If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them wanders away, what will he do? Won’t he leave the ninety-nine others on the hills and go out to search for the one that is lost?
And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.
Matthew 18: 12, 14
Content Warning:
Discriminatory Language Relating to Disability
If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them wanders away, what will he do? Won’t he leave the ninety-nine others on the hills and go out to search for the one that is lost?
And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.
Matthew 18: 12, 14
Content Warning:
Discriminatory Language Relating to Disability
The Child Among the Pipes
The church waited with eternal patience beneath a baleful sky. Far beyond the culmination of the bell tower lay heaven, heavy and overcast and threatening rain. The hour of that mid-December morning was an early one, and the lightless world, through whose dark and barren plains swirling, occasionally sardonic winds crisscrossed in wild, bipolar jets, was hours yet from the discovery of any good humour, any consolation, a single and first ray of good hope.
Cyril Pickton’s train hurriedly left behind a broad breast of marsh and swerving rivershore. In one of the silver pools where the moody sky looked at itself without love and the ripples of a soft rain were raying out, an avocet stood, serene and patient and in poise. A crowd of lapwings ricocheted into view, seemingly from ether, in a dance like molecules, in a sneeze of crested birds, their silhouettes dark and heavy against the sky, its pallor.
Cyril’s train pulled into the station. The verger had already arrived and was awaiting the train’s arrival. He’d to pick Cyril up, and take him the mile or so to the church, where Cyril was contractually obligated to play the organ each week at the 10 o’clock Sunday mass. The verger opened the door of the parked car, leaning out beyond the steering wheel to his left. He bade Cyril a good morning, and Cyril got himself into the car and seated himself with the greatest alacrity, pulling the door to behind him. Cyril liked the verger, only he couldn’t remember his name and he was embarrassed to ask. A light shone out of the verger, something graceful and kind, luminously so. Some people have this quality someone had told Cyril once, though he couldn’t remember who.
The drive was a pleasant one, and about half-way through its brief duration the rain began to cease. The church’s seclusion came upon Cyril with a kind of trepidation each week, it never failed to cause a small pang of dread within him, as the already thinly-populated district of houses, fish and chip shop, two pubs (one of which seemed to Cyril infinitely more attractive than the other), a school attached to a convent, and a post office, all ebbed away, and tracts began to present themselves, wooded in places, but for the most part wide, open, and desolate as a sea tranced grey and sinisterly calm. Two enormous graveyards, in hilly expanses, like the partnered backs of two slumbering beasts, lay spread behind the church, which leapt above them, crowning a hill of its own. Further hills slumbered in the distance beyond the vastness of the cemeteries, and they breathed, in long, seldom, somnolent grunts, sheets of mist behind whose congregation they hid and they slept.
The car pulled up to the boundary of the churchyard, that ran down in a slope from the church’s unassuming threshold to meet the road. The churchyard was busy with a high attendance of numerous withered trees, and no two even subtly the same.
Cyril disembarked and thanked the verger. A girdle of highwires girded the space of sky the church considered his. On one of the nearest pylon-steaks, a notice, filmed to keep it protected from the rain, met Cyril. It told of a missing boy, a boy who had disappeared a few months ago …He was last scene with a man described as tall and non-descript leaving St. Francis de Sales Church where he… but Cyril didn’t see any of that, he forgot the name and he forgot the face, almost instantly. He had other things on his mind.
The door to the church lay open, a warm, lit orange beckoning in the grey. As Cyril ascended the path, that met him like a ribbon unrolled in welcome upon the slope of the hill, he glanced up, his gaze pulled upward by something like a shout from on high, and he thought he saw a face, resting on the castellated rim, peering down at him, from the very top of the bell tower. Cyril couldn’t tell who was looking at him. Was it a boy, a girl, a woman? He was quite sure it wasn’t a man. Perhaps it was not human. Cyril waved, presuming that it had a good explanation for being up there. It did not wave back, it looked down upon him with a frown as St. Francis de Sales’ venerable organist shrugged, went on his way, and crossed the threshold.
