Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan Page B

Poole.'
    'It's been coming to a head these last three months,' she said. 'And God knows where I'm headed now.'
    The school bus was beeping outside, but I asked her if she would like to say a prayer, and she said she would. So I dipped a hand into the water font and we sat on the stairs and said three Hail Marys. We stood back up and I could see a person wearing a baseball cap through the frosted glass of the porch door. I hugged her and said that God would find a way, and her shoulder softened as I placed it under my chin, a smell of figs and almonds rising from the wool of her jumper.
    'That's just as good as a prayer,' she said.
    It never escaped me that Mrs Poole considered my general tactility to be yet another aspect of my falseness, and it seems now, when I look back, that she reproached herself for responding to it. I believe she observed the impossibility of sexual interest on my part, but we each found it hard not to play sometimes the parts of man and wife, even if only for vivid moments engraved more with pain than pleasure. Only once that year did I stop inside my own thoughts to consider her differently. We had gone to Glasgow to buy chairs from one of those superstores, and we passed through the aisles on either side of a massive trolley, stopping to look at lamps and bookshelves and little bedrooms with bunk beds that accused us with their multicoloured pillows.
    'They have such nice things nowadays,' she said.
    For a brief moment that day, I had thought of the children we might have made together and the father I might have become. I saw myself lifting a child up to the top tier of that plywood bunk bed; I saw myself pulling up the duvet, kissing the child, and Mrs Poole standing at the door with a mug of tea in her hand and the child's trousers under her arm. How absurd. It is the only time I have ever thought of fatherhood. I believe it was the impossible colours and the atmosphere in Ikea: it kindled a notion of another life, a life of domestic contentment and heart-shaped lights. It must have touched Mrs Poole too, because we went downstairs to a lunch of meatballs and chips and she told me the story of her only son.
    'He lives with my sister, Irene,' she said. 'I don't know if that was the right decision, but it was the decision I made. He is a good-looking boy. I don't see him much. He has his three cousins and he calls them his brothers and Irene is good to him.'
    'But why?'
    'Simple,' she said. 'I couldn't bear to bring him up with his father the way he is, the drink and everything.'
    'That was the only reason?'
    'That's a big enough reason. It is to me anyhow. Jack talks like he loves families. But he only likes them at a distance. He doesn't actually know how to be in a family. So that was it. I wasn't having the boy suffer from all that, a father who didn't know how to be a father, a family full of disappointment and blame. So my sister took him.'
    I closed my hand over Mrs Poole's, and she let it rest there for a second, moving her fingers in compliance.
    'In life,' she said, 'you've just got to do what you can to improve the situation.'
    She pushed the lunch plate away from her that day. She bent into her shopping bag to examine a packet of night lights she had bought and never mentioned her son again.
    The young people were banging on the rectory door.
    'Hurry the fuck up!' shouted Mark.
    'Really,' said Mrs Poole. 'You shouldn't let those youngsters speak like that around you.' I opened the door and Mark was smiling amid all his stripes and hoods.
    'Morning all,' he said, tipping his cap with a stick of lip balm. His appearance was always very sudden; as soon as he presented himself all the oxygen seemed to be swallowed into the vacuum he created. I could feel Mrs Poole becoming rattled at my side.
    'I hope you crowd are going to behave today,' she said. 'It's a treat, Mark McNulty. Do you realise that? Father David is taking time out of his own work to give you all a nice time.'
    'Definitely, Mrs