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Description
Part 2 - Checking In



    It’s not long before my head grows heavy and my sight grows dim. I must be getting tired. The adrenaline has worn off and the accident is taking its toll. I’ve lost track of time and I need to fill this thing up before I run out of gas anyway. All things considered, I have to stop for the night.

    A sign comes up out of the darkness up ahead. I pull over to get a better look, but instantly regret it. It’s a U-turn sign with ‘REPENT’ in ugly hand-painted letters above it and ‘OR IT’S GOING TO BE HELL’ below it. I gun the engine before the car comes to a full stop. Goddamn bible thumpers. I didn’t even know they were bothering people this far out west.

    The hotel itself doesn’t really have a sign. The road just ends up in the parking lot in front of the main building, which is weird because I could have sworn I was still on the interstate. There is a small sign stating ‘hotel parking only’ though, so I pull up into the nearest empty spot. My bones hurt when I step out of the car and I have to force myself to stand up straight. God, I wish I wasn’t getting older. Stiff legs carry me across the parking lot. There are some really nice cars here. A ’58 Plymouth Fury, pearly white on blood red, the sexy curves of a silver Mercedes 300 SL gull wing. That one alone must have cost a fortune. From the parking lot it’s hard to make out the hotel itself. It looks old with lots of arches. Red brick walls that look a washed out grey in the dark of night and a tiled roof. A rectangle of light appears in the black shadows beyond the middle arch and oh - my - God.

    There she stands in the doorway. A pitch black silhouette, but unmistakingly a woman. I draw closer and the warm light from inside slowly reveals more detail. Raven hair and ruby lips. A low cut dress.

    ‘A lost soul,’ she says and her voice alone renders my stash of Viagra unnecessary. As I walk up the stairs to stand next to her in the wide opening of the double oak doors, she extends her hand. I take it and immediately yank mine back in painful surprise. Sparks fly from her fingertips with a clearly audible crack as static electricity stings our fingers.

    Or perhaps just mine. Her smile never leaves her as she extends a slender arm and beckons me inside. Just as I’m about to step inside I hear the mission bell. I freeze, one foot on plush red carpet, one foot on cold bare stone. A furious look distorts the face of the woman. No wonder, who the hell rings a bell in the middle of the night? It reminds me of the church bells back in London. The highest density of churches in the whole of England and the city still managed to produce one of the world’s most famous blasphemes. Involuntarily, I remember father Dowley lecturing me while the church bells of St. Michael’s ring overhead. He sits me down in the benches with my hands out on the bench in front of me.

    ‘Do you know why you’re here, Lennard?’ he asks.

    ‘To serve God?’ I can’t help being a smartass. Of course I know why I’m here. It’s because that prick Nigel ratted me out when we were caught spying on the girls in their changing room. It didn’t matter it was Nigel who made the peeping hole it in the first place. He just made sure he was the first to lay blame on somebody else and that somebody else was me.

    ‘No, my son. You are here to be held responsible for what you did.’

    I look down at my feet. Now I know I’m in trouble. Father Dowley is old school. He’s not one to spare the rod as they say.

    ‘I thought you were different than the other boys, Lennard. I honestly thought you were better than this. Your mother is an honest and hardworking woman. She doesn’t deserve the humiliation of her son being caught a Peeping Tom. Tell me, Lennard, are you sorry for what you did?’

    I close my eyes and although I do feel sorry, for I know I betrayed my mother’s trust in me, all I see is a room full of young girls taking their clothes off. They’re laughing and talking and I spot Emma McCall immediately and see how she is completely naked. Her breasts are as big as I imagined they would be and they jiggle as she walks towards the showers.

    ‘Yes, I am,’ I manage, severely hoping my adolescent erection doesn’t show.

    ‘Of course you are. Lennard, you can lie to me, but do you realize there is someone you cannot lie to? You will have to answer to him eventually. Will you lie to him too? Don’t you know you have a choice? It may be difficult to see, but you do. You always do. You know what will happen if you stray from the path. But it is and always will be a choice that leads you there. Do you know where making these choices could lead you?’

    Torn between my shame and the urging sensation in my groin, I’m thinking to myself, this could be heaven, or this could be hell. Father Dowley waits patiently. I feel the enormous weight of the church around me and above me. I feel the eyes of Jesus as he looks down on me from above the altar. I can’t bear it anymore.

