A Cleansing of Souls (6 page)

“Don’t they amaze you, Tom?”

“Why should they?”

“Do you know how many there are?” continued Michael.

“How am I supposed to know that?”

“Have a guess. Go on. Just guess.”

“I don’t want to have a fucking guess,
alright?”

The silence that followed berated Tom. The evening was becoming colder. He shivered.

“Thousands?” he muttered, more as an act of atonement than of genuine interest.

Michael, temporarily quelled, sprung back into life.

“Millions,” he responded, proudly, “billions even.” It was as if he had fashioned each one of them himself, such was his sense of wonder. “Billions and billions.”

Tom stared mournfully upwards into the black sky before curling himself up again to try and retain some warmth. He felt so old as he lay there.

“I sometimes think about the stars, Tom. I like to lie back and look at the sky as if I am on some great hill in the country, just lie back and look as far into the sky as I can. I look at the stars, day and night. Just because we can’t see them so easily during the day, it doesn’t mean they’re not there. They’re just a little harder to find.”

Michael’s melodic voice continued on like a gentle stream as he lay back on the cold ground.

“You know, Tom, some stars are bigger than the earth, much bigger and they move terrifically fast, so fast that we can’t even see them moving. That’s how they shine. It’s because they’re actually moving, moving and glowing like a huge fairground ride. Ah, Tom, those stars.”

But Tom was asleep, his eyes closed, his mind heavily vacant.

Michael smiled a clown’s smile and nodded his head very slowly. He looked with tenderness at the boy beside him. An urge came over him to kiss Tom’s grimy forehead, just gently, softly. But he resisted. So he began to talk again in that wonderful voice, whispering almost.

“I sometimes close my eyes and imagine myself in a dark room. I don’t know the size of the room; I just know that I am at the entrance to it. The door closes hard behind me and I feel alone. And I realise soon that with each step I take, I could be a yard from the other side of the room or I could be a thousand miles away. But I know deep within me as I stand there shaking that my dark room is everybody’s dark room. We are all here together somehow. And as it is so dark, so very dark, the clever people close their eyes so they may pretend that it is they who are creating the darkness. They just close their eyes and strut quickly to the other side, leaving this place in seconds. They learn nothing and they experience less. But me, I keep my eyes wide open. And I realize I am the only one there. For the others have gone, not seeing me at all. And it is light and it is beautiful all around me.”

Tom’s father, George, was forty-eight years old. He was a tall man with a pallid complexion and greying hair that hung well past his neckline
at the back and was forever flopping across his blue eyes at the front.

By trade, George was a carpenter. From the start of his apprenticeship at the age of fifteen, he had manufactured a world entirely of his own. It was as if the practical skills he was taught were translated into metaphysical techniques. With each new skill acquired and mastered, he had added one more insulating layer between himself and the world outside.

George had safety and surety in wood. Where most people saw the picture, he saw the frame; and in a timber yard, there was paradise. The soft texture of fine sawdust in his palm, the smell of the burning wood as the drill bores through it, that beautiful acrid smell, the sound of the hammer on the cold nail head and the rasping of the saw as it wobbles and bursts its way through - these were the elements of George’s fragile existence, the corners of his earth. He was an introspective man who found comfort and peace in dreamy solidity. And there exuded from him a childlike awe of all things, a seductive innocence so natural as to be perfect. Some would call him a dreamer; others considered him to be just plain odd.

George had met his wife, Elaine, at evening classes. He had gone to learn French polishing, she car maintenance. Both sessions took place on the same night in adjoining rooms. After the classes, some of the students would gather at the village pub for a drink before heading home. For many of them, it was the only socializing they engaged in. George, at twenty-eight had been the youngest and most dedicated in the French polishing class, his passion shining through.

When George first met Elaine, she was small and thin and had the most beautiful long dark hair. She had always worn tight jeans, trainers and baggy jumpers that, although they added bulk to her slight frame, did not detract from her petite figure. She had enrolled in the car maintenance course as a result of having then recently bought her first car. She had purchased it from a friend of a friend and was soon to discover that she had shown perhaps a little too much faith in this extended acquaintance than had been fiscally sound. In short, she had been ripped off. Unable to easily afford the mechanic's bills, she had decided to learn as much about repairing the car herself as she could. It couldn’t be that difficult, she had reasoned. She had come to know a few mechanics since buying the car and their attitude had instilled within her the resolve to deprive them of her custom.