A soft bell chimed in the upper chambers of the church, winging its way down and through the building like a strange, solitary bird. Cyril stopped as he rounded the ring of the font. The bell stopped just as he stopped. He went on in the soft, silent gloom, up the aisle, through the middle of the pews, symmetrically arranged on either side of him. Having entered the vestry, Cyril began his ascent up the spiralled stairs to where the organ sat lofted, the console where its solitary sound-summoner would soon sit hidden from view, its massed pipes like a big, wise, weird face in their mass, burgeoning out from the stone, ready to wash the sanctuary in song, with the rowdy chorus of their many mouths. Cyril slid open the organ’s double doors, revealing the three manuals and numerous stops. Reaching his hand forth to turn the key, in the mood for a preparatory play, he heard a sudden whisper sound from somewhere above his head.
“Hello!” the whisper said, forceful through its hush.
Cyril just about leapt from his skin. The voice was high, ringing, childlike. The whispered shout that had so surprised Cyril, flung its two syllables down towards the altar, and the sound bounced about the various surfaces of stone, the echo, as it bounded off pillars towards the ground, growing less and less until it was nothing, with perfect graduality.
Cyril looked about, expecting to see a little person, lost and haunted, appear in his vicinity. He walked around the body of the organ and returned to his seat. Nothing: nobody. He readied to play.
“Help!” the whisper said, sharply, sharper than before.
“Who’s there?” Cyril said. The volume of his voice was normal but it resounded loudly in the church’s highly-strung quietness.
“Help me,” the voice said. It wasn’t really a whisper now, it was more of a mew, a little mew, kitten-like.
“I can’t…who is this…I can’t see anyone…where’s your voice coming from…?” Cyril stammered.
“Look above the emblem,” the voice said.
Cyril felt a sense of relief that the voice was able to respond to him, reasonably, cogently. The voice was so childlike, that of a little boy Cyril was able to deduce, but it used language like an adult, or a person many years senior to the age he sounded at any rate. Voices can be deceptive, of course. Curious, Cyril thought, obeying the voice, looking over where the St. Celia’s shield sat, central, on the console’s upper rim, just below where the pipes began. In the darkness in between the static, dead, soundless pipes, Cyril was able to see a pair of eyes. They glowed.
“Yes, I see you,” Cyril said. “It’s nice to meet you”.
The eyes seemed angry.
“What’s the matter?”
“You haven’t said Hello”.
Cyril’s brows furrowed.
“Hello,” he said. “It’s very nice to meet you, to meet your eyes.”
“Hello,” Eyes said. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“What do you want?” Cyril asked.
“I’m stuck in here. Please get me out,” the voice, now eyes with a voice said.
“How on earth do you expect me to do that?”
“Just try you best…”
Cyril looked about and wrang his hands in some desperation. He hurried down the dark stone spiral of the stairs and sought out the sacristan, who was laying out the celebrant priest’s vestments upon the sacristy table.
“There’s a boy stuck in the organ,” Cyril panted breathlessly from the doorway.
“There’s a what in the what?” the sacristan said with typical truculence.
He struck Cyril as a man who took great delight in his own grumpiness. He was an old Anglo-Catholic cockney who had moved about the country a great deal in his life. Perhaps he had come to his last pasture, never again to up sticks.
“There’s a child, in among the pipes,” Cyril rephrased.
“What pipes?” the sacristan grunted.
“The organ pipes. There’s a boy stuck in the organ pipes.”
The sacristan laid down the cloths in his hands and breathed one of his typical full-bodied breaths, his whole upper body lifted and dropped back in place with the breath. It was a breath of both mastered exasperation and an attempt to calm himself with the small releasing power that a well-breathed breath can grant.
“This is just the sort of thing that drives me up the wall,” he said.
