A few years ago, I started writing a novel called The Cross. I wrote six chapters of it, including a bit of Chapter Seven.
A few people have read what I'd written so far. I got some very positive feedback.
Ultimately, however, I decided not invest any more effort in the novel, and it's almost certain I'll never return to it.
Life is so short and there are only so many things one can focus on in that limited time. At the moment (at least as far as my cultural or intellectual energies are concerned), I'm concentrating on improving my knowledge and grasp of the Irish language. Indeed, that is where the very ideas and impulses dramatised in this abortive novel have led me, at this point.
I believe there are some worthwhile things in this novel, which make it worth blogging even though it breaks off at chapter seven. I hope I'm not deluded!
Chapter One
“What on earth is that?”, asked Holly,
pointing.
Dean’s eyes followed her finger.
Embarrassment struck him.
“Oh that...that’s just a piece of rubbish I
picked up…”
But already, Holly had stepped into the
garden shed and pulled out the clumsy, handmade cross. She stood it upright on
the garden path, gazing at it with complete absorption. The top of it stood a
little higher than her head.
“Where did you get it?”
“Oh….at a craft fair….”
“What did you pay for it?”
“Ten quid, I think.”
They stood there awhile in silence, staring
at the cross. It stood a little under six foot. It was made of chipboard, with
a figure of Jesus daubed in black ink upon it. His arms and legs were too long,
and the face was barely sketched in. It was not at all heavy.
“I can’t believe you’re throwing everything
else out, and keeping this.”
Dean laughed. He laughed more around Holly
than he laughed around anybody else.
“I can’t really bear to give it away. I’ve
had it six or seven years now. I thought it was the weirdest-looking thing I’d
ever seen, when I first laid eyes on it. I think I felt sorry for whoever made
it. Who else was going to buy it?”
“You’re such a softie”, said Holly, smiling
with amusement, as she swivelled it around to look at the other side.
Such a bewitching smile, he thought,
watching her. Holly was a rather short young lady, with shoulder length
dark-brown hair, and a girlish figure. She was pretty, but not exceptionally
pretty. Right now, she was wearing a pair of jeans and a grey Chicago Bulls
sweater. Nobody would give her a second look in a crowd, but Dean thought she
was the closest thing to pure goodness he’d ever met.
“I don’t see any signature”, she said, in her
musical Kerry accent.
“There isn’t any. I’ve looked for one, too. I
have no idea who made it, or where it came from. It was a charity craft fair
and all the stuff was donated.”
The sound of children playing drifted from
another garden, far away. Dean realised that he felt more contented, more
light-hearted, than he had for a long time. He’d always liked garden sheds.
There was something very simple and calming about them. He liked this time of
year, this time of day, and the sound of children playing. More than anything
else, he liked being around Holly.
The cross itself added to his good mood. The
very clumsiness of the thing had always appealed to him. In a world of mass
production, its roughness and lack of finish made it stand out.
Holly seemed to like it, too. She was running
her hands along its length, dreamily.
“Seems a shame to throw it in a garden shed”,
she said.
“You’re right. Let’s bring it inside. After
all, there’s plenty of space.”
Holly laughed again. Despite being a petite
girl, she had a hearty laugh. He liked that. “You’re right about that. I never
suspected you’d be bitten by the minimalist bug.”
“Neither did I”, said Dean, taking the cross
from her and carrying it the short distance to the back door. Holly carried a
stack of movie magazines, the only thing she’d wanted to keep from the garden
shed. They stepped into the kitchen. Dean propped the cross against the wall,
and strode mechanically to the kettle.
“Well, there’s one thing you couldn’t
get rid of”, said Holly. “How many cups of tea do you think you drink a day?”
“They used to give out tokens with packets of
tea-bags when I was a kid”, said Dean. “If you got some phenomenal amount, then
you could win a car. I think maybe that stuck in my head and I’ve been trying
to win the car ever since.”
“Even though you couldn’t drive it”.
“One thing at a time”, said Dean. “You know,
thinking of those old ads makes me melt with nostalgia.”
