After The Fire

2. The Haunted Abyss

Brighton, recently

On his bed in the hostel all day, in the queue for the food slopped out on the plates, watching crap in the TV lounge in the evening, smoking any spliff he could get out by the fire escape, it didn't matter where he was, what he did, Joe Belton couldn't get away from the sign.

Two simple lines that cross.

They say if you know how to worry you know how to pray, but he stuck with the worry. From every angle he broke this cross apart, and considered it, and jammed it back together in different ways and none of it fitted with him. He gnawed at it, and it gnawed at him, and he tried to digest it but while he did that it ate him right up.

Start with nothing. Out of that comes a dot. The dot becomes a line. Then two lines. Then they meet. A cross is the fourth most simple thing in the world.

Yet everywhere Joe turned his gaze this simple symbol leaped out at him.

It was in shadows made by the blind across his ceiling at night. (How come it only came with the street lights, only at night when he was scared? Why couldn't he see the shape in the slats in the daytime) It was in the crack on the wall of the smoking shed. The scar on the neck of the old boy who doled out the dinners. The way they laid out the trestle tables in the dining hall. The breaks in the glass in the mirror he shaved in. In silver and gold on the necklace of Ginny who worked on reception. The tattoo on Ant's arm. In the logo on the poster of the smiling teenagers at the bus stop. The interweaving tyre tracks in the mud on the grass verge. Two crossed syringes in the gutter. The carving on Ronnie's brand-new gravestone last November. Birds forming intersecting rows in the branches above the grave. Silver contrails in the frost-blue sky. Everywhere he looked, everything made the sign of the cross.

The most powerful cross of all? The mark made on his forehead on Christmas Eve.

Swaying into midnight mass, the whole church spinning, his belly bubbly, feeling pukey from the lagers and the kebab, his heart banging in his chest from the brandies, in there for no more reason than something childish and long-forgotten and soft and warm-hearted had led him, Joe had knelt at the altar rail, his head bowed low, his arms folded in front of him.

He had folded his arms because even through the booze he remembered he couldn't take proper communion. Unconfirmed at his age, the mumbling shame of it. Never confirmed meant a mam who hated God for her own dad who walked out, and her own mam who died way too young. Who hated God for how the kind older man she picked as husband could only give her one single weird kid before he turned out to be weak and buffeted by all he should have saved her from, to the point he could barely keep a roof over their head let alone excite her. Never confirmed meant a dad who wanted Joe out playing football, or fighting, or breaking and entering, or smashing stuff up, or doing anything but going to church on a Sunday and sitting with the posh kids who mocked him.

Never confirmed. Unconfirmed. The story of his life.

Preparing to give him the wafer the vicar noticed Joe's folded arms and changed his approach to give him a blessing. He touched his middle finger to a vial of oil and then marked a slow cross on Joe's forehead.

So tender his words.

'May God bless you and keep you. Make his face shine upon you'

The cross he marked on Joe was 2,000 years old, and Joe felt every day of its weight.

A week later, as he woke up in his pit on New Year's Eve, Joe could still sense the cross on his forehead. He lit his first rollie of the day and considered why this might be. Not many people touched Joe these days so that could account for a lot, but there was more. That touch had mattered. It was the touch of love. The tenderness of it burned. The fact such a thing as this ceremony existed. The penetrating compassion with which the vicar spoke the words.