Skippy Dies: A Novel

Once a week, more if his schedule permits, Father Green makes the journey from the haughty garrisons of the bourgeoisie into St Patrick’s Villas, to visit those parishioners who are too sickly or frail to attend mass. The journey is less than a mile, but the Villas belong to a different world, a world corroded by neglect and stinking of human waste. He climbs flaking stairwells to arrive at graffiti-limned doors; even after he announces himself, a timid eye will size him up and down through a crack before undoing the final chain. They are women, almost exclusively. Mrs Doran, Mrs Coombes, Mrs Gulaston: liver-spotted, blue-rinsed, forgotten, and yet, somehow, still here. Inside will be the television, muted in deference though not switched off; floral wallpaper webbed with damp images of Padre Pio and John Paul II beside pictures in oval frames of long-deceased husbands, of children and children’s children now living in Ongar or in Spain or simply too busy for the inconsolable laments of age. He will sit in the kitchen; they bring him tea and he will make himself listen as they tell him of their woes – the electric heater that is not working, the sores on their legs, the neighbourhood’s decline. It’s all gone to the dogs, Father. It’s like a jungle. Worse than a jungle! These kids robbin cars and racin them up and down. Breakin bottles. Shoutin and screamin at all hours. Gurriers they are, on drugs, the lot of them! It’s the drugs have been the ruin of this place. It used to be a lovely place, Father, you remember. A lovely place. Now you daren’t go out at night. Sure even in broad daylight you’re takin your life in your hands. They’d knock you down soon as look at you. They’d be in your flat before you’re halfway out the door.

Father Green nods, sips from his cup. In truth, this has never been a lovely place, not for the twenty years he has been coming here. The ‘boom’ never penetrated; to look out the window, it might be the 1980s still, the height of the heroin plague, the police doing nothing, the politicians doing nothing. The same faces loitering in the forecourt of the boarded-up garage, proud of their intractability, the notoriety of their home. Wearing their failure like a badge of honour, generation after generation, parent and child. Everybody knows what they are doing there; you may call the guards if you want, talk to a bored-sounding young man, and an hour later, if so inclined, the squad car will roll by, and they will disperse until it has gone, or regroup outside the shopping centre, or in the park. But nothing changes, and no one is overly concerned, as long as ‘the problem’ stays down here, in the slums.

Before he leaves today Father Green stops at the grotto of Our Lady. It used to be that no matter what horrors raged around it this little corner remained immaculate. Now her devotees are too old and frail to maintain it, and the paintwork on the plaster statue has bleached with time, turning her serenity to exhaustion, her gesture of providence to a shrug. Reaching over the railings he fishes out a can, crisp packets, a condom; people eddy around him, glancing indifferently as they go past, as they might at a tramp rooting through a rubbish bin. He hauls himself painfully back over to the street, cradling his armful of filth to his chest, goes in search of a receptacle – when out into his path steps a man –

A black man, perhaps forty-five years old, glossy-skinned, muscular, the negative of the listless washed-out natives: inside Father Green a clock winds backwards at supernatural speed, and from the man’s yellow-tinged eyes a corresponding recognition seems to leap into being, and he raises his hands, huge, animalistic –

Gently they reach out and take the load from his. Thank you, Father, the voice says. Those familiar plodding vowels. Tank you, Fodda.

Of course, Father Green whispers, as the man returns inside with the garbage. Through the doorway, carousels and dusky faces may be glimpsed: a shop, a new shop, it seems.

He is still trembling when he arrives back at the school. At dinner in the priests’ residence he is eager to discuss his encounter; he waits for the conversation to turn to the past, as it so often does, that he might casually bring it up. Do you know, he says when the time comes, hearing the words ring high and false in his ears, do you know, making my rounds of St Patrick’s Villas today I was struck by the influx of Africans to the neighbourhood. A few seemed to me to be just of the age that I might have taught them on the missions!

And he waits, braced, for what they might say.

I can never understand why in God’s name anyone would leave Africa to come here, Father Zmed remarks. Give up all that sunshine to live in a slum.

Land of opportunity, Father Crookes responds. Civilization. Read about it in their schoolbooks, quite natural they’d want to see it for themselves.

It’s our fault then, Father Dundon says gloomily.

What I mean to say is – Father Green attempts to steer the conversation back around – do you think it possible that those same children we taught might by pure chance have ended up living in Seabrook? Wouldn’t that be… wouldn’t that be marvellous?

Father Zmed’s brilliant diamantine squint searching him out across the table. What is he thinking?

I’d imagine most of ’em would be dead by now, Jerome, Father Crookes says through a mouthful of dessert. Know what the life expectancy is for the average African man?

Father Dundon sighs. I often wonder did we do the right thing at all. Heard a chap on the radio blaming the Church for the spread of AIDS over there. Said the Pope was responsible for the deaths of 22 million people.

Well, that’s just –

Of all the silly –

That’s twice as many as Hitler, Father Dundon says.

Oh, come – they know this is wrong but they do not know why; they look to Father Green to refute it. We can’t rewrite the word of God, he says obligingly. And disease does not give one licence for immorality. Even in Africa.

Not everyone is like us, though, Father Zmed says to Father Green – fixing on him again with that curiously penetrating gaze, that barely visible smile. Not everyone has the… moral strength for abstinence.

Then they must pray for it, Father Green says, and crumples his napkin summarily.

Dead, so. Heart eased, he stays with them at the table till well into the night, trading old war stories, what they’d done, what they’d achieved. Young men faced with an impossible task, a continent, a whole continent subsumed in witchcraft! Natives who’d kneel down to pray with you, then after sunset melt away into the bush, returning at dawn daubed in blood, eyes rolling like lunatics. Every night you’d lie half-awake waiting for the footfall outside your tent – drift off expecting to awake on the altar yourself! Or cooking in a pot! No time for subtleties – only surefire way was to terrify them. His name is Satan. He lives in a place of flames. That they could understand. Pointing white-eyed into the desert. Yes, yes, Hell. Only God can protect you. Reading to them from Dante. Sometimes you’d scare yourself! But it worked, that was the thing! They came to heel! They could learn, they could be lifted out of that squalor! For all its savagery there was hope there! The sheer volume of souls saved, one came home feeling one had done something! Is it any wonder that they themselves retreat there now, into these stories each has heard a hundred times, when the present is nothing but ambiguity and accusation, intent on dismantling everything they believed in?

Perverts, monsters, brainwashers.

Retiring to his room, Father Green stays up for another hour correcting homework. He sits in a small pool of lamplight, reviewing the bright dull portraits of the world – bicycles to be rented, purchases to be made – that the textbook presents for the boys to complete. He works steadily, unhurriedly, and although he knows exactly where Daniel Juster’s copy lies in the pile he pretends to himself that he doesn’t; when he reaches it, he does not stroke the page, imagining the boy’s own hand travelling slowly across it; nor linger over the handwriting, its guileless, meticulous loops and crosses, nor sniff the paper, nor kiss, ever so softly, the bitter ink.

Handwriting. Chalk on slate. Plane trees outside a church, wind rolling in from the desert, laughing carefree children, zigzagging half-naked, ebony-thewed, through the stern young priest’s classes… Those children! Irrepressible! You couldn’t help but smile – and now, alone in his bed decades later, with the children dead, safely dead, a smile plays again over Father Green’s face, carrying him down into sleep, a sleep of flames, a thousand tiny white-hot desert tongues licking and searing and scalding him everywhere, an agony of guilt that is also, dreadfully, an ineffable ecstasy.