Be Near Me (12 page)

'We're bored,' said Lisa. I could hear the smack of chewing gum and smell something like hairspray.

'I've got house visits,' I said.

'Bite it,' said Mark.

'Aye,' said Lisa. 'Can we no' go on a wee drive up to Glasgow? Come on, let's go up to Princes Square. Totally awesome. Mark's fed up. He had a fight with Chubb last night.'

'A fight?' I said. 'What about?'

'Just stuff,' said Mark. 'I got burned. He's a thievin' bastard.'

'Aye,' said Lisa. 'He is so.'

They could talk. Later that day I saw Lisa stealing soap from a cosmetics shop on Buchanan Street and Mark had watches in his pockets. 'Don't steal when you're with me, Mark,' I said. 'If I see you stealing, then I'm leaving you here and that's the end of it.'

'That's hardcore,' he said.

'I mean it.'

'You won't leave,' he said, casually.

'What makes you so sure?'

'You're not the leaving type,' he said, leaning into my arm and putting his hand on the small of my back.

There were protesters wearing gas masks in George Square. I sat on one of the benches to watch them for a while. They stood under a statue of Robert Peel, and my eyes got lost in the style of them and the chants they were making.

'What you staring at?' said Lisa.

'Shut it, bitch,' said Mark.

'Fuck you, nigger,' she said.

'He's just watching all the mad hippies and their daft protest. Those people just want Saddam Hussein to run the world.'

One of the banners said: 'Say No To Religious War.'

'Don't be stupid,' I said to Mark. 'They have every right to protest if they don't agree with what's going on.'

'What do you care?' he said. 'You hate Arabs just as much as me.' As he spoke, he was lighting matches from a box and flicking them over the back of the bench.

'I don't hate anybody, Mark. And let me tell you something: you don't know the first thing about me.'

'Awright,' he said. 'Keep your wig on.'

'You don't know me. Why would you say I hate Arabs?'

'Because you let us talk nasty about them.'

'That's got nothing to do with me.'

'Right,' he said. 'Just fuck off then. I'm starvin'.'

He put a lighted match inside the box and the box flared up before he closed it. After a second, he opened the end of the box again and sucked out the smoke, inhaled, then blew it out of his mouth before chucking the spent box into a puddle. He walked off.

'He's angry,' I said.

'Naw,' said Lisa. 'Don't worry about him. He flies off the handle all the time. Let's go to Burger King.'

I looked for a second or two at the people in the masks and their colleagues giving out leaflets by the stone lions.

'It's a bit pathetic, isn't it?' said Lisa. 'For a protest.' I said nothing and stood up to go off and find Mark.

'Let's go back to Fraser's after this,' said Lisa, spinning a line of chewing gum around a purple fingernail. 'My mother works in there on Saturdays and I love stealing from the places she works.'

I handed her a five-pound note. 'Here,' I said. 'The two of you can go back to Dalgarnock on the train. This is not what I had in mind for a day out. You're going to have me strung up.'

'Don't get eggy,' she said. 'We're just havin' a buzz.'

I felt vaguely humiliated and unstable as I walked to the car park, and I stood for a while in the concrete stairwell, urging myself to be brave and leave them behind. Then eventually I walked back to the burger place where they sat at a table sucking on straws.

'Hiya,' said Mark.

My mother's life became solitary after my father died, and the solitude was productive. She said she didn't have the gift to make other people's lives orderly, and I think I understood that, keen in my own way to emerge from my father's death as a changed person. She began to write her best books. At first, she rented a farmhouse on the outskirts of the village, turning it slowly into the kind of place that better suited her own talents. The other house had really been all about my father, everybody happy to live by his clock and be instructed by his taste, yet my mother had always possessed her own more colourful vision of how to furnish and decorate her life, everything in time growing exuberant, her books no less than other things. As for me, I was always a secondary husband, a little adult, and after his death she took my complications for granted, allowing me to go in whatever direction I chose so long as it didn't put a drag on her own dear plans for survival. I hope I don't sound bitter. We each had a right to our share of bitterness, but we didn't go along with much of that, simply ordaining one another with the freedom thereafter to live whatever lives we were capable of imagining.

