The Blood That Stains Your Hands (6 page)

'I know,' he says, 'yet people get by. They enjoy themselves. They find the little things. People get jobs, people fall in love.'

He's about to turn into Julie Andrews.

'Thistle are in the Premier League,' he continues. 'The Scotland team's getting itself together. There are always new women to sleep with, even you haven't gone through them all. Crime's down, believe it or not. Serious crime, even the petty shit. Economy's on the mend. Exam grades are up, university results are up, there's less teenage pregnancy, there's talk of a new Scottish enlighten—'

'Most of that's shit,' I say, finally cutting him off. 'We know crime isn't down, it's just reported less because people are so disaffected with us, which is fair enough because we've been cut back so far we are total shit. There may be the odd positive economic indicator, but the country's in trillions of pounds of debt, which one day soon is going to bite us all on the arse and we're going to be totally fucked. Thistle are getting gubbed most weeks, Scotland are still shit, and the only reason there's been a drop in teenage pregnancy is because of online porn.'

He's been smiling at my rebuttal, but at that last one he laughs out loud.

'Seriously? Only you, Hutton. How do you work that out?'

'Firstly,' I say, turning and looking at the bar, because I don't care what he says, I'm having another one, 'there's lots of talk about the malign effect of porn on teenage girls. But I bet there are thousands of teenage boys scared to show themselves naked to a girl, because all they see are those monster porn guys with fifteen-inch erections who make them feel incredibly deficient in the cock department, and so they sit in total inadequacy in their rooms watching porn, rather than getting out there, getting girls pregnant.'

'Hmm... has someone done a study on that?'

'And secondly...'

'Here we go,' he says, and now he gets to his feet.

'The ones who are having sex have learned how to do it from the porn channels, so there are all these kids who are about to ejaculate inside the girl, then at the last second they withdraw and the girl's thinking, what's with that, that's incredibly sensible, then the kid starts pulling his pudding furiously beside the girl's head and she's like, what the fuck are you doing, and he says, I'm going to cum all over your face, and she's like, NO YOU'RE FUCKING NOT, and then blam, he does it anyway, and she's like, what the actual fuck, you moron, and he's like, that's what happens! That's what you're supposed to do! This is how you have sex! I've seen it on triple-fucking-X! And it's fucked up, man, and a bit mental, but on the plus side... nobody ever got pregnant from snorting semen.'

Taylor is laughing and shaking his head as he walks out. I watch him go and then turn and look at the bar.

Vodka tonic, bag of peanuts.

––––––––

T
here's a small house attached to the halls beside the Old Kirk, and in the house lives the church officer. Kind of the gatekeeper figure, you know, if this was some kind of epic, Arthurian quest. But since it's just a bleak little house attached to the halls of a church that's on the verge of becoming an ex-church at the top end of town, gatekeeper might be a little too grand a title.

Mary Buttler, early fifties, I'd say, and an air of common sense about her. The husband answered the door, didn't invite me in. She came and stood on the doorstep for a while, then offered to show me round the church.

Across the small car park, through the padlocked iron gates to the approach path to the church. We pass the centuries-old head stones. Three locks on the church door.

'Get much trouble up here?' I ask. 'Graffiti, kids getting drunk in the graveyard, that kind of thing?'

Spent a couple of hours this morning on Dorritt's paper bust up the road. Not far, in fact, from the fourth church in our current little disaster. Didn't have much to do with the operation. I was there to add to the numbers as we were trying to impose ourselves. Everything came off well. Must admit, overall Dorritt impressed me in a way I wasn't expecting. Smooth, clinical, carried the whole thing off with competence. Lacking in the kind of panache that I bring to a procedure, you might say, but no one got shot, none of the suspected criminals even tried to leg it. They were impressed with the show of force.

Me? I got some fresh air and didn't have to do any paperwork.

'Comes and goes,' she says. 'We thought there might be more once the church stopped getting used full time, but there's still enough going on round here. There's the occasional wedding or a memorial service and, of course, the halls are used all week round for one thing or another.'

