Thicker Than Water

You went to Oxford in September, and Matty left in December. He gave his first sermon two weeks before Christmas. You remember? We all came up for it.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I remember. But he was ordained in April. So what was he doing in between times?’

Mum gave me a look that was a couple of centuries too ripe to be merely old-fashioned. ‘He was learning to be a priest,’ she said. ‘He’d been ordained, aye, so he wasn’t a deacon any more, but it isn’t like an assembly line, Fix. They had all sorts of things he had to ›ingriedo first.

Seminars, he called them. A seminar here and a seminar there. All up and down the country, he was, and living out of a suitcase. Except it wasn’t a suitcase, it was just a big shapeless bag with two handles that he got from the Army and Navy. Six feet long.’ She illustrated with her hands. ‘He looked like he was carrying a bloody bazooka, honest to God. If it was nowadays, someone would think he was a terrorist and shoot him.’

That brought her too close to the painful subject of Matt’s current situation, so she shied away from it again.

‘He was everywhere,’ she concluded. ‘Running around like a blue-arsed fly.’

‘But he was still living at the seminary? Over in Skem?’

‘In Upholland? No, after that big - you know, passing-out parade thing, where the bishop put the oil on him, and gave him his Jezebel - they needed his room for someone else. He stayed there until the autumn, when they had the new lads in, then he came back here.

’

‘Jezebel’ was Mum’s mispronunciation of chasuble, the sleeveless robe that a priest wears on top of all his other vestments when he does the business at Mass. I was never sure whether it was a joke or an actual mistake: after all, her mangled renderings of song lyrics, including turning Fun Boy Three’s ‘Our Lips are Sealed’ into ‘Olives to See You’, were legendary.

But what made my ears prick up was the revelation that Matt had come back home in between the seminary and his first ministry.

I was already off out in the world by that time, screwing up my degree course, and I don’t think I came home once in the first two terms.

‘Back to Walton?’ I asked, making sure I was getting this straight.

‘Back to this house, Fix. Where else was he going to go?’

I nodded, conceding the point. ‘So he was around for three months,’ I said. ‘Back in circulation. Looking up old friends.’"

"Mum sniffed. ‘I don’t know about that.