Pandaemonium (17 page)

‘Aye. We can get our revenge in the morning, though. Wake them up early and kick in their hangovers.’

Heather realises he’s only half joking. Despite dire announcements about being sent home instantly if booze was found on them, everybody knew it would still be flowing, even Guthrie. It was a matter of entrusting the kids to police themselves: it wouldn’t be an issue unless any of them were daft enough to make it one.

They’re walking slowly along the link corridor that forms an alternative route back towards reception, avoiding a trip back through the boys’ corridor. It’s fairly quiet, just the occasional burst of laughter.

‘You’re fifteen quid up, by the way,’ Blake tells her. ‘The sweep.’

‘Oh, nice. I’ll put it towards more malt. Actually, on second thought . . .’

‘Yeah,’ Kane says, a hint of a blush about him. She expected him to be unapologetic, even perversely proud of starting a rammy, but she sees something else. It’s as though he’s been caught doing something, and she thinks she knows what it is.

‘I used to think that Guthrie got on Con’s case, but I’m starting to realise: Dan’s a pussycat compared to you.’

‘It’s not what it looks like,’ he insists. ‘Con and I go way back. We’ve been friends since before we were the age of the kids here. We like to butt heads, philosophically, but it’s just a debate, albeit an endless one.’

‘It looked like more than that to me,’ Heather says.

‘Don’t worry about it - there’s no animosity, I can assure you.’

‘I believe you. What I saw was the opposite of animosity. You were impassioned. It was like Blake’s an alcoholic and you’re his best friend staging an intervention.’

Kane opens his mouth as though to offer a denial, then lets out a regretful sigh. Busted.

‘You guys were at school together. Catholic school. But one day you saw the light and you’ve been trying to save him ever since?’

‘That would be one way of looking at it,’ he concedes. ‘Except I don’t tend to regard it as being me that had a conversion. It was growing up talking to Con about things that set me on my heretical way. He was always a deep thinker about these matters; about all matters. Smartest guy I’ve ever known.’

‘But if the smart guy turns religious, you reckon something’s gone wrong? Doesn’t that seem a little arrogant?’

‘It would if that was the whole story. Someone once said that “the reason smart people believe weird things is that they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons”. Usually that reason is that they were told this belief at an early and impressionable age by someone they trusted to tell them the truth. Then decades of reinforcement weave a web that is very difficult for the individual to pick apart because it’s like performing surgery on yourself. With Con, I’m determined to keep picking at the web for him, stop it from hardening.’

‘Because you think a “non-smart” reason lies at the heart of his faith. Sorry, but that still sounds incredibly arrogant.’

‘Like I said, it’s not the whole story.’

‘I heard he was once engaged before he decided to become a priest. Is that part of the story?’

Kane has a glance back along the corridor, as though checking there aren’t a dozen kids sneaking up on him. They’re approaching reception. With a troubled look on his face, he nods towards a couple of couches, and they sit.

‘Blake met this girl Gail in second year at uni, met her through me. She and I were at Strathclyde, Con was at Glasgow. She was studying law, but she said she’d no great desire to be a lawyer. Con was different: he didn’t know what he wanted to do before he went to uni, then once he got there, he just knew he didn’t want to leave. He enjoyed learning and he enjoyed teaching. By third year he was already paying back his student loan by tutoring kids for their Standard Grades and Highers. The guy just loved academia. He also loved Gail. The two of them were sickening, in fact, back then. I’d be going from one disastrous relationship to another and they were love’s young dream.’

Kane grimaces a little, like he’s suffering acid reflux and will have to re-swallow something bitter.

‘Just a fucking waste,’ he says. ‘Thinking of what he could have had. What
they
could have had.’

‘So what prompted this dramatic change of path? Never mind that, what about Gail: if they were engaged, how did the poor girl take him ditching her to join the clergy?’

Kane swallows, and it’s as bitter as he anticipated.

‘She dropped dead on a squash court two days after Con sat the last of his finals. Undiagnosed cardiac defect.’

‘Christ.’

‘I can’t begin to imagine what Con went through, and in my opinion, he never recovered. I think he joined the priesthood in the same way that men used to join the Foreign Legion.’

Kane’s eyes fill, though he’s talking about things that must have happened well over a decade ago.

‘He would probably have described himself as agnostic before Gail died. We were both brought up Catholics, but the difference between us was that while I was happy to have extricated myself and given it up as a bad lot, Con was regretful that the Church couldn’t answer his questions. He hadn’t been to mass in years, but it was like he was always leaving the door open just in case the Church could improve its case. Then he suddenly finds himself trying to make sense of what had happened to Gail, contemplating the loss of this whole future that had been in front of him one minute and taken away forever the next. He needed to believe in something, needed to believe there was a reason or an order behind it, and a purpose for himself in the world after being cut adrift. That’s his “compelling but non-smart” reason for turning to religion.’

