2001 - Father Frank (7 page)

Sighing with relief, Frank whispered back, “Wasn’t that what I told you to do with that blonde girl from Somerville?”

And so began a tacit, reciprocal arrangement between them. Tips on matters social were exchanged for tips on matters sexual.

Academically, Frank coped reasonably well, tugged gently along by the patience and perspicacity of his tutor, Dr Mike Grady. He had seen Frank’s type before, and very gradually—gram by gram—increased the weight of his workload. Frank still did the bare minimum but even this was considerably more than he’d ever done before.

Like all students, Frank would tell you that he spent his entire time at college getting pissed and having sex, but that wasn’t strictly true. He might have had more sex than most of his Christ Church contemporaries and certainly more than if he had remained at home in a strict Catholic household, but he still did a fair amount of work. All students do. No one has ever acquired the suffix ‘BA’ or ‘BSC’ without working reasonably hard, even if all that effort and application tend to become lost in a mist of rose-tinted hindsight.

Learning ancient Greek had been a bit of a grind but Frank completed the journey from alpha to omega by telling himself that this was a small price to pay for the fun he was having. Now that he could read and understand the New Testament in its original form, without having to rely on the linguistic whims of generations of translators, he could see at first hand what a load of far-fetched old nonsense it almost certainly was.

Still, all these millions of Christians surely couldn’t be wrong so it was now that Frank started trying to find God. Not in a floaty, ethereal, religious sort of way. No, he expected something a little more concrete. He wasn’t expecting His Elusive Omnipotence to appear like Our Lady at Fatima but perhaps just to give a little clue to His existence, just peep over the parapet in a way that only a serious student of theology would see and understand.

But, no. As all Catholics were told, if God were just to turn up every now and again, that would be proof rather than faith. It would be too easy, everyone would know. There would be no conflicting religions, no conflicting theories to study and appraise, no theology course at Oxford through which Frank Dempsey could have the time of his life at the taxpayers’ expense.

It was this fundamental flippancy that kept him afloat. Oxford was the most fun he’d ever had but it hadn’t changed him a bit. When he looked in the mirror, he saw the same person grinning back at him. The mirror, of course, was a liar. Of course, he’d changed. The yellow van, for instance. He’d bought it originally so that he could escape back to London and join the lads on a Friday night for a pub crawl along Kilburn High Road, and for the first couple of months, that was what he did. After a while, though, he used it to escape back to Oxford. Each trip home was a little more uncomfortable. He loved his family and friends and was always delighted to see them, but once the brief euphoria of salutation had worn off, he watched the once vast tracts of common ground between them disappearing like the Amazonian rainforests.

Now he did the old pub crawl along Kilburn High Road more as tourist than native. Standing at the bar, pint in hand at Biddy Mulligan’s, ostensibly having the crack with the lads before all piling down to the Kilburn Tandoori, or Tony’s Steak House—‘
Tony’s Steaks Are The Best Value In Town
’—his mind would wander westwards and he’d find himself dreaming of spire and quad, cursing the surfeit of Guinness in his bloodstream that prevented him jumping into the van and heading straight back.

On his next trip down, Frank went teetotal. Told the lads he’d caught a dose and was on antibiotics till it cleared up.

“Thought you had a regular bird up there,” said Frostie.

“I have,” said Frank, pulling a guilty face, “and I’m having to avoid her. Why do you think I’m here?”

They all laughed uproariously and Frostie got the beers in.

Phew, thought Frank. Got away with it. Drinking lemonade might have lost him a serious quantity of face but luckily the mendacious story about having the clap had sent his stock soaring.

Frank’s college friends were fascinated by his life in Kilburn, probably because he’d told them dozens of highly embellished stories about what he and the lads got up to. They were desperate for him to take them there one weekend but that was something he would never do. Charles Morgan and his chums would be appalled by just how dreary a Friday night in Kilburn could be. His mates, nice as they were, still lived at home, had limited horizons and were content to get paralytic. Often, once the drink took hold, the atmosphere would turn a bit nasty and it could all go off for any reason—like a couple of Old Etonians having the fucking cheek to be standing there minding their own business.