“Everything makes you melt with
nostalgia”, said Holly. “A twenty-five year old shouldn’t be so nostalgic. Save
that for when you’re an old man.”
Dean looked over at Holly, who was sitting by
the kitchen table, her hand still stroking the arm of the cross. Whenever he
tried to speak to her about nostalgia, about his interest in the Ireland of
previous decades, she was completely uninterested. She made fun of him, gently,
whenever he launched into a rhapsody about some old show like Hall’s
Pictorial Weekly, or about Irish street ballads.
But one of the things he loved most about her
was that she looked as though she had walked straight out of the past--
the nineteen-thirties, or the nineteen-forties. Oh, she wore fashionable
clothes, and listened to modern music that Dean couldn’t stand, and all of that
kind of thing. But she also radiated an innocence that didn’t seem to exist, in
the twenty-first century-- in women or in men. He had never heard
her say anything crude, or anything cruel.
The very expression on her face always seemed
strangely out-of-time-- the sort of expression that would be more suited to a
smoky, black and white photograph from a hundred years ago. It was too gentle
for the second decade of the twenty-first century.
“Well, I may never be an old man”, said Dean,
handing Holly her tea and pulling up a chair at the table. “I had the nightmare
again last night.”
He spoke lightly, but a look of anxiety
passed over Holly’s face. “The fellow with the gun?”, she asked.
“Yeah”. Even in the brightness of the
morning, he felt a distant echo of the dream’s terror. “And, once again, I
can’t remember who it was. Every single time I dream it, I recognise the
gunman. Or I think I recognise him. But when I wake up, it’s gone.”
Holly didn’t speak. She still looked anxious.
“Always the same thing. I’m in a living room,
a living room with a large mirror over a fireplace. There’s some kind of
chanting coming from a radio. I see the gunman shoot somebody else, right
in front of me. Then the he turns to me, raises his gun, laughs, and shoots.
And then I wake up.”
“That’s awful”, said Holly. “I think you
should speak to somebody about these nightmares.”
“You mean, a psychiatrist?”
“Well, a counsellor of some kind.”
“A counsellor? Really? I’m sure she’d tell me
that the gunman represented my inner demons, or maybe my internalized anger, or
something like that.”
“And maybe she wouldn’t”, said Holly. “A
counsellor was very helpful to you before.”
Dean said nothing, taking a long sip from his
tea instead. Holly had spoken softly, because she knew how sensitive a subject
this was. He told very few people about his teenage problems. He’d spent too
many years of his life believing he was crazy-- being told he was
crazy-- to want to dwell on them.
“Well, if I keep having them, I’ll think
about”, he said. “Hey, do you want a biscuit?”
The subject was soon changed, and in a few
minutes Holly was laughing again. When she laughed, Dean felt giddy. Did Holly
have any idea that he felt more for her than friendship? Whenever he thought
about this, he felt strangely ashamed. He was lucky to even have her as a
friend; she was too good for him, he thought. It was silly to think she might
think of him as anything more than a friend.
They finished the tea, and carried the boxes
of books, DVDs and magazines to Holly’s car. There were five boxes.
“You really want me to take all this stuff?”,
Holly asked, one hand on the cover of the boot. “Last chance now.”
“Yeah.”
“Even the comics from your childhood? I mean,
my nephew will love them, but you’ve told me so often how much they meant to
you…”
“Well, I’m not twelve years old anymore”,
said Dean. “It’s time for me to let go of all that stuff.”
Once again, there was concern in Holly’s
eyes. “What does that mean? Why is it time? What are you going to do?”
Dean smiled, hoping to reassure her. “It’s
just time. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. All I know is that I’ve felt, over
the last week or so, that I should get rid of all the stuff that’s cluttering
me up.”
“The stuff that’s cluttering you up?”, Holly
asked, looking towards the house. “You’ve left barely anything except the
kettle and that cross!”
“Bit of an exaggeration.”
“Yeah, well….I hope you’re not going into
some kind of….some kind of downward spiral. I know you’re depressed about the
contract coming to an end, but there will be other jobs. You’re a good teacher.
I have a feeling you’ll land a serious job soon.”
