The Fields (24 page)

The two fathers, funnily enough, have a great ole night by the fire, and they do, as Fr Jason promised, talk about the big stuff. It starts out vague enough, with Fr Jason doing most of the talking, and banging on breathlessly about the days when he was an alkie, and all the bad things he’d do for booze. He says about ten times, during this bit, that he doesn’t have a problem any more, and that he saves his boozing for special occasions like tonight. O’Culigeen stays silent during this whole bit, but we can tell he’s drinking too, coz Fr Jason keeps saying, Amen, in the middle of his own sentences, and each time he does he clinks his whiskey mug against another mug, which must be in O’Culigeen’s hand.

After barely thirty minutes Fr Jason has moved on to feelings and moods, and how lucky they are to be priests today, in this day and age, and yet how no one understands the burden that comes with the gig.

Amen to that, says Fr O’Culigeen, speaking for the first time. His voice is like a clap of thunder in the darkness, and shakes all five of us, even the sleepy ones, into a state of bug-eyed awakeness.

For me, he says, it’s all about the man upstairs, and has been my whole life.

He gives Fr Jason a big spiel about the role that God has played in his life, always watching him, through thick and thin, and worse, on the farm. Always there at his shoulder, showing him what’s wrong and what’s right, always there to comfort him when others that he knows, mostly his brothers, have strayed sadly from the path. He says that it’s just like that footprints thing, where the fella is dead and finally meets God, and God says, ‘See that beach back there, that’s your life, and those two sets of footprints are me and you walking through life together, side by side, me always watching you, keeping you safe!’ And the dead fella says, ‘Oi! But what about those bits there, the big gaps, where there’s only one set of footprints, what happened there?’ And God says, ‘They were the worst times of your life, the absolute pits!’ And the dead fella says, ‘Well, what the feck were you doing when I was having the worse time ever?’ And God just smiles and goes all Goddy on it, and says, ‘I was carrying you!’ And the dead fella’s like, ‘Ah, Jaysus! That’s brilliant! Tanks a million!’

O’Culigeen finishes his little speech by saying that God is his real father, and not that ole fella down the bog, and that all his life has been about his love for God, and trying to get God to be happy with his behaviour, and happy with the path he has chosen for himself.

Fr Jason clearly isn’t happy with this, and launches back into his version of God as not being a man with a beard in the sky but a big floaty thing that wound up the universe billions of years ago and just let it go to see where it went. He goes straight into the pizza theory of time too, and the multiverse, and tells O’Culigeen that they only think that this camping is happening over this weekend, whereas it’s happening on a giant and unmoving moment in their lives, and yet it’s not happening at all, while simultaneously happening in every possible way in every possible universe.

We can hear nothing from O’Culigeen, which means he’s either drinking or thinking, but either way Fr Jason continues and suggests to O’Culigeen that God is really someone who is kicking back and admiring his own multiverse unfolding, and not some old bossy git, staring down at everything that’s happening to every person in the world, with a black notebook and pen by his side and a score-chart of who’s done what to whom.

But mostly Fr Jason, three sheets to the wind now, tells Fr O’Culigeen, three sheets also, that God at his best is simply love. And there is love for everyone, he adds, before saying slowly, Even you.

O’Culigeen, slurring now, tells Fr Jason that he’s right, and that God is good and God is love. And for a moment, all of us in the tent dare not look at each other in the darkness, because we’re all thinking the same thing – that maybe Fr Jason had this planned all along, and that his lecture is getting to O’Culigeen, who is realising, on this one mild summer night, in a tiny patch of grass low in the Dublin mountains, on planet Earth, that God is love, and love is the only way to go, and that it’s not too late to turn his back on his wickedness, and embrace the beauty of the universe in the for ever now of the all non-time.

The fathers say goodnight to each other in a jokey way, using foreign accents and different words that all seem to mean See you
in the morning. Within seconds, O’Culigeen comes crashing into our tent, almost taking the central supporting pole down with his shoulder. He stinks of booze, and is struggling so much with his belt that he falls forward and decides to bed down with his clothes on. He pads about the groundsheet for his sleeping bag, now scrunched up in a ball near the top canvas, and as he does he starts pawing us all in the process. Right then, it’s like as if a light bulb suddenly goes off in his drunken head, and he remembers that there are five youngfellas wrapped up neatly in presentation sleeping bags, like fecking Ferrero Rocher, and arranged around the floor of the tent for him to feast upon as and when he wishes. For then he starts leaning over us, one at a time, on all fours like a family dog inspecting a series of food bowls. He hovers over each one of us, coming in real close with his stinky booze breath, and sucking our air in, with a real shake in his throat, as he decides how to proceed.

