Miro's brush with God...

Or a story could begin a week before, with Miro wrapping stolen books in his own christening dress, a torn piece of netting and cheap lining that he had stripped from his sister’s doll, and stuffed into his satchel after Sunday dinner. The books were Crowley’s Equinox, stolen from the Mitchell Library earlier that day, a cache of books that smelt of bibles, edged in gold and bound in white calf skin. He would hide them underneath a loose floorboard in the bedroom of his own flat after another miserable dinner.

He had moved from the family home in June, but was still expected to go to chapel every Sunday morning en famille, then share an overcooked meal with them after mass. Only sixteen, he still felt uncomfortable drinking alcohol with them – his mother, Margaret, an embittered tea-totaller, and his father, James, an inveterate alcoholic, who would force it on him. This violent ambivalence towards booze meant that an uneasy compromise would be struck in the form of a bottle of Lambrusco, an unholy and wholly undrinkable wine. But after the first half mug it wasn’t so bad and then Miro would down it to drown them all out.

The same stories, the same names, the Celtic score, the prayers for the death of his father’s enemies, the Boyds, the Orange bastards, fuck the Queen, God bless the Pope, Our Lord and the Virgin Mary. Miro was not a fan of Our Lord who was their Lord; he hated what He had done to his religious yet hate-filled family. Christ’s bleeding heart pouring down all the walls in the house, over the wallpaper, down tothe chipped skirting. Christ’s ultimate sacrifice: to die for nothing, thought Miro. Red filthy nothingness slathered over the Anaglypta.

His honeymoon with Christ had been a short and bitter one. The few years of enforced piety at primary school, where babies are taught how to pray to the Baby Jesus, quickly became a force feed of fear. How do you teach a child how to fear an all-seeing and jealous God? You condemn the secrets of their tiny, little hearts and teach them how to genuflect correctly. If the iron rod god-graft takes, then fear becomes awe, love of the rod, but if it does not then the fear stagnates, contaminates the vessel then finally dissipates. It would take ten years to be rid of the god-stink.

Their God was a god of death in disguise, the God who quietly removed family members from parties, walked grand parents down the path, never to be seen again, took them out to somewhere far beyond the small known world. Heaven was a death camp, not an Elysian playground. His teachers had helped make it so: ‘So if my mum’s not a Catholic, where will she go when she dies?’ he had asked when he was seven years old. ‘If she is a Christian she’ll go to heaven, but a different part of heaven,’ said Mrs McInally, and it started right there, the horror and doubt set in. He saw his mother on one side of a high wire fence that was crowned with barbed wire, and him, God and the father he feared on the other. He imagined kissing her and clinging to the wire as God and his father dragged them apart.

Yet his walks back from school were enchanted, and a god of sorts, who did not demand capitalisation or supplication, came to him as he followed the path home through the bushes and grasses. The light would change, or maybe just his focus, and something filled the air around him. He would sing the hymns he had learnt at school, and the god of lonely boys who walk through holy scrub-land would appear to him. Not through parting clouds, nor heralded by trumpets, but in the space between everything and their God, on the very tips of his fingers, in his belly as a quickening. ‘And if wicked men insult and hate you all because of me,’ he’d sing ,‘know that I am with you through it all,’ every long walk home.

He needed this more than anything, assurance from this god, the holy father of the boy in the wasteland, not the brass one tacked to the cross, or the one mooning through cast plaster and pastel paint. It was to this god that he dedicated his first ever poem, an entreating paean to Pan by a seven-year-old boy for his school project on the Romans:

Pan plays on his flute
And all the birds toot.
I feel very happy
And the birds feel very yappy.
I watch him in the reeds and weeds,
Music is flowing down the stream,
Great noise and noises fill the sky,
Birds tooting in autumn’s aye.

And Jesus wept.

Dinner was over so he started the dishes. Christ gawked at him from the calendar on the wall facing him.

