The Fields (15 page)

Now, naturally, Daryl’s crying his head off when he’s telling us this, and we all kind of feel a bit sick while we’re listening. Partly because it’s a sick-making story, but also because by listening to
it we all know we’re crossing a line, and heading into uncharted waters where anything from any of us is likely to come spewing out.

And it does. And it keeps on coming. Justin Rafferty, one of the star swats from the Leaving Cert class, says that his best day was when he got his Inter Cert results, eight As and two Bs. He talks about being taken to Blakes in Oakfield, and having two helpings of everything, even two knickerbocker glories, and getting his picture taken with all the family members, uncles, aunts, the works. He jokes, at first, and says that the worst day of his life hasn’t happened yet, and is going to be the day before his Leaving Cert results, just in case he doesn’t do as well as in the Inter. Everyone laughs and we think he’s going to get away with it when Fr Jason asks him if he’s sure that’s it. And then, like a fecking meteorite of filth, right out of nowhere, he goes, no, actually, the worst day of my life was when I licked out my cousin.

We’re all looking at each other, like, What in feck’s name?!!! And you just know the little ones, including and especially Pilibeen, are going, Licked out? But Fr Jason is cool as ice, and tells him to continue. We get the whole set-up, how he’s bessie mates with his cousin Gemma, and how on her confirmation day, after another big pig-out in Blakes, he locks her in his room and forces her to let him lick her out because he was sick of being called a swat and a virgin by the other Leaving Cert hard men. Pilibeen’s eyes, I can see at this stage, are out on stalks. Fr Jason is nodding. And Justin continues about the guilt, about Gemma crying all the way through, and about never again being able to look her in the eye, or speak to her parents – his once favourite aunty and uncle. Of course, he’s bawling while he’s telling us all this, and still sobbing when Fr Jason turns to me and says it’s my go.

Before I’ve even started talking I can feel my legs shaking. In my head I’m thinking, fecking hell, how in God’s name am I
supposed to top all these totally bonkers stories?!! But in my heart I know what I have to tell them. I start with the best day of my life, and I tell them that there’s been many, and that all mainly revolve around my mam telling the bus conductor breastfeeding joke around the table, and my whole family bursting out laughing. I look around, and even in the candlelight I can see that everyone’s super-disappointed. Besides the mention of the word breast, this is perhaps the most boring thing that’s been said all morning. Fr Jason, however, is pleased, and smiles and even half bows, and tells me that it’s good to hear me speaking so readily from my heart. And the worst day? he says, beaming, hoping for a real humdinger. It’s now when my breathing goes totally haywire.

I find it hard to catch my breath, but no one really notices. Plus the shakes in my legs have started to move up into my stomach. My fingers start to wriggle madly, as if I’m playing an invisible piano on the spot and I feel like I want to stand up and sit down a thousand times in a second. I can’t actually make properly formed sentences, but I fire ahead as best I can and for some reason, I find myself starting with Helen Macdowell and the hockey ball. I don’t make much sense. My words are coming out in either short sharp repetitive bursts, or else a big nonsensical tumble. I say that it was Helen Macdowell getting hit in the mouth with a hockey ball that ruined it all for me. I keep on repeating the five words, It was the hockey ball, like some complete looney, for about a minute, before Fr Jason asks if I’m OK. He does this because some of the fellas have started to laugh.

Fr Jason puts his hand on my shoulder and presses down hard, pushing me into the carpet. The pressure helps a little bit, and I can explain that Helen Macker saw it coming, and she looked inside me and saw it coming, saw the very spot I’d be standing on when it all went pear-shaped, and when He came along.

Who’s He? says Fr Jason. I say the words, It was Father. It was Father. It was Father. It was Father. But I can’t finish it. It’s too much, even in this safe space, even with the lick-outs and the mad mirror-eating. It’s too much, and I start to spaz again, only worse. Like the shakes in my legs suddenly rush up into my whole body and become concentrated madly right in the centre of my chest. I begin to flop about on the spot with the pain of it all. I fall forward on to the ground and have a fit of sorts, flipping and flopping like the fresh summer trout that Dad caught in Connemara on our last family holiday together. We were out in a tiny rowing boat that managed to fit all eight of us at a push, even though Mam said it was illegal and would get us all arrested if we didn’t drown first. Dad was being all bold, and gamey, like a GAA lad, and rocking the boat on purpose just to make everyone, including Mam, cry for fun. When he caught the fish he flicked it down into the boat and told me to kill it. Back of the head! he kept barking, back of the head off the side of the boat!

