Notes from a Coma (6 page)

“Spirits would be His drink, wouldn’t it, sir?” someone called from the back of the class. “Top shelf.”

“No,” someone else said. “Wine would be His drink, wouldn’t it, sir, that cheap Italian stuff? Or that stuff monks brew in monasteries. I’d say you couldn’t keep it drawn to Him if He got started.”

JJ looked down at his desk. I waited for the laughter to die down.

“JJ, if God were to sit down and rewrite the constitution there wouldn’t be a problem. By definition God is all good and virtuous so anything He wrote would be on the side of good, both private and public, and hence unarguable. It would be interesting, however, to find out just how near or far our constitution diverged from the Divine Law. De Valera would be interested; he’d be up out of his grave in a shot.”

“There wouldn’t be a problem if God was true to your definition of Him …”

“You don’t accept the definition? God is God, JJ.”

“I’ll go along with it for the sake of argument. The real problem arises if there is no God. Supposing someone was to stand up with definite proof that He did not exist—then the arse and foundation would fall out of the whole thing. All laws in this country would be groundless. No one would be bound by them any more.”

“That doesn’t follow. In that situation all we would be left with was the law of the land without divine source.”

“No, this is an interim constitution. It is predicated on God’s existence. It gets its authority from God and is directed towards God: it begins and ends in God. Now if God is absent then it collapses and has to be written again. We’d have to start from the beginning.”

“Interim or not, JJ, it has served the country since 1937 …”

“With twenty-eight amendments.”

“OK, twenty-eight amendments. That doesn’t discredit it. Constitutional amendment is part of an evolving democracy. Even if I accept your argument the onus is still on you to prove that God does not exist and that is where you’re stuck.”

JJ shook his head. “My point is that there is a denial of
intellectual conscience in the constitution. The opening sentence, article six, it runs right through the whole document. The faithless are blackballed from the off and that is a denial of the very freedom and dignity it purports to uphold. It does not legislate for the faithless. Under its own terms they are quite literally unconstitutional or, to use Cearbhall O’Dalaigh’s phrase, repugnant to the constitution. They can hardly be classed as citizens.”

The bell went and the rest of the class began gathering up their books. Not for the first time they’d found themselves lost in the wake of JJ’s reasoning. I needed a breath of fresh air myself.

“Time out, JJ,” I said. “We’ll continue this another day. Is this another of these mindrot meditations?”

“It was just an idea,” he said, “just an idea I had.”

“I’m impressed. You don’t believe in God or the constitution?”

“It’s not that I don’t believe in them, it’s just that I have no faith in them.” His face brightened suddenly. “Suppose …”

I opened the door. “No, JJ. Suppose and suppose and suppose. Some other day.”

I often think of that discussion in light of what’s happened these past three months. Everyone has a theory about JJ, not just here in this town but throughout the whole country. You know yourself all the think pieces and editorials that have been written about him. All that guff about the alienation of young men in a feminised world, trying to tie his coma into the rising number of suicides in eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds. You could turn yourself inside out reading them and still have no clue at the end of the day who or what they were on about.

But if you ask me, JJ’s problem was that he saw signs everywhere, he made too many connections, this was his difficulty. Everything that happened in his life—his time in the orphanage, his adoption, the burning in the church—he wove all these things together into a kind of world view. I suppose you could call it a philosophy … His abandonment by his mother and the circumstances of his adoption were only the start of it. He saw himself free in the universe, not in the positive sense of being able to make and forge his own destiny but in the negative one of being cast out without love or grace. Of course if you pointed out to him that he’d been rescued from something a lot worse he would have said that was just chance, he was lucky not
worthy, and to JJ there was a world of difference. There was this want in him, this hunger—you could feel it in every discussion and debate we ever had. Argument for the sake of argument or point scoring didn’t interest him; he had more need than that. He believed in everything he ever argued no matter how unlikely the idea. And that’s why I don’t think he was confused either. That’s the kind of fool’s pardon I find objectionable. I’ve never come across anyone with such a coherent sense of himself in the universe—it’s something I can’t explain, it just goes beyond me. But if that’s confusion then it’s the most reasoned and clear-sighted confusion I’ve ever come across.

You can see us together here in this photo. This was taken on the steps of the hospital the day I was discharged, three weeks after the accident. JJ with his arm around me and a big smile on his face, me with my bald head and crutches. It was the beginning of August, a beautiful summer’s day, the sun splitting the stones. But see how pale I am, like a ghost; that was my first day in the sun that whole summer.

