The Fields (19 page)

I ding on the bell just after 6.55 p.m., for a 7.30 p.m. kickoff. I’m technically late, but really, what’s he going to do? I’m pushing Saidhbh’s hands away from mine, all giggly, as I hear his steps charging towards the door from within. He flings it open and throws himself outside, going ‘Ta-dah!’ as he does. And as he does, he waves three small coloured brochures in his hand. His face, however, drops like a stone when he sees Saidhbh, and I barely get a chance to read the first line of the first brochure, which says, ‘Visit Papua …’ before he roughly shoves them, all crumpled, into his back pocket.

‘Oh. Saidhbh,’ is all he can say when he sees her by my side, but he can barely stop his mouth from curling up into a snarl of disgust. Saidhbh nods at him, calls him ‘Father’ but can easily feel the bad vibes. And so she turns and says goodbye to me, waits for a moment, to see if I’m going to reach up and kiss her, then, undaunted by my obvious inaction, casually kisses her own fingers and wipes them on my cheek, as a kind of cutesy fare-well.

This makes me feel brilliant, and warm and safe, but it blows O’Culigeen’s mind. Raging, he shoves me inside and slams the sacristy door. He rages non-stop for the next twenty minutes,
full-on ranting, right until the moment when little Johnny Carroll, my second-in-command, pops his cheeky ginger head around the corner and we begin the processional. Johnny was forced upon O’Culigeen by Johnny’s mam Carmel Carroll aka Curlywurly (she has incredibly curly hair, like an Irish African). Her husband owns half of a hoover factory and has paid for twenty-two brass plaques on the pews that say the names of loads of her dead relatives. She practically owns the church, is forever breathing down O’Culigeen’s neck, and so when her boy Johnny came of age O’Culigeen just had to accept him into his flock, despite the fact that he was clearly not the kind of boy that he normally fancies.

So, I can feel still feel O’Culigeen’s eyes boring into the back of my head as I’m carrying the big golden cross through the packed church, dead serious, up the aisle and on to the altar. Mrs Daikin from Clannard Close is upstairs on the organ playing her dirgy version of ‘God Father, Praise and Glory’ when I turn around with the cross and catch his eyes on the altar steps, and they’re still kind of mad-looking. He spent the whole preamble in the sacristy calling me back-stabber, and a Brutus and a Jezebel. Not a filthy pup, or anything to do with sex. In fact, I could tell from the way he was looking at me that rape was completely off the menu. Instead, it was all about how much I had betrayed him. His language was all over the place. He called Saidhbh a bitch about a hundred times. And said she was a whore, and the daughter of a drunk. And then he said that I had shat all over him. Like the Brutus that I was. Ripped his heart right out of his chest and shat directly on top of it.

Now, normally, in moments like these, he might go a bit randy at the thought of shits and bums and stuff, but this was a different level of anger altogether. Even out on the altar he can barely contain himself. He does the First Reading and the Psalm through gritted teeth, and then he suddenly announces that he’s
going ‘off-piste’ with the gospel-reading and that everyone should turn on their missals to Luke 15:11, for an old favourite of his. At this point he warms up, and slips back into
Knight Rider
mode, and asks the congregation to join in a little game with him. He tells everyone, a full house, to listen closely to the words of Luke, to really listen to what he’s saying, but then not to worry, because there won’t be a test afterwards. The whole congregation hoots at this. They’re the easiest crowd to please, Mass-goers. They’re having such a monumentally grim time, thinking about their sins, their dead relatives, and how it’s all going to get totally shit after they die, that the worst joke in the history of comedy would still get a sizeable chuckle.

