Saved.

Father Conroy always brought a glint of sliver, a bottle, the kind that was used by cowboys. In films, it was called a flask, but a flask was something you kept soup in, to keep it warmish. Later you would drink it out of the white cup that was meant to screw on to the flask, but you could never get it tight enough. It made everything taste the same plasticity taste, apart from tea, that tasted different, but not like tea. Cowboys, in the movie world, would take a quick swig out of their flask before death or Indians, or the onscreen debauchery of kissing someone they really shouldn't be kissing, or for anaesthetic, to take the edge off cutting a bullet out of your arm, or sawing your leg off, with a twig between your teeth. Father Conroy's hip flask was filled with water, but it was holy. It had been blessed. He had his rosary beads, always at the ready, lying, dangling from his wrist, with the crucified Christ, turning one way, glinting in the sunlight, a little sunbeam, on its short Stations of the Cross leash. Father Conroy inscribed the sign of the cross on my forehead.

Out of a grown up respect, I tried not to listen to his prayers. Silently, I thought the prayer of the dead would be appropriate. Something puzzled me, but I didn't have the energy to imagine what it was. I was flunking out. That's what they called it. I remembered the muffled words, like an echo, but it seemed in a different language, one that I couldn't master. It played like a record in my head. I couldn't sleep and I couldn't stay awake. I was already dead. I had no emotion, no need for any, but if I had been capable, I'd have felt sorry for my body lying in that bed.

Father Conroy eased himself into the chair, his knees knocking primly together and smoothed out his cassock. The chair was a monstrosity from some bygone era, the size of a confessional box, with wings that you could lean back into and hide in its hard green leather folds. It was angled beside my bed, a signpost of sickness.

Father Conroy brought his battered and chipped mug with him. It seemed to be made out the kind of stuff he W.H.Shanks used to make toilets out of. We used to call him a tea jenny, because he always seemed to have a cup of tea in his hand, a cushion against the cruel blows of the world. I don't know if it was ever hot, because he used to put it down and forget about it, as he waved his arms about to emphasise a point he was making, because he couldn't talk without using the twisted knobs of his arthritic hands.

Father Conroy also brought with him a battered biscuit tin. But the notion of eating was foreign to him. For if you come to like something enough, even food, then you come to desire it. I think he brought the biscuits for me. I think he was secretly hoping that God would give me the grace to ask for a brown sugary Bourbon cream, a knobbly Lincon, a Jamie Dodger or a Jaffa Cake. Only the devil would have made me ask for a Custard Cream. He stirred the biscuits with his paws, his hoary old nails separating Carmel wafers that had stuck together. For waste was a great sin. He searched for a broken bit of Digestive, the kind that was already soggy with age, a dunking biscuit for his tea, for his teeth, weren't that good.

Father Conroy got into the habit of reading his office by my bed, his specs gradually slipping down his nose, his hand automatically moving up and repositioning them, just off centre, with the red cockerel of the Kellog’s cornflakes box bridging the gap between the two black lenses. Father Conroy had fixed them himself. As long as the two lenses held, even higgledy-piggledy, there was no need for another pair of NHS specs. His eyes scanned the page like some bug-eyed insect. But sometimes he would stop and sit back in the chair. He seemed to listen. He would mouth a few words to me and explain some abstract theological point. He sometimes got caught up in the wind of his own words. He would argue, back and forth, with me as an involuntary witness.

Father Conroy, a modernist in most things, wanted a return to the Tridentate mass. It was the language of his childhood, offering great balance and beauty, when sung or even spoken and understood all over the world. It also offered a bridge to the Saints in heaven. It was true that some of our flock couldn't understand it, but they could follow it, in the way that you follow a song that you didn't know all the words. And if they really wanted to they could learn. For even the heathen Jews and Muslims made no such concessions. Even they understood the need for one God and one language to unite us all, the living and the dead.

Father Conroy was a great devotee of the Virgin Mary. His words spun serially into each other, one click of the tongue after the other, until he came to 'blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus,' were they separated and he acted out the part of responder. Father Conroy's tone would then change. He was a different man, a penitent man asking for help, before he would change again into a priest: 'Hailing Mary full of grace'.

If I could find comfort it was in these word, not in what he said, nor in the way that he said them, but in there repetition, the striking of the same chord again and again, so that for a time we were in the same place, away from the cacophony of noise and being. Father Conroy would lean over and make the sign of the cross on my forehead: 'Lead all souls to heaven, and save us from the fires of hell', as he said these words each and every time. I resented the intimacy of his touch, not that of a priest, but of a father to his son. For I had no father and no mother and I was not his son.

I could see clearly now that the architecture of his life, the straight lines and walls of words built on sand. There was no Holy Ghost. There was no God. I mourned not for him, but for the kind of man I imagined myself to be. There was only man. Cruel man.