Excerpt
St. Peregrine’s stood before me, nothing but an empty shell now, a shadow, a ghost of its’ former self. For a moment I felt almost overwhelmed by sadness, an acute sense of loss. I stood there, looking at the decay, thinking, oh, so it has come to this? I felt like crying. As I looked up at the few remaining fragments of mosaic clinging over the porch way, I thought of my own moral decay and the crucifix hanging on my Mother’s wall at home, the thrill that had run through me when I had turned it round so that Jesus had his nose pressed against the flowered wallpaper. The memory of it made me shiver. I turned away. I couldn’t enter the church, not this way, anyway. I descended the front steps and went round the back.
It was the same route that my Uncle had taken to get in. I could see that at once. There was a deep, fresh pathway trodden through the undergrowth, created very recently. As I pushed open the door, I could smell the cold stench of decay, even before I saw how the rot had advanced since the last time I had been here. That shot came back to me now with a startling clarity. It was as though I had gone back in time and nothing that had happened since that day had really happened at all. I gazed around me and saw my Uncle now, sitting on the very edge of the one remaining pew. He didn’t see me, he was hunched forward with his head in his hands, holding it delicately, gingerly between his fingers, as though he was afraid it would shatter, or (perhaps more likely) decompose into nothing. As I approached him slowly, he looked up, quite suddenly. Perhaps some angel had given him a nudge, to tell him of my presence there. He stared at me; his eyes were hollow and rimmed with red. He didn’t seem to recognise me. He stood up slowly. I hesitated, unsure what to do.
“Hello, Uncle,” I said, “I thought I’d find you here.”