Be Near Me (29 page)

'Now, confine your remarks to what might be said in response to the questions put to you by this learned gentleman.'

'We hear you now speak in broad defence of your former employer, Mrs Poole,' said the Fiscal. 'But let us leap back. In a statement you gave to the police on the fifth of August this year you said, and I quote: "I don't think he took his vocation very seriously. I think it's all sentiment with Father David. He lives in the past or some other place. He was stupid to take up with those menaces and I told him as much." Are these your words, Mrs Poole?'

'I was upset at the time,' said Mrs Poole.

'Are these your words? Or are you now withdrawing these statements you made to the police?'

'I am not withdrawing anything,' she said. 'I was upset when I made these remarks. I have not been well.'

'So they reflect your views at the time?'

'Things are complicated sometimes,' she said.

'Complicated you say, Mrs Poole,' he said. 'And was there anything complicated about what you saw when you came to start work early on the morning of the eleventh of July?'

'I don't understand the question.'

'Let me refresh your memory. In your statement you said that David Anderton was "sitting in the living room surrounded by bottles of spirits and wine". You said he was
holding Mark McNulty's hand when you entered. You said there was loud music playing and the young man looked inebriated. You said there was the smell of hashish or "something of that kind". You added: "Father David was stupid. He was hanging over that boy McNulty like a cheap suit." Did you say these things, Mrs Poole?'

'Yes,' she said.

'And did the young man look comfortable?' he said.

'That young man always looks comfortable,' she said. 'It isn't in his nature not to be comfortable. He does what he pleases.'

'I put it to you, Mrs Poole, that you are in no position to judge that. Mark McNulty was fifteen years old at the time of the incident. You are in no position to judge what trauma he might have suffered at the hands of David Anderton. Or what situation of trust may have been exploited.'

'No,' she said. 'I suppose I'm not.'

He went around these topics for some time, and the fire slowly went out in Mrs Poole's eyes. She looked weary again, as if she had spent everything she had on that first outburst. Eventually the glare of the court lights made her seem very small and white. 'One last question,' said the Fiscal with a sweep of his gown. 'His Lordship referred at the beginning to your recent illness. We are very sorry to hear of it.'

She nodded into the middle distance.

'You recently underwent a series of operations at Crosshouse Hospital. Is that right?'

'Yes,' she said.

'And you were under the care of the private medical wing of that hospital, is that right?' She looked past him towards
me and said nothing. 'It would appear to be the case,' continued the Fiscal. 'And may I ask you to tell the court who paid for that private treatment, Mrs Poole?'

'Objection!' said Hamilton. But Mrs Poole said nothing while the lawyers argued and the Sheriff took out his handkerchief and issued his views on the proprieties. She simply stared over the courtroom and held my eye very firmly, a long, farseeing look which had about it nothing regretful and nothing beseeching, as if she were looking down the length of our former garden to see the sundial and the roses.

'That'll do for now,' said the Fiscal.

'It's okay,' I said to Mrs Poole's glittering eyes.

When they brought me from the cells the police had cuffed me in front so that I appeared to have praying hands. Before coming up, I had washed them in the metal basin by the bed, and I stopped there to read again the graffiti scratched into the walls. 'Young Tiny Cumbie,' said one. 'The Apache Rules the Nation,' said another. 'Big Shout Out to Sharon and Wee Santa from the Big Jello.'

Sitting on the bed, I remember wondering what the Bombastics would have said of all this: the building scored with the people's desires, the amount of personal history lodged in the names of gangs and girlfriends and babies evoked in solitude. When I came up the steps into the courtroom and heard the hissing, I felt my great appointment with the people's hatred had arrived. I looked up at the jury of men and women with their civic mouths and clean shirts and blouses. 'I have come some distance. Everything is personal. What I have done and what I have failed to do. What you will
think and what you will fail to think. It is all personal. My journey towards you started a long time ago, and so did yours to me—a long time ago—and we must simply play our parts and move on.'

