by John Johns
Near the end of a jog along the beach I came across a priest painting a picture of a rock. His painted rock was grey and, for the time being, featureless. It just floated there on the canvas. The actual rock on the table was smaller than its image in the painting. And the priest’s easel looked brand new.
He had not yet painted the blue sky. Or the sea, or, in the distance, the magical island castle known as St. Michael’s Mount. To the right of St. Michael’s Mount a freight ship hovered on the horizon. This ship hadn’t moved for several days. I watched an inflatable banana drifting in from that direction towards the beach, never quite reaching the sand. It was just a narrow beach. Which of these things would the priest paint? And then there was the actual rock. His subject rock. It lay inert on a sheet of red tissue that intermittently flapped about in the wind, presumably obscuring the priest’s view. And then the table was pretty interesting too – the priest had weighed it down with these funny little bags of stones, one bag for each leg. Clearly the table legs, like human legs, could fold in half. Their knees bowed slightly from the weight of the rocks. And for some reason the priest had also etched a line in the sand leading from beneath this table to his easel. Would he include the semi-inflated banana in his painting? I hoped so but didn’t think so. I stared at the line in the sand and learned nothing.
The priest was an unsettled priest, that was obvious. But he was also determined. He wore a pair of narrow rimless glasses that emphasised his determination, and also emphasised his broken nose. Why do priests always wear little rimless glasses? And, knowing he was heading off to paint, why would he put on his full white gown? Maybe this was a ritual of some kind. He daubed at the red puddle on his palette and shook his head gravely. Without opening my mouth, I laughed. I took a photo of the scene and sent it to my family. Standing away from his easel, the priest raised up his brush and then frowned as the paint dripped in front of him onto the sand. Maybe the paint was too thin. He picked up another brush, this time smaller, and he started mixing a pale blue. The new brush seemed way too fine to paint a sky, and the shade he’d chosen was much paler than the sky itself. Just when I was thinking maybe the priest had no interest in the sky itself he cocked his head back robotically and squinted, the remains of his grey hair poofing up with the wind. Again, he shook his head. He didn’t like what he saw of the sky itself. Then he took his new brush and painted directly over his rock, presumably to erase it and start again. But, no, it did not erase. Having not quite set, the grey paint corrupted the pale blue of his brush; what had been a rock became a distorted raincloud in a warped sky. For a moment the priest stared intensely at this mess of his. He pouted. Then he continued, persevering towards the corners of the canvas with his dirty grey-blue paint and his tiny little paintbrush. At first his brushstrokes were vague, long, and faint, and then they were fine and compact, suggesting a denser rhythm of sky. He swabbed his palette with increasing frequency and the paint became increasingly thick on the canvas, in the top-right corner even visibly sagging. Maybe he felt this improvisation might actually work out. Maybe he suspected a failed painting could be better than an intentional painting. It was abstract now, though probably he’d disagree with that. I judged the priest unfairly. A seagull landed beside the line he’d drawn in the sand. What is faith? Surely, he watched the imposition of his paintbrush against the filthy canvas and considered this. For what am I here doing this? Am I in pain?
After completing the top half of his new background, the priest spent a long time looking at the red blob on his palette, and then glancing about at the surrounding families and dogs. He glanced at the sea and discovered the semi-inflated banana had finally made its way to shore, though nobody came for it. Then he glanced towards me. To hide myself I squatted down and pretended to analyse a tiny collapsing sandcastle. A nearby ice cream van started playing Greensleeves and I laughed at the sandcastle, and I laughed at the thought of the furious priest watching me laughing at the sandcastle with this song playing. Then a little South Asian girl who must’ve been the sandcastle’s architect wandered into view and stared as I laughed at her creation. I tried to stop laughing but the damage was done. She was stricken. She didn’t cry but it now seemed to her that the object of her pride was in reality an embarrassment. She didn’t understand. She didn’t belong here at all. Her sandcastle had sticks pointing out from the top, but there were no trees in sight.
‘Look at that seagull there,’ I whispered, and she turned to look at the seagull and this marvellous scene with the priest.
