Pastor Jack

There were blackouts and three-day weeks and no cigarettes and pacing. The snow seemed to hang and drift, rather than fall down the backcourt of our tenement block, renewing the old Electrolux cooker from number 5, softening it so that it seemed to move up against the grey bin; making them seem sentient, almost human. Moonlight picked out Pat Fogey in the slanting drifts of white, his old grey coat tucked up around his ears and his grey dog, ears down, licking the ground, looking for a bite to eat. He shuffled forward punch-drunk by the cold, his elbows up, protecting his box camera, which hung around his neck with a strong piece of curtain string, a mechanical goitre, ready to flesh-out new life. He dutifully pointed his camera into the shell of old Mayfield Parish Church across from us and turned away as if the flash blinded him. Even the local kids had grown tired of lampooning his uneven gait, his spray of sibilant speech and his prattle about photographing phantoms

Outside my front door Fogey’s dog, Max, sniffed and licked and shook snow from matted fur. With a sharp little whine Max announced his presence and timidly scratched at the wood panel. I had the dog’s Digestive biscuit ready in my hand.

The dog’s master was more difficult to deal with. I don’t know whose idea it was to give Pat old rolls of film for the camera, or if he had found them in his endless nocturnal wanderings. He carefully pushed and pulled them one by one out of a hole in his Greatcoat pocket and lined them up like gun casings on the surface of the bookshelves I kept meaning to fix in the hall. His mouth open and tongue lolling he gave up any notion of good manners or waiting and pressed the rolls of film still in their cardboard tombs into my soft hands. Inside they were like loose leaf tobacco. The dog stalked his feet and I muttered and made encouraging cooing noises as I poked and prodded the film from its shuttered grave and into the light and pushed it back down again.

Pat trailed two steps behind and the dog three, as we picked our steps through the detritus of the hallway into the cavern of the living room-bedroom of unmade double- bed and unwashed pots of my studio flat. I liberated a bread knife from its sink grave and carefully wiping it on my sleeve I grew, in Pat’s eyes, with his box camera cradled carefully in my hands, into a Thomas Edison type figure. The lens was cracked, but the black casing seemed to come from another camera, bolted on somehow. One turn of the screw and the film port popped open. The film inside seemed remarkably shiny and new. I knew enough not to unravel and expose it to the light.

The first piece of film from Pat’s camera showed my mum and dad, posing. I don’t remember if it was colour or not- if memory wrong footed me - but mum’s hair seemed to fluff up like a helium balloon and jut out of the cellulose frame like a red Frisby, that no clasp could control. Dad had his arm around her waist, leaning into mum and that jaunty half smile on his face that said, ‘What’s this all about?’

I stood transfixed as the film image of Mayfield Parish Church blossomed in the framed light of my mind so that I felt I could almost touch the warp of the oak on the old wooden pews. Max’s throaty growl was at first a background noise, gradually building revs like a tractor engine warming up. I wasn’t sure if Dad moved, but his face seemed to scowl out at me as if he was going to say something. Max’s canine teeth tore through denim and punctured my dreams. I instinctively lifted my leg and tried to shake him off. Fogey tried to grab at his dog, or grab at me, I wasn’t sure which. I tumbled sideways against the stainless steel sink, hands flailing, knocking the fat encrusted cast iron frying pan to the ground with me. I was disorientated when I stood up and rushed into the toilet to throw up.

The over-ripe smell of Fogey and his damp dog lingered days later. Digestive biscuits crumbled like dust in my pockets. A whistling wind pushed blizzards of snow up against the windowpane, muffling all noise, so that I could only hear my sharp shallow breaths and watched as it swept over all Pat Fogey’s tracks in the snow. I didn’t know if I was asleep or awake when I first heard the peal of a girl’s laughter and the cry of a mewing newborn child. I wiped at the frosted glass on the inside of the windows, but could see nothing. I pushed up the sash of the kitchen window, my feet sliding on the floor. The wind seemed to fill the room. At first I did not feel the change in temperature, but by the time I’d shut the window the cold had me. I pulled on another pair of cotton socks and crawled between the sheets. The room seemed to plunge and plateau and grow ever colder so that it was almost like shades of ebony that my hollow white breath disappeared into. I lay shivering, separated from sleep like the glass in the kitchen window. I heard the mewing again in the room with me, but my eyes felt as if they have been sewn shut and I couldn’t move. I tried to gulp down air, to cry out, but couldn’t and felt that I was choking on a dog hair blanket.

My alarm sounded at 6.20am. I banged Big Ben to a halt and bleary eyed watched the luminous hand gather strength, ready to peel out again in the dark. I sat up sharply needing to pee, pulled myself back from the siren call of warmth the bed offered, as if that singular action would help decide whether it was Sunday or the dead end of Monday, or if I still had a job to go to.

Fogey’s box camera sat on top of the cistern. My hands were so cold I almost peed on them to warm them up. I couldn’t remember him leaving it because I couldn’t remember him leaving. The camera seemed warm to the touch, the weight seemed right and fitted in my hand as if I was working for Magnum. I looked through the viewfinder and clicked my dishevelled image in the mirror. It was stupid. I didn’t know what I was expecting. The click came 30 seconds later and startled me so that the camera almost fell out of my hand. I looked down the lens into the camera's insides as if it were a gun barrel, likely to go off. But there was nothing amiss. It was just an old camera that an old man had left behind. Part of me was scared to look through the lens again and click the shutter.

I strode through my bedroom cum living room and glanced at the clock it was 10.20. I shook the clock but it seemed to be working fine. Neither the radio nor the telly would go on. My first thought was blackout, but the lights clicked on and off. I looked through the camera lens and clicked a view of Mayfield Parish Church. Nothing happened at first. There was no surprise, just a sense of unease, when the camera clicked about a minute later. The clock said 12.20.

A church bell tolled and it was as if a hole in my head had opened and hot summer had entered into my body. My window was open and my mind floated like a red Admiral over all the people dressed in their Sunday best. Mum and dad were waiting. They’d put on my best black shoes for Sunday school, my chubby little hand pointed up to the sky.

Mum laughed and said, ‘air-O-plane’. She liked to spell things out to me so that when it came time to talk and read and write I’d have a head start.

But it wasn’t an aeroplane.

‘Hurry up.’ Dad pulled at mum’s arm.

Mum swept me up into the smell of her. My warm cockleshell ear pressed down against her rising chest as she hiccupped with laughter and tried to run before they shut the church doors.

Mr Fogey, the pass keeper, stood waiting holding the door open, his little dog Max safely tucked up in his jacket pocket with only its head showing.

‘You’ll be late for your own funeral,’ he joked.

Mum passed me quickly to Dad as my wails rang around Mayfield church.

‘He’s meant to do that when we Christen him, not before it,’ Dad passed me back to mum after she’d adjusted her patterned dress, pulling it away from her body so that the sweat stains under the armpits didn’t show.

‘Well maybe he knows something that we don’t,’ she replied, swinging me onto her hip and striding confidently to the front of the church where Pastor Jack was waiting at the Baptismal Font.