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The Age of Reason

Originally published in Etchings Isssue 1, Ilura Press, 2007

Barry Smith and Bernadette Gibbons were dead. They stood hand in hand by the door, giggling about being stillborn.
         I was at Table Seven. I was a doctor. I had two kids, a history of heart disease, my own house, a wife I’d been told nothing about.
         Mrs Leddick dealt me a card, a yellow one. I had another child. Mongoloid, it said in brackets.
         ‘It’s a blessing,’ Mrs Leddick said. ‘You’ll find they’re very loving.’ She had a mongoloid child, too, but in real life, a little girl our age.
         ‘There’s a queue at Table Eight, Martin,’ said Mrs Leddick, ‘so just stand here until it dies down.’
         She had blue-rinsed hair and always wore jewelry, brooches big as Chocolate Wagon Wheels or dangly earrings made of coloured glass that caught the light and made rainbows on her neck. She was always very glamorous, Mrs Leddick. I thought it was to make up for having a mongoloid child. Apparently, they didn’t live that long.
         She looked at the yellow card in my hand. ‘What are you going to call it?’ she asked.
         I hadn’t named my other two children yet. I looked to the door where Limbo was, and said, ‘Barry, Mrs Leddick.’
         She shook her head and made more rainbows. ‘Barry isn’t really a holy name. You’ll want it to be baptized, won’t you? Think of a saint’s name you really like. One you can pray to if things go wrong. My little girl’s called Josephine.’
         This was the summer of 1965. I was not a doctor. I was childless and unwed. I lived at home with my mother and, occasionally, my dad. I was seven years old. So was everyone in Year Three.
        
         We had reached the age of reason. We had made our First Confession. We had taken our First Communion. In May, Karen Worswick had crowned the Virgin Mary with flowers in our church, and we had walked before the bishop down the aisle, strewing flowers at his feet. The bishop had anointed our foreheads with an oily thumb and confirmed us in our faith.
         ‘Spiritually,’ Father Loran had told us the day before, ‘this has been your busiest year.’
         He was our new priest, young and handsome to us, licorice thin in his black cassock, a tiny mouth in a long bony face. His eyes were soap powder blue.
         ‘In God’s eyes, you’re now grown-ups. You’re now responsible for your actions. You know right from wrong and good from evil, and you’re already halfway through the sacraments. Which ones are left?’
         There was a poster of the sacraments on the wall behind him, but we had spent the year learning about little else. A forest of answering hands shot up from which he selected one eager branch, not mine.
         ‘Holy Matrimony,’ answered Eric Bamping, who always got in first.
         Father Loran made a temple of his bony hands and, smiling, rested his long chin on it. ‘Yes, indeed, there’s Holy Matrimony, but, there’s another sacrament, yes? For the very special few. What is it?’
         A more modest forest sprang up at this.
         ‘Holy Orders,’ answered Barry Smith.
         ‘Yes, indeed, Barry,’ Father Loran said. ‘Excellent.’
         Beside me, Barry’s neck reddened like an apple I’d have liked to bite.
         ‘And there’s one more sacrament, isn’t there? One final one. Which is?’
         This was also on the poster, with a picture of priest like Father Loran, only smoother and less tall, bending over a dying man, both lit by a wedge of lemon sunlight and the Holy Ghost like a dove fluttering above them.
         ‘Last Rites,’ said Karen Worswick, bowing her blonde head as she did whenever she said anything religious. Since crowning the Virgin Mary in May, she’d become particularly pious. She wore a Miraculous Medal and had had her glasses blessed in Lourdes.
         ‘Last Rites, yes,’ said Father Loran. ‘Or Extreme Unction, as its properly called. Now, it’s fair to say, these other sacraments are a long way ahead of you. I mean, none of you are planning to marry anytime soon?’
         He asked it so seriously, the class laughed all the more, and I shifted in my double desk so that my knee was touching Barry’s.
         Father Loran paused to cough, covering his little mouth with a soft white hand, and then coughed again, delicately, his eyes tearing. He swallowed and continued: ‘The sacraments you have received will prepare you for what lies ahead. And so will tomorrow. I want to talk to you about tomorrow. Your teachers have prepared you for tomorrow. I’m here now, preparing you for tomorrow. I want you all to take tomorrow very seriously. Will you do that?’
