“Reverend Coulter, you were born and bred on this estate. As its Church of Ireland rector what does this shocking event tell us about the mood of the people here?” George Coulter opened his mouth. He saw the journalist’s professionally alert face, the microphone, the camera. He saw the multi-pointed security fence beyond and, higher again, the supermarket logo, garish against the tentative morning sky and – it was the sky; the sky, struggling to assert itself above the neon with no more in its armoury than the tenderest pink tinge to a pale September wash of blue – it was the sky that did it. The pathetic sky. He gulped and swung away, somehow aware of the journalist’s swift gesture to his mate to cut, let it go, for now; the journalist’s judicious frown.
Even as he stumbled behind some vans in an instinctive dash for cover he could imagine himself captioned: Minister Lost For Words. He wanted to vomit though he felt no nausea; to have some physical pain or punishment, something to stop him thinking. No good. He supported himself with a hand against the cool metal of a van door.
What had made Carson do it? He’d had so much support. People had been protesting on his behalf outside the supermarket for weeks. You couldn’t say he hadn’t been himself. Being himself was important to a man like Carson. That’s how he would have seen the whole business. He’d said what he had a right to say: merely the kind of thing that got said around the Twelfth – though it could never have been innocuous with Carson, convicted murderer of Catholics.
It was, George imagined, a nightmare for the manager, an import from England, a Catholic and, probably, the reason why a co-religionist was taken on in Bakery and one in Butchery. It wasn’t so much discrimination that had kept the staff Protestant as the reluctance of Catholics to work in such a hard-line Loyalist area. But times were changing, surely.
It was indeed the Bakery worker who had heard Carson describe the manager as a Lundy, Ulster Loyalism’s epitome of a traitor, burnt on the street in effigy every year; the man who would have opened the gates to besieging Catholic forces. How far was someone like Carson likely to take such an analogy?
Had the company turned a blind eye? No. It had applied its procedures and sacked him, though it had not prosecuted. But what the most expensive legal engagement would have been unlikely to achieve, Carson Villiers had managed. The company had re-instated him, ‘in the face of popular pressure’, as reports (though not the company) had put it. Carson had strolled back into work through applauding crowds and media attention, his return timed to coincide with the manager’s arrival.
So why, then? After all that effort. After winning. Why had Carson done it?
George thought of him at the check-out. He was an unlikely-looking till operator with his huge hands scooping up shampoo, dog biscuits, dainties; or reaching over to swing the heaviest things out of the trolley with no visible effort. Good-humoured, Carson had run his till like it was your privilege to pass through his care, like he was dispensing approval or patronage. What a great bishop he’d have made. He used people’s names, knowing instinctively who’d be pleased to be called ‘Mister’; who’d appreciate a bit of joshing; who actually liked to be dealt with impersonally. George had noted how he nevertheless kept the general area under surveillance: his hands moving across groceries, his eyes sweeping the bigger picture.
Carson, like George, had grown up on the estate. They had gone to primary school together but George had moved on and out, up the educational ladder. It was Carson who knew everything and everyone and remembered everything and everyone. Carson Villiers walked tall, and not only in the Orange parades when the big drum would be strapped to his chest, his shoulders back to support it. How does a man feel, George wondered, marching down his own streets, with the boom of each thud of the sticks pounding through his own body too? It must be like playing your own heart. Is it? You’re there at the core of the band, the Big Man, rows of people on either side, cheering, smiling, the weans on people’s shoulders, waving the Red, White and Blue.
Amnestied, Carson had walked out of prison in the same way, looking neither to the right nor to the left, his supporters on either side. It was only when he got out of the flashy car that brought him back here to the estate, that he spoke or smiled – so not a few of George’s parishioners had reported. Carson had raised his hand, they told George, and they had all waited for him to speak.
“Her Majesty,” he said and paused. “Her Majesty is a pretty nice girl and I have been enjoying her hospitality for some years….” This got a laugh, of course. “But, you know what?” he went on. “You know what?” And here he stopped and looked around the entire estate, long and slow. George knew from the way this encompassing gaze was spoken of that people had felt something rare. They had struggled in their various ways to express it. “He knew me,” one man had said, “though he didn’t. I mean, I was a kid when he went inside but he looked at me like he knew me. He saw me.” George was told many times how they felt that Carson, in his steady survey of them, had…. They’d stop at this point but George understood. Carson had taken them on, shouldered them. Things would change. “You know what?” Carson had continued. “Compared to this place, compared to these people, you people and what you have here, compared to what we have here….” Another pause. “Buckingham Palace is shite!” A grin and the place exploded. Talk about a hero’s welcome.
That had been years ago. Carson had remained what one might call an activist. He had gone into youth work and it was there they met again. George envied Carson his way with the teenagers. He’d screw up an eye and look at them with the other as though he had all the time in the world, never letting them moan needlessly about anything because he’d say something acute – this man with only a meagre secondary education. He’d take their concern and work it into a plan for action. He was a doer. Yet he’d let the youngster, or whoever, feel it had been their idea in the first place.
