Demons

by Bill Nagelkerke

  Pushing myself through the throng, past some

  teachers gas-bagging to each other alongside the wall, I made it out of the hall.

  My ears were ringing and I felt shivery-cold after the warm press of bodies inside. I thought Robbie would come to find me, angry perhaps, apologetic

  maybe, but neither of those things happened. I could have been nothing, nobody, for all the interest anyone took. Neither Michele nor Jo, assuming they were in the hall, had seen what had happened otherwise

  they’d have come to console me. Wouldn’t they?

  I called home. Dad hadn’t been long back and was very surprised, naturally, that it was me ringing, asking to be collected, I’d had enough already. Still, he didn’t argue, but arrived in about fifteen minutes. He didn’t say much either on the way home, just asked briefly what had happened to cause the turnaround. I verified that no, Robbie wasn’t the quite nice guy I’d taken him to be and yes, I’d managed to look after myself well enough, and Dad said good on you Andrea for doing the sensible thing, you’ve got your whole life ahead, don’t hurry it, etc, before falling silent.

  Dad was preoccupied, that was obvious. He often was but tonight more so than usual. So was I. I thought about what would be going down at the dance, what Robbie would be saying about me next week but during and after the events that followed I

  forgot all about Robbie, and the dance became

  something of absolutely no importance at all, a black hole in a collapsing universe.

  STRANGE MEETING

  At the same time as Chris throws out the compliment, loaded with all the possessive memories of the time

  and place when everything changed and changed

  again, his head bobs about like a great, big, uncouth sunflower.

  His hair is still rough and yellowy, the colour of the sandstone sculpture in the reserve in which I

  paused more than three years ago. It’s unfashionably long, like a lion’s mane, his head too big for his thin, tapering, wiry body.

  I know - knew - that body well. It was quite the opposite from mine. ‘Pinhead’ they called me at high

  school, when at thirteen I grew tall and my hips expanded at the expense of my head so that even my long hair couldn’t equalise the imbalance. The people who called me that thought they would hurt and embarrass me but they didn’t really understand the strength of the rebel Irish blood that ran beneath my skin.

  Following the Year Ten dance it didn’t take me long to have my fine tresses cut short. And these days I don’t give a shit about my shape.

  Hold fast

  I knew something was badly wrong when I heard voices in the kitchen, even though I tried hard to convince myself otherwise.

  It was a dream wasn’t it? A nightmare following the nightmare dance.

  I opened my eyes, the darkness pressing against them as I strained to see. It was no nightmare. It was

  real. What on earth was going on?

  The voices weren’t hushed. They were loud, worried voices. Mum’s and Dad’s.

  I should have got up straightaway to find out what the hell was happening but I held back for as long as I could, hoping that if I could understand what the voices were saying then I would learn that it was

  nothing serious and I could fall back blissfully to sleep.

  Of course, it wasn’t to be. Soon, my door opened a crack.

  ‘Andrea?’

  Dad’s voice. Trying not to sound anxious but full of urgency nonetheless. Trying not to be too scarily loud but deafening all the same.

  ‘I’m awake Dad.’

  ‘Good. Gran’s not well, love. We’ve called an ambulance.’

  I sat up. ‘Not well. What d’you mean? What’s wrong with her?’

  I was aware of course that poor old Gran hadn’t been quite her usual self these last few months. Had suddenly gone a little greyer, quieter, more distant. In trying to ignore those realities I knew now that I’d unfairly and irretrievably ignored her as well. I started to tremble.

  Dad came over to me, trying not to stumble in the darkness.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I said.

  Dad sat on the edge of the bed and we put our arms around each other. His face was wet. He was crying. ‘We think Gran’s had a heart attack, or a stroke, or maybe both,’ he said.

  ‘Is she dying?’ I asked. My voice shattered, like a broken mirror.

  I felt his head nod, ever so slightly. ‘I’m no doctor but I don’t think she’s going to last long.’

  A vehicle came down our road. A throbbing engine pounded in our driveway.

  ‘Get dressed,’ said Dad. ‘We can all go with her to the hospital.’

  He hurried from my room. In a trance I stumbled

  to the chair over which I’d thrown my jeans from last night. I didn’t put the light on, it was too harsh a thing to do. The challenge of retrieving clean underwear from the drawer and a fresh blouse from the cupboard

  in the dark meant I could think of something other than Gran.

  Dad, or maybe Mum, was letting the ambulance people in. They went to Gran’s room, doing what to her I didn’t care to think about. I flailed blindly about

  managing somehow to get my clothes on.

  And then, and then, I had to step out of the room into the light and see Gran being wheeled on a stretcher to the ambulance, down the familiar hallway into a strange and unknown world, another wrenching journey. Her mouth and nose were sealed by an oxygen mask and liquid dripped from a tube into a vein on the back of her knobby, purpled hand.

  ‘Gran!’ I said, wide awake now, wishing, praying I was still asleep. A lost, wailing cry.

  Prayer. I hadn’t prayed very much the last couple of years, not since starting a different school and whenever I still did, it wasn’t in the sure and certain way of before. But now the conviction briefly returned and I gabbled away inside my head, praying for Gran to survive, to be well again.

