Barley Patch (20 page)

The chief character had moved out of his parents’ house during his twenty-first year. He took with him two cardboard grocery cartons full of books, several manila folders of drafts of poems waiting to be revised, his binoculars, and his clothes. During the four years between his moving out and his arrival with his binoculars at the upstairs flat, the chief character had lived in six different rented rooms in various suburbs of Melbourne but had kept safe his cartons of books and his folders of poems and his binoculars, which were still in their original case of imitation leather. In the case also was a parcel of white cloth, about half the size of the chief character’s thumb. The parcel was stuffed with some or another sort of crystal or granule, the purpose of which, so the chief character had heard from someone, was to draw off the moisture in the air inside the case of imitation leather.

Whenever he opened the case in order to take out the binoculars or to put them away, the chief character would touch the parcel several times with a fingertip. Afterwards, he would roll the parcel between several fingertips, pressing and squeezing the cloth until he could feel some of the many crystals that were packed into the parcel. Whenever he merely touched the parcel, he seemed to be plumping a pillow that belonged on a bed in a bedroom on the upper storey of a doll’s house. After he had plumped the pillow, it would have been ready for placing on the single bed in the upper room in his mind so that the young female personage whose room it was could have lain to rest in the bed whenever it had pleased her to leave off looking out from her upper-storey window and to step across the room to her bed. If it had occurred to him that the usual occupants of a doll’s house were lifeless figurines, then he would have seen the female personage in his mind either as a character in a comic-strip in his mind or as the handiwork of a craftsman of genius who had equipped the personage and, perhaps, each of the other personages in the same house, with tiny clockwork or electric motors that enabled the personages to walk and to perform certain rudimentary movements. Whenever he fingered the granules inside the parcel, he seemed to be fingering beads of a substance that he knew as Irish horn.

Like many another earnest Catholic schoolboy during the 1940s, the chief character had carried in his pocket a set of rosary beads. Sometimes he passed the beads between his fingers while he murmured the collection of prayers known as the rosary. He understood that the beads themselves were no more than counters or markers and had no intrinsic spiritual value. However, he had once received as a present from his father’s youngest sister a set of beads somewhat different from any that he had previously owned or seen. A small cloth label attached to the beads stated that they were made from genuine Irish horn. The chief character did not know at the time, and never afterwards learned, what were the origins of Irish horn, whether genuine or imitation. But his not knowing as a boy what the beads were made from only added to their value in his estimation. He would have prized them for their appearance alone. Every bead differed, however slightly, from the next, if not in shape then in colour. If a bead was not distinguished by some bulge or concavity, then it was more richly tinted or less so than its neighbours. The fifty and more beads, when viewed from a distance, seemed predominantly blue-green, but hardly any bead, when he looked closely at it, could have been called either blue or green. In many a bead was a tint that he could not name, but this only pleased him the more. He would sometimes hold bead after bead between an eye and the light, hoping
to see what he saw whenever he peered into certain of his glass marbles or into certain panels of coloured glass in the front doors of houses: a luminous other-world waiting to be populated by personages of his own devising; or, perhaps, a limpid medium, much less dangerous than water, through which he might have found his way towards places beneath rivers and lakes where characters from comic-strips or from poems watched over their female captives who might have been, after all, not dead but merely fast asleep.

The chief character took his binoculars to the upstairs flat on a few Friday evenings and Saturday evenings but got no benefit from them. He and his companions soon tired of keeping watch in the dark bathroom until the light might have been turned on in the young woman’s bedroom. Sometimes, when one or another young man had seemed to stay overlong in the bathroom, the others would suspect him of having sighted the young woman and kept her for himself alone, as it were. Once, when the chief character had stepped into the bathroom in order to urinate, the light had just then appeared in the young woman’s room. The chief character had picked up the binoculars from where they lay in readiness on the bathroom floor, but before he had brought them into focus the light had been turned off again.