“Sorry?” Cyril said.
“This sort of airy-fairyness, these constant eleventh-hour problems I’m expected to deal with. I’m going to pack in one of these days, I really am…”
“It’s an emergency!” Cyril managed to say.
“…I got Father Petroc coming in to take the mass and he always leaves it until the very last minute to arrive, the stupid bastard. Frankly I could do without the added suspense, there is quite enough suspense in my day to day existence without that trifling ingrate waltzing in here at one minute to, leaving me and the servers with tenterhooks so far up our…”
“What are we going to do about it?” Cyril snapped, interjecting.
“About what?” said the sacristan.
“The boy among the pipes?”
“Dunno what you’re asking me for, I’ve got no idea. Leave him to work his way out, that usually works in life. Brush everything under the carpet, make sure you don’t think about what’s under that carpet ever again, and away it all goes. And I’m busy, Cyril, you’re the brave brainy one of the group, why don’t you use some initiative for once…”
“I use initiative,” Cyril said.
“Well, you don’t need me then, do you?”
It was clear that the sacristan was no help. Cyril rushed back to the organ loft. He peered in between the pipes. Silence and motionlessness was all that he sensed. He decided that he wasn’t going to concern himself any longer with the child among the pipes.
Cyril turned on the organ and its blower wheezed and the whole machine whirred and bristled as it roared into life, not yet with musical notes, but with the whoosh of an engine in a vehicle ready to go places. Cyril pressed on a moderately heavy combination piston, a great number of the stops jumped out with a clunk. He spread his hands the known width and landed down, hard, upon a big D major chord. The chord filled the church, with radiant hugeness, even drifted out the door and a short way down the lane. But just as soon as the chord sounded, a screaming noise, a pained bawling joined it. Cyril stopped immediately, disturbed. He stood up and saw the boy’s eyes, there he was, in the darkness between the pipes, glowing. His screaming stopped with the chord.
“What are you doing?” the boy said.
“I’m sorry, I thought you’d gone,” Cyril said. The glow was faint.
“What a strange thing to think,” the boy said.
“Well, the entire situation is rather strange,” Cyril replied.
“Is it?”
“Yes. I mean, how did you get there in the first place?”
The boy paused a moment. “I have certainly no idea.”
“Well, I’ve got to play the organ at mass in about half an hour, so you’re going to have to get used to it…”
“Please don’t play the organ again. It’s really loud. I don’t like loud noise.”
Cyril sighed: “There must be some way of getting you out…”
Cyril reached into his pocket and took out his mobile phone. He touched the device into torch mode, and a beam of piercing, white light rayed out from the top right corner of the phone. It was a bright, secular, sterile light, it gelled with the dim, natural light that the boy emitted. Cyril pointed the light in between the organ pipes, the big front ranks.
Now Cyril could see not only the gleam of the eyes but the rest of the child. As though his acknowledgment of the child’s presence among the pipes fleshed out his being, first he was a voice, then he was a voice and the soul-windows of the eyes, Cyril now saw that there was a face, pale. There was unkempt blond hair, and the curl of the rest of the child’s body gradually presented itself too. He was positioned foetally, in a shape like a croissant in the space between the front rank of pipes and the row second from the front. The space was not great, and he was wedged between them as though between two trees in a grove that from the seed, had enjoyed great propinquity. On the boy’s top half sat a black sweater tightly, with the sleeves rolled up half-way, and his legs were covered by three quarters of cotton trouser. His feet were bare, and looked a little reddened, calloused.
“What is your name?” the boy said.
“Cyril,” Cyril said.
A pause.
“You not going to ask me what my name is?” the boy said.
“Sorry, that’s very rude of me…”
“No, it’s good,” said the boy. “I don’t like telling my name to strangers”.
“Okay then,” Cyril said.
