BARRY SNELL, RIP

A weird little story about a very grey man...

Barry Snell was proud of his place in the world, but then Barry Snell had a curious and rather grey view of Creation.

Before I go on to elucidate the particular events that nudged me into writing the following account I'd better go back to the beginning, or at least to his beginning.

Barry Snell had been born premature and grey during the last few months of World War Two. On the surface it didn't look as though that war had influenced the cadaverous baby in any way, but maybe it had. Maybe the shortages (he was British and there were more shortages in his homeland than anyone from a more respectable time would consider bearable) had touched the growing Barry foetus.

No matter: the fact that he was born grey and seemingly lifeless was bad enough, but it was when he stirred and slobbered and cried out for the very first time that the essence of his life was born, because it was then that his mother, one Looby-Loo Snell (by marriage) cursed him for daring to be alive and consequently for daring to be a burden, and his father went to the shops nearby and bought a rod with which to beat the child whenever he put his foot wrong. His father was high in the Church and knew all about proper discipline whereas his mother was low in a bordello and knew about the flesh.

Somehow the baby Barry Snell grew up to become the child Barry Snell and it could be because he had learned to be inconspicuous as a means of escaping his father's anger and his mother's selfish sexuality, but he managed to survive school by not being seen. His fellow pupils barely knew he existed. He sat somewhere in the middle of the class and his teachers thought his chair was empty and his desk uncluttered. Even at school meal times, when he managed to suck the juices out of lumps of fatty pork, he was barely in evidence. It was a skill he had learned, and he depended on it for his very existence. At home his mother forgot all about him and his father discarded the rod he'd bought because he could see no point in keeping it.

So Barry Snell became truly anonymous. He moved round his home like a shadow until the time came for him to leave the family Vicarage and seek a life of his own. His mother didn't notice the day he failed to turn up for breakfast and his father whispered the Lord's Prayer a tad more loudly than was his custom. In all other ways life at his childhood home carried on as if he was still there, meaning it didn't change one bit.

He entered University to study, of all things, Christian devotion because, despite the first quarter of his life being spent in a Vicarage he knew absolutely nothing about the subject. He knew a bit about sin, of course, because on the rarer occasions when his father had deigned to discuss anything with him he'd been called a “wretched sinner deservous of the rod” and on the even rarer occasions when his mother had addressed him it had been on the subject of his private parts and whether he was happy playing with them on his own.

After three years at University he emerged with an average degree and, peculiarly, the desire to add a new line to his own personal prayer every day of his life because everything had to grow, even prayers - and found employment straight away as curate at his father's church, though his father, being a true Christian, didn't recognise him. Why should he? Barry Snell had learned the true art of invisibility and nobody actually ever noticed him.

When his father died at the age of sixty-six (which earned the late lamented the nickname “clickety-click”, a fact that would have enraged him in life because he had a hatred of anything others found pleasure in, including games of chance like bingo), he was promoted to take his place as Vicar of Saint Rudolph's Church in Meadsville.

It was while he was serving his Lord and Maker that he did two things almost on the same day. He became forty and discovered sex.

To him, forty was a sensible age. It was the time in a man's life when he could cast the frivolous things of his youth aside, like enjoying chocolate biscuits at supper time, and become serious. As for sex, well, his mother was still alive and she had something to do with his discovery there. She led him on, not in any way incestuously, because the had given up men and formed a strong attachment to Phyllis Granger from the local Inn and wanted greater access to her. The scheme worked, Phyllis Granger moved in and to her credit she introduced Barry Snell to sex by teaching him how to do shameful things with himself.

He married her, of course, and proceeded to wonder why his own mother (a woman he barely recognised) should want to spend so much time with his new wife, but it mattered little to him because his devotions were taking ever longer to complete. Let me explain. His personal prayer was now almost twenty years old and had grown by a line a day since he had left University, so now it took over an hour to whisper at bed time. It was a matter of little concern to him that his wife was away somewhere when he held his interminable conversations with his God because she seemed to think the whole business was bizarre, and had told him so on one of the rare occasions when she had actually talked about something with him.

His mother died a few years after his marriage to Phyllis, and if he wondered anything it was why she was more upset than he was. After all, she had been his mother, and the good creator of his flesh had barely been interred in the Earth when Phyllis announced that she was off, it didn't matter about getting a divorce because they weren't really married, not in the Christian sense, not properly because marriages really ought to be consummated, and anyway he didn't need a woman in his life.

By the time he'd whispered his personal prayer and extended it by one more line (“and Lord forgive the b***h for bearing me”) she was gone and it was then that I met him.

I was on holiday with my wife quite a few years ago now, staying at an olde worlde Inne in the heart of the Lincolnshire Wolds and enjoying a drink at the bar before retiring to bed for the night, when he walked in.

To all intents and purposes nobody recognised him. It was as if he wasn't there. He ordered a drink, but the barman ignored him. He surveyed the room, but if anyone looked back at him I didn't notice.

He came and stood next to my wife and myself and looked at us. He was the greyest man I'd ever seen. His eyes were grey, his lips were grey, and when they parted his teeth were grey. He was like a walking corpse, and when he breathed out his breath seemed grey, like the breath of a corpse.

“Hello,” I murmured, not liking to be rude.

He looked at me through grey eyes, and shook his head ever so slightly. Then somehow the barman furnished him with a drink of black beer and he sat in a corner, at a table of his own.

“A strange cove,” muttered the barman, and he set about polishing glasses as though polishing glasses might go out of fashion. “Reverend Barry Snell, though I wonder which god will claim him when he pegs it.”

I nodded. The dog-collared grey man sat in his seat and cuddled his glass as though it was a much loved pet.

The door opened, and a newcomer walked in. Without any introduction or hesitation he walked straight to the vicar.

“Are you Snell?” he asked “Barry Snell?”

The grey man nodded his head, almost curiously.

“And was your mother known as Looby-Loo?” barked the stranger.

The grey man nodded again.

“Hello son!” shouted the stranger, “Hello, hello, hello! I've been searching above forty years and I've found you! I'm your father! Glory be, that I am. Your ever-loving father and fornicator with dearest Looby-Loo, may the Heavens bless her perfection " and who would have believed any son of mine would have grown up to be big in the church! Hallelujah and glory be!”

It was, of course, all too much for Barry Snell. He who has spent a lifetime perfecting the appearance of death actually died (of shock) there and then, his drink untouched and the very air he no longer breathed all the more fragrant for his passing.