I would have said this, given half the chance. But I said nothing. I turned my head and saw my mother in the public gallery. There was no one from the Church and no one from England. The people of Dalgarnock were the world to me now, and they sat in rows in their puffy jackets, checking the style and the workings of each other's phones. Afternoons in court are like afternoons nowhere else: time and progress come to a stop, daylight falling from the glass panels like manna from a careless world.

Bishop Gerard had spoken about me in one of the papers. 'I knew him as a young man,' he said. 'In those days he was a person of very singular devotion. Father Anderton came from a good family. Before he arrived in our diocese, he spent many quiet years as a parish priest in Blackpool. We have looked into this time and found nothing untoward. I appointed him in the hope that he would bring a new vitality to our pastoral care. He is now on a different journey and we pray for him. The Dalgarnock parish is undergoing a period of healing and we must put the past behind us.' One of the policemen showed me the
Evening Times
as we left the court after the first day. There was a huddle round the car. It's hard to tell the difference between press people and ordinary people: they have a similar avarice for the drama of wasted lives, and as the car pulled out I could see them pressing forward with the same sort of pleasure.

The next morning, we heard evidence from the young
people via a live television link, and, in this way, the Procurator Fiscal extracted their version of the damage done to them and the liberties taken. Lisa exhibited all the fear and excitement one might have expected: she seemed very pleased to be on television at last, and she told lies, though none that mattered a great deal by that stage. My advocate stood up to speak and my heart lurched, something in his method making him more objectionable than anyone.

'In the year prior to meeting Father David, would you say you were a good pupil, Miss Nolan?'

'No' bad.'

'Not bad,' he said. 'Yet not very good, either. It appears you had a truancy problem. It also appears you had been excluded from St Andrew's on two separate occasions for unacceptable behaviour. I put it to you, Miss Nolan, that you were in fact the very opposite of a good pupil, and that, far from Father David exploiting you and your friend, Father David was in fact very kind to you both. He took trouble with you that few other individuals would have taken, and you rewarded him by drawing him into circumstances you knew would be difficult for him. Is that not right?'

'Naw,' she said. 'It was him that wanted to go to places. It was him that rang us or texted us and wanted to go out. He never even acted like a priest. He acted like he wanted to be our pal or something.'

'You may say that, Miss Nolan, but the evidence suggests that you in fact turned up several times at the chapel-house uninvited. You pursued Father David at his place of work many times, did you not?'

'You're twisting everything.'

'On the contrary, Miss Nolan. I believe I am stating the facts as they occurred over the course of the spring and early summer of this year. Mark McNulty was your boyfriend, was he not? And you were having some difficulty with one another, were you not? And you in fact became jealous of the help that Father David was giving Mark and of the innocent friendship that had grown between them. Is that not right, Miss Nolan?'

'That's rubbish,' she said. 'He fancied Mark. Everybody knew that.'

'Did they, Miss Nolan? The record suggests that you could not maintain a relationship with any of your teachers. Your father was often unhappy with you. There is a suggestion here that you have been involved in several bouts of under-age drinking. But now, Miss Nolan, we are to accept you as an excellent judge of character?'

'You don't know him,' she said.

'Oh, but you do, Miss Nolan. You know him very well. This man who has been a devoted parish priest for nearly thirty years. This man who played a part in people's lives long before you were born. This civilised man whose reputation you now play with—you know him, do you?'

'I know he was wrong,' she said. 'He didnae behave right.'

'Thank you for your lessons in good behaviour, Miss Nolan. We shall be sure to bear them in mind. No more questions.'

I had asked Hamilton not to berate the witnesses. I wanted the evidence to say what it said and then for him to
let me take the stand. He ignored these hopes, thinking me crazy and out of touch with the modes of legal reality, and the trial became a scrap between my world and theirs. I only wanted to answer for my sins, for the exhaustion of my wisdom, to say something true and then go. 'You'll lose if you go on like that,' Hamilton said. 'Think of your mother.'

'We have lost so much,' I said.

