Water

Water

August 1966

St Thomas Catholic Church, Edgbaston

I T HAS BEEN

a dull day at God’s house.

Father Owen has had very little to do. The cleaner did not stop to talk, just muttered something in her indistinguishable accent and took her caddy of furniture polish and dusters and headed elsewhere. Perhaps home. Perhaps to another church. Perhaps she cleans all the chapels and churches in town? The thought is an alarming one. Father Owen resolves to ask her where she goes after cleaning the pews of St Thomas. It just won’t do to share furniture polish with men of other denominations.

And then, nothing. Not a confession, not a prayer, not even a squeak from the family of mice that Father Owen is relatively certain live in the baseboard beside the baptismal font. He presumes they drink the water, make their insides holy. He wonders why he himself has not done this, for if baptismal water can bless without, perhaps it can bless within. Father Owen would like that; his stomach pain has become intolerable recently, especially at mealtimes. He’ll

eat even the simplest of things, an apple perhaps, some sausages with onion gravy, and then there they come, great waves of pain that send him rushing to what his grandmother euphemistically referred to as the ‘ladies’ lounge’.

He can’t go to the doctor; his doctor has come to confession. And how could Father Owen trust the voice that instructs him to remove his trousers and cough when that same voice has admitted to an affair with his receptionist, despite the wedding band the good doctor wears beneath the surgical glove holding Father Owen’s testicles. No, he can’t go to the doctor.

The holy water arrives, distilled, in large bottles from a company in France. It used to be tap water that he held his hands over and blessed, but it was harder for Father Owen to believe that this liquid from Edgbaston’s pipes could be anything divine. Filling a jug from the tap in the back room and then whispering an invocation to God to bless it didn’t feel, well, magical

enough. Now he knows it is shipped from Lourdes, he can really believe. And if he believes, they will believe. That is what his favourite seminary teacher had said.

Father Owen walks over to the font. The baptismal water is rarely changed, has blessed the heads of countless babies, squealing and wriggling and mewling with little regard for the importance of the ordinance being bestowed on them. He dips a finger into the water lying still in the font. It is cool. In the heat of this summer day, that feels like a miracle. He presumes it is at the very least refreshing for the babies. Father Owen swirls his finger around in the water, making a figure of eight. Eternity.

O Christ the Lord, from your pierced side, you gave us your sacraments as fountains of salvation.

Those are the words he must recite at baptisms, but he does not like them. ‘Pierced’ puts him in mind of Jesus pricked in the side with a fork like a baked potato. It is a mental connection he cannot separate, and it is undignified. He much prefers Isaiah 55: Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters

. He makes his hand into a scoop and collects the cool, clear water on his palm and is raising the holy water to his mouth when there is a creak of the door. Quickly and self-consciously, he turns his palm over, and the water splashes back into the font. Father Owen wipes his hand on his trousers and turns. What the young man saw, if anything, he does not know. Father Owen realizes afterwards that it is because he was on the back foot that his first greeting to this young man was not as kind as it ought to have been.

‘Yes?’

‘Oh, er, good morning,’ the young man replies, taking off his hat. He is tall, skinny, seems like he would topple over in a strong wind. He is wearing a bow tie that looks all wrong on one so youthful and he is clearly not a Catholic because he does not cross himself with the holy water at the door, does not genuflect in the aisle.

‘How may I help you?’ Father Owen asks, his hand still wet between the fingers.

‘I’m wondering,’ the young man says, ‘if I could ask you some questions. About your faith?’

‘Certainly,’ Owen says. ‘Please.’ He gestures for this young man to sit on the front-row pew and he drags over an altar boy’s chair so he may sit opposite, his back to Christ’s suffering on the altar.

‘Father Owen Bishop.’ Father Owen extends his hand, and if the young man finds it amusing, as so many before him have, that this priest has the surname Bishop, he does not express it.

‘Eddie Winston,’ the young man says.

‘So?’ Father Owen asks.

‘You see, the thing is, I’ve been wanting to know …’ The young man tumbles over his words, then pauses and looks at Father Owen. There’s a fleck in this young man’s blue eyes that looks like God picked up his green brush by mistake when he was colouring them in. Owen likes to think of God making people by the mixing of paints and colours because, if nothing else is evident from the world, God is an artist. Father Owen’s own flesh is exactly the shade of his cup of tea when he puts a little too much milk in.

‘What is heaven like?’

‘Oh.’ Father Owen sits back in his chair. ‘Well, it’ll be very nice,’ he says. ‘There’ll be no pain, only peace, and … lots of light and, of course, we will be reunited with our loved ones.’

‘I see,’ the young man says, and he turns his hat over in his hands. Father Owen feels he may have undersold the afterlife.

‘Heaven will be,’ he tries again, and casts around, ‘glorious and very …’ He wants to say heavenly

, but that seems redundant, ‘nice,’ he lands on again, his English teacher turning in his grave. ‘We’ll all be very happy,’ he concludes, and while the ‘we’ could refer to him and Eddie, it is meant to refer to Father Owen and his congregation, and Catholics the world over. But nobody else, of course.

The young man turns his hat over again, revealing a tired

lining and something written just above the band. Father Owen wonders if there might be another convincing adjective he ought to have used, but there is nothing so dull as talking about heaven.

‘And,’ the young man says, ‘what is hell like?’

Father Owen’s eyes light up. ‘Hell,’ he says, delighting in even saying the word, the feel of the ‘L’ on his tongue as it meets the roof of his mouth.

When Father Owen was a little boy, a lonely child with no siblings to occupy his attention, his mother would send him out to play in their small back yard, and he would crouch at the paving slabs and watch for ants, and when one came he would pick it up and, one by one, pull its legs off. Then he would set it down and watch it struggle.

His father, a bookish man who drove a bus, told him that some people believe in reincarnation. Father Owen had asked his father who would be reincarnated as an ant, and his father had replied somebody bad, probably. And so Owen had taken it upon himself to make sure that these bad souls had suffered. And it is the eight-year-old Owen who lives inside the priest now who delights in explaining to the young man the types of torture that will exist in hell, of how souls shall scream for mercy and regret their misspent lives on earth. Bones will break, eyelids will be ripped off, the screaming shall never cease. Around five minutes into Father Owen’s description of hell, the young man is looking peaky.

‘Son,’ Father Owen says, having realized he has forgotten the young man’s name, ‘are you quite all right?’ Father Owen did not expect this fellow to have such a weak disposition. He hadn’t even got to the good bits.

‘And adultery,’ the young man says. ‘The punishment for that

is that you might go to hell?’

‘There is no “might” about it, my lad. Adulterers will burn in hell for eternity.’

The young man nods, says, ‘I understand,’ in a hoarse voice and then bends over and vomits into his hat.