Passion by Jeanette Winterson Read Free Book Online Page B

Patrick, who had clipped his moustache, whipped to the end of the queue and managed to receive the host twice.
    'Double the blessing,' he whispered to me.
    I had not intended to take communion at all, but my longing for strong arms and certainty and the quiet holiness around me forced me to my feet and down the aisle where strangers met my eyes as though I had been their son. Kneeling, with the incense making me light-headed and the slow repetition of the priest calming my banging heart, I thought again about a life with God, thought of my mother, who would now be kneeling too, far away and cupping her hands for her portion of the Kingdom. In my village, each house would be empty and silent but the barn would be full. Full of honest people who had no church making a church out of themselves. Their flesh and blood.
    The patient catde sleep.
    I took the wafer on my tongue and it burned my tongue. The wine tasted of dead men, 2,000 dead men. In the face of the priest I saw dead men accusing me. I saw tents sodden at dawn. I saw women with blue breasts. I gripped the chalice, though I could feel the priest try and take it from me.
    I gripped the chalice.
    When the priest gendy curled away my fingers I saw the imprint of the silver on each palm. Were these my stigmata then? Would I bleed for every death and living death? If a soldier did, there would be no soldiers left. We would go under the hill with the goblins. We would marry the mermaids. We would never leave our homes.
    I left Patrick at his second communion and went out into the freezing night. It was not yet twelve. No bells were ringing, no flares were lit, heralding a new year and praising God and the Emperor.
    This year is gone, I told myself. This year is slipping away and it will never return. Domino's right, there's only now. Forget it. Forget it. You can't bring it back. You can't bring them back.
    They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?
    By forgetting. We cannot keep in mind too many things.
    There is only the present and nothing to remember.
    On the flagstones, still visible under a coating of ice, some child had scrawled a game of noughts and crosses in red tailor's chalk. You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It's the playing that's irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value. I sat down and scratching in the ice drew my own square of innocent noughts and angry crosses. Perhaps the Devil would partner me. Perhaps the Queen of Heaven. Napoleon, Josephine. Does it matter whom you lose to, if you lose?
    From the church came the roar of the last hymn.
    Not heard as half-hearted hymns are heard on monotonous Sundays when the congregation would rather be in bed or with their sweethearts. This was no lukewarm appeal to an exacting God but love and confidence that hung in die rafters, pushed open the church door, forced the cold from the stone, forced the stones to cry out. The church vibrated.
    My soul doth magnify the Lord.
    What gave them this joy?
    What made cold and hungry people so sure that another year could only be better? Was it Him, Him on the throne? Their little Lord in his simple uniform?
    What does it matter? Why do I question what I see to be real?
    Down the street towards me comes a woman with wild hair, her boots making sparks orange against the ice. She's laughing. She's holding a baby very close. She comes straight to me.
    'Happy New Year, soldier.'
    Her baby is wide awake with clear blue eyes and curious fingers that move from buttons to nose to stretch at me. I wrap my arms around them both and we make a strange shape swaying slighdy near the wall. The hymn is over and the moment of silence takes me by surprise.
    The baby burps.
    Then the flares go out across the Channel and a great cheer from our camp two miles away comes clearly to