Realising he’d smeared grey-blue paint beneath his armpit the priest closed his eyes and nodded. He smiled ironically and raised his eyebrows. Then he opened his eyes very wide and turned back to the painting. Probably he did not appreciate the Greensleeves. He closed his eyes more deliberately now. For about a minute it looked like he was kind of meditating. The wind had picked up and the sky turned into something closer to the mottled colour of his painting. Maybe this pleased him. He opened his eyes and looked at me. No. No, he was not pleased at all. I put my T-shirt on. He turned around and tried again with the grey-blue paint but even from back here I could see that the wind had covered his palette in sand. He threw down his brush and nodded emphatically. ‘Ah,’ he shouted. ‘Yes. Jesus. Alright, that’s fine.’ A gentle rain began to fall and the priest laughed. He nodded and tapped at the sand with his foot. ‘Very good!’ he said. ‘Very funny! Very clever! Thank you! Very, very – yes, everything – absolutely perfect.’ Then a raggedy long-haired dog hobbled over to the priest – to his paintbrush lodged obliquely in the sand. It licked at the paintbrush. ‘Good boy!’ said the priest. He looked at me and looked down and spat. The line between the table and his easel had quickly disappeared in the rain. It was time for me to go. Again the priest tapped his foot and he gestured as if composing himself to resume his good hard work. But then, presumably mistaking it for a stick, the dog picked up the priest’s paintbrush in its mouth and wandered off, wagging its tail.
I walked on for a while and felt bewilderingly happy, and I still felt warm despite the rain. Then I started running up my granny’s hill before the cold set in. I ran as fast as I could because for some reason I believed a jog should conclude in total exhaustion. I wondered about this compulsion as I ran and, while becoming breathless, I started to dissociate.
Standing at my granny’s front door was her neighbour, knocking and shouting. My granny is completely deaf and, trying to catch my breath, I told the neighbour this. He rambled on madly about her caregivers and I told him she had no caregivers. He said her new caregiver kept singing loudly, every single morning, and I told him it definitely wasn’t her caregiver singing, it must be her grandson. Sweat dripped from my chin to my knee. He asked me to tell her to sort it out because he worked from home and his dog was ill, and I coughed and said I couldn’t ask her anything at all because she’s deaf. He complained that I shouldn’t be caring for a woman I couldn’t communicate with; I said I’m not her caregiver, I’m her grandson. He looked too old to work from home and he wore a faded black T-shirt that said MOZAMBIQUE. I told him I needed water but he stayed where he was and carried on about the sins of the singing caregivers, so I just took out my granny’s fluffy keychain and edged towards the door. He grabbed my sleeve and said the caregivers must stop singing, and I told him he was absolutely right and that I’d sort it out literally right now. I deliberately left the door ajar and then stomped into the house loudly enough for the neighbour to hear. I started screaming at my deaf granny about these shithole caregivers of hers and how they must either stop the singing or die. I called her a withered cow and asked whether this bungalow looked to her like the set of fucking Guys and Dolls. I also said her omelettes were runny and bad, which was true. The neighbour was still there beyond the door’s frosted window. I asked my granny to do everyone a favour and fucking keel over and die already. That’s when the neighbour finally left. My granny never realised anyone had even come in – she sat at the dinner table facing the back garden, reading the sports pages of the Daily Mail. I said I also disliked the nationality of her many caregivers. Her tranquillity was absolute and radiant.
After closing the front door, I laughed and wheezed. I grabbed an ancient banana and went to sit on the wicker rocking chair by the french windows beside my granny – I wanted to watch the priest finish his painting of the rock. The french windows were so clear it made me sad about my granny, who was the cleanest person I had ever met. It was no longer raining. Through the binoculars I could see the priest’s set-up had been taken down, and it was definitely the same place because there were four little piles of rocks on the sand, in a square. The water came up right to the stones now. My view sharpened as I turned the little focus dial, and then I followed the path up over the dunes but the priest was gone. He’d given up, though it’d take a lot more to give up entirely because he was a priest. Eventually I came across a red bin near a rusty old ice cream van. Sat beside the bin was a young woman in a leopard print beret, and her little dog had a triumphantly big stick. I thought about that other dog running along the shoreline with the paintbrush in its mouth, and I could not believe a person could be as happy as I was now. When I was younger nothing suggested a feeling like this existed. To witness it and feel it, here beside my granny, felt like vertigo. I was overwhelmed by her serenity before the theatre of hateful people. The little dog dropped its big stick and moved on, leaving me staring through my binoculars at the red bin beside the unmanned ice cream van among the sand dunes, and, rather than the hissing sea, there was the sound of my wicker rocking chair rocking. Surely the priest would get an ice cream. All he needed was an ice cream from the Greensleeves ice cream van. I became cold then. For a brief moment I considered – I believe earnestly – changing my life and writing a new bible. Then I laughed out loud at this thought which didn’t feel like a thought of mine. Oh God. I must’ve gesticulated a bit because my granny looked up at me and smiled mischievously. She would be gone soon. The ancient banana was inedible and I put it down. I wished I had a banana ice cream. Tomorrow I would go for a run, and the next day I would go for a run, and the day after that I would probably go for a run if I still could.
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John Johns is a writer. He lives in London and runs Tar Press. At the moment he's finishing a novel about flowers.