The hooting, nonetheless, gives O’Culigeen a boost, and he immediately decides to go all Vegas on it. Throwing caution to the wind, he turns to me and, still leaning into his own mic, says that he needs some help from his beautiful assistant for this one. Now, on any normal day, and on any normal planet, this would be a risky statement – a bit icky. But here, in Kilcuman village, in early April 1985, during a Saturday evening Mass, it’s like the biggest, funniest gag that anyone’s ever cracked. More hoots from the congregation, this time half giggling at me in a kindly a-would-ye-look-at-the-poor-fella way. I step gingerly up towards O’Culigeen, aware that three hundred giggling gom beens are watching my every move, and his. He smiles at me, like St Francis of Assisi looking at a newborn lamb, and hands me his own back-up bible, open on Luke 15:11. ‘You can be the younger son,’ he whispers, before winking at me with the eye that’s hidden from the crowd. Johnny Carroll shifts in his seat, and gives O’Culigeen a needy look that says, ‘And what about me?’ O’Culigeen just glares back, a vicious sneer that says, ‘And you can feck right off!’

The reading begins. It’s the parable of the Prodigal Son, with me playing the title role. O’Culigeen does all the other voices – the
dad, the older son, and, most importantly, Jesus, who’s telling the story in the first place. He’s actually pretty good as Jesus, and drops his voice down into a deep and dreamy ‘Once upon a time’ style lull that’s almost as good as Robert Powell. ‘There was a man who had two sons,’ he says, dead slow, milking everything for what it’s worth. ‘The younger one said to the father …’ O’Culigeen nods curtly at me for this. I’m standing on the second mic, at the secondary lectern, right at the edge of the altar, where visiting priests usually hover, on big ceremonial occasions, or where the Protestant vicar stood the time they had the all-faith hands-across-the-communities celebration.

‘Father, give me my share of the estate,’ I say, voice shaking like mad, and quiet, and with not a single bit of O’Culigeen style pizzazz. O’Culigeen almost rolls his eyes when he hears my delivery, but goes on nonetheless as smooth Jesus, describing how the father then divided the property up and handed the loot out to the younger son. Now, O’Culigeen’s normal practice is to break up the actual text with little asides and footnotes, and anything he thinks will ‘enrich’ the gospel experience. So here he goes on a big lecture about how the estate would’ve been an olive-yard, and describes how olive trees take a full fourteen years to mature, and how valuable they are, and how you can get up to twenty gallons of olive oil from a single tree. Although nobody in the congregation seems that interested in olive oil. Certainly not twenty gallons of it. This is strictly a butter-only community, and they only use ‘that foreign muck’ for treating dry scalp, or to make the skin more glisteny when you’re sunbathing. In fact, Sarah has her own baby bottle of olive oil that she brings with her any time we make it down to Silver Strand in Wicklow, or Barley Cove in West Cork. On those days, with the sun belting down and everyone sweating like dogs before a quick dip into the icy water, Sarah simply lies there, still as a corpse, and dripping with freshly applied layers
of olive oil, just to make sure that every single ray of sunlight that’s racing down from the fiery heavens is bending and curving towards her fresh and fragile Irish skin, nuking every single cell within, and turning her into a third-degree burns victim that will eventually, for two days, and only after the bubbling and blistered skin has flaked away dead on to the floor, look a tiny bit brown.

So the olive-oil lecture isn’t one of his best, but it’s nowhere near as manic as where he goes next. He looks down at his lines, and it’s as if he’s only just realised what’s coming. Because his mood totally changes. ‘Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, and set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living.’ He says all this in a dead serious growl. Still low and deep, and Jesus of Nazarethy, but a bit angry. He goes into footnote mode and glares around at the congregation, silently nodding, before finishing up at me and saying, ‘Do we know what Jesus means by “Wild Living”?’ He doesn’t let anyone answer, and instead keeps on staring at me, saying the words ‘Wild Living’ over and over again.

‘He means …’ O’Culigeen pauses, and scans the crowd for kids. You just know he wants to say words like ‘fucking’ and ‘shagging’ and ‘arse-raping’ but instead he says, super-loud, ‘CAROUSING!!!’

