The Wake - Table of contents

The Wake - THE END. AND THE BEGINNING.

So we’re living here in sin next to Mickey MacTamm’s shacked up in the shadow of Saint Eugene’s. And the clergy are on to me, I can see it in their eyes how their eyes avoid mine. At the time of writing they haven’t made a move but I suppose they’d be within their rights to sack me for giving scandal, Catholic teacher in Saint Ignatius’s primary dragging their name in the mud and so on. Maybe when the bishop holds his next monthly meeting of the parish priests of the diocese over there in the parochial house and they’re shooting the crap about this and that, maybe then the subject of Jeremiah Coffey will come up.

Even if they decide to keep me on rather than airing Ignatius Loyola’s smearridden linen in public I know I’m never going to get promotion but I’ve got Aisling which is more than all the heads and deputy heads in the world put together could ever even fantasize about in a million years. Or the priests and bishops in their finery and fancy cars. Or the pope and his cardinals with their vassals and serfs running round tending them hand and foot.

And Mammy? Mammy will just have to lump it. I know she’s down on her knees half the day and night and she’s never out of the cathedral lighting candles to Saint Monica that her son will do an Augustine. No chance of that, not for now anyway Lord. Maybe if I get a sickener, pick up some kind of infection from Frances, I’ll turn out to be Augustine Mark 2 but somehow I doubt it. She should be grateful actually, Mammy that is, she’s got Majella McAllister staying with her now. Remember her? The Majella that French-kissed me at Maud’s wake? The same girl would have stayed for nothing because she’s been lusting after me since we were about nine and she’d do anything for me. I’m talking literally here.

“Five pound a week all right Majella?” I asked her.

“That’s too much Jeremiah. You’re far too generous.” Her big brown heifer’s eyes were eating me up the two minutes I was standing at her door making the offer. Invited me in and all but the last time I was in there she pulled my trousers down and I ran home crying. So I wasn’t going to take the chance. She’s a very strong girl, muscles on her like, who do you call her, Boudicca, be all right maybe if you were desperate.

“When could you start?”

“Anytime you want Jeremiah. I’m on my own now since Daddy died and I’ll be glad of the company. I’d start tonight if you wanted.”

I’ll say she would. She knows the score about me and Aisling but her attitude is she’s prepared to wait. In the meantime she’s keeping my bed warm. Mammy put her in the back room but she only stayed there the first night because the bed was too lumpy she said. So now she's in my room. It occurred to me as soon as I walked away from her door actually that she looked like one of those ones that would be right and thorough with the cleaning and dusting and all and it wouldn’t take her long to ferret out the black plastic bags with God knows how many pairs of dreamspattered underpants and three pyjama bottoms if not more in them. And the Woolworth’s bag behind the bath. And I don’t think I ever got rid of the pair of corduroy trousers I ruined with that girl from Bishop Street. Wherever they are, too late now. The whole thing’s sort of embarrassing but no doubt she’ll put them to good use.

So for now anyway, routine. Aisling won’t get married but we do everything a married couple does near enough — except for the Malone Road and the cat of many tales that is, both of which look as if they’re going to go on awhile yet — plus I’ve turned into a bit of a community activist, out there trying to get the rioters to go home, real do-gooder, scared I’m going to get my head in my hand some day if I look at them sideways though.

And then there’s the other kind of fear which is far worse. Juan Antonio’s spirit is still there but it struggles sometimes and I’m asking myself how much longer I can go on believing there’s no such thing as that kind of mortal sin as long as it’s done for love. The fear comes out of the dark when I waken up in the middle of the night certain times and think, What if I died before the morning, where would I go, does every penny of this not have to be paid back? And then I touch the brown scapular I’ve been wearing since the Carmelites gave the retreat in May and I feel better. Aisling’s okay about it, amazingly okay actually, but she says I shouldn’t wear it in bed, it would serve me right if I got strangled making love with it on. And where would you be then? she says.

I wish I had her certainty about hell not being there. How is it people are so different? I can hardly stand the sight of some of the priests now but I still need their rites and their penances. I take the partial indulgence granted by Pope Benedict the fifteenth to those who devoutly kiss the scapular with a pinch of salt but I believe the virgin Mary’s promise to Saint Simon that whosoever dies wearing it shall not suffer eternal fire and also her revelation to Pope John the twenty-second that all who wear it will be released from purgatory on the first Saturday after death. And then sometimes I’m thinking, wise up, there are no Saturdays in hell (only Mondays Aisling says), these things should have gone out with Santa Claus, you’re a grown man for Christ sake.

But old fears die hard and this is going to take me awhile. In the meantime I say to myself that life without Aisling would be a worse hell than anything the devil could serve up. And if there’s such a thing as heaven on earth then this is it. Happy daze.