George could not compete. He recalled how, the first night that Carson had turned up at the Youth Club, although he had insisted on standing in the background, ‘looking on’, still the older boys were drawn to him like filings to a magnet. His behaviour was unobtrusive but his presence was unsettling: massively muscled, shaven-headed and mightily tattooed.
Carson altered the balance of everything. He would come, wearing a suit, to ‘support the young people’ at church parade, or volunteer to drive the minibus on a church outing or swing a mallet putting up a marquee for a fete; he was popular; but George felt himself enough of a clergyman to know that, whatever Carson was committed to, it was not the Lord. Sometimes, George suspected that Carson was making use of God and God’s facilities, for his own ends. As long as religion had something to offer Carson’s ‘brand’, it would be enlisted but quietly despised.
George felt this especially whenever he caught Carson’s appraising gaze fixed on him during a sermon. Every weakness of expression, every superficiality, each slip into ingratiating jargon and George would note Carson’s discreet, almost private, amused censure, as though he were calling into question George’s commitment; challenging his record. How far had George been willing to go for his principles, he seemed to imply. Had he walked the walk? Carson had, and however you looked at George’s principled return to his roots, he was little more than a dilettante in Carson’s view, no matter how many years he put in.
George took to addressing whatever parts of the church Carson was not sitting in and, afterwards, would rebuke himself for such thin-skinned vanity. He recognised that Carson had become what his old pastoral care tutor used to call ‘the demon parishioner’, the one who puts his finger on you. The more you distrust him, the more you try to compensate with Christian charity but still your distrust grows, so you try harder and your judgement swings more and more out of true, like a maddened pendulum, till you can hardly see your fellow-Christian for the blur.
Carson became a sort of fogged mirror in which George’s slightest doubt about salvation or providence was magnified; a silent, knowing critic of assertions about the goodness of God, his smile tolerant of the absurdity of everything George stood for.
Carson’s wife, Marnie was the believer, in an undemonstrative way. Marnie McKechnie. Younger than Carson and something of a Loyalist Princess, they had married after Carson’s release. She spoke as if her faith was something Carson shared, “We enjoyed that sermon, Reverend. Didn’t we, Carson? Took it to heart,” she’d say and he’d nod, “Very good, George. Very telling.” When Carson shook his hand at such a point, George longed to demand that he come clean, gloves off, and confront him, one hypocrite to another, man to man, if he was so hard. That never happened.
George’s wife had reproached him several times recently for his coldness to Carson. She told him he wasn’t seeing things in the round but he had responded with flippant aggression, “I’ve seen you and Marnie, heads together. You hear her confession if you want to. I’ll not be rushing to hear Carson’s. Our sort of Anglicans don’t go in for that. Thank God.”
Carson had been heard to say that achieving anything was all a case of knowing where to put the pressure. After certain killings, undertakers had whispered to George about the state of the remains, “Maybe help the bereaved let the viewing go by this time, Reverend.” These days it had become rarer for George to be taking funerals. People went to the Evangelicals or the harder Gospel groups.
George didn’t know the details of the feuds and positioning and deals among Carson and his associates over the years. The general drift towards a democratic solution for Northern Ireland’s problems was clear: the compromises – and the rationalisation of criminality into businesses of a sort. Who’d have imagined Carson Villiers working in a supermarket? But that meant something and nothing. We were all New Men now. And it left time for another life and its opportunities.
So why? Why had he done such a grotesque thing? Why? Why had Carson stood outside the supermarket, doused himself in petrol, set himself alight and walked in front of a car?
It was an inhuman act. And one that had involved others. Four eye-witnesses: two appalled pensioners walking their dogs in the very early morning; the driver, poor man – he had been absolutely traumatised with guilt; and the fourth witness, a parishioner delivering newspapers, who had called George instantly to the scene. George had embraced the driver, repeating to him that he could have done nothing to avoid the collision; that it had been planned and deliberate but the young man, neatly dressed for work in a city office, kept saying: I could have… I should have… If only I’d…. With Carson’s charred body humped on the road in front of them, George wondered angrily what Carson had hoped to achieve by implicating an innocent stranger. The car had been the means to make sure there would be no going back.
Because Carson was thorough, a strategist always. So why no media coverage – if it was a statement of some kind? If Carson had laid down his life, it was for nothing in particular, apparently. He had left a note, though, under a stone by the kerb, asking that George take his funeral.
Christ! George hit the van door with the flat of his hand and was jerked into awareness of the scruffy carpark and of the appalling fact that Carson had implicated him too. He would not be manipulated! The church full of Carson’s associates; his fans; his widow, Marnie; a eulogy…. No!
