War Baby by Colin Falconer Read Free Book Online

smile? Perhaps he imagined it. ‘I think perhaps it is a useless gift. You are not a Christian, I can tell.’
    ‘Now that’s where you’re wrong. I’m one of your lot.’
    ‘You are Catholic?’
    ‘My oath. There’s a lot of Micks where I come from.’
    ‘Micks?’
    ‘Roman Catholics.’
    ‘Where do you come from, Monsieur Ryan?’
    ‘Sit down and I’ll tell you.’
    Ryan felt his pulse racing. A nun. A bloody nun!
    She perched on a wicker chair, looking as if she were ready to break for the door at any moment. He sat in the other chair, and they weighed each other carefully like combatants in a chess match.
    ‘It’s all right,’ Ryan said finally. ‘I don’t bite.’
    ‘I think perhaps this is not... proper.’
    ‘Spending time with sinners is an occupational hazard, isn’t it?’
    ‘Are you a sinner, Monsieur Ryan?’
    ‘We all are, aren’t we? It’s just a matter of degree. Isn’t that right?’ When she didn’t answer, he said: ‘My old man was one of the biggest sinners of the lot. You might have heard of him. Ronald Ryan.’
    ‘The movie actor?’
    ‘You know who I mean, then?’
    Her face glowed with unexpected enthusiasm. ‘Yes. I see one of his pictures, I think. He is a pirate. He is very brave.’
    ‘I don’t know if he was brave or not. When I was born he took the soft option and shot through. But that was before he went to America and became famous. Maybe he got a bit braver later on.’
    ‘You are a lot like him.’
    ‘Yeah, everyone reckons I look like him. I can’t help that.’ There was a heavy silence. Soeur Odile sat there poker-straight, as if she were being interviewed for a secretarial position at a bank. Why is she here? he wondered. At the instruction of the canonesse , or on a whim of her own? ‘So - you are a Catholic?’ she asked him.
    ‘Not a very good one.’
    ‘You go to Mass?’
    ‘Haven’t been to Mass since I was thirteen. I got thrown out.’
    ‘But who will throw you out of a church?’
    ‘The priest. He had no option, I suppose, me and my mate drank all the altar wine.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘We wanted to get drunk.’
    She stared at him as if this were quite incomprehensible to her.
    ‘We got our own back, though. It was only a small church and they couldn’t afford a proper bell. So they had a record player and an amplifier hooked up to the bell tower. The priest had this LP with bells playing and he used to put that on every Sunday morning. We waited until Christmas Eve and we broke into the church and put on an Elvis Presley forty-five and turned the volume up full blast. Three o’clock Christmas Eve and the whole population of Miller’s Creek were in their front gardens, scratching their heads listening to “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog” coming from the sky.’ He wondered why he had told her that particular story. Had he been trying to shock her? She was staring at him with an expression of utter astonishment. Then, unexpectedly, she smiled. She put her hand over her mouth.
    ‘Well, that’s better. I don’t think I’ve seen you smile before.’
    She looked embarrassed. ‘ Desolé . This is not a funny story.’
    ‘Well, I laughed at the time.’
    ‘You must be very ashame now.’
    ‘Not a bit of it. If I could have taken a picture of it, I’d have it hanging on my wall.’
    ‘Instead of these pictures?’ She looked around, at the black and white glossies tacked to the wall, GIs in jungle fatigues, pictures of the dead and the living, victors and vanquished juxtaposed.
    ‘I’m not ashamed of them either. It’s what I do.’
    ‘Why do you like to take picture about wars?
    ‘I don’t really know. Always had a fascination for it, I suppose. I was born the day they dropped the big one on Hiroshima. My mother always used to say I was a war baby, as if it was something special. I don’t know why I do it. I guess I’ve never wanted to do much of anything else.’
    ‘It is worth all this risk?’ she asked him, looking