I asked to go away to school. It was my decision, and I think it saved our friendship. My father's higher selfishness had put a check on my mother's more local kind, and I don't think we could have been happy playing house together. The way we managed things, her eccentricity grew in step with mine, and we came quite to admire one another's jokes and to save parts of ourselves up for one another in a way that has never changed. There was never any of that weeping at the end of the holidays. She didn't go in for those displays of devoted motherhood or the guilty bursts of attentiveness that so characterised the holiday antics of my school chums' mothers. We would each have been instantly embarrassed by anything of that sort. 'Darling,' she said, 'you've been very entertaining. You've got your bags packed. Off you go to Yorkshire now.'

'Goodbye, Mrs,' I'd say.

'Okay, then. Off you go,' she'd say. 'And don't make me use up any clichés. I need them all for my books.'

We'd laugh. And that was that.

My childhood gave me a strong sense of unreality, of stories and myths being better than facts. I suppose this made me a natural Catholic but a less than natural person. Anyhow, I admired the miracles and rituals, the business of the Assumption. It all seemed to give texture to life and to the hunt for goodness, and I loved the stories and thought they were beautiful—the Last Supper and the pieces of silver, the raising of the dead, the loaves and the fishes and the water into wine. I liked the Galilean weather and I liked the feel of old England too, the England of martyrs and illuminated manuscripts. The lives of the saints were my myths of adventure and transformation, my Hercules and Achilles, my Apollo, my Minerva, not stories so much as ethical testaments, consummate portraits of suffering, death and redemption, to enlarge the soul and brighten my daily efforts.

I stood at the library window and could hear the sound of plainsong traversing the halls and spreading out there in the fields. The school to me was a community not so much of excellence as of total sufficiency. But most of all it is the tone of the monks that remains, for me, an idea of exactitude and sportsmanship and continuity with the medieval world that seeped by hours and by years through the older buildings to change the character of the boys. We are supposed to have had it tough. But I don't think so. It was the world outside that seemed tough to us.

There is said to have been abuse at Ampleforth, and the newspapers can now produce individuals who recognise the gleam of lust on every friendly face from the past. I'm sure the individuals are right: there was evidence that some of the monks were troubled and troubling in that particular way, and early Masses in the crypt may have been difficult for some of the boys. But I cannot give in to the notion that the school was a hotbed of abuse, partly because 'abuse' did not have the currency in our minds—perhaps in anybody's mind—that it now enjoys on a worldwide scale. I would never seek to excuse the hurts that lonely men are known sometimes to enact upon their juniors. Yet the school was paradise to me, a heaven spotted with frailty. I can't bear witness to the horror stories because, to me—perhaps another of my blindnesses—Ampleforth was a merciful place and a truthful one. It gave me the means of forgiving others before I sought to be forgiven myself.

I was in St Thomas's House, and if you were brisk enough to ask the housemaster, Father Victor, what one was expected to learn at Ampleforth, he would go quiet, gently refuting suggestions about maths or Latin, concealing his hands in the sleeves of his black habit—we called the monks 'crows'—and smiling at the suggestion that it was our purpose there to learn to love and serve God. The crows were always rather sedate. 'You are here to learn to behave beautifully,' Father Victor would say. The library was my lair of choice: I liked the books, certainly, in which the elements of life coalesced with the beauty of language, but I also liked the desks and the chairs, the great, wooden solidity of the school furniture, each item carved by a venerable carpenter called Thompson, whose signature, discernible everywhere, came in the form of a small oak mouse.

I felt very temporary as a child. I may always have felt that way, but Ampleforth had a way of making one feel more fixed in the world, more indelible overall. Part of that feeling must have been Yorkshire—one never forgot that the school lay in a valley bordered by moorland and drystone dykes, and, further afield, mining pits and lime kilns—but it must also have been the soft hum of reliability that came at all times from the Benedictines, who seemed to know the world, and not only this world. Every boy at the school, whatever his attainments, whatever his plans and whoever his parents, came to be marked by a certain unobtrusive quality. A good joke was more impressive than a powerful idea. The plains of indecision were more attractive than the wilds of passion. Ampleforth wasn't like other English public schools: we hated ruthlessness, we liked ease, and we followed the monks in feeling that being a little absent was infinitely better than being too present.