On a certain Friday or Saturday evening, the chief character’s binoculars were lying in readiness on the floor of the bathroom of the upstairs flat but all of the young men gathered in the flat were drinking beer in the lounge-room and watching some or another television program. At a certain point in the evening, according to the narrator of the abandoned work of fiction, the young men found themselves watching images of bishops or cardinals or high-ranking personages of the Catholic Church while some or another religious ceremony was taking place. Several times, while the young men watched, the image of one or another personage was seen to close its eyes and to bow its head for a few moments. After the second or third occasion when an image had appeared thus, the young man who lived in the upstairs flat began to jeer at the images of the personages.

The young man who jeered was one of two persons in the room who had attended a Catholic secondary school but had later ceased to call themselves Catholics. The other such person was the chief character. The young man who jeered looked while he jeered in the direction of the chief character. The young man then left off jeering and asked a question of the chief character as though he might have been the only person in the room who could answer the question. The young man asked what it was that Catholic bishops and priests and members of religious orders saw or affected to see whenever they closed their eyes during religious ceremonies.

The chief character of the work of fiction that would never be completed gave some or another flippant answer to the young man who had jeered at the images, but he, the chief character, was not comfortable. This was not because he was in any way sympathetic to the personages whose images had appeared just then on the television screen but because he himself, a few years before, had often closed his eyes and bowed his head during religious ceremonies. The chief character and the young man who jeered had sat in the same classroom during their final year of secondary education. The jeerer had failed his matriculation examination and had then gone to work in an office in a building of many storeys where he had spent much of his time planning to find a young woman who would live with him without first having married him. The chief character had passed his matriculation examination and had then gone to live in a building of two storeys among mostly grassy countryside, which building was the novitiate of a religious order of priests. The chief character had lived for only twelve weeks in the building of two storeys and had then returned to his parents’ home in a suburb of Melbourne. Soon afterwards, he had gone to work in an office in a building of many storeys where he had spent much of his time planning to write poetry or prose fiction. On the evening when his former classmate had jeered at the images on the television screen, the chief character had suspected that his former classmate was jeering at him—not as though the chief character still prayed or still attended religious ceremonies but as though his staying alone in his room during most evenings and his trying to write poetry or prose fiction was his way of closing his eyes against the real world for the sake of something illusory. The chief character could not have defended himself if he had been thus jeered at. Moreover, he suspected already that he was far from being the sort of writer who could include, years later, in one of his works a scene, so to call it, in which a fictional writer avenged himself against a fictional jeerer.

Twenty and more years after the young men had gathered of a Friday or a Saturday evening as reported above, the chief character began to notice in newspapers one after another report of one or another person’s having been paid a sum of money by one or another diocese or religious order of the Catholic Church for the reason that the person had been sexually assaulted by some or another Catholic pastor or teacher. On one or another of the evenings mentioned above, the young man who was reported above as having jeered at images of Catholic clergymen announced to the other persons gathered in the young man’s upstairs flat that he intended to take legal action against the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne and against the orders of religious brothers and nuns that had taught him. The grounds for his legal action were going to be that his various parish priests and teachers had set back his intellectual development by ten years and more; they had filled his mind with legends and superstitions instead of useful knowledge. (Even if the persons in the upstairs flat had not been drinking beer for several hours, none of them would have supposed the young man to be talking seriously. Any sort of legal action against the Catholic Church would have seemed preposterous folly in the early 1960s, even though certain priests and religious teachers were perpetrating during those years some of the sexual assaults that gave rise to criminal charges and out-of-court settlements in later years.)

The sum of money that the young man was going to demand from the Catholic Church was the equivalent in today’s currency of about twenty million dollars. When his listeners asked how he would spend such a sum, the young man answered them in detail.

Twenty and more years after the young men had gathered of a Friday or a Saturday evening as reported above, the chief character began to notice in newspapers one after another advertisement offering for sale one or another building of two or even three storeys that had formerly been a convent for an order of nuns or a monastery for an order of Catholic priests in some or another town in the countryside of Victoria. At the time when the young man in the upstairs flat began to explain how he would spend the equivalent of twenty million dollars, it would have seemed preposterous to suppose that any convent or monastery in any town in the countryside of Victoria would ever be offered for sale, and yet the young man predicted that the Catholic Church, which was then a flourishing organisation, would soon begin to be less than flourishing and that convents and monasteries would soon be offered for sale. The young man explained to the other persons in the upstairs flat that he would use part of the proceeds of his legal action as the purchase-price of a building of two or even three storeys in the countryside of Victoria, which building had been formerly a monastery or a convent.

