may make me gag, but cannot kill me. I’ve cleaned up rich men’s shit for long enough to know.
I see men die, and beasts live. Especially the horses: Death hates their odour, which makes me love it, purely to annoy Him. Then there are the rats, too small for men to notice. What is a rat? Of no more consequence than a girl. A girl who does not know her letters, but can read men. Who does not know her prayers, but knows what they are for. Who is tired of waiting for a saviour to turn stones into loaves.
I hear tales about punishment for sins, the wrath of the Lord. As for God’s anger, I’ll say nothing: not for fear of Heaven striking me down, but for the anger of men, who fear the fragility of their faith so keenly they would burn a child who spoke one small word against it.
I dance down the coast, from village to village. The first time, I tell the truth and say I am come from Bristol. They smell trouble and I escape with my skin, racing from hurled rocks and cudgels, only stopping when I am in the forest and they will not follow. I spit on the path that leads back.
The next place I am wiser, but still am chased off. I run: not only from their fists but also from the fever I smell on their breath, the roses blooming in their throats. I avoid villages, sniff out the stink of men and keep away. I use their fields for my larder; learn to move quickly. And all the while I keep one step ahead of the fearsome dancing partner whose breath rots the road behind.
We make a good pair, Death and I. As long as I can pique His interest, amuse Him with a merry expression and fancy riddles, He does not bid me stop. As long as I am more valuable alive than dead, He does not draw me into His most intimate and final of embraces. Each morning I devise a fresh amusement and play it out, ear cocked for His approving chuckle. Poised for dangerous silence.
I point to a man and say, This one?
He nods, and I start my game: steal a string of sausages from under the butcher’s nose, piss on the blacksmith’s fire, throw sand between the miller’s stones, spit on my lady’s poached halibut. I watch them fume and shake their fists, so consumed with anger they do not see the towering darkness behind them till He taps on their shoulder and there’s no time for hand-wringing and pleas for mercy.
I boast, hoping he cannot hear my desperation.
See how light I can make your labour?
Did you ever have such fun before?
What diversions. What amusements! Do I not garland your workaday world with wonders?
It’s a thin path to tread: I must not get so close that He gathers me into His arms and presses His stinking lips to mine. I must not strike a bargain, their lives for mine; nothing so dangerous as spare me and I will make you laugh. I am not so stupid as to spit on my palm and shake Death’s hand. I’ll keep myself well clear of His claw.
I am a jolly-man, a wooden-head; not everyman, but every-fool. I dance, I sing, turn cartwheels and weave my body into knots. For Him I flit between boy and girl, between dog and vixen; so fast that I lose sight of what I am, submerged in the swirling, glittering soup of my creations.
I am exhausted. So very tired of all this labour, this hanging on to life.
The Feast of Saint Brannoc
Because I could not hear the voice of God, I went to the fields.
I woke early, hoping to find a small corner of quiet in my church, but there was none. Before dawn I knelt at the altar, straining to hear the Lord but instead heard some farmer bawling for his cow. By first light this solitary cry had swelled into a wild congregation of yawning and farting and belching and pissing and wailing and sneezing and hawking and cracking of stretched limbs and banging of doors and no chance to hear the boldest cock crow over the dreadful racket.
So I went into the meadow. The morning was brisk: crisp bracken, brown as crumbled horse-bread, curled into itself as though trying to keep warm. Holly thickened the hedgerow, beside thorn bushes and grey-skinned ash with its black fists of buds. Small birds fluttered alongside, keeping pace with my steps.
I strode to the centre of the field. The earth spread its cloak beneath my feet, prickly with barley stalks cut close as stubble on a man’s chin. The breath of the dawn rose in a mist. Drops of water hung at the tips of the grass stems, catching the new light. Rooks splashed in the rutted puddles that lay athwart the fields. Over the sea to the west the sky was dark; the brightness of coming day showed itself to the east.
I shook my head of these distractions, pressed on, dropped to my knees. The dew came straightway through my hose and chilled me awake. I listened: nothing but my own happy breath. I pressed my palms together and spoke the beautiful words of the Office under the roof of God’s sky. No one bothered me with, Father Thomas, are you sick? I did not have to snap, No; I am at prayer. I am your priest. I pray. It is what we do. It was delightful.
For a moment only. A crow cawed, emptying its throat of sand. Its fellow answered from three fields away, echoed by the clattering of magpies. A cow mourned for her calf, taken at the last harvest. Bullocks steamed, sheep coughed at the sparse winter grass. All I asked was a little peace. If Hell was unimaginable pain and Heaven was unimaginable bliss, then the bliss I sought was humble silence. I shook my head, tried to retrieve the silence I tasted when I first knelt.
But here was a fox crying with the voice of a whipped boy, the dit-dit-swee of the titmouse, the rattling chatter of robins, the twee-twee of dunnocks, the bubbling of blackbirds. Seagulls cackled at some private joke. I pushed away the thought that it was myself they found so amusing.
I prostrated myself upon the earth and inhaled the reek of its dark breath, rolled over and lay on my back, stared upwards into the bowl of the heavens: the half-darkness unrippled by clouds, the stars closing their bright eyes one by one as the approaching daylight spread itself across the sky.
Can you not pray, my son? Am I so difficult a master?
I groaned. My disobedient senses were drawing me away from God. I shut my eyes tight, shoved my fingers into my ears till all I could hear was the hissing of the fire in my head.
‘Oh God!’ I bellowed, to drown out the world around me.
My heart slowed. Oh Lord, behold Your servant. That was the sum and total of my prayer, for the hour of the Office was done. It was time for me to spit upon my hands and labour for God. The pilgrims would come today and I would be ready.
I hitched my cassock and splashed through the ford into the village, slapping warmth into the cold meat of my thighs. Rain slanted down onto the thatch, gathering itself together for another busy day. There had been no frost all winter, only this steady river falling from the sky and making the fields swim. But the rain must stop soon: it was almost spring.
William stood at the lychgate collecting donations from the gathered pilgrims. He was a fine steward, and I could not fault him for the wholehearted way he displayed his stave of office with its clubbed
