by David Park
So he goes into the next room and does what the priest has asked and when he returns he finds him sipping from the cup of coffee. Once Mulryne pauses to run a hand through the thick mop of hair that has fallen forward across his brow but then he slips into silence staring intently at the contents of the cup.
‘What’s wrong, Father?’ he asks.
The priest does not lift his eyes away from the cup and for a second he thinks he’s not heard the question. Then something makes him say, ‘Maybe none of my business, sorry.’
‘You’ve nothing to be sorry about,’ Mulryne says, looking at him as if he has suddenly remembered that he is still there. ‘Nothing to be sorry about at all – I’m the one who’s sorry.’
‘You want to talk about it?’
‘What’s there to say, Danny, except I’m shat upon? Shat upon from a great height.’
‘What’s happened?’
The priest stares into his face and then cups the coffee in both hands. ‘You know how to listen, Danny, don’t you? Know how to listen and forget what you’ve heard,’ and when he nods in reply, ‘Sure you do, son, sure you do.’ Then there is only a drip from the tap and the labour of Mulryne’s breathing. ‘A child has made an accusation against me.’ But then he drops his eyes again and lapses back into silence.
‘What sort of accusation?’
‘An accusation that I touched them,’ and then in a tone of voice as if quoting sarcastically, ‘inappropriately – I touched them inappropriately.’ He lifts the glass of Jack Daniel’s again and drains it. When he has finished he licks his lips, pauses, then says, ‘You’re too polite a guy to ask so I’m going to tell you now just so that you know, Danny. I never touched that child in any way I shouldn’t. Never did. On the Holy Book, I never did.’
‘I believe you,’ he says instinctively.
‘You believe me?’
‘I believe you.’
‘That’s good, son. And why do you believe me?’
‘Because I’ve seen you round kids. Seen how you treat them.’
‘Been round kids all my life and never had so much as a whisper. This is the first and the last.’
‘Others will believe you.’
‘It doesn’t really matter who believes me, I’m finished. Shat upon.’
‘How are you finished?’
‘Because an accusation has been made and even though they know it’s a cheap, evil scam for money the Church will pay out and I’ll be moved to a desk somewhere out of sight. I’ll never get within a mile of kids again.’
‘I could speak for you,’ he says. ‘Maybe they’d listen.’
‘You don’t understand, Danny. It’s open season on priests. I’m dead in the water. It wouldn’t matter if the Archangel Gabriel spoke for me. The accusation has been made – a kid’s word against mine – and I’m going to pay for all the times we didn’t believe kids, brushed it under the carpet.’
‘Who was it made the accusation?’
‘That little punk Marvin. He’s a poisonous little viper.’
‘The kid who stole the shin guards. Did he say it happened that day?’
‘Yeah, the kid who stole the shin guards. Payback time. They claim it happened a year ago on an overnighter when we travelled to Tampa for the tournament.’
‘And he waited to now to make the claim? Still came voluntarily every week to practice?’
Mulryne nods and almost smiles, then pours them both the remains of the bottle. ‘We’ll have to raid the communion wine next,’ he says, pushing the empty bottle to the side of the table. ‘You work with his brother.’
‘His brother?’
‘Yeah, Edward. Now he was a player – could have played big-time basketball at college. I’d have put money on it. Don’t know why he dropped out.’
‘Marvin is Edward’s brother?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think he’s a decent guy. Maybe I could talk to him, sort this thing out.’
‘There’s no point, Danny – it’s a waste of time. They smell a fast buck. Like sharks in the sea they’ve got the scent of blood money and they’re circling for the kill,’ Mulryne says, then goes to the sink and splashes his face again, this time cupping some water and pouring it over his head. Without turning he adds, ‘I’m sorry you saw me like this. I’ve taken it hard. But the bottle doesn’t help – I should know that.’ He shakes his head and shoulders like a dog casting off its wetness. ‘You caught me at a bad time.’ Then he turns and faces him. ‘I think I’d like to go and lie down now, Danny, try to get some sleep,’
‘You be all right?’ he asks.
