Jubilate (28 page)

‘What’s wrong, Sheila?’ Louisa asks.

‘He’s a pig! Look!’ She points to the regurgitated cereal.

‘Worse things happen at sea,’ Louisa says. ‘We’ll soon have that cleared up.’ While waiting for a handmaiden to bring a cloth, she stands behind Frank and ruffles his hair. He makes no response but returns to his little finger and resumes counting.

Derek gazes approvingly at Richard and Nigel. ‘Looking out for one another already. That’s what Lourdes is all about.’

‘I’m going to look out for Nigel,’ Richard says staunchly.

‘That’s the spirit,’ Derek replies.

‘I’m going to look out for him at every meal.’

Derek and Louisa move off. A handmaiden wipes the table. I am touched by the evidence of Richard’s newfound compassion, while reminding him that toast tastes better eaten through the mouth than the nose.

‘I’m not eating it,’ he says, as if to a simpleton. ‘I’m showing Nigel my moustache.’

Nigel, at least, seems to relish the sight. Moments later the young doctor comes to wheel him away for an injection. ‘Anticonvulsant,’ she whispers to me.

‘I had a needle in my brain,’ Richard says proudly to Nigel as we follow them out, leaving Sheila and Frank to continue eating.

We assemble outside the building at eight o’clock, which seems premature for a service that begins an hour later in a church a few hundred yards away, but that is to ignore the logistics of a Lourdes procession. Ken looks baleful as he barks out commands which are erratically obeyed. Like a ten-year-old boy playing soldiers, he
marshals
us into a line that is regularly broken when people step out to fetch sunshades, exchange greetings and distribute water. I intervene to stop Richard accepting the wheelchair that is routinely offered to every
malade
, a term rendered all the harsher by the coarse English accents. It feels cruel to separate him from his new friend, but I refuse to tempt fate by letting him claim a phantom handicap.

‘Do you want people to think you can’t walk?’

‘I don’t care. My brain doesn’t work properly, which is more
dangerous
than Nigel’s legs.’

Once again I am left to speculate on the extent of his self-
knowledge
. ‘The exercise will give it oxygen.’

‘You’ll be sorry if I fall over.’

‘Nonsense!’ Louisa interjects, as she hurries past with a sun hat. ‘You’re a fine figure of a man.’ Far from bridling at the interruption, Richard looks smug.

‘If I can’t go at the front with the chairs, then I’ll go at the back.’

‘If you insist.’

‘The very, very back.’

‘Wherever you like, as long as you stay in line.’

I see no sign of the film crew and, to my surprise, feel a tinge of disappointment. Yesterday at the airport I was unduly sharp with the director (Victor? Gilbert? Hubert?). I did my best to make amends during the evening mass and, fanciful though it might seem, I would swear that we shared something more than the collective Peace. I would like the chance to build on it, not least because his sensitivity and intelligence (the glint in his sea-green eyes) make a welcome change from the doleful antics of Frank and Sheila Clunes. But he is here to work and I am here for Richard. I am not one of his chosen interviewees and I have no intention of pushing myself forward. Nevertheless, I cannot deny the spark of … what: sympathy?
solidarity
? that I felt when I held his hand. Victor? Robert? Clement? How can I have forgotten his name?

Patricia strolls up and rests her hand on Richard’s, only for him to brush it away. I have to admire the skill with which she
camouflages
the rejection, swatting an imaginary fly off his sleeve. ‘Your first procession, Gillian,’ she says, as piously as if it were my first communion.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s good to see everyone wearing their Jubilate shirts. No
distinctions
. All one body, even the disabled.’

‘Yes.’ I repeat, distracted by the glimmer of her brooch.

We pass a fresh-faced young priest who might have walked straight off a Fra Angelico fresco. Patricia gives him an unctuous smile.

‘Did you see his hair?’ she asks, as we walk on.

‘Beautiful,’ I say of the russet locks spilling down his neck.

‘He’s just trying to be clever.’

‘Our Lord had long hair.’

‘Our Lord wore a loincloth,’ she says, peremptorily.

