by Lorcan Roche
‘Shetlands.’
‘Yeah. So my sisters, the Shetlands, they’re leaping through these little circles of conceit or deceit with poodles on their backs. Hey hoopla, hey hoopla! Look how clever we are!’
Now he’s smiling and nodding, and maybe I had a little, tiny toke of Ellie’s grass before I left my room and I’m on a bit of a roll.
‘And at night when they go to brush their manes in the mirror, they don’t see how ridiculous they are, all they see is their red rosettes and silver cups and stupid square hats.’
‘Mortarboards.’
‘Whatever, and their endless poxy degrees and diplomas, and the ringmaster standing there waxing his moustaches in his demented red coat and it’s all pointless, it’s all …’
‘Bolloxology.’
‘Nice one, Father.’
And apart from the deliberately loud whisperings of the zealots and the quiet, determined sobbing of a lone fireman whom the priest hadn’t had the heart to approach, the only sound you can hear is coins falling solidly into the slots where ancient Irish people are lighting candles.
‘See, it never dawns on them, Father, not for one single second that there’s no one watching except for maybe God and me and Ma. And that we don’t actually find them all that clever, especially Ma who told me she was worried sick that they’d never meet any men, and she’d never get them out from under her feet. I mean, they never even went into town and, Jesus, you should’ve seen the heads on their friends. ‘Specially the blokes.’
‘What was wrong with them?’
‘What was right with them, Father? Do you know people who’ve no idea about cars or clothes or modern music or the latest films or what was on the telly the night before?’
‘I must confess that as regards popular culture, I …’
‘No. No. The sort of people, and yes I know I’m generalizing here, Father, but I’m the one who opened the door to them and shook their flaky little pastry hands and watched the way they went all red when the dog stuck his nose in their odourless crotches, the sort who think sex and tongues and porno-thoughts and dizzying arsey smells are, well, a bit mucky, sort of yucky and aren’t we much better off having separate beds and do you feel like reading dear, or shall I switch off the light? Sorry, Father.’
He says, no, no, it’s OK to talk to him in this vein – it’s actually quite instructive.
‘Anyway, you know the type. The sort of women who answer surveys and say they prefer a good hug to making love which you would too if you saw their husbands with their curly black teeth and coke bottle glasses and brown shoes with blue trousers.’
He’s trying not to laugh but you can see the capable, green eyes dancing. You can see he really loves being talked to as a non-priest. It’s like when your world has shrunk and the only humans you encounter are worn-thin frazzled teachers, the guys in class who give you a wide berth after lessons, your swimming coach, your decrepit relatives on your father’s side, and your sisters. And they all have this frozen set image of you, this rigid fuckin’ script, and then you meet someone new or you have the opportunity, maybe through a new job, to step outside the prison of their perception. And you get to become someone different, maybe even the person you always dreamed of being.
And suddenly you find yourself looking forward to meeting that new individual, to talking to them at length, and after you meet them things always speed up a little, new ideas, new possibilities, and your dreams are more vivid and …
‘I take it your sisters’ boyfriends weren’t exactly your cup of tea?’
‘Well, in my dealings with other people, Father, I try not to be judgmental. But I have to be honest: they were just so terrifically, soporifically boring.’
‘Well, boring is never good.’
‘No. And if one of them was even half alive, why he’d be officially declared a card, a character, a ticket, and he’d smoke cheap cigars and wear outrageous bow-ties and go all weird if you brought him upstairs and put on some Jim Morrison and maybe smoked some skunk, or a tiny smidgen of sensamalion.’ I need to be careful – I’m nearly confessing.
‘And he’d sit there, his face changing colours like a baboon’s arse in heat, and he’d go, “I say, do you know something, Trevor? I’m not nearly as jolly as everyone presumes.” And you’re thinking, “Hey man, neither am I, but I don’t go around telling perfect fuckin’ strangers.” No offence, Father.’
‘It’s OK, son. Go on.’