    ‘Look, I said I was sorry, didn’t I?’ I shout out. The stone walls echo back to us. Big mistake. I look up, but father Dowley doesn’t appear to be angry. He’s not even scowling. He looks disappointed. It confuses me for a moment, but then a searing pain streaks across my hands. He may be old, but father Dowley is still quick as lightning when he gets the chance to use his ruler. He smacks it down on my fingers again and again. The pain is excruciating and one panick-stricken moment I fear never to be able to play my guitar again. I jump out of the bench and ram my shoulder into the old man, bowling him over onto the cold stone floor. Without stopping, without looking, I run out of church.

    ‘You’re only sorry you got caught, filthy little boy, and that’s not enough!’ father Dowley cries after me. Next Sunday, I fake a flu and stay at home. I stopped listening what church had to say from that moment on.

    ‘Mr Washford? Are you all right?’

    I blink and stare in her eyes. They are dark. Seemingly pitch black and endlessly deep. She looks comically puzzled and her frown makes her look even more attractive. Her smell is intoxicating. I’m so tired I don’t care she addresses me by my real name.

    ‘Yeah, sorry. I just need some sleep, badly,’ I say to her, captivated by those dark eyes. ‘I’ve been driving for a long time and I kind of had a near miss a while back. I need a place to crash and to be honest, I’d never expected you guys to be open at this ungodly hour. Do you have anything available?’

    ‘Of course we have. And we’re always open, especially at ungodly hours. Please follow me.’

    Then she lights up a candle and shows me the way. I get a good look at her amazing backside shifting below the shimmering red silk of her dress. I’m not so tired I don’t notice there are no panty lines in that dress. I don’t know what to make of her. She’s classy, elegant and sophisticated, but somehow everything about her just makes me want her in a very unclassy, unelegant and a very unsophisticated way. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it. All I can do is to keep my cool.

    For now.

    We’re walking up the wide stairs, arriving at an ornamental hallway leading directly away from the lobby. Several smaller corridors lead away from this one. The place is a maze. We pass a dark courtyard and I can’t make anything out. We climb another flight of stairs and go down a wide adobe style corridor. She leads me down several of them and I follow like an obedient puppy. When we pass another smaller one I think I hear something. There are voices down the corridor. I thought I heard them say... something. I can’t make it out. Hotel hallways always seem to have a weird way of distorting sound. She's walking very close to me now, way inside my personal space. I don’t mind and I think she knows it. I’m taller then she is and when I glance to my left, I can look straight down her cleavage.

    ‘I’m sorry I didn’t catch your name,’ I say as we walk down yet another ornamental hallway. ‘Or the name of this place, for that matter.’

    ‘Please call me Cally, Lennard. May I call you Lennard? And welcome to the Hotel California. Such a lovely place.’

    ‘Cali? As in California?’

    Her smile is wide and warm and she flashes her long lashed eyes at me. Such a lovely face.

    ‘‘No, silly, although I do love California. You can find anything you fancy out here. People are not bound by the old rules and they’re willing to try things strictly taboo not too long ago. This hotel is a reflection of that lifestyle, a tribute even. Plenty of room at the Hotel California, every time of year. You can do whatever you want. Every whim and every fantasy, you can find it here.

    ‘Every fantasy?’ I ask credulously. I can’t help giving her my Jack Nicholson grin.

    ‘Well, you know,’ she answers and leaves a world of meaning hanging in the air. Again, there’s that look.

     ‘So, Hotel California, huh?’ I venture, eager to keep the conversation going. I want her to keep talking forever. I want to hear her soft voice saying things to me that would make the memories of the naked girls of St. Margaret’s Grammar School sound as boring as Sunday sermons. ‘Strange place for a hotel, though. It looks old. Spanish?’

    She nods. ‘It used to be an old mission,’ she says. One of the forgotten missions of California actually, but not one of those two they found again. This one has quite a different history. There are some great ghost stories to tell about this place, you know. Guaranteed to keep you up all night.’

    ‘I bet you do this far out in the desert.’

    We turn into the next corridor branching off into utter darkness. The feeble flame of her candle is the only light and it draws us closer to each other. She stops in front of a heavy oak door, one of many identical doors lining the walls.

    ‘Here we are; room number 616.’

    I don’t want her to go away. I want to pull her close and kiss her. I want to feel her black curls on my face as I sweep my lips alongside her long neck down towards her chest.