He looks over at me, all mad-eyed and furious lips, says the word ‘carousing’ again, and then delivers the rest of the rest of the verse right at my lectern, without taking his eyes off me, without even looking at the page. All off by heart. He finally comes to the bit where the younger son recognises the error of his ways, after years of famine and pig scraps, which means that it’s my cue again. ‘How many of my father’s hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death?’ I say, this time with a hint more confidence than the last, kind of getting used to the character, and
even putting a little whine into it, like the Billy Barry kids who do song-and-dance routines on the
Late Late Show
. ‘I will set out and go back to my …’

O’Culigeen interrupts me, with a raised hand, and whips round to the congregation for another enriching footnote. This time he asks everyone, with a vicious gleam in his eye, to notice how the younger son is driven. Not by guilt, he says. Not by compassion for his father. Not even by the recognition that he has fallen from grace. No! he says, again catching me in a sidelong glance, the younger son is fuelled by selfishness, by hunger, and by the animal need to feed his own gut. He gives me a curt nod, as if to say, That showed you!

We go on like this through the whole reading, ping-ponging back and forth. Me doing the selfish son, better and better, eventually even getting the accent right, going for the Arabic guy who works in Luigi’s kebab shop on Ranelagh Road and who says, ‘fecking bashtar’ a lot, for ‘fecking bastard’. And O’Culigeen, being angry and a bit mad and explaining everything in a way that’s meant to educate the audience and make me feel bad about having a girlfriend at the same time. By the last verse, however, O’Culigeen, the big ham, decides that he’s had enough of punishment duty, and gets right back into the forgiving flow of his character. He gets to the bit where the older son, also voiced by O’Culigeen, is going bonkers, and can’t believe that his dad has welcomed back the young wastrel with a feast of fat calves and booze and the best of Bronski.

O’Culigeen pauses dramatically here, and gives a little half-chuckle to himself. An inward smile of sorts. Something he knows that we don’t know. He then addresses the audience as if they were the older son, and slowly, even as he’s speaking, begins to walk right across the altar, Val Doonican style, towards me.

‘My son,’ he says to the crowd, who are intrigued by his
showmanship, and have never seen the walk’n’talk before – certainly not in the middle of a reading – ‘You – you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we have to celebrate and be glad because …’

He reaches my lectern, puts his hand on my shoulder, and lets me see up close his wild red eyes, glistening with real tears, the creepy old bollix. ‘Because this brother was dead, and is alive again …’ He pauses once more, and actually gags this time with emotion. Not trying to hide it any more, in fact, positively showing off, he closes his eyes and raises his head heavenwards, and lets the tears stream freely down his cheeks. It’s a genius move. Some of the old biddies in the front pew burst into floods in sympathy. He’s got the entire congregation in the palm of his hand. ‘He was lost,’ he continues, and this time he opens up his arms, both of them, as if waiting for me to hug him. ‘… And now he is found!’

He stands there, all teary-faced and puffy-eyed, his arms out wide, looking like the sorry sap that he is, and waiting for the climactic hug. I can feel the whole crowd willing me on, and at this stage I’m so beyond protesting that I let myself fall into the big stinker’s filthy chest. His arms lock around me tight and the entire congregation, all fifty-six pews and the standing room at the back, bursts into spontaneous applause.

The hug goes on for ever. My face is squashed completely into his armpit, with only my left eye poking out just long enough to scan the faces of the satisfied throng. They’re in ecstasy, all the old biddies in the front pew, thundering away, clapping their arthritic paws to pieces. Inside, I’m kind of having the weirdest oddest laugh in my life at the whole thing, and at the gas of it all, when my roaming eyeball is drawn to one lone worshipper, sitting deadly still amidst the grannies, wearing a bright-red coat, black leather boots, lightly dyed blonde hair, and a mildly disgusted expression on her face. I’ve already started saying to
myself, ‘What’s her problem? Didn’t she catch the whole show?’ when I clock her closely, pull my second eye out from O’Culigeen’s armpit, and recognise her fully and for the first time. It’s Aunty Grace from England, and she’s staring right at me, giving me a look that’s saying, in no uncertain terms, ‘What. The. Fuck?’

