Black Bread White Beer (12 page)

But there are things to put a cap on his sentimentality, namely the understanding that staring at the face of Christ is unable to take him back in time to prevent what was lost. That the Crucifixion is no adequate shoulder for the ache that fills him, the size of a boulder settled in the place where a baby should be. He does not feel the oncoming lightness often attributed to a pensive posture facing the altar; nor can he understand how those who find themselves in unexpected, dire circumstances, can leave this building after a few minutes, an hour, and claim to be healed.

The stillness is a comfort. Perhaps it is the coolness of the interior, and the silence, that pushes him into a state where comfort is felt: a starting point for prayer. There is stillness in the house in Richmond too, but here the rooms are overwhelmingly personal, shell-firing memories
at every turn to the point where only methodically sweeping the front drive or hosing the bins can block them.

Except, there isn't complete silence. The louvres have been pulled open, allowing the pulse of the Herald to intrude with every heartbeat. Distracted now, he turns his head to catch it. Too close to be dismissed as white noise, his overactive brain is no longer capable of filtering it out. Voices ringing, high and in unison; soaring sharply over claps and cheers.

It is not the tug of war that has brought them together, he realizes, but the school choir. They are singing the song
‘You're beautiful'
to an accompaniment from a couple of guitars and a flute. Another strange display of village insularity and narcissism, he thinks, until the penny drops, and he remembers how most of them were dressed in daffodil yellow and crocus white.

The voices are young, nervous, and wilfully attention-seeking. They bring the reality of the Herald, and a vision of what Sam wishes for his grandchild. He can see his kid, four, five years from now, standing plaited and clad in Barbour in a country field somewhere, singing the same kind of songs. He sees, even before his baby has breathed his first, this scheming for ownership; how they will take his child away from him.

Ma and Puppa have the same plans, though their tongues are loose to the point of stream of consciousness. Too excited to hold anything back, they have no secrets; itself
an admission that they have waited too long for this moment, their first grandchild made real.

‘We've told Auntie Ginny to get permission to extend the house at the back, so we can all come over next year after rainy season. It will be warm but not uncomfortable. Perfect for a toddler.'

There is more than just hopefulness in their voices. Under the pragmatism lies excitement, and middle-aged mischief that comes from asking Puppa's lazy sister to get her arse in gear and fix the Kolkata house up. The urgency is there too, of course. The urgency never leaves them. Baby's foot must touch his blood soil whilst he is still in an underdeveloped, inarticulate state. The mish-mash of his origins can be taken for granted, so long as everyone starts off on an equal footing.

In-laws on all sides are ready to lay down their food-grabbing arms if they can all get a little of what they want in those first twelve months. After that, it is for the parents themselves to decide.

Ordinarily he is hardened to children's singing. He finds choirs twee and emotionally manipulative. At the first sign of them in shopping centres or rugby matches he heads the other way, self-satisfied with his verisimilitude. He despises the way cutesiness is deployed to cream cash from innocent shoppers. Donations of ten pounds to vaguely explained charities is mugging at its worst. Kids brainwashed into doing good works, even at a young age,
dazzled by the lure of garish costumes and guaranteed attention.

They have not talked of specifically how they will raise their child. Still overtaken with relief, the unspoken understanding is that common sense will dominate over interfering parents and exacting manuals. There has already been too much of both.

Theirs would not be paraded about like Sussex show ponies. There were plenty of cool, funky children they could take as their template. Ones that were fully engaged with other children without dance competitions and singing around bonfires. Claude had exactly that kind of upbringing throughout her primary years. That was how he knew she wanted the complete opposite.

But the children in the choir have been coached well. For all the wonder of the song, they play upon its sense of melancholy, conjuring shades of grey they have no right to know about. Choral coercion. A sadness snaking under the church door, coiling around his arm and twisting it behind his back. Twisting to the point of tears. More tears.

He has not come to church to cry. The wetness sitting on his cheekbones becomes as familiar as the stillness that envelopes him. It floats around him in thick bubbles, like humidity; something that cannot just be physically felt, but grabbed, captured.

Bastard children. Even at this distance they have the
power to paralyse him. His legs are glued in their cross position, as frozen as Claud's impenetrable eggs.

His phone buzzing in his pocket sends his left leg into spasm. Hari.

‘Your family is seriously screwed up, man.'

‘Watch your language. I'm sitting in a church.'

‘Bad choice of words. Unlucky, is what I meant. A real case of bad timing.'

Now that he is over the shock, and embedded deep in their duplicity, Hari has reverted to his trusted self: dramatist, stirrer.

‘Your call is the thing that's bad timing, son. I really have to go.'

In spite of the rabble-rousing tone, something in Hari's voice centres him; perhaps the same element that comes from the altar cross, whatever that unspeakable element may be. He is hooked on stillness, an addict, clinging on to those that can anchor him.

Maybe this is the point of prayer. Like an entry point. An invisible door located deep in this silence. You just have to keep your mouth shut and your thoughts together long enough to work out where it is. If this is the case, I have become a believer, he thinks, shying away from nothing. I believe in the power of prayer . . . so long as it
can get me what I want: patience, a time-machine, a stronger cellular structure, the ability not to apportion blame.