He stops at me, of course, and lets his big horrible head fall fully down on mine, forehead to forehead, with a solid clunk.

Wake up, pup! he whispers, all spitty and wet. Wake up, pup! as he pokes me firmly but quietly in the ribs with his open finger. I keep my eyes shut, and play dead, even when his finger-pokes turn into full-fisted thumps. Still nothing. He drops his head down beside my face and viciously bites my earlobe. Still nothing. He calls me pup once more, and says that he’s had enough of my horseplay to last him a lifetime, and has just started to unzip my sleeping bag when a last-minute bark, here-comes-the-cavalry style, of Knock Knock! is heard from outside the zippy door.

It’s Fr Jason, who has spilt, he says, an entire two litres of lemonade over his sleeping bag, and all over his groundsheet, and would O’Culigeen mind, just for the night, if he bunked in here? O’Culigeen groans as he pulls himself together and drily welcomes Fr Jason inside. The two men are soon lying side by side
in the darkness with Fr Jason up against the side canvas, and Fr O’Culigeen against the middle poles and against the tips of five different pairs of boy feet. Fr Jason falls asleep in seconds, but I can tell that O’Culigeen’s still awake ages after that. I can almost hear his gummy eyes blinking open and shut with frustration. I then stretch forward with my left foot, and give his thigh a right good and sexy rub, just to let him know that I’m still here, and to give him a seriously decent taster of what he’s missing.

The ferry to Holyhead is brilliant. Dead exciting. Me and Saidhbh are having a hoot outside on deck. And for some of the trip we even forget that we’re going over to London to kill a baby. There’s Irish all around us, and they’re all doing loads of drinking, even though it’s nine in the morning. There’s some English too, but they’re easy to spot, because they mainly have families and are sitting down in neat clothes reading the papers, and hoping that their Peugeots and their Rovers are safe in the car deck below, and not getting bopped about into each other’s bumpers by the waves.

The Irish, meanwhile, are in brilliant mood, packing out O’Kelly’s Sea Lounge, full of fun and cracking jokes, and doing the country proud. If you were an American on the boat, or say a Chinaman, you’d look at the Irish and then you’d look at the English, and you’d know straightaway what nation was the biggest laugh. You’d be straight over to the Irish, saying, Give us a pint, lads, and let me sit among you and watch you all be a bit mad and funny and drunky.

And they’re here, the Irish, mainly in three different and easy-to-spot groups. There’s fellas on their own, on the small tables, with pints and huge rucksacks, and all looking sad about being
on the boat, and having to leave the homeland for good, to look for work as builders and sweepers in London town. One fella near us has a book called
Dubliners
out in front of his pint. Saidhbh’s done it for her Leaving, so she clocks it straightaway. The fella isn’t reading it at all. It’s more of a sign to let everyone know, and himself, that although he may be waving goodbye to his homeland, possibly for ever, he’s still a salt-of-the-earth fella who reads books called
Dubliners
, and not something called
Ireland’s a Bit Rubbish and Has No Jobs
.

The second type of Irish on the boat is gangs. Gangs of builders happily cradling their pints, glad to be going back over to the mainland, to continue their construction work after a break on the Auld Sod. Gangs, too, of fellas, loud and shouty, drinking and singing, heading to England for God knows what, with all sorts of hopes and dreams and imaginings in their drunken heads. And more gangs. Gangs of red-haired tinker kids, running riot in the bar, far away from their gangs of tinker parents, some of whom are already face down on the table, calling out the names Jacintha, Shane, Frankie, Concepta, and yelling, Get yir bleedin arses over here before I burst yiz, yiz little bollixes.

The third and final type is us. Young people, in twos mostly, his and hers, bog-standard looking, with a few shifty expressions darting about on their faces, no pints in front of them, and dark and strange unspeakable plans in their hearts. Coming to London to get it out, to make it happen, to do it. Consequences be damned. God not allowed. Young couples, his and hers, who walk around outside on deck a lot, and hug each other every now and then, with him saying it’ll all be fine, and her choking back the tears when thinking about the bigness of it all.

As I say, Saidhbh is in dazzling form, considering. She’s dressed in patent Docs, dungarees, and another of Taighdhg’s sports coats – navy blue this time – and she’s even wearing big black
sunglasses and a leopard-print hair bow, like Madonna in
Desperately Seeking Susan
. She says that she feels lighter, and kind of giddy, knowing that we’re going to split up at the end of this awful business. And that we were mad to rush into it to begin with, and that she always looked on me as a kind of lovely little bender friend, and that’s the way we should’ve kept it. She asks me if I think we can be best bender friends after the abortion, and I tell her that I don’t see why not. She gives me a big bender kiss on the cheek, and bets me that I can’t catch her as she springs away from me, and darts around the thin metal corridors of the upper deck. I find her eventually, at the back, and we spend ages there, near the engines, standing in the smoky diesel-brown air and looking deeply down into the churning white water. We don’t say much. Instead we watch in silence as Dublin slowly disappears into the dirty horizontal haze in front of us.