I compose myself as we process around the Esplanade and down the steep incline to the church, where we find the crew waiting for us at the entrance. I decline to play to the camera and fix my gaze straight ahead. We walk into a building reminiscent of a vast nuclear bunker, along a ramp lined with primitively painted posters of saints, and down to an egg-shaped nave with a ribbed concrete ceiling like an upturned boat. The pews are already packed, but
neither the wealth of humanity nor the brightly decorated altar can relieve the brutality of the design.

Given the lack of seats, I suggest that we join the Jubilate helpers in one of the shadowy recesses bordering the nave. Patricia objects. Spotting a modest gap on a distant bench, she makes a dash for it, flashing a gracious smile at the Mediterranean family on the other side who, realising that she is in earnest, shuffle their already cramped bottoms closer together. That done, the three Pattersons, one triumphant, one indifferent and one embarrassed, squeeze into the vacated space.

‘See,’ Patricia whispers to me, ‘all these people need is a push.’

Conscious of activity behind us but unable to distinguish it over the sea of heads, we watch the lengthy procession on a giant screen. First, representatives of the various pilgrimages, holding up banners, file down the nave and around the altar before vanishing from view. Then a line of priests and bishops, with a cardinal at the rear, approach the altar, kneel and kiss it, before taking their
designated
seats opposite the choir. Every so often the director – or whoever else selects the shots – cuts away to the conductor waving his hands like a schoolboy tracing an hourglass figure or a potter throwing a dimpled vase. At slack moments the screen fills with stock footage of the Virgin, St Bernadette or a chalice. At others, the camera pans over the congregation, lingering on the wheelchairs at the front. Richard jumps as he spots Nigel, his face fixed in a
permanent
grin, nodding out of time with the chorale.

‘That’s Nigel,’ he says to Patricia, who looks blank. ‘That’s Nigel,’ he says to me. I nod and smile. The fortuitous sighting keeps him busy, as he fixes his eyes on the screen in the hope of another.
Meanwhile
, the officiating priest welcomes pilgrims from around the globe, listing their many different cities and organisations, each of which is greeted with warm applause. At the mention of Barcelona, I clap with particular vigour, a compliment which our disgruntled neighbours resolutely fail to return to the ‘Jubilates from the UK’.

The prayers, spoken in French, German, Swedish and Italian, with simultaneous translations into German, Spanish and Dutch, remind me of the woman I once wanted to be: someone with a world of language at her fingertips. I feel cheated when an American voice
booms over the loudspeakers, rendering my one skill superfluous.

The linguistic duplication drags out the service and I am
grateful
for Richard’s preoccupation. The Communion is equally
protracted
, the congregation lining up in front of scores of priests who are dotted around the church. Anxious not to be accused of
queue-jumping
after our appropriation of the bench, I steer Richard and Patricia away from the Spaniards towards a huddle of
wheelchair-bound
Jubilates. We stand behind Brenda, the woman with the
ferocious
sales pitch, as two young Irish girls walk among the
malades
, offering them cups of water.

‘Can I give you some?’ the larger girl asks Brenda.

‘Have you got one with gin in it?’ she replies.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Gin! Gin!’ she cackles. Heads turn. The priest looks up from his current communicant. Marjorie rushes forward to silence Brenda. The two girls scurry away.

‘She’s got multiple sclerosis; she’s a lesbian; she lives in Hull,’
Patricia
hisses in my ear, leaving it unclear which of the three distresses her the most. She breaks off on finding herself next in line for the priest. Richard follows, opening his mouth to receive the Blessed Sacrament. I turn away wondering why, given his wholesale
regression
to childhood, it should offend me so much that he takes
communion
on the tongue like his mother, rather than in the hand like me.

We emerge from the subterranean gloom into blazing sunlight. Marjorie is waiting for us at the entrance.

‘Straight up to the square for the group photograph! I don’t need to tell you where to go, do I?’ she asks Patricia.

‘Of course not,’ she replies, her pleasure at being deemed a doyenne overriding her dislike of being taken for granted. A
silver-haired
brancardier who knows her of old comes up to greet her. My mind drifts during the introductions and I spend the next few minutes trying – and failing – to catch his name. He explains that six months ago he was diagnosed with high blood pressure and ordered to take more exercise, hence the pedometer on his belt, which he slips off at Richard’s insistence. Having shown him how it works, he enters Richard’s statistics – a procedure complicated by his refusal
to acknowledge his weight in kilograms – before clipping it on to his waistband. Richard dashes up and down the path, narrowly
avoiding
both wheelchairs and crutches, before returning to announce triumphantly that he has ‘lost eight calories’.