         We solemnly promised to take tomorrow seriously.
         He looked at us sceptically with his Daz blue eyes.
         We promised again.
         ‘Very well. Tomorrow, we will play the Game of Life.’
        
         We had gone across to church after Morning Registration, and Father Loran had said a mass where we had to mean every word. Then, without a break, we had lined up outside the school hall, a prefab building with corrugated walls, and windows in its pitched roof. It was where we did Music and Movement in our underpants and vests.
         Prefects from Year Six, ten years old and ten inches taller, kept us in line until, one by one, we were to enter the hall. There would be a number of desks there, and we were to go to each desk in turn, and, at each desk, we would be given cards.
         ‘Sometimes,’ Father Loran had warned us from the pulpit, ‘these cards will say good things. Sometimes they will say bad things. You might not always be happy. You might not always think it fair. Sometimes’ he said, smiling but stern, ‘life is like that,’ and Mrs Leddick and the other staff nodded at us that this was so.
         We entered the hall in order of birth, not alphabetically. Barry Smith was first. I was about ten behind him.
         At Table One I was given an orange card. It said: 9lbs. Forceps birth. Baptised.
         ‘You’ll be concussed,’ said Miss Saltney, lighting up an Embassy Regal. Teachers smoked in front of you in those days. She spat the smoke out, telling me, ‘Forceps births are always concussed. Bruised about the head. They’d have taken an age to drag you out. Blame yourself for being a fat baby. Martin Benstock. Now move along to Table Two.’
         I was confused – what was forceps birth? what was concussed? dragged out of where? – but I was more confused by Barry Smith standing in the corner and trying not to cry.
         ‘Isn’t Barry coming with me, Miss?’
         ‘Barry Smith is dead,’ Miss Saltney said. ‘He’s in Limbo until Judgment Day. Table Two, Martin Benstock. I’ve told you once already.’
         Barry had been my best friend all Year Three. He lived in the next estate and evenings we’d meet halfway and play Marines or Secret Agents on the railway bankings, long wordless games of war which ended with us rolling together down the grassy slopes and parting suddenly.
         Even in winter he had skin like caramel. His hair was the colour of wet slate and his narrow eyes glittered when he laughed. By day, I sat by him at a double desk. At night, without adult understanding or analysis, I dreamed I slept on the smooth slope of his cheeks and swam in the narrow glitter of his eyes.
         I waved at him in Limbo, and he waved back. As I moved away, he held out his orange card to show the black spot that meant, unbaptised and stained by Original sin, he’d not be traveling through life with me as outside we’d arranged.
         The first one in, and the first to die, he stood in the shadowed corner, a lesson for us all.
         Others raced ahead.
         Karen Worswick and Ann Bessel, who wore calipers, were allowed to skip straight to Table Six. They would both be nuns so they could glide past the tables for Education, Matrimony and Worldly Goods. Even if they were dealt poor health, they could offer it up to God.
         Father Loran crouched down to chalk a circle in the middle of the room, its circumference little more than that of the cassock that gathered around him as he knelt. As he rose, he lost his balance. Wavering, he splayed out one of his hands to steady himself and outstretched the other, which Mrs Leddick rushed across to hold. She helped him rise, and he smiled at her. I thought then, of all the teachers, she was probably the one he liked best. She was always looking out for him, and had known his mother when he was very young.
         The chalk circle on the floor, he announced to us, was Hell, and a larger square he had already chalked was Purgatory. Heaven, he said, pointing, was the piano by the fire exit. It had been draped in tinsel for the day, and there was milk and Jammy Dodgers for when the blessed arrived.
         At Table Two, Mr Byrne gave me my education. I rolled a dice and was given three grey cards that told me I would excel at Sports, Music and Long Division. Another dice, the number six, meant another card, a white one: I had passed my Eleven Plus exam.
         I’d not go to Secondary Modern, Mr Byrne explained, with the other thickies, but Grammar School. I’d be taught by monks, I’d play cricket and, generally, get on.
