2001 - Father Frank (9 page)

As Frank watched his beloved van being winched on to the breakers’ tow truck for its final journey, he put Jim Reeves’s ‘Adios Amigo’ on the turntable. He realised that he was more upset by this requiem than he ever was at parishioners’ funerals. He sniffed back the tears and pulled himself together.

F
unerals were Frank’s speciality. He did death very well. He was genuinely unafraid of it, and it was from this that bereaved parishioners drew comfort and confidence. If that nice Father Dempsey, a Roman Catholic priest—a man who knew about these things—was not afraid, then there was nothing to fear. Of course, Frank knew absolutely nothing about ‘these things’: he hadn’t a clue what happened to people once they’d checked into the Wooden Waldorf. Though, many years ago, he’d narrowed it down to two scenarios.

Scenario One: there is no God. Death is the full stop to end all full stops. Utterly final, utterly silent. Well, what’s so frightening about that? You’re finished, you’re no more, no harm can ever come to you because there’s no you for any harm to come to.

Scenario Two: there is a God. Whether he turns out to be Allah, Buddha or Jesus Christ, he is all powerful but, more importantly, all merciful, so he’s hardly going to condemn you to Hell for the venial sins you committed during your lifetime. Hell was strictly reserved for the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.

You see? Absolutely nothing to worry about.

In Frank’s experience, although some deaths were very sad, few were truly tragic—except the funeral of a child, with the sobbing father carrying a tiny white coffin into the church wondering how God could possibly allow this to happen, the deep and bitter grief that no amount of condolences could assuage. Such occasions were, mercifully, rare. Frank’s funerals, for the most part, were for those whose hearts had finally succumbed to a lifetime of fags, booze and unsaturated fats. He tried to make them joyous rather than sorrowful. If the family wanted their loved one dispatched to the strains of ‘Return To Sender’ rather than ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’, then that was fine. Frank truly believed that the deceased was heading for a better place. How could Heaven be worse than Harlow?

It was in this unappealing Essex new town that Frank was wearing the black vestments for possibly the last time before taking up his new post as a parish priest. He was up on the altar of a stupendously ugly concrete edifice known as All Saints Church. You could almost imagine the scene in the mid-sixties when the church was built and none of the saints wanting anything to do with it, refusing to put their names on the door. Even the virtually unheard-of St Plachelm, who had been waiting for nearly twelve hundred years to have a church named after him, didn’t want this one. In the end, God calls a big meeting and tells them that He understands their aesthetic aversion to this revolting 1960
s
architecture but the hideous building had to have a name and it was to be called All Saints: first so that none of them has to take sole responsibility for it and, second, so that in thirty years’ time the good people of Essex would think it was named after a pop group.

Anyway, the dearly beloved were gathered in All Saints Church to say goodbye to Bill Waites, a London cabbie and one of Frank’s favourite parishioners. As handkerchiefs all around the church were snuffled into, Frank went into his mild-bewilderment-while-acknowledging-the-pain-of-bereavement routine. “Let me ask you a question,” he began, “or let me ask you to ask yourselves a question. Why are you crying? You’re not crying for Bill. And if you are, you shouldn’t be. Out of all of us, isn’t he the lucky one? He was a good man. Our Lord won’t be turning him away. He’s just about to embark on an eternity of unfettered happiness and joy. He’s finally found a place with no traffic jams, no speed bumps, no Japanese tourists with nothing smaller than a fifty-pound note, and you’re crying for him? But you’re not, are you? You’re actually crying for yourselves and that’s understandable. He was a lovely man and you’re all going to miss him—I’m going to miss him—but remember, our separation from him is only temporary. The fact is, unless anyone here has led a lifetime of irredeemable evil, we’ll all be joining him sooner or later. It’s going to be one long party. Really long, it’s never going to end. It’s just that Bill has arrived at that party a little earlier than we have.”

The snuffling seemed to stop. Brave smiles began to flicker across tear-stained cheeks and the atmosphere lightened into one of acceptance, almost happiness. Even at the graveside, while going through the perfunctory prayers and procedure, Frank was mindful of the common horror of seeing a loved one lowered into the ground or conveyor-belted behind a curtain to be burnt to a frazzle. He paused. “Try not to be distressed. Try to remember that it isn’t Bill inside that coffin. It’s just his body. And our bodies are just things we wear during our time on Earth, like clothes. Bill is in Heaven. All we’re really burying are his clothes.”

