Kruger's Alp

Whether this was true or not didn’t matter. It was believed. It was an article of faith.

And then there was the deep loathing which the Margaret Brethren instinctively felt for the wayward and disreputable Father Lynch, another of the highly impressive qualities about him that attracted to him his altar servers.

Blanchaille was among the first. Blanchaille’s mother lived three thousand miles away and sent him to the hostel when he was seven. She had been destitute and so the hostel, and the Margaret Brethren across the road, waived their fees and took him in in the name of Catholic charity. Blanchaille’s father, a Mauritian sailor, had deserted his mother when she fell pregnant and never returned and yet she kept his name and passport, drew one for her son later which she renewed religiously, placing her faith in the French co

This love of the blasphemous jest was one of Father Lynch’s appealing characteristics. Another was the conviction that he was dying and hence everything must be done in a hurry, a conviction repeated often but without any apparent sign of alarm since haste did not preclude style.

Kipsel seldom came to Mass and never to the picnics. Perversely as ever, Lynch praised his loyalty and predicted that Kipsel would go far in life.

Last in the group but first in martyrdom, poor Michael Yates, later Mickey the Poet. If there was any epitaph for him it was that he never knew what was going on. It might have been inscribed above his lost gravestone — ‘He never had the faintest idea.’ He was only to write one short poem, four lines of doggerel, which led Lynch to call him Mickey the Poet, and the name stuck. Lynch went on to discern in him, in that wild prophetic way, ‘some gymnastic ability’.

Now I saw in my dream how Blanchaille grieved at the death of Ferreira. I saw him shaking his head and muttering to himself repeatedly: ‘What shall I do? What shall I do? First Mickey the Poet, then Miranda, now Ferreira.’

Naturally he detected in these violent deaths real signs that the end was near, this fuelled his anxiety, deepened his general feeling of doom, of approaching extinction. It is common enough at the best of times in beleaguered minorities in Africa, this feeling of looming apocalypse. Blanchaille’s people, a despised sub-group within a detested minority waited for the long-expected wrath to fall on them and destroy them. They didn’t say so, of course. They didn’t say anything unless drunk or tired or very pushed — and then they would say, ‘Actually, we’re all finished.’ Or ruined, some of them said, or washed-up, or words a lot worse.

This was what in my dream I heard Blanchaille say again and again as he stared into his occupied garden. He knew, as I know, that as the years have passed more and more people have felt this and they knew it to be true and the greater their perception of truth so greater became the efforts to disbelieve it, to push it to the back of their minds, to discredit it until at last, at the time of the Total Onslaught, it became a punishable offence to admit to the possibility. You could be punished, arrested, beaten up, imprisoned for defeatism in the face of the enemy, for after all there was by then a war going on. In my dream I saw Blanchaille place his hands on the window-sill and bow his head, his whole body bent as if something heavy pressed down on his back and he leaned forward rolling his forehead against the window-pane and staring into the garden, the very picture of a man oppressed, weighed down. He thought only of ways of escape. But from what and in which direction remained dark to him.

CHAPTER 2

And when in my dream I saw how Blanchaille stood at his window looking out across the garden towards the small knot of angry folk outside the front gate, I knew them to be his parishioners. They were the stony ground on which his seed had fallen. He had preached, he had warned, but the lambs would not hear, instead they banded together and drove their shepherd out. Tertius Makapan, in a mustard suit and luminous magenta tie, leaning against his dusty Toyota. A colossal man, a brick salesman, responsible for co-ordinating the attack on him; there were, too, his storm-troopers, Duggie and Maureen Kreta, Makapan’s willing creatures, formerly the treasurer and secretary of the Parish Council (before the Council was reconstituted into the Parochial Consensus Committee, the consensus being that Blanchaille must go); and poor Mary Muldoon, mad Mary, who knew no better, or at least he had thought so until she had tricked him out of his key to the church and so allowed the Committee to lock and bar the place against him; and there, hanging back, his black housekeeper, Joyce, who had joined them quite suddenly one night. Simply abandoned the di

PINK PRIEST MUST GO! Priest? The use of the singular case a