Skins

Part Three.

'Father, I want to see the world,' she clung, almost desperately, to his white robe. Her voice broke and shivered, grew louder and more gasping, 'I want to see God in different ways, anywhere, please--,'

'Enough, child.'

Father Romero considered himself a holy man. He had emigrated from Milan in the seventies, a young, strong, dark-haired youth, and found himself the centre of female attention. He fumbled in romance and earned the affectionate nickname Romeo, which, with every utterance, stung his ears with irony. His awkward bravado wore down to a bitter, cynical melancholy. At night he ached for female warmth, and dreamt of his childhood, his mammina's smooth, summery skin and the lullabies she whispered that put images of white flowers, arching stained glass windows, and dappled sunlight in his mind.

'Pie Jesu, pie Jesu, pie Jesu, pie Jesu
Qui tollis peccata mundi
Dona eis requiem, dona eis requiem.'

He began attending church as a consolation for his loneliness and found the ideology addictive. Before three years had passed, he had taken his vows and spent his waking hours in the company of saints and martyrs. He was consumed by Catholicism in the way young people are overcome with desire - it removed the need for his lovelessness, it gave him a solution, and he honoured his God like a lover, lingering on his Latin and gripping his rosary with blind and dramatic faith. He spent every year sinking deeper and deeper into an existence renouncing flesh and its beauty, and focused on the unseeable and incomprehensible that lay inked into old, brittle paper. His and other's feelings and actions became irrelevant to him.

The girl stumbling at his hem wound her fingers tighter around his vestment. Her eyes were red and swollen and greener than usual, but with a rare and faltering mercy for a small and practically faithless human girl, Father Romero laid his hand on her cheek and sighed.

'How old are you?'

'Eighteen.'

'You are very young.'

'I know I am - why, Father, is my youth prejudiced against when we are all equal in the eyes of God?'

Her sharpness jolted him. Unwilling to admit to his own actions being contrary to the text he obsessed over, (he was, after all, a holy man, and holiness sets no mistake) he glanced uncomfortably at the ground, fingered his rosary and mumbled, 'Well said, my child. I shall enter you for consideration.'

He strode away powerfully, lost in a foreboding sense that a strongwilled girl was more trouble than the Church needed. He would sway the others to think of her as so. She called after him.

'Father!'

'Yes?'

'If I am chosen, where am I going?'

'India.'