NIALL WILLIAMS

Boy in the World

For my son, Joseph

Contents

Title Page Dedication Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Chapter Thirty-Seven Chapter Thirty-Eight Chapter Thirty-Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty-One Chapter Forty-Two Chapter Forty-Three Chapter Forty-Four About the Author Copyright About the Publisher

ONE

Iamu.

Strange sound. African sound.

Three syllables. Iamu.

In the brief stillness of morning the boy stood and studied himself in the mirror. Beneath a lank fringe of black hair his brown eyes examined their reflection, as if for secrets. The pale brown of his skin, the prominent angle where his cheek seemed now to emerge more clearly, the darkness of his eyebrows, the squat saddle of his nose, these things he considered. The secret the boy sought was who he was to become. With the fingers of his two hands he touched the skin about his jaw to see if there was sign yet of any beard.

Will I be bearded?

Maybe, maybe that roughening was something starting. He turned his head this way and that to look at himself sidelong.

‘I am you,’ he said aloud, turning back to face the mirror, allowing himself to pose with pretend confidence. But almost at once the boy in the reflection lowered his eyes and the confidence crumbled like a mask made of flour.

‘Are you all right in there?’ From just outside the bathroom door a man’s voice called hesitantly. And with even greater hesitation, as though the subject were one of tremendous delicacy, he enquired, ‘Are they fitting?’

‘Yes,’ the boy said. ‘Yes, they’re fine.’ But in fact the new shirt and jacket and trousers bought for his Confirmation that morning were still hanging off the towel rail.

‘Grand, grand. I’m not rushing you,’ said the man. ‘There’s plenty of time. But if anything needs adjusting. Oh, and I will do your tie, don’t worry about that, all right?’

‘Yes,’ said the boy, ‘fine, thanks.’ He could feel the pale grey eyes outside watching the door.

‘So, whenever you’re ready.’

The old man moved away. He himself was already changed into a white shirt and blue suit trousers, and the tight black shoes he wore only for weddings and funerals squeaked off into the kitchen. Through the house now he had last-minute jobs of preparation, counting chairs for guests later, arranging glasses and bottles, gathering stray items of clothing that he and the boy allowed to lie around the house in the ordinary course of their living.

In the bathroom the boy was standing with his two hands pressing down on either side of the sink, looking at himself. It was not because he was vain, not because he often looked at himself in this way, or because he thought himself in any way worth looking at. Rather it was the very opposite, because to himself it seemed he had until that very morning been almost invisible. He had not really thought about what he looked like, or whom he looked like, or what changes were happening in the map of his face. Nor had he thought about what lay ahead for him. Not really. But in the week at school just finished, with the preparations at their most intense, this was the thing the Master had emphasized.

‘You are not boys and girls any longer,’ he had said. He had a voice more aged than himself, sounds frayed and whispery from the smoking of his youth and the whiskey of his middle life. But still he could be firm. He knew a way of telling things that made the words seem important so that even those who paid no attention to spellings or History or Maths paid attention now.

‘You came into this school as boys and girls, but in a week you will be gone.’

There was a broken line of grins along the back row.

‘Yes. When you see me again, in a short time, in a very short time, you will think to yourselves: how old the Master has become. You will think, how very grey is his little bit of hair, how crooked and stooped he seems.’ Here the Master had stooped crookedly and peered out half-blind and the class had laughed. ‘He who once was so large and full of knowledge to me, so wise,’ he continued, ‘will be no more the Master but just an old man. Soon, very soon; in fact for some,’ and here he had looked directly at the boy, ‘this has begun to happen already; you will meet me and think how little that man knows, because you will quickly know so much more than me. And while you will become even smarter,’ again he singled out the boy, ‘I will become to you more foolish.’

The boy had thought to make some response to this, to deny it, but was too timid to speak out loud in front of the class.

