Dead Secret (7 page)

Can you imagine how hard it was to quell all those emotions and go out to meet Sarah at the church? It helped that I felt
proprietorial
about the knowledge I had gathered from the bureau; it was mine. It also helped that it was incomplete. I told
myself
there was no point in saying anything to Sarah until I knew the whole story. I picked up my bag and left the house, walking slowly in the heat but with my mind racing.

I hear Father Riley before I see him.

I am standing over at the trees in the church grounds and his voice booms out as the doors open, hard as hellfire, roasted with an Irish brogue and years of Capstan full strength.

“Yous’ll all be wanting home for the football on the telly
tonight
. Starts in five minutes, so the Lord will forgive us if we sing only one verse of the final hymn and let’s hope He gives us the right result tonight.”

There is a little ripple of laughter; Father Riley is a wag, so he is. So human as well as holy. That’s what everyone says. Voice like thunder and a heart the size of a pea, if you ask me. The pews empty and the crowd flows through the doors and I catch a flash of Sarah’s blonde hair somewhere at the top of the steps. She comes down to stand with me and we wait for the priest.

“Father Riley,” says Sarah tentatively, as he goes to sweep by
us. She touches his arm. I suspect he would have pretended not to hear otherwise.

“Ah, girls,” he says briskly, putting his arm on Sarah’s shoulder and propelling her with him. “Yous are lovely but can it wait? I’ve got a lovely steak pie on low in the oven and the footie is about to start. Are your souls in danger or can it wait?”

“Our dad died yesterday, Father.”

“Ah dear, dear, dear,” says Father Riley. He sighs. I think the sigh is more for his steak pie than for Da, but Sarah says I don’t give priests the proper respect and maybe she’s right. There’s a reason for that, as you’ll find out later. There are too many
secrets
to give them all at once.

“You’d better come in now,” he says.

He turns the key in the lock of the church house and leads us through into a sitting room. It isn’t a room he uses himself, I am sure. More a births, weddings and funerals kind of room. I suppose even priests have to keep a part of themselves for
themselves
.

It has been a grand house once, the kind of place that a housekeeper fussed over. But it is too big and draughty to heat properly nowadays. The place smells vaguely fusty, like the
holiday
cottage in Ireland we once went to with Da. It is a room too long shut up, with only stillness and dust for company and no warmth in its chilled veins. A grandfather clock ticks loudly in the corner.

“Sit down girls, sit down,” says Father Riley. “I’m sorry for your trouble, surely I am. Now I know your faces, and I know your daddy, but your name again is…?”

“Connaghan,” says Sarah. “I’m Sarah and this is Rebecca.”

“Ah yis, yis. Your father will be James.”

“Joseph,” I correct.

“Ah yis, yis, Joseph. Of course. And what happened to poor Joseph now?”

“He had a heart attack, Father,” Sarah begins levelly, and then her eyes fill with tears. “He hadn’t been ill… he just… just…” Her voice falters.

“Ah dear,” says Father Riley, shaking his head softly. “You
never
know the minute. Were yous with him?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Well now, that’s a comfort anyway, isn’t it? Sure, he didn’t die alone.”

I suppose he’s being kind in his own inadequate way. I look around the room, cold and functional: devoid of flowers or wedding photos; of hideous china dogs won at fairs; of
crayon-drawn
posters smeared with chocolate; of graduation portraits. It’s everything that’s NOT here that tells you about Father Riley’s life. I’d lay money that the room he uses himself isn’t any
different
, except it will have a television and a well-stocked drinks cabinet. You could rattle around in there, keel over with a heart attack, and the only human voice would be from the box in the corner. I said that once to a young priest I knew. You’ll die alone to the tune of
Coronation Street
, I warned him.

“Yes, Father, we’ve been to the undertakers,” I hear Sarah say. “And we are hoping the funeral will be Friday morning if you can say the mass for us.”

“Yis, yis, Friday,” he says. “Ten a.m. now, will that be all right for yous?”

“Ten,” repeats Sarah, looking at me. I return her stare blankly. I feel completely detached. None of this seems real. We could be organising a coffee morning instead of Da’s funeral.

“We’ll have the service the night before when the remains are brought into the church… say six-thirty?” says Father Riley.

The remains. The word makes me flinch.

“That will be fine,” says Sarah. “I’m sorry… I don’t know,
really
… we haven’t got any experience… I’m not sure what we…”

“Ah, don’t worry now,” says Father Riley, going over to a desk by the window. “I’ll give you a book of readings suitable for
funerals
and maybe you could have a wee look through and see which you think would be nice.”

