Aelred's Sin (26 page)

Benedict pulled Aelred off the path into the shade of the lime trees. ‘Brother, this is not a good start. In front of everyone. I wanted to say this more quietly with time, but I expect you’re right. You’d realise soon enough.’

‘Realise what?’

‘I didn’t know how to say it earlier. The reason I was late this afternoon coming down to the basement was
that I was having to move my things. Father Abbot has moved me to the senior’s dormitory, given that I’m not far off my profession. He thinks it would be better. He is concerned that our relationship is not the best preparation for my final vows. You would have realised going to my cell and finding it empty.’

Aelred stood quietly looking out into the fields. ‘You would’ve let that happen? Let me go to your cell and find it empty? I see. I see.’ He turned and began walking back down to the farm.

‘Aelred,’ Benedict called. He met up with him. ‘I was going to stay up and look out for you. I thought I would do that. I’m sorry. It’s all got too much. I will find a way to meet you. Please, please take this as a sign that we need time apart. The Abbot is our superior. We must see in this God’s will. Go and see Basil. Talk to Basil.’

‘Yes, yes.’ Aelred let his hand brush against Benedict’s. ‘Yes, I will. I must get to the barn. They’ll be wondering what’s happened.’

The rain clouds were already purple on the horizon in the late summer sunset. There was a cool breeze whipping up the valley.

The barn was still warm. Aelred and Edward worked at stacking the bales, which the conveyor had dumped in a random way. At first they did not work according to any method, but struggled on their own.

Now that they were together, Aelred could not talk. Stacking the bales took the place of talking. Aelred meditated. He noticed that Edward followed him with his eyes, hiding them when he thought he would be noticed. They worked hard till they had stacked all the bales that
were brought in that night. ‘Let’s meet tomorrow in the common room after classes. Benedict thinks we should have a talk.’

‘Yes, I’d like that.’ Edward seemed uncharacteristically shy. Then he said, ‘Everything OK? You seem miles away.’

‘I’m tired, I suppose.’

‘We must get those boots for rock climbing.’ Edward smiled, trying to lighten the mood. Aelred tried to smile. He was tired.

Afterwards, they walked separately, hooded, hands in the folds of their smocks, away from the farm. They walked in silence back to the abbey for supper. Then they went to the Abbot’s room to receive his blessing before bed.

In bed, anticipating the early call for Matins, Aelred hoped that a new day would change everything.

Aelred, the young Abbot of Rievaulx, woke earlier than the call for the vigils. He could feel the cold breath of the north in the woods about Rievaulx. The cold water of the River Rye flowed over the smooth rocks. Dark brown and green. Rust bled in the bubbling foam.

He knew that he had no choice in what he should do about the raging fire that had woken him in a dream. This was a fire within him, the embers dying in his hearth. A raging fire had filled not only his mind and the wild images that played there, not only his dreams to wake him with their terror and their seduction, but also his loins. His dreams were of Simon, the young monk, who amazed him with his tenderness and delicacy, whose beauty enraptured him and who had accepted him as a friend. Though frail, the young man was zealous for the
monastic life, in fasting, vigils and the discipline. He had heard the sound of the lashes coming from his cell. He imagined the welts on his back. He was a young man whose beauty had attracted him the first day he saw him, when he had first come to Rievaulx, requesting admittance as a novice.

Aelred battled to hold this within his ideals of chastity, but the night woke him with the most sensual phantoms of this dear youth. They were phantoms he could not rid his mind of without the most extreme measures.

He saw the writing on his back, the welts, the blue veins.

He whipped himself. His monks heard and took example.

In the midst of his flagellation the images appeared.

The power of this seduction, the most beguiling of images, was Simon as the young boy Jesus at twelve when he was lost from his parents and found in the temple in Jerusalem. The boy was lost in the city. He ached with wanting to feed him fresh bread dipped in olive oil, to quench his thirst with red wine. He pined to prepare his bed with clean linens. He longed to take off his shoes, to wash and kiss his feet, to anoint them with fragrant perfumes. His longing held the boy Jesus, turning into Simon, naked in his warm bath scented with balsam. He wept with finding his lost one in the city. He hung upon his neck kisses, a necklace of red roses. He drank the blood-red wine that flowed from the roses on his ivory neck.

