Shit!

(One of my favourite cartoon strips as a child was Oor Wullie and I can still see him smiling and sitting on an empty bucket, in my head I can... no shit! Ever nearer to the end of Port Brokeferry... and some stories reach some sort of end - as much as stories ever end.)

ST AUGUSTINE AND A BUCKET OF SHIT

Kelso had stepped into the church. It was not that he was thinking to pray. He did not believe in any of that, just as he did not believe in the palm readings that old May gave at the fair. She’d read his palm for free, said things he had heard her tell to others, that there was a girl in his life who was important and that the future was clearer and brighter. And she would be like the sun in his world, this girl who meant so much. Nothing about his being a father and a child between this girl and himself. Nothing about that or his thoughts all muddled. Storm-tossed is what it felt like in his head. All May had was just words for people to cling onto, and if they’d paid money to hear what old May had said, then those words took on a false importance for them.

Inside the church it was like an escape from everything. The air was cooler and still and there was the sense of being outside when you were in. Outside and alone, shut off from everyone and everything. ‘The peace that passeth human understanding.’ It was something he had heard when he was younger. A minister had come to the school and it was something he had said, standing tall on the stage at the front of the school hall. Kelso hadn’t thought he’d really been listening, but the words came back to him now.

Kelso crept to the far end of the church, feeling like he was trespassing, creeping like a thief. He sat in one of the wooden pews at the front and just sat, looking at the smallest movement of the coloured light across the floor and up the walls, and at the same time not really looking at all.

‘I sometimes just take the time to sit,’ said the minister. ‘It can help to get things straight in my head when I am troubled.’

Kelso had thought he was alone, but the voice of the minister did not startle him. He waited for the minister to speak again, expected that he would, that there’d be something about God and God listening and understanding and a confession of help wanted coaxed from him. They sat in quiet.

Then Kelso spoke. ‘It’s all just shit isn’t it?’ he said.

There was a quiet after his words. Time enough for the minister to consider his response.

‘I think St Augustine put it in just those words, something about life being a bucket of shit that we had to carry around with us always. The same for him as for everyone.’

Kelso was surprised at what the minister said. It wrong-footed him. Then he thought that maybe the minister had intended that it should.

‘What makes a man a saint if his life is a bucket of shit?’

Kelso expected that the minister would talk about God then, and the blessing of God, and what it is to pray, to really pray. Instead the minister just shrugged his shoulders.

‘Is that it? Is that all you’ve got? Nothing!’

‘What is it you are looking for?’ said the minister.

‘A way out. A way to go back to the start of things and not make the same mistakes.’

‘There was a girl I knew once. Before I became a minister. She was everything to me. And I thought it was the same for her. I thought we would last. That we could survive whatever the world threw at us. All Augustine’s shit.’ The minister laughed at that. ‘But clearly we didn’t last, otherwise she’d be here or I’d be there, wherever she is.’

Kelso did not get it. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘In here there is an escape of sorts. But it’s only temporary. You don’t want to stay in here. Cut off. Never seeing anyone else. You have to go out again, into the world. And you carry that bucket of shit with you and it never gets any lighter.’

Kelso hadn't come in for answers. He left without any. He did not turn towards Berlie's when he left the church. Instead he headed in the other direction, back along the road that had brought him into Port Brokeferry, and maybe he carried something heavy with him, and maybe it was, as Kelso'd said, and St Augustine had said, and the minister, too: maybe it was all just shit.