Irene, Bill’s widow, invited everyone back to the house and as Frank stood chatting and nibbling a cheese and tomato sandwich, she drew him aside. “Bill thought a lot of you, Father, and towards the end, he decided to leave you something in his will. It’s something you might find useful. Come into the other room for a minute and let me show you.”

“B
ingo!” yelled Sarah Marshall, in the middle of a client meeting. She would have startled everyone in the room had she not shrieked it to herself. Until her recent introduction to ‘Buzzword Bingo’, Sarah’s working life was becoming insufferable. After university, she’d opted for a career in advertising, carried along, like so many before her, on a whitewater raft of excitement and optimism. The industry hovered on the fringes of big business and show business, of politics and sport, and she had gone in confident of enjoying the big salary, the company car, the lunches at London’s most chic and expensive restaurants, the glamorous shoots in exotic locations, the sheer pizzazz of it all.

However, by the time she’d made it to the fashionably stark offices of Collins, Davies and Pearce, one of London’s top agencies, she felt as though she’d arrived at a party long past its peak. As heads older than hers would confirm, the fun and the funds seemed to have gone from the industry and it was all a lot more sensible, a lot more professional, a lot less attractive.

And least attractive of all was Mike Babcock—‘the client’, sitting across the table from her. Mike—thirty-six, wife, two children, Barratt house with carport for Vauxhall Vectra on new estate just outside Basingstoke—had one redeeming feature of which he was blissfully unaware. If you wanted to play Buzzword Bingo, Mike was your man. The rules were very simple. There were thirty irritating buzzwords or phrases which to Sarah were like fingernails scratching a blackboard. They had an increasing tendency to crop up in meetings, invariably from the lips of the client. You know the sort of thing—‘basically’, ‘bottom line’, ‘core business’, ‘at the end of the day’, ‘ballpark’, ‘proactive’. Players had to tick off six on their imaginary scorecard before crying, ‘Bingo.’ To themselves, of course. An hour with Mike Babcock and you could usually complete half a dozen full houses. Sarah still smiled at the memory of Buzzword Bonanza—the day when she cried, ‘Bingo,’ at the end of his opening sentence.

“Basically,” he began, “at the end of the day, we’re hopefully looking at a win-win situation. The bottom line is, we need to think outside the box if we’re going to put this one to bed.”

Buzzword Bingo had brought a little welcome amusement into Sarah’s life. Instead of dreading the banality, the boredom, the drivel dressed as marketing analysis of everything Mike said, she found herself hanging on his every word. The elusive sixth buzzword had been a long time coming, but once Mike had expressed his intention to ‘go the full nine yards’, Sarah congratulated herself on another full house.

While listening, she looked at him with disdain—Top Man suit, duty-free tie and all too visible cufflinks. She reflected on how most people would assume that those who worked in flash London ad agencies would be more ostentatious, more status-conscious, more money-driven than their provincial clients. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Everything Mike did was designed to show what a razor-sharp guy he was. The way he shook your hand too firmly, his predilection for making intrusive and unwelcome eye contact whenever he spoke to you, his ever-present stack of business cards, ‘Michael P. Babcock—Divisional Marketing Manager’, the unseemly pride he took in that title and in his Vectra SRI, which had colour-coded bumpers—so much more prestigious than his more junior colleagues’ cars, which hadn’t.

Mike was currently excited about his latest top-level project. He was ‘heading up a team’ involved in the marketing of Slattery’s, a chain of truly awful
faux-lrish
pubs, which, he assured Sarah, would have ‘representation’ in every major town centre within a ‘timescale’ of three to five years. It had been Sarah’s unenviable task to visit some of these establishments and she was horrified. If you had a drop of Irish blood in your veins, you’d have every right to find them patronising, insulting and barely the right side of racist. With their outsides painted a lurid shade of green, their identikit ‘Oirish’ interiors and accoutrements, their diddly-dee music and their inflated prices for badly poured Guinness, they were a greedy, ignorant, multinational brewing chain’s attempt to cash in on the vogue for Celtic culture.