“I believe you”, said Dean, although he
didn’t. He grabbed the lid of the boot, and pushed it down, emphatically.
“Look, I’m not depressed. I’m not about to jump into the Liffey. That’s not my
style at all. I’m actually feeling strangely excited these days.”
“Oh yeah?”, asked Holly, a whimsical smiling
touching her lips. “You’re feeling excited?”
“Yeah”, said Dean, a little embarrassed. It
was true. He was feeling strangely excited, at the oddest moments. “So
don’t worry. Take my boyhood treasures without a qualm.”
“Alright, then”, said Holly. “I’d better fly.
I’ll talk to you soon, Buddha.”
As the car pulled away, Dean waved and
wondered why she’d called him Buddha. He was getting a little chubby, for sure.
Not fat, but definitely carrying some extra weight. Then he decided it
had probably been a reference to Zen Buddhism, a joke about his newly-found
minimalism.
He walked back to the house, drinking in the
softness of the autumn sky. Yes, this was his favourite season. Season of
mists and mellow fruitfulness. Had anyone ever written a better line of
poetry than John Keats’s evocation of autumn? Soon the fireworks would start
going off, in the long build-up to Halloween.
Back inside the house, he walked from room to
room, noting approving how his footsteps now echoed in some of them.
There was very little left. No television. No
radio. No computer. (After all, he had a smartphone if he really needed
to use the internet.) The only books were a Bible, a dictionary, and various
volumes that had been given to him as Christmas and birthday gifts by his
parents and his grandmother. He’d kept his back issues of his favourite
magazine, Erin’s Pride, and that was about it when it came to reading
material.
The only picture left hanging was one that
Holly had given him once, as a “thank you” for a favour. It was a sentimental
painting of the Virgin Mary pointing to her heart. Her heart seemed to be
floating outside the middle of her chest. It was girded by a belt of white
roses, and flames sprang from it. Behind her, the sun was setting on a silver
sea. Doubtless the painting was “kitsch”, but Dean liked it. He liked it
because Holly had given it to him, but also for its own sake.
Rather awkwardly, he crossed himself and said
the Hail Mary before it.
Dean didn’t pray very much. He was a religion
teacher, but he didn’t pray very much. He was also an English teacher. He read
all the time.. The contradiction bothered him, sometimes. An English teacher
should read. A religion teacher should pray. But a few minutes a day was the
extent of his prayer life.
What would Holly think of that, he wondered?
It had been so typical of her to buy him a holy picture as a gift. He faith was
as much a part of her as her accent, her eye colour, or the way she walked.
“I’ve been praying for you a lot”, she would say, as naturally as any other
person might say I was watching the news last night. Nobody would ever
call her a Bible-basher or a holy roller. But-- other than his own grandmother,
Fran-- Dean had never known anybody so deeply religious as Holly. It was part
of what he loved about her.
But what about his faith? He stood there,
still looking at the schmaltzy picture of the Blessed Virgin, and wondered how
much faith there really was in his heart and soul.
He went to Mass every Sunday, and every holy
day. He read religious books-- now and again. He prayed-- now and again. But
sometimes he wondered if he really believed.
When he prayed, he felt as though he was
talking to himself. When he received Communion, he told himself it was the body
and blood of Jesus Christ, but did he really believe that in his heart? He
wasn’t sure.
And yet, for all that...he knew which side he
was on. He was on the side of religion. He was against the people who attacked
religion-- the humanists, the atheists, the scoffing professors, the
smart-alecky liberals, and all the rest of them. He was on the side of Catholic
Ireland. He was on the side of his grandmother saying the rosary in her front room.
He was on the side of old men lighting candles before some kitschy shrine. He
was on the side of Christmas carols and holy wells and streets named after
saints. He was on the side of innocence, simplicity, reverence, faith.
But the question remained...did he actually believe?
Did he really believe in angels, demons, miracles, and all that? Did he believe
something actually happened when a priest said: “I absolve you of your sins”,
or “This is my body, this is my blood?”. Did he really believe that his parents
still existed, after their deaths?
