Mondo Desperado

by Patrick McCabe

  All of which were truly successful, for not once did the truth occur to myself, or my esteemed second-in-command in those days, Fr Buttkins McArdle. With whom I earnestly found myself in agreement when, having poured the Dubonnet for our nightcap one evening in my study, he angled his elbow and, leaning on the heavy marble mantelpiece, turned to me and with his eyes glittering, said: ‘Do you know, your grace? I think the calibre of men we’re getting is improving every year. I quizzed that young Packie Cooley up and down in Latin class and be cripes if he didn’t come up trumps every time! As true as I’m standing here with my elbow on this mantelpiece, I don’t think there’s a Latin verb in the dictionary but he’s conversant with it!’

  Of course, if Buttkins were to say the exact same thing to me now, I know what my reply should be, ready and waiting to leap off my tongue. ‘Aha!’ I would cry. ‘But do you know why that is, Buttkins? Because he is the Devil! And if the Devil is not knowledgeable in the art of the ancient languages, then I ask you – who is? Who is, I ask you!’

  But Fr McArdle isn’t here today, of course, having thrown himself off the roof of St Mackie’s some years ago in the throes of a mid-life crisis concerning the validity of his faith and his relationship with his Maker, and so my words are as wishful thinking, nothing more. And the truth is, dear reader, that the reply which I made to my gentle deceased friend and colleague in faith on that occasion long ago was: ‘Packie Cooley is as brainy a scholar as ever strode through the portals of St Mackie’s, Father. And as far from committing the sin of pride as Castlebar is from Dingle.’ And to which my old friend, tilting the meniscus of his dark beverage, mused softly: ‘Now you’ve said it. You’ve said it now and no mistake, me old butty!’

  I would soon come to rue those words! How can I begin to impress upon you, dearest reader, how it galls me to this day to think that I, who had been – not a rock! but a virtual slab of granite to my beloved students, should have been deceived by the smiling cherubic complexion of a football-playing ‘angel’ whose heart seemed to burst with passion for both his peers and the human race in general. But who, in truth, was the leavings of the celestial barrel, a handful of Mephistophelian scrapings whose soul was as nothing more than a piece of canine excrement you might tread underfoot when you were pacing the perimeter of the football field in the company of your colleagues at the end of a long teaching day. Surely, dear readers, even amongst the fallen themselves there must prevail some form of hierarchy. One must surely believe that even within the breast of the wickedest succubus there gleams some tiny star of hope, of goodness.

  *

  But not within that of Packie Cooley. For, as it gradually and inevitably became clear to me, he was no unspectacular drone in the armies of Hades. Would that he had been! Would that he had, gentle reader!

  By now, I feel certain that it is evident as to why these reminiscences continue to trouble me so. Had Packie Cooley been nothing more than a humdrum private in those black, smoking regiments of the expelled, perhaps there might have been a tiny glimmer of the hope of which I have spoken earlier. But what I didn’t realize – along with the fact that it was by now already too late to do anything even if I had! – was that I was dealing with no casual, insouciant, part-time agent of the shadows. What I now harboured within the walls of my beloved seminary – which I would have realized had he not so effectively fashioned winkers for me with his – as I now can see it – reptilian charm – was the very President of the Damned, the Earl of Nothingness – Satan himself!

  *

  The first indication I had that Fr Packie Cooley might not exactly be who he said he was came on a dark night in the year 1961, not long after the terrible news had arrived that some Irish soldiers had been brutally done to death by members of the marauding Baluba tribe in the Congo region of Africa. I had just concluded my spiritual reading and was making my way along the main corridor to my room when I became aware of a presence close by, and upon turning the corner leading to what was affectionately known as the Big Corridor, to my astonishment found the student in question (he was by now a subdeacon) chuckling away to himself as he held the newspaper, as large tears coursed down his flushed, excessively mobile face, spattering the newsprint of the paper which he held before him. ‘Packie,’ I gasped, ‘oughtn’t you be in bed?’ ‘Yes,’ he coughed as he began his reply, ‘but I was so upset at this dreadful news that I simply couldn’t sleep. Did you read about it yourself, Father? You know what they did to those poor soldiers, don’t you? They ate them! It’s beyond words! It’s just too much to bear!’

