In front of him is the last stretch of the twenty-minute walk from the bus stop to Saint Brigid’s Parish Presbytery. Is it home? Home has been a difficult idea for him. For years he has been unable to think of the family home as anything but a place to spend holidays. He has eaten, slept, studied, and prayed in two seminaries, but it has been just as difficult to think of either of those cold places as a real home. Now the presbytery has to be home of a sort, perhaps, for the time being. A trial posting as parish assistant, the archbishop had said, just until the issue of his ordination was … clarified. He had paused, hesitated, looking out of the window at the old palm trees in the garden before settling on the right word. Thomas had noticed how plump and smooth his face is. And his hands. He hates this last stretch. An unkerbed roadway with the bitumen edges breaking up, and an uneven footpath of pale grey concrete slabs, most of them cracked and broken. Between the path and the road there is a strip of road verge, dry and sandy, with a few thin stands of dead wild oats bleached pale at the end of the long dry summer.
