Or maybe I wanted him not to be there. Or to be there with this girl he’s been seeing, so I could feel even worse about myself. I don’t know. I don’t know what I wanted, or what I thought would happen. Anyway, when I got upstairs it was obvious the buzzer had woken him up, and he’d had to get out of bed to let me in. It wasn’t really late, only around midnight. He was standing in the doorway looking tired and old. I don’t mean that in a bad way. But when I see him usually, I suppose I’m used to seeing the same beautiful blonde teenager I’ve always seen, since I was a little girl. And when he was standing in the doorway last night I realised, he’s not that boy anymore. What do I really know about his life? When I developed my first teenage crush on Simon, I didn’t understand sexual feelings very well, and I came up with the phrase ‘the special touch’
to describe to myself how I felt when he touched me. Which, by the way, he only ever did either by accident or in the most chaste ways imaginable. Isn’t that a really funny phrase, ‘the special touch’？ Thinking about it now, it makes me want to laugh. But then last night in bed, he put his arms around me and immediately those words rushed back into my mind, like the last fifteen years were nothing, and the feeling was the same.
We ended up going to Mass together this morning. The church on his street has a very glamorous stone portico at the entrance and the extraordinarily Catholic name ‘Church of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners’。 He didn’t ask me to come with him, by the way, I wanted to go, though I’m not sure now why I wanted to. It’s possible I was getting such a nice feeling from his company that I just didn’t want to be physically parted from him for an hour. But it’s also possible, and I’m not sure how to put this, that I didn’t want him to go without me because I felt jealous. Now that I’ve said it, I don’t
really know what I mean by that. Do I resent him for liking the concept of God better than he likes me? The idea seems plainly absurd. But then what? Having put myself back on intimate terms with Simon, albeit for a brief interlude, was I afraid that he was going to Mass to cleanse himself of me? Or maybe in a way I didn’t really believe he was going to go through with it, and that if I offered to go with him, he would have to come out and admit he had not been totally serious about the religion thing after all. In the end of course we filed into the church together uneventfully. Inside, it was all white and blue, with painted statues, and dark panelled confession boxes with luxurious velvet curtains. Most of the other attendees were little elderly women wearing pastel-coloured jackets. When the service began, Simon didn’t suddenly start acting very intense and spiritual, or crying about the majesty of God the Father or anything like that, he was just his usual self. Mostly he sat there listening and doing nothing. At the beginning, when everyone kept repeating ‘Christ have mercy’ and all of that, I think a part of me wanted him to start laughing and tell me it was all a joke. In a way I felt afraid of the way he was behaving, saying things like ‘I have greatly sinned’ – actually saying such things out loud in his ordinary voice, the same way I might say ‘it’s raining’， if I had a sincere belief that it was raining and nothing about this belief struck me as ridiculous. I looked over at him a lot, feeling I suppose alarmed by his seriousness, and he just glanced back at me in a friendly way, as if to say: Yes, this is Mass, what did you expect? Then there was a reading about a woman pouring oil on the feet of Jesus and, I think, drying his feet with her hair? Unless I misunderstood. Simon sat there listening to this patently bizarre and freakish story and looking, as ever, completely calm and ordinary. I know I keep saying how ordinary he was, but it was precisely the seeming absence of any
change in his personhood, precisely the fact that he went on being fully and recognisably the same man as always, that was so mystifying to me.
After the readings, the priest started blessing the bread and wine, and then he asked the congregation to lift up their hearts. All at the same time, in a soft collective whisper, everyone in the church replied: ‘We lift them up to the Lord.’ Is it really possible I witnessed such a scene, right in the middle of Dublin, only a few hours ago? Is it possible such things literally go on, in the real world you and I both live in? The priest said ‘Lift up your hearts’， and everyone, including Simon, replied without any hesitation or irony: ‘We lift them up to the Lord.’ Did they believe they were telling the truth, and that their hearts in that moment really were lifted up to the Lord, whatever that even means? If I’d asked myself that question yesterday, I would have said, of course not. Mass is just a social ritual, religious people don’t actually spend time thinking about God, and they certainly never try to lift their hearts up toward him or to conceptualise what it would mean to do such a thing. But today I feel differently. I feel that at least some of the people in that church sincerely believed that they were lifting their hearts up to the Lord. And I think Simon believed it. I think he knew what he was saying, and had thought about it, and believed it was true. After that, the priest asked us to give each other the sign of peace, and Simon shook hands with all the silvery little elderly women, and then he shook my hand and said ‘Peace be with you’， and by then I wanted him to mean it. I didn’t feel anymore that I wanted him to be joking, and in fact I felt that I wanted him to be as serious as he seemed, and more serious, and to mean every word.