His dream was all feeling, a feeling to save the young Jesus from his lostness. When he held the boy in his arms, he turned into the delicate Simon whose mouth was as
sweet as all the kisses in the
Song
of
Songs,
which tasted of pomegranates. His cheeks were dusty like plums. His breasts, where he put his hand under the coarse wool of his habit, soft, the nipples growing hard as nuts in his fingers. He heard the words of the
Song
of
Solomon
: ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.’ In his dream, he kissed Simon’s lips with his full mouth and the kisses of the youth were from lips of scarlet, purple as the grapes from the vineyards on the hillsides of hot countries. He smelt of the fragrance and perfume of incense, a field of lilies, an acolyte of the choir, a server at the altar. His woollen habit flowed like a flock of sheep over a green hillside, the lace of his surplice frothing like the gush of water over the rocks of the River Rye.

He was a shepherd’s boy, a shepherd himself; the boy Jesus, the carpenter’s son from Nazareth with a cross as his staff.

He felt under the wool for his belly, a sheath in a heap of wheat.

He was one whose skin was as smooth as skin which is oiled to prevent it from the cracks of the heat. He took his hand to run into those hillsides growing crimson with the vines where the grapes are poured out. They ran where the henna flowers grew among the vines of Engedi. He pursued him with a passion as nervous as a young deer, with the agility of a gazelle. He ravished him on a bank of lilies by the pool of Heshbon, by a pool of milk. They lost themselves on the hillside where the shepherds’ flocks leave their tracks for the summit of Amana, the crests of Senir and Hermon, dangerous with lions and leopards. He hears his voice asking, ‘Tell me then, you whom my heart loves: where will you lead your flock to
graze, where will you rest it at noon?’ In the wild, like vagabonds, they wandered. In the dream, they tumbled and coupled like young chestnut horses whose cheeks were as smooth as the cheeks of the horses that drew the Pharaoh’s chariot.

Then they were young men together again, best friends, with a love for each other, as Jonathan had for David.

The dangerous text which the Abbot had banned from the novitiate to protect his young monks had already possessed the deepest layers of their being. ‘Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that is uttered from the mouth of God.’

The Lodge:
5 November 1984

There is a strange synchronicity in all this, a macabre pattern, a common impulse: denial, punishment, death. The pattern becomes compelling.

Something else was afoot. I heard them planning. The sense of threat was tangible. I said nothing. I could’ve gone and reported something. What would I report? How would I talk about it? I was expecting it to be at night. But it was in the middle of the afternoon, hot, blinding light. The seniors didn’t have games that Saturday. I remember it so vividly now, the noise, running feet on the bottom corridors. A roar of boys! I had detention in the study hall. The prefect in charge left to go and see what was happening. We were all out on the corridor hanging over the parapets, looking down into the playground. A ringside view. Ted and J. M. were being pursued by what seemed like twenty seniors. It was wild. They had taken off from the playground and had disappeared down the path which led to the bush, past the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes, and which eventually led into the hills behind the college. We could not see anything. It became very silent. The prefect returned and the detention continued. I kept my head down. I could not imagine what was going on.

‘Ave,
ave,
ave
Maria
…’ Even now, our hymns plait themselves in incongruously.

There was a high wind, which howled and rattled the windows. Parrots screamed. Then the silence and the scratch of pens on paper continued. Lines: I must not talk in chapel, five hundred times.

Once when I looked up, the boy in front of me turned around and signalled with his hand and fingers, flicking them so they made a clicking noise, indicating that Ted and J. M. were getting what was coming to them, what they deserved.

Licks, he said, clicking fingers like whips.

I put my head down and wrote. I must not talk in chapel. Blue Quink ink on white paper with pale blue lines, words in blood: now his poetry is mine.

When we came out of detention I saw the seniors, one or two at a time, come straggling back into the playground.

J. M. called it ‘The Raid’. He had a way with titles. Like ‘The Night of the Rain.’

There is an account in the journal. Aelred going over the ground three years later?

But I heard the seniors talking. One or two were real braggers. So bragging that it was some time before they noticed me.

The brother, they pointed.

They had it coming to them. If that’s what they want. If that’s what they like, the bullers. If that’s where they want to take it. Let them.

Did you hear them? Like they were asking for it.

PLEASE was louder than STOP. Did you hear them?

The bragger was going over the top. I saw others slink away - already ashamed now that they were back in the playground. I saw some others not even join the gang
with the bragger, who were congregating into the lavatories to smoke. I slipped into a cubicle.

I heard some say, Shut up, leave it.

A fight nearly broke out. But then a core of braggers egged each other on with description. I sat in the cubicle and listened. I dared not breathe. I hardly read what was on the walls: ‘K.O. SUCKS S.T. WHO WANTS A PRICK AS BIG AS A DONKEY?’ Someone had written under it, ‘YOU DO. FOCK YOURSELF.’ An O for U. The cleaners hadn’t got here with their brushes as yet.

