3. Wes
Wes
I’ve moved my work to the floor of the nave.
I tell myself it’s the light. The scaffold platform is cramped, the gallery’s a long climb, and there’s a set of misericords down here in the choir that genuinely do need attention, the diocese will want them photographed at least, little carved seats with green men and a fox in a friar’s hood, four hundred years of choirboys’ boots worn into the oak.
Good honest reasons to set up my trestle in the crossing, under the lantern tower, where if I lift my eyes I can see the gallery and the dark crouched shape at the lip of it.
The truth is I want him to see me work.
I haven’t touched his face again. Three days.
I’ve climbed up, cleaned the rest of the gallery cornice around him with my heart in my mouth, kept up the patter, don’t mind me, just your neighbours’ gutters, you’re still the best-looking thing in this postcode, and he has stayed stone, stone, stone, and I have started to believe the warmth was a story I told myself because I’m lonely and the cathedral is large and I’ve been talking to carvings for eleven days like a man auditioning for his own breakdown.
Except.
The candle. Twice now I’ve left a candle burning on the scaffold when I climb down, and twice in the morning I’ve found it guttered and leaning, the wax dragged hard to one side as if a wind blew it, a wind, inside, in a building with the doors barred, on nights the air outside was dead still.
And once, on the flags by the crossing, in the grey dust I haven’t cleaned because it isn’t on the list, I found a mark.
Three lines and a curve. The print of something with claws, set down and lifted clean, the way you’d set down a hand if you didn’t want to be heard.
I cleaned the dust off the rest of the floor after that. Not because it was on the list.
I’ve started doing other things that aren’t on the list, too.
I’ve started leaving the rectory light on a little longer.
I’ve started talking to him about real things, not just the diocese and the gutters, the patter, the armour of the patter.
Last night I told him about my mother, who is alive and well in a town I don’t go back to, and who introduces me to her friends as “my son, he does old buildings,” as if I’m a tradesman she’s vaguely embarrassed by, as if the careful invisible work I’ve built a life out of is a thing to apologise for.
I told the dark gallery that, and I didn’t expect an answer, and I didn’t get one, but in the morning the candle on the scaffold had burned out leaning hard toward the rectory door, and I stood and looked at the drag of the cold wax for a long time.
Here is the thing I keep not saying out loud, even alone, even to a carving: I have never in my life felt as wanted as I do talking to a statue that might be listening.
That is either the loneliest sentence a man has ever thought or it’s the first true thing I’ve let myself feel in years, and I genuinely cannot tell which, and the not-being-able-to-tell is why I’ve moved my whole working life to the floor of the crossing where, if I lift my eyes, I can see him.
Tonight I’m gilding. Small work, a boss in the choir vault lost its gold sometime in the last century and I’m laying new leaf onto the size, a slow patient job where you breathe wrong and the whole sheet wrinkles and tears.
I’ve got it down to a rhythm. Lay the size, wait for the tack, lift the leaf on the tip of the gilder’s brush, breathe it down, press it home.
It needs a steady hand and an empty head, and I have neither, because I’ve been talking the whole time without quite meaning to, and the thing I’ve been saying is dangerous.
“I know you’re up there,” I say, not looking up. Tip of the brush to my cheek, static, the gold leaf lifting and trembling on it like a moth. “I’m not, I’m not going to make a thing of it. I just wanted you to know that I know. So we can stop pretending.”
The lantern tower is full of dark. The gallery is full of dark. Somewhere a long way up, the rain finds a new way in and ticks onto stone.
“I figure either I’ve lost it,” I go on, breathing the leaf down onto the boss, pressing the gold into the carved oak grain with the squirrel-hair, “in which case talking to you is the least of my problems. Or you’re real.
And if you’re real, you’ve been listening to me complain about the diocese for eleven days, which means you’re either a very patient man or you’re as bored as I am. ”
I sit back. The boss has its gold again, dull and bright at once, the way new leaf is before you burnish it.
“That’s a joke, by the way,” I say. “The bored part. You can laugh.”
And out of the dark above me, low and dry and entirely unhurried, a voice says: “It wasn’t your best.”
I drop the brush.
It’s the voice you’d build out of the bottom of a well and a slow landslide and the very lowest pipe of the organ, gravel and weight and a strange, careful gentleness, as if the speaker is holding it down on purpose so it won’t shake the windows.
It comes from the gallery. It comes from him.
And the thing that undoes me, the thing that has me sitting on the cold flags with my hand pressed over my mouth, is not that the carving spoke.
It’s that he made a joke back.
He didn’t say behold or do not be afraid or any of the things a thing in a cathedral might say. He heard me make a bad joke for eleven days into the dark and the first thing he chose to say, the very first, was to tell me dryly that my material needs work.
I take my hand off my mouth. My eyes are stinging and I let them.
“Oh,” I say. “Oh, you’ve got jokes.”
“I’ve had three hundred years to think of them,” the dark says. “And no one to use them on.”
“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
There’s a silence. Then, lower, careful, like a man setting something heavy down so it won’t break: “You’re the first one who’s talked to me.
Not at me. To me.” A pause. The pressure of that subsonic note rolls down through the building and I feel it come up through the flags into my crossed legs, into my chest, a warmth that has nothing to do with temperature.
“I didn’t think anyone could anymore. I’d stopped, I had stopped wanting it.
And then you started telling me about gutters. ”
I look up into the dark where he is and I can’t see him, only sense the shape, the weight, the patience.
“Come down,” I say. “If you can. I’d like to see who I’ve been talking to.”
The note in his chest stops. The whole cathedral seems to hold still.
“You won’t like it,” he says.
“Try me.”
And I hear him move, a great soft shifting up in the gallery, the drag of something heavy unfolding, the leathery rush of wings opening in the dark, and the candle on the scaffold leans, and I get to my feet, and I wait for him to come down out of three hundred years and let me look.