Demons

by Bill Nagelkerke

  Good thing then that I wouldn’t have to worry about us ever meeting.

  A woman of colour

  It wasn’t my idea to wear gothic black to Gran’s funeral. I didn’t want to. I buckled to pressure.

  Nothing heavy mind you, in fact it was probably only

  in my own head that I felt any pressure, a sensitivity to other people’s emotions and expectations more

  than anything else. I didn’t want to upset anyone. I didn’t want to get upset.

  Even though I was fifteen (just) at the time, I still

  mostly did what Mum and Dad asked me to. Strange, given that they were pretty stroppy, independent, assertive people themselves. They wouldn’t have expected me to be so compliant. So why was I, you ask? Habit? Afraid of hurting their feelings? I was an only child. A couple of years earlier I’d found out they hadn’t wanted any more kids. They’d stopped at me. Perhaps I didn’t want them to be disappointed in the only one they did have.

  Still, I would have preferred to see Gran off in emerald green. Black wasn’t right for her. She was a person who loved colours. I knew that because of what she’d once told me about her rosary beads.

  ‘The turning points in people’s lives are like the beads on this handmade rosary of mine,’ she’d said. ‘Each bead is different, unique. Each is important in its own way because each is a milestone on the road to God. Remember that Andrea.’

  ‘Yes Gran.’

  I don’t think it would have occurred to me to disagree with her either, not then and not at any time actually, but if I had thought of doing so I would nevertheless have kept any rebellious ideas to myself. Gran was usually sweetness and light, lovely, but if you seriously crossed her she could be as sharp as tacks. A scary matriarch.

  ‘The colours are pretty, too,’ I said.

  ‘Just like people’s lives,’ said Gran. ‘As they should be.’

  ‘Pretty?’ I asked.

  ‘Full of colour,’ she said, rather surprisingly.

  ‘Remember that.’

  I did.

  Forever

  Here is an example of my thinking way too much about religion.

  Was being small-c catholic close to, or very different from, being big-C Catholic, a member of (big capitals) THE CHURCH OF ROME? Being catholic means you embrace everything, the world, the stars, the universe, in time and out of time.

  What if the Catholic Church was nothing more than just another institution - ‘God-begun, man-run’, as Mum often said - and, as with any human institution, subject to laws of destruction and decay? And if the Catholic Church could die, how close to death was it? And, if it died, what about the small matter of its central teaching about life after death, life everlasting, our eternal place in space? Would that still hold true or would the possibility of Heaven (which at home we called the Happy-Forever-After place) die with the Church?

  Did any of these questions matter? Did they bother anyone much, Catholics included? I can’t speak for anyone else. All I can say is that they mattered to me. They bothered me. Sometimes my head got tired of the roundabout way in which all those bothersome thoughts swam around in it.

  The notion of the Happy-Forever-After place had been in my head so long I couldn’t shake it out, even when I got the chance.

  Contradictions

  When I was twelve, going on thirteen, and it was time

  for me to move to high school Mum and Dad said I could chose whether I went to Catholic St Anselm’s,

  girls only and way across town, or the nearest State

  school, mixed gender and much closer to home.

  I couldn’t believe it at first. Choose!

  ‘You’re old enough now to start making up your own mind about these things,’ said Mum.

  I guessed she was talking about more than just which school I went to. It was as if there was a hidden current flowing beneath her words. I could sense the cool, freeing rush of water without actually sighting it

  ‘What things?’ I asked, to make it clear.

  ‘We aren’t going to insist you believe what we believe, not when you can think for yourself,’ said Dad. ‘That’s something we decided years ago.’

  I shouldn’t really have been too surprised but I did start to feel uneasy, as if I was a life raft that was just about to be untied from the boat it had always been attached to. What was going on?

  ‘We promised we’d bring you up Catholic,’ said Mum.

  ‘When you were baptised,’ Dad added. ‘And we’ve done the best we can, given the sort of people we are. It’s going to be up to you now. What you decide for yourself to be and what to believe in.’

  Learning to pray

  I went to the local Catholic primary and intermediate school just down the road from where we lived. One hundred and ninety-two kids, six and a half teachers, and a priest who lived in the presbytery across the playground, an older man named Father Brady. Some

  of the meaner kids laughed behind his back and called

  him Farter Brady.

  Mum had gone to my school too, when she was a

  kid. Those days, she said, it was run by nuns, fierce, red-faced women, as she described them, who wore

  dark habits encircled by wide black belts into which

  they poked their heavy, wooden crucifixes, like swords. She still remembered their names and would recite them like a litany. Sister Joan, Sister Carmel, Sister John Bosco, Sister Mary, Sister Bernadette, Sister Andrew. They were not only fierce, said Mum, they were also tougher and meaner than most of the toughest, meanest kids. They belted kids including Mum once when she’d been only a tiny bit naughty.

  Mum’s description made me feel scared of them even though I’d never met them and never would. Because the days of the black-belt nuns were over. They’d all got old, retired, gone mad (according to Mum, who still felt bitter about the treatment she’d received from them) or died. There were hardly any new nun recruits, not surprisingly. The school didn’t have any nun teachers at all when I was there.