    I’m not sure if she knows what I’m thinking. I think she does, but she just smiles a little wider and winks. Then she hands me the candle, placing it between us like the smallest of shields.

    ‘I suggest you have a good night’s sleep, Lennard. To be honest you look like you need it. And sleep in tomorrow, why don’t you? You deserve it.’

    With that she touches my arm and walks away, down the unlit corridor. I stare after her until she dissolves into the darkness. I guess I do deserve some rest, although I expect to lie awake all night from everything I went through. The long drive through the desert, the car crash, it all seems so unreal to me now. All I can think of is Cally’s perfect ass moving from side to side as she walks away from me.

    I realize she hasn’t given me a key to my room, but fortunately the door is unlocked. Inside, I cannot help but whistle. I have seen plenty of decadent hotel rooms, trust me, but this one is just gorgeous. Everything is pristine white, just as I like it. A bed the size of a football field dominates the entire room. The bathroom is a cathedral of white porcelain and chrome. But as inviting as the group sized Jacuzzi is, I flop down on the bed with my clothes on and immediately drift off into nothingness.

    The nothingness doesn’t last long however. I can’t decide whether it’s a dream or one of those hyper realistic memory experiences. All I know is that I’m standing in the kitchen of my mum’s house. Dad buggered off long before I can remember, so it has always been my mum’s house. It’s small, damp and impossible to heat in winter. We didn’t have any money; nobody did in those days. Mum worked at the factory. She worked every day and most evenings too, except for Sundays. She worked until her back was permanently bent and still we were never able to pay rent on time. But by God it could still be clean. Every curtain, every table, every floor was a deep clean you don’t get with poncy detergents, only with hard scrubbing on your knees.

    But not this time. I see a thin layer of dust on the kitchen tiles and so I know something is terribly, terribly wrong. I look up and catch myself in the hallway mirror. My hair is long, my cheeks have pimples. I’m dressed in rough clothes too wide for my stick figure of a body. I can’t be older then seventeen.

    As I climb the stairs I know what will be waiting for me and yet I climb them anyway. Muffled sounds drift out of mum’s tiny bedroom. It’s Aunt Christina, mums younger sister. I can see her through the doorway. She’s dressed in black and her hair is tied in a black scarf. She’s bent over the narrow bed where mum lies. As I enter, I see doctor Flatts and father Dowley are also there. The only person I hate intensely is also the only one who acknowledges my existence. Without a word, he ushers the others out of the room and leaves me alone with my dying mother.

    She looks old, so old. I could pick her up and cradle her like a small child. She’s lost the hard look in her face, the one that could bite through steel if needed. The cancer took it from her. It took her strength and replaced it with fear. She is dying and she is afraid. I want to take her hand, but we are years past any physical intimacy. Suddenly she clutches my hand and I jump. She always was a mind reader. She’ll never say it, but we look each other in the eye and we know. So much heartfelt things remain unspoken.

    ‘Father Dowley tells me you quit the choir,’ she manages under her breath. ‘He says it’s not the same without your voice.’

    I say nothing. I have nothing to say and I couldn’t manage it if I did.

    ‘He says you’ve been chumming with those boys from the Buck and Horse.’

    This time I nod. The Buck and Horse is notorious for the rough crowd of East End and the rock and roll music that lures them in. The “boys” are Noël and Liam. They started the band Bad Reputation which is sort of the Buck and Horse’s main attraction. Every night the band plays, the coppers come and clear the place out. Sometimes that includes the band too. I met up with Liam while having a drink with a friend. He got hit in the throat during a fight and was looking for someone to fill in as a singer for a few weeks. So I sang Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” right there and then and Liam simply told me to come round next Friday night. That was two months ago and I’ve been singing every Friday and most of the Saturdays since then. If not at the Buck and Horse, then somewhere else. Noël already mentioned it might be a good idea to make me a permanent member of the band. Liam kept having trouble with his throat anyway and the crowd went mad every time I started singing. And every time the crowd goes mad, I get a rush like never before. I feel so alive, so full of fire, so free. It’s as if the people are giving me their energy and I can take it, put into my song and give it back amplified. I want to be on stage. I need to be on stage. I need to be free.

    All this I can’t say to mum. She’s not one to stand in the spotlights. She kept her head down and worked hard, minding her own business. She raised three sons the hard way, two of them turned out fairly decent. David worked at Mr Condon, the butcher and Lou was in the navy somewhere. Only Lennard, the runt of the litter, is causing the neighbours to whisper.