If anybody asked him, he would say “yes”. But
when he asked himself...well, he couldn’t give a confident answer.
His mind turned to the questions that Holly
had been asking by the car. Why had he been seized by this sudden desire
to give all his stuff away? Why did he suddenly feel his possessions were
weighing him down? He’d been a clutterbug all his life. Why on earth would he
do a complete about-turn at the age of twenty-five?
He didn’t know. That was the honest answer.
And really, was it all that strange? He’d always been the kind of guy who went
through crazes and phases. He’d had his photography phase, his fishing phase,
his soccer phase. In his late teens he’d even had something of a Left Bank,
bohemian phase. He’d been a vegetarian for six or seven months, many years ago.
This decluttering was just another….thing. They had to be got through, that was
all.
And what about the excitement he’d told Holly
about? (He’d never say these things to anyone but Holly.) Well, that was there,
too. Even before the urge to get rid of stuff. He thought it had come to him
for the first time at Connolly train station, standing at the train platform,
waiting to say hello to a friend arriving from the country. Just looking at the
screen of arrivals and departure, at all the people coming and going, made him
feel extraordinarily excited, as though he was on the brink of some great
adventure. And this feeling had surprised him many times since then...looking
at the wind whirling autumn leaves along the street, or watching the rumble of
traffic in the morning, or seeing a pretty face in the street. He felt like
there was a wind blowing behind, about to sweep him away….
All of it nonsense. Some quirk in his body
chemistry, no doubt. As meaningless as his nightmares of a gunman. But there
was no reason he shouldn’t enjoy these fits of exhilaration, when they came.
They might even motivate him.
He walked upstairs, went into the bathroom,
turned on the taps, stepped into his bedroom, grabbed a few copies of Erin’s
Pride from his bedside, and within a few moments he was luxuriating in the
hot water, flicking through the pages of an issue from 1995.
Could anything beat reading in the bath? He
didn’t think so. The front door and the back door were locked. He was expecting
nobody, and nobody was expecting him. Nobody in the world was concerned with
him right now.. No blank gazes from indifferent teenagers, slumped over their
desks. No small talk from colleagues about traffic congestion, the news, or
anything else. Not even the mild sense of anxiety, of being open to inspection
and judgement, that he felt standing in the queue at the supermarket. He was
invisible, invulnerable, deliciously safe.
He flicked through Erin’s Pride. The magazine
had barely changed at all in a hundred years; short stories about chaste love
affairs and harmless village eccentrics, nostalgic articles about agricultural
fairs and trips to the cinema as a child, features about golden age Hollywood
movies stars...this, too, made him feel deliciously safe. He didn’t like the
Ireland of the present. He didn’t like gangland killings, foul-mouthed
comedians, constant media attacks on priests and nuns, crass entrepreneurs
treated like demi-gods…no, he didn’t like any of it….
After a few minutes, he tossed the magazine
aside, laid back in the tub, closed his eyes, and began to day-dream. Images
passed through his mind. An old grainy photograph of a fiddler in Erin’s
Pride….the thought of the locked door….the simple beauty of a garden
shed...Holly’s smile…
He had begun to doze off when he distinctly
heard these words, in a low male voice: Take up your cross.
He started up in the bath, his heart
pounding.
After a moment’s hesitation, he stood up,
grabbed a nearby towel, wrapped it around his waist, and stepped towards the
door, which was three-quarters closed. He swung it fully open, felt a wave of
adrenalin wash over him, and saw…
Nothing. There was nobody in the hall.
For a moment, he wondered if someone might be
downstairs, if someone might have broken in. But only for a moment. The voice
had been low, almost in his ear. It had either been someone standing right
beside him, or….
Or he was hearing voices. Again. Like he had
when he was a teenager.
No, he thought. It
was just my imagination. I was half-asleep. I was dreaming.
He stood there, his heartbeat slowly
returning to normal, his rational mind gradually winning over his moment of
panic. Yes, that was it. It was just a dream, the beginning of a dream. No need
for panic. Absolutely no need for panic whatsoever.
He’d just finished tying the belt on his
bath-robe when the doorbell rang.
