fact that he was different from them. The confusion depressed him.
Similarly, when it came to posh folk, he could share neither Mick’s quiet dismissal nor Angus’s aggressive desire to engage every boy in nice clothes in combat. Conn simply didn’t see any difference in them. He was happy as he was, and that was enough for him.
Worst of all, his brothers’ talk about churches took him out into chaos and abandoned him there. He dreaded the subject coming up and when it did he used to try to will himself to sleep. But their thoughts still wormed into his mind, coiling there into grotesque and fantastic shapes of fear. Though Mick and Angus exchanged Catholic and Protestant images of God with all the aesthetic preoccupation of two boys swapping cutout pictures, their words innocently invoked in Conn a welter of lurid contradictions.
His fears were intensified by the news of God he picked up from other places in incompatible bits and pieces. In spite of the fact that Catholic and Protestant lived together harmoniously in High Street, in spite of the fact that his brothers and his sister were singularly unconcerned about any religious differences, Conn contrived to worry a great deal about whether God was a Protestant or a Catholic. He was never quite clear which side Jesus had been on. His amorphous doubts made him too vulnerable, so he crystallised them into an irrational fear of priests, who weren’t an unfamiliar sight in High Street. Every time Conn saw one coming, he vanished up the first convenient close.
7
It had been raining. Having become intolerable in the house, Conn was allowed out as soon as the rain stopped. For quarter of an hour or so he had been scuffing about the almost empty street, where road and houses were still black from the rain, trying to get his idling imagination to move. Without seeming to have noticed it at any given moment, he became aware of a dark figure coming up from the Cross towards High Street. Conn paused and stared. The dull mother-of-pearl glare of the sky seemed so low as to make a tunnel of the Foregate. The figure came nearer, carrying a stick. It was a priest.
He was already spinning for cover when he saw his father standing in shirt sleeves at the close-mouth, smoking a cigarette. Wondering how long he had been there, Conn gravitated casually nearer to his father and became very interested in a chipped part of the tenement wall where the rain had softened the crumbling inside of the stone.
Sure enough the priest stopped at their entry. Conn stared in awe at the large figure. Father Rankin: a big man, in his early forties, prematurely grey – commonly known as the Holy Terror. He was said to go round certain houses where the husbands were known to lack religious fervour, and hound them out of their beds with his stick to go to Mass.
‘Guid day, Father,’ Conn’s father said politely.
‘Not for you, Tam Docherty. Not for you.’
Conn noticed his father’s lips purse and his eyes begin to study his cigarette. It was a familiar moment for Tam. For years priests had been coming periodically to the house, to do battle for Angus and Conn over souls the boys didn’t know they had. Usually they came in twos, a regular one and a new one, rather like an experienced doctor introducing a medical student to an unusual and particularly difficult case. Tam rather liked their visits. They always helped him to sort his own thoughts out. With a couple of them he had a pleasant, half-bantering relationship. And there was one whom he admired profoundly, Father McDermott, who called Tam ‘Doubting Thomas’ and insulted him pleasantly while sparring with one of the boys. But Father Rankin was different. When he was angry, his eyes beheld the damned. He felt no need of reinforcements.
‘And it won’t be a good day for you till you become a proper Catholic again.’
His father glanced at Conn and it was as if he was trying to explain something which Conn couldn’t understand. Conn didn’t know the significance of the words but the tone of them conveyed a reprimand, even to him. It was the first time he had ever heard anyone speak to his father like that.
‘You’re a pain to your mother and father. To your whole family. More than that. You’re an affront to God.’ To Conn the whole day seemed to drop dead, and they were three people standing in a desert of silence. ‘Well? Have you nothing to say for yourself?’
‘It’s still a guid enough day, Father.’
Conn thought he had never seen anybody as angry as the priest. The stick quivered indecisively and when it suddenly swivelled to point in his direction, Conn hung where he was, impaled on the gesture.
‘Is this your son?’
His father’s voice came very quick and very small, its smallness measuring the force which was compressing it.
‘Keep yer mooth aff the boay, Father.’
The priest’s eyes enlarged, looking at Conn’s father. ‘Right,’ he said, and moved towards the entry. Almost accidentally, it seemed, his father’s hand came up to lean on the wall, so that his arm just happened to bar the way.
‘Where wid ye be goin’, Father?’
‘To speak to your wife.’
‘Ah’d raither ye widny.’
‘I’m not concerned with what you want.’
‘Naw, but Ah am. Slightly.’
The pressure of their confrontation was so intense that it would have seemed impossible to walk between them. Conn stared.
‘I’ll have to speak to her about all this.’
‘She his a lot o’ worries, Father. Ah don’t think you wid help them any.’
The priest stepped back. The stick went horizontal in his hand. His face was tight with anger.
Tam Docherty,’ he said, ‘I have a duty to perform. You’re interfering with it. If you don’t step out of my way, I’ll take my stick to you.’
Conn’s father released his breath painfully and shook his head, his eyes closed. Conn couldn’t understand what it meant. Despair. Tam was suddenly exhausted by the complicated terms of his life, utterly baffled by the impossible acts of equilibrium it called for. They wanted you to respect authority when authority had no respect for you. They told you what your life meant, and asked you to believe it, when it had nothing to do with what was happening every day in your house and in your head. While your wife slaved and your weans were bred solely for the pits, like ponies, and your mates went sour, the owners bought your sweat in hutches, the government didn’t know you were there. And God talked Latin. The rules had no connection with the game. You came out to your door for a smoke and a man walked up and threatened to hit you with a stick. Where did he live? Conn’s father opened his eyes and looked steadily at the priest.
‘You do that, Father,’ he said, ‘an’ Ah’ll brek it intae inch-long bits across yer holy heid.’
The priest seemed hypnotised by what he saw in the other’s eyes. Tam’s frustration had become almost impersonal to Father Rankin. The priest was no more than the catalyst for many disparate perceptions, of furtive men who turned their masonic certificates face to the wall when they saw a priest coming, drunken women who would rather send their weans to the chapel than see them properly fed, his own father thankfully embracing his life like a galley-slave kissing his oar. The priest shook his head, deciding that philosophy was the best method of defence. He nodded towards Conn.
‘The sad thing is. Children tend to follow their parents. Even to the gates of Hell.’
‘We’ll be company fur each ither then.’
The priest shook his head again, as if Conn’s father had unsuccessfully been trying to answer a question.
‘What would your father say?’
‘Exactly whit you tell ‘im tae say. Ye’ve maybe made a blown egg o’ the auld man’s heid. But mine’s still nestin’. An’ ye never count yer chickens till they’re hatched. Ah’ll let ye know.’
The priest shook his head again, thought for a moment, turned suddenly, and walked away, back down towards