The Master paused and angled himself against the seat of his stool, his two hands thrust deep in the pockets of his tweed jacket, his soft grey eyes travelling over the pupils one by one. ‘But this is no reason for sadness,’ he said. ‘No, no. I will not be sad. And you must not be sad. This is a cause for celebration, because it means this; it means the world is getting smarter all the time. And you will be the evidence of that, you will be the ones to save the world from the mess your parents have made of it.’

He allowed this phrase to settle over them, and it was to each of them as if these words were new clothes that they found themselves trying for the first time. Some were uncomfortable, some delighted and proud. The boy was not so sure. He looked at the large crinkled map of the world on the wall behind the Master. He had stared up at it for years in that classroom and knew his way from one country to the next with his eyes closed. But the world was a big place, and the idea of he and his classmates saving it from anything was hard to imagine. He looked along the wall at the posters they had made in preparation for the Confirmation, pictures of the Apostles with yellow crayoned flames touching their foreheads, and he was wondering if the flames burned and hurt when the Master continued.

‘Here, I will remain. And I will know that I have done a very good thing when you are gone from this school. I will have done what I can to teach you what I know. And we will have shared that important time, perhaps that most important time together. But now, you have arrived at a threshold, a doorway. When you leave in a week’s time, you will be leaving something important. Do you know what it is?’

Some hands were raised. Some guesses given: their school, their classroom, their desks with the names written underneath. But each guess the Master patiently dismissed.

‘No, no,’ he said at last, ‘the thing you will be leaving behind is your childhood.’

There had fallen a silence then, as if a gap opened in the air between the Master and the pupils.

‘Now the question you have to begin to ask yourselves is this: what kind of man or woman am I going to become?’

Again the Master allowed his question to hang in the air before them. Then, when he was sure it had begun to play in their minds, he added in a lighter tone, ‘Because of course to some passing by outside this might seem to be only a small country schoolhouse in the middle of nowhere in the west of Ireland. It might seem a quaint old place with a funny old schoolmaster …’

‘Crooked and stooped,’ said Martin Collins from the back row.

‘Yes, crooked and stooped, in a place where nothing important could ever happen. Our roof is falling in. Our blackboard is grey from a hundred years of white chalk. From the skills of our footballers, some of our windows are cracked.’ At this there was murmuring and laughter. ‘But,’ continued the Master, ‘despite appearances, here something remarkable has happened. Here you have taken your first steps in becoming yourselves, in becoming who you are, and who you will be in the world.’

The Master had leaned back on the stool again and considered the faces gazing up at him. Some of the boys had begun to forget already the words he had just spoken and were restless for the bell when they could run out of the schoolyard for the last time. But not the boy. The boy thought about things deeply. This was his nature. Although he had once tried to join in and play games in the schoolyard he was not good at sports, and soon enough discovered both teams preferred it when he did not offer himself to be picked. Above all other things he enjoyed reading books. He was curious about everything in the world and had read through the small school library years before. He had read all the editions of the books of Charles Dickens there, of Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jules Verne. He had read the translations of great epic tales from Greece, of the stories of Ulysses and Odysseus, and the entire collection of slim books about the countries of the world. Although these were at least forty years out of date, some with their covers ripped off and pages marked and torn, from them he had tasted something of the places there were out there beyond the classroom. He was a boy who was interested in the how and why of all things, and whose understanding was far greater than others of his age. And this, rather than bringing him closer to adults or his contemporaries, had in fact created a distance between him and everyone else. In a row of lights strung out along a line he was a bulb too bright.

Knowing this, and considering how in the world of childhood he had had such difficulty, the boy had sat at his desk and for a moment let his eyes meet those of the Master. Who am I to become? In the grown-up world, who am I to be? Soundlessly he asked, and felt for the first time the burden of this question in his heart.

Now, in the bathroom before the mirror, he thought of all this again. He leaned against the sides of the sink and might have stayed longer if there hadn’t been a tapping on the door.

‘Nearly ready?’

‘Yes,’ he called back, ‘just coming.’

Quickly then, he put on the new grey trousers and the white shirt that was stiff about the collar. When he squeezed closed the top button the shirt was still loose around his neck. In the mirror he looked ridiculous, he thought. He took the comb and drew a parting in his black hair and smoothed the line, but after an instant shook his head until the hair had returned to its usual untidiness and then he opened the door.