         ‘It’s what we expect from a boy like you, Martin,’ said Mr Byrne. He was wide and tall, too wide for his shiny suit and too tall to be sitting at a child-sized desk on a child-sized chair. Underneath the desk, his shoes were scuffed and his socks were not a match.
         Because I’d passed my Eleven Plus, he dealt me another card, this time pale yellow. It said: University. Medicine. 2:1.
         ‘My brother-in-law’s a doctor,’ he said. ‘When you open your mouth, people will listen and think you’re summat special – and so will you. Now, Table Three for your wife and kids. They’ll bleed you dry, but you have to have them.’
         Every boy was given a wife and every girl a husband, except Karen Worswick and Anne Bessel who had married God. I rolled a dice and won two children.
         ‘I don’t really want them, Mrs Morrison,’ I said as politely as I could.
         ‘Want what?’
         ‘A wife and children, Miss.’
         Mrs Morrison looked up from marking Sums. ‘ Surely, Martin Benstock, you don’t want to go through life alone?’
         I looked across at Barry Smith in Limbo. I was already going through life alone. I waved across at him, but he was slumped against the wall. Even those still coming into the hall didn’t notice him any more. He had died, and life went on regardless.
         Limbo is mapless and bald, a place for lost things, a place for babies never born, born dead or dead before the age of reason. They do not suffer. They wait numbly – a long amnesia of waiting – until at last they are redeemed. I would redeem Barry Smith. I would reach Heaven and beckon him in. His waking eyes would glitter at the sight of me.
         At Table Four, Karen Rimmer, prefect in Year Six, was handing out Worldly Goods. It was here I picked up my house, a car, two dogs and some holidays, one of them abroad, but I was given nothing until I showed my Education cards.
         ‘That’s the best hand yet,’ said Karen Rimmer. ‘I was a nurse when I did this. I had a caravan in Cleveleys. And a maisonette’
         Eric Bamping stomped across, red-faced but for the mole on his cheek which was brown and shaped like Belgium. He hadn’t passed his Eleven Plus. He worked in Kenton’s Supermarket, stacking shelves. He had expected better.
         ‘I can give you this,’ said Karen, handing him a green card.
         ‘Is that all?’ he whined. He was breathing heavily, and so angry the green card trembled in his fist.
         ‘You never passed your Eleven Plus exam,’ Karen Rimmer reasoned flatly. ‘You can’t fail that and expect to run a house and car.’
         ‘But I will pass my Eleven Plus. I’m top in Spelling now.’
         ‘Not in this life, you’re not. Be happy I gave you a moped. Others have to walk.’
         He stomped off to Table Six. Even the back of his legs looked angry.
         Karen Rimmer watched him go. She looked back at me, one medical professional to another. ‘I reckon he’ll be dead by Table Seven.’
         A good third had died before Table Four. They stood about in Purgatory, none of them very happy.
         I told Karen Rimmer my best friend was dead by Table One. ‘He’s over there in Limbo.’
         Karen Rimmer peered across. ‘The year before they were about six of us born dead. Infant mortality is very low this time out. Mind you, Purgatory’s filling up nicely. And look at who’s gone to Hell.’
         At Table Four, Peter Cummins, expecting to collect a family, was handed a red card that told him he’d died of a heart attack, and a black one to tell him he’d been sent to Hell.
         ‘But I haven’t done anything, Miss,’ we heard him wail. ‘I haven’t, honest.’
         ‘They all say that,’ said Mrs Boyle, not even looking up from her knitting pattern. She clicked two fingers, and two lads from Year Six hauled him into Hell.
         Hell’s circle was only wide enough for five. Peter Cummins was the fourth. The other three were William Rooney, Karl Yates and Spencer Bellis who’d been transferred to us from a C. of E. school in Eccles. They, towered over Peter Cummins, who was the smallest of the boys and always off with things like whooping cough and asthma. He stepped away from them in search of Father Loran.
         ‘Don’t put one foot outside that circle, Peter Cummins,’ Mrs Boyle shouted across, ‘or I’ll keep you in Hell all through dinnertime.’