When the young man who lived in the upstairs flat first mentioned a monastery or a convent, and whenever he afterwards talked about such a building, the chief character saw in his mind one or another detail of an image of a two-storey building of bluestone that he had seen twice only, on a certain Saturday when he had attended a race-meeting for the first time. The chief character had been taken to and from the race-meeting by a paternal uncle who lived in a coastal city in the south-west of Victoria. The race-meeting had been held some twenty miles inland from the coastal city, at a racecourse that was surrounded by mostly level grassy countryside with trees in the distance. Between some of the trees were the roofs of buildings in a small town. The tallest of these buildings was a convent belonging to an order of teaching nuns. The chief character had only twice glimpsed the convent through the windows of his uncle’s motor-car but he, the chief character, had noted several dormer windows above the level of the upper-storey windows. He had asked his uncle whether the windows were mere ornaments or whether each window had behind it a cell-like room where one or another nun read or prayed or slept of an evening. The uncle first told the chief character that any male person who went beyond the hallway and the front parlour of the convent earned the penalty of immediate excommunication. The uncle then said that the nuns in the convent in the small town took in as boarders a few older girls from districts further inland. Perhaps each of these older girls, so the uncle said, was allotted a comfortable attic room with a window overlooking grassy countryside and part of a distant racecourse.

One of the conditions of his buying the convent or monastery, so the young man told his listeners in the upstairs flat, was that all the furnishings and fittings should be sold to him. He would be especially concerned to have the chapel handed over to him with its altar and tabernacle intact and the sacristy with its cupboards full of vestments and so-called sacred vessels. If possible, he would buy also the robes or the habits worn by the priests or the nuns who had formerly lived in the building. After having acquired the building, he would arrange for part of the first floor to be turned into a luxuriously appointed apartment for himself and the woman who lived with him. The rest of the first floor would be turned into many smaller apartments, each of which would be occupied, so the young man said, by a high-class call-girl. The upper floors would be converted into spacious apartments to be occupied permanently, or at weekends, by each of the young men who had visited him on the many Friday and Saturday evenings when he had been no more than a clerk who worked in a building of many storeys and who lived in an upstairs flat. One of these young men, of course, would have been the chief character.

When the young man had fitted out to his satisfaction the former convent or former monastery, so he told his visitors not only on the evening when he first talked of taking legal action against the Catholic Church but on many an evening afterwards, and when each of the smaller apartments on the first floor had been occupied by a high-class call-girl, then would begin the series of events for the sake of which the building had been bought and fitted out. On every Friday and every Saturday evening, the owner of the building of several storeys would arrange for the celebration in the chapel of the building of a Black Mass, that is to say, an obscene travesty of the Catholic Mass. Whenever he discussed this matter, the young man who lived in the upstairs flat would state that the chief character was the best qualified of all the young men in the flat to be the celebrant of the Black Mass. As the celebrant, he would wear only a chasuble of the style known as Roman, which would scarcely hide his nakedness. The young man from the upstairs flat would be the altar-server or acolyte and would wear only a lace-edged surplice reaching to his waist. The congregation would consist of all the other residents of the building of several storeys, each of them naked beneath the habit of a nun or of a priest. At a certain point during the Black Mass, the celebrant would reach into the tabernacle and would take out a croissant and a bottle of expensive wine. The so-called priest’s communion would consist of the celebrant’s buttering and eating the croissant and swigging often from the bottle. Soon afterwards, the congregation would be invited into the sanctuary not to receive communion but to take part in a banquet. (Food and drink would have been waiting on tables near by.) Towards the end of the banquet, a plentiful supply of comfortable cushions would be spread around the sanctuary, on the steps of the altar, and on the altar itself, in front of the tabernacle. Then would follow what the young man from the upstairs flat called a sex-orgy.