‘But whether you like it or not, it was religion that got him through it,’ Heather says. She speaks softly, trying to ensure it doesn’t sound like she’s telling him off or taking sides, but she’s already conscious of wanting to protect Blake. ‘You have to give credit where it’s due. Con is happy in what he does. He’s good at what he does. He could never get back what he lost, but what he’s got today, he’s got because of his faith. Maybe you should try to make peace with that.’

Kane says nothing for a moment, but it’s like he’s struggling to suppress a response rather than contemplating her suggestion. He opens his mouth to speak, then holds off again, looking at her as if to say she really doesn’t understand.

‘Tell me this, Heather,’ he says, finally having collected himself. ‘Where’s the control group when people say faith got a person through something? How do we compare how that person would have got on in the same situation
without
their faith?’

‘But if you’re his best friend, the one who understands most what he’s been through, shouldn’t you of all people respect the decisions he’s made, the conclusions he’s reached? Even if you disagree with them, shouldn’t you accept how important to him Con’s beliefs are?’

Kane nods like this is something he knows is true, even something that bothers his conscience, but then fixes her with a look of unapologetic sincerity.

‘If I believed
he
believed them, I would.’

Heather feels her mouth open slightly but nothing emerges. She’s about to gently admonish him again for the inherent arrogance in Kane’s words, when she realises that they explain everything she’s never quite understood about Blake.

‘When we were debating tonight,’ Kane continues, ‘did you really hear what he said? He talks about “the God I have faith in”, not “the God I believe in”. Con has always had faith in the
idea
of faith. What he has is a meta-faith. Con isn’t a priest because he believes. He’s a priest because he wants to believe. Since Gail died, he’s spent his entire adult life searching for something that will
make
him believe. And he’s yet to find it.’

The laity and the media had talked of Joseph Ratzinger as being ‘the Vatican’s Rottweiler’, but those truly in the know understood that it was Parducci who had long been the most feared man in Rome, the unseen power behind two of the preceding three papacies (John Paul I being the exception, with Luciani’s efforts to marginalise Parducci’s influence leading to the most squalid of rumours).

‘Cardinal Tullian, peace be with you,’ he said.

‘Peace be with you.’

‘I hope you breakfasted well, for it was your last meal on this Earth as you used to know it.’

That Parducci was speaking English, despite Tullian’s fluent Italian, played a large part in salving his fears about what might be about to happen in this hidden and unwitnessed place. Parducci was extending a generous courtesy, and his tone was one of regret.

Parducci produced a key and pulled open the wide pair of wooden doors that dominated the antechamber. They revealed only a further door, this time of grey steel, its lock taking the form of an electronic keypad.

‘What is this place?’ Tullian asked.

‘To put it in the context of your home country, Cardinal, this place is the Church’s equivalent of what you may have heard referred to as Area 51.’

Parducci opened the steel door and led him inside, into his rebirth.

The specimens were enclosed in glass cases to prevent decaying contamination from the air, and kept in darkness to preserve them also from light; the vault being lit by ultraviolet lamps on the extremely rare occasions when anyone was permitted to view it.

Parducci first showed him a skeleton, picked clean by the ravages of time but shocking enough in bearing a tail at one end of its spine, horns protruding from its skull at the other.

‘This one came into the Church’s possession in 1321, slain in the mountains of Bavaria. If you look closely, you can see the damage to its upper arm from a sword blow, though it was in fact killed by being run through. Little is known beyond that. It was sent here by Matthias, Bishop of Mainz, and its discovery precipitated a truly bloody period of witch-hunting throughout Germany.’

He then led him to a desiccated and partially mummified specimen, dried-out skin still stretched across its frame, a look of snarling violence still legible on its grimacing face.

‘This one was entrusted to us by King James VI of Scotland - later James I of England - in 1590. Attempts were made to preserve it, but as you can see, the means available to our predecessors at the time were inadequate. This one was taken alive and observed personally by James, who eventually had it transported - under all secrecy - to the Vatican. James had seen the beast tortured but feared the consequences of killing it, in case this merely freed its soul to possess another.

‘The experience had a dramatic effect upon him and consequently upon his country. Witchcraft had been a criminal offence in Scotland before 1590 but very little action had been taken in the name of the law. However, having seen this demon live and breathe, James became both obsessed and paranoid. Within a year, three hundred alleged witches were tried for plotting to kill him, accused of feats such as summoning a storm to drown him at sea and attempting to conjure his death by melting a wax effigy of him. In 1597, he wrote his treatise on “Daemonologie”. Hundreds upon hundreds of people were executed as witches throughout his reign.’

