A. Kennedy - All the Rage

Doug let his attention romp about a while to save deeper confusions and the outbreak of resentment.

Set in a niche on the opposite side of the church to his own was a statue of God’s mother, who bore God’s son — and who was therefore God’s wife as well, God help her and he did — with only the minimum of warning.

Blue cloak and the star-scattered halo, one foot pressing definitively on a willing, or shocked, or semi-conscious snake.

First carol.

What he came for, the singing. That was his sole aim.

Say what you like about Doug, he was a reckless singer. Out of practice and not able for the higher notes — because how long is it really since he’s sung anything — but he rattles his voice and efforts in amongst the comingbacktohim words and does his utmost with head up and slightly the manner of the child he could have been, had he ever existed. Decades ago, Douglas could have been prone to white aches of passion for an unhuman love and the hope of bigwingedwarmwinged angels with serious eyes and the glow of a wise and approachable baby, laid out amongst animals and presents, like one more of both at once when animals and presents were the greatest things.

He remembered feeling that kids always understood kids. And Doug perhaps shared the common opinion that you could rely on the golden baby to see your side of it. By spring, the tender nipper would have grown up scary, harmed, and that would be totally down to you. He would be an elaborate reproach. It was only at Christmas that he was okay.

The subsequent reading stepped back within more prudent limits — Mary getting her tidings and even another baby on the way to another mother, a mother without hope, and NOTHING WILL BE IMPOSSIBLE WITH GOD , which might be as much a threat as any type of promise. There should be a line between impossible and possible, there shouldn’t be crossing and seeping, elsewise the world becomes a trick and not a place, not a home. This was Doug’s opinion.

A lullaby passed and then an anthem, familiar.

The Mary statue over the way remained unimpressed, God-baby in the crook of her arm, but her eyes not towards it — no, both of them were fixing on the middle distance and matters incomprehensible to most.

Wise men arrived and were foolish and spoke, as ever, incautiously and innocents were ended and shepherds had their naked sky torn across by heralds, a night full of terror and din and this need to travel. In Doug’s, or someone’s, head the passages tumbled together until they were refined into one lunchtime at primary school — somebody’s authentic recollection — when a boy spoke up loud and talked about the manger. Gentle word, manger. He took it to be a kind of cradle.

The boy remained a boy for only the usual period. Then he was, as recommended, put away with the other childish things.

And Mary set her foot over the snake, because she could and because it was Sin and she was not. And in the Original Garden, deep at the start of ourselves, Eve was led astray by the serpent and, that so long time afterwards, Mary wasn’t. And plainly the snake is, more properly, the bad maleness of man, the writhing soft-hard wickedness he carries ahead of him into his life, the heat he goes astray with. Mary stamps on it. Bad boy and she stamps it flat.

She reminds the more thoughtful, the put-away boys, that the beast was only cursed to go on its belly after it gave man and woman the knowledge of how they were shaped to fit each other sweetly and, furthermore, shaped for wide, mad catalogues of other pleasure. This meant that, before the curse, there were legs maybe, legs and arms and elbows maybe, the presence of some other, unrecorded man in Eden maybe, one who knew what he was all about and who spread the word and then was reduced to his essence in animal form: side-winding lust with a tongue in flickers and hard eyes.

Doug flinched somewhere at the sharp idea of it. He was quite sensitive, Doug.

I MADE YOU AND HELL MEND YOU.

Which was hardly fair.

DID I SAY IT WOULD BE?

And now another tune washed over him from childhood and shook loose something, nothing, some emptiness that wanted to be filled with apples and angels and promises and releases from sacrifice.

This was customary; you wanted it in a Christmas service: an opportunity to weep.

Douglas, or whoever, shivered and the snag and heave and braveness in his breath surprised him. Wipe at the eyes when he sat and no shame about it.

Before this lifting up of prayers started, the guy with the lectern, quiet and sincere, deliberately named the anxious and lonely and fearful and so forth.

He took pains to make his audience aware of them.

He was beseeching.

His audience was beseeching.

Douglas was beseeching with them, he couldn’t avoid it, and was hurt beneath his ribs from the effort, the wholesale striving for others’ sake.

No thoughtful child, no watching mind, could say they didn’t care or hadn’t asked, considered feasible improvements.

And then here is the final carol coming, designed as a crescendo, the triumph of being born as solid in the music as the triumph of refusing to be dead — lower harmonies thrumming in the floor, as if hell is dancing and not so bad, nowhere and nothing so bad as the man who isn’t Douglas, as the put-away boy, might have thought and he doesn’t believe, is not a believer, doesn’t seek to be pure, or righteous, or mingled with forever, tasting it. He is simply crying and unable, for heaven’s sake, to cry any less or prevent small howling bubbles of sound from escaping him and there is no justification for his behaviour, he is not especially mourning or damaged and this is exactly his problem, to be frank, because he deserves no particular sympathy. All that has happened is that time has passed and he isn’t who he was and never will be and occurrences have hurt him tump tump and so he weeps and he would like a rest and so he weeps and this boy, this man beseeches an intervention, but has no faith in saviours and so he weeps and he knows he is commonplace and unrequited and so he weeps and he knows he is impossible and built around these small pieces, baffling pieces, ridiculous animal pieces, and so he weeps and he knows that he needs to be saved and he sings for it, tries to sing for it.

Everyone, he thinks, does try to sing for it.

His problem would be that he’s making the wrong noise.

DOROTHY USED TO dream in wonders, but that happened not so often now. Apart from the usual, there was no joy in pulling back a quilt and fitting herself snug to a sheet for that first touch of rest. She appreciated what was there: the cool cloth above and below and an inrush of what was gentle, was purely easing, but her nights remained unillustrated: sleep was simply fast, it seemed, and getting faster, no more than that. It would find her and immediately open itself in the manner of a soft but determined, familiar mouth. Yes, familiar was the word for it. Not miraculous.

Nevertheless, she had no real cause for complaint.

Insomnia would be worse.

Any number of things would be worse.

So she should take advantage of her current situation.

Dorothy’s next stage in life, as many magazines and also human people told her, would involve increasingly extreme possibilities. Either she would be eaten by some irreversible dream and disappear, or else she would tackle older and older age — frayed bones, cascading dysfunctions — sustained by less and less unconsciousness. The old did not sleep, apparently. She would start to be up and about after three or two or fewer hours of respite from activity, outrunning the sun and desperate to knit, or bake, or to shout at lawn-digging squirrels until trespassing children dared her to summon up the deeper kinds of wrath. Leastways, these were the occupations of the elderly when Dorothy had been a long-dozing, shouted-at child. And there was sitting, of course. Sitting formed a tremendous focus for the waning and silvered, it once was their chief endeavour. It had been sort of heroic, the way old people sat. But as magazines and also human people told her, the current generation of over-sixties were mainly occupied with Internet shopping, exotic holidays, divorce and unprotected sex, perhaps in that order, perhaps not. This seemed a step forward, if not exactly up.