Before Jesus got the boot, and fear still reigned, he had pleaded for his mum to become a Catholic. As an indifferent, unspecified Protestant she went along with it for him, a little symbolic sacrifice for her own little god. It meant weekly visits to the priest’s house; not just the quick cut and shunt job she hopped for, but lessons about the distinctions between this and that, her God the theirs. The bells were fastened to Him and holy smells wafted around him, and Christ, the perfumed Lord of Fools came stumbling into view, a papal guard in harlequin dress with pom-poms on his shoes. He was not a God she recognised, but took him in for Miro’s sake.

When James worked nights she would take Miro with her, he would watch the TV in the priest’s cosy living room, nibble his rich biscuits and drink his Coke. He shouldn’t really be there; it didn’t feel right, but as the weeks passed it became a treat and he’d go with her if his father was home or not. And it was one of these nights, when he was just old enough to try and know himself, maybe eight or nine, that he realised he shouldn’t be thinking this, and shouldn’t want that, and ‘this’ was the priest and ‘that’ was to love him, but he did. Love had come in though fear of the priest’s power, his spiritual and physical magnetism, and had become a small but white-hot pinprick of desire. So he waited and prayed to a God who suffered little children to come unto him, but the priest never came. He left the parish and took hisGod with him, but left desire.

Miro could see the whole pantomime of it all from the settee in their front room now the dished were done, through the harr of the sweet wine, past the Two Ronnies on the telly. His eyes rose to Christ on the wall, arms held out, stigmata in his palms, showing off.

After the priest left, Miro’s fervour increased, and he and his mum would talk constantly about the Bible. He’d take their findings into school, hitting the teachers with a barrage of homespun truths. ‘My mum said that the Gospels are all different. My mum said that Jesus did sin, because he doubted God on the cross.’

‘That’s not true, Miroslav Low, and I’ll be telling the new priest when he comes what you’ve said.’

‘My mum said that He said: ‘Why have you forsaken me,’ on the cross, and that means he thought God had forgotten him. A sin.’

‘No more ‘my mum said, my mum said’, Miro,’ said Mrs McInally, ridiculing him to get the children back on side, ‘you sound like a baby.’ And he was still a baby, really; committing the very little sin of asking difficult questions – her crime was greater.

But amongst the unanswered questions there was still the miracle of the mass, the mysteries of communion, but before that, confession. Martin, who had always hung around the family, was almost ten years older and successfully terrified him over it, turning confession into a modern Inquisition, the confessional booth into a torture chamber or doctors’ surgery, with the priest wielding an enormous syringe, inoculating the confessor against sin. And he told him that he knew a boy who had only pretended to swallow the host at communion, but had spat it out and taken it home, put it on a dartboard and thrown darts at it, and the host bled. A few weeks after his own first communion, a terrified but curious Miro took the bread out his mouth as he knelt in prayer, examined it in his palm and saw the mystery dissolve as the waver turned into sticky white pulp. It was only edible paper, like the sweetie paper you could buy at the post office. He wipped the muck on his trousers and stopped his pretence at prayer.

But he couldn’t ignore the god of the quiet places, the god of tree cover and hiding places. Even after his class had their first communion he felt him in the air, saw him gust around the children who still wore their fancy clothes, the boys running about in kilts and suits like little drunk soldiers, the girls in hooped and ruffled skirts, looking like they were rolling on casters. When he thought of it later all he could come up with is that the colours looked brighter, everything whiter, that there had been a bleaching not a cleansing.

There was a corner in the playground, covered with a large pine tree that leant over the wall from the chapel gardens, one dark space amongst the brightness, and he felt drawn to it. He looked up into the canopy, under the protective cover of the dark green above him, and where there were pits and mounds where branches had been broken off he saw eyes. He looked into the darkness and the darkness looked back, and he was scared for a moment, then relaxed, like a kitten in a lion’s mouth. The children came over to see what he was looking at, a few saw it too and then didn’t, then they all ran back to their play, the aimless bright whirr of a game without him.

Miro looked over to his mother in their drab living room, and lifted his eyebrows.

‘Are you ok?’ she asked.

‘Yes, just thinking,’ he said.

‘What about?’

‘Nothing.’