All along he had been right to doubt the depth of Carson’s ‘conversion’ to normality. Carson had committed an appalling act. The community needed to recognise the true nature of this hero of theirs. Were they Christians or not? The time had come for him to call the Carsons of this world out. It wasn’t too late. Time to put aside scruples about his own worthiness. The Holy Spirit was there for the asking. The Holy Spirit would give him the words to speak, starting with this interview.
He turned just as the journalist approached him, waving away George’s apology for needing a moment or two, saying it was natural, a man you knew all your life, a prominent local figure, a community leader, even. “Nasty business,” said the journalist.
“I’m ready now,” said George.
As they walked back to the storefront George saw that the crowd was growing steadily and he knew what he would say: Carson Villiers was godless. He executed himself. Ruthlessly. With as little mercy on himself as he had on those whose lives he cut short so brutally in the past. This community thought he was a hero but we don’t need heroes like him. Our hero is Christ, who laid down his life, who went to the cross, to save us….
Positioning him once more, the journalist said considerately, “Look, we’ve already covered the debts and the wife in earlier interviews so we’ll just do the community angle with you, Reverend. OK?”
“Debts?”
“Villiers’ debts.” The journalist’s attention was on his iPhone. When George, puzzled, said nothing, he looked up at him as though reminding him of a commonly known fact, “The cross-border fuel scam – Carson trying to go it alone, strung out from the big boys.” His eyes back on the screen, he added, “And then, his wife, she was the last straw.”
“Marnie?”
“You married them, I believe.”
Generations of her true-blue family had been ranged on her side of the church. Classy, by the standards of the estate and always self-possessed, as Marnie came down the aisle that day she had looked wonderful. George saw her before Carson did. He had been trying to avoid Carson’s complacent grin as he waited with his best man and it was probably his own instinctive blink of approval that had made Carson turn towards his bride. The naked adoration on Carson’s face as Marnie stepped into place at his side! How could he have forgotten that, George wondered. Such vulnerability. Marnie had looked at Carson through the fine mesh of her veil, steadily, then calmly turned towards George. Carson looked only at her.
“She cleared out his bank account – when she ran off.”
“What?”
“Yesterday,” said the journalist. He suddenly shied back from his phone with a hiss of disgust. “That’s a bit strong. Can’t see that getting on the six o’clock.” He flashed the screen at the cameraman who winced in response.
“Who did she.…?” asked George.
“Manager. Look, I’ve just got to… another witness has turned up. Twitter. Passing motorist. Just let me.…” His thumbs flew over the screen.
“With the manager,” George repeated. “Of the supermarket.”
The journalist nodded, eyes down, engrossed. George reached out and snatched the phone. A figure with its arms stretched wide, a man in flames, stepping off a kerb, a car.… The journalist, protesting, grabbed the phone back and began a call, saying to George, “I’ll be with you now.” George heard him discuss chasing the supermarket security camera footage.
Of course, Carson would have thought of that. There would be pictures. George reeled from the implications. He put himself in Carson’s shoes – in that moment before he’d sparked the irrevocable flame – dripping petrol, choking on fumes, grasping a lighter, about to step off the kerb, and at the click of ignition George was enveloped in a cold flame, furling up around him like a burning flag, showing him…. My God. My God! An abyss. An unfathomable Why?
Forsaken, at the kerbside, betrayed and abandoned, Carson had fashioned his own answer: to annihilate himself rather than give his destroyers the last word. He had not believed in the love of God. He had believed in himself, and in Marnie. Carson was a lost soul. George had done nothing to save him yet expected the Holy Spirit to jump to attention the moment he clicked his fingers.
The journalist stowed his phone and posed his question again. George felt so empty that he could not speak. The journalist, was about to repeat himself but George held up a hand and he subsided attentively. The crowd quietened around them.
George opened his mouth, “Carson Villiers was a child of God. A child who got lost, who didn’t believe he had a father to turn to. People like me blocked the light. I didn’t show Carson God. I showed him myself. I helped to kill him. Carson challenged my faith in God, and, instead of admitting my weaknesses, I hardened myself to him. May God forgive me and everyone one of us for our blindness to each other’s needs. We crucify each other and blame God.”
George stopped. He too was lost. The journalist made a cutting gesture to the cameraman and the two exchanged a look that George understood to mean his statement would not be used. The crowd, dissatisfied and uneasy, parted for him.
He walked back to his church numbly, his mind again with Carson, his fingers seeming to clutch that lighter. To have all the love you’d poured out come to nothing, deserted by the one you thought would never leave you, a has-been, a failure.… He stopped, amazed. Didn’t he recognise that man? Wasn’t that Christ?
He had reached the church. He grasped one of its spear-like railings for he felt the ground giving way beneath him. What was the next step? Where should he put his feet? He was on the verge of something immense.
“Carson”, he prayed, “Carson, save me.”
“Step out,” said Carson. “Is He there?”