talking to myself in a secret way, having wicked thoughts. At home and in my aunt’s garden I became a man my father had read about in a newspaper and whom, he’d said, we must all pray for, a thief who broke the windows of jewellers’ shops and lifted out watches and rings. I became Father Smith, drinking too much stout and missing the steps of the stairs. I became Father Magennis and would lie on the weeds at the bottom of the garden or under a table, confessing to gruesome crimes at the moment of death. In my mind I mocked the holiness of my parents and imitated their voices; I mocked the holiness of my Aunt Isabella; I talked back to my parents in a way I never would; I laughed and said disgraceful things about God and the religious life. Blasphemy was exciting.
‘Are you ready so?’ Father Parsloe asked when my parents and my aunt had left for the visit to my uncle. ‘Will we take a bus?’
‘A bus?’
‘Down to the town.’
I’d never in my life done that before. The buses were for going longer distances in. It seemed extraordinary not to walk, the whole point of a walk was to walk.
‘I haven’t any money for the bus,’ I said, and Father Parsloe laughed. On the upper deck he lit a cigarette. He was a slight young man, by far the youngest of the priests in my aunt’s house, with reddish hair and a face that seemed to be on a slant. ‘Will we have tea in Thompson’s?’ he said. ‘Would that be a good thing to do?’
We had tea in Thompson’s cafe, with buns and cakes and huge meringues such as I’d never tasted before. Father Parsloe smoked fourteen cigarettes and drank all the tea himself. I had three bottles of fizzy orangeade. ‘Will we go to the pictures?’ Father Parsloe said when he’d paid the bill at the cash desk. ‘Will we chance the Pavilion?’
I had never, of course, been to the pictures before. My mother said that the Star Picture House, which was the only one in our town, was full of fleas.
‘One and a half,’ Father Parsloe said at the cash desk in the Pavilion and we were led away into the darkness. THE END it announced on the screen, and when I saw it I thought we were too late. ‘Ah, aren’t we in lovely time?’ Father Parsloe said.
I didn’t understand the film. It was about grown-ups kissing one another, and about an earthquake, and then a motor-car accident in which a woman who’d been kissed a lot was killed. The man who’d kissed her was married to another woman, and when the film ended he was sitting in a room with his wife, looking at her. She kept saying it was all right.
‘God, wasn’t that great?’ Father Parsloe said as we stood in the lavatory of the Pavilion, the kind of lavatory where you stand up, like I’d never been in before. ‘Wasn’t it a good story?’
All the way back to Montenotte I kept remembering it. I kept seeing the face of the woman who’d been killed, and all the bodies lying on the streets after the earthquake, and the man at the end, sitting in a room with his wife. The swaying of the bus made me feel queasy because of the meringues and the orangeade, but I didn’t care.
‘Did you enjoy the afternoon?’ Father Parsloe asked, and I told him I’d never enjoyed anything better. I asked him if the pictures were always as good. He assured me they were.
My parents, however, didn’t seem pleased. My father got hold of a
That night my mother prayed for her extra long period, after the visit to my uncle. I lay in the dimly lit room, aware that she was kneeling there, but thinking of the film and the way the people had kissed, not like my parents ever kissed. At the convent elementary school there were girls in the higher classes who were pretty, far prettier than my mother. There was one called Claire, with fair hair and a softly freckled face, and another called Peggy Meehan, who was younger and black-haired. I had picked them out because they had spoken to me, asking me my name. I thought them very nice.
I opened my eyes and saw that my mother was rising from her knees. She stood for a moment at the edge of her bed, not smiling, her lips still moving, continuing her prayer. Then she got into bed and put out the light.
I listened to her breathing and heard it become the breathing which people have when they’re asleep, but I couldn’t sleep myself. I lay there, still remembering the film and remembering being in Thompson’s and seeing Father Parsloe lighting one cigarette after another. For some reason, I began to imagine that I was in Thompson’s with Father Parsloe and the two girls from the convent, and that we all went off to the Pavilion together, swinging along the street. ‘Ah, isn’t this the life for us?’ Father Parsloe said as he led us into the darkness, and I told the girls I’d been to the Pavilion before and they said they never had.
I heard eleven o’clock chiming from a nearby church. I heard a stumbling on the stairs and then the laughter of Father Smith, and Father Riordon telling him to be quiet. I heard twelve chiming and half past twelve, and a quarter to one, and one.
After that I didn’t want to sleep. I was standing in a classroom of the convent and Claire was smiling at me. It was nice being with her. I felt warm all over, and happy.
And then I was walking on the sands with Peggy Meehan. We ran, playing a game she’d made up, and then we walked again. She asked if I’d like to go on a picnic with her, next week perhaps.
I didn’t know what to do. I wanted one of the girls to be my friend. I wanted to love one of them, like the people had loved in the film. I wanted to kiss one and be with one, just the two of us. In the darkness of the bedroom they both seemed close and real, closer than my mother, even though I could hear my mother breathing. ‘Come on,’ Peggy Meehan whispered, and then Claire whispered also, saying we’d always be best friends, saying we might run away. It was all wrong that there were two of them, yet both vividly remained. ‘Tuesday,’ Peggy Meehan said. ‘We’ll have the picnic on Tuesday.’
Her father drove us in his car, away from the town, out beyond the heathery wastelands, towards a hillside that was even nicer. But a door of the car, the back door against which Peggy Meehan was leaning, suddenly gave way. On the dust of the road she was as dead as the woman in the film.
‘Poor Peggy,’ Claire said at some later time, even though she hadn’t known Peggy Meehan very well. ‘Poor little Peggy.’ And then she smiled and took my hand and we walked together through the heathery wastelands, in love with one another.
A few days later we left my Aunt Isabella’s house in Montenotte and returned on the train to our seaside town. And a week after that a new term began at the convent elementary school. Peggy Meehan was dead, the Reverend Mother told us, all of us assembled together. She added that there was diphtheria in the town.
I didn’t think about it at first; and I didn’t connect the reality of the death with a fantasy that had been caused by my first visit to a cinema. Some part of my mind may passingly