‘And he keeps sighing like a big bellows. “Phew, I say, what is this stuff?” as his big boneless face goes from purple to red to green, to a kind of deathly pale. And Jim Morrison is singing his guts out, ‘Break on through to the other side.’ – Oh, and I should have said, Father, that it’s Christmas and my mother isn’t very well at all, and that my sisters wanted to book us into a poxy, atmosphere-less hotel in Dublin to avoid all the fuss and bother of cooking which my mother actually enjoyed ‘cause it used to take her mind off pills and pain. And they’re pretending that they’re thinking of her when really they’re just thinking of themselves which is what people do best, isn’t it Father? And they haven’t bothered buying me any presents, they’ve just given me money in a plain white envelope, as per fuckin’ usual.’
There’s a bit of a silence and he asks was it possible that I went out of my way to upset my sisters, or indeed their friends? And I say, ‘Mmm, maybe once or twice, Father.’
And he says it’s OK. We all had transgressions that could be blamed on our youth, I could tell him, so I do.
‘Well Father, it’s like this: Barry, the guy with the bow-tie, just wouldn’t leave me the hell alone. Sat too close on the couch and kept pressing his jelly-baby leg against mine and if I got up, even to rub the dog or to throw a briquette on the fire, so did he. He was like a shadow, but a shorter, thicker one. Anyway, I know it was dumb but I put something into his drink and well how was I supposed to know that people like that get all panicky when the walls of their mental estates come tumbling down and all the turrets and tent-poles of their beliefs start to slip and slide? Do you know what I mean?’
‘No.’
‘You know when you actually see someone’s house of cards collapsing. The scaffolding falling away, aaaaaaagh, conviction and certainty and maybe even sanity melting, like in that painting by Salvador Dali.’
‘The melting clock?’
‘Now you have it.’
The priest, who now that I think of it was called Emmet, asks me what I did next. And I remember at the time that if you listened really, really hard in the kitchen of my father’s house you could hear Kylie Minogue singing on the radio. ‘Everybody’s doing this brand new dance now … So come, come on, do the locomotion with me.’ And it was like when you hear your thoughts being broadcast over the radio in a taxi. And yer man, Mr Outrageous Bow-Tie, he’s on his arachno-back and his legs are pumping the air as if he’s on this invisible unicycle, almost in perfect time to the music. And I had this overwhelming desire inside to get up and boogie on down. But it’s OK, I didn’t, I mean, there are limits, right?
‘So what happened. To Barry?’
‘Well, Father, the local doctor – who knew me well because I was accident-prone until I was about fifteen – comes around huffing and puffing and holding up his little leather valise as if it held the answer to the riddle of fuckin’ existence.’
He’s smiling again which is good because previously he was doing that therapist thing. You know when they just look at you and say nothing but with their furrowed eyebrows they’re actually saying quite a lot and isn’t it weird the way none of us can stop our minds leaping to conclusions even when we don’t know half the fuckin’ facts?
‘Anyway Father, this doctor, he asks is it possible the guy with the tie has had access to anything other than brandy and cigars and they all look up at me shock horror like these really bad actors on a murder mystery weekend. I say yes, it was maybe slightly possible Barry might have eh inadvertently taken one of my Ma’s paink
illers which had fallen on the ground and been trampled on by a high heel and then somehow got confused with the hundreds and thousands, you know, the little dressing-dots on top of the Christmas cake he’d been wolfing down from the moment he arrived.
‘And was this poor man OK afterwards?’
‘He was grand. He gave up drink and probably saved a fortune, lost weight and avoided getting gout and a big purple fuckin’ nose. He even came out of the closet – something my ugly sister should have been extremely grateful about but which she always kind of held against me, which you have to admit is not exactly rational now is it?
He pauses and considers what I have told him. ‘What else do you remember about Christmas, my son?’
‘I remember wishing I belonged to a different family.’
‘Why?’