‘Here you are.’ A small man past sixty with a kindly face crinkled like a favoured newspaper stood with the boy’s shoes freshly polished in his hand. His eyes did not move from the boy’s. They were the pale grey of a thumb smudged with newsprint. Although he was still the Master, he did not look like the Master now. Out of the schoolroom and his faithful old tweed jacket and in the blue suit and white shirt, he looked almost a different person altogether. He was shaven very cleanly. There were tiny red nicks cut in his throat and one high on his cheek. The unruly tuft of his hair had been flattened down with water and was momentarily under control.

‘Thanks,’ said the boy.

‘You’re more than welcome. You look … well, fine. Yes, absolutely fine.’

The boy took the shoes and sat in the kitchen to put them on while the Master lifted two kites that were lying by the couch and carried them out to the back hall. ‘Both of these are fine again,’ he said. ‘Maybe this evening, after the lot are gone, we might get a bit of breeze, take them out.’

‘Yes,’ the boy called after him. ‘Thanks for fixing them.’

‘No trouble. May evening, perfect for them.’

It was one of the things the Master and the boy liked best, to be standing below connected to the fluttering kite flying above.

When the boy stood up in the polished shoes the Master returned, holding out the tie.

‘A tie? Do I have to?’

‘Just for an hour. No more. Now, this is a tricky business,’ the old man said, reaching up slightly to loop it around the boy’s collar. ‘When I first learned I choked myself for weeks after.’ He raised his heavy eyebrows and made his eyes smile. ‘Like this, you see, then over here, then under and through. It may not seem much, but to me, when I was growing up, it was like a secret, like something you had to be a certain age to know how to do, the knot. And of course there were fellows with some fancy ones and showing off and … well.’

The old man stopped. It was as if just then there was an obstacle in his way. Only it was invisible. He stood looking at the boy, losing any words he could say.

The boy moved the knot at his throat. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘It’s em, it’s …’

The clock on the wall ticked loudly. The boy watched the man as he watched a memory.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I …’ The Master had his lips pressed tightly together as though holding his feelings trapped there. Again the clock ticked, louder still, and the room seemed to tighten, as though a pressure had been put on the air. ‘When you get old you get foolish, that’s all,’ the Master said at last and shrugged as though attempting to escape, and raised the eyebrows again, but this time in his eyes there was no smile.

‘What is it? It’s something … something’s wrong,’ said the boy. ‘Tell me.’

And there was a moment, and then another. Briefly, everything was stopped, as if a hand reached out and paused the world in its turning. And inside that small cottage, in the kitchen stood a boy and an older man and the slow passing of a ghost, or maybe two. The Master saw them. One was his wife who had died when the boy was seven. She stood by the cooker now watching him, the pale blueberries of her eyes glinting with pride, her two hands brought up to her mouth the way she always did when she had feelings too large for words. The other ghost was the boy’s mother, Marie, the Master’s daughter who had died of cancer when the boy was two. She moved across the kitchen not a day older than the last time the Master had seen her, alive, her face pale, her auburn hair tied behind. She stood by her son and touched the side of his face, although the boy could not see or feel her.

‘Tell me,’ said the boy again. ‘What is wrong?’

The Master was not looking at him but watching the ghost of the boy’s mother and feeling all parts of himself singed with a sorrow he couldn’t speak.

‘Are you all right?’ The boy was nudging the old man’s shoulder.

‘Yes,’ said the Master, and again ‘yes,’ as though answering various questions from various speakers. He blinked and seemed to right himself.

‘What is it?’ asked the boy.

‘Hold on.’ The Master crossed the kitchen and went to a drawer in the dresser in which he kept a file of papers. The boy knew that in the wild jumble of things were kept documents of all kinds, in there were the instruction book-lets and guarantees on everything, their two passports for the trip the Master was always hoping they would take together. In the file the old man hunted hurriedly and then found a cream-coloured envelope. He closed the file and put it back in the drawer and came to the boy, the envelope in his hand. He blew on it and brushed it against his sleeve. When he went to speak the words got caught on the knot of his tie and he pulled it a little to the right. Then he held out the envelope.