Aunty Grace knows everything about everything. She’s Mam’s younger sister and has been living in London since she was a teenager. She knows all the modern stuff that the English know and that the Irish are just learning. So when she comes over it’s always dead exciting, and there’s always a chance that she’ll start talking, right in the middle of dinner, about sex and divorce and being gay. Not that she is gay herself. She’s been married and everything, but her husband, my uncle, had too many affairs, so she left him, and now she lives alone in a big house near the Queen’s garden and is married only, she says, to her work.

When Aunty Grace left for London it was a big deal. Mam said that the whole family was crying and weeping for weeks, as if Aunty Grace had gone off on a coffin ship, never to return again, instead of just a ferry to Holyhead. Although Mam says things were different in those days, and that the Irish in England had a worse time than the niggers, the pakis or the kikes.

Aunty Grace says that it’s actually worse now than it was when she first went over, because of all the bombs, and the IRA. And that every time some horse gets blown apart in Hyde Park she gets weeks of death threats and heavy breathers, phoning her at all hours and telling her to pack up and get out of the Queen’s
own good country. ‘Go on, you Irish bitch!’ is the usual one, she says. It’s hard too, she says, when you’re on your own, and it’s night-time, and every creak in the house could be one of the mob, sneaking up the stairs to tar and feather you and chuck you out the window. It was different when her husband, Nigel, was around. They never threatened him, because they thought he was English in the first place. Mam said that all of her family thought Nigel was English too when he came courting with Aunty Grace way back in the day.

She was only seventeen, and he was already deep into his twenties, and had a dead flash job working for the civil service. Mam’s parents loved him at first sight, and practically gave him a free pass to have his way with Aunty Grace whenever and however he wanted. He had a curly moustache, and wore his hair slicked to the side, and Mam said that her dad, my grandad, used to call him ‘King George’ behind his back. They only found out later, after he and Aunty Grace left for London, that he wasn’t actually English but from Carlow, and had always fancied himself something of an English rogue ever since his mother told him, at a young age, that his father wasn’t actually his father but had been an English sailor on leave up the Liffey for one night only.

So Nigel became his own dandy, and became his own dad in a way too, a great lover of women, and with a posh English accent to boot. Mam told Fiona that Nigel never actually wanted to go to London, really, but that getting Aunty Grace in the family way was the last straw. So the two of them left from Dun Laoghaire harbour, amidst much weeping and wailing, with Mam, Grace and Nigel alone holding the real reason for the departure close to their chests. It was Nigel’s decision. He was too young to be a father, he said. Too young to be tied down. But he’d do the right thing, and pay for it all, and take his chances in the UK. Mam told Fiona that it was a mad old farewell, with everyone hugging and kissing King George himself, and telling
him he was a great man to be taking Grace on such a serious life adventure, and everyone telling Grace to take care of herself and of her fella, and all along Grace would be just staring at Mam, sharing the quiet and hard secret that she was going across the water to kill a baby, nothing more, nothing less.

Fiona says that the abortion was pretty rubbish, and that Aunty Grace nearly died because of it, lost her womb and everything. But on the upside Nigel agreed to marry her and to change his woman-loving ways right then and there while kneeling at her almost-death-bed. However, Fiona says that Mam says that Grace changed after that. Became hard as nails. Only married Nigel because why not. Got a job herself as a secretary at a law firm. Had loads of affairs for a while, totally turned the tables on Nigel and even used to bring her fellas home while he was in the house. She made all the cash too, while Nigel scrounged for jobs, which didn’t come easily, especially when he found that his posh English accent wasn’t actually that convincing in England itself, and rarely got him further than some labouring work on a building site, or shuffling cupboards for a removal firm.