‘Because mine were so contrived and controlled and no one laughed out loud at Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and there was no sense of wonder left inside them, and therefore no sense of loss when she finally died. It was just business as usual. The inevitable had happened.’
‘I’m sorry for your loss, son. Do you miss your mother?’
‘Sorely.’
‘And since her departure?’
‘It wasn’t a flight, Father. No disrespect.’
‘Since her passing, what do you feel now about religion? And God?’
‘I’m still very religious in my own way. The first school I went to had us all write AMDG in the margins.’
‘Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.’
‘For the greater honour and glory of God, yeah, and I believe that’s what I try to do with my life’s work.’
‘What is it that you do, my son?’
‘I’m a companion to a boy with Muscular Dystrophy.’
‘I too have worked with the sick. So you know about sacrifice?’
‘I know about sacrifice and toil and sickness and doubt and sitting in a stuffy room all day long with nothing happening except time passing slowly and Death filing his fingernails in the corner.’
‘I see.’
Go on tell him.
Almost as if he hears it too he says, ‘Go on, my son, tell me what else you feel.’
‘I sometimes feel these voices questioning the reasons why I do it, Father, and some of the voices are sort of cynical and upper-crust English, and they say, You’re not really making a sacrifice, Trevor. You’re just trying to draw attention to yourself, trying to prove to God that you are good so he can move on to the next candidate and leave you the hell alone.’
‘God bothers you?’
‘My conscience does.’
‘Many theologians would contest that conscience and God are one and the same.’
‘I’ve heard that alright, Father, yeah.’
Emmet seems to have forgotten that I was Jesuit-educated which is annoying because I’ve kind of presumed this, in fact I’ve based my entire conversational riff around it.
‘In what way does your conscience bother you?’
‘It niggles me. Undermines me.’
‘How?’
‘It gets at me at night. It says, Trevor, you’re performing in a bizarre little theatre of the absurd. You’re play-acting and the script is destined to get weirder. And the Director is going to ask you to do something to make the play’s dramatic purpose clear. Something ritualistic and sacrificial. Something strange yet familiar, just as the lights are slowly dimming and …’
I’m totally losing it and he’s looking at me the way they all do, trying to find a way out. Oh look. There’s someone I know. I really must rush. Toodle-pip, old bean. And it’s not nice to feel you were opening up only to find the other person takes a look at what’s inside and turns their nose up like a housewife in a fishmonger’s being shown yesterday’s catch, up close.
But no, I’m wrong, he’s not retreating, he’s just gathering his thoughts.
‘Listen to me now. I believe you are making a genuine sacrifice. I believe that for a young man to devote his time, and his energy, and his love, in order to assist a dying person is a wonderful, life-affirming deed.’
‘Maybe.’
‘There’s no maybe about it.’
And that’s the problem with priests and psychiatrists and people in general isn’t it? You open up, you disclose, you try your utmost to be completely honest then afterwards they say emphatic shit like, No, I think what you are doing is right, I don’t see how it can be any other way. When the whole bloody point is that you’re supposed to see it the other way, you’re supposed to try and see that even ugly sordid barbaric truth has a right to exist. I mean, you don’t have to necessarily agree but at least you see the possibilities. At least you acknowledge the grey areas, swirling.
Shit, maybe American Jesuits aren’t as well trained as Irish ones.
And I don’t tell him about the keyhole, or how ritual and sacrifice are linked and repeated, repeated and linked – that’s how primitive tribes lived. And that none of us are half as fuckin’ civilized as we like to think.
And I don’t tell him how some nights when Ed’s head is resting on the starched pillow it looks like he’s already dead, or how my hands feel on his scratchy, eczema-coated flesh, or how some days the need to scream rises up inside like oppressive opera music. I don’t tell him how small I feel under the exaggerated skyline, how insignificant I am, how the job is the only fuckin’ thing that gives me power, the only thing that allows me some small degree of control even if I have to do my breathing exercises three times a day in the hall, the only thing that permits me to feel vaguely God-like when I brush his thinning hair last thing at night, before I stretch him out. And his feet are wrapped up in a hot white towel, and he is smiling down. Beatifically.