‘Sure, Danny, I’ll be fine. Got it out of my system.’
‘You sure?’
‘I’m sure and if the worst comes to the worst at least I’ll get a chance to go to Donegal and swim in the sea. But what was it you wanted to see me about?”
He hesitates, looks around the kitchen then says, ‘I’m thinking of starting up a small landscape business, wondered if you or the church needed some work done.’
‘I’ll enquire for you. Outside this place could do with a tidy, that’s for sure. I’ll do my best. Would you mind finding your own way out, Danny? I need to get my head down. It’s started to feel so heavy like it might drop off at any moment.’
‘No problem,’ he says and before he turns to go the priest makes a cradle of his arms on the table and slowly lowers his head so the image he carries out into the night is of Mulryne’s hunched shoulders, bulging out from under his vest, and the grey swathe of his doused hair falling forward to hide his face.
Once after a night out when taking a lift home in Scott’s car they had dropped Edward off so he knows he lives somewhere in the little enclave that squats behind Fairfields and Alona Avenue. It is predominantly a black area, poorer than the rest of its environs and tucked out of sight. Maybe only a hundred houses, maybe fewer. As he elrives over he wonders why he is going. Because he likes Mulryne? Because he wants Mulryne to help him over the wedding? There’s a church on the corner of Alona and as he stops in front of it on a red, the doors open and a choir of black women in white gowns cascades down the steps into the dusk of the evening and lingers in conversation. It’s like a sudden fall of snow, as if all the city’s magnolia buds have burst open at the same moment. The night feels illuminated, spinning in ceaseless clusters of light, and he stares fascinated until the impatient blare of a horn tells him that the lights have changed. He drives on but it is as if the image is burnt on his senses and he cannot blink its intensity away.
He lowers the window and tries to remember where Edward lives, trawling the streets slowly, staring at the faces who stare back at him. He slows down even more to avoid some kids playing on bikes who dart out from between cars like minnows in a shadowy pool. He begins to feel uncomfortable, uncertain of why he has come or what he is going to say. Just when he is going to stop and ask someone for directions he sees Edward sitting on a fence with two other young men. They scrutinise him as he parks and gets out of the car but at first Edward shows no sign of acknowledging him. As he walks towards them he tries to assume a relaxed confidence he does not feel, lifting his hand lightly in greeting.
‘What’s up, Danny Boy? You got yourself lost?’ Edward asks.
‘Kinda. Was hoping to have a word.’ He hesitates. All three faces stare at him impassively.
‘I’ll be in work tomorrow – same as always.’ He makes no attempt to move from the fence. ‘Maybe you’ve come to learn some hotshot moves.’ The other two men smile as Edward slowly pretends to shoot a basket.
‘I’m just a water carrier,’ he says, smiling. ‘Too late for me to try any hotshot moves.’
‘Maybe you should take up boxing, bro – you got the quick hands.’ He gets off the fence and, putting his open palms in front of his face, does a little shimmy. ‘Danny here did a little boxing in our last game. A real Muhammad Ali – isn’t that right, Danny?’
‘Sure,’ he says. ‘I coulda been a contender.’
>
‘What you want, Danny?’
‘A quick talk. Could we go somewhere?’
Edward walks off without replying and he follows. Once he turns to look back at his car and Edward sees him. ‘Relax, Danny – nobody with any pride would be seen dead driving a pile of junk like that.’ He laughs at his own joke and shouts to his two friends, ‘Keep a good eye on that sweet machine – Danny thinks it might fill the bros with envy and tempt them to steal it.’ Then he turns down a bare earth path running between two houses which leads them into a piece of land that is part cultivated and part scrub. Along a chain-link fence someone has started a vegetable patch and a row of faded sunflowers tiredly lift their still furled faces to the coolness of the night’s breeze. At what looks like an old water tank Edward stops and leans against the rust-blistered sides.
‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ he says. ‘Everyone is entitled to their own privacy, their own space. I don’t go around turning up uninvited on your doorstep.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mean any disrespect. It’s just something I need to talk to you about.’
‘I know why you’ve come.’
‘You know?’
‘Sure I know. You Irish stick together.’
‘I don’t think Father Mulryne did what he was supposed to, Edward.’
‘And just how would you know that, Danny? You were there or something?’
‘No, I wasn’t there but I’ve been around him a long time now – help out with the soccer sometimes – and I’ve never seen anything to make me think he would do some shit like this.’
‘Did he send you here?’
‘No, he doesn’t know I’m here.’
‘Bullshit! He knows you work with me – that’s why he told you. And being around him a long time don’t mean nothing. You think he does what he does when you’re looking over his shoulder? What Marvin said he done, he done and no one’s going to tell me otherwise.’ He leans off the water tank and his head juts forward. ‘We’re doing a public service here, doing our duty as citizens, because if he did this to one kid and got away with it then sure as hell he’ll do it to some other. That what you want, Danny?’
‘If he did it he can rot in hell – deserves everything he gets. I just don’t think he did it.’
‘You don’t think he did it because he’s a priest and he’s Irish,’ Edward says, kicking his heel against the tank and sending a hollow reverberation through the stillness of the night. ‘I suppose you think all those other ones with their faces in the paper didn’t do it either.’ He starts to walk slowly towards the fence.
‘I know they did it. This isn’t a religious thing – I haven’t been inside a church since I was a kid.’ He does not know what else to say and instead follows some way behind. At the fence Edward slips through an almost invisible gap and then turns to him again, his face pressed close to the wire, both hands held above his head and clutching the links.
‘You know why he picked Marvin instead of one of those rich white boys? Because he was a black kid and he thought he could get away with it. That no one would complain or make a fuss. Now you go back there to that sicko and tell him that we’re going to fry his ass.’
There is nothing more to be said. He watches as Edward slips away into the shadows between two buildings then retraces his own steps. At the water tank he pauses and touches the coldness of the metal. He lets his fingers trace the contours of a rust patch and when he looks at them they are stained as if with nicotine. He needs a smoke. Instead he thinks of the choir of women, their white gowns flapping like unfurled flags against the darkness of the night.
At the car the two youths are still sitting on the fence. ‘It’s still here, Champ,’ one says, ‘but we had to hold off armies to keep it safe.’
He doesn’t answer but gets in the car and turns on the engine. It does not start first time and he sees his two spectators smirking and shaking their heads. Suddenly he feels angry, humiliated, and he wants to roll the window down and say something sassy, something that shows them he is a man and isn’t afraid, but the engine starts up and instead he drives off quickly. As he slows for the corner he sees Marvin standing with a soccer ball in his hand. The boy stares at him, proud, indifferent, and as their eyes lock, he takes the ball and spins it on his finger.
As he drives it’s not words that fill his head but images the women on the steps of the church still sharp as the flash of a camera; the spreading patches of rust on the water tank; the scorn in Edward’s eyes; Mulryne’s head buried in his arms, his grey hair wet and flattened to his skull. But then into the chaos settles another image and it presses all the others to the outer edges of his consciousness and it’s that of the priest on the far side of the field standing with his arm round the boy’s shoulders under the shadows of the tree. It feels as if it’s printed and fixed on the road as he drives and it can’t be blinked away even though he tries and now the words he hears are, ‘Because he was a black kid and he thought he could get away with it.’ Suddenly his certainty is washed away and although he tries to persuade himself once more of his earlier conviction he knows it’s gone now, replaced by a confused conflict of clamouring voices insistent on the truth of their assertions. All he knows for sure is that he doesn’t want to take the discordant claims and counterclaims of his brain to his home. He tells himself he did his best but then is unsure if it was the best thing to do. He switches on the radio and tries to drown out the voices.