I wrote only once from school for money. I was preparing for Gormire Day, 5 June, the day when everyone in the school went up to the Gormire Lake for picnics and games. It was traditional to make your way by whatever conveyance you could manage: a great many went by bike or by bus; Fletcher and Leishman, my best friends at Ampleforth, once went by milk float; legend said that a group of Durham boys had once gone by pony-and-trap. It was the greatest single event of my schooldays, Gormire Day 1959. I imagined I was carving a perfect day out of marble. I begged my mother for money, and she was good enough to consider it an excellent investment. Billy Smart's circus was in York, with its herd of fifteen elephants. The beast I chose was an old, tolerant-eyed animal named Birma. I wrote letters and my mother wrote letters; it came to seem to me a production out of Genesis, and a truck was hired, special feed was arranged, permissions were sought and hastily denied and then warily granted.

'How clever of you to think of it,' my mother said. It must have cost a fortune, yet it was the sort of expense my mother could approve of. Her gift has always been to avoid the conventional view, especially when it stands in the way of the grand or ridiculous act. My mother wanted to repay me for the originality of my impulse, and we spoke the same language. I think she enjoyed knowing my father would have called it outrageous, and, on the appointed Friday, she came to York so that we could go and see the man about the elephants, which were marched that day from York station to the field where the circus took place. I remember the handler asking my mother if Birma was to be hired for educational purposes. 'In a way,' she said, 'that is very much the case. But also for romantic purposes.'

'Is it a wedding?' he said.

'Again, in a way,' she said. 'Not a wedding, but certainly a marriage. My son is being married to the joys of the modern imagination.'

'Right you are,' said the man, though he must have thought we were lunatics. 'I'll be there to lead him off and look after his feed.'

'Thank you,' she said. 'There's a bonus for good cheer.'

'Right you are.'

He told us Birma was the star of the fleet. We watched him at the railway station, his giant feet on the road, people gazing up and jostling one another for a better view. I liked his eyes. I liked his silence. The handler spoke of the animal as if it were a friend that nobody understood. 'When the guvnor brought him over,' he said, 'he had to spend a year in quarantine in Edinburgh Zoo.'

'In Edinburgh?' my mother said. 'What a nice thought. That must have cheered up his chops somewhat.' She laughed towards me. 'You're practically cousins, you and Birma,' she said.

'Thank you for this, Mother. You are a sport.'

'Any time,' she said. 'Any time, for the collective beasts of Edinburgh. You know how patriotic I am.'

All in all, our researches proved equal to the exquisite thrill on Gormire Day, the wonder of Birma waiting at the top of the hill festooned in feathers and satin armour. It seemed so right to mount an elephant and rise in my white shirt above the dry Yorkshire road, my long-lashed vehicle all tassels and bells in a glorious rapture of unacceptable pomp, the gypsy smoking his cigarette and leading us all the way to the Gormire Bank. People left their bicycles by the roadside and cheered. The sun cracked through the trees in flashes and points of light. Birma the elephant raised her trunk and hooted into the Hambleton Hills and the monks surrendered their vote at last to the sheer madness of it all.

'I m-must say,' said Brother Joseph, 'm-m-most singular.'

Brother Joseph was master of the day. He'd known of my plans and said it was probably the greatest wheeze since 1857, when Thomas Hodgson, the schoolmaster at Kilburn, got his boys to cut out a giant horse on the side of a hill and paint the ground white: the White Horse of Kilburn. During those five slow miles on the back of Birma, I saw the locals' faces looking up and shining with delight. The working class was another thing back then. They had a culture. They didn't have their gold chains or their cable television; they had their work, their interests, their families and no very obvious sense of spite or entitlement. The monks had a long history of going into those villages with pastoral zeal, and the people admired the Benedictine style of balance—order, prayer, discipline, self-denial, or self-indulgence as it's sometimes known—but here was a new style of balance altogether, David Anderton as imperial traveller, passing the good people of North Yorkshire on the back of an elephant, mill workers and bottle-factory operatives stopping to wave from the roadsides of Oswaldkirk and Oldstead, sending me off in a rain of makeshift confetti on the road to the Gormire Bank.