The Wake - Table of contents

The Wake - afters (31)

And yet. And yet they have me in their thrall still, they seduce me with their sights and sounds and smells, to this day I’m a sucker for their incense and their rituals and their Gregorian chants, they frighten me half to death with their pictures of hell.

The truth is, reader, I’ve been hearing about hell since I was knee high to a grasshopper and I can’t get it out of my head, that place Our Lady showed little Lucia and the other Fatima children in a vision with its burning blackened demons that used to be people walking about like you and me.

But then I say to myself, how can this be, who told us about this? Lucia, that’s who, ten years old, poor indoctrinated child, hearing about hell since she was knee high to a grasshopper, imagination going like wildfire, grew up and became a nun and wrote her memoirs that faithfully told of hell again but now in more measured language. It’s like my brain breaks free for a while and tells me the Church is giving me crap but my soul is triggered to shrivel up at certain times when they go on about eternal punishment and it’s always for sins of the flesh I can’t help noticing and not financial corruption like you might get in the Vatican bank for example. They’ve had me twenty-eight years now and it doesn’t look like they’re letting go easy.

But I started to turn the corner a bit round about the middle of February there, Valentine’s Day in fact. Talk about appropriate. This Spanish priest Father Morales, or Father Juan Francisco Morales to give him his full name, came to the cathedral on some sort of exchange scheme and he was a godsend, a man sent from God whose name was Juan you could say.

I only went to him in confession because I was stuck seeing Father Finucane was away taking his place in Barcelona. Anyway, the first time I went I told him about sleeping with Aisling, holding my breath like to see how he’d take it, testing the holy water as it were. It turned out he’d the most amazing attitude, so much so I nearly peed my trousers with joy right there in the confession box. You love her? he asked. Yes, oh yes Father, but she won’t marry me, she doesn’t believe in marriage, she says it’s manmade. Then stay with her, he said, and convert her if you can. Pray, pray for her and you will see, God will reward you. But is it all right to go on making love to her, Father? Oh yes, absolutely, this is very important. Always remember that love is the greatest of all things, like the rainbow that God sent after the flood it overarches all other things.

This man could be mad, I thought, but he could also be exactly what I want. He’s a priest isn’t he? He’s my confessor isn’t he? So then the next time I went I told him about the bondage, breaking it to him in stages if you follow me, and later the three in the bed thing, but that’s only two days out of every seven, Father, and I have to do it to hold onto her. I couldn’t see him right in the dark of the confession box but I’d a feeling he wasn’t batting an eye.

The fact that he went away with John Pius Allbright at the end of May, to Las Vegas I heard though nobody has ever actually confirmed that, I heard other people saying the Canaries, in no way affects what he told me. If what he said was true for those three and a half months then it’s still true. Just because he turned out to have certain tendencies doesn’t make what he said invalid, right? He didn’t deceive anybody, he never pretended to be heterosexual, not like John Pius did. Married and all too, death on homos Michael Cole was telling me, queer sort of a queer hater he said, never out of the parochial house, lived in the priests’ pockets, prize prick in other words. Allbright he fell, proud carrier of the canopy over His Lordship Bishop Neil Farren’s head up and down the middle aisle every Corpus Christi and Easter Sunday and so on and so on. Shows you, doesn’t it? I still don’t know what Father Juan saw in him but there you go.

The other side of the house lapped it up of course but plenty of our own crowd as well. He’s Juan too, some of the vulgar ones said, takes Juan to know Juan, cheap shots like that, but I’ll bet you anything even the holiest of the holiest on our side had a good sniff of satisfaction to themselves when they were going over their rosary beads. It’s the News of the World gene in everybody, that’s what it is, this craving for the gossip. Next to love it’s what makes life worth living I suppose.

When I think back, John Pius Allbright was a pillar of the church from ever I remember. Actually when I was about ten I used to think he owned the cathedral gates, the ones at the bottom of Creggan Hill I’m talking about. You’d see him there every Sunday in his three piece suit with his big buck teeth like Horatius at the bridge stopping drivers getting into the cathedral grounds if they didn’t have a pass.

I remember the time I got a car first I applied for a pass because Mammy was acting up about her legs and said she couldn’t walk the two hundred yards to the cathedral but no, John Pius wouldn’t give me one, said there were a limited number of parking places in the grounds and our case wasn’t deserving enough but I could park round by Great James’ Street and bring Mammy in through the sacristy if I wanted. I didn’t really care because that way was just as handy but she said Maud told her John Pius only gave passes to his friends so I challenged him one day, on principle you understand, and he’s blanked me ever since. I’m not even sorry for his wife because she’s a prick too. At least there’s no children. But you want to see the cathedral grounds now since he’s gone. Things have gone to pot, who gets parking seems to be down to natural selection, the survival of the thickest you could say.