The bragger coughed, and the smell of smoke mixed with the smell of urinals.

Did you have them both?

One and then the other.

I saw O’Connor come out and there was blood all over his prick.

Do you know what he did? He went round. And when Macdougall went in, he shoved it down one of their mouths.

I heard him say, Suck it clean, you cunt.

They all laughed. I retched. I could not help it. I started being sick.

Who’s in there? They were kicking the door.

I sat bent over. They clambered up and looked over. When I looked up, four faces.

All said, It’s the brother.

One jumped over and opened up the door. They dragged me out. One was about to put my head in the urinals, when another boy walked in.

Leave him alone, he’s not a buller, just because he’s his brother.

It was him who shouted buller. I saw him in the
refectory. You know your brother is a buller, don’t you?

Maybe his brother has bulled him, another laughed and sneered.

Get out.

They all kicked me as I passed out of the door.

Get out or we’ll all bull your fucking arsehole. Then they laughed again. Yes, come take this. One held his cock bunched in his pants and shoved it out at me. I was passed along the line, blows to the head.

Yes, your arse must be sore. They kicked me again.

I did not see J. M. or Ted. The headmaster called me into his office that evening and said that my brother had been taken home and would not be coming back until the new term. There were still two weeks to go before the holidays. I could not imagine how they could come back. It was kept from me, kept between my parents and J. M.

During the next holidays I remember he did not play, as he used to, with me, even though I was younger. He wouldn’t come down to the savannah to play cricket. He stayed a lot in his room, reading. Was that when he went religious? I remember he used to get up early early in the morning to go to Mass in San Andres. He would take the five o’clock bus. He had a whole set of prayer books. I remember Mum saying things like: Toinette take Master J. M. lunch in his room today.

This was when I learnt to creep around him quietly. It was like I knew what had happened and knew what it was
but didn’t fully bring it into my mind to see it for what it really was and cope with it. I never wanted to admit any of the things I had done and said. I suppose it was the time we were living in. Now I might’ve had a counsellor. J. M. would’ve had therapy. All that was on offer was Father Gerard’s spiritual direction and confession. Inside his heart there must’ve have been so much shame, so much guilt. And then what happened to Ted! No wonder he left and went away. And it was hardest when they had to go back into the new term to prepare for their exams.

But before the holiday, a special assembly was called on the last evening. Two boys were expelled as ringleaders, another two suspended. They let the others stay. There was a long queue outside the dean’s office late that night.

Some were strapped, some caned. All in pyjamas, dropped, naked bottoms. Ironic.

There was a new head boy. The following week there were new captains for the teams. Ted was dropped, J. M. forgotten. Forgotten?

I overheard the gym master one afternoon speaking to one of those I noticed in the lavatory, who had not been suspended at the beginning of the new term:

They had it coming to them - fairies, he said.

Now I think of angels. Wings. A fancy.

What is it Joe said that really struck me?

It’s like the church has taken possession of the body. It’s like a demolition site.

Then he asked: Why does spirituality have to entail the subjugation of sexual passion?

There’s another thesis he developed, which I find startling. It was on one of those nights when he and
Miriam stayed up really late finishing the rum and getting me to play the cuatro. They want to come to Les Deux Isles. They took me down to a West Indian restaurant before for some good food. It was Jamaican.

Joe is so animated. The state wants to control the body, wants to say what you can and can’t do with your body. Then, ironically, it now says that we can kiss and touch. Well, it’s not explicit, exactly what it is we can do with our own consent, provided we are twenty-one. That has to change. We have to have the same rights for gay people as we do for heterosexuals. It will come. Sixteen! he says. Look at your story, the story of your brother and Ted. It will come because it’s enlightened and just. He talks of the Stonewall riots.

I try to imagine myself having this discussion in Les Deux Isles with the family, or just with so many friends. Of course back home there’s no protection under the law, no rights whatsoever.

Religion run amock, Joe says.

I agree, actually. Though Joe says that many countries give lip service to some UN charter. I didn’t know that.

He says, It’s barbaric. There are things afoot in this country, even now.

Miriam says, In some countries, particularly with fundamentalist regimes, it’s like concentration camps all over again, and so often in the name of God. All this done in the name of God.

Maybe J. M. died for something in the end. To make his brother think straight. Straight? Words take on a new meaning. And I always have
his
words, grist for my mill. I see the forming of his complex desires and where they got hidden.