         ‘But, Miss, I haven’t done anything?’
         ‘Haven’t you? You stand there and just think about what you might have done while you watch all these other good souls go by.
         I looked across at Barry, still in Limbo, now crouched on the floor, his lovely head in his clean hands. He was safe there. On Judgment Day he would be released. He would know God, and so would those in Purgatory. Peter Cummins had all eternity to wonder why he was in Hell.
         Peter Cummins wasn’t the only one upset. Seven of the Middle Set Girls were all in Purgatory, dead and no explanation given. They stood about, cross-armed and bored.
         ‘It’s rotten in here,’ said Veronica Murphy really loud. ‘Can’t we have some chairs at least?’
         Mrs Boyle shouted across, ‘In Purgatory, Veronica Murphy, there will be no chairs, so stand up straight and think on.’
         Father Loran addressed the room.
         He stretched out his hands. The room stilled, reluctantly. Outside, the sun disappeared behind a cloud and the hall grew grey.
         ‘I don’t want anyone to be upset.’ His voice was weaker than in the pulpit, muffled somehow, strained. ‘Didn’t I say in church you’d hear good things? Didn’t I say you’d hear bad things, too? Didn’t I say you won’t always think it fair?’ He spoke slowly, but gave no pause. He did not want or expect our answers.
         From Table Six, I saw how very thin he was, and that his left foot in its winklepicker shoe was tap-tapping the linoleum floor. He was trembling. No one notices this, but me, I thought. I’m the only one. I had special knowledge sometimes. It was what made me feel so holy.
         The sun slipped out for instant and fell on Father Loran like the lemon-coloured wedge of light on the priest and the dying man in the poster of the Sacraments, but without the Holy Ghost, only dust motes glittering as they fell.
         He surveyed us with his Daz blue eyes, and, when he spoke again, his voice was thicker, angrier. ‘Whose to say that, this afternoon, when you go home, one of you won’t be knocked down by a car. Five thousand children die every year in car accidents. Who here died knocked over by a car?’
         Veronica Murphy raised her hand in Purgatory, and Carl Yates raised his in Hell. Those around them stepped ever so slightly away as if Carl and Veronica were suddenly infectious or ghosts and really dead.
         Father Loran nodded sadly. ‘Four and half thousand children are born with or develop illnesses that prevent from reaching adulthood. Theresa Finlay, what did you die from?’
         Theresa Finlay, the smallest of us all, in a plaid skirt and a pageboy bob her mother had cut using a bowl, said. ‘’Leukemia, Father Loran.’ She said it weakly, but we all heard the word, some of us for the first time.
         ‘And Vincent Durkin?’ Father Loran said, turning on his heel to face Table Five where, seconds before, Vincent Durkin, a broad lad, ginger and good at games, had been handed his red card. ‘What did you die from?’
         ‘A blood clot, it says here.’
         ‘How old were you, Vincent, when you died?’
         ‘Thirty-two,’ he answered proudly, as if, in this company, thirty-two was a ripe age to reach and like scoring a goal in football or a six at cricket.
         ‘And, Vincent, tell me, how old were your children when you died?’
         Vincent bowed his head. He read the back of his card. A little boy aged two. A little girl aged one.
         ‘Who’ll look after your children now, Vincent, now their daddy’s dead?’
         Vincent couldn’t say.
         ‘Were you prepared for death, Vincent?’ Father Loran asked him quietly, his voice steady now, as strong and as deep as it was in church
         ‘No, Father?’
         ‘And what will you do now – in life, in real life, Vincent – to prepare yourself for something like this, something so unexpected and undeserved.’
         Vincent took his time to answer and then said in a roll, ‘Not get married, not have kids and see a doctor, Father.’
         Father Loran tipped back his large bony head and laughed and, now, so could we. Mr Byrne began a round of applause. We even cheered. Father Loran rode out the laughter and then clapped his hands and said, ‘Right, lets carry on with the game.’
