Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.
Edward Greestone did not really like people. Not that he was aggressive or obsessively withdrawn, but he had an air of apartness about him, of being a man who stood always to one side. He was a pale brown man with a palely sallow skin and pale mousey hair, wearing fawn trousers and a brown jacket. He was neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, neither obviously happy, nor obviously sad - altogether a man whom no-one much noticed and whom no-one ever knew. He lived in a modest house with a biscuit-coloured front door on the edge of the city at the end of a short track, muddy or dusty according to the season. Beside the neat front gate was a locked box in which the postman left his few letters and on top of which, in the plastic folder provided, the boy with the red cart left his Free Papers.
He worked from his house, something to do with computers, or so it was said by the gossips in the smart terrace up the road into the city. He was a regular church goer, but not to the little Saxon parish church at the end of the city road. Instead, he walked every Sunday across the wide green acres where once the Roman city had stood and was now a huge public park where swans and moorhens swam in the the lake and children played in the stream while their parents sat in the shade of the ruined walls which were two thousand years old. Then he climbed the long hill to the massive Cathedral which dominated both the cities, old Roman and “new” Saxon. He liked the Cathedral. There he could sit behind a pillar, bothering no-one, unbothered by anyone, and commune with his God in his own individual and solitary way. The clergy, both the local Rector and the Cathedral canons, had tried to visit him pastorally, but none had ever got further than his front doorstep from which after a few moments’ desultory conversation they had been politely but definitively dismissed.
One weekday morning he walked down the hill from the Cathedral - it was Ascension Day and he had been to Choral Matins - and stopped at the bridge over the little stream. He could see a red-headed girl of about eleven or twelve with two quite small boys. ‘She should be at school.’ he thought. One of the boys pulled a small loaf of bread out of the bag the girl was carrying. He held it up over his head and shouted excitedly. Attracted by the shrill calling, a group of Mallard ducks clambered up the low bank and, in a wetly glistening feathery herd, hurried purposefully, as one duck, towards a late breakfast. All of them that is except for the last one to get out of the river who hobbled, one foot shrunken and malformed, slowly along the path behind the rest of the group. The children tore up the bread and offered it to the ravenous group jostling and gobbling around them."Crippleduck. Crippleduck!" they yelled at the straggler. As the lame duck caught up with the rest, the boys broke away and ran down the path, pieces of bread still in hand, laughing and shouting to the ducks "Come on, come on, chase us!" The ducks broke into an untidy slow gallop, leaving their lame cousin yet again way behind and still unfed.
Edward Greestone felt an uncomfortable and wholly unfamiliar anger rising within him. How could these children behave with such unthinking cruelty, how could they run away laughing from this pathetic deformed little creature? How was it that the God whose power and glory and love just twenty minutes ago he had remembered and affirmed could allow such wretchedness, such pain, such casual disregard? He wanted to run after the children and shout at them that he hoped one day
they would be left behind, that
they would be hungry, that
they should know what it felt like to be isolated, an outsider, to be in the world but not a part of the fabric of it. But the children had gone, down the path, through a gap in the hedge, lost in the bright sunshine of the morning.
In his frustration he kicked the bridge, and scuffed his well polished brown shoes. The ducks, finding there were no more crumbs to be had, took themselves back to the river, slid down the bank and into the water. They gathered themselves into formation and swam slowly up stream, whistling softly as contented ducks do, eyes bright, beaks busy snatching and filtering. He watched them as they came towards the bridge - eight mallards, a watery squadron as confident and precise as the flight of Hurricanes he could hear thousands of feet above the city. He counted them again. What had happened to the lame duck, why was she not lagging behind? His anger subsiding, he realised that in the water, in her own environment, in her own world she was not isolated, not an outsider, not a lame duck at all. Whereas himself...
He walked on slowly, thoughtfully, beside the lake, across the soft grass under the old oaks, past the lovely eighteenth century houses in their quiet old gardens and the gentrified Edwardian terrace, up the slight rise to the Saxon Church, then along his own dusty lane. The postman had leaned his bike against the wooden fence and was pushing letters into the locked box. “Good morning,” said Edward Greestone, “it’s a nice day.” The postman, who was very big and very black, was amazed by this greeting from a man who in five years had never acknowledged him with more than a barely polite nod. He swung round, knocked over his bicycle, seized his helmet from his head and held out out his hand. “Brother,” he said, “it is indeed a beautiful day.”
Naomi