“Now,” he says, reaching for a notebook and pen, “hymns. Have you thought yet about hymns?” His pen hovers over the page.

Aye, here’s a list I prepared earlier, I think. Da’s Funeral Hymns Should He Snuff It Unexpectedly… Aloud, I say I’d also like some secular music to be played. Father Riley isn’t keen. Some priests might allow pop music at funerals but he’s not one of them. None of this, ‘My Way’ carry on. And wouldn’t a good Christian man like James want things to be done right? His name was Joseph. Oh yis, yis, sorry.

Anyway, I say, it’s opera I’m thinking of, not pop music. An aria from Puccini’s
Gianni Schicchi
. Is that a requiem? No, a comedy. Sarah, thinking I’m being facetious, looks warningly at me. Father Riley says tightly if it’s not a hymn, it’ll have to be at the end. Not part of the liturgy. I look at him resentfully but silently. Yeah, like the football chat, I think.

Father Riley wants to know who the singer will be.

“I have a friend, Shameena. A family friend.”

The little flicker, the blink of the eyelids, when I say her name might have gone unnoticed if I hadn’t been staring at him.

“Is she a Catholic?” he says.

“Catholic Muslim.”

I don’t think he likes me. Which is fine because I don’t like him either with his hard little raisin eyes and his soft, doughy belly and his florid skin. I hate men with florid skin. Sarah
always
protests when I say that and says you can’t hate someone just because their skin is a bit red but I can. I hate men with florid skin and right now I hate Father Riley.

“Perhaps we could have a quick look through a hymn book if you have one, Father,” says Sarah quickly. “I think we’ll be able to pick some out that Dad would have liked.”

I sit back. Sarah can choose the holy stuff.

“‘Soul of my Saviour’?” suggests Father Riley.

“Oh God.”

They both look at me.

“A lot of people like it,” says Father Riley, the colour rising in his neck, staining it purple.

“Aye, well I’m sure it’s Top of the Funeral Pops, but I hate it.”

You know, I can almost laugh writing that sentence all these years later, though the laugh is a little shamefaced. It was so
typical
of me back then: mouthy, snappy, rude. But I have to stop short of apologising for the old me. Sarah did enough of that. I look back now and I see so clearly how much I was hurting. And how scared I was. I needed Father Riley to offer me something and he couldn’t. Nothing that meant anything to me. Given half a chance, he’d no doubt give me that old line about my Father in heaven looking after me. The best way he could do that, I would have told him, was to leave me one on earth.

Two faces staring at me in the silence. Sarah is wearing her horrified, ‘what-do-you-think-you-are-playing-at-Rebecca?’
expression
. Father Riley stares stonily. “Let’s have a little respect,
shall we?” he says with wounded dignity. “I can see you are not a believer, Rebecca, but you are asking the Church to bury your father and I think that’s what we should focus on.”

“I’m sorry,” Sarah says. There she bloody goes again. “It’s been such a hard couple of days. ‘Soul Of My Saviour’ will be fine. I’m sure Dad would have liked that.”

What is she talking about? Sometimes I think Sarah knew a different Da from me. He’d have hated it. ‘Soul of My Saviour’ is old-time Ireland. A hard Ireland, where his mother died when he was just a boy. ‘Soul of my Saviour’ is childhood, with his toes sticking through rough woollen stockings, and beatings in school, and lots of God but no mammy.

Sarah looks exhausted all of a sudden. Her elbow is resting on the arm of the chair and she leans her head against it, eyes cast downwards. Father Riley looks at her sympathetically. He is warmer towards Sarah than he is towards me, but priests sniff out their own, don’t they?

“Ah dear, dear,” he says. “You’ve had a hard couple of days right enough, Sarah, so you have, but you just remember that your daddy’s with God now. He’ll look after him for you, so He will.”

Oh here we go. I knew it was coming.

Sarah nods tearfully, gratefully, and scrambles in her bag for a tissue. I fix my eyes on the grandfather clock in the corner. Tick, tock. I don’t feel at all grateful. Tick. Tock. I look up at a picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall. The compassion of Christ. It makes me feel angry. Inexplicably, furiously angry.

“We were supposed to all be looking at holiday brochures this morning,” says Sarah. “Becca and Dad were going on holiday
together
and I was going to go if I could get time off. We’d thought
maybe Italy… or even Spain. Dad would have liked it so much, all that sunshine…”

“Well Sarah, you just remember that the sunshine in heaven is brighter and warmer and altogether sweeter than the
sunshine
in Italy.” Father Riley sits back, a little smugly, I think. He is pleased with that line.

Sarah tries to smile through her tears, presses her tissue to her eyes. “That’s a really comforting thought, Father.”

