At Last Read Online Free PDF Page B

his stomach. And then he suddenly made a connection. Of course, how strange – how determined. Aged seven, going on his first trip alone abroad with his mother, a few months after his parents’ divorce. His first flash of Italy: the white number plates, the blue bay, the ochre churches. They were staying at the Excelsior in Naples, on a waterfront buzzing with waspish motorcycles and humming with crowded trams. From the balcony of their magnificent room, his mother pointed to the street urchins crouched on the roofs, or clinging to the backs of the trams. Patrick, who thought they were in Naples on holiday, was alarmed to hear that Eleanor had come there to save these poor children. There was a marvellous man, a priest called Father Tortelli, who never tired of picking up lost Neapolitan boys and giving them shelter in the refuge that Eleanor had been bankrolling from London. She was now going to see it for the first time. Wasn’t it exciting? Wasn’t it a good thing to be doing? She showed Patrick a photograph of Father Tortelli: a small, tough, fifty-year-old man in a black shirt who looked as if he was no stranger to the boxing ring. His bearish arms were locked around the fragile, sharp-boned shoulders of two sun-tanned boys in white vests. Father Tortelli was protecting them from the streets, but who was protecting them from Father Tortelli? Not Eleanor. She was providing him with the means to fill his refuge with ever-growing numbers of orphans and runaways. After lunch that day, Patrick had an attack of violent gastro-enteritis, and instead of leaving him in luxurious neglect while she went to look after the other children, his mother was made to stay with him and hold his hand while he screamed with pain in the green marble bathroom.
    No amount of stomach ache could make her stay now. Not that he wanted her to stay, but his body had a memory of its own which it continued to narrate without any reference to his current wishes. What was it that had driven Eleanor to furnish children for her husband and for Father Tortelli, and why was the drive so strong that, after the collapse of her marriage, she immediately replaced a father with a Father, a doctor with a priest? Patrick had no doubt that her motives were unconscious, as unconscious as the somatic memory that had taken him over in the last three days. What could he do but drag these fragments out of the dark and acknowledge them?
    After a quiet knock, the door opened and the attendant leant into the room.
    ‘Just to make sure everything is all right,’ she whispered.
    ‘Maybe it is,’ said Patrick.
    The journey back to his flat had a mildly hallucinatory quality, surging through the rainy night in a fluorescent bus, freshly flooded by so many fierce impressions and remote memories. There were two Jehovah’s Witnesses on board, a black man handing out leaflets and a black woman preaching at the top of her voice. ‘Repent of your sins and take Jesus into your heart, because when you die it will be too late to repent in the grave and you’ll burn in the fires of Hell…’
    A red-eyed Irishman in a threadbare tweed jacket started shouting in counterpoint from a back seat. ‘Shut up, you fuckin’ bitch. Go suck Satan’s cock. You’re not allowed to do this, whether you’re Muslim, or Christian, or Satanic.’ When the man with the leaflets headed for the upper deck, he persisted, investing his accent with a sadistic Southern twang, ‘I can see you, Boy. How do you think you’d look with your head under your arm, Boy. If you don’t shut that bitch up, I’ll adjust your face for you, Boy.’
    ‘Oh, do shut up yourself,’ said an exasperated commuter.
    Patrick noticed that his stomach pains had gone. He watched the Irishman sway in his seat, his lips continuing to argue silently with the Jehovah’s Witness, or with some Jesuit from his youth. Give us a boy till the age of seven and we’ll have him for life. Not me, thought Patrick, you won’t have