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SUNDAY AT THE CROSS BONES
A Novel
JOHN WALSH
CONTENTS
To my darling Sophie – an inspiration, always
For years I have been known as the Prostitutes’ Padre – to me the proudest title that a true priest of Christ can hold. I believe with all my soul that if He were born again in London in the present day, He would be found constantly walking in Piccadilly.
– Reverend Harold Davidson
‘The Working Girl’s Life’
Monday in the nursery ward,
Tuesday in the schoolyard,
Wednesday painting lipstick on,
Thursday going with George and John,
Friday at the Crown with Billy,
Saturday weeping down the ’Dilly,
Where will she rest from her tears and moans?
Sunday at the Cross Bones
– Old rhyme, c. 1880
Well go ahead and call the cops –
You don’t meet nice girls in coffee shops
– Tom Waits
Journals of Harold Davidson
Central Beach, Blackpool 6 September 1932
Some child of Satan has deposited a quantity of candyfloss in my hair. I suspect it may have been the gormless boy in the Edwardian sailor suit, four or five at most, whose mother lifted him up in her meaty arms to be kissed by the famous rector. A sulky, unbiddable young man with a face that Raphael himself would have found it a burden to render adorable, he performed his task with reluctance, turning his putty cheek away so that my lips found only his ear, and leaving me the inestimable gift of sticky spun sugar clamped to my snow-white locks. By the time I realised the damage that was done, she and he were long gone. I must have greeted a dozen visitors looking like a Lancashire barmaid permed and pink-rinsed for a night on the tiles.
Cramped legs; sticky hair; kissing babies; enduring the sniggers of the ungodly. These are hardly the ideal circumstances of the modern clergyman, no matter how nationwide his renown. But then neither is this barrel in which I sit for the second morning of my ten-day-long stint. I do not say it is uncomfortable. Mr Gannon has kindly provided me with a cushion upon the narrow seat where I perch like a maiden aunt. The structure of the barrel has been cut away to allow me a kind of counter upon which to rest my arms, or to write in this journal, or to sign autographs – that puzzling new phenomenon, as though the inscription of one’s name on an envelope or ticket stub forged a connection of sorts with a complete stranger, who will display it later as proof of his having met me, as though a lion in Chessington Zoo might have volunteered to him a paw-print of brotherhood.
Above my head, raised on a metal stalk, a wooden roof houses a small electric fan to circulate the late-summer air and disperse the cigar fumes. ‘We generally disapprove of the exhibits having a smoke, Padre,’ said Mr Gannon with his habitual air of a man supervising an event of vast importance, ‘but we’ll make an exception for you.’
On my left is Mr Gavin Tweedy’s World-Famous Flea Circus, a ludicrous entertainment