‘You're right. I agree with you absolutely,' he says, aware that Hari's voice has risen in volume and pitch, and hoping this cover-all masks his wandering. Hari's only venture inside a church was down to his best man duties. He once boasted of taking a piss outside the convent on Westbourne Grove during his student days as ‘a laugh'.

‘You're sounding very distant, 'Mal. Otherworldly. Have they made you saint in there? Has Jesus performed his magic?'

‘Don't take the piss, Hari.'

‘Ha! That's mature. So it's all right for you to swear, is it?'

‘Acceptable in the circumstances. I'm defending the faith.'

‘You only like it down there because it's pretty. You wouldn't be so fast to wave a tambourine down some community centre in Peckham if that was the only option. You can't fool me the way you do them.'

‘And even that I do badly.'

‘Ha! That's my boy!'

‘What are you even doing calling me? They say a respectful distance in these situations is always best.'

‘Like a priest to his flock.'

Hari can proclaim heresy to his heart's content, so long
as it keeps him on the phone. Nonsense acting as sound barrier between him and the kids choir; him and the continual rolling in his chest; the weak, hollow feeling in his teeth and the new, sudden itchiness of his skin, that makes him want to shed his outer form and start again, light and unburdened. But more than that, it is the skin-tone that binds them. Family. He would never speak this way to anyone else.

‘That's always been your problem, 'Mal,' – the lazy drawl in Hari's voice makes Amal wonder where he is, sofa, pub, bed – ‘I've never been very good with boundaries. You're in church because?'

‘I'm hiding from the glorified village fete. Long story.'

‘They haven't taken it well, then?' ‘They don't know. Not yet. Claud has to decide when, not me.'

‘Yes, best leave it to her. It's a man's job, after all.'

He takes it, the barbs, same as he takes his wife's. Day-to-day abuse delivered down phone lines. Daily, like cornflakes; as fulfilling as prayer. It is a masochism that always put him on the lower rung in previous relationships – lippy girls who told him he never did anything right, until he got out his credit card – a facet of character best suited to temporary residence here, where both the start and end point is one of sin.

‘If I didn't have guts I wouldn't have driven down here,' he says flatly, as unconvinced as his listener.

‘I know you do,' Hari says suddenly, welling with an unfamiliar remorse. ‘I've no idea how I'd react in the circumstances. Nowhere near as sound as you're doing, I imagine.'

‘Don't know about that. I'm . . . muddling along. Passing time until the day's over.'

‘I shouldn't have called you, I'm sorry. I'm sitting in the pub, bored because the person I'm meeting is twenty minutes late. It's pathetic. Allow me to take leave and go fuck myself.'

‘Not before you tell me your news. You haven't called for no reason.'

‘It's nothing . . .' He hesitates, embarrassed. ‘Just bored. Other people have the sense not to answer when they see my name. Not you.'

‘Sure?' He is still in the market for distraction. If religious icons and a restored nave cannot do the job, maybe the mantle should be taken by the selfish, the trivial.

‘Yup. No different to usual. Empty mind and all that.'

He feels hollow once Hari has hung up (‘Look after yourself, man. Look after her'), ill at ease with the uncertainty in his friend's voice. Hari's desire to self-censor is unheard of in other situations – shagging at funerals, nicking the odd present at wedding receptions – prompting him to wonder at which elements of their ordeal have driven this response. Notes of wistfulness
maybe; that this tragedy is not his to experience first hand. Or is that just how he, Amal, now thinks of it? Willing himself to swap places with Hari and become the outsider.

Then, a second phone interruption before he even has a chance to take his hand out of his pocket. Others are at fault for his inattention to prayer. He would be faithful, devout, if it were not for these distractions.

The polysynthetic ring tone he chose as jokingly retro, pleasingly base next to Claud's bog-standard BlackBerry audio signature, sounds just as tinny and cheap as it did moments earlier. No, worse than before, shamefully so, as its cartoonish top notes bounce from icon to font to altar steps. Even the echo seems to slide despairingly off each hard surface, slick of unwanted matter; like a Teflon pan coming into contact with mono-saturated fats.

Similarly, his arse cannot help but skid across the pew, as he struggles to fish the phone from his pocket. It is as if the actual building knows he is an outsider, and refuses his attempt to take root. It renders the shelter into something temporary and of a flimsier construction than the one in his mind; pavilion bench or suburban bus stop.

Try as he might, he will never fit into this town. Even in places where he hides away. No matter how well-worn his wellington boots are or how stained his Barbour Mac, the countryside will always reject him.

‘How are you feeling?' he asks, softly, hearing her
breath, and immediately wishing it was not this phone, but her nestled against his ear, her weight pushing into his neck, perfume filling his nose and mouth.

‘Better,' says the voice on the other end. Claud's, thick with warmth and hoarse with crying.

A whisper that brings something back from their wedding, small utterances that only the other could hear: I'm bricking it; You're beautiful; the ring won't fit.

‘I've slept. Washed my face.'

‘That's good. We're leaving the Herald now.'

‘I think I've had enough of being on my own.'

‘I'm really pleased you called, Claud. It makes me happy.'

He realizes his prayer as he says it. Silence paving the way for honesty. Anger and guilt, banished.

He hears her intake of breath before replying; a pause where an unspoken apology is accepted.

‘Come home, 'Mal. I'm missing you.'