Mark appeared on the screen looking older. He was wearing a jacket and tie and his hair was combed with a side parting. I saw he had changed in small ways over the summer: he looked that day like a young man about to take on the world, using his hands to articulate the steps of his molestation as if explaining the rules of modern economics. Measures of pride and reason had embedded themselves in Mark's speech; he knew who he wanted to be and his charisma had quietened into a display of refreshing plausibility. In some rather even way, I was proud of him. That was my feeling. He didn't hate anybody and his evidence, if anything, was a show of love, a good and timely gift of loyalty to his broken father. I watched the screen without hearing many of his actual words: it was just his face, the face of the boy with brown eyes who shouted at passing trains. With every little thing he said I knew that my case was done for.

'Would you say you led this gentleman on?' said Hamilton.

'I wasn't in the best nick at the time,' said Mark.

'You
what?
' said the Sheriff.

'I'm sorry. I wasn't in the best of health at that time,' said Mark. 'I was drinking and ... it was drugs. He took them with me.'

'Right,' said Hamilton. 'But, in your mind, there is no sense in which you took advantage of his generosity? You didn't abuse his weakness? It didn't occur to you that the accused might be lonely?'

'Aye,' said Mark. 'I felt sorry for him.'

'And you took him to one of your drinking dens, did you, because you felt sorry for him? You brought drugs into his house because you felt sorry for him? You danced in his sitting room for the same reason? And you lay down on the sofa with him that night because you felt sorry for him? Is that what you would like the court to believe, Mr McNulty?'

'He was my friend,' said Mark.

'And you were excited to have a friend like that, were you not? A priest with a powerful position in the parish?'

'It was just somewhere to go,' said Mark.

'And after your work at the service station, you thought it wise to go looking for your friend, to wake him up, and it never occurred to you that this would present a difficulty for my client?'

'He could have said no. He could have told me to go away. He was supposed to be the adult, wasn't he?'

There was a mumble from the gallery. Somebody raised their voice. 'Ya dirty English bastard!' it said. 'Paedophile!'

Sheriff Wilson spoke loudly into the microphone and waved his hand at the court officers. 'Remove that man,' he said. 'I demand order in this court. Order!'

One could hear the shouts fade to nothing in the hall outside the courtroom. Mark was looking from right to left on the TV monitor. It must have been confusing not to know what was happening. At that point, with Hamilton walking
forward with a flash of steel in his eyes, I decided the business had to end. The knot was so carefully folded in Mark's tie and his lips were red and his eyes open to the future as if the world of possibility was bright and new every day. His face was young and he could not see me as I got to my feet.

'Please stop,' I said, and Hamilton turned.

'What is it now?' said the Sheriff. 'This is your defence counsel, Mr Anderton. Do you wish to speak with him in private?'

'Will you just stop?' I said. 'It was my fault.'

'Please sit down,' said the Sheriff.

'It was my fault,' I said. 'Never mind about the words.'

'Silence! Would you please both approach the bench.'

Shaking his head, Hamilton joined the Fiscal and the Sheriff leaned down to speak with both of them. The Sheriff then said there would be an adjournment of fifteen minutes.

I waited downstairs with my eyes fixed on the concrete floor while Hamilton told me I was ruining my chances of acquittal. 'You mustn't lose your footing,' he said. 'We are in a stronger position than you think.'

'You might be,' I said. 'But I am not.'

'They will ask you to take the stand.'

'I'm ready for that,' I said. 'It is all I wanted.'

On the stand, I wasn't really listening to Hamilton's questions. I fear he didn't understand my position and was trying to wiggle me into blaming everybody other than myself. 'Father David,' he said, 'could this situation with the young people in Dalgarnock be described as having been a sort of culture clash?'

'Not really,' I said. 'Not in the terms you mean. When it comes down to it, I am more childish than they are. And, in relation to the things that matter to them, the young people were more pious than me.'

I see.

Hamilton hesitated, then he blushed, and he looked through me as if trying to find one final way of turning the proceedings to my advantage. He stroked his silk tie and waited for another moment, then he gathered up his gown and sat back at the table. 'No more questions.'