She fiddles with the locks, takes her time to open, and then we walk into the church. She hits the light switches inside the door. A short entrance hall leading to a corridor running the width of the church. Doors at either end open into the nave, with stairs at one end leading, presumably, to more seating above. The gods.

She turns to her right along the corridor, then opens the door to the nave of the church, ushering me in first. It's large, painted in pastel colours, the natural light in the room entering through stained glass windows.

'Would you like the lights on in here?' she asks.

'No, it's fine.'

I stare up for a moment, and then walk slowly down the aisle. Each row of seats is split into three, with two aisles creating a centre phalanx of seating. I walk into the body of the church, and then take a seat. Long, old-fashioned pews, with thin red cushioning. I sit and stare up at the chancel. The pulpit, set low down, the lectern with a large Bible open on top, a long table, the baptismal font, seating for the choir behind, organ pipes, although the organ is not situated next to them, and then at the back, a high, and pretty damned impressive, stained glass window. Twenty feet tall maybe. Maybe more. Beneath are two pots of red flowers.

The silence is almost ear-splitting. I don't speak for a while. Mary Buttler sits across the narrow aisle in another pew. She doesn't look at me, and I don't look at her. I stare up at Jesus in the window. Suddenly I feel that I could sit here all day. I can't sit alone in silence in my own home for more than thirty seconds. I need noise, I need distraction. But this. This is a silence you can crawl into and surround yourself with. Let it envelope you, and shield you from everything outside. And everything that's inside as well.

No wonder people come here. It doesn't matter whether you believe that the guy up there was the son of God or just some geezer who had a way with words. That's not what it's about. And no wonder fewer and fewer people are coming. No one sits in silence anymore. We all need noise. We all need music and chatter and videos and movies and TV shows and the internet and Facebook and friends and the sound of our phone pinging with an update on something that we haven't had an update on for upwards of three minutes.

I don't think there's anything on earth, or otherwise, that could convince me to believe that Jesus was the son of God, or that religion wasn't just invented as a means to control the population, but I could be converted to sitting in this kind of silence.

No idea how long we sit there, but I realise when I start to think about creating a little shrine in my own home where I could go and sit and meditate while sitting cross-legged beneath the picture of the Thistle side that beat Celtic in the '71 League Cup final, that I'm coming out the other side of my brief moment of awakening.

'You ever come in here and just sit?' I ask.

'Every day,' she says, smiling.

'It's beautiful,' I say. 'Doesn't look like it's under-used.'

'It was in good order before the merger,' she says. 'The church was well enough off, had a lot of money bequeathed to us.'

I think of a comment someone has made in the last couple of days, that this was the posh church of the four, the congregation that everyone else viewed as the snobs. Perhaps that's all it was. Jealous of their money. Another deadly sin to add to the list of un-Christian behaviour that is mounting by the day.

Was jealousy one of the deadly sins? God knows. Sounds like it ought to have been. Typically, when trying to remember the seven of them, my thoughts have nothing to do with religion, going straight to the movie
Se7en
with Brad Pitt, before quickly giving up and heading off to check that I can still remember the names of
The Magnificent Seven
.

'Since the merger, all the money's been spent by that lot down the road. God knows what they've done with it. A couple of pews and a kitchen cupboard. If you ask me, someone's got his hand in the cookie jar. This whole business... Well, it's got a long way to go, that's all.'

I glance over at her. There's nothing on her face. No resentment. Perhaps sitting in here every day helps with that kind of thought process.

'We'll do our best, but inevitably this place will start to go, deteriorate, you know, and then someone will say, why are we spending the money keeping it going when we rarely use it? And then there'll be some argument, but most of the people who feel passionate about it, good people from around here, they've already given up. And then it'll be sold. And that will be that...'

Her voice trails off, a melancholic quality to it. I've been looking at her as she spoke. The whole time she's been staring up at the window at the back of the church.