  With that, he covered his face with his black-clad arm and fled down the corridor, the echo of his muffled sobs lingering in the silence long after he had left the building.

  Had that been all, it is likely that I should have thought no more of it, but when I examined the newspaper – which in his ‘distressed’ state he had discarded on the window ledge – I noted that onto the image of one of the unfortunate deceased military had been added a crudely drawn pair of spectacles and ludicrously thin moustache, and beneath that again, a barely legible scrawl which formed the words – my head lightened – Irish stew! It’s tasty!

  The strangest of feelings enveloped me as I stood there in the half-light of evening, as if a ghost-snake were making its way with infinite but lithe patience up and down the length of my spine. The tragedy is that I did not acknowledge the import of this sign, shot through with foreboding as it most surely was, but simply shook myself and folded up the newspaper, popping it into the waste-paper basket as I proceeded on my way to the Sacred Heart dormitory.

  The next incident took place in the sacristy on the 11th of November 1962 when I was doffing my vestments, having completed my celebration of Mass. I was in quite high spirits – it was a truly beautiful morning, with spears of golden sunlight seeming to impishly fence with each other above the mosaic in that bright and airy room – and was looking forward to my religious instruction class with my students, humming ‘Juxta crucem! Misericordiae!’ quite absentmindedly, I have to admit, when I perceived at my feet a most extraordinary sight. Initially, the opinion that I formed of this spectacle was that it was but random flecks of foam perhaps dislodged from the jaws of a hastily shaved, unfortunately tardy colleague, but I was forced to revise this – an unjustifiably hasty assumption in any case – almost immediately when I realized that what my eyes were gazing upon were nothing other than the tiniest fragments of printed paper. But not only that – for what lay beneath me, on those polished tiles, were pieces removed from the most holy missal! My perplexity deepened. Who could have done this thing? I asked of myself again and again, turning the fragments – some of them actually compressed until they had become hard pellets – abstractedly in my hands. It was then I looked up to see him standing there above me – Packie Cooley. Instinctively one is alert to the mysterious energies which often pass between human beings. An intense current which can be revelatory, combining now with a grey nimbus of cloud which seemed to form itself like a mask before his eyes, veiling his normally fresh complexion as if to say: ‘The man you are looking upon is not Packie Cooley! For he has ceased to be that man!’

  By this point I was emotionally overwrought. I cast my eyes over the tattered remnants of what had once been a beautifully hand-stitched gold-embossed religious book and cried: ‘Who could have done this? Who?’ Then – gloriously, in a way, weakening, I became aware at that very moment of his stifled yet unmistakable sobbing, and felt his comforting hand fall upon my shoulder, as he said: ‘Now more than ever the Church needs us, Father. There is no knowing the extent to which our enemies and the enemies of the one true established Church will go.’ Flushed as I was, in my heady emotional state, I found myself clasping his hand – idiotically, as is now only all too evident – and, as if I had been personally and single-handedly responsible for snatching a soul in danger from the trapdoor that led to the Pit itself, cried aloud: ‘Yes, Packie! It’s so true! What you say is so, so true!’

 
Instead – if only I had done it! – of slapping him across the face and crying: ‘Don’t lie, you hypocrite! You did this! You did it, Cooley! You! And for one reason and one alone! Because you’re the Devil and it’s your job!’

  But, whether or not through the gathering of so many anxieties within me like so many atomic gases, it was not to be, and I feel no pride, readers, none at all as I look back upon it, that half-hour in an early morning sacristy where we stand together, collecting ill-fitting pieces of creased and irretrievably torn tissue paper, Sellotaping and aligning them, those forlorn fragments, as best we could into an approximation of what that sad, blasphemed publication had once been.