The pub in which the students would congregate was small and gloomy and quiet, untouched by modern extravagance. It was an Inn, an Alehouse. There were no bright lights, lurid colours or loud, searing music. There was just a bar, some tables and benches, a dartboard and a fire. And George would sit there alone at a corner table, gazing up through the smoke, at the blackened timber beams above his head.

It had been one such evening, as George sat transfixed by the ceiling accoutrements that Elaine had sat down opposite him. He had turned and looked at her smooth, youthful face, her green eyes and her long hair. And he had fallen in love with her small, gentle, perfect hands. She had looked into his wide, timid eyes and fallen in love with his fragility. A year later, they were married. Take away the worries, the deceit, the fear and the jealousy and there is love, simply waiting for you to happen upon it.

The wedding had been a small gathering attended by close family and a few friends. The couple returned from a short honeymoon somewhere not very far away and began their married life in George’s flat in the village. They would walk for hours in the evenings and at the weekends, through lanes and fields and woods that eased on forever. They would become lost and enraptured in their surroundings as they followed hidden paths together. He trusted to fate, she to her sense of direction. And they would barely speak during these times. Just to be in one another’s company was enough. Love is simply the pleasure of experiencing another – oh, so simple.

Those first few years of marriage had been idyllic for George and Elaine. They had both in turns felt the responsibility and irresponsibility of partnership but had remained close. Looking back now at that time and all that happened over the ensuing years, it had indeed been an idyllic period. It is a torment of the age that we only realize how precious is a moment once that moment is long gone, a true torment.

When she was twenty-two, Elaine gave birth to their first child, Tom. Fourteen years later, almost to the day, would come the birth of Little Norman.

Moving from the village to the town shortly after Tom’s birth, George had joined a large building company as a carpenter. All those things for which he had secretly hoped had come true. His days were spent amidst the smells and the sounds of creativity. He would breathe it in, inhaling it all deeply. And he would return home to Elaine, exhausted and elated. No man cherished his work more than George for everything was wonder to him.

Elaine had, in almost every respect, brought Tom up by herself. When her husband wasn’t at work, he was in the small shed at the end of the garden hammering and sawing. For a while, she had accepted all of this; but as time wore on, resentment wove its way into her mind. The reasons she had given herself to justify his behaviour such as his sweetness and his boyish innocence, now seemed trite to her. She was being asked to change and adapt, manage the house, the family. It was hard for her. They would argue frequently, or rather she would scream at him until tears streaked down her face and he would look back at her scared and truly bemused, like some puppy that was being chastised for muddying the carpet with his sodden paws. He really did not grasp how she felt during this time. And it had been then that Elaine had sadly realized that she and her husband occupied different worlds. They saw things from different angles, one incapable of understanding the other.

But, as happens, Tom grew to love and admire his father and to take on his persona. George would make toys and games for his son and they would play together for endless hours. So Elaine saw her son grow up to be a dreamer for which she blamed her husband. Communicating with Tom became ever more difficult. She saw how he struggled so hard to understand why she shouted at him. She couldn’t answer him when he would come to her as she stared out of the kitchen at the vibrating shed, tears in her eyes. And she saw that he really did try to get close to her, but there was something within her that was forming, something cold and hard that prevented her from showing the pleasure and affection her son so innocently craved.

Elaine loved George and Tom deeply – her ‘two boys’ as she would call them in uncommon lighter moments. From the confident, pragmatic girl who had enrolled in that car maintenance course to teach all car mechanics a lesson, she had grown into a formidable housewife and mother. And thus she worried and fretted more than she laughed. She became easily irritated and upset, found it harder and harder to relax. She regretted almost everything she said. She had watched herself receive heavier and heavier burdens until her once shining green eyes became shrouded in lines of doubt and despair.

Little Norman had come to save Elaine. He could have saved us all.

Elaine gave birth to Little Norman at the age of thirty-six. Tom had been fourteen. The bitterness and reproach of the previous fifteen years that had covered her like a blanket of cobwebs left Elaine the instant she held her tiny baby in her arms. Nobody had ever seen a woman more transformed or more joyful. She was young again.

The night Elaine brought Little Norman home from hospital had been a triumphant time for George. He had been transforming the spare room into a nursery for months. Tom had helped a little but the adolescent disaffection for all things family had begun to nag at him. This new baby would be nothing special, he figured.

