Demons

by Bill Nagelkerke

  Demons

  Demons

  Bill Nagelkerke

  For Mum,

  in memory

  This edition first published in 2016 by Bill Nagelkerke

  Copyright 2016 Bill Nagelkerke

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted. This book is copyright. All rights reserved. Except for the purposes of fair reviewing, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the copyright owner and the publisher of the book.

  They say some stranger has arrived

  From the land of Lydia,

  An enchanter,

  A man with wine-dark eyes,

  Sweet-smelling, golden-curled hair,

  And all the charms of Aphrodite.

  All day and night he tempts young girls,

  Holding out to them his joyful mysteries.

  From The Bacchae, by Euripides

  Prologue

  From where I’m sitting one end of the airport’s digital clock is hidden by an overlapping sign, so all I can see are the last two numbers, the ones that count off the seconds. At that precise moment they read 23, which is weird because that’s also my age. As I stare at the clock something in my mind seems to spin and twist and instead of the numbers advancing, as they should, they click backwards so that 23 flicks to 22, and 22 to 21, and 21 . . .

  I blink and when I open my eyes again the numbers are back where they should be, they’ve moved ahead, 24, 25, 26 . . . relentlessly, on and on. Soon a voice will announce my flight and I’ll get up, hug Mum and Dad goodbye and with my cabin bag slung casually over my shoulder I’ll exit through the departure gate (‘Strictly Passengers Only’) and fly off into the unknown.

  But of course I do know, sort of, where I’m going and why.

  I’m starting to close the gap.

  It isn’t quite time yet. The olds have gone for a coffee, understanding that I don’t mind being alone for a little while. I’ll have to get used to being alone, at least to begin with. My friends wanted to come and see me off, too, but I told them ‘No.’

  No more airport-goodbyes than absolutely essential. I don’t like them. I made the mistake of being here when Chris went (he didn’t know I was there, I didn’t show myself) and that was it.

  Is he lurking somewhere? Who knows? Who cares?

  But that clock. Ticking time in reverse. I can’t

  get the illusion (was it an illusion?) out of my mind. The numbers take me back too, like a time machine.

  To that strange meeting late last year, in the Square. Age 22.

  Further. To the South Bank Restaurant. Age 17.

  Further still. Gran’s funeral. Age 15.

  Even further . . .

  Part One: The Sorrowful Mysteries

  Naked bodies

  Naked bodies are often cold bodies.

  I discovered this as we stripped off in Chris’s room above the garage. Maybe it was the cold of uncertainty, of nervousness, of fear or of all those things. Or, maybe, it was simply caused by the fresh easterly breeze that slid between the ill-fitting wooden window frames and laid cold fingers on our skin.

  It was dark but not dark. We were in a near dark that was gradually being illuminated.

  The first time

  How did I get here, to this point, a ‘good, Catholic girl’ like me? This used to be a favourite phrase of Gran’s. She liked to hitch the words ‘good’ and ‘Catholic’ and ‘girl’ together. Now I suspect that at least once or twice she was being ironic.

  Fitting in

  I always knew I was different. I don’t mean to say that in a show-off way (‘pride goeth before a fall,’ another of Gran’s favourites) but for me, fitting in was never very easy. I guess it was my fault as much as anyone else’s. Maybe I should have tried harder. Maybe I didn’t want to make the effort.

  Here was I, a ‘brought-up-as-a-Catholic’ girl in a family with direct Irish ancestry on the paternal side, European New Zealand ancestry on the maternal (Mum’s family a proud mix of Scottish and

  Polish dating way back to whaling and sealing days), eventually choosing to study at a staunchly sectarian state high school and then falling for an atheist and

  classics geek. (‘Geek’, incidentally, was Chris’s own description of himself. He felt it was better if he labelled himself a geek before someone else got round to it. Chris always liked to be well prepared.)

  Gran was also fond of saying, ‘once you’ve made your bed, you’ll have to lie in it.’ As it turned out she was right, but also wrong.

  Deconstruction of the fables

  People say that kids, teenagers in particular, aren’t much into religion these days. Not much, if not at all. Maybe people are right and I’m wrong. But I suspect there are a lot more who are like me, the way I was back then: hidden, camouflaged, not wanting the spotlight to fall on them. Safety only in numbers, when they can get the numbers together.

  So I’ll be upfront and say right from the start that I was ‘into’ religion, if you can put it that way. Or, more accurately, eschatology. In fact I was never ‘out’ of it even when I believed I was. Why? Well, maybe I just thought too much about those things. Maybe the unusually rich combination of coming from a Catholic family that was also deeply into matters of social justice meant I absorbed religion like calcium. It got into my bones very early on and stayed there. Perhaps that’s why eventually I had to deconstruct my skeleton, pull my castle of bones apart and rebuild it.

  So, I’m sorry, but that’s me. And that’s what my story’s about. You can leave now, before my tale begins, but you’re welcome to come along for the ride.

  Your choice.

  Your . . . free will.

  OK, here goes.