  Many times since have I reflected that had I acted on either of those two occasions – it is with tormented soul and guilt-drenched heart I have picked up Conrad’s tales of guilt and cowardice in the face of adversity, I assure you! – perhaps the scorch-footed march of the fork-tongued soul-taker would have been halted. But it was not to be! My eyes were as blind as those of a bat long since in thrall to the demon grape, the pail from the well of moral courage drawn up once more, hopelessly empty, as the career of ‘Fr Packie Cooley’ proceeded apace, nay hurtled.

  *

  First there was the medal for Best Student. Then followed the Essay of 1963 award, and of course Exemplary Latin and Classics Scholar of the same year. Not to mention the captaining of the team which sailed to victory in the 1965 Cardinal McGing All-Ireland Championships trophy. On a morning in 1967, I opened a copy of Caritas magazine to discover once more his sleek, Brylcreemed head superimposed above the squat, many-windowed outline of a fever hospital which, apparently, he had single-handedly been responsible for building in the African parish where he was finishing up as spiritual administrator, having been transferred home – I shuddered! – to the town of Barntrosna, in the parish of Clonacoosey. All of a sudden I was seized by a blind, uncontrollable panic. Some inexplicable, atavistic fury found me with the magazine twisted beyond all recognition in my lap. What am I to do? I repeated hoarsely to myself as I paced the Axminster of my study. Never in the history of St Mackie’s had the rise of a student been so meteoric. It was at that point – yet another fever-sweltering dream concerning my failure to act on that fateful morning in the sacristy having wakened me in the night – I became convinced that events were definitely coming to a head with Mr Packie ‘Fr’ Cooley!

  I flung the remains of Caritas magazine into the waste-paper basket and resolved at once to act.

  *

  I arrived at St Ignatius’s General Hospital (in which establishment I had ascertained he had taken up residence as chaplain) on the morning of the 16th of July 1967, to be informed, to my amazement, that ‘Dear Fr Packie’ had had his farewell party only the evening before and was now stationed in the town of Labacusha, fifty-five miles south of Drogheda. Little did I know that on the very spot where I stood, only one year later fifteen children would be wheeled out on squeaking trolleys, each and every one of them having perished from some inexplicable, unidentified illness – and each of them members, at one time or another, of Fr Packie Cooley’s St Ignatius’s Hospital Soldiers of Christ Choral and Drama Group.

  Those, of course, were the days of flower power and ‘hippies’ and the strains of popular hits of the time, dealing as they did with young people opting out of society and what have you, delivered up their raucuous, hopelessly deluded cacophony to the street as I made my way past some elderly cap-doffing citizens, struggling with the defiantly atonal strains of ludicrously foreign instruments in an effort to gather my thoughts and formulate some plan of action.

  I am not and have never pretended to be a cleric in the G. K. Chesterton mould, but conscious as I was of the importance and, at this juncture, undoubted urgency of my task, I gave myself wholeheartedly to the investigation and within a matter of mere days had located the elusive, chameleon-like clergyman. A young boy I chanced to encounter in the supermarket told me that it was his custom to attend the ‘cubs’ with ‘Fr Packie’ and that if I was to make my way on Thursday evenings to the vicinity of the local football field, I would without a doubt find him there.

  *

  To this day, any recollection of the sight that met my eyes on that fateful day in 1967 as I briskly turned the corner towards the football field fills me with an almost intolerable grief. For there, ringed by a phalanx of red-eyed young boys in shorts who were sobbing their little hearts out, was the prone figure of an eight-year-old, now lying dead on the grass because of a ‘kick in the head’. An ‘unfortunate, freakish accident’, it would later, in the full throes of his weeping, be categorized by the ‘trainer’ – who, of course, was none other than . . .!

  I fled from that place, lest I become overwrought and find myself drawn into physical confrontation, which could only – in those maddeningly fabricated circumstances – have proved counter-productive. Being possessed, of course, of no concrete proof of what were not – at this stage – my suspicions, but my absolute convictions, I could not feasibly make my accusations public, crying: ‘I know, Cooley! I know, you see! You’ve played your last card here, my friend!’ or similar. And thus I was compelled to bide my time and enjoin the Lord to continue to assist me as I gave myself wholeheartedly to my investigations which I realized would now have to become both dogged and persistent if there was to be any hope of confounding my adversary, which he now undoubtedly and most emphatically was, for who can look upon the pale cold countenance of a once-breathing footballing child in the prime of his youth without a sliver of ice entering their heart?