         Everybody resumed their places, happier now, excited about when they were going to die and how. They ran about comparing cards, numbers of children and terminal diseases. A prefect was given a whistle and every two minutes he could blow it sharply and let two pupils out of Purgatory, but anyone who spoke or argued with him would be kept in another two thousand years. Karen Worswick and Anne Bessel, devout nuns that they had become, were in Heaven. Anne Bessel was supping milk from the bottle and eating Jammy Dodgers by the tinselly piano, and Karen Worswick, allergic to milk, was given Vimto. Heaven was filling up with souls released from Purgatory, and Peter Cummins was suffering eternal wedgies from Karl Yates and William Rooney. The teachers were enjoying themselves, and Father Loran stood in the middle of the hall, mopping at his wide forehead with a handkerchief so white it glowed like a soul redeemed.
         And Barry Smith was no longer alone in Limbo.
         Bernadette Gibbons was standing next to him, standing hand in hand with him, giggling with him. I couldn’t hear their laughter, but I felt it, scissor sharp, inside.
         Bernadette Gibbons, the youngest in the Year, had been the last to enter the hall. Miss Saltney must have looked her up and down and thought, there wasn’t time enough for Bernadette to have a life, and so had handed her a pink card with a black spot on it made with her own Biro. Bernadette, too dim to see this was unjust, had just skipped to the corner and taken Barry’s hand as if she owned it, as if being in Limbo meant she could.
         They weren’t even a matched pair. Barry was short and dark and mine. Bernadette was a foot taller than any of us. She had great gangly legs and eczema all up her arm. She was still on Reading Book 1. She still did a blue band for the sky and didn’t know where to put ears on when you drew a face, but she had hold of Barry Smith’s hand, and I did not. Married, a doctor, a family man, from Table Seven and from the terrible distance of my imaginary middle-age, I envied her its grip, its heat.
         I would have swapped my unearned wife and children, my holidays, my house and car, the place in Heaven I was about to win so effortlessly, all I’d gained in the Game of Life, to be in Bernadette Gibbons’ manky shoes. To be Bernadette Gibbons, to be the slowest reader in Year Three, to be a girl, to have eczema on my arm and Barry Smith by the hand, but I was Martin Benstock, a boy of seven, and I had no right to him at all.
         Barry Smith had occupied my innocent heart all year long and I had kept my feelings hidden, not out of any sense of shame – I didn’t know to have one – but, rather, some private joy I had not even thought to share. Shame had arrived. It fell on me in one hot shower and I was drenched.
         If I had stood in Limbo, hand in hand, if I had shared my heart, Barry Smith would have pushed me away, the whole class would have laughed at me, Mrs Boyle would have clicked her fingers and two prefects would have dragged me all the way to Hell.
         It is always at this point I decide my life became real to me, and I reached the age of reason.
         Barry Smith belonged to someone else, and it wasn’t some momentary loss: it was permanent knowledge. This was how life was, how it had been without my knowing, and how it would be from now on. He was someone else’s to touch and handle, to have and hold, and I, in consequence, felt grubby, tampered with, and lost.
         I threw my dice at Table Eight, indifferent to the number. Miss Ryan smiled. She’d had a stroke the year before and her lips were to one side. ‘You’ve done ever so well, Martin Benstock. Go get your milk, and enter Heaven.’
         I sat by the tinselly piano, the milk sour, the Jammy Dodger ash, and Karen Rimmer walked over, dismissed from Worldly Goods for causing too many arguments. She sat down beside me in Heaven, and spread her skirt to cover her shoes, plastic sandals with cracked soles.
         ‘When we did this with Father Leary, we did it different,’ she said.
         Father Leary had left the year before. He was stooped and angry with a rim of bright white hair. He’d said God was like a goalkeeper, one who always saved. Most things he said went back to Football. He was why Father Loran seemed to me a different kind of priest.
         ‘We had cards for sin when we did this. They said Burglar, Liar, Disobedient, Proud, words like that.’ She looked across at Peter Cummins, who was weeping now. ‘No wonder he’s confused. I can’t see how you can play this game without having cards for sin, can you?’