He spoke well and articulately, and yet when Cyril looked at his face and the large, melancholy eyes, it was as though the voice passed through him, from a source not him, he seemed almost disconnected from it, as though it said whatever it purposed to say and the boy had nothing to do with it.
“I was baptised in this church,” the boy said. “Confirmed, been here all my life, I used to be a bell ringer.”
“I had no idea. This really is your church, then,” Cyril said.
“There’s nothing I don’t know about bells, and carillons, but I don’t know much about organs. I don’t know when this organ was built. I wonder when this organ was built?” something seemed to have cheered the boy, he spoke with greater freedom and fluidity, zest, from within the dark prison of the organ pipes.
“It’s a jolly good question,” Cyril said.
“So you got your keyboard and you got your foot pedals. The big pipes are lower and the little pipes are higher, that’s right isn’t it, yeah.”
“Spot on,” Cyril said.
He wanted to get on, prepare his service, practice loud as he liked in the precious ten minutes before the people began to flood into their temple of habit, demanding peace. But he figured he might resist that wish awhile, talk to this child among the pipes: what an awful spot of bother to find oneself in, thought Cyril. Cyril was glad to talk with the boy a little, put him at ease as best he could. And for a while, he did, after which the boy said:
“Thank you for talking to me.”
The boy knew this church, he knew its bells and sounds and sacred yards, the moments to which its walls bore witness week on week, he knew the regular hour was approaching, the little mass bell, like an angelus bell, ringing away with distant insistence, louder without than within, beckoning 10 o’clock closer, closer, when finally the priest would ring the introit bell. Having assembled all the books he needed for the service, Cyril began to play the organ, softly as he promised the boy that he would. As the minutes drew on, Cyril played and he played, floating to the gathered heads, men hatless, women hatted, like a lovesong- the loneliness of the loft, allowing that soft preparational seriousness to drape them with its spell, its promise of perfect imminence. The choir entered the vestry and garbed themselves in cassocks and surplices.
Cyril played softly. As his hands fluently moved on the manuals, as his feet stomped about on the pedal board and the right of his two feet occasionally lodged itself as if of its own accord into the swell box, every so often he glanced upward, so as to catch sight of the eyes of the child among the pipes. They watched him, glowing in the darkness, they were there and would remain there. Cyril kept his playing soft, he didn’t want to hurt the child’s ears, he was sensitive to noise, anyone would be hurt and rattled by the racket of the organ from such a place as his, in among the geometric forest of the pipes. Cyril found the poignant eyes, the whole soft face of the boy among the pipes to be a sort of burning spot, a lit spot of life at the organ’s centre, like a flare the organ’s soul let up from its darkness in distress, and let burn like an ember between the brows of his vast visage.
At about a minute before mass was due to start, Cyril called a far larger number of stops into service, and the organ’s sound swelled in an alarming crescendo like a big, frothing wave rising up out of the sea. As soon as Cyril began his loudening, in the final minute of this, his improvised paean of imminence and culmination, the boy among the pipes began to moan. Cyril went on a few measures, attempting to ignore it, but the new loudness of the organ was torture to the boy, and his moan became a wail, a long, loud, long cry. The cry was disturbingly loud to Cyril, discordant and disparate against his music, it made him grimace, filled him with a feeling that reminded him very distinctly of listening to a five-year old play the oboe. Like listening to twenty five year olds playing oboes. Cyril prayed that the congregation wouldn’t be able to hear the boy’s cacophony against that of the organ. It was such a strange sound, alien, animal, it didn’t sound like a sound that the boy’s spoken voice suggested he was capable of producing.
Just moments away from the ring of the mass-beginning bell, Cyril could no longer stand the unhuman wail of the boy among the pipes and he ceased playing quite suddenly, in panic and frustration and exasperation, ejecting himself from the loft, hurling himself down the spiral of steps and out to the front of the church, before the sanctuary, the pulpit and lectern on either side, gesticulating and petitioning as the boy’s protestation died down:
“Please somebody help, there’s a child among the pipes!” Cyril cried out.