Parducci’s words barely registered as Tullian stared aghast at these revolting affronts and contemplated the hideousness of all that their existence implied - for the world and, indeed, for the cosmos.

‘Your letter to Cardinal O’Hara suggested that the shadow realm could be but an atom’s width away. Here lies proof that the border between it and our world has already been breached. Demons are not merely symbolic, Cardinal, not simple projections of our darkest thoughts and most fearful nightmares. They have been coming through into our world for centuries, most probably for millennia.’

‘Caitlin,’ she tries again.

There’s no response.

It’s Friday night; no, Saturday morning now, technically. Saturday night into Sunday morning will mark her little anniversary. Six weeks clean. Six weeks since she last succumbed. It was getting more all the time, but she couldn’t say it was getting easier. Some things required less and less effort the more you got used to them, but this was like holding your breath. The longer you held out, the harder it became.

She used to read about drug abusers and, despite the Church’s message of compassion towards the afflicted - hate the sin but love the sinner - she couldn’t help but feel they were weak and self-indulgent. That was before she found her own heroin. Closer to the mark, she used to think the same thing about homosexuals, who were ‘called to chastity’ according to the Church. ‘This inclination constitutes for most of them a trial,’ the Catechism said. ‘These persons are called to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.’

Why couldn’t they just call on God’s strength and simply restrain themselves? she used to wonder. Now she knows.

This desire, it feels like a curse. She who has been so faithful, so devout, in every way that has been in her power; she who has never missed mass, said her prayers every night since she was three, given up most of her free time to church activities: she has committed a mortal sin. Knowingly, wantonly and repeatedly committed a mortal sin.

‘Both the Magisterium of the Church - in the course of a constant tradition - and the moral sense of the faithful have declared without hesitation that masturbation is an intrinsically and seriously disordered act.’ So said Pope Paul VI in
Persona Humana
1975. She had searched for any update on the Church’s position, or even a more liberal-minded interpretation of the previous, but as recently as 2000, the Scottish Catholic Education Commission’s consultation document ‘Relationships and Moral Education’ reiterated that it was ‘a very serious disorder that cannot be morally justified’, while Pope Benedict had called it ‘a debasement of the human body’.

She wishes she was still a child, wishes she was back in what that same document reminded her, longingly, was a ‘period of tranquillity and serenity’, undisturbed by ‘unnecessary knowledge’. She barely talks to boys now. She sometimes tells herself that she finds them disgusting, with their crudeness and base obsessions, but she knows that she’s merely deflecting the blame. What disgusts her about them is only what she sees reflected of herself: what they make her want; what they make her
do
.

She has to make her sacrifice to the Lord’s cross, and accept that she has a condition that, like homosexuality, must be seen as a call to chastity. Thus she has to limit her interactions, keep her dealings with boys as stilted and functionary as possible. She can’t let them give her imagination anything to feed upon, because that’s how it starts. A moment of flirtation, a lewd comment, a stolen look: the slightest thing can be the seed, the germ. That’s how temptation works.

It is a relief to be here, to be on retreat. Perhaps God knew she needed respite. Three nights in a room with three other girls. Three nights with no option. She’s been looking forward to it, knowing it will ease her over the six-week mark and beyond.

So why can’t she sleep?

Because a retreat is not enough. Three nights’ respite is not enough. She needs to talk to somebody, but there is nobody she
can
talk to: not about this. She can’t confess it either, can’t tell a priest. Not Father Blake, certainly, and not Canon Daly either. He’s known her since she was about five, spoken to her three times a week at choir practice and what have you.

Bernie and Maria are not an option. Nor is she going to ask Caitlin: ‘Hey, do you touch yourself?’ But Caitlin does seem spiky on the subject of the Church these days, and Rosemary has a sudden interest in discovering why. She wants to hear a dissenting voice: not that of a person who was always ambivalent or even hostile to her faith, but a person who used to be as devout as she. If she could talk, just talk to someone who might have a different perspective, she’s sure that would help.

But help how? Help because basically she wants someone to say what she’s done - what she wants to do again - is all right? Who could tell her that, with any authority, when the Catechism is so clear on the matter, and has been for centuries? Isn’t she like a drug addict wishing the authorities would just legalise heroin rather than dealing with her own problem?

It’s
not
all right. That’s why she’s suffering. It’s not rocket science. Sin leads to suffering. She sinned, ergo she is suffering.

So why, when she is
not
sinning, does it feel like she’s suffering more?

‘Caitlin,’ she whispers a third time. ‘Are you awake?’