Status Updates From Faith Healer

gracie i like you

that the whole corporeal world – the cobbles, the trees, the sky, those four malign implements – somehow they had shed their physical reality and had become mere imaginings, and that in all existence there was only myself and the wedding guests. And that intimation in turn gave way to a stronger sense: that even we had ceased to be physical and existed only in spirit, only in the need we had for each other.

We never got that summons to Teddy's royal palace; not even to a suburban drawing-room. And it would have been interesting to have been just once – not for the pretensions, no, no, but to discover was it possible in conditions other than these, just for the confirmation that this despair, this surrender wasn't its own healing.

‘Be Jaysus, Boyle, it'll be hard for him to beat his aul fella!’ And for the first time I saw his mouth was filled with rotten teeth. And I remember being ashamed in case Boyle had seen them, too.

And I remember thinking how young she did look and how cruel her laughter at him was. Because by then my anger against him had died and I had some envy of the man who could use the word ‘chicanery’ with such confidence.

‘Mr Hardy, as long as men live in Glamorganshire, you'll be remembered here.’ And whatever way he said it, you knew it was true; and whatever way he said Glamorganshire, it sounded like the whole world.

O my God I'm one of his fictions too, but I need him to sustain me in that existence

And I felt such overwhelming relief that when he cried, I cried easily with him.

not in hope but for the elimination of hope; for the removal of that final, impossible chance – that's why they came – to seal their anguish, for the content of a finality.

And listening to him I'd almost forget what indeed he had given up to tour with us – a Miss Mulatto and Her Three Pigeons, and a languid whippet called Rob Roy who took sounds from a set of bagpipes. Humbling precedents, if I were given to pride.

And when it did, when I stood before a man and placed my hands on him and watched him become whole in my presence, those were nights of exultation, of consummation – no, not that I was doing good, giving relief, spreading joy – good God, no, nothing at all to do with that;