The congregation looked at Cyril as one, each face blank and perplexed:
“What’s he on about?” a voice said.
“What did he say?” another said.
Another voice said: “There’s what in what?”
“There’s a child, a boy, an actual human boy, trapped, in the organ pipes!” Cyril breathlessly specified before them all, rattled and apoplexed.
“What an incredible notion!” somebody exclaimed.
“Yes, incredible, most improbable,” someone else agreed.
“I think it’s balls. Why don’t you just get on with it?” someone said.
“I don’t like children,” an old, scratchy voice said, androgenous with age. “Especially boys. I’ve not yet met a single boy what deserved to be born”.
Cyril couldn’t see where the voices were coming from, they just rose up from the mass before him in the pews, and sounded, almost as though the voices came from his mind.
“Didn’t you hear him?” Cyril protested. “He was screaming.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” a voice said.
Father Petroc, purple-vested, emerged from the sacristy, the sacristan lingering behind him, scowling and shaking his head slowly from side to side:
“What’s going on, Cyril?” Father Petroc said.
“There’s a child among the pipes, the organ pipes,” he answered, tired of having to utter the ludicrous phrase so many times in a single day, and he feared he was far from done doing so. Ludicrous, yes, he realised that, but it was true! One struggles with the articles of belief, why should one not struggle with this, proved, true as true could be, the eyes were true, the voice was true, the face, the body, all was true, Cyril fiercely thought.
“What about the organ?” Father Petroc began. “Is it playing up?”
“No!” Cyril cried, “there’s a boy stuck in it, among the pipes!”
“Dear Lord,” Father Petroc said. “Well, we must see what we can do at once.”
The priest followed Cyril up the spiral steps and into the loft where Cyril pointed out the child among the pipes, only to discover a moment later that he wasn’t there.
“He was just here, he has a little voice and large, expressive eyes, and a face, a body, he wears three-quarter length shorts, he has everything a human has…” Cyril gibbered.
“I don’t see anything,” Father Petroc said, peering into the darkness between the pipes. It was three minutes past ten.
“There’s a boy among the pipes!” Cyril cried.
“No, Cyril,” Father Petroc said, standing his narrow frame up straight. “There is no child among the pipes.”
“But there was, Father!” Cyril protested.
“Do your job, Cyril. Try not to get distracted.” The priest paused, and as he paused a strange look moved in his eyes and darkened his fallen face. Then he said: “Why not try to live in the world gratefully? Why obsess over everything living in it when you’ve yet to learn how to live in it yourself?”
These words took Cyril by surprise, they seized him, their arrest chilled him as they coursed from Father’s mouth. The congregation waited patiently, they must have heard the footsteps and the murmur of voices on high. The organ stood very grand and still and soundless like a cloud in heaven.
Father Petroc departed. He assured the congregation that mass would shortly begin, and without incident. Cyril shuddered as if about to start crying, but he was shocked a second later by a familiar voice:
“Hello again!” the boy said from among the pipes, with surprising jollity. “Is he gone?”
Cyril was incoherent with amazement in reply but, seeing the pale face and the big, honest eyes in among the organ pipes, he managed to answer: “Father Petroc? Yes, he’s gone back down, but where, where did you just go?”
“I don’t like him. I like you the best,” said the boy among the pipes.
“But he would have helped you, he thinks I’m mad now…you should have showed yourself!” Cyril was almost exasperated.
“I’m shy. I’m really shy.” A pause. “…and they won’t help me,” the boy said mysteriously. “They’d rather I stay here, they don’t have the money to cut away the pipes and let me out, cut me a space to crawl out of, and then repair the pipes. They’d rather see me stay here.”
“I’m sorry,” Cyril said. “But I’ve got to play the organ.”
“Just play quietly,” the boy said.
“But I’ve got to play loudly sometimes, I’ve just got to.”