‘What is it?’ asked the boy, not taking it.

‘Before your mother died, and you were only an infant, she wrote this letter to you. I watched her write it in the hospital. She wanted you to have it when you turned thirteen. But today she … today you …’ The Master looked to the ghosts but they were gone. ‘Well … the, em, the Confirmation is an important day. It seems right. Here.’

Suddenly the boy could not move. His heart was racing, his throat tight, had he already loosened the tie? Then why was it he could hardly breathe? Why was it the walls of the little kitchen seemed to pulse in and out?

Breath. In breath. Breathe.

He had to breathe.

Her letter. Breathe. This. In breath.

Don’t. Can’t.

No. No, he couldn’t. He would not take the letter. He would not reach out and take it. No, he couldn’t bear to, he silently decided.

The decision flashed in his mind like a wet knife in a dishcloth. He wouldn’t take the letter. He would wait. He would take it some other day. Then he gasped a breath at last, and the room seemed to stop pulsing.

No.

He looked down. And there in his hand he held the cream-coloured envelope.

TWO

The boy had never known his mother other than that her name was Marie and that she was the shyly smiling young woman with brown hair in the photograph on the piano. He knew that she died after fighting cancer until her hair was gone and her hands so weak they could not hold on to him. He had no idea who his father was, nor, it seemed, did anyone. And in fact for almost all of the boy’s life to that day he had not thought about it very much. His father and mother had been the Master and his wife when she was alive. They had adopted him as a baby and had loved him always.

But now he had the cream-coloured envelope in his hand. He was holding the envelope she had held, about to look at the page she had written.

‘It’s all right,’ said the Master. ‘You can read it now or you can keep it until later.’ He glanced towards the kitchen door and then the windows to see if the ghosts might be lingering somewhere, but there was nothing. ‘She is … well, she would have been so proud of you today. They both would have.’ He smiled with his eyes and a hundred wrinkled lines were written around them. ‘Whatever you’d like now,’ he said softly, seeing that the boy was lost and unsure. ‘Sometimes,’ he put his arm upon the boy’s shoulder, ‘sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing for a while. Doing nothing at all is often the very wisest thing. Because, it was explained to me once, as the world is a ball and is turning and everything is in fact in motion all the time, doing nothing is not really doing nothing, it’s allowing things to move at their own pace.

‘Of course some people don’t understand the wisdom of this,’ the Master whispered, ‘they think when men are doing nothing they are doing nothing.’ Without the boy’s realizing it, the old man had led him to the kitchen door. ‘Take the envelope, go upstairs, do nothing. The church is in half an hour, plenty of time,’ said the Master, ‘go ahead.’

But the boy did not move. He looked down at the envelope in his hand. And suddenly, there opened a quake in his heart, a glaring gulf of sorrow – widening and widening – a dark nauseating chasm into which he himself was about to fall. He felt he was going to cry, but made only a small moan. Rushing up inside of him now rose a giant black wave of loss and sadness and a kind of anger at the world. The torrent roared in his ears. In it were carried the dead, the ghosts of the past he had thought buried. Before his eyes the room seemed to shimmer. The walls would give. The envelope was shaking in his hand as if electric. He could not bear it. He could not bear the hurt he would release if he opened the letter. He suddenly believed he would drown in grief. And so, perhaps even before he had made a decision, before his brain had considered its menu of options and chosen, and before there was time to stop him, he had stepped back inside the kitchen and thrown the cream-coloured envelope spinning into the fire.

‘I don’t want it,’ the boy said, his face flushed, his eyes bright.

And with that he quickly opened the door and left the kitchen and climbed the stairs two by two until he was inside his bedroom and had thrown himself headfirst on to the blankets.

