After Purple (38 page)

The service was over now. The long tide of clergy (still no Ray) was processing out, the organ playing strong conclusive music full of amens and underlinings. I wanted to race after them, tug at their nightshirts, yell, “Don't go yet. Please don't go!” I hadn't prayed, I hadn't concentrated. I craved a second chance, a second Communion, a God who would explode like a rocket in my gut, fill me up like a whole fresh fragrant loaf.

I dashed up the ramp so that I could see them better, watched them disappear into the sacristy. Two hundred priests now dwindled to six or seven strays! Those straggledy few were already disrobing in full view of the congregation, snatching off their albs and girdles, and revealing creased shirts and baggy trousers underneath. They were no longer Reverends or Divines, set apart by trailing skirts or ritual vestments, but shabby commoners bundling their sacred garments into tatty plastic bags or canvas hold-alls, sloping off for a pee or a smoke or even forty winks. It was the same with the choirboys. One minute ruffed and snowy angels, the next wrangling urchins in short pants and runny noses.

I turned my back. I couldn't bear to look at them, to see coarse humanity swilling and grunting beneath the sacred packaging.

The crowds were bad enough, pushing me from every side towards the exit. I had no choice but to join them, a piece of litter swept along by blind and trampling feet. Everyone was buttoning up coats, turning up collars, fumbling for umbrellas. The rain was stinging, sheeting down outside.

I stood at the exit cringing at the cold cruel Lenten air. I was dressed for spring, but the new-born Easter sun was already dead. Christ had risen and God was in my stomach and all He could do was steal my priest away and turn two hundred others into soggy, dripping seculars.

“Happy Easter!” said a voice, and a black umbrella poked almost in my eye. I stopped in my tracks, ready to welcome Doris, Cammie, anyone — but it was a nun in an anorak greeting another nun. I had never seen nuns in anoraks. These two even had their hair — thin wispy stuff — hardly hidden beneath their short, immodest veils. I glowered at them. The only English people I'd spotted in the entire square and they couldn't even wear the proper uniform. If they were truly religious, they‘d give me their umbrella. St Francis would have done.

I didn't want to think about St Francis. He only reminded me of Ray, and that set the pain off in my ribs. It was bad enough being freezing cold and soaking wet and the only person on my own in the whole of Lourdes. Everybody else was in couples, groups or hordes — flurries of nuns, coach-parties of school-children, fat Italian families arm in arm and gabbling, lovers under shared umbrellas, nurses with their invalids, helpers with their wheelchairs. I'd have been grateful to have glimpsed even Lionel — at least he would have smiled. Pax Pilgrims were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they were already tripping up the hill towards their cosy communal breakfast, their shared Easter eggs and Irish jokes, their unpolluted priests.

At school, there had always been a special gala breakfast for the First Communicants. I'd never gone, of course, but my friends had told me how Reverend Mother poured the tea herself and there were saucers of sugared almonds on the table and little pats of butter with Easter crosses on them. I had a hunk of bread back in my room. I could always mark a cross on it with the orange gluey stuff. Or go up to Ray's hostel and try and seek him out, share a bowl of porridge with dribbling Jimmy. I stood a moment, trying to decide. The daisies in the grass outside the basilica had closed up their petals, their undersides stained pink as if somebody had grazed them. Even the chestnut trees had furled their buds in tighter. Everything looked as if it were flinching from a blow.

Breakfast could wait — it was the Grotto I must go to, that sacred spot where Our Lady had appeared to Bernadette. It was a place of miracles, the very heart and nucleus of Lourdes, the reason for it all. I had planned to visit it with Ray, but now he was missing, it was a miracle I needed. Everything was crumbling and disintegrating. I would go to the Grotto and beg St Bernadette to put joy and Ray back into Easter. After that, I'd eat.

I crossed the square, passed the other two basilicas, one perched above the other, and walked through the huge stone archways to the river bank. There was no need to ask the way — the crowds were surging there in thousands — gabbling and jostling as if they were about to visit a circus or a zoo. A notice said “Silence” in a score of languages, but no one took much notice. One man was munching a banana and I saw several people chewing gum. My shoes were already squelching, my pure white jeans wet and muddy round the hems. One of the miracles of Lourdes was that it never rained — at least, that's what the girls at school had told me. In all their photographs, the sky was always smiley blue and sparkling. Nothing sparkled now, except the puddles.