    ‘Lennard, look me in the eyes when I’m talking to you.’

    I look up from our hands and meet her gaze. I realize the room is cold, so very cold.

    ‘Have you lost your faith, boy?’

    I mumble something both indistinct and apologetic.

    ‘Speak up, boy! I have to know.’

    She pauses. Her burst of anger is fading away with the last of her energy.

    ‘I have to know if I will see my boy again.’

    The meaning of what she is saying hits me. She isn’t afraid of death. Not afraid is what is to come. She is afraid she will never see me again, because she is going to heaven and her little boy is going to hell.

    I don’t know what to say to that.

    ‘I’m not a bad man, mum,’ I whisper. ‘It’s just music. I sing. People like it. I like it. It makes things come alive. Not like church. Church is a tomb. Praying is just talking to yourself and faith is pretending someone listens.’

    I know these words hurt her, but she smiles. It is not a warm loving smile.

    ‘Faith? Let me tell you something about faith, boy. Something father Dowley never speaks of in church, because not many people want to hear it.’

    She falls into a long hacking cough. It’s painful just to watch. When she finally quiets down, I fear for a second it was her last breath she just coughed up, dry and rasping, without a chance to say this last thing she wanted to tell me. Then her eyes focus with such intensity that I’m reminded of the thing David once said to me when he changed the light above the kitchen table. How sometimes a bulb will shine extra bright, just before going out completely.

    ‘Faith, Lennard, does not keep you fed, clothed, safe or comfortable. Faith is not some requirement to be able to ask the Lord for favours, no matter how selfless they may be. Faith’s reward is not in this life and it is only attained after much hardship. The cold truth is that the reward may be equal for all, but the hardships are not. On the contrary, faith is definitely not the same as fair. Faith will test you and sometimes faith will burn you.’

    Her brittle hand takes mine and she pulls me in. I know these will be the last words, the last exchange we will ever have. Her other hand opens to show the little silver cross she always carried around her neck. She does it without taking her eyes off mine.

     ‘Get out, Lennard, because you know where it burns the hottest.’





***

Description
Part 2 - Checking In



    It’s not long before my head grows heavy and my sight grows dim. I must be getting tired. The adrenaline has worn off and the accident is taking its toll. I’ve lost track of time and I need to fill this thing up before I run out of gas anyway. All things considered, I have to stop for the night.

    A sign comes up out of the darkness up ahead. I pull over to get a better look, but instantly regret it. It’s a U-turn sign with ‘REPENT’ in ugly hand-painted letters above it and ‘OR IT’S GOING TO BE HELL’ below it. I gun the engine before the car comes to a full stop. Goddamn bible thumpers. I didn’t even know they were bothering people this far out west.

    The hotel itself doesn’t really have a sign. The road just ends up in the parking lot in front of the main building, which is weird because I could have sworn I was still on the interstate. There is a small sign stating ‘hotel parking only’ though, so I pull up into the nearest empty spot. My bones hurt when I step out of the car and I have to force myself to stand up straight. God, I wish I wasn’t getting older. Stiff legs carry me across the parking lot. There are some really nice cars here. A ’58 Plymouth Fury, pearly white on blood red, the sexy curves of a silver Mercedes 300 SL gull wing. That one alone must have cost a fortune. From the parking lot it’s hard to make out the hotel itself. It looks old with lots of arches. Red brick walls that look a washed out grey in the dark of night and a tiled roof. A rectangle of light appears in the black shadows beyond the middle arch and oh - my - God.

    There she stands in the doorway. A pitch black silhouette, but unmistakingly a woman. I draw closer and the warm light from inside slowly reveals more detail. Raven hair and ruby lips. A low cut dress.

    ‘A lost soul,’ she says and her voice alone renders my stash of Viagra unnecessary. As I walk up the stairs to stand next to her in the wide opening of the double oak doors, she extends her hand. I take it and immediately yank mine back in painful surprise. Sparks fly from her fingertips with a clearly audible crack as static electricity stings our fingers.