The longer Frank was at Christ Church, the more mannerisms he absorbed from those around him. It was most noticeable in his speech patterns. His North London accent remained unchanged but his tone and inflections now contained an almost aristocratic confidence and certainty. Vocally, he seemed to have leap-frogged the bourgeoisie entirely, going from “Eh?” to “Sorry?” without pausing at “Pardon?”

This dual identity should have been a blessing—after all, he was as much at ease with his old schoolmates in Kilburn as he was with his new college mates at Oxford. The trouble was, he was equally ill at ease too. The dual identity was more of a curse: instead of fitting in anywhere, he fitted in nowhere. He knew the loneliness and discomfort of being in a ‘class of his own’. He’d never be upper class, wouldn’t want to be, but at the same time, he could never again be an ordinary working-class boy. This awkward disaffection extended into his relationships with girls. Frank had lost count of the number he’d slept with—his room at Christ Church might as well have been fitted with a revolving door. However, although he was attractive to and attracted by girls from either end of the social spectrum, and had no shortage of admirers, he never found one with whom he shared enough common ground to build a lasting relationship.

Anyway, that wasn’t the reason he’d come to Oxford—to find a long-term girlfriend. No, he had years to do that. At the moment, he was just doing enough work not to get sent down and have this avenue of pleasure prematurely curtailed.

He worked his way through New Testament Greek and biblical Hebrew, Pauline Christology and the theories of Kant and Troeltsch, all the time expecting to find something, just a tiny shred of evidence, about the validity of the teachings of the Catholic Church. Yet the more he looked, the less he saw. It was simply a matter of faith, of suspending disbelief, which his study of theology had now rendered impossible.

He spent the summer holidays in London, working on building sites. He could cope with this because he knew his ticket to the construction industry was a return. He pitied those whose tickets were one-way—physically, it was so hard. Now he was in awe of his father who had been doing this sort of work every day for more than thirty years. After a day hauling bricks up and down ladders, Frank got home exhausted. After a bath and a bite to eat, he had to decide whether to go straight to bed or stay up late and watch
John Craven’s Newsround
.

Towards the end of each vacation, he would be itching for the new term to start, until one day there were no more breaks and no more new terms. His time was up, it was all over. It ended as suddenly as it had begun. He sat his finals and when he completed the last paper on early Syriac Christianity, that was it. Game over. What now?

Unlike most undergraduates, Frank hadn’t gone up to Oxford to get himself qualified for a career. He’d gone there simply to postpone the day when he’d have to have one. Neither was he a man so in love with his subject that he was prepared to devote further years to academic research. Anyway, he felt his turn was over. He’d had a wonderful time, but had no wish to become an eternal student, too lazy or frightened to emerge into the outside world. He didn’t want to feel like a grown man still trying to play for the under-14
s
football team. Moreover, he felt that he no longer fitted in. Since the lavish TV adaptation of
Brideshead Revisited
, Christ Church had been awash with a new breed of undergraduate: fey, foppish fogeys with smug, punchable faces, they wandered around Tom Quad and punted on the Cherwell dressed in 1920
s
clothing, carrying battered teddy bears. The trend would probably pass, but Frank had no desire to see his beloved college turned into an Evelyn Waugh theme park.

More worrying was that many of these young fops professed, like Waugh, to be Anglo-Catholics, seduced by the pomp and pageantry of high mass. That posed the real danger of theology becoming a fashionable subject, taken up by people who were actually interested in it, rather than using it as a tradesmen’s entrance to Oxford.

It dawned on him slowly that he was the only one who had no future plans, nowhere to go, nothing to do. The only one who really had gone to Oxford just for a laugh. His drunken contemporaries had sobered up. Christ Church had been a hoot but now it was time to follow the time-honoured path into banking, the law or the City. They were earnestly taking their places behind old oak desks at Kleinwort Benson or Grieveson Grant. Others were heading for the new, eighties option of management consultancy—“We came, we saw, we invoiced.”

Even Charles Morgan, the laziest and most crapulent of them all, was following in his father’s footsteps to the Foreign Office, to end up as a diplomat. “It’ll be fucking great,” he told Frank. “I’ll be able to park in the middle of Selfridges’ Food Hall.”