         The cards for sin had been white, Karen said, and printed with words like Pride and Vanity and Sloth, Bully, Deceiver, Glutton. There were no cards for sin this year. No one had picked up a card that said Murderer, Blasphemer, Thief. Ifthere had been cards for sin, Peter Cummins might have understood why he was in Hell, the girls in purgatory might have complained a little less, seeing the sense of it, perhaps, but I knew, even if there had been such cards, not one of them would have named my sin.
         Jealousy did not begin to cover what I felt, and we were too young to be told of lust, or what coveting really meant. Nameless, my sin would not have been printed out on a small white card, but represented only by a black and angry spot made by Miss Saltney’s disgusted Biro.
         But my sin did have a name. I named it there and then. Its name was Barry Smith.
         Later, from time to time, as I grew up, I would name it Peter Cummins, so pliable and small, or Michael Haliday, so blonde and clean, and then it would be Vincent Durkin whose beefy frame in adolescence was covered over with a ginger fuzz I’d ponder in PE when, together, we went to Secondary Modern.
         I never did pass my Eleven Plus. In all instances, not one of my cards came true.
         Which did?
         Eric Bamping didn’t pass the Eleven Plus. Whatever they were testing us for, it obviously wasn’t spelling or answering first in class. I saw him last when I was eighteen. He worked the Deli counter in Tesco’s. He told me, whenever he was bored, he gobbed into the stuffed olives and served out the pâté with dirty hands. He was always angry and hard to like.
         And Karen Rimmer did become a nurse. I met her on a plane from California not so long ago. She had been at a medical conference, a national expert on incontinence. She hadn’t changed at all.
         God knows what became of Bernadette Gibbons. Her parents emigrated some time later. I know she spent most of that afternoon in tears at Mrs Leddick’s desk because she couldn’t quite understand that the morning had been a game and she really wasn’t dead and, no, she really wasn’t in Limbo and, no, she couldn't sit by Barry Smith.
         The last time I saw Mrs Leddick I was thirty-five and home for Christmas from San Francisco. It was Midnight Mass, and Josephine, her daughter, living still, was leading her slowly down the aisle. Time had bent the glamorous Mrs Leddick into a hoop. She didn’t remember me. She said, ‘’You’re very tanned,’ but she looked at me as if I came wrapped around in fog.
         And Barry Smith?
         We never met up in the evenings after that. There were no long games of Marines or Special Agents, no tumbling down the grassy slopes, no breathy sudden partings. My choice, this. Call it penance, if you will.
         He passed his Eleven Plus. He went to Grammar School. He was taught by monks, played cricket and, I suppose, got on, but, really, Barry Smith is in Limbo still. Of course, he is. He means far more that way.
         You need a place to lose things; people, memories, unanswered prayers, tears that go unnoticed, friendships that never came true, and loves that never made it to the age of reason. It’s all too heavy otherwise. You can’t fall as fast or free.
         But the first to be lost and gone from me was more unexpected.
                   One Sunday, no more than a year later, Father Loran disappeared. Another priest was in his place. This priest asked us to pray for Father Loran. Father Loran was unwell. There were masses of special intention, rosaries and benedictions in his name. There were rumours of TB and, eventually, of cancer, which in those days was shameful, dirty even. I don’t think the word was even used.
         I remembered his long face, that bony body, the soft hand over his tiny mouth, the delicate coughs, the trembling foot in its pointy shoe, and how, in Heaven, drinking milk and leaning on the tinselly piano as the Game of Life was drawing to its close, I saw Mrs Leddick rise from Table Seven and Father Loran sit down in her offered chair, and how he slumped there, her ringed hands on his drooping shoulders, and how, closing his eyes, he pressed his face against her hand for just one moment, no more than that, and I thought, nobody has noticed this, but me.
         When he died, there was a great funeral. The entire parish attended it, but the night before we were allowed to troop past his open coffin, if we chose. I did not choose.
         Now, I yellow the fingers of his soft white hands and I pour dust into those Daz-blue eyes, and young priests, for all I think them deluded fools, seem to me to be figures of romance. I even imagine him the night before we played the Game of Life, shuffling the cards in the quiet of his room, preparing for the day to come and pondering what was the one thing he wanted most to say to us now we had reached the age of reason, and taking out all the cards that mentioned sin.