent mixture that they protected themselves at Saint Jude’s and could, ironically, practise the very freedoms the Other people claimed to enjoy, the freedoms that were bandied around as being somehow the looked-for end result of millennia of social cultivation. At Saint Jude’s they were free to think; they were free to examine the meanings of love or happiness, unlike the Other people, for whom happiness was the accumulation of objects and experiences that satisfied the simplest of desires.

The Other world had equality now, they said, but what they meant was that everyone had the means to exhibit their own particular unpleasantness. There had been people shot dead in Londonderry and women blown to shreds in Aldershot in the name of equality. And they were always marching. He had seen men marching for the right to sleep with other men. He had seen women marching for the right to rid themselves of their unborn children without reproach. He had seen them marching to Trafalgar Square with their heavy boots and their Union Jacks. Oh, the black shirts might have been hidden under suits and donkey jackets but they were same men who had infected the place where he had grown up.

Equality. It was laughable. It wasn’t equality at all. Not what he understood by the word. Only in the eyes of God were people equal. In the eyes of God each person had the same opportunity to be rewarded with everlasting peace, even the most hardened sinners. They could all walk the same path together if the people of the Other world would only repent. But they never would.

He detested leaving Saint Jude’s or the presbytery and dreaded any meeting that would necessitate the use of the Tube, which at rush hour really did seem to be a place from Hell.

The only way to cope was to think of himself as Dante, documenting evidence of this Other world’s iniquities to share with his flock on his return. That way, as he was swept along in its currents, he might lift himself out of the tide of filth that pressed up against the doors of the train, the way the gulls were pressing against one another now to get at whatever it was that had become such a prized catch.

***

At first it was an old fishing net rolled up by the sea into a cocoon; no, a beached seal, he decided, when a gull lifted off and he caught a glimpse of pale skin.

But then he saw the boots tumbling in the edge of the water.

He went down the dune, slipping and almost falling, grasping the marram and feeling it hold firm for a moment before it came loose in his hand. At the bottom he took his shoes from around his neck and started across the sand, running for the first time in years, shouting and waving his hands, scattering the gulls.

It was as he had feared. The man was drowned. The thought that he might yet be saved had crossed his mind as he ran towards him, but it was far too late for that. The gulls had pecked deep holes in his neck and slit the tattoos there, but had drawn no blood.

The man’s hair was half covering his face, but when he knelt down and bent his head close to the sand he could see that it was the old tramp they had been talking about at the dinner table. The wretch he had seen asleep in bus shelters and leaning against the gates of cattle fields, his body limp with drink, his eyes slow to follow what was passing. Well, now his eyes were as blank as mushrooms.

A fresh wave broke and surged up the beach and washed under the body, leaving little bubbles in the tramp’s hair and in his beard as it ebbed away.

So this was death. A brief, salty sousing and it was done.

The next wave came soon after and as it retreated again the sand gave way and broke into little runnels, the grains pouring down into the gouges.

He looked around, but there was no use in calling for help. Not here. There was no one. He thought about going back up the dune and waving his arms to try and attract their attention back at Moorings, but it was unlikely they would see him. He would seem a tiny figure to them, obscured to shadow by the sun. And if they did see him what would they think? Would they come? If they came what use would they be? There was nothing they could do now. And was it fair to compel them to see what he had found? The women especially. It would cast a shadow over the whole trip.