Sarah had visited the genuine article in Kerry, in Wexford, in Cork, wonderful places, often comprising little more than the landlord’s front room, the focal point for a small, friendly community where a lot more than alcohol was dispensed. To see this marvellous tradition reduced to a quick way to fill shareholders’ pockets made her want to vomit. And the sites they’d chosen were usually in places with a big Irish community: Camden, for instance, where they’d converted a proper Irish pub, frequented by Irish people, into another branch of Slattery’s. The Irish regulars naturally got up and took their custom elsewhere and were replaced by tourists and out-of-towners deluded into thinking they’d found a little slice of the Emerald Isle.

She felt real guilt and shame about what she was now involved in. All right, so it was perfectly legal and technically not even wrong, but the debasing of what she believed to be a noble, delightful culture left a taste in her mouth as nasty as Slattery’s badly poured Guinness. Only ‘Buzzword Babcock’ unwittingly made it tolerable for her. Snapping his attache case shut, he said goodbye and left the meeting room. To Sarah’s intense disappointment, she was left one word short of her fifth full house. Just then, he turned back round. “Sarah, need to sit down and discuss the new research findings—
touch base
on Monday.”

Bingo.

It was five to one, and she was due to meet her friend Helen for a gossipy lunch in Clerkenwell in five minutes. She ran out to Golden Square, hailed a cab and jumped in. In her haste, she failed to notice two things: first, that this cab did not have a Metropolitan Police licence plate on the back, and second, that the man at the wheel was a priest.

F
rank had followed Irene Wakes into the back room where she’d taken an envelope from the top drawer of an old teak sideboard. He opened it and inside was the Document of Registration for vehicle no. G339 YMC—Bill Waites’s taxi, his mode of transport, his place of work, his life. “Towards the end,” she explained, “Bill was quite relaxed. He knew he wasn’t long for this world. In fact, thanks to you, he was quite looking forward to it. He wasn’t too worried about me—with his policies and whatnot, he’s left me quite a tidy sum. He wasn’t worried about the kids, I mean, they’ve grown up and made their own lives. But he was worried about you.”

“Me?” Frank was simultaneously flattered, surprised and alarmed.

“You and that motorbike of yours. He said he’d seen you tearing around on it—nearly knocked you off once. He was worried that if you weren’t more careful, you’d come a cropper.”

Frank was close to tears at a deceased parishioner’s touching concern for him but managed to smile himself out of it. “So just before he went, he had the idea of leaving you the taxi. Insisted, he did, a lot safer than that motorbike, so it’s yours. It’s in very good nick. Well, black cabs have to be, the Old Bill are very hot on that. Besides, he’d been part-time, really, for the last few years so this one hasn’t clocked up so many miles. I mean, you can sell it if you want.”

“No, no. Absolutely not,” said Frank, perishing the very thought. “I wouldn’t dream of it. I’m—I’m—I mean, I…no, no…I’d never sell it. What a wonderful way to get around.
But I tell you what, I’ll sell the bike. Bill was right. And, much as I’m going to miss him, I’m not ready to meet up with him just yet.”

Frank embraced Irene warmly, thanked her again and rode his old Suzuki X7 back to the presbytery for the last time. As a mark of respect to the late William Wakes, he rode at twenty-nine miles per hour.

§

Within a few weeks the moment came for which Frank had been waiting: the reason he hadn’t considered the other career options that might have been open to him after Oxford; the reason he had endured six years in the seminary and taken a vow of celibacy; the reason he had served a further ten-year apprenticeship as a priest in all those different parishes. It was the moment to which he had been building up for the past sixteen years: written confirmation of his appointment as a parish priest.

At thirty-eight, he was very young. The whole priestly process is painfully slow: it is not a career that offers an accelerated promotion scheme. Your own parish at thirty-eight. That was about as fast as anyone had done it.

Frank knew he’d have to tread carefully. He was only too aware of how reactionary some Roman Catholics could be in their outlook. Many still regarded Henry VIII as a cocky young upstart with new-fangled ideas about marriage and divorce. Any new parish priest would have to appraise his flock carefully before attempting anything that might look unfamiliar or he could risk alienating them.