Skippy Dies: A Novel

Father Green had intended to attend tonight’s concert, if only out of a childish wish to irritate Greg. But at the very last minute he had been called out to administer the last rites to an ailing woman on the other side of the city. He drove for an hour only to find she had made a miraculous recovery. Father Green had no option but to concede the point to his rival. Well played, sir! When he returned everyone had gone. The halls are empty as he makes his way down to his basement office, where he will sit and watch the hands of the clock.

No work, Jerome? That’s not like you! Getting old at last?

It has been like this since the boy died. He does not work, he does not sleep. You know he sees him still, in his office, dutifully folding cardboard sheets into boxes, taping shut the flaps, oblivious to the silent battle raging only a few feet away, the carnal ravenings of an old man. Even now, approaching Our Lady’s Hall, Father Green thinks he hears footsteps behind him; and he cannot stop himself from a shiver of hope as he turns round. But of course there is nothing.

At the top of the hall, he stops by the crib – as yet only half-occupied: no Infant, no Kings, only the oxen and donkeys to keep watch over the Holy Parents as they kneel in the straw. Before it, the offerings for the hampers. He bends to examine the labels. Mascarpone cheese, semi-sundried tomatoes, lychees. Donations are down this year. The idea of giving food, of taking actual food from your larder and putting it in another’s, must seem tiresomely Victorian in this ethereal age of numbers flying through the air. Poverty far too literal for these abstracted people.

That is not the reason, Jerome. The reason is you.

Yes. Father Green is aware of the rumours surrounding him. He sees the graffiti on his door; he hears the whispers, detects the snubs in the corridor, the staffroom, the vestry even. All in all it has pained him surprisingly little: the blessing of being an unsociable man. Except that now it has taken away what power he had to do good. For how can a criminal tug at anyone’s conscience? Who will give to a monster? He himself becomes the excuse not to think of those wretched slums, those addled lives. Irony upon irony! One always underestimates the capacity of life to diminish one.

So why do you stay?

He asks himself the same question as he descends the steps to the office. Why stay? He has given Greg his scapegoat. Scandal is averted, the swimming coach may make his escape unblemished, the school continue as a shining beacon of the bourgeoisie. What they need of him now is to go. Go, that they may curse his name and forget this ever happened. And he wants to go. He has done enough for Seabrook. Why stay, to be calumnied? To be painted with the sins of another?

It’s obvious, Jerome. You wish the sin had been yours. That’s why you will not tell the truth, that’s why you will not leave. Instead you must stay here and be punished. Yet you committed no crime.

Only because I was afraid.

Ah, Jerome. Come, it is over. The boy is in the ground, with nothing to touch his lips but the worms. You have done him no wrong. Why must you torture yourself?

Why?

For Africa? For what happened forty years ago? Who remembers, Jerome? Those little boys? Most likely they are dead too. So who then? God? But what God do you believe in any more?

The priest sits at his desk, leafs through the paperwork unseeingly.

You would rather punish yourself than accept the alternative, is that not so, Jerome.

That noise outside again. Footsteps?

None of this matters. That is what you will not accept. None of it has mattered, nothing you did, the good, the bad. And nothing matters now.

Definitely something out there. A smell too, acrid. He rises, crosses the floor.

But you, you would rather burn than think this. You would rather hellfire, than look at the world and see the truth. See nothing.

Tears, or the ache of tears that will not come. He opens the door. As the red flame leaps for him he staggers backwards. Shock at first, but then a glimmer of joy.

Hellfire!