Lent (Cai)
It wasn’t until Lent began that Cai realised how much he’d been keeping inside over the last few months. He was certain that, this year, he had so much more to talk about at confession than he had last year.
Last year he’d been worried about his psychic powers. Last year he’d been hurting over Alex. Last year he hadn’t even met Zoe or Rachel or reconnected with Danny. Looking back at last year Cai couldn’t believe he’d had much to talk about with the priest at all, though thinking about it logically he knew he’d felt just as concerned with events then as he did now. It was just that all the events felt that much bigger.
Cai didn’t go to confession very often during the year, but during Lent he made himself go every week. He liked his priest, Father William, who had been there as long as Cai could remember, who had taken his mother’s funeral, who had been really great after Alex dumped him. The whole congregation had been sad that Cai and Alex were over; they’d been church sweethearts, and Cai knew that everyone in Nonnie’s tight-knit knitting circle had been planning their wedding since the first time they held hands through mass. And no one really knew where his new girl had come from, except that she was accompanied by some dark stories from London College. Nonnie firmly and loudly approved of her, though, so the ladies at church had stopped asking Cai when he and that sweet girl Alex were going to make up.
Lent made Cai realise that over the last year he’d drifted from God, he didn’t think about Him as much as he had when he was younger, and how much he missed that strength and guidance. He didn’t blame himself; his new friends were so real, their problems so visceral and present that of course it was difficult not to put them right at the forefront of his mind. But it was important to step back a little from that, once a week, and talk about where he was in life and where he was going, and think deeply about the things he wanted to do to make himself better, make his relationship with his friends stronger, re-strengthen his relationship with his family and the church.
Confession with Father William was a good place to vent. He could release all his pent up feelings about so many different things, work out how he was going to work on being more honest with himself, how he was going to use this time of reflection to work toward finding some grace,
He spoke about the leftover bitterness toward Dom for not letting him have a choice about going back to school.
He spoke about the rage that bordered on hatred for Greg and what he’d put Danny through. The rage and disgust he felt at the defense through the two days at court from hell.
And the spark of cynicism for humanity that Cai hadn’t realised he’d had before the trial. He hadn’t missed the fact that people could sometimes be thoroughly evil to each other, but sitting in the court room and hearing people defending that evil made him sick right down to the core of who he was. He couldn’t seem to let go of it. The memory of it crept into his head at night and made him want to punch someone, and he’d been a grumpy bastard to live with since the trial ended.
He talked about his guilt over his lack of patience with his foster sisters, who were behaving more and more like sisters as the weeks went on and this meant half the time they were fighting and half the time they were scheming something “hilarious” to do to Cai. Last week he’d woken up and found four of the neighbours chickens in his bedroom and the two girls holding his door shut from the outside, laughing so hard they couldn’t breathe. It was funny, he could say now, but at the time he was overtired from staying up late thinking about lawyers, and not in the mood to scrub chicken shit out of his school trousers before he could leave the house.
And he talked about Zoe, a little bit.
Zoe shared his anger at the lawyers and Greg, but her version of it seared with a different kind of heat, and he was worried that she was going to burn herself up from the inside. He was worried he might lose her to it. He didn’t know how to take her rage in his hands and cool it, calm it, without making her feel like he was silencing her.
Part of him still felt that kissing her was pretty much the best thing he could so and it felt very important to keep thinking about this all the time because another opportunity to make out would come up and he should be ready. He thought quite a lot about the kiss the night she’d stayed over when it was raining.
Eventually he told Father William about this as well. About how he never thought he’d be part of a relationship where they didn’t really call it a relationship, didn’t really call it anything, didn’t really talk about themselves as a thing but they didn’t deny there was a thing there. And quite often there’d be small touches like she’d lean against his shoulder or he’d play with her hair but just as often there would be nothing because when Zoe was upset she closed all her doors and didn’t let anyone in. Sometimes she would bring her computer over and all they would do was study together and other times she fell asleep on his couch and he felt privileged that she felt comfortable enough to do that and other times when nobody else was home she’d get up and kiss him.
He told Father William about one night when she’d rang him when they were both in bed but not asleep, and she’d told him in a sad and resigned voice (that didn’t sound like her at all) about how she’d been angry, scared and violent enough to hit a boy with a metal ruler because of what he was and what he’d done, and how she felt Cai was going to find out one way or another and she'd rather tell him herself. (Cai didn’t tell Father William the specifics, he’d said: she made a decision I sort of understand but don’t agree with and I’m kind of mad at her for not being as good a person as I wish she was, and kind of mad at myself for being mad at her because she is who she is for so many reasons.)
It was only the second Sunday of Lent, too. Cai knew he had a lot of work to do before it was over.
Danny was out of hospital, the trial was over, Astrid was safely back in London, and Cai wanted somehow to come back a place of strength, so that he was ready for Easter, for spring, for the rebirth of the year and whatever new trials were still ahead. Cai still felt like a mess, like his emotions were too raw and disruptive and human, but these forty days were going to help put him back together, settle his feet back onto the bare earth and link arms with his family and commit to link his heart back up with God. There was still a way to go, but Cai felt in his heart he was on the right path.