'This place was originally selected?' I ask. I know this stuff.

She smiles, affords me a brief glance.

'Well, you'd like to think that everyone had seen some sense right at the beginning, but to be honest, we had the biggest congregation so we had the highest number of votes. So we won. Unfortunately, in trying to be corporate, the various church positions were handed round, and that cunt from down the road got the position as property convenor.'

In all I end up spending over an hour in the company of Mrs Buttler. That's the only time she swears. A bluntly effective denunciation of the man who remains property convenor at St Mungo's. Perhaps I should try that. Only swearing every now and again, so that it's really effective and powerful when I do it.

I can add that to the list of aspirational items that I'll never get around to.

'Excuse my language,' she says.

'It's fine.'

'He came up here and picked this place apart with a toothcomb. The nerve of the man, as if St Mungo's is perfect. Every little.... every single little thing he could think to say about the building. Everything. The long list of expenditure that was needed to meet health and safety this, and health and safety that. We'd already passed all that stuff! And then he found the rot in the roof of the halls.'

She shakes her head. Her gaze has dropped and she's staring at the floor. She's not sounding so sanguine and peaceful anymore.

'This is Paul Cartwright you're talking about?'

She snorts. I didn't even need to ask. Every time this guy's name is mentioned you know you're going to get some sort of reaction.

'And just look at what they've done down there,' she says. 'They twisted the vote, said that we couldn't use the Old Kirk because of the amount of money that'd be required, and then they've gone and spent all our money,
our
money, repairing their church.'

Another shake of the head.

I look back at the stained glass Jesus looking down on us from the rear of the church.

'I'm sorry, Sergeant, I shouldn't be getting annoyed. Take a look around if you like, I'll just wait here for you to finish. We can talk further over a cup of tea.'

I get up and walk down to the front. The pulpit is set low, and I'm tempted to climb the few stairs up there and stand and look down over the rows of empty pews. I'd probably do it if she wasn't here. Instead I stand at the lectern and look at the open Bible.

Revelation 9.

And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men. And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions...

OK, so let's get this straight. We've got locusts that look like horses, with women's hair, men's faces and lion's teeth. Well, that makes sense. No doubt there's some of that metaphor going on in there.

I glance up and contemplate reading some of this shit out, but if I did that I'd probably end up sliding into Sean Connery. Mrs Buttler looks upset enough as it is, what with me getting the conversation round to Paul Cartwright. It's not going to be helped by my saying, 'And the name of the shtar ish called Wormwood: and the third part of the watersh became wormwood; and many men died of the watersh, and they too had blackened fingersh and blackened tonguesh.'

––––––––

M
y original intention had been to get around as many parishioners as possible, a broad spectrum, and then if there were any that I thought needed adding to the list, to seek them out tomorrow. However, it seems pretty obvious that I really need to speak to this Cartwright character to find out if he's as much of a bell-end as everyone implies. Given that I tend to have a low view of pretty much everybody, it's a fair bet that I'm going to dislike him even without him being as awful as they all say, but let's not let that stand in the way.

He's an architect, and a quick phone call to his office tells me that he's at a project site in Largs all day. Won't be back in the office until Monday. I weigh the odds, two hours on a round trip to Largs to interview one person – and not a very long interview included – or spend that time on four of five people in the area? Contemplate calling Taylor, then decide that I need to speak to Cartwright regardless. Largs it is, and at least the drive won't take as long as it used to back when I was a kid, hitting the coast for the ferry to Millport.

The project site is on the hill looking down over the town, the Clyde and Great Cumbrae out in the firth. A beautiful view from up here, even on a crappy day like this. This is at the point where the river has opened wide, and Cumbrae sits in the middle, with the low hills of Bute beyond, and behind Bute the hills of Arran and the hook of the mainland, as the Mull of Kintyre dips south, forever awash to the sound of Paul McCartney. To the right, the mountains of Argyll, although today they are obscured.