Aunty Grace eventually calmed down and made a new name for herself as a recruitment boss who hired out secretaries to the very randy lawyers that she used to go with herself when she was feeling all angry about having no womb. She gave up on men altogether, even on Nigel himself, who she eventually kicked out of the house. He went back to being a ladies’ man, and began running his own wine wholesaling business and got his accent down pat. Fiona says that they’ll never get an actual divorce, even though they don’t see each other from one end of the year to the next, because once you’ve almost died with someone, it kind of cements you together for ever, even if you hate each other. Aunty Grace had an idea, briefly, that she might even adopt some children on her own, but Fiona says that the part of her that would’ve done it was too long dead inside her and she didn’t
have the right equipment to bring it back to life. Instead she concentrates on being brilliant in work, and living in a huge flash house in the Queen’s own private park, and having amazing leather clothes, and being a brilliant aunty to all of us.

You wouldn’t have a clue, when she’s over with us, being the life and soul of the party, getting everyone up dancing, and talking all modern-like about sex and gays, that she is, as Fiona says, hard as nails. But when you think of all the phone calls she gets in the middle of the night, telling her to feck off back to bogland for being a big Irish bitch, and how she doesn’t give a feck about everyone knowing the story of her life and how she got here, then you get just a tiny hint of how tough she must really be deep down inside.

I get a bigger hint when she grabs me by the shoulder outside the church and tells me she’s hauling me right up to the sacristy to confront O’Culigeen, and to ask him to explain, in plain English, just what sort of godforsaken abomination had occurred right in front of her eyes on the altar of a holy fecking church. She says that she’s hot off the plane from London, here to help Mam on cancer watch, and was going to surprise me with a lift home in her hire car, but now can’t believe what she’s just seen in broad daylight. I plead and beg with her, big time, not to do anything, not to cause a fuss, because O’Culigeen, I warn her, will only make it worse for me if she does.

Worse for you? she says, with mouth agog in disbelief. What do you mean, worse for you? Now, there’s a moment here when I could answer her. I could explain. And of all the people who had looked for answers thus far, be it Saidhbh, Fr Jason or even Fiona, it was my Aunty Grace who was mostly likely to get a real answer. But I don’t. And I don’t know why. I only know that I can’t. And so, instead, in my silence, and via the power of a vaguely constipated expression alone, I try to let her know that she has, perhaps, momentarily forgotten what country she is in,
and that this just isn’t the way we do things over here, and that her English attitudes might actually upset the apple-cart completely, rather than shake the bugger out of it.

She doesn’t buy it. She grips my shoulder even tighter and drags me round to the sacristy door, telling me that we’ll see right now who’s worse off at the end of all this. She barely gets a finger on the brass knocker before O’Culigeen’s there in person, vestments off, and back in his man-in-blacks, and with the madness in his eyes. ‘There you are, ye little scamp!’ he says, reaching out and grabbing my other shoulder, with barely a word to Aunty Grace. She holds tight on her side while O’Culigeen’s own fingers dig deep around my clavicle, curling up under, and into, my armpit. He hits Aunty Grace with a barrage of information, about what a chancer I am, about what a good actor I am, how I should be on the stage for life, how I’ve been begging him, O’Culigeen, to do more performance readings on the altar, and how the whole thing is my idea, and how he humours me because I’m a terrible fella and because of my poor father, and wanting to give me some sort of enjoyment, and some kind of outlet for my pain in these sad and terrible days.

Aunty Grace tries a few ‘buts’ and ‘yets’, but she’s no match for a horny priest with a hefty dose of rape on his mind. Because as he’s talking and mentioning me, again and again, he’s looking at me like I’m the best fecking blancmange in Clery’s café that he’s ever seen, and his eyes are bulging and telling me that, if he can work his magic on Aunty Grace, he’s going to finish what we started so romantically on the altar. And it’s not going to be pretty.

He’s like a battering ram. Doesn’t draw a breath, tells her that I was out of order for skipping out this evening without hanging up my surplice or anything, and that there was a good half-an-hour’s worth of work to be done back there before I could consider myself a free man, ho ho. He winks at Aunty Grace and
tells her that he’s sure that everyone back home could do with as much breathing space from the young ‘uns as possible, considering my dad’s condition and everything, and that he’d be more than happy to drop me off later in the car, once my chores are done.