  Impressions

  If I seem a little random, and rambling, especially to begin with, bear with me. It’s the only way I can tell my story. Time, as represented by the fantastical airport clock, may give the illusion of moving in a straight, direct line, backwards or forwards but in reality when you look at where you’ve come from and where you’re going the line wavers and shifts, like a mirage, resembling a bendy highway with lots of side roads, some long, some short, some with dead ends.

  Time past is memory time and everyone remembers differently. Maybe this comparison will help to clarify. Picture a set of prayer beads, Catholic rosary beads to be exact. Imagine scrunching the beads loosely between your palms and then letting them flow like water through a gap you make between your hands. Feel their texture on your skin as you close that gap, as you suddenly press the rosary hard into your flesh so that one bead in particular leaves a firm mark, a dent, whose impression remains until the skin smooths out again. That small, self-created crater is what you focus on, what has meaning for that moment. The choice of bead to make the mark is random even though all the beads of the rosary are connected.

  STRANGE MEETING

  The Square. In an up-and-coming small city, in a small country, far away from anywhere else.

  Gray granite pavers slippery with sunlight, from which the silver and blue sculpture rises looking very much like a fantastic ice-cream cone or, better still, an Olympic torch, a tangible link to past times, ancient traditions.

  Summer trees boxed in by squares of green.

  Coffee shops.

  Alfresco dining.

  The full-swing hum of the weekday market.

  An oily smell of roasting nuts.

  A band tuning up for the lunchtime crowd. Irish, being so near to St Pat’s Day.

  As graduation looms exams already seem long ago; a new life waits in the wings.

  Or in the winds?

  Like Odysseus, that great Greek
traveller, I have them all trapped in a bag but, unlike him, I will make sure to set them loose as and when I need them. And I know where they will blow me first.

  Soon.

  And then…

  And then everything suddenly spins, turns topsy-turvy, bends and fractures like light, changes. The way things have a habit of doing.

  Extracts from Chris’s notebook

  This is what I’ve decided I will one day inscribe onto the ancient stone of the Tower of the Winds. Ho bios mython estin. Ancient Greek, transliterated and minus the accents, meaning ‘Life is a story’.

  She’s beautiful. She doesn’t think so herself but I think, I know, she is. She is a goddess-statue, pale marble, smooth-skinned, her short dark hair tight against her head, her ears curving through the strands like soft sea shells in fine sand, her breasts reminding me of the goddess Hera’s golden apples, falling from their tree into my outstretched hands. Today we were Daphnis and Chloe, characters out of history, mythology. A story come to life. The past became

  now. The future was here already.

  Dear Andrea,

  (It seems a bit random, even to me, to be writing these pretend letters, letters which you’ll never read, but I’m the sort of person who has to write things down, partly so as to make them real, partly because it means I can have a conversation with you, one-sided though it is, anytime and anyplace. Anyway, here goes.)

  The first time I saw you, cars were lining the grass verges of the narrow country road. Because of this I had to slow down and, opposite a church, I was forced to stop quickly when some old people suddenly crossed over not looking where they were going, oblivious to everyone and everything, not expecting much extra traffic in this quiet rural backwater. Taking their lives in their hands.

  At the same time, both Dad and I glanced over to the church to see what all the fuss was about. A country wedding perhaps? Not, as it turned out.

  Even after the wayward pedestrians had tottered by, we were still staring.

  Dad said it looked like something out of the dark ages. ‘Catholic no doubt,’ he added with his characteristic snort.

  People in black exited from the front doors of the church, swelling into the small cemetery, following a coffin.

  You were hefting one corner of it, angling sideways with the strain. You were what stuck in my mind. I noticed you were tall, that your hair was long and black like the clothes you wore. You were striking.

  Dad was speaking. ‘Somewhere in Ireland

  perhaps.’ I asked him what he meant by that.

  ‘It could be a scene from rural Ireland,’ he said sardonically. ‘Last century.’ He pointed to the church name on the sign beside the road. ‘See. What did I tell you? St Brigid’s. It’s a Catholic Church all right.’

  As you in due course discovered, Dad had no time for Catholics, nor any religious denomination. He was focused on work, achievement, success.

  But I thought the whole scene, although incredibly depressing, was surprisingly moving. Even from the distance, I could see that you were sad. Sad, and beautiful. Beautifully sad. I couldn’t help feeling sad for you.

  And I couldn’t help wondering . . . what were you thinking of at this time? What were you hoping for, if you were hoping for anything . . .?

  ‘Drive on,’ said Dad, impatiently. ‘You’re blocking the road. That’s no way to get a licence.’

  Unsettled, I drove on. Fiddle music slipped in at the open window. It faded as we rounded a bend and drove away.

  I couldn’t get you out of my mind. Stupid really. I was never going to see you again.

  Death

  Gran’s funeral.

  A small, nearly-full church way out in the wop-wops.

  Green-brown fields, orchards, dairy farms. Macrocarpa hedges, white gates, wire fences, farmhouses with red roofs. Dogs barking in the distance.

  And a small, stuccoed, white-painted church,

  roofed in grey-brown corrugated iron, well over one

  hundred years old.