Saidhbh does give me a few titbits, though. Says, with a shrug, that her folks barely noticed when she said she was off out the door for a three-day post-Leaving Cert blow-out with Finula Sweeney in Malahide. Her father especially, she explains, was up to his neck with a new march, Teachers Against Internment, and was happy to see the back of her for now. Her mam had to shout in his ear, like he was a deaf aul wan, and say, Taighdhg! Your daughter is going now! To Finula Sweeney’s! What do you say? And even then he just looked up and grunted a goodbye, but without words. Although Eaghdheanaghdh, she says, gave her a pretty wicked look as she walked out the door, swinging a hefty brown suitcase by her side. It was an I Know What You’re Up To face.

I tell her that mine were a breeze too. And that a few frantic phone calls between me and Fiona was all it took to get Aunty Grace involved, and before I know it I’ve got an urgent invite to go across the water to visit my favourite aunt in London, no questions asked.

Saidhbh asks me about the camping weekend, and I tell her that nothing much happened. Just a load of boys, eating beans and farting. She pulls the sunglasses down an inch or two on to her nose, and looks at me, eye to eye. And what about you and O’Culigeen? she asks. Well? Did he beat some sense into you?

By the second night of the camping trip I have O’Culigeen right where I want him. Gagging for it. I’ve been flirting like mad with him all day, brushing by him during the morning ablutions, accidentally rubbing against him during the lunchtime puck around, and even suggesting that we all go stream swimming in our pants to cool down, the whole lot of us, just to wind him up into a boy-hungry frenzy. But I never leave Fr Jason’s side. I’m not thick. I even stand behind Fr Jason, by the riverbank after the swim. And when he’s busy struggling to pull up a pair of dry socks over wet legs, I give O’Culigeen a real Hollywood stare, and touch my towel a bit, like I could whip it off at any minute, and just might.

O’Culigeen, of course, is getting madder and madder by the minute, like a frothy rabies case, and doesn’t know what to do with himself. The hunger too is making him reckless, and he starts showing his hand, in a way, to Fr Jason. He rushes us, for instance, around the rubbish orienteering course that he and Fr Jason cooked up after lunch, and he then rushes us through our tea too – baked beans again, this time with burnt sausages. He cuts Fr Jason dead in his tracks, when the idea of another singsong is suggested, by saying that the demon drink has given him an awful headache and he’s going to crash out ‘with the boys’ instead. Fr Jason’s a cute whore, all the same, and brilliant at trumping O’Culigeen’s plans, and comes clattering into our tent with a broken pole in his hand, saying that you can never trust a British-made tent, that he should’ve bought an Irish one, and that he was going to have to bunk in with all of us again!

No one sleeps. Everyone’s pretending in their own way, except for Hennessy, who’s really out of it, and doing a kind of half-whiny snore, like he’s having a dream where someone’s called his mammy a big cow. The rest of us, we’re all lying there, eyes shut tight in the darkness, listening to the grass blowing in the nettle bush behind us, to the odd passing car in the distance, and to the far faraway hum of Dublin life wafting its way bravely up into the Three Rock air.

It takes me ages, but I work up the courage after an hour. I start rubbing O’Culigeen’s leg like mad. Like he’s turned into Saidhbh and I’m trying to work my way into her fanny. I’m rubbing so loudly that the whole tent can hear it, the slippy slippy of two sleeping bags sparking together. Up’n’down’n’up’n’down. I can feel the little bodily trembles coming from O’Culigeen. He’s gasping for air, and letting out these tiny light whines every twenty seconds, like Hennessy in his sleep. I can tell that he’s biting his own hand too, with the whole fat thumby side stuck good and deep inside. I can hear his exhaled breath ‘fffff’ing out through his teeth with each deeper thigh rub. I go rub crazy until it’s almost embarrassingly loud, and just as I’m waiting for one of the lads, or Fr Jason himself, out of sheer awkwardness alone, to ask to what in feck’s name is going on, I suddenly stop. Just like that. I kneel up in my sleeping bag, with my navy-blue Dunnes Stores pyjamas all loose and hanging off me, like the Mexican housemaid in
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
, and I walk straight out the door, as if I’m going to do a slash, or to take a long romantic stroll in the moonlight.

Naturally, Fr O’Culigeen comes racing out behind me with the maddest grin I’ve ever seen on any human being ripped across his crazy face. He’s already got his mickey out when Fr Jason rugby tackles him to the ground. He gets punched once in the head by Fr Jason who, instead of going all tough, and beating O’Culigeen to a pulp, merely hugs him tightly in a bear-like grip, and tells
him that it’s all over, and that he’s safe now, and that he can give up the struggle. There’s no more hiding, he says. It’s all over. You are saved.