  Her eyes opened momentarily and she looked at me but she didn’t, or couldn’t, speak. I guess if she’d tried, her words would have become trapped alongside the misty vapour steaming-up the inside of her mask.

  ‘Mum’s going to follow in the car,’ Dad said. ‘Will you come with me in the ambulance?’

  I nodded. ‘Is she in pain?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Dad. ‘Not now they’ve started the morphine drip.’

  Morphine. So that was what was leaking into

  Gran. She was being drugged up.

  We sat on a bed on one side of the ambulance. Gran lay opposite us.

  ‘She will be all right, won’t she? You didn’t

  mean what you said before?’

  Dad shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  I turned to the paramedic.

  ‘We’re doing all we can,’ he said.

  ‘Why aren’t we going any faster?’

  ‘Can’t,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t be safe.’

  ‘But she could die before we get to the hospital.’

  ‘Shush,’ said Dad, putting an arm round me as I cried into the Irish wool of his jersey, feeling five instead of fifteen. Neither of us said anything else for a while. Dad gently stroked Gran’s arm as she lay there, still. I touched the tip of her left index finger with the tip of my right. Then there was no more gap between us. At one point her eyes opened again and she looked right at us, through us, past us, as

  if she’d had a vision of another world. She lifted her right hand, the one with the drip, tugging the oxygen mask away from her mouth.

  Dad tried restraining her, but the ambulance man shook his head. ‘It’s OK. Just for a quick minute.’

  I didn’t know a quick minute could last an eternity. As the mask came away, Gran murmured something.

  ‘What was that Mum?’ Dad leaned over to her.

  She spoke again. Dad nodded. ‘Too damn right,’ he said.

  Then Gran said, loudly and clearly. ‘Damn and bugger it!’

  And then, without warning, she died
.

  Famous last words

  I’d never seen anyone die before, never seen anyone dead. Dad had.

  ‘Why’d you come to New Zealand,’ I’d once asked

  Dad, when I was around nine or ten.

  ‘I got sick of being called a Fenian bastard,’ said Dad.

  Maybe he thought that explained everything. It

  didn’t tell me anything at all.

  ‘I’d seen too much death and destruction,’ he elaborated. ‘My two brothers died in the Troubles. One was murdered by Provos because he joined the British army and the other was shot by the British simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  It still didn’t make a great deal of sense, not the reasons why Dad’s brothers, my uncles, had died but of course I understood that Dad had suffered because of it. Was suffering all over again because I’d asked. But how could I have known what the effect of my question would be?

  I’d almost always been aware that Dad had come from ‘somewhere else’, why else did he sound different from Kiwi Dads? So wasn’t it important for me to know more about him?

  ‘What exactly is a family tree?’ I’d asked Gran not that long before I tackled Dad.

  ‘It’s the history of a Family,’ Gran had said. ‘It’s

  like a great big tree with branches extending every-where, but one strong deep root system to hold it all together.’

  ‘Like the tree in the Garden of Eden.’

  Gran looked at me. ‘All trees have hidden snakes,’ she said unexpectedly.

  ‘What’s your history Gran?’ I’d asked.

  She went even more serious then, her mouth tightening into a line. ‘It’s a history of injustice,’ she said. ‘It’s a history of being a second-class citizen in your own country. It’s a history of the loss of sons.

  Ask your father Andrea. And one day, go there and discover it for yourself.’

  So I had asked Dad. There was clearly more, lots more, to our family tree but Dad wasn’t prepared to

  shake any more apples off its branches.

  Tears were streaming down either side of my face, like small waterfalls.

  ‘What did she say?’ I asked Dad. ‘What did she say? I didn’t hear her!’

  Not her actual last words. Those were for everyone. ‘Damn and bugger.’ Her last words to Dad, I meant.

  Turned out to be those famous lines from a poem by Dylan Thomas.

  Do not go gently into that dark night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  Those were Gran’s last words to us.

  In her coffin, open before the requiem and shut before the Mass began, Gran’s hands held her rosary. Rather, we had looped the beads around her fingers. Each bright bead had been a milestone, on the way to . . . God? Gran had reached all her milestones. She had nowhere left to go. But had she got there in the end, where she had expected and wanted to be? Had God reached her in time and touched her index finger, closing the gap? Who knows? How can anybody know? It was all very well to believe, as Mum said

  she and Dad did, and as I had always done, in the Happy-Forever-After place but where was it and why did no one ever come back to tell the rest of us what it was like?

  We buried Gran in St Brigid’s graveyard, among

  the ghosts of her distant past, those people who had come all the way from Tippperary, from County Kerry and County Clare, and then we all went home.

  I didn’t go back to the cemetery for another three years.

  Part Two: The Joyful Mysteries

  An extract from Chris’s notebook

  I wondered whether, if Andrea had happened to see me the day I drove past in the car with Dad, would she later on have remembered me?

  STRANGE MEETING

  I can’t help thinking, I’m twenty-two today and already I feel old. The history of my life seems to have been written although I know for a fact it hasn’t, it’s only just beginning.

  ‘It’s so weird, bumping into you like this,’ says Chris.