  I used to think my school was a pretty normal, everyday, common-garden school. I believed that every kid, no matter which school they went to, got taught how to pray.

  Young Ms. Proctor taught us religion, including prayer formation. One day she started teaching us the rosary. She was very pleased when I said I already knew all about it. We prayed it at home, I explained. How many families did that anymore these days, she said. Not many, if any. She must have thought I was going to be a star student. I liked Ms Proctor a lot and was very sorry that, not long afterwards, I had to let her down.

  The family rosary

  Unless you’re a Catholic you probably have no idea what rosary beads are or what you are supposed to do

  with them.

  A brief lesson, a la Ms Proctor and Gran.

  A rosary is a string of prayer beads divided into five groups. Each group has eleven beads, a lone bead followed by a clutch of ten. There are four prayer cycles to choose from so you could, if you were a saint or in a masochistic mood, recite the rosary four times in four different ways. Each cycle is called a ‘mystery.’ They are: The Joyful Mysteries, The Sorrowful, The Glorious and The Mysteries of Light. The nicest rosaries look like jewellery. Like necklaces, with pendant crosses hanging from a main circle.

  Praying the rosary was a bit like swaying to trance music, I discovered. More about that soon.

  Gran was a big influence on me.

  Before I even started school Gran insisted that we kneel down to say the rosary aloud every night at home, before I went to bed. ‘So if you die in the night, you’ll be received by God, purified,’ she said.

  Mum and Dad went along with Gran (after all, once a year or so Father Brady exhorted parishioners to pray the rosary and Mum and Dad had promised to bring me up in the Catholic faith, so . . .) but they carried on like big kids, giggling behind their hands, which made me giggle a little too, even though I didn’t really understand what was so funny. My knees hurt and that wasn’t fun
ny at all.

  Gran tried to ignore the stifled laughter, her gaze fixed ahead as we knelt on the lounge floor. Ignoring us was, as far as she was concerned, a necessary

  compromise. Having won the battle to make us recite her all-time favourite prayer she didn’t feel she could complain too much if we didn’t meet her own

  prayerful high standards.

  When I turned five Gran gave me a rosary of my own.

  At first I was confused. I saw in front of me a cluster of sapphire coloured beads nesting in cotton wool. I made the mistake of thinking it was a necklace. I draped them over my head before I learned my mistake.

  Before Gran pointed it out.

  She quickly leaned over and removed them from around my neck. Luckily, she wasn’t angry, or sharp, only firm. Very firm.

  ‘They’re for praying, Andrea McNamara, not preening.’

  Later on, a funny thing happened. Funny in that no one explained why. During my first year at school, after I’d already boasted to Ms Proctor about my rosary-saying skills, we stopped reciting it at home. Ms Proctor was disappointed when she found out. She didn’t voice her disappointment but I was sure she looked betrayed by her fallen star.

  ‘Why aren’t we saying the rosary anymore?’ I asked Mum and Dad.

  ‘We didn’t think we were doing it justice,’ replied Mum.

  I’d heard the word justice many times before (I’ll tell you why in a moment) and I already had my own idea of what it meant, but somehow it didn’t seem to fit in with not praying the rosary together anymore.

  ‘I think we’d be more serious about it if we said it to ourselves,’ Dad added, also not very

  convincingly.

  For a few days I tired saying it by myself but it was too difficult for a not-yet-seven year old to

  sustain. I sometimes made it to the end of a whole

  decade, but more often than not I’d give up after only eight or nine Hail Marys.

  However, for a long time I kept those sapphire beads, kept them safe in their nest.

  An extract from Chris’s notebook

  Dear Andrea

  I never really thought I’d be seeing you again so when I did, a short/long three years later, I’d convinced myself I’d forgotten all about you. Walking into that classroom and being face to face with you, it was as if the solid ground fell away from under me and I was left suspended in emptiness, out of orbit or, like the Greek hero Odysseus in his journeys, being sucked into Charybdis’ whirlpool, drugged and deliciously abandoned, like him, in the land of the Lotus-Eaters.

  If I believed in miracles I would have called this chance meeting one. Instead, I called it fate.

  After three years, I found out on the first day that your name was Andrea.

  Turning points

  The day I arrived on the scene was a turning point, for Gran if not for me. I don’t remember it of course. Does anyone?

  But I’m told it was on March 17, St Patrick’s Day. What a coincidence! Mum and Dad couldn’t have timed it better. St Patrick is the patron saint of Catholic Ireland, where my grandmother came from and where my Dad was born.

  I was Gran’s first and only grandchild, the one she thought she would never have.

  She blessed God and praised my parents, I think

  in that order. And, afterwards, for her to go on living

  in this strange land was never quite so bad, or strange, again.

  I was given all the credit but wasn’t responsible for any of it.

  Working backwards, I was actually conceived in a turning point year, the year in which the South African rugby team, the Springboks, came and went and New Zealand changed forever. Mum and Dad met at an anti-tour march. Anti-tour, anti-apartheid. Dad, aged twenty-six, had come out here to settle, leaving the so-called Irish Troubles behind. Mum, at thirty, was ready to settle down.