  Outside, gravestones rose to life from a lawn of dry trimmed grass, the last cold beds of Irish men and women (and their children) who came to build the railway, north to south. They came to this small, very far-away country from another, equally small and distant.

  Many of the present-day Irish community, our friends (some of whom were probably descendants of the navvies), had turned out to farewell Gran.

  This wasn’t our first visit to St Brigid’s. We had come a couple of days before, Mum, Dad and me, to suss the place out. It was Gran’s wish to be buried here, among the Bradys, Callaghans, Faheys, Fitzgibbons, Hallorans, Keenans, Kennedys and Quigleys. Not that Gran knew any of them, not personally, but the names were familiar. They were names she’d grown up with back home.

  Actually, it was our third visit. Until Mum reminded me, I’d forgotten that we’d come here when I was little, to Mass one Sunday, a change from our regular routine. What I hadn’t realised was that Gran had fallen in love with the place then, had left instructions in her last will and testament to be buried here.

  I don’t know how she wangled it. I thought people weren’t allowed to be buried in a cemetery so far from where they lived. But then, Gran had already come such a long way that maybe she got some special dispensation for her troubles.

  Anyway, that concern seemed trivial now.

  Piercing gold flames burnt around Gran’s coffin, long

  yellow candle-fingers dripping wax onto a half dozen tall, slim, rimu candlesticks. One at her head, one at

  her feet, two at either side. The candlelight flickered

  back from the dark, polished wood; it was mirrored in the small but vibrant Dublin-made stained glass windows of the sanctuary. As the priest moved about the altar (Father ‘Missionary’ Brown had been another one of Gran’s demands - she had met him at some fundraiser or other and luckily he’d been available) the light fluttered in and out of the gold-woven thread of his gaudy vestments, their bright, incongruous Indian colours rippling to tunes played by mournful Irish fiddles.

  The Foggy Dew.

  The Wild Rose of the Mountain.

  The (oh so sad, it always made me cry) Derry Air.

  All the tunes Gran especially loved.

  And the words she also loved. The familiar words of the Catholic Mass. All of its prayers, chants, ingrained responses. They shifted me into a kind of trance, too, helped me to be sure of what to say when really knowing what to say was actually impossible.

  And the incense! Puffs of heavy sweet smoke choked the little church and drifted outside. Anyone driving past might have thought we were on the point of announcing a new Pope; they might equally have called the fire brigade, or the drugs squad.

  Our lungs were filled. Those lungs that were still rising and falling, keeping us breathing, keeping us alive. Gran, on the other hand, was lifeless, dead. No words or songs or smells could change that sharp-edged fact.

  ‘Born to New Life,’ intoned Father Brown. ‘Our

  sister is with Christ now and with the saints of his

  Holy and Universal Church.’

  At that moment it all sounded, felt, so old-

  fashioned, so non-universal (and catholic with a small

  ‘c’ means universal). It was certainly different from the everyday Sunday Mass I was used to. If I was on the outside looking in, I guess it would have seemed to me as if we’d warped back in time, a hundred years maybe, or even just thirty or forty.

  I was reminded of something Mum had told me about the masses they used to have when she was little. They were still said in Latin then and, from the way she had described them, they reminded me of Gran’s requiem. There were still places you could go to for a Latin mass, if you wanted to. In fact, Mum had said they were becoming rather retro-chic.

  ‘Would you go to a Latin Mass?’ I asked her.

  ‘Not on your life,’ she said.

  At least the words of Gran’s mass were said in English, not in Latin or in Gaelic (which
Gran spoke). I wouldn’t have understood either.

  If there had been any people around unconnected with the funeral, what would they have thought, seeing us emerge from the church holding Gran’s coffin shoulder-high (it was surprisingly heavy, my neck and right shoulder hurt for days afterwards), dressed and behaving like a procession from some medieval painting of the Dance of Death?

  Should I have cared? It was Gran and what she wanted that mattered most, not what I thought about it. Yet I couldn’t help feeling a sense of embarrassment and exposure. What would passers-by have thought? Poor deluded souls, perhaps? All this ceremony, for what?

  A song off one of Dad’s old vinyl records came into my head:

  Dead and gone

  Life’s a song

  So sing it while you can.

  An extract from Chris’s notebook

  Typically, I did some research.

  Catholic comes from the ancient Greek word katholikos. This is the masculine version, although it comes in feminine and neuter forms, too. But the masculine seems the most appropriate given the male makeup of the Catholic Church’s leadership. Ironically ‘catholic’ means ‘comprehensive’ or ‘Universal.’

  A person of ‘catholic tastes’ is someone interested in many things. In reality, (and this is my interpretation, not the words of the online encyclopaedia I used for my research) Catholics have narrow interests and are narrow-minded. A Catholic, in the sense of a person of that religious persuasion, is a limited being, bound by rules and regulations, making their church’s concept of ‘free will’ seem a bit like a humourless joke.

  If I did ever happen to see that girl again and had the nous to talk to her, would that mean I’d find her humourless and her interests narrow and narrow-minded? How much would I be bothered if that turned out to be the case? Actually, probably a lot.