Some, having served their time in the Oxford Union, were destined to be politicians, maybe not immediately but certainly in the future. Frank had been increasingly courted by both sides of the debating chamber. The Left saw him as that rare thing, an articulate Oxford undergraduate from a genuine proletarian background. The newly emerging Thatcherite Right saw him as the very emblem of meritocracy: a working-class boy who, through his own grit and industry, had propelled himself to Christ Church. Since arriving at Oxford, and witnessing many debates in the Union, Frank had adhered firmly to the old maxim that politics was just ‘showbusiness for ugly people’ and avoided both factions like the plague.

But now he couldn’t bear the thought of the dismal drudgery of everyday life that seemed to await him. As an Oxford graduate, many doors were now open to him that would otherwise have been closed. But behind them, Frank suspected there were just de luxe versions of the same unappealing things that had awaited him at sixteen or eighteen, the things that would still await him if he remained in full-time education until he was thirty: commuting every day to a job he detested—marriage, mortgage, misery.

And so, blinking like a pit pony, Frank re-emerged into the real world. In a bit of a daze, he and his yellow Escort van drifted back down the A40. He unloaded it at the other end, put his records back into the box room, sat on his bed and moped. Not so much about having no job, no money and no future, but about the dismal prospect of having no fun, which was worsened because his family and friends were so thrilled to have him back where he belonged. He’d be expected down the pub every Friday night to drink a skinful of Guinness before he threw up either on the pavement outside or on the dance-floor of the National Ballroom. He simply couldn’t face it. His mother fussed around him—“What time will you be home?”

“What’ll you have for your dinner?” It was all he could do to stop himself screaming. Worst of all was the prospect of Sunday mass. He could have a standup row with his parents—“I’m a grown man, I don’t have to go to mass if I don’t want to, etc, etc,”—but why bother? Why fall out with the people he loved over something about which they cared very deeply and he cared very little. He was living under their roof; to abide by their rules wouldn’t kill him. Yet.

Once again, he found himself heading for the eleven o’clock mass at Quex Road. He’d been embarrassed enough about doing this when he was eleven but now, at almost twice that age, walking between his parents to the big church, he felt like a patient from a mental hospital who had been released back into the community.

He was welcomed back by the O’Hagans, the Quinns, the Mackens, the Hennesseys and all the other Quex Road regulars. Maybe he was imagining it but they seemed to treat his time at Oxford as a bout of temporary insanity. Perhaps it had been. After all, wasn’t this home?

Still, the question gnawed at him. How could he escape? He had to escape before he became used to it again and, heaven forbid, began to enjoy it. He reckoned that he could probably put up with Kilburn life for a maximum of six weeks. By then, the tunnel would need to have been dug with the light clearly visible at the end. Otherwise, he feared the whole Oxford experience would be erased and he’d find himself, three years behind everyone else, training to be a quantity surveyor.

He decided to contact God, see if he had any suggestions.

Nothing.

“Come on,” he pleaded, “I’m in church, I’m on my knees. I need a bit of help here.”

Silence.

Frank sat back in his pew and watched Father Rogan deliver the sermon. Although he paid no attention to the content, he found himself transfixed by the concept. What other career offered this weekly opportunity to get up and say whatever you liked to a captive audience of several hundred people who then felt duty-bound to go off and do as you told them? Where else could you make such a difference to people’s lives? In what other walk of life were you automatically assumed to be virtuous, even saintly?

No, no, surely not. He couldn’t even consider it. That was the most fatuous idea he’d had since applying to Christ Church. Fatuous or not, what else could he do?

T
he priesthood. The more he thought about it, the more it appealed. As a DJ, he had unwittingly developed some of the qualities of a really good priest. He’d shown a flair for bringing people together, making them happy, controlling their emotions. His records, his decks, his speakers and lights had all been agents for the forces of good. During his three years at Oxford, the charity balls at which he’d performed had raised thousands for people in need. Even the sobriquet ‘MC’, which was used by a lot of black American DJs, had a priestly parallel: mass was a ceremony, the priest was its master, and the eleven o’clock service, heaving with punters, must be, in DJ-speak, a great gig to be playing.