Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan Read Free Book Online Page B

said. 'If he hadn't he would just have said "no". You're busted, Father. It's "yes".'
    'Don't be so idiotic.'
    'Don't sweat it, Father,' he said. 'We're all human.'
    'I have my doubts about that,' I said.
    'That's right,' he said. 'Like Arabs.'
    We talked about other things, or they talked and I nodded, the young people's views proving less interesting to me than the liveliness with which they were able to express them. It all left me doubting my basic honesty but also feeling giddy and hopeful and slightly breathless.
    During my time in Dalgarnock, it had begun to cling to me: not faithlessness, which I haven't suffered since leaving Oxford, but a large private sense of wanting to depart from the person I had always been. I could see it happening: one sort of world was colliding with another, and that evening I wanted to join their world and embrace their carelessness. That's what I wanted to do. I wish I could say I knew their kind and beheld all my errors, but what I knew about that pair, Mark and Lisa, was only what I wanted to know. They were very young and ready for life.
    A smell of pine came from the corridors. The cleaners were knocking off for the evening and the janitor came with his grumpy face and his chain of keys. 'Got to lock the doors now, Father,' he said. 'It's been a long day. Don't let these ones keep you.'
    Maybe I felt refreshed by their badness; maybe I knew them all along, those two, and fell out of step with myself in recognition, knowing they might keep me from boredom with their loose talk and their chaos. The boy rose from the desk and eyed me, then he yawned. I later noticed that Mark would begin yawning every time there was a pause of more than two seconds in his adventures. He was never attentive to anything that didn't involve himself directly and had no sentiment beyond that relating to the fortunes of Celtic Football Club.
    'You're a good laugh,' he said. 'You don't get eggy over a bit of chat. No' like them dicks.' He nodded out to the corridor and the invisible teachers now home in their kitchens.
    'Thank you,' I said. 'It's rather diverting for me to hear the opinions of young people. Especially on current affairs.'
    'Diverting, is it?' he said, grinning. 'You're awesome.'

    The only American poet I cared for in my childhood was Wallace Stevens. He wasn't terribly Christian, not like the others I read, but I loved the colour of his thoughts, the way the earth was to him a paradise of green umbrellas and red weather rather than a place of obscure punishments. My mother gave me
Harmonium
for my twelfth birthday and I don't suppose I understood the poems at the time, but I've been thinking about them ever since, and I begin to see that the search for happiness is all we have. To sit in a park and listen to the dogs barking; to sit in a park and hear church bells: are we not always present, always human and always religious according to our faith?
    Those poems are made for the earth-loving young. I remember my delight at what they suggested, the world outside with its stars and palaces, its teacups and oceans, and my mother and I chuckled over his titles: 'Stars at Tallapoosa'—'there is no moon, no single, silvered leaf—and 'Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion':
You dweller in the dark cabin,

To whom the watermelon is always purple,

Whose garden is wind and moon.
    Of the two dreams, night and day,

What lover, what dreamer, would choose

The one obscured by sleep?
    It was Mark and Lisa and me. We laughed in the car on the way to the Blue Star garage. The young people were so completely themselves that they wasted no time on reserve, and so we drove round the edge of the town as if we'd been companions for years, and it seemed right that I was with them and not with anybody else or thinking about the past.
    That was my folly: the past was actually present in every word and grin.
    'Call me David,' I said.
    'Call me Cardinal,' said Mark.
    Lisa was tapping out a rhythm on the back of the