O’Culigeen bursts out crying and lets his sore, punched head fall on to Fr Jason’s shoulder. He moans a lot and keeps it buried there for ever, unable, it seems, to lift it out and to face the world ever again, or to look upon the eyes of boys who are no longer filthy young pups but real-life children with their own mams and dads, or men in the making, with cares and fears in their own hearts, just like his. Instead he sobs, and clings. And Fr Jason strokes, and pats, and says, There there.

None of us sleep for the rest of the night. And O’Culigeen is made to spend the few hours of darkness on his own, in the broken Toblerone tent. Fr Jason does all the driving the next morning, and drops us off, each one of us, to our homes, without saying a word. O’Culigeen doesn’t say anything either. He just sits in the front seat, hands on his knees, sulking like a baby throughout. He’s obviously had time to think it all through in the Toblerone tent, and to pull himself together, and to put the sobbing and the sad O’Culigeen far far behind him. Because when it’s my turn to get out he simply shifts in his seat, tosses his head towards the open side door and, just as I slip past him, out on to the footpath and to freedom, he hisses and spits in the maddest most vicious tone, like John Wayne times a million, ‘I’m gonna kill ye!’

Fiona meets us in Euston station. By then we’re not so cocky. We’ve gone all
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
, the first episode, where he wakes up from space sleep, and mostly spends the whole programme trying to deal with the fact that everyone five hundred years into the future wears leotards to work and has little metal midget helpers who don’t really do anything useful apart from chatting to you and saying beedley-beedley-beedley. Or at least Saidhbh is Buck Rogers and I’m her little metal fella,
tottering along beside her, as we stare with wonder renewed at the world around us.

London’s massive. We spend the train journey down from Holyhead thinking that England is very much like Ireland, with green fields everywhere, and walls and houses, and a few giant chimney things every now and then, to let you know where the factories and the power stations are. It only starts changing in the last hour, as we get closer and closer to London. From then on the voices of the Irish on the train, all the usual gangs, still drinking tinnies of beer and chatting, get quieter and quieter till they disappear altogether. And yet, what’s completely bonkers is that the Irish voices get quieter in exact proportion to the amount that the English voices get louder and louder.

It’s mad, as well, if you haven’t heard that many English voices together and up close before in your life. Because mostly you know the sounds from
Minder
on telly, or
The Professionals
, or even
The New Avengers
, or
The Good Life
, or the presenters from
Blue Peter
who say that the telephone is ring-ging, or the children are sing-ging. But if you’ve only ever seen no more than a few real-life Brits in person, say holidaying in Ireland, and asking directions from the windows of the camper vans in West Cork on a sun-splitting-the-rocks kind of day, then it can totally blow your mind.

Because up close, in that train carriage, with buckets of them, black, white, brown and yellow, all rammed together, and getting more rammed with every passing station, closer and closer to London, it’s like someone grabs your head and sticks it right into a great big noisy English voice machine, one that’s on turbo spin and boom bass, and pumps out all this deafening chatter that sounds like everyone’s teeth are showing at once and they’re shouting out words like, free hundred and firty-free and a fird, and talking about how much they’re finking about their muvvas, and their bruvvas, and how it’s all a lot of bovva.

That’s why the Irish go quiet. It’s like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. You don’t want anyone to know that you’re not the same species, or to know that if you opened your mouth you wouldn’t go free hundred and firty-free. Instead, it would give your position away in a second if you took a big breath and said, Tree hundred and tirty tree an a tird. They’d be on to you with their dead alien faces, and their hungry flesh-eating teeth showing, with just the sound of finking, finking, finking, echoing in your ears as they chew you to pieces.

As I say, by the time we get to Euston station Saidhbh and me are pretty quiet. She’s also realised that although it’s going to be brilliant to split up from me once we get back to Dublin, we still have the small matter of an evil God-bothering baby murder to get out of the way in London. Of course, we don’t actually mention the subject to each other. We just sit in silence, and look out at the big chunks of grey concrete and graffiti that go whizzing by the windows until we slide to a halt on platform number 8.

Fiona picks us up, right on the concourse, but she has to wave at me, up close and into my face, before I recognise her. She’s gone totally English, and has her hair cut dead short at the sides, like a boy, and floppy on top, and wears mad baggy trousers that go in at the ankle, and an orange
Miami Vice
jacket with huge square shoulders. She looks at me and Saidhbh and says that we’re a state, like two knackers from a tinker site, and tells us to hurry up because Deano’s double-parked.