  Following the ‘sad incident’, as the credulous local newspaper described the passing of little Tommy McGinnity, the parish priest – Ladies! Have you met Fr Lucifer? He’ll be taking over from Fr Joe! Ha ha! – retired to Europe for a short holiday, returning prematurely when the city of Paris was torn apart by riots – the photographs of which, as has now become common knowledge (at least among us, the clergy, much as it horrifies us to admit it), revealed, without exception, the unmistakable figure of a familiar white-collared silhouette, its face disfigured by pure evil.

  I was horrified to hear that on his return he had been appointed pastor of St Gertie’s School for Girls, a reputable convent on the south side of Dublin City. Rather than make my presence conspicuous, I decided to employ a more peripheral modus operandi, attiring myself after the manner of a gardener in a tweed hat and weather-beaten brown corduroys, and applying for the position which I had been given to understand was currently available there. And which, I am happy to say, having acquainted myself with all manner of domestic plants and flowers which might have been expected to be found thriving there, I am happy to say I was successful in acquiring.

  With small three-pronged fork in hand, my investigations were now to begin in earnest.

  *

  The shriek of what at other times might reasonably have been considered girlish laughter echoing in the night to this day returns to haunt me, and with it the memory of fit young bodies appearing at unadorned windows like pure, unblemished dolls only to be whisked away by a cackling shape with unmistakably protruding horns. Which I endured as best I could, but in the end I could take no action other than that which I did, bursting into his office, firmly slamming a paperweight upon the felt-topped desk as I cried, hoarsely, such was the level of my distress: ‘The Devil is in this building!’

  But little did I realize – even yet! – the adroitness and resourcefulness of the fiendish intelligence with which I was now engaged. Some days later, subsequent to the ‘exhaustive’ interviews she had conducted with him – a consequence of my relentless insistence – I was horrified to hear Sister Soobie inform me that far from discovering the ‘can of worms the like of which the ecclesiastical world can only have nightmares about’ she had now come to the conclusion that my accusations regarding Fr Packie were nothing short of ‘hysterical’, which, as it transpired, the reverend mother did too, remarking coolly as she sipped her tea, ‘Can you imagine! Our
Fr Packie!’

  I will not pretend that I found myself in any place but the pits of despair as I doffed my tweed hat for the last time and slipped quietly down the avenue, not once turning to look back, the black energy that was radiating from behind the glass where he stood at the main window of the reception room on the ground floor, along with the catgut-thin length of his lopsided, teasing grin, just about as much as I could at that moment humanly bear.

  It is of little use now to repeat that only days later the carcass of a sacrificed sheep was discovered in one of the girls’ wardrobes and that a secret compartment in the senior locker room gave up its horrid contents of bales of pornographic magazines and an upside-down cross.

  There is an old folk-tale dating back to famine times, that in places where the dreaded blight exhaled its foul, dread breath, it was found when it had passed that in each of these stricken villages there was somehow always a locked cottage. Locked, firmly shuttered, and seemingly uninhabited. Inexplicable yes, but a constant which remained with dogged ferocity throughout those shoot-rotting, nettle-munching days, on each and every occasion when the blank, unfeeling door was broken in, revealing the interior to be packed floor to ceiling with what can only be described as a ridiculous surfeit of foodstuffs, including potatoes, corn, maize and any number of handsomely filled wooden chests of Indian tea. Not uncommon also were sides of cooked ham. All of which, of course, had mysteriously disappeared only weeks before the ragged cloak of the hunger had first draped itself about the unwitting land! Is there any need for me to point out the single, stark and unequivocal conclusion which we have no choice but to draw from these assembled, totally incontrovertible facts? That in each of these unfortunate villages at that time, there had resided and ‘ministered’ a man known by only one name – Mr Packie ‘Fr’ Cooley!