Eager to clear my head, I leave Richard in his mother’s charge and press on, finding myself alongside Claire, the softly spoken woman with the cerebral-palsied son, whom I met at the airport. She
supports
his elbow as he limps along, dragging his left leg with his right foot turned inwards, his arms bent and his hands pressed to his chest like a child mimicking a begging dog.

‘Hello again,’ I say. She smiles warily. ‘Did you do the
International
Mass on your previous pilgrimages?’

‘Oh yes, it’s one of the highlights. Martin looks forward to it, don’t you, love?’ He emits a sound like escaping gas. She strokes his hair protectively. His right hand flails as if to flick her off, but his face beams. ‘Let me do that again.’ She strokes his hair and sniffs it. ‘Oh you smell so good.’ He giggles and dribbles down his chin. ‘I’m sorry,’ Claire says to me, ‘but I can’t resist. He’s so clean. He had his second shower of the year this morning.’

‘When was the first?’ I ask inanely.

‘Last night,’ she says, with a laugh. ‘Last night.’ I am afraid that she might burst into tears. ‘He’s getting so big now that I can’t manage on my own. Of course we do our best. A strip wash every day. But there’s nothing to beat the smell of freshly showered boy.’ She nuzzles his neck and I try not to stare at the patch of drool on her sweatshirt.

‘It must be hard for you.’

‘It’s harder for Martin,’ she says sharply.

‘I didn’t mean –’

‘I understand. But I won’t be made a martyr. People who know – who knew – me far better have tried. When Martin was born and everyone was throwing in their pennyworth, it was my mother – my dear, sweet mother who always wanted everything to be just so – who put it best. “God doesn’t make rejects,” she said. And she was right.’ Looking at Martin, his broad smile a sign that he knows we are talking about him even if he cannot make out what is being said, I am inclined to agree. ‘Martin isn’t my cross or my trial or my burden; he’s my son.’

‘Still, you must need help.’

‘Why?’ she asks, and I glimpse the steel in her soul. ‘Martin’s father has offered to find people.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise you were married, still married.’

‘I’m not. He left three years after Martin was born.’

‘Men find it so hard to cope with imperfection, especially in a son,’ I say, thinking of Richard’s father. My words tail off as I watch a middle-aged man tenderly leading a boy dressed as Batman into the Basilica Square, his prominent hump artfully concealed beneath the flowing cape.

‘He said it wasn’t Martin he couldn’t cope with but me, or rather me and Martin together. Do you have children?’

‘No.’

‘I’m sorry. Yes, even though Martin’s my only child, I’m sorry. And I make no bones about it. Do you need some water, love?’ He shakes his head. ‘All fathers are a little jealous of their sons – that’s where the psychiatrists have got it the wrong way round. But the father of a boy who’s special (I drop the
needs
) is the worst. I
understand
now, though at the time … let’s just say I found it more
difficult
. He wanted to keep Martin out of sight. He wanted to have more children. How could I when I knew I’d have to devote every ounce of my strength to Martin? No rejects, remember! So he left and he found someone else. Helen – his wife – is very good with Martin. He goes there sometimes at weekends, although I won’t allow him to … Martin wouldn’t be happy to stay overnight. They have two children. Boys. Arthur and John. They’re good with Martin too. You like Arthur and John, don’t you, love?’ Once again he emits the
disconcerting
hiss. ‘But they’re not special. Not at all.’ Her eyes fill with tears. ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to witter on like this, but you’ll find that’s the way of things in Lourdes. When I was at school, a friend had a phone with a party line. I asked my mother if we could have one. “We have a line to ourselves,” she said, making it clear that a party line wasn’t quite the thing. But it still sounded much more exciting. And Lourdes is like that. You spend the week listening in on other peoples’ lives. Some of them are happy, and some are sad, but they’re all inspiring.’

We enter the Basilica Square and head for the patch of lime green
at the base of the steps, parting company when Patricia beckons me to join Richard and herself in the front row. I watch the director filming, until he too is brought into line when Louisa, living up to her nickname, orders ‘our honorary pilgrims’ to join in. I must stop thinking about him. It is absurd to assume that the man must be as interesting as his job.