I can feel Aunty Grace’s grip loosening on my shoulder and I think, feck! And shit! And all the words that mean I’m in for something that might finally push me over the edge tonight. O’Culigeen can sense it too, and he’s practically got his trousers down as he pulls me momentarily free from her grasp. It’s all going hunky-dory for him, and Aunty Grace has pretty much given up the fight, when she says to O’Culigeen, harmless as anything, ‘I’m his Aunty Grace, by the way.’

Now the big thick country bigot had a million ways he could’ve played this. A million ways. Most of which would’ve meant a glorious result for him, and a hateful, possibly fatal night of pain for me. But instead, his own worst enemy, the little small-minded, spud-munching gobshite had to go and say, ‘Oh, I know all about you!’ And he says it in such a way, all pointing downwards with his nose, that means in no uncertain terms that he is referring to Aunty Grace’s past life as a fallen woman in London.

Bam! Her hand is plunged back into my shoulder like the spear of Satan itself. She pulls me so hard out of O’Culigeen’s grip that she nearly takes his own hand with her, and makes him give a little yelp of agony as the tops of his fingernails are suddenly snapped backwards with the jumper jolt of it all. ‘The boy needs to see his father,’ she says, cold as graveyard stone. This was tough Grace, hard-as-nails Grace, in action. She then turns on her heels and drags me behind her through the darkening Saturday evening churchyard. The last glimpse I catch of O’Culigeen is of him standing there in disbelief, angrily sucking on his damaged fingernails, and giving me a look that lets me
know, without a doubt in my mind, that the next time we get together in private, I am as good as dead.

Aunty Grace drives me home in total silence, and doesn’t mention another word about O’Culigeen. She spends the weekend in our house whispering to Mam over coffees and wines in any quiet corners they can find, about big plans and big changes that need to happen, and fast, in order for Dad to stay alive and Mam to stay sane. I catch snippets of their chat, and it mostly revolves around sick-pay, and how we’re running out of money, and how Mam can’t afford, in both financial and energetic terms, to run the household and to play nurse to a dying man at one and the same time. Aunty Grace’s flight back to London is Monday morning, and thus Sunday night ends with a climactic meeting in the sitting room, kind of like the results section of the Eurovision.

Here, while Dad’s upstairs, lying on his bed in his dressing gown, we three youngest are sitting round the fire with toast crumbs in our pyjamas, after eating bananas on toast and watching
Glenroe
and
Murphy’s Micro Quiz-M
back to back. We are told by Aunty Grace, who’s basically leading the meeting, like the spokesperson for Mam, that it is time for the family news. Fiona, Sarah and Siobhan come shuffling into the room, all red-eyed, like they’ve been crying for ages, and with Mam following close behind them, and actually crying, and before they have a chance to speak a word Aunty Grace announces that Sarah and Siobhan are going to move out of the family house to their own flat, which they’ll pay for with a handsome donation from Aunty Grace together with the dole money they get now but spend mostly on fags and fellas in Blinkers – the total monies, all considered, aren’t a lot, and might only get them a poxy little place in Cabra, but will hopefully encourage them to get better jobs so they will eventually be able to afford to move south of the river.

Before we have time to process this, she turns to Fiona and speaks directly to her and to us at the same time, saying that Fiona is being taken out of school and coming back with her to England on Monday morning, to work with her in the recruiting business. Fiona gives Aunty Grace a half-nod of thanks in return, but doesn’t dare look around at the rest of us. And that means that the little ones, continues Aunty Grace, meaning Claire and Susan, will have to start pulling their weight around the house from now on, with extra housework and less time gadding about with their friends. And me? I say, perhaps a little foolishly. Aunty Grace just looks over at Mam, who’s kind of glassy-eyed and zonked through it all, and then back at me and tells me, solemnly, that I’ll have so many things to do around the house, manly things, like fixing the central heating, and cleaning the chimneys, that I won’t have time, from this very night, to partake in altar-boy duties ever again. Ever.