Back of the head? I could barely hold its flippy whippy body in my hand for a micro-second, let alone manage a pin-point thwack of its head against a single wooden slat. In the end Dad battered it viciously with the handle of the oar and said, with a wink, Ask a boy to do a man’s job, eh?!

The boys all freak. They stop laughing and Pilibeen nearly pisses himself. I can definitely hear him crying. Fr Jason, though, and true to character, is untroubled, and just stands over me, telling the fellas to make space. He starts by acting as if nothing is happening, and continues with my Worst Day story, saying, And what did Father do to you? What did he do? I can hear this in my state, but I can’t quite believe it. My chest is about to explode outwards in a grenade blast of gore, like yer man in
Alien
, and my teeth are chattering like mad and there’s not a chance in hell of getting anything out, let alone the story of how
I was taken back to O’Culigeen’s evil lair, and how I was demolished therein.

Fr Jason eventually gets this, and says that it’s all good, and he holds my hand and raises his head up to face the ceiling and begins praying. Although it’s not like any praying I know. It’s all gobbledegook. A few words here, a few words there, mixed up with lots of nonsense words, like Jabba the Hutt in
Return of the Jedi
. Pa-ees-ka-chung-cow-a-wookie!!!

He tells the boys not to be afraid, that what he’s doing is called speaking in tongues, and that he’s simply asking the Holy Spirit directly to help me in my hour of need. I feel dead embarrassed at this stage, and I still can’t stop the shaking. Fr Jason is kneeling now, on both knees, right next to me, his hand just hovering on my head. I feel warm, hot even. And I remember my bible stories, and the one where Jesus casts out the spirit of Satan from some mad old fecker who’s having a monster fit in the middle of the market square. In the TV show
Jesus of Nazareth
the fella goes from being a complete rag-tag rattle-boned mess to being a normal guy with gratitude in his eyes in ten seconds. I wonder if this is how he felt. Was he, maybe, not possessed by the spirit of Satan, but actually a victim of some ancient desert priest who picked him up on his camel and then raped him in the dunes. And maybe that’s why he needed Jesus, the super-priest, to sort him out. And while I’m thinking this, and wondering if Fr Jason would’ve made a better Jesus than Robert Powell, I notice that the shakes are slowing down, and that things are beginning to calm around me.

Another minute and I stop completely. The fellas hold their breaths. Fr Jason picks me up with both his arms around me and lifts me on to my feet. He says I’ve done very well today, and that he’s looking forward to see how I’ll progress over the next twenty-four hours.

I get home late that evening and Mam asks me how was the
retreat. I tell her that it was fine, and that nothing special happened. I don’t have dinner that night, and instead I lie in bed feeling bad that everyone at the retreat thinks that my father is now the most hideous man on the planet and has done something so unspeakable that it would turn his own son into a mumbling whimpering flippy-floppy spazzer.

I spend most of the night awake. Crying. Not real crying, though. Dry crying, where it’s coming from your mouth only, and not really connected to your throat, or your stomach, much less your heart. Mam and Dad are having the Connells round at the time, for a chat, a drink and to show off the new brown sanger bread that’s come directly from Quinnsworth’s that evening. It’s not like the brown bread that Grandma, Mam’s mam, makes and has been passed down from family to family from the wilds of Ballaghaderreen and was probably the same brown bread that they were eating when St Patrick first came over on the slave boat with a bottle of holy water and a fistful of shamrock. That one is, basically, a load of nuts and seeds mixed up into a big brown paste that somehow comes out of the oven tasting brilliant, especially when lathered in melted butter and strawberry jam. Dad says, though, that he wouldn’t touch it at room temperature because he values his teeth too much.

No, this new Quinnsworth’s bread is like regular sliced Brennan’s white bread, only it’s coloured brown. Mam first got it over in Aunty Una’s in Rathfarnham, wrapped around a couple of slices of cucumber. It was a big talking point for the
night, and Aunty Una was dead proud when she arrived out with the sanger plate and no one could believe their eyes. Mam kept pucking Dad all night in the arm, asking him to agree with her that it was totally amazing that the bread tasted just like white bread, only it was brown. Una told her that it was much better for her, because it was brown, and then all the uncles and aunts got chatting about how they could barely keep up with the changes in Ireland, and how modern it was all getting. It’s all cholesterol this, and roughage that, and women’s lib this, and gay that, and divorce this. In these types of chats Dad normally tries to make a big joke of it, especially if he’s had a drink or two, and he’ll say things like, ‘You should be so lucky’ when Mam mentions divorce. But she usually gets annoyed and says, ‘Oh, it’s well you may laugh!’ And then gives him, and whoever’s listening, a lecture about the country going to the dogs before her very eyes and how her entire Christmas was ruined by that filthy song.