Nothing now the nothing he felt at his own confirmation, a confirmation of nothing, no, the opposite of a confirmation, a silent but definite renunciation. When the priest asked, ‘Do you renounce Satan and all his works?’ Miro mouthed the word but could not say, ‘Yes.’ He chose St Nicholas for his confirmation name, Santa Claus, a big jolly joke. It was only now that he could see Satan in Santa, Old Nick in Nicholas, and this made him smile. His dad had come to the ceremony late; it was the first time they had all been to mass together since he had throttled Miro’s mum to get at her purse. More money for drink. They had been staying in a woman’s refuge the month before, a house for battered women, a house plagued by drunk husbands shouting from the street at weekends, babies crying for their mummies milk. But it was better than being at home with his dad, with his God and their shared malevolence.

Miro had stood in the chapel, waiting for the Holy Spirit to descendas he was told it would, but it didn’t. No third term to bind the Son and the Father, tertium non datur. He could see now, from his parent’s settee in Whiteinch, that Christ needed his hate more then Miro needed his love – the hate of the fallen angel spitting in His simpering face as he eternally fell.

Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.

‘I’ll go home after this,’ said Miro to his mother, as he gestured lazily at Ronnie Barker in a twin set and pearls.

‘You be in tomorrow?’ his father asked, commanded.

‘Yes, dad. I’ll make sure.’

Sherry for Breakfast

it's been some time since i last posted here, simply because i have been getting on with writing the bloody book rather than just thinking about it. it seems to have turned into a bit of an apologia, which was not my initial point. but i am letting it be what it has to be. miro's early life has been filled in - it came from i know not where - and his daemonic nature, the fact that he is murderous, should make a little bit more sense. not totally, i hope. i'll paste up a section of the new, more measured work, in a sec.

miro - still in london.

(this works well when read with ravel's 'kaddish' in the background)


‘There should be a flickering neon sign above the door saying ‘Give up hope all ye who enter here,’’ slurred Miro.

His only solid memory of this part of the evening would be the foyer, where tall black men standing sentinel at the gateway guarded the labyrinth’s pylon like inevitable statues of Anubis. Then a flash of light and water and him in the shower, wrapping a white towel around himself like a baby after a bath, and then into the maze.

‘The Rites of Eleusis,’ he said to the bleach-heavy air. Boris had already left him.

Men walked the halls like the inpatients of a mental ward, a moving swarm of lobotomised bees, bringing sperm as honey to the dead hive, flitting between the tiny cubicles, the cells, licking and sniffing at each other in the vain hope of finding direction. He too had left a part of his brain and hope with his clothes in his locker, and took on the same desperately indifferent gaze of the others, to blend in, to become one with the inmates.

Some men looked as if they had forgotten why they were there, and shuffled over the tiled floor, like slowly dying wind-up toys without traction, others seemed to have more of a purpose, like rats that had figured out the maze, and knew how to generate dubious treats. This was a map of the brain, a memory map, of rooms and anti rooms from childhood memories. It was endless corridors and lost classrooms, changing rooms at swimming pools, all the places that generated fear and excitement in a boy’s brain. Or was it the naked halls and improvised shower areas from an inherited memory – the hell of a concentration camp, a gas chamber? Love amongst the inmates. Is there? Wouldn’t that be a greater hell?

Doors half open, half closed, faces half awake, half asleep, bodies turning towards you or turning away. Where do you generate the will, the desire, the drive to make one of this indecipherable, undecidable ciphers mean something? He couldn’t muster the inclination to even nudge a door, so continued the trudge until he found the dark room. Heavy ribbons of rubber acted as a curtain, like the almost-doors of an abattoir or a hospital, so he pushed through them, let them lap at his tacky skin, and into the darkening.

We watch him, but he’s not there. The smell of bleach, amyl nitrate and sperm in the sticky room. No sound. Bodies rise up and fall back into the obliterating fog, darker spaces, darker bodies, moving through and over the waves of grey and paler folds over the curtain that blows over a black hole.

Miro’s neck bends this way and that, as if he is testing its strength, his head too large, too heavy; a tired child. He is trying to see the genitals, the truth behind the smoke and the gauze. There’s an arm around him, protective and strong, its owner invisible, moving him into the centre of the room, the gravity of desire without aim pulling him in.

blues on purpose. miro's music of choice after you didn't turn up. the fall out will begin soon...