    Or perhaps just mine. Her smile never leaves her as she extends a slender arm and beckons me inside. Just as I’m about to step inside I hear the mission bell. I freeze, one foot on plush red carpet, one foot on cold bare stone. A furious look distorts the face of the woman. No wonder, who the hell rings a bell in the middle of the night? It reminds me of the church bells back in London. The highest density of churches in the whole of England and the city still managed to produce one of the world’s most famous blasphemes. Involuntarily, I remember father Dowley lecturing me while the church bells of St. Michael’s ring overhead. He sits me down in the benches with my hands out on the bench in front of me.

    ‘Do you know why you’re here, Lennard?’ he asks.

    ‘To serve God?’ I can’t help being a smartass. Of course I know why I’m here. It’s because that prick Nigel ratted me out when we were caught spying on the girls in their changing room. It didn’t matter it was Nigel who made the peeping hole it in the first place. He just made sure he was the first to lay blame on somebody else and that somebody else was me.

    ‘No, my son. You are here to be held responsible for what you did.’

    I look down at my feet. Now I know I’m in trouble. Father Dowley is old school. He’s not one to spare the rod as they say.

    ‘I thought you were different than the other boys, Lennard. I honestly thought you were better than this. Your mother is an honest and hardworking woman. She doesn’t deserve the humiliation of her son being caught a Peeping Tom. Tell me, Lennard, are you sorry for what you did?’

    I close my eyes and although I do feel sorry, for I know I betrayed my mother’s trust in me, all I see is a room full of young girls taking their clothes off. They’re laughing and talking and I spot Emma McCall immediately and see how she is completely naked. Her breasts are as big as I imagined they would be and they jiggle as she walks towards the showers.

    ‘Yes, I am,’ I manage, severely hoping my adolescent erection doesn’t show.

    ‘Of course you are. Lennard, you can lie to me, but do you realize there is someone you cannot lie to? You will have to answer to him eventually. Will you lie to him too? Don’t you know you have a choice? It may be difficult to see, but you do. You always do. You know what will happen if you stray from the path. But it is and always will be a choice that leads you there. Do you know where making these choices could lead you?’

    Torn between my shame and the urging sensation in my groin, I’m thinking to myself, this could be heaven, or this could be hell. Father Dowley waits patiently. I feel the enormous weight of the church around me and above me. I feel the eyes of Jesus as he looks down on me from above the altar. I can’t bear it anymore.

    ‘Look, I said I was sorry, didn’t I?’ I shout out. The stone walls echo back to us. Big mistake. I look up, but father Dowley doesn’t appear to be angry. He’s not even scowling. He looks disappointed. It confuses me for a moment, but then a searing pain streaks across my hands. He may be old, but father Dowley is still quick as lightning when he gets the chance to use his ruler. He smacks it down on my fingers again and again. The pain is excruciating and one panick-stricken moment I fear never to be able to play my guitar again. I jump out of the bench and ram my shoulder into the old man, bowling him over onto the cold stone floor. Without stopping, without looking, I run out of church.

    ‘You’re only sorry you got caught, filthy little boy, and that’s not enough!’ father Dowley cries after me. Next Sunday, I fake a flu and stay at home. I stopped listening what church had to say from that moment on.

    ‘Mr Washford? Are you all right?’

    I blink and stare in her eyes. They are dark. Seemingly pitch black and endlessly deep. She looks comically puzzled and her frown makes her look even more attractive. Her smell is intoxicating. I’m so tired I don’t care she addresses me by my real name.

    ‘Yeah, sorry. I just need some sleep, badly,’ I say to her, captivated by those dark eyes. ‘I’ve been driving for a long time and I kind of had a near miss a while back. I need a place to crash and to be honest, I’d never expected you guys to be open at this ungodly hour. Do you have anything available?’

    ‘Of course we have. And we’re always open, especially at ungodly hours. Please follow me.’

    Then she lights up a candle and shows me the way. I get a good look at her amazing backside shifting below the shimmering red silk of her dress. I’m not so tired I don’t notice there are no panty lines in that dress. I don’t know what to make of her. She’s classy, elegant and sophisticated, but somehow everything about her just makes me want her in a very unclassy, unelegant and a very unsophisticated way. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it. All I can do is to keep my cool.

    For now.

    We’re walking up the wide stairs, arriving at an ornamental hallway leading directly away from the lobby. Several smaller corridors lead away from this one. The place is a maze. We pass a dark courtyard and I can’t make anything out. We climb another flight of stairs and go down a wide adobe style corridor. She leads me down several of them and I follow like an obedient puppy. When we pass another smaller one I think I hear something. There are voices down the corridor. I thought I heard them say... something. I can’t make it out. Hotel hallways always seem to have a weird way of distorting sound. She's walking very close to me now, way inside my personal space. I don’t mind and I think she knows it. I’m taller then she is and when I glance to my left, I can look straight down her cleavage.