“I don’t like noise; loud noise” the boy said. Then his tone changed: “Me and you are going to fall out if you don’t respect that.”
From the pew below, a cross shout flew up, winged:
“Get on with it! Play the damn thing!”
“Go on,” the boy said. “But softly”.
That’s what Cyril did, all mass. Even the strongest, most triumphant hymn, and the blazing Gloria, and the offertory improvisation when the thurifer censed the people, usually so radiant and strong, was soft, and feeble. When it was over the people told Cyril as much, as if he didn’t already know, and they all said they were not impressed. The woman who habitually served coffee in the adjacent church hall, usually so cordial to Cyril, refused to give him a cup. He had approached the table, reaching out happily for his usual cup, only to be told that he didn’t deserve it, and admonished abrasively for good measure.
Cyril returned to the lonely organ loft, redolent with must, and old books, and cold chapel smell, and something geriatric whose source he couldn’t identify, like an old man’s jumper.
“Hello,” the boy said, with a glow.
“Hello again,” Cyril replied. Then he asked: “How are you getting on?”
“I would like to get out of here at some point,” the boy answered.
“I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Cyril sadly said. “I did try.”
“I know you tried. But I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to give you a bellringing lesson, I know everything there is to know about bells.”
“I know, but…” But what? Cyril did not know.
“I’m sorry,” Cyril resolved, firmly. “I’ve got to go now”.
“You’re not serious…” said the boy.
“I am. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ve got to go. I tried to help you I did, but I’ve…I’m really sorry”
“Please don’t leave me…”
But Cyril had already left, and he knew that he would not look back, would not try to find those eyes, and the face, and the curled shape of him in the darkness among the pipes. The voice of the child among the pipes became soft, it dwindled into a whisper, and didn’t seem like a boy’s voice anymore, more like a child so young its sound was androgenous. Cyril heard one more protestation of don’t leave me, a soft whisper winging its way down and around the flights of stone, down the spiral of steps. Cyril sought out the verger and said he was ready to return to the station, and the verger obliged. Getting into the verger’s car, the last thing Cyril saw was Father Petroc, cassocked, standing with a coffeecup in his hands at the portal, in the doorway of his church, a guarding angel, stern and unsentimental in the gaze he cast over the wet, windy, baleful world. It was raining again.
Cyril got out at the station and bade the verger goodbye. But he resolved to do one thing right before they went their separate ways.
“I’m so sorry about this,” Cyril said. “It’s terribly embarrassing, I’m dreadful with names: what’s your name?”
The verger looked at Cyril, warmly, beaming. Then he closed the door and drove off without answering.
Instead of going up the steps onto the platform, Cyril went across the road to the more attractive of the two village pubs. It was just after midday and the pub was empty but for a few eager, scattered patrons, but it would soon grow busier with lunching families, carvery hungry. Cyril went to the bar:
“Large whiskey, please,” he said.
“Which one?” the barman asked.
Cyril strained to see the line of whiskey bottles at the back.
“Don’t mind,” he said. “As long as its Scotch. Anything with a Glen in front of it.”
“Right,” the barman answered, obeying, but not naming the bottle. “Rocks?”
“No thanks,” Cyril said.
The barman produced the tumbler with its two or so fingers of whiskey in the bottom.
Having charged his customer, the barman said:
“You alright, mate?”
Cyril’s lips were about to utter their usual, spasmic Not too bad thanks, yourself? but something stopped him from doing that.
“Not so good,” he said. “I was playing the organ over at St. Francis de Sales. There was a child among the pipes.”
“There was a what in the what?” the barman said.
“There was a child, a little boy…stuck in the organ pipes. I wasn’t able to help him.” Cyril stopped. Some epiphanic light was suddenly shining in his mind. He didn’t know why, but, talking to this man across the bar, something became clear that was never clear before, in the bar’s level, secular light, things were clear that had not been so in the church, in its deceptive, holy gloom. “I wasn’t able to help him. But I know who he is! People always mentioned a boy who rang the bells, that he knew everything about the bells. They told me he had autism. I saw him…I never met him, but one day I saw him…he went off with a man. He was with a man. How was I to know! I didn’t try to stop th-…but how was I to know!”