Little Norman’s room had been George’s masterpiece. He had stripped it bare, completely removing the carpet and rubbing away the existing paint until the whole room breathed relief, fumes wafting to the open window thick, heavy and delightful. From the skirting boards to the coving from the walls to the ceiling, George performed magic. He crafted mobiles of clowns and cars and animals from balsa wood and suspended them from on high where they would dance and twirl in one heavenly, dismembered frenzy. The paint was applied everywhere with a gentle touch and a subtle hand. Everything was perfect. But there in the middle of the room rested George’s heart. He had designed it himself, built it with his own hands. His sweat and his blood were in every dovetail joint, in every rounded corner and in every brush stroke. The tiny crib in which Little Norman would lay his sweet head was wonderful, magnificent.

One morning, some weeks after the birth of Little Norman, George had arrived at work to find he was to be made redundant. It had hit him like a train. To be without work had never been a contingency that he had really considered; to be denied the right to work. He was forty-two years old, a skilled craftsman. None had ever worked harder. ‘The world will always need its craftsman’, he used to say to himself. He doesn’t say that anymore. For that was his world. The world into which he was from that day thrust was one where Beauty and Imagination are subservient to Expediency and Conformity, a world that had finally caught up with him, had leapt upon his back from behind as he looked up in wonder at the tall, tall trees of his own heaven.

Thus the days had stretched before him yawning wide and eternal. He would find himself gazing at programmes on the television for hours without really watching them. They were just moving pictures. But at least it was motion. Countless times, he would pace from one end of the front room to the other just to see if anything outside had changed. Maybe a car had been moved. Maybe a ‘For Sale’ sign had been erected or taken down. Or maybe Tom was coming home early from school.

When the telephone rang, he would let it ring and ring just to hear a different sound. And when he did finally answer it, it was never for him. He had given up answering the door entirely.

George had lost so much when he had lost his job – confidence, motivation, self-esteem, and human contact. Mutual friends of himself and Elaine would bury him deep beneath excuses and embarrassment. He was alone and ostracized. And he had never been so scared in all his life. Each day, he would hear on the radio or sometimes read in newspapers that he was now one of a large group of people who were a burden to society, who wanted something for nothing, who were undermining the infrastructure of the country and that measures would have to be put in place to streamline the system that so magnanimously supported him.

Ah, sir. If you could only live my life for a while, I would show you my very soul. And then may you weep.

This initial period of despondency had eventually given way to a rush of enthusiasm. He would get another job. He knew it. He was still over twenty years away from retirement age. And he had a skill to offer, a specialised craft.

So, George had visited the job centre every day, scanned the ever-decreasing Careers Section in the local newspapers and even put a card in the window of the local shop advertising himself, somewhat modestly, as an ‘odd-job man’. There had been some posts for which he had applied to which his experience and abilities were eminently suited. He would write lengthy applications detailing his career, his skills and his virtues. Time after time, he would make a single spelling mistake and screw up the whole letter before starting again. It had to be perfect. And he would wait like a child for the postman to come each morning.

But gradually, ever so slowly, one basic truth began to sink and embed itself into George’s heart – he had actually ceased to exist outside of his family unit. It had been a long process but the final confirmation came to him in a sudden flash, followed almost by relief. He was no more. He had faded to nothing in this forsaken world. Gone.

Nobody returned his telephone calls. Bright young voices asked for his name and then promptly forgot it. Letters he wrote, so many letters, received no reply. He became confused as he tried to make sense of it all. What had he done wrong? For what was he being punished? He had never harmed anybody, never even insulted anybody. He was a kind and gentle man, thoughtful and hardworking. He had never taken a day off sick, had always been on time, and had always done whatever was asked of him. As such, he was an easy victim of the fabled Market, pure and simple, a casualty of an economic situation. He was the price paid for another man’s mistake.

As time wore on, the creative stimulus that had fuelled George’s being was replaced by a hefty void. And it was within this void that this quiet, gentle man lived out his days.

Elaine’s hands had been full during her husband’s early months of unemployment. Her tired eyes and restless nights were due as much to the broken man who lay awake beside her as to the broken sleep of Little Norman. But although he kept her awake, Elaine was unable to think one bad thought about her new baby. He was beyond joy. There were, of course, some days when he would just not stop crying and George would be sitting there in that bloody armchair as another bloody Open University tutor lectured backwards through a ragged beard. At these times, Elaine would become angry and miserable. And she would just stand and wonder at the lines on her face, feeling them with her fingertips. But then, just at the darkest moment, Little Norman would stop crying. He would look at his mother and smile, perhaps giggle, chuckle in a way you wouldn’t believe. Elaine would cling to him with raw hands and clutch him to her shoulder as if trying to absorb him into herself. And he in turn would look past her through his beautiful eyes at the sad and tortured figure of his dazed father.