the haunted abyss
Extract from my novel ‘After The Fire’
On his bed in the hostel all day, in the queue for the food slopped out on the plates, watching crap in the TV lounge in the evening, smoking any spliff he could get out by the fire escape, it didn’t matter where he was, what he did, Joe Belton couldn’t get away from the sign.
Two simple lines that cross.
They say if you know how to worry you know how to pray, but he stuck with the worry. From every angle he broke this cross apart, and considered it, and jammed it back together in different ways and none of it fitted with him. He gnawed at it, and it gnawed at him, and he tried to digest it but while he did that it ate him right up.
Start with nothing. Out of that comes a dot. The dot becomes a line. Then two lines. Then they meet. A cross is the fourth most simple thing in the world.
Yet everywhere Joe turned his gaze this simple symbol leaped out at him.
It was in shadows made by the blind across his ceiling at night. (How come it only came with the street lights, only at night when he was scared? Why couldn’t he see the shape in the slats in the daytime) It was in the crack on the wall of the smoking shed. The scar on the neck of the old boy who doled out the dinners. The way they laid out the trestle tables in the dining hall. The breaks in the glass in the mirror he shaved in. In silver and gold on the necklace of Ginny who worked on reception. The tattoo on Ant’s arm. In the logo on the poster of the smiling teenagers at the bus stop. The interweaving tyre tracks in the mud on the grass verge. Two crossed syringes in the gutter. The carving on Ronnie’s brand-new gravestone last November. Birds forming intersecting rows in the branches above the grave. Silver contrails in the frost-blue sky. Everywhere he looked, everything made the sign of the cross.
The most powerful cross of all? The mark made on his forehead on Christmas Eve.
Swaying into midnight mass, the whole church spinning, his belly bubbly, feeling pukey from the lagers and the kebab, his heart banging in his chest from the brandies, in there for no more reason than something childish and long-forgotten and soft and warm-hearted had led him, Joe had knelt at the altar rail, his head bowed low, his arms folded in front of him.
He had folded his arms because even through the booze he remembered he couldn’t take proper communion. Unconfirmed at his age, the mumbling shame of it. Never confirmed meant a mam who hated God for her own dad who walked out, and her own mam who died way too young. Who hated God for how the kind older man she picked as husband could only give her one single weird kid before he turned out to be weak and buffeted by all he should have saved her from, to the point he could barely keep a roof over their head let alone excite her. Never confirmed meant a dad who wanted Joe out playing football, or fighting, or breaking and entering, or smashing stuff up, or doing anything but going to church on a Sunday and sitting with the posh kids who mocked him.
Never confirmed. Unconfirmed. The story of his life.
Preparing to give him the wafer the vicar noticed Joe’s folded arms and changed his approach to give him a blessing. He touched his middle finger to a vial of oil and then marked a slow cross on Joe’s forehead.
So tender his words:
‘May God bless you and keep you. Make his face shine upon you’
The cross he marked on Joe was 2,000 years old, and Joe felt every day of its weight.
A week later, as he woke up in his pit on New Year’s Eve, Joe could still sense the cross on his forehead. He lit his first rollie of the day and considered why this might be. Not many people touched Joe these days so that could account for a lot, but there was more. That touch had mattered. It was the touch of love. The tenderness of it burned. The fact such a thing as this ceremony existed. The penetrating compassion with which the vicar spoke the words.
How could two crossed lines on his forehead make him want to cry so much seven days later?
On his phone on his bed all the day long, but this day was not normal. Bored with Instagram he had a look at Facebook, scrolling through a group created for his old school. He did this more these days, flicking through the feed, spotting marriages, divorces, hair loss, weight gain, children, grandchildren even. Gate-crashing holidays and getting drunk at family birthdays by proxy. Seeing which of the teachers got love, and which were remembered bitterly. Seeing holidays in Canada, the Grand Canyon, Ayers Rock. New kitchens and boat trips and houses in Cornwall. Football teams, netball trophies, school shows. Glimpses of lives he could have had, and one or two of the deaths. Time spent on Facebook never ended well, and this day was no different. He saw they were planning a school reunion
in May. Funny no-one had invited him.
For a moment he fantasised. Get lucky on the horses and keep the money for once. Get a haircut, hire a suit, a Merc, get back up to Grimsby, put on a show and rub their noses in – what? The rubbish of his daily life? How bad would that make him feel?
He played it out for a moment, saw the old faces, imagined how it went. He’d go in, get a drink, find someone he recognised, and go over to talk about – what? Maybe he could fake it. He could have a wife. Say they met in Cyprus on an 18-30. Two kids, hell, maybe a grandkid or two by now. If he stayed away from the fine detail, he could blag a good history. He could bang on about the holidays in America, the businesses he’d set up, the – but there Joe stopped stuttered, and eventually stopped. He couldn’t think of anything else. It rang fake, every word of it.
The rage hit him. Who was he kidding? He choked even trying to blag himself. He’d had five years living on the street, two turns in prison, twenty years as an addict. You can’t hide what that does to you with a suit and a haircut. He wouldn’t last five minutes. He could see the smiles fading, the frowns, the smug gets starting to mock, the jeers starting, till they ran him out of the place.
Sick to his stomach, beginning an anxiety sweat, he got off Facebook fast. Stupid, stupid, digging that up. When would he learn?
