Читать онлайн «Pack Animals»

Peter Anghelides. Pack Animals

(Torchwood – 7)

Light filled Father Ninian’s church and lifted his soul. He loved the place most when it was like this in the mid-morning.

He shaded his eyes to stare up at the rose window above the choir loft. Its brilliant light silhouetted the music stands like skeletal overseers, and sent long shadows running down the length of the nave’s nut-brown parquet. Two centuries of city building around Holy Innocents meant this was the only time of day that natural light streamed uninterrupted through any window in the eighteenth-century building. For much of Cardiff’s population, passing by on their way to shops or work or clubs, the church might as well be invisible. It was tired and old, a bit like Father Ninian, but at moments like this he saw the glory of God again in its damaged pink sandstone. He could even ignore the thrumming vibration of the sewer works in the street around the corner.

He inhaled all the church’s familiar smells. The snuffed smoke of extinguished offertory candles. The beeswax of polished pews. The background tang of old incense. In the vestment room there would be the scent of crisp linen and the cheap aftershave of the more senior altar boys.

Only boys, because Father Ninian didn’t like altar girls.

Two lonely parishioners awaited his arrival for confession today. Mrs Wendle and her husband, of course, bundled in their heavy coats, sitting in the pew between the fifth and sixth Stations of the Cross. Simon of Cyrene and St Veronica gazed down with the glazed beatific expressions of nineteenth-century oils.

He genuflected before the altar. When he rose, he smiled in the Wendles’ direction. Unlike the painted saints, they avoided his eyes.

The pensioners preferred to talk with their priest in the supposed anonymity of the confessional, pouring out their endless personal litany of venial sins, trivial misdemeanours and perceived slights. Father Ninian kept the pain of his own mortal sins close to himself. He had entered into temptation, he knew, but the flesh was weak. He also knew the promise of damnation if his sin remained unpardoned, and that it must be expunged by sanctifying grace before the time of death. Well, he had opportunity enough for that.

His sacristan fussed by the altar rail as she prepared the church for afternoon mass. Father Ninian smiled at the old woman, and indicated the Wendles. ‘The usual suspects, eh, Miss Bullivant?’

Miss Bullivant scrunched her aged mouth into a disapproving pout so that it puckered like a dog’s bum. She opened the New Jerusalem Bible on the altar rail, and tapped an arthritic knuckle on a page. Father Ninian could see it was the Book of Revelation.

‘Its heads were marked with blasphemous titles,’ she whispered. Miss Bullivant always whispered in church. Father Ninian only ever met her in church, so perhaps she whispered all the time. ‘Blasphemous titles,’ she emphasised, and grasped his sleeve with a gnarled hand. An unlikely description of the Wendles, Father Ninian was about to say, when Miss Bullivant continued: ‘Those youngsters play with monsters. They don’t understand that Halloween should be All Hallows Eve. You should talk about it in your sermon, Father. It’s not about tricks and treats and ghosts and monsters. Forget the saints, and all that’s left is a cult of death. ’