    ‘I’m sorry I didn’t catch your name,’ I say as we walk down yet another ornamental hallway. ‘Or the name of this place, for that matter.’

    ‘Please call me Cally, Lennard. May I call you Lennard? And welcome to the Hotel California. Such a lovely place.’

    ‘Cali? As in California?’

    Her smile is wide and warm and she flashes her long lashed eyes at me. Such a lovely face.

    ‘‘No, silly, although I do love California. You can find anything you fancy out here. People are not bound by the old rules and they’re willing to try things strictly taboo not too long ago. This hotel is a reflection of that lifestyle, a tribute even. Plenty of room at the Hotel California, every time of year. You can do whatever you want. Every whim and every fantasy, you can find it here.

    ‘Every fantasy?’ I ask credulously. I can’t help giving her my Jack Nicholson grin.

    ‘Well, you know,’ she answers and leaves a world of meaning hanging in the air. Again, there’s that look.

     ‘So, Hotel California, huh?’ I venture, eager to keep the conversation going. I want her to keep talking forever. I want to hear her soft voice saying things to me that would make the memories of the naked girls of St. Margaret’s Grammar School sound as boring as Sunday sermons. ‘Strange place for a hotel, though. It looks old. Spanish?’

    She nods. ‘It used to be an old mission,’ she says. One of the forgotten missions of California actually, but not one of those two they found again. This one has quite a different history. There are some great ghost stories to tell about this place, you know. Guaranteed to keep you up all night.’

    ‘I bet you do this far out in the desert.’

    We turn into the next corridor branching off into utter darkness. The feeble flame of her candle is the only light and it draws us closer to each other. She stops in front of a heavy oak door, one of many identical doors lining the walls.

    ‘Here we are; room number 616.’

    I don’t want her to go away. I want to pull her close and kiss her. I want to feel her black curls on my face as I sweep my lips alongside her long neck down towards her chest.

    I’m not sure if she knows what I’m thinking. I think she does, but she just smiles a little wider and winks. Then she hands me the candle, placing it between us like the smallest of shields.

    ‘I suggest you have a good night’s sleep, Lennard. To be honest you look like you need it. And sleep in tomorrow, why don’t you? You deserve it.’

    With that she touches my arm and walks away, down the unlit corridor. I stare after her until she dissolves into the darkness. I guess I do deserve some rest, although I expect to lie awake all night from everything I went through. The long drive through the desert, the car crash, it all seems so unreal to me now. All I can think of is Cally’s perfect ass moving from side to side as she walks away from me.

    I realize she hasn’t given me a key to my room, but fortunately the door is unlocked. Inside, I cannot help but whistle. I have seen plenty of decadent hotel rooms, trust me, but this one is just gorgeous. Everything is pristine white, just as I like it. A bed the size of a football field dominates the entire room. The bathroom is a cathedral of white porcelain and chrome. But as inviting as the group sized Jacuzzi is, I flop down on the bed with my clothes on and immediately drift off into nothingness.

    The nothingness doesn’t last long however. I can’t decide whether it’s a dream or one of those hyper realistic memory experiences. All I know is that I’m standing in the kitchen of my mum’s house. Dad buggered off long before I can remember, so it has always been my mum’s house. It’s small, damp and impossible to heat in winter. We didn’t have any money; nobody did in those days. Mum worked at the factory. She worked every day and most evenings too, except for Sundays. She worked until her back was permanently bent and still we were never able to pay rent on time. But by God it could still be clean. Every curtain, every table, every floor was a deep clean you don’t get with poncy detergents, only with hard scrubbing on your knees.

    But not this time. I see a thin layer of dust on the kitchen tiles and so I know something is terribly, terribly wrong. I look up and catch myself in the hallway mirror. My hair is long, my cheeks have pimples. I’m dressed in rough clothes too wide for my stick figure of a body. I can’t be older then seventeen.