  They were both what you might call professional protestors. Mum since uni days, and Dad since forever because, being born and bred in Northern Ireland, he was, as he described it himself, ‘bottle-fed on the milk of rebellion’.

  The day my parents met they were both wearing motorcycle helmets to ward off the long batons of the police, they had sewn peace symbol patches onto their jackets and were carrying opposite ends of the same banner. They were on the front line and, the following day, on the front page of the newspaper, battered, bruised and bloodied but unbowed.

  Yes, everything changed that year. For the country and for them, personally. They were felled by police batons and afterwards fell in love, got married and, ten months later, hey presto, moi.

  Daughter of protestors for social, political and racial justice. Granddaughter of traditional Irish

  Catholic matriarch and daughter of Catholic parents. Good Catholic Girl. Yet even though I hardly ever rocked the boat, either as a child or as an early

  teenager, I’m sure that rebel thoughts had always run

  through my head. I mean, how could they not? I was

  genetically programmed to be a rebel but, during the

  first dozen or more years of my life, what sort of a rebel remained a mystery. I was destined to surprise everyone, including myself.

  Photo opportunity

  Funny how one thing leads to another.

  Mum and Dad kept a photo album with clippings about the various justice issues in which they were interested and in which they had been involved. Everything from the anti-tour demos to keeping New Zealand nuclear free, from gay rights to land grievances. The only photo of them in the justice context was that first one. A few years after it was taken it appeared (with their permission) in a high school textbook. When some local teachers,

  who knew Mum and Dad, saw it they invited them to take part in classroom discussions. They agreed. I guess they saw it as an opportunity for evangelising. Later on, in new editions of the book, Mum and Dad were even quoted describing their experience of the events. They didn’t exactly become famous, but they did become known.

  Rebel acts

  At age thirteen I opted for the State school over the Catholic all-girls’ college.

  At age fifteen, the year Gran died, I had a major crisis of belief and decided to abandon my religious upbringing and beliefs.

  At age seventeen, Year 13, my last year at school, I met Chris.

  That final year, three of the Mysteries, the joyful,

  glorious and the mysteries of light, were all rolled

  into one.

  I’ll take you there, soon. But, first, none of these acts of rebellion might have happened if it wasn’t for the game I played when I was small.

  Priestly rites/rights

  When I was seven I wanted badly, desperately, sincerely to be a priest. Other kids my age at Mass got bored quickly but for some reason, I never did. Maybe it was because I fell in love with the mystery and drama of it all, the colours, the words, the actions. Too much so, perhaps. I’m sure that was why, when Mum and Dad so unexpectedly untied the rope that had held me fast to them I felt, and fell, adrift.

  Because Dad was a great storyteller I was already well programmed to like stories. A lot of the gospels that Father Brady read each week had stories in them, called parables. And what happened at the Mass was a kind of storytelling in itself.

  Some masses were extra special. Easter Mass when all the lights were switched off and everyone held candles. Christmas Midnight Mass, with its smell of Christmas lilies, its carol singing and the moist piece of Christmas cake handed out to everyone when it was all over.

  As I’ve said, our parish priest Father Brady was quite an old man. He did everything slowly and reverently but his sermons were as short as he was, and sometimes even funny. He didn’t ignore the kids at Mass either. He tried talking to us using words we understood.

  When I was seven I wanted to be like him (in all ways except old). Already when I was seven, I didn’t just want to be part of the mystery and the magic, I

  wanted to be the mystery and the magic. Not to

&nbs
p; mention that saying Mass standing up as if on a stage

  was also a lot more fun than saying the rosary on my knees.

  Mum and Dad but, curiously, not Gran, laughed. Big joke, Andrea. They didn’t seem to understand that I was as serious about becoming a priest as only a seven year old can be. In other words, deadly.

  ‘Only men can become Catholic priests,’ said Mum. ‘You know that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s a mystery to me why they’d want to,’ said Dad, giving Mum a significant cuddle. ‘Whatever the reasons, they miss out on life’s good things.’

  I had no idea at all what he meant.

  Gran did. ‘Don’t talk like that,’ she said to him. ‘Priests are called to a Higher Good.’

  ‘They’re welcome to it,’ said Dad. ‘All due respect to them, of course.’

  ‘Leave the girl alone in any case,’ said Gran. ‘She can play at being priests, surely?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mum surprised. ‘If she wants to.’

  I did.

  Gran helped me get the things I needed.

  She transformed an ordinary cardboard apple

  box into a golden tabernacle for the Holy of Holies, turning its side flaps into doors, which I ‘unlocked’ with an old key discovered in the back of a drawer.

  Gran extracted a thin card from one of Dad’s as yet unopened birthday shirts, drew and cut out a chalice shape, as well as a big round host.

  Christ’s blood and body.

  Bright priestly vestments - green, purple, red (not white I decided, too boring) - were hanks of material

  rescued from the St Vincent de Paul rag bag, chopped

  to my size with Gran’s hefty scissors and draped over