“Sorry, mate…,” the barman said, he had a customer to attend to. “Yes, sir, what can I do for you?”
Cyril shook his head, swept past the figure that had joined him at the bar, and sank down into a chair in front of the fire. The chair sat, companioned by a few others, in strange worship of the fire, as if to bear witness to the spitting, crackling miracle of its flames, as if waiting for the fire to speak of some great knowledge. Cyril shook and tremored, so he began sipping his whiskey right away, nursing what strong little there was.
A song Cyril loved came on the radio:
Adia, I do believe I failed you
Adia, I know I've let you down
Don't you know I tried so hard
To love you in my way?
He’d looked it up once. Adia: he’d discovered that it meant “God’s Gift”. There's no one left to finger, There's no one here to blame. Cyril felt better about life, the fire, the whiskey, the song, his life’s small joys. But when he heard Sarah MacLachlan sing the line “I pull you from your tower, I take away your pain,” he felt sad. He imagined the shut doors of the church, the darkness within, and the little light of the boy among the pipes, and his little voice, his child’s voice, a whisper loud in the silence, in the gloom. But no-one to hear it, no-one to see his eyes, no-one even to notice the little fair-haired boy who knew about the bells and used to ring them, missing from their number. Who was he? Who had he been, who were his parents?
A man approached Cyril. He was holding a pint, Cyril sensed his warm, weighty approach before he spoke. It was just as Cyril turned to look at him that the man said:
“Sometimes an angel needs help to get to heaven”.
He spoke deliberately, with soft, serious mysticism. The man’s face was very still and pale, only his lips moved when he spoke, nothing else, every other part of him froze. His voice had a stifled, forlorn beauty about it. The man’s eyes were slitted.
“Sorry?” Cyril said. He had heard what the man said, and was confused.
But the man just smiled and walked back to the stool he had come from, with his pint. Cyril had not noticed him when he walked into the pub, nor had he noticed him come in since he had sat down.
Sometimes an angel needs help to get to heaven? Cyril thought to himself. He thought about the strange words of Father Petroc. He relived that first moment when he first had heard the whisper of the child among the pipes. Why me? Cyril thought. Why did he come to me?
As he imagined how he might enter the church, acquire a chainsaw, and though it would hurt the instrument, try to cut the little boy free, voices behind Cyril caught his attention. He heard the song’s last “’cause we are born innocent, Believe me, Adia, we are still innocent…”. What were the voices saying, the three men, table behind him…? Laughter. They were talking about someone across the room, at the bar with his back to them. It was the man who had spoken to Cyril.
“They used to call them mongoloids because of their Asian eyes,” one said.
“It’s not even offensive really it’s just accurate,” another said.
“Who was that spastic kid we were at school with?”
“Oh, yeah…can’t remember his name. What did he have?”
“Dunno, general learning difficulties”.
“He was really strange though, weren’t he?”
“Yeah, I remember. What was his name?”
“Did you ever see him glow in the dark?”
“What in the what, mate?”
“He glowed in the dark. Honest.” The man who spoke stilled the other men, they looked at him, in bemusement and expectation. Lowered voices sounded, a clink of glass, a pool cue cracked in another room. In the men’s silence, Cyril was able to notice a figure crossing the room. It was the man who had spoken to him, told him that sometimes an angel needs help to get to heaven. The man with downs walked out of the pub and disappeared, the double doors didn’t swing behind him.
“Richard! That was his name,” the man who last spoke said. He seemed moved as memory moved in his mind, quite overcome by it, lost in its mystery. Finally, he said: “I remember. I remember. I saw it! A light used to shine out of him”.