Free Gospel by Wilton Barnhardt Page B

slivers from the giant cylinder of meat. Lucy gave him two pounds in return.
    Lucy and Duncan talked some more and ate their kebabs as they walked back to the Braithwaite gate. Lucy heard herself tell Duncan some outrageous things … she knocked her age from twenty-eight down to twenty-three when Duncan said he was twenty-one … she said something about being Dr. O’Hanrahan’s assistant, traveling the world over, chasing lost gospels across the Middle East … she had invited Duncan to come to visit in America and she said she’d help him pay for it.…
    â€œYou allreeght, lass?” he asked her, looking concerned.
    Lucy discovered she was sitting on a damp stone wall. She felt worse than bad.
    â€œYou’re gonna toss that kebab, I can tell.”
    â€œI’m perfectly fine,” she said.
    The last thing she said before she blanked out.
    J UNE 22 ND
    Lucy awakened and felt ill. There were bells making a lot of unnecessary noise, too many for too long in the established Oxford fashion. She turned over and closed her eyes hoping she might retrieve her sleep.
    No.
    How does O’Hanrahan do it? she wondered, slowly lifting a hand to her pounding head. Apertifs in the paneled room, all that wine, the Headbanger at the Turf, and that kebab thing she ate … My God. Did she throw up in front of the one cute British guy that had given her five minutes of time? Lord, speak to me and assure me no, no …
    (Yes, yes.)
    Okay, she decided, maybe I’ll just die in this bed. It was the most she’d drunk since a Theology Department party her freshman year. No wonder they close the pubs at eleven, she thought, if this is how they drink until eleven. It must be noon, thought Lucy.
    (It’s 7:45 A.M. )
    After a merciless visit to the toilet to be sick, she dragged herself achingly to the bed, hoping to still her stomach and the revolving room. Two hours later she awoke again, only then knowing she had slept again. She dared herself to raise her head, and finally put feet to floor and stood up slowly.
    From that act, Lucy risked standing on her bed to peep out her high window in the slanted attic roof of the Braithwaite College guest room: a gray and rainy morning. She opened the window for needed fresh air and listened to the British noise, extracting meaning as only a first-time tourist can do; the rain had a foreign rhythm, the snatches of British conversation, the European ambulance siren song, the rumble of trucks with differently revving engines.
    She combed her hair, pulled on a sweater, and looked for a time in the mirror and thought: I am on the verge of failure. I can’t report anything back to the department on O’Hanrahan’s project, and I don’t have a clue what has become of Gabriel. During the brushing of her teeth she felt an imminent nausea so she scurried to lie down again.
    She fixated on the ceiling, sighing. Gabriel O’Donoghue.
    Gabriel was in her kindergarten class back in Bridgeport, born and bred there like herself. He was a crybaby, she remembered, a weepy, pious Catholic boy who went through “phases.” A rebel, a pious altarboy goody-goody, then getting in trouble for hitchhiking to Milwaukee, then announcing he was going to take vows as a priest, then for eleventh grade wearing an earring and being a hippie, then wanting to be an actor his senior year.
    Lucy and Gabriel were reunited at St. Eulalia Catholic High School for four years, then Gabriel started seminary at Notre Dame, then dropped out, then went back to South Bend for a degree in geography, of all things, then applied for grad school at Chicago. He was bright, he was cute—though Judy disagreed—and Lucy had a crush on him when she was younger. He was tall and olive-complexioned, his eyes were very big and sad, and something about his hands turned Lucy on. There was something so unlikely about Gabriel as a sexual partner that Lucy thought about