In the place where he lived the boy had no friends. Perhaps because of his great intelligence, he had found himself living on the edge of things for his entire childhood. In the classroom many might elbow him and ask in whispers for the answer to questions in English or History or Geography, but once in the open spaces of the yard they quickly ignored him. Perhaps too it was because his skin was not as pale as the others, because there was something indefinable about him that seemed marked, the way a boy might feel with a splashed birthmark on his face or a scar that reminded all of peril and injury. Whichever the reason, the boy had long ago begun to feel that some part of him was flawed, did not work the way things should. He imagined sometimes there was within him a real but invisible damage. And it was this of which he was most afraid.

To escape the feeling that he had no friend to confide in, the boy had a journal. To its white pages he told his thoughts. Some days there was little to tell, others there was not space enough in the calendar day for all that was hurrying through his mind. As he got older his thoughts grew more complex. Things were not so clear any more. He couldn’t write down just one phrase to tell what had happened or what he thought about something. He wrote in fragments, half-questions. The boy did not name the journal, nor did he think of it in any way as a person. But by the time he was twelve years of age he could not have imagined living his life without it.

So, now, lying on his bed after throwing the cream-coloured envelope into the fire, he took out the most recent volume. It was green-covered and hard-backed and came from a supplier in Dublin the Master knew. It had a thin frayed golden ribbon that acted as a page marker. This the boy especially loved. He loved when the book was closed to see how it marked his progress, and to open the journal by taking the frayed end and pulling so the pages splayed open at exactly the right place, like an invitation.

Now the invitation was urgent. He pulled open the page quickly and took a green pen from the book-stacked locker beside his bed. He looked briefly at the words he had written the night before.

Cour-age

Faith-age

Believe-age

I believe in what?

Now on a new page he wrote:

I burnt the cream letter.

Crimletter Criminaletter

Why? Why?

There is no I in why.

There is no why.

Because knot.

Because I am knot.

Because A cause B cause

See cause I don’t want to know.

No know thatsall.

Endofstory.

The boy lifted his pen and snapped the journal shut. That was it. He was done. Though to someone else the few phrases he had written might have seemed barely anything, almost the moment he had finished writing them the boy felt better. He sat on his bed and could breathe more easily now. It was over and done with. In a few moments he heard the Master’s heavy step on the stairs, then the knock on his door.

‘Come in,’ the boy said.

The Master’s face was kind and full of concern, in his grey eyes something so forgiving and wise that the boy felt at once the comfort of him, like a flannel blanket.

‘All right?’ asked the Master.

‘Yes. Fine. Thanks.’

‘All right, just that it’s maybe time for us to go. And you know what Father Paul’s like. Want everything like clockwork. Be up since dawn with terror of the bishop coming.’

The boy stood up.

‘Here,’ the Master leaned forward and with a slight tugging put the boy’s tie back in place. ‘All right?’

The boy nodded. They went downstairs and passed through the sitting-room that was set for the guests later, the boy’s seven great-aunts and their husbands. There were stacks of rough-looking sandwiches with their fillings half-falling out and bottles of various kinds of drink. ‘Look all right?’ asked the Master. ‘You know what my sisters-in-law are like? Eat a turkey each, never mind turkey sandwiches.’

‘Looks fine.’

‘Good, good.’ The Master crossed to the television where the news channel the boy liked to watch was reporting latest trends in world terrorism. He switched it off. ‘Enough of that,’ he said, ‘come on.’ They went outside and got into the small yellow car and drove towards the village.

It was a blue May day, the countryside they passed full of the beginnings of summer: hedgerows sprinkled with the small white blooms of blackthorn and the blaze of yellow gorse, meadows already green and grass thickening. Soon farmers would be out in tractors and morning, noon and early night would fill with the sound of mowers. The village was not far away and as they arrived at the top of its one long street there were cars parked everywhere and at all angles, as if abandoned. Banners of small triangular flags had been hung between the lamp-posts to signal the Confirmation Day and to welcome the bishop.