All the same, I couldn't help but be excited. I was approaching the very spot where Bernadette had knelt before the Mother of God, the dazzling Queen of Heaven! I could almost see the fierce rushing river which she had feared to cross, the spreading meadows, the browsing flocks of sheep. The grass should be damp and cool beneath my feet, the air rich with the scent of flowers and lambs and miracles. All I could smell was wax. They were selling candles, the largest I had ever seen, huge phallic flagstaffs stacked in what looked like coal bunkers. The cheapest cost five francs. Five francs would buy two bread-and-salami meals a day. Bernadette would be
furious
. She'd continuously told the townsfolk not to turn the shrine into a corner shop. Actually, I couldn't see the shrine — not yet. I had only reached the water taps. I stopped and stared at them. So this was their famous Holy Water — twenty taps, each with a long queue snailing behind it, like check-outs at a supermarket. Bossy women with shopping baskets full of empty bottles were shoving each other out of the way, as if they were fighting for bargains in the sales. A paunchy Frenchman had stripped to the waist and was splashing holy water on a chest already drenched with rain. Every face showed greedy self-absorption. One woman had a ten-gallon plastic jar which she was filling slowly to the brim, while the man behind her swore and grumbled about the delay. Another was struggling with twelve Pepsi bottles, emptying out the dregs and replacing them with cola-flavoured water. Most people used the hollow plastic virgins sold everywhere in Lourdes, which were both statues and receptacles in one. You filled one Lady up to her neck with water, then screwed her crown on as a stopper. A group of Germans were swigging mouthfuls out of Mary's head. It looked strange and almost blasphemous to see a dozen Virgins dangling upside down with their feet in the air, while their owners gulped and swilled.

I watched, appalled. It wasn't just the jostling and the guzzling, it was the lack of all result. That tide of miraculous water should have washed the last germ and microbe off the earth, restored mankind to his Garden of Eden. Yet all I could see was sin, disease and shabbiness. Even the able-bodied had their varicose veins and acne, their warts and squints and eczemas, their scuffed shoes and blistered feet, their dandruff and their head-colds. Those in the wheelchairs were too weak and crippled even to approach the taps. Bernadette's water had gushed out from a holy spring and dashed laughing down a hillside. This was grudging, godless water trickling sullenly from some municipal plumbing system to splat out into a dirty gutter which looked all too like a urinal. Where was the hillside and the holiness, the pure healing torrent, the open countryside?

Bernadette had called the place her paradise. She wouldn't even recognise it now. Nature and beauty had been banned from it. True, the river still rushed and rippled on, but a tamed and castrated river, its banks pushed back, its meadows besieged and overrun. The trees were docked and pollarded; flowers and shrubs had turned into cold iron railings.

I took a few steps forward. Now I was at the very threshold of the shrine. I only had to lift my eyes up higher and I would see the famous statue of the Virgin. I hardly dared. I stared first at the pilgrims kneeling in the puddles, rapt faces upturned to God and His driving rain. Slowly, I looked higher. Saw the candlestands, the altar, the outline of the cave, the faithful trooping round it, the rock worn smooth where a million million lips had kissed it. I turned my eyes to the left, where a row of rusty crutches dangled over the rock-face, abandoned by their owners who had leapt to health and strength. At last — and tremblingly — I flung back my head and gazed at the focus of it all, the statue of the Immaculate Conception.

It was hideous. Bernadette had been rare unearthly beauty in a small young simple shining girl. The sculptor had made her a taller, older, simpering, Gothic matron with a pious smirk and dead marble eyes. Yet everyone was gazing at her, worshipping her almost, as if she were the Blessed Virgin come to life again, standing there in person.

The candles lit below her had almost all been extinguished by the rain. In the books and photographs you always saw them burning. Our Lady herself had asked St Bernadette to bring a lighted candle to the spot, and ever afterwards the tourists copied her. Yet here were only damp black wicks, spluttering stumps, grotesquely spastic wax. The light in the sky had also been extinguished. The clouds were the colour of dirty handkerchiefs, the rain had slowed to a mean grizzling drizzle. It could have been Scunthorpe on a November evening, instead of Easter morning in the most holy place on earth. There
wasn't
any holiness, not even any joy — only a sort of total poverty. A boy in a wheelchair was tearing a piece of paper into tiny useless scraps, stuffing them in his mouth, then spitting them out again. A little girl with burn scars on her face crouched down by the railings and peed on her new shoes. A thin nun in mufti snapped at a fat one in black robes. I ached for angels, for miracles, even for some hushed sacred centre of it all.