The filthy song is ‘The Power of Love’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and it made Mam write to both the BBC in London and the
Irish Indo
letters page. It was the same letter to both. She read it out to us a million times, and in it she described how she had been enjoying a pre-Christmas tea of scones and sandwiches (white bread) with her entire family when the number one song, with its video, came on
Top of the Pops
, and how she had enjoyed the opening few bars and the Nativity theme of the video until she was hit – and it was an assault, she wrote – with the chorus, and specifically with the words that invoked the listener, very explicitly, to make love.

She said that this might be the sort of thing that suffices for a Christmas message in heathen England, but in Catholic Ireland we have a tradition of wholesome family Christmases, where sex and filth are the last things on anyone’s mind. Especially during Christmas songs. Plus the confusing of the Nativity theme with
the very idea of making love was the most wicked sin of all, and a blasphemy that spoke volumes about the morals of the pop group Frankie Goes to Hollywood and of its lead singer Holly Johnson (she had to look that bit up in Susan’s
Jackie
), and spoke even less about the makers of
Top of the Pops
itself, and the powers in Ireland who agreed to broadcast it in the first place. She signed it, Worried, from Eire.

Thankfully, the letter didn’t get printed in the
Indo
, and she got no reply from the BBC, but Mam didn’t tire of reciting its contents and telling anyone she could about how that filthy song had ruined her Christmas, and how she had lost track of the amount of times she had to dive across the kitchen floor when it came on the radio, in order to switch it off before the first chorus.

Tonight’s different, though. The chat from below is more the low-level murmur-murmur of discussion than the whine and the bark of lecture and complaint. From my position in bed, over the kitchen and to the right of the sitting room, I can tell that although the brown bread may indeed have gone down a storm, they have nonetheless moved on to more serious things. Fiona tells me that they’re talking about Dad’s always-tired disease, and how to beat it. She heard Tim Connell, the Aer Lingus pilot, saying that everyone’s tired in the States, and that Dad just needs to go on a course of multi-vitamins and take up jogging with a Sony Walkman. He even offers to bring him back a Walkman from his next US flight. With the dollar only worth fifty pence it’s a steal, he says. Dad asks what would he listen to on the Walkman and Tim tells him not to be such an old square, and that one of Dad’s daughters can surely whip him together a jogging mix tape. Dad asks if you can get
Hooked on Classics
on tape, and Tim laughs.

Fiona does this a lot nowadays. She slips into the room, for old times’ sake, and flops down on the floor where her bed
used to be, and picks up my old discarded
Star Wars
figures, and fills me in on the all the goss. The first time she did it, she managed to get into the room without me knowing it, and crawled on her hunkers, commando style, all the way under my bed and, just as I was falling asleep, kneed me very slowly in the base of the mattress, from below. Naturally, I freaked, and shouted out for Mam, and could only think that a ghost, or a burglar, was under the bed, and Fiona giggled like mad for the rest of the night, even when she was back in Claire and Susan’s room.

She doesn’t stay long tonight. Mostly because I’m not much to chat to. I grunt a lot, and barely take my eyes off the ceiling. She’s only gone ten minutes when the crying starts. I don’t know why. It’s brutal stuff. Really fake. But I can’t stop it. Waa-haa-haa. She comes shooting back into the room and tells me that I’m mad, and that the Connells will be able to hear me if I don’t shut up. But I can’t stop. I just keep going, like I’m being driven to it. Waa-haa-haa. Eventually Mam comes up and cuddles me and calls me her old-segosha, and asks me what’s wrong, and if anything happened at the retreat today. I say nothing, but turn to the side and keep going. Waa-haa-haa.

Eventually, at last, Dad appears. My father. He sits down on the bed beside me and lays a huge hand on my back, just below my neck. He calls me his son, and asks me if he’s going to have to phone for an ambulance. I continue. Waa-haa-haa. He leans in closer, and kisses the back of my head. I can feel his moustache grazing my ear. There’s booze on his breath. He is a giant. His huge hand moves over on to my shoulder and he gives it a squeeze and says that I’m a good lad.

I close my eyes tight for the first time that night, and imagine him dropping down to his knees beside the bed and crooning ‘The Power of Love’ into my ear. I’ll protect you from the hooded claw, he begins, half singing, half speaking, somewhere between
Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Holly Johnson and Fr Jason’s cuddly altar-floating non-God. He does it all note perfect, and with real feeling, just like in the video, and he cruises straight through, with his hands clasped and close to his heart, right up to the final shouty bit about always being around, no matter what, because he’s driven by nothing less than his undying and death defying love.

The next thing I know, it’s morning. And time, again, for the retreat.