    As I climb the stairs I know what will be waiting for me and yet I climb them anyway. Muffled sounds drift out of mum’s tiny bedroom. It’s Aunt Christina, mums younger sister. I can see her through the doorway. She’s dressed in black and her hair is tied in a black scarf. She’s bent over the narrow bed where mum lies. As I enter, I see doctor Flatts and father Dowley are also there. The only person I hate intensely is also the only one who acknowledges my existence. Without a word, he ushers the others out of the room and leaves me alone with my dying mother.

    She looks old, so old. I could pick her up and cradle her like a small child. She’s lost the hard look in her face, the one that could bite through steel if needed. The cancer took it from her. It took her strength and replaced it with fear. She is dying and she is afraid. I want to take her hand, but we are years past any physical intimacy. Suddenly she clutches my hand and I jump. She always was a mind reader. She’ll never say it, but we look each other in the eye and we know. So much heartfelt things remain unspoken.

    ‘Father Dowley tells me you quit the choir,’ she manages under her breath. ‘He says it’s not the same without your voice.’

    I say nothing. I have nothing to say and I couldn’t manage it if I did.

    ‘He says you’ve been chumming with those boys from the Buck and Horse.’

    This time I nod. The Buck and Horse is notorious for the rough crowd of East End and the rock and roll music that lures them in. The “boys” are Noël and Liam. They started the band Bad Reputation which is sort of the Buck and Horse’s main attraction. Every night the band plays, the coppers come and clear the place out. Sometimes that includes the band too. I met up with Liam while having a drink with a friend. He got hit in the throat during a fight and was looking for someone to fill in as a singer for a few weeks. So I sang Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” right there and then and Liam simply told me to come round next Friday night. That was two months ago and I’ve been singing every Friday and most of the Saturdays since then. If not at the Buck and Horse, then somewhere else. Noël already mentioned it might be a good idea to make me a permanent member of the band. Liam kept having trouble with his throat anyway and the crowd went mad every time I started singing. And every time the crowd goes mad, I get a rush like never before. I feel so alive, so full of fire, so free. It’s as if the people are giving me their energy and I can take it, put into my song and give it back amplified. I want to be on stage. I need to be on stage. I need to be free.

    All this I can’t say to mum. She’s not one to stand in the spotlights. She kept her head down and worked hard, minding her own business. She raised three sons the hard way, two of them turned out fairly decent. David worked at Mr Condon, the butcher and Lou was in the navy somewhere. Only Lennard, the runt of the litter, is causing the neighbours to whisper.

    ‘Lennard, look me in the eyes when I’m talking to you.’

    I look up from our hands and meet her gaze. I realize the room is cold, so very cold.

    ‘Have you lost your faith, boy?’

    I mumble something both indistinct and apologetic.

    ‘Speak up, boy! I have to know.’

    She pauses. Her burst of anger is fading away with the last of her energy.

    ‘I have to know if I will see my boy again.’

    The meaning of what she is saying hits me. She isn’t afraid of death. Not afraid is what is to come. She is afraid she will never see me again, because she is going to heaven and her little boy is going to hell.

    I don’t know what to say to that.

    ‘I’m not a bad man, mum,’ I whisper. ‘It’s just music. I sing. People like it. I like it. It makes things come alive. Not like church. Church is a tomb. Praying is just talking to yourself and faith is pretending someone listens.’

    I know these words hurt her, but she smiles. It is not a warm loving smile.

    ‘Faith? Let me tell you something about faith, boy. Something father Dowley never speaks of in church, because not many people want to hear it.’

    She falls into a long hacking cough. It’s painful just to watch. When she finally quiets down, I fear for a second it was her last breath she just coughed up, dry and rasping, without a chance to say this last thing she wanted to tell me. Then her eyes focus with such intensity that I’m reminded of the thing David once said to me when he changed the light above the kitchen table. How sometimes a bulb will shine extra bright, just before going out completely.

    ‘Faith, Lennard, does not keep you fed, clothed, safe or comfortable. Faith is not some requirement to be able to ask the Lord for favours, no matter how selfless they may be. Faith’s reward is not in this life and it is only attained after much hardship. The cold truth is that the reward may be equal for all, but the hardships are not. On the contrary, faith is definitely not the same as fair. Faith will test you and sometimes faith will burn you.’

    Her brittle hand takes mine and she pulls me in. I know these will be the last words, the last exchange we will ever have. Her other hand opens to show the little silver cross she always carried around her neck. She does it without taking her eyes off mine.

     ‘Get out, Lennard, because you know where it burns the hottest.’





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