If this was the Grotto, you could almost have passed it by. It was just a dingy cave on a weeping stretch of concrete, mobbed by greedy grousing bargain-hunters in their drenched and shabby clothes. How could the Queen of Heaven step on earth and leave behind only drizzle, litter, and the smell of steamy humans in their plastic packamacs? One of the proofs of the existence of God was the beauty of the world He'd made. What beauty? Had He created those pinched pasty faces, those mouths drooping at the corners, that sulky sky? Would God Himself turn out to be a bald man with a hernia and age spots on his hands?

I turned away. If I got my miracle, it would be halfway up a mountain or in a meadow full of cowbells, not in this tarmac wasteland. I trudged back across the square, through the gates, up towards the town. I was soaked and shivering, my clothes sticking to me, my hair in seaweed strands. The shops were in full commercial swing now. I stopped for a moment, tempted by a rack of warm fuzzy scarves marked “Local Pyrenean Wool”. When I looked closer, I saw they had labels on them saying “Made in Hong Kong. 100% acrylic”. I almost knocked the stand down. Bernadette had said “no profits”, and here was filthy lucre built on lies.

I stormed into a chemist. At least there were no plastic virgins there, just toothbrushes and Tampax. My phrase-book French was limited to things like, “My big end has gone” and, “Where is the municipal art gallery?” so I asked rather nervously for
I' aspirin
and
le laxative
and was amazed when the woman understood. I suppose the words must be the same in both languages. Someone like Adrian could write a thesis on French and English words which are identical — amen, alleluia, sex (e), revolution, laxative, orgasm, Communion. But not God or sin or father.

I was so exhausted when I reached my lodgings, I could hardly crawl upstairs — a combination, I suppose, of hunger, four hours' sleep and disillusion. I tried not to smell the almost taunting reek of roast lamb which followed me up all five floors. My room looked different, somehow — cleaner but sort of barer. Someone had made my bed which pleased me and nicked the bread from my suitcase which did not. I almost marched downstairs again and demanded it back. But breakfast words are not the same in French. Bread, jam, thief, snooper, spoilsport, all sound hopelessly Anglo-Saxon. I rummaged through the case. I knew Madame had done her own private rummaging an hour or two before, because she'd put the things back differently. Apart from the bread (which was mine by rights in any case), she must have been impressed by my devotion. There were far more books on Bernadette than clothes. I opened the largest and turned to the picture of the Grotto as it was in 1858 — a natural cave springing out of the wild rugged countryside around it, the Savy stream frothing and rippling round its entrance, a sturdy sheep-track leading up to the lush green grass beyond.

Perhaps I was being unfair or too romantic. After all, four million visitors couldn't really fight their way over stepping-stones and sheep-tracks. Lourdes was an industry now, not an idyll. I closed the book, measured out three spoonfuls of the laxative, and made a sort of porridge by mixing it with three crumbled aspirins. That was breakfast, now the bread had gone. The instructions were in French, so I'd guessed the dose, then doubled it. In less than half an hour the griping pains began. I had to dash along the passage and down the stairs to the poky little lavatory three times in just ten minutes. In the end I stayed there, leaning my head against the damp flaking wall and feeling like an empty paper bag blown up by a jeering schoolboy and then burst between his hands. I shat the last dregs of God into the toilet bowl. Even He could never have withstood that total flush-out. I felt better, almost, to be rid of my Communion. The whole thing was a cheat and an illusion. God only came as dove or lamb to His own Chosen People. To outcasts and pretenders He sat in the stomach like a stone or roared through the intestines like a tiger.

It was still Easter day. The smell of new-baked Easter biscuits had joined the
agneau
and was now creeping up the stairs. I was
starving
. It was almost sixty hours since I had eaten and the laxative had cleared out all my reserves, so that I was a completely empty larder. I could always cadge a free lunch at the hostel, but I hardly dared set foot there. If Ray was still missing, I would feel guilty and responsible, and if he weren't, I would have to face his fury at my having made him a sinner. I could stroll down to the café and buy a French Welsh rarebit. But cheese on toast cost money. It would be cheaper to buy plain bread and eat it in my room. I hadn't seen a food shop anywhere. I felt too weak to face the stairs and rain and crowds again, and maybe, even then not find a loaf. The only thing left was bed. I'd read somewhere that the body burns up fewest calories when sleeping, so I peeled off my soggy clothes and climbed in under the duvet.