I like this photo, it’s full of sunshine and it caught me at a moment when I was happy. More importantly, it caught me at a moment when I knew I was happy. I’m sixteen and a half in this photo, just back from the dead with a shiny new Kevlar plate in my head, a pair of crutches and two months’ supply of opiate painkillers in my pocket. On that day, the eighth of August, I was the happiest girl in the world. My bones were mending, I had a recovery to look forward to and, best of all, I was in love.

What shocked me most was the amount of anger in him. I couldn’t understand it. Everyone knows how Anthony took JJ out of that orphanage but not everyone knows that money changed hands. It made no difference to me when JJ told me. All I could see was that he was lucky to have been saved.

“Saved,” he hissed. “For the umpteenth time, Sarah, I was bought, I wasn’t saved. A herd of cattle went to the sword—well, the humane killer—for me. In the beginning was bovine spongiform encephalopathy.”

“Don’t be such a drama queen. How can you be so angry, it could have been a lot worse.”

“How could it have been worse? You mean I could have changed hands for a consignment of fags or a colour TV. A fair exchange is no robbery.”

“That’s how it was, you said so yourself. It was chaos in that city. Riots, tanks in the streets, miners beating shit out of students. Revolutions are messy things.”

“Revolution my tit. Revolution would be a fine thing. What kind of revolution starts by selling off its own kids? To this day no one knows whether it was a revolution or an internal coup. Imagine, you could go into any of those orphanages with a wad of used notes in your hip pocket and browse away to your heart’s content till you found some child you fancied.”

“Those orphanages were hell, JJ. Those kids have better lives now than anything they could ever have hoped for.”

“How do you know? Have you ever wondered where some of those kids ended up? We were easy meat, Sarah, it was a free-for-all in those orphanages, like the new year sales. The US State Department estimates that ten thousand kids left that country in the immediate aftermath of the quote-unquote revolution. And they don’t have a clue where they ended up. How many of them ended up in pornography or among paedophiles? No one knows, there were no checks or screening. As long as you had the spondulicks you were
sorted. And of course if you came home and found that your little pink Caucasian baby was suffering from some illness you hadn’t bargained for or that his chromosomes weren’t stacked up the way God intended then you could turn him over to a state orphanage here, no questions asked. Twenty-three of us are now in orphanages here. AIDS, HIV, hepatitis, all the different shades of autism—bond with that! Some of us were so sick you couldn’t quarantine us, never mind love us. It wasn’t right, Sarah.”

“You could be dead by now, JJ. Worse, you might still be in one of those orphanages, another state statistic. You should be glad you’re alive and angry.”

“Les irrécupérables,” he said softly.

“What?”

“Les irrécupérables, that’s what we were called. The irrecoverables. All of us lost to the world. Out of sight, out of mind.”

“It wasn’t your fault. You’re not guilty of anything.”

He turned away and I was left looking at his back.

“My point exactly, Sarah. I’m not guilty of anything, I’m just guilty.”

This was the worst of him, all that anger and bitterness, it just kept chewing away at him. This going hand in hand with his mindrot meditations could make him hard work sometimes. The mindrot meditations; that’s what he called those flights of fancy he would go off on sometimes. They could take hold of him any time, a chance phrase, a snatch of a song, a picture—it didn’t matter, off he’d go spinning out a ream of rubbish for whatever length of time it took
for it to fade out under its own weakness. But, because they never resolved themselves in any lesson or insight, they frustrated him. That’s why he called them his mindrot meditations. He had this idea that his own mind was eating itself up. He got the idea from reading an article on bodybuilding. Seemingly, in the bodybuilding community it’s common practice to starve yourself in the days before competition. The idea is that with no foodstuffs to process the digestive enzymes turn on the body itself and start consuming the fatty tissue and after a couple of days you get optimum definition. But sometimes the process goes too far and the body starts feeding on its own muscle and starts to rot from the inside out. JJ thought he saw this happening to his own mind. His mind or his soul was chewing itself up, eating itself back to its own substructure. Those flights of fancy, the remedial metaphysics as he called them, were only the first stage of its self-consumption. What would happen when his mind had burned off all that fat, what would happen when his mind had nothing to feed off but itself? What would happen then?
^*

One day we were at the sea, walking behind the pier. It
was quiet, just the two of us with the whole beach to ourselves. We were talking about the Killeen further up the shore. The Killeen in this parish, where all the stillborn and unbaptised babies were buried, was dug in a field behind a cliff face which looked out to sea. But over the years coastal erosion had eaten back the cliff face and disturbed some of the graves. Sometimes after storms and high seas people found little skulls and bones strewn along the sand. I said something about how terrible this was, how painful it must be for people with loved ones buried there. Of course JJ saw it differently.