‘We’re a tiny bit late,’ the Master said, ‘but never mind,’ he added, noting a look of concern on the boy’s face. ‘I’m the Master, they can’t start without me.’

The boy did not say anything.

‘You all right?’ The Master patted him on his shoulder. ‘Honestly you’ll be fine. Absolutely fine.’

He stopped in the middle of the street and then began to reverse into the smallest of spaces between two cars, but as he did the engine coughed and died. The Master shrugged. ‘Well, made it this far,’ he said to the old car, and got out to hurry up the street.

Inside the church the choir was already singing. The parents of children from the Master’s school exchanged looks of disapproval when he at last arrived. He smiled and was making a small wave at his seven sisters-in-law when the bell was rung on the altar and all stood. Mrs Conway on the organ pounded out the notes and made a jerking motion of her head, so that verse by verse her pink glasses edged further down her nose. The small timid figure of Father Paul came out; to hide his terror of the bishop, he wore a curve of smile freshly glued.

The bishop was a large man who loved himself completely. His fine black helmet of hair he considered magnificent, his nose straight, his teeth blanched and fearsome, his great girth symbolic. There was more of him than of most people.

The choir sang. The little church was hot with people, with the hundred candles and the pride of the parents. The first prayers passed over the boy, and soon he was standing and kneeling with others of his classmates but in a kind of dream. The whole event was unreal, as though he were watching it on the television, or had opened the door and come inside a theatre where a play was going on and everyone was involved except him. Everyone but him knew the lines. Or, they didn’t even see him. He wasn’t even there. There was just this new shirt and tie and new trousers and polished shoes in his place.

Over the weeks of preparation and drilling, the many visits the class had made down to the church, the boy knew what followed what. He knew like clockwork how the ceremony was to go, how first there was the Mass and then inside it as it were was the actual Confirmation when the boys and girls would step out of the church pews and go in line up to the bishop. He knew there were some in his class who were terrified of this. There were some whose mothers and fathers, for what reasons he was not sure, had told them horror stories from their own childhood. Had told them of bishops who smacked children hard across the face sending them spinning like tops. Bishops who asked impossible questions just to watch the humiliation burning the cheeks of the poor unfortunates. Bishops with waxy skin and hedgehog moustaches. Bishops with teeth that whistled. Bishops who smelled like burnt sausages. And when Father Paul had come to talk to the class about the Confirmation and its meaning he was a priest who was so unsure of himself, who seemed terrified that he might say the wrong thing, that he spoke in whispers. To the best that most of them could understand he had told them that after Confirmation they were all going to be soldiers.

The Master had told the boy no such tales. Rather when the boy had asked him one evening he had spoken of Confirmation as a rite of passage. ‘It’s a kind of gateway,’ he said, ‘between boyhood and manhood.’

‘Other religions have them too.’

‘They do,’ agreed the Master. ‘In the Jewish religion they have the Bar Mitzvah.’

‘The Hindus have a ceremony too. The native Americans used to have one.’

‘That’s right. Jumping across fires, I seem to recall,’ the Master said. ‘The main point is it marks something. I suppose it’s the beginning of becoming who you are. There’s nothing at all to be afraid of.’

Now, as the actual ceremony continued, the boy was not frightened at all. But there was an unease gathering inside him. Something was wrong. For no reason at all he kept thinking about one of the prayers, the Creed, and its opening line, ‘I believe in one God.’ He had said it a hundred times, maybe more. But only now, at that very moment, did he ask himself if this was what he believed. Suddenly it seemed such a huge thing to him, such a declaration. Did he even believe he had a soul? Did he believe such a thing existed? Or had a separate life longer than his? That even then as he sat there in the church it was inside him? That somewhere his mother’s soul floated?

Meanwhile the Offertory had come and gone, the gifts had been carried up. On the altar the bishop had slurped back the wine and grimaced a little at the inferior quality they used in the country village. All had proceeded with the strange order and precision of a familiar dream.

Only it was not a dream.

