Free Dark Echo by F. G. Cottam Page A

came calling in the 1990s. A certain sensitivity had become voguish among thinking men, an imperative to get to understand your masculinity and be more open and honest generally with women. It was a fad that would degenerate towards the end of the decade into navel gazing and a sad kind of self-obsession. But just then, sensitivity of a sort was acceptable. What was not, were cassocks and incense. The last time the Catholic clergy were fashionable was probably when Bing Crosby wore a dog collar and gave his speaking voice an Irish lilt in those sentimental Bowery-based Hollywood melodramas of the 1930s. Since then, it had all been downhill for the image of the priest.
    My friends were appalled. They reacted as though I had become the victim of a cult. Most of them just dropped me. The couple that didn’t tried to save me from the dangerous delusion about to sabotage my life before it had properly begun. My girlfriend of the time interpreted the whole process as a crisis of sexuality. I had discovered that I was gay but did not dare confront either her or myself with the truth. Her weird take on what was going on provoked in me the sin of vanity. Could I have been so hopelessly non-committal in bed with her? I hadn’t thought so at all.
    My father was delighted. My vocation made sense of everything in me that had confused and dismayed him. It justified my lack of aggression and competitive fire. It made a virtue of my dreamy inclination towards solitude. Best of all, I think, it provided him with grace. The sacrifice of his son to the priesthood was exactly like the medieval buying of indulgences by wealthy men too busy generating profit to find the necessary time for prayer. Only it was more so. My father wasn’t ungodly, which was a sort of irony. He believed very devoutly in an omnipotent and sometimes vengeful God. But business life had compromised his chances of redemption and he had been lax in guaranteeing adequate compensations for his sins. In short, he was badly overdrawn at the Bank of the Almighty. My electing for a celibate life of poverty and devotion, in the service of his God, put him right back in the black. I’m guessing in saying that, but I think I’m right. I know my father and the knowing of him has come harshly earned. It’s a well-educated guess.
    I couldn’t have been that unconvincing in bed because Rebecca, my college sweetheart, came to see me.
    ‘Have you never admired a priest?’
    She pondered this. ‘The one in
The Exorcist
. He was cool. Sort of.’
    She had on red lipstick and a clingy dress in black fabricand she wore a push-up bra. She had sprayed or dabbed her skin with Shalimar perfume. She smelled delicious.
    ‘Father Merrin.’
    She shook her head. ‘The other one. The young, flawed guy.’
    ‘The whisky priest.’
    ‘Him. He was sort of cool.’
    ‘He didn’t really believe.’
    ‘That was what was cool about him.’
    She brought with her a bag of provisions.
    ‘This isn’t a prison visit, Rebecca.’
    ‘That’s why I didn’t bake you a cake with a file in it. Why are you smiling?’
    ‘The idea of you baking any sort of cake.’
    The bag was filled with temptations assembled to coax me out. She’d brought me an envelope of pictures of the two of us taken on a weekend in Brighton. She’d brought me an assortment of CDs. Van Morrison, Everything But The Girl, Prefab Sprout. Maybe she was just getting rid of them. ‘Wimp rock’ had always been her description of my taste in music. Most poignantly, she brought my football boots, bound together by their laces. I’d played every Sunday for a scratch team on Regent’s Park and would greatly miss that ritual. I was missing it already. The seminary overlooked the sea from its hill on the remote and craggy coast of Northumberland. It was a Jesuit citadel built when Queen Victoria was young. I’d been there six weeks. I missed everything.
    Rebecca, perfumed, smelled edible.
    ‘Paddy McAloon trained for the