The kid in the room upstairs started blasting drill out from some antique sound system. Joe dug his head back into his pillow and tried to go back to sleep.
The day passes quietly enough, but it’s about waiting, getting ready. This evening is a big evening. New Year’s Eve is the biggest night of the year, it’s a given, any kid on the pull knows that, and Joe is still very much a kid on the pull, even though he should have long learned his lesson, but where else is he going to find the woman he’s been seeking for the past forty years?
And he’s right, it’s going to be great because at ten past seven the pub is already rammed. He gets past the bouncers without a second look, which makes a change, and from the first step inside the glee bursts out of him at the full-body blast of the crowd. The Irish girl is behind the bar, Jamie is next in line to be served so it’s perfect timing, the jukebox is playing I Feel Free by Cream, top tune from way back to get him in the mood, and Rob is working on three girls by the window who are laughing and flicking their hair.
He bares his teeth at these six hours of pleasure that’s his. He’s saved for weeks so he’ll get a couple of drinks from Jamie, they’ll get over to Rob and the girls, have a laugh. There’s one girl each and they’re fit, things will be good.
He gets his first pint down and the jokes come in. Endless gags, the lagers fizzing in his brain, him bouncing off Jamie and Rob, the three of them doing the old routine, but they’re on fire tonight, the other two are faster than him but even so he’s well on form too and he’s hanging on in there, he’s got a good few sparks in him, he’s leaping and jumping with them, and everyone is laughing so hard at the bar and the Irish girl is laughing with him while she serves the crowd, she’s appallingly beautiful and her smile jabs at the need in him so hard it wounds, yet she’s laughing so much at his jokes he can’t get it wrong, it’s like playing pool with each ball on rails to the pockets, like ten-pin bowling with the bumpers up.
Later and two flash twenty-five-year-olds have pulled the flicky-hair girls, and the Irish girl is off down the other end of the packed bar so it’s more lagers and shots and then a few wines because you have to don’t you it’s New Year’s.
Later and it’s gone to shit. The music’s too loud and the crowd’s thinned out and the Irish girl is huddled in a corner with Jamie who’s smiling a filthy smile and whispering in her ear, and Rob’s AWOL, gone off hunting with that blank look in his eye, but it could still be OK because at least Joe’s got himself huddled up in a corner too, and even if it’s not the Irish girl it’s the remaindered flicky hair girl, left behind by her better looking mates. She’s definitely not so clever up close, but she’ll do. But something’s off. Too much booze maybe. Whatever it is he can’t talk no more, his tongue’s too thick. His lines stopped landing a while back, she’s trying to keep it going on her own but she’s getting bored. He knows he shouldn’t have got on the Kraken but he can’t see an obvious moment when he should have stopped drinking; it was one long conveyor belt to this point.
He tells her how he’s being haunted by the Cross; she says yeah OK but it’s obvious she thinks it’s a line and really he just wants to shag her. He surprises himself because he did, but he doesn’t want to now, that would take him away from the Cross, now all he wants is to talk to her, why can’t they just talk why does sex always come in they might really love each other if they could just get to know each other first.
Later and he’s on his own by the toilets. He should have eaten before he came out, not saved his money for the booze, stupid, so stupid after all these years’ practice, how can he still mistime it so badly? And the music is banging on his head and his stomach is turning over and he’s sweating and he can’t hear properly but now he thinks he can hear bells ringing and everyone is kissing everyone else except him and everything’s aching and he feels he’s got the flu of a thousand years, a flu from the tomb, an Egyptian flu, a flu from back before history. He aches so bad and now everywhere he looks is light and blur and jagged colours and the kissing has stopped and the faces are coming and going and they’re full of fear and sharp teeth and the people are hungry and there’s a rush coming and they’ll swarm at him and fall on him and tear him apart and the mouths will feed on him and he’ll be done and that’s going to be it, once and for all, finally the end of him, is this all he came to?
Later outside in the cold and the air is biting at him, and he’s down on his knees in mud, and he’s sprawling and scrabbling for his money. He knows he’s miles from the pub now, but it’s even more miles home to the hostel and he’s put his fists in his pockets to find what cash he has left, see if he has enough to mumble his way to a kebab, a strip club, a cab home, a car to a new life, a way out, some hope, but he’s only left with coins and they slip through his fingers, jump away from him into the dark, land in the mud.
He’d bent down, couldn’t reach them, tipped forward onto his knees. It’s ice cold through his jeans, but it’s only mud it’ll warm up soon anyway who cares. Then he’s collapsing forward, smack onto his hands, plashing about in the slop, now he’s fallen he wants to stay there, even though the ice in the mud is killing him and he’s panting and he lets out a sob because it’s not that comfortable and his legs are cold and his belly’s getting in the way and there’s such a long walk home and it all hurts so bad. He lifts his head, realises he’s by the side of the church, and moans, ‘not again’, because up above him is a big banner – it’s got Bear Grylls on it for some mad reason which defeats him entirely – and red next to it hanging like blood in the night is the biggest cross of all.
In the morning Joe would be sober, and he’d look back at this moment in disbelief and fear, but for now he’s too drunk to do anything but groan. This cross has got the killing grip on him so he groans good, groans deep and low and agonised, groans in pure, shameless terror of the light cloaked in dark and the infinite and final knowledge of a newly birthed yet eternally patient world of love that calls him out of himself.