And I don’t tell him my theory about how we all attempt to be God-like at some point in our lives, how maybe we don’t even know we’re doing it. Perhaps it’s a broken person too dedicated to their dead-end job, a perfectionist computer programmer with no outside life who works on into the night and forgets to eat, or sleep, or think; a grim-faced, granite-jawed street urchin in Rio practising with a football until his feet go numb; the boy-Achilles attacking shadows with his wooden sword; perhaps it’s a woman who gets slowly confused and starts to tidy her house obsessively ironing tea towels; a vaguely angry man firing a handgun at a black target every morning before taking the crowded subway to work; a fat lonely child whose parents have divorced and who watches a Barney video, over and over again, until he knows every frame, every beat, and can therefore enter it, become part of it. Control it.
I tell him none of this. Instead, when he asks me what’s wrong, I just tell him that the odd time I can get, well, a bit isolated, a little bit down.
‘I’m always here.’
‘Hardly, I mean you don’t live here, Father.’
‘No. But God is always here.’
‘Is he, though?’
‘We have to believe, son.’
‘Why? Because if we don’t, there’s no point in trying to be good?’
‘No, because if we don’t it makes a mockery of His sacrifice and His love, and too many people in the world today are already making that their vocation.’
There’s a trace of anger in his voice, which is OK, because in the newspaper today there was a story about fundamentalists invoking God’s name moments before they blew apart some mothers and smiling toddlers outside a primary school.
‘We need to balance the equation, is that right, Father?’
‘That’s right, son.’ He does something incredible now: he tilts my chin up, the way my swimming coach used to. ‘Believe in yourself, son. Believe in the goodness you hold within. Believe in God’s grace which is limitless and which He bestows upon us daily. Look at me now.’
I do. It’s as if he’s hypnotizing me.
‘I want you to believe in the sacrifice you are making. I want you to make it for Him. Believe in your own power now and recognize it as His. Recognize it as His love flowing. Recognize t
he forces at work in your own heart. Understand that they are His. Understand that you are His instrument, His channel, that through you His eternal goodness flows.’
He blesses me with his eyes closed, touches me softly on the forehead and the chest and mutters ‘Ego te absolve’ which are my three favourite words in Latin, and probably any other language to boot. I feel Grace descend like dust upon my shoulders and I when I stand up, he opens his eyes, smiles and nods as if to say, It’s OK now. It’s the first time in quite a while that I remember how big and strong I am.
‘Thanks, Father. I’ll probably see you in here again – soon I hope.’
And before I walk out I stop and touch the fireman on his broad back, softly. He places his hand over mine without turning and says, ‘Thanks big guy, ’preciate the gesture.’
And it has been returned, it has been rendered unto Caesar, the ability.
As I walk through the massive doors out under the Gothic archway down the steps, I am a giant. A gentle giant. There is no shadow of badness, no mark of doubt upon me, no danger within.
And what I spied through the keyhole shook me to my core, burned and lowered me, but did not knock me over, did not cause me to crumble and fall.
3
Some of the smells, certain aspects of the daily chores, I’m not going to get into. Why? Because it’s just not that fuckin’ pretty, OK?
It’s like when the bloke I used to buy LPs from in this dank, second-hand store in Greystones started keeping stuff behind the counter for me, telling me out loud in front of the whole fuckin’ shop that he’d been waiting all week to play something special for me. And one afternoon in October I suggested a pint and the child-part of me really believed we were going to become fast and firm friends, even if he did have coated, yellow teeth and a cracked leather waistcoat with an Old Holborn tobacco pouch protruding.
Except it turned out he was one of those whackos has to tell you everything about his last sexual encounter right down to the squishing, farting noises, and whether or not he did it from behind with a fuckin’ Spiderman costume on.