  ‘Do you remember the first time we met?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘But . . . it wasn’t the first time I saw you Andy.’

  ‘Not the first time? What do you mean?’

  ‘The first time I saw you, noticed you, was the day you were coming out of that little church, the day of your Gran’s funeral.’

  I remember that day, only too well. But not that Chris was part of it.

  ‘St Brigid’s?’

  ‘Yep. Dad was teaching me to drive. You were at one corner of your Gran’s coffin.’

  I’m amazed, astounded, angry.

  ‘I can’t believe you never told me that! Why on earth not?’

  Chris shrugs it off. ‘Probably because I didn’t want you to think I’d been spying on you. I thought you might have been embarrassed. I mean it was a pretty medieval affair. Even you’d have to admit

  that. And later on it didn’t seem important.’

  ‘But it was three years later that we met.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And you already knew who I was?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know. You were just a face. Seen from afar. The main reason I remembered you at all was because that day you looked so terribly sad. And alone. There must’ve been a hundred people there but you seemed to be the only one.’

  ‘Men!’ I said sounding angry but not as angry as I felt I needed to be. ‘What is it with them? Can’t they ever tell the truth?’

  Chris looks shamefaced. But he rallies quoting, of all people, Pontius Bloody Pilate.

  ‘Ti estin aletheia?’ he asks, in perfect Ancient Greek, of course.

  I don’t give him the satisfaction of letting him translate it for me. This time I pip him at the post. ‘What is truth? Yeah, right, a damn good question, classics geek,’ I say.

  Portents

  My final year at high school - lucky Year 13 everyone called it - started off a drag but blossomed into, among other things, Chris.

  Lucky, unexpected and, I have to say, by then not unwanted.

  Under siege

  As you’ll have realised by now the chipping away of my Catholic faith started even before Gran died. In fact it probably began with Gran when she spoke up for women being priests, and probably ended when my quick and dirty, but not insincere, prayers for Gran’s survival went unheeded. I wanted to know she was safe in the Happy-Forever-After place but no

  matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t be sure. Had

  even she been sure?

  I’d always thought Gran’s faith was unassailable but her dying words suggested another possibility, not only great frustration at having to shuffle off her mortal coil but doubt. Why else would she have railed as she did? Damn and bugger! Wasn’t it possible, after all, that she had been terrified of heading into dark nothingness instead of to Happy-Forever-After?

  On top of all that Mum and Dad had left me to make up my own mind about the things they’d brought me up believing. Was it any wonder that by the time I met Chris, atheistic Chris who strongly believed that God was nothing more than a myth, as fabulous a piece of storytelling as the Greek legends which he loved but didn’t literally believe in either, that I had already crossed from belief to doubt and finally to disbelief? My faith seemed to have become as cold as Gran in her grave.

  By then I felt free, but also empty.

  You can’t go back

  In town one day I bumped into a few old primary school friends - well, acquaintances.

  ‘You still liking St Anselm’s?’ I asked them, feeling a bit homesick for their company.

  ‘It’s cool,’ they said. I found it hard to know if they were telling the truth or not. ‘But why d’you want to know? You could’ve come with us.’

  And that’s true. I could have but I’d chosen not to. We were miles apart now, literally and figuratively.

  A little bit like Gran, I’d moved on.

  Like Gran, I had no intention of coming, or going, back.

  STRANGE MEETING
>
  ‘When did you get back?’ I ask.

  ‘Couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘That all?’

  ‘Haven’t got used to the place yet.’

  ‘Course not. Must be really strange.’

  There’s a pause. Chris hurries to fill it, anxious maybe that otherwise I’ll lose interest in him.

  ‘Got time for a coffee? Something to eat?’

  ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘I’m a free agent. I’m free.’

  ‘My shout.’

  ‘I’m a big girl now, remember.’

  ‘Irish independence. How could I forget?’

  We cross the tram tracks, head down the Boulevard.

  ‘You won’t have had the time to find the best eateries,’ I say. ‘There’s a really good coffee shop near the Arts Centre. They do a mean Greek salad, too. The feta’s the real thing. Unless of course you’re sick of all that?’

  ‘Sounds perfect,’ says Chris. ‘Hey, and thanks for not just walking away, even if you are a free agent.’

  I look sideways at him as we walk, thinking, I could never ‘just walk away’ from you.

  ‘I only meant that uni’s finished for good,’ I say, at the same time contemplating, what is freedom really?

  Is anyone ever truly free?

  I’d believed I was, but now look at me. A slave to memories, like other people are to instant coffee.

  Our place

  Mum and Dad had given me the choice of school, so I

  made it. And then, high on the freedom they’d

  presented me with, I made another decision for myself.

  The straw that broke the camel’s back landed, I think, the day I had a conversation with our newish and much younger parish priest, Father Wright, still on the right side of thirty, a marathon runner, active in keeping (or trying to keep) young people in the Church and kind to the elderly. Apparently he did quite a good funeral, Gran had whispered to me one Sunday and she ought to have known, having been to not a few funerals of older friends she’d made since she’d lived here. Father Wright didn’t end up being right enough for her funeral though.