She means it. She bloody means it.

I can smell the rich scent of steak pie wafting from the kitchen at the back of the house. It makes me feel vaguely nauseous. I just want out of here. I look through the window at the last small group of parishioners still talking in the grounds after mass, at the sunshine dappling through the trees and casting shadows below.

I stand up and they both look at me expectantly.

“I’m not feeling too well,” I say. “I think I’ll just step outside for a moment in the fresh air…”

The church is cool inside, and the scent of summer flowers and incense from the evening service lingers in the air. I sit down on the back pew. It is less committed.

On the back seat I am just visiting, not really part of anything.

The wood feels hard against my backbone. Da always said I hadn’t enough flesh on me. Like a sparrow, he said. “You need a good steak in you, girl,” he used to say when I came home. But I like the austerity of the hard wood right now, and the warm golden glow of it, and the round carved edges of the rows. And the stillness. I wish I understood about that stillness. I wish I could tell if it is the stillness of peace or just the stillness of a vacuum.

I stare straight ahead at the massive crucifix above the altar and the trickle of plaster blood and paint on the hands and feet. Blood of my saviour, bathe me in your wounds. At the side
altar
to the Virgin Mary, the candlelight flickers and dances. As a child, I used to think the Virgin’s eyes followed me, that they actually changed expression. Sometimes I imagined they were reproving, and sometimes I thought they were imbued with a kind of tenderness for me, her child. Right now they seem
neutral
, staring without judgement.

A metal coin clinks into the iron box as an elderly lady in a headscarf lights a candle in front of the altar. She kneels before
the statue and I hear her whispered prayers, a little sibilant hiss in the silence. It is always old ladies who light candles. Old
ladies
in patterned headscarves. I wonder what she wants at her age that makes her pray so fervently. Salvation? And what about me… what do I want in a church that is empty save for evening shadows? To look for Da, I suppose.

Father Riley’s words keep running through my head. The sunshine in heaven is brighter, warmer, sweeter than here on earth. Religious people don’t half talk shite. You can keep your sunshine heaven. I want sunshine that blisters your skin and sun milk that soothes it. No need for sun milk in heaven. We had a teacher at school once, Miss Edwards, who used to talk about heaven. She told one of her classes that she had been away to be a nun but had come back. I don’t know why she bothered. She might just has well have worn a habit as those frumpy tweed skirts and jumpers.

Some of the girls made up stories about why she left the
convent
, most of them involving great spiritual crises. But I said I reckoned she’d left because she’d fallen madly in love with the man who came to clean the convent windows and had been caught kissing him by the Mother Superior. Everyone had looked at me wide eyed and then we had all snorted with
laughter
at the thought of Miss Edwards ever kissing a man, which was as far as our chaste imaginations went.

Miss Edwards talked a lot about heaven. She was into guitars and tambourines and listened to hymns like that ghastly ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’ thing on her car tape deck and she had never even heard of Oasis. I know that because she gave me and Maria Toretti a lift to a fourth-year retreat once. We had to listen for 30 whole minutes to a tape called ‘Hymns of Praise’ and when
it finished she said she thought it was terrific that me and Maria were developing our faith by going to the retreat like this. Maria and I looked at one another slyly in the back seat and tried not to giggle. We were only going because we fancied Father Douglas.

Father Douglas was young and intense and beautiful, and
almost
enough to keep you a Catholic. He preached a lot about purity, his dark hair falling over his face so that he had to keep shoving it back. We quivered while we listened to him, not entirely from religious fervour. It’s just a pity he ran off with Maureen from the café round the corner from the school. Good ice cream, I suppose, and she was a voluptuous blonde, but Maria and I still thought he’d have been better off with one of us
because
we’d have understood him, while Maureen was a Proddy. I’ll bet
she
never knew all the words to ‘Sweet Sacrament Divine’.

Father Douglas, we were told gravely at a school assembly, had risked his immortal soul and his place in heaven, but after what Miss Edwards said about heaven in RE classes I thought he would probably have a better time with Maureen anyway. Heaven, Miss Edwards said, wasn’t a place at all. That was just childish and we had to grow up now and think as adults.
Heaven
was a state of consciousness. A state of being. After that I stopped going to church at all. What kind of incentive was a state of bloody consciousness?

I want a place. A place where you still wear short skirts and lipstick. Where you still drown in heavy, musky perfume and fancy the guy in the corner shop, and put six boxes of baubles and two packets of tinsel on the Christmas tree till the branches droop and it looks like it belongs in a tart’s boudoir. Where
dinner
is sizzled prawns in spicy sauce and there is always, always, the possibility of falling in love with the waiter who brings it. A
peaