Walk the Blue Fields Read Online Free PDF Page B

covered by a shade. Almost everything is white, the plywood painted. There’s a big indented cushion and an open book.
    The Chinaman looks at the priest’s feet. The dirty shoes are an insult here. The priest takes them off and leaves them outside the door, realising, as he does so, that his feet are sore. A stool is taken out. The Chinaman’s hands are quick. He is a lithe man, handsome, moving freely about his home. The priest looks through a perfectly clear pane at the river and feels a fresh stab of envy.
    ‘Yes,’ says the Chinaman. ‘You trouble.’
    ‘My trouble?’
    The Chinaman nods.
    ‘I have no trouble,’ the priest says.
    The Chinaman laughs; he understands this is what people who are in trouble say. He takes a glass from a shelf, pinches dried leaves from a canister, pours boiling water. He fills a glass to the brim, hands it to the priest. It is almost too hot to hold. The leaves float at first then fall slowly and expand. It tastes bitter and burns his tongue.
    The Chinaman stares at him. His eyes are wide open, focused. He folds his sleeves up neatly to the elbow and reaches out to touch the priest. It is three years since anyone one touched him and the tenderness in the stranger’s hands alarms him. Why is tenderness so much more disabling than injury? The hands are dry and warm. When they reach down from his jaw and encircle his throat, the priest swallows hard and stares at a print on the wall. The print depicts a plain, alabaster bowl and its shadow.
    ‘Yes.’ The Chinaman goes to the mattress and slaps it.
    ‘What?’ says the priest.
    ‘Good,’ says the Chinaman. ‘Yes.’
    The priest takes off his jacket and lies on the mattress. He lies on his back but the hands turn him over. His socks are taken off. Thumbs press his toes, his heels and move deep into the soles of his feet. The Chinaman lets out a grunt of comprehension, shifts to the priest’s side and begins, with his hands, to strike him. He starts at his ankles and moves, with infinite patience, up to the back of his thigh. When he reaches his buttocks, he pushes his fists deep into the flesh. The priest feels an urge to cry out but the hands move to the other leg pushing whatever is in his legs into his torso, as though his contents could tip from one side of his body to the other. The priest slowly feels his resistance giving in; it is the old, cherished feeling of his will subsiding. Let the man strike him. It is a strange feeling but it is new. He turns his head and stares at the alabaster bowl.
    Fragments of his time with Lawlor’s daughter cross his mind. How lovely it was to know her intimately. She said self-knowledge lay at the far side of speech. The purpose of conversation was to find out what, to some extent, you already knew. She believed that in every conversation, an invisible bowl existed. Talk was the art of placing decent words into the bowl and taking others out. In a loving conversation , you discovered yourself in the kindest possibleway, and at the end the bowl was, once again, empty. She said a man could not know himself and live alone. She believed physical knowledge lay at the far side of love-making . Her opinions sometimes galled him but he could never prove her wrong. He remembers that night in the parlour, her smooth, freckled arms. How she sat on the edge of the bed in Newry town and sewed the button back onto his shirt. The next morning, their last, they had lain in bed with the window open and he’d dreamt the wind had blown the freckles off her body. Later that morning, when she turned her head and looked at him, he said he could not leave the priesthood.
    Now, the Chinaman is manipulating his hands, pulling them back from his wrists until the priest feels certain they will snap. His head is lifted, brought round in circles that get wider. Knees are placed at either side of his head. The Chinaman is dragging something from the base of his spine, from his tailbone, up through his body. There’s