There was a sudden rustling of movement and now the boys and girls were standing and moving out along the bench to stand in the aisle. One girl with blonde curl-ironed hair, impatient at the immaturity of a boy in front of her who insisted on walking on the narrow kneeler as if it were a pirate’s gangplank, shoved him in the back, and the whole line tottered forward. In the aisle they stopped and waited. Mrs Conway on the organ gathered steam. The Under-Tens Choir stood and battled against the mighty volume, singing as if they were sucking sour-pops. The parents leaned forward anxiously. Some fathers, elbowed that it was now time, stepped shyly into the aisle with video cameras, each one vying for a slightly better angle.

The line stood and waited. There was a music cue when they were to walk. They were to keep their eyes down. The bishop was to get up and come forward. It was practised a hundred times. One by one they would be confirmed and return to their rows while the video cameras rolled.

The Master had no camera. He watched the boy get out into the aisle, and tried to wink to him but the boy wasn’t looking.

The Under-Tens reached the final chorus and the boys and girls heard their music cue to move. The bishop gave two little forward rolls and managed to rise. He moved forward with a kind of majesty, as if he imagined himself a king and the crowd cheering. Down one step, down another and forward towards the altar rails. Behind him, almost unseen, came the small crouched-over and smiling figure of Father Paul.

One by one the children stepped forward. The boy was thirteenth in the line. Already some were coming back down the aisle.

Were they confirmed now? Did they look any different?

Faith full. Faith filled.

Soldiers. Soul jeers.

Stoppit. Concentrate. I believe.

I believe in … NO!

There was no way the boy could have known beforehand, no way that he could have realized earlier and saved himself and the Master the embarrassment that was soon to follow. And perhaps it was just then, while Mrs Conway played a solo on the organ, her whole upper body swaying back and forth and her glasses slipping ever closer to the end of her nose, that the boy realized he couldn’t continue. Perhaps it was only the motion of the line itself as it got smaller and smaller and he moved nearer and nearer to the bishop.

All he knew was a heat along his collar. Then a sense that his shoes were full of warm water, that he was finding it hard to take the next step. Then the heat under his collar was rising and his breath was growing shorter and the panic of his drowning was ever more real.

Then suddenly the bishop was standing directly in front of him.

He was enormous.

‘My son,’ he said, and his fried breath travelled across to the boy. He had a pink palm raised and in its creases the boy could see glistenings of sweat. The bishop’s eyes bulged. His lips he moistened with the tip of his tongue and then opened his mouth to proceed.

Know. No. I believe. St.

No.

‘No, stop,’ mumbled the boy.

The bishop ignored him.

‘Stop!’ said the boy much louder.

And then everything did. The bishop froze, his eyeballs huge, his mouth open. Above in the organ loft Mrs Conway stopped playing. There was a groan of sound out of the organ, a gasp, and then nothing. The church breathed in. Candles danced. There was a moment of absolute silence, as though a grave announcement had been made.

Through the congregation then there began the wave of response in which the Master’s and the boy’s names were whispered. From around the back of the bishop, Father Paul’s small face appeared, his smile loosening in panic.

‘I can’t,’ said the boy in a quiet voice. He said it only once, but his two words were repeated over and over as they were murmured back among parents and relatives, making a rustling like leaves in a sudden breeze.

‘He can’t.’

‘He can’t.’

‘Shsh.’

‘What?’

‘He said he can’t.’

The bishop was not about to have the Confirmation disturbed. The boy was foolish, or nervous and foolish, or stupid and nervous and foolish, and didn’t know what he was doing or saying. These little hiccups in the ceremony could be overlooked. He could just carry on, he decided, as if nothing had happened. But he needed to do so quickly, because there was whispering in his church now. The rule of his majesty was under threat. He raised the sweat-glistening palm to the boy and placed it on his shoulder. ‘Now my son,’ he said.

But the boy stepped away from him.

‘No!’ he said.

The bishop made a little grasp as if the unconfirmed child was a slippery thing about to get away, but the boy pushed off the hand. He turned to where all were watching, his face burning brightly, his eyes like coals, and he ran down the centre of the aisle and out of the church.

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