Chapter Text
Everyone’s always said that Jamie’s bad news.
Jamie knows this, obviously – he’s not fucking dim. He’s seen the looks his mam’s friends used to give him when he’d walk by their houses to the post office. He’s read his high school report cards.
A pitbull with the face of a choirboy, Father Duffy had called him once.
Truthfully, Jamie doesn’t get it. He thinks he’s perfectly fucking fine, ta very much. He’d never skipped school. He prays three times a day. He never starts fights – even if he’s fairly good at finishing them.
To the Fathers, though, it’s not enough. Because they’re fucking Catholics, aren’t they? Nothing’s ever enough. They say Jamie’s got a bad streak in him. It’s his temper, apparently. Jamie’s pretty sure he was born angry. Angry at people; angry at the world. At himself, too, sometimes. But never at God.
God’s good and kind and merciful. People are weird. And selfish. And stupid.
Sometimes Jamie finds himself staring up at the stained-glass angels on the windows of the kirk, wondering what it would be like to be one of them; to be something more than human. Something close to God. Perfect and beautiful and untainted by sin.
“Original sin’s a bit of a bummer, eh?”
Murray glances up from his notebook.
“What?” he asks, squinting through the sunlight.
Jamie doesn’t take his eyes off his football, busy trying to break the keepy-uppy streak that he’s admittedly far too proud of.
“It’s just not very fair,” he says. He’s panting a bit around the words. “To take one look at a newborn wean and tell him he’s already fucked it just by being human. I mean, give the wee bugger a chance, right? Fuck–”
He watches the ball hit the grass and roll away into the bushes.
“That’s what baptism’s for, Jamie,” Murray says simply. Shifting a little on the stone step beneath him, he pats the spot to his left and beckons Jamie over.
Jamie doesn’t budge, just stands there staring down at the other lad with a funny sort of look on his face.
“We’re handing out pamphlets in Glasgow on Friday,” Murray goes on. “Father says you can come so long as you don’t get another strike on your record.”
“Whoop-de-fucking-doo,” Jamie mutters with a roll of his eyes, scuffing his shoe across the surface of the grass. “Why’s it always pamphlets? Folk just chuck them in the bin the second they think we’re not looking. Why’re we always trying to convert everyone?”
Murray looks mildly offended at that.
“It’s called spreading the good word,” he says. “Don’t be dense.”
That sets off a little spark of red in Jamie’s chest, and he shoots Murray a glare.
“I’m not fucking dense,” he grits out, squaring his jaw defiantly.
Jamie fucking hates folk saying shite like that. He might be a fair few things, but he’s not fucking stupid.
His mam keeps saying he’s dyslexic. Father Duffy thinks that’s a made-up nonsense word that dim people use to make themselves feel better.
Whatever it is, it’s hardly Jamie’s fault if letters move about the page all the time, or if they’re always making him read passages so long they’d send a crying baby to sleep. He’s practically fluent in Ecclesiastical Latin. He’s fucking miles ahead of the other boys in that department. He can memorise an entire verse in the space of a few minutes. He got decent enough grades in school.
Why’s it never enough?
“James!”
Both boys’ heads snap up at the sound of Father Duffy’s voice.
***
“I want you to go with Peter to Glasgow on Friday.”
Father Duffy’s study is sort of like the inside of a coffin. Cramped. Dark. Far too much fucking wood. Sometimes – like right now – it’s even got the body of a borderline-senile old fart inside of it to really top it all off.
“Peter’s a promising young lad,” the Father goes on. “I think it’d do you some good to have him around.”
Jamie manages to tear his eyes away from the pretty scenes painted on the panelling above the Father’s head.
“Peter’s younger than me, Father,” he says, matter-of-factly.
“Aye,” Duffy huffs out a laugh. “And he’s a mile better behaved, too. You could learn from him, James.”
Learn fucking what? thinks Jamie. How to rock the world’s worst bowl cut? How to talk like he’s got a tube of fucking Polos rammed three miles up his arsehole?
“I don’t think I need to, Father. I’ve got everything memorised, I understand it all. I’m–”
“It’s your temper, son,” says the man, leaning in over the desk. “It’s this…this need to go against whatever it is you know you should be doing. It’s like you can’t help it, James. It’s the Devil’s temptation.”
Frowning, Jamie shifts in his seat.
“It’s not like that,” he mumbles.
He finds his eyes wandering back towards the paintings on the wall. Little flecks of gold and bright blocks of red adorn the scene in the middle – it’s Jesus being baptised in the River Jordan. The white dove looms behind John the Baptist’s head; two archangels flank the Anointed Son. The water glimmers green and blue, the riverbanks cut off either side by the wooden frame of the wall panel.
“What’s it like, then?” comes Father Duffy’s voice, barely an echo in the back of Jamie’s head.
“I…” Jamie can’t quite find the words. He brings his gaze down again, lets it land on the man before him. “I just…Don’t you ever get angry, Father? God gets angry, doesn’t he? God’s always angry.”
“God’s not a seventeen year old boy, James,” says Duffy with a knowing sort of smile.
Fucking smartarse.
“So you don’t, then?” Jamie presses, shuffling forward in the chair. “You never get angry?”
Father Duffy rolls his eyes.
“It’s not about that, James. Your anger controls you more than you control it. It’s not natural–”
“It’s completely natural, Father!” Jamie silently curses when he hears the way his voice breaks. “The world’s f— The world is terrible, you’ve said it yourself! Everyone’s suffering and–and dying, and there’s nothing we can do other than sit by and whine about it! Does that not make you angry?”
He’s standing now, hands gripping the rim of the desk like he’s hellbent on making the wood chip.
“James,” Duffy says, slow and measured like how you’d talk down a toddler throwing a tantrum, or a fucking loony in Times Square with a gun. “Calm down, son.”
Jamie wants to vault the fucking desk and rip his fucking head off.
“I am calm!” he yells. “You’re just not listening! How can you look at the world and not be angry, Father? God looks at the world and it makes his fucking blood boil! But he doesn’t sit around and complain about it, he tries to make it better!”
“Mind your language, James–”
“No!” Jamie jabs a finger right at the fucker’s chest. “I’m right, you know I’m right! That’s what we’re supposed to be doing – that’s supposed to be the whole point! To try and make things better!”
The words have barely left his mouth when the priest rounds the table and grabs Jamie firmly by the wrist. Jamie finds himself being yanked up towards him so roughly he needs to stand on the tips of his toes just to stop himself falling forwards into him.
“You’d better pipe down and learn your place,” breathes Duffy, low and gentle – like a prayer. “The Devil’d make quick work of you, son. God knows he’s already gotten started.”
Silence fills the darkened study, then, broken only by the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner and the sound of jackdaws in the kirkyard. Jamie stares haplessly up into the eyes of the Father.
A priest is in persona Christi, Jamie knows. He acts in the person of Christ. Father Duffy’s closer to God than Jamie is – closer than Jamie will ever be, maybe. God talks to him, talks through him. He acts out God’s will in the kirk hall every morning whilst Jamie sits silently in the front pew and watches.
Do the fingers digging into his flesh right now belong to the hands of God?
Is that why it hurts so much?
“Sorry, Father,” Jamie whispers, hoping it sounds like the truth.