It is Ramona’s night to work late so he decides to wait for her, drive her the short distance home. He drives to the mall where there are only about three dozen cars in the car park. He’s able to park almost at the door. The single security man leans against an inside wall, the contours of his uniform creased with boredom, his hat pushed back on his head revealing the youthfulness of his face. His languid indifference says that he thinks he should be somewhere else, like cruising in a car with a pretty girl or smoking a joint in some badly lit parking lot. Certainly not here where there’s not even the momentary distraction of a shoplifter or a lost child to colour in the time or embroider his uniform with a momentary importance. No breathless thanks from a teary-eyed young mother or the chance to frisk some drugged-up punk. Just the slow passing of time, like watching over an elderly relative who takes too long to die, dragging it out, fighting the inevitable fade into nothingness.
Each time he comes here it feels as if the remaining stores have somehow pulled towards themselves, circling round each other like wagons against the marauding misfortunes that threaten. ‘Everything must go’, ‘closing down sale’ – these are the harbingers of another departure. He sits outside the bookshop and watches an old man with a cart push a mop along the tiles. His heavy clacking feet beat against the squeak and slither of the mop. When he comes to empty the trash cans he looks in each one with expectancy, followed by disappointment, and then swiftly consigns the contents to the back of the cart. He watches him trundle the cart towards the next bin, the mop extended in front of him like the sniffing trunk of a baby elephant. Two jobs done at once to the chorused, clacking castanets of his heavy feet. The sound rises up and seeps into the curved ceiling with its painted frescos of blue sky and wispy clouds. For the first time he notices that there are little Zephyrs with blond curls and puffed cheeks blowing the clouds and then his gaze moves to the almost empty second level where a Christmas-all-year shop has draped Christmas lights and tinsel garlands over the railing. It has silver plastic trees at its entrance and a giant model of Santa with a toy-filled sack.
How could he have been so stupid to consider making his confession to Mulryne? What was he thinking of? After all this time to open the closed box of the past and try to unpack what he’s been so careful to stow away. The only thing he knows is that it wasn’t a religious impulse because he has already stopped believing in one part of his head. It was for Ramona, for the child – to somehow be more worthy of them. To start afresh, step into the future clean and entitled to the happin
ess that it promises. At Christmas he will drape the front of the house in white icicle lights, light it up like a birthday cake. Do it when she is out with the child so that it’s a surprise and she will come home unsuspecting and see the whole house lit up like the biggest smile. So how could he, even for a moment, have thought of letting loose the spores of the past, of casting them to the wind with no way to predict or control where they would land?
He thinks of the anthrax scare, of envelopes seeping with white powder. Of contamination. Of isolation wards and men in white suits like spacemen who cautiously trace the surfaces of unknown and possibly hostile planets like diviners with their outstretched twigs. A young man hands him a leaflet advertising a new car valet service. As one business dies another is born – it’s another part of an unending circle of human optimism. So why even in this place should he let these tainted seed heads blow through his mind and infect the future? He was foolish to get involved with Mulryne and try to help, never fully considered what he was getting into. It was nothing to do with him and he was crazy to let himself drift close to the flames of a public dispute that might have spread in all kinds of directions he could not anticipate. Just walk away, let people sort out their own mess in their own ways. Never take risks, never lift your head too high, never draw unnecessary attention to yourself – for a moment he had forgotten the wisdom of his own rules. Keep your eyes only on the future. And so as the tune of ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas’ slithers slowly like a snake through the sleeping mall, he thinks of the business he could build, of the houses on the lake with the screened pools and perfect lawns, of contracts and franchises.
Ramona is pleased to see him, telling him that she’s a little weary and that her ankles are sore. He imagines the smile on her face when he drapes the house in white lights and then asks himself why he should wait for Christmas, deciding that he will do it for her the day she brings their child home from hospital.
‘You want to eat Chinese?’ she asks as she massages her ankles.