Glenn Patterson

	Walberberg 2007: You cannot be serious!

Monday is as close to a day off as a Presbyterian minister gets
in a normal week. That Monday morning, Avery woke late.
Frances and Ruth's voices carried to him above the sound of
the radio downstairs. It was going to be another warm day.
Frances had left the side windows ajar in the bay, and the rise
and fall of the breeze had sucked the curtains into the openings.

The house - Avery resisted the word mansion - was off the main road, five minutes' brisk walk from the church. With its rustic nourishes and vestigial outhouses, it was still referred to by some locally as Townsend Grange from the days when the city's outward reach was several miles shorter. Now, its tall hedge was broken on one side by the palings of an electricity substation, and on the other by the goods yard of a Tesco Metro. The view over the hedge from the back-bedroom windows was of the stairwell of a block of seventies mai-
sonettes, from the windowsills of which at this time of year a startling array of flags flew: Ulster flags, UVF and UDA flags (though never close together), Scottish flags, Canadian and Australian flags, even the occasional Union Jack. To find anything remotely resembling countryside these days you had to carry on a further mile out the main road and cross the four lanes of the Outer Ring Road, where a glen would take you the quiet and roundabout way to the south-eastern suburbs.

Avery's predecessor had lived here for dose on thirty-five years, had died here, and though the house was as well fitted-out as you could want, the decoration left much to be desired for a couple in their thirties with a young child. Young children. There was no end of volunteers to help with the stripping and painting, but Frances and Avery were trying where possible to manage on their own, bit by little bit. Last Monday Avery had repainted the walls of the cloakroom under
the stairs and today he was going to put up shelves to take
some of his excess videos.

He was glad to have woken into such practical thoughts for he had not gone over to sleep easily last night. He had spoken to Guy Broudie after the evening service, but Guy could add nothing to what he had told Avery in the morning. He had discovered the man in the corridor, looking at the nameplates on the various doors. When he told Guy what he wanted, Guy had tried to persuade him to come back another time, though he might not have spoken for all the notice the man
took.

Frances was even less help. As they were getting ready for bed Avery had asked her had she noticed anyone unfamiliar before or after the morning service. But Frances had had her hands full with Ruth. It's no joke, you know, sometimes, she told him, keeping her in check.

Frances was worried she had a haemorrhoid; she was
entitled to be a bit short.

Lying in bed, at half past nine the next morning, he listened to her laughing downstairs, more like herself, and might have dozed again but for the sudden klaxon of a lorry reversing through the gates of the Tesco goods yard. The price they paid for being able to run out in their slippers at eight o'clock in the evening for chocolate cake and banana frozen yoghurt.

He thanked God for the blessing of a new day, then swung his legs out on to the floor, jogging them to gee himself up.

Hey-ho, let's go, he chanted, a secular exhortation.

He was supposed to have two weddings that week, but the second cancelled with only forty-eight hours' notice- He spent much of Wednesday afternoon at the family home of the disconsolate groom. No, of course he wasn't a dull person, nobody was, God had made us all individually interesting. Yes, three former girlfriends and his fiancee could be wrong.

On Thursday lunchtime he attended a lecture at the City Mission: Facing Up to the Fractions. More than 9/10 of people on the globe would soon be living in urban areas. More than 9/10 of the world's current city dwellers attended no manner of religious service. The question was, was the Church driving people away by the slow pace of change, or were the changes too fast, making the Church just another form of entertainment that today's urban population could take or - as it
increasingly appeared - leave? The audience of six was split, 1/2 and 1/2. Avery leant one way, then the other. He was attached to his collar, if not the title that went with it, and to certain traditional forms of worship, the yeas and verilys of the King James Bible, the hymns of Isaac Watts, while not forgetting how as a teenager those same forms had driven him almost beyond the Church's reach.

As he walked back to the car he was hailed by a group of tourists carrying precautionary Pacamacs. German, up from Dublin for the day, their spokesman explained and handed Avery a map. Waterfront Hall? he asked.

Avery traced the route with his finger. We are here, it is there.

He told them there was an even bigger arena, the Odyssey, now being built just across the mouth of the Lagan from the Waterfronl. Worth a look at least.

The tourists thanked him, began moving off, map like a divining rod before them. The spokesman hung back a little. I was wondering, he said, as awkwardly as if he had been talking to a pimp, not a Presbyterian minister, where is everything, you know?

Avery knew. Walk half a mile in any direction from here, he said, you'll come across something.

I'm sorry. You don't mind me asking?

No, said Avery, conscious that in Berlin, Belfast's erstwhile wall-twin, he might ask the same thing.

That night, switching on the news while he worked in his study, he heard that a former loyalist prisoner had been found dead at the foot of'a cliff in north Antrim. Police said they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the incident.

The enormity of the deeds come home.

They gave an age, forty-four, and a name, which meant nothing to Avery, though he had no reason to believe that the man who had come to the office had told the truth about his.

He endured another restless night thinking about it, persuading himself one minute that the odds were still stacked against it being his man, the next that it could be nobody else. He hadn't talked like any ex-prisoner Avery had met, it's true, and if he was in denial then he was in a pretty advanced state. Even so, first thing in the morning Avery went and bought both local dailies, flipping through the pages as soon
as he was out of the newsagent's door. There was a picture in one, a blow-up from a prison group-shot. The quality was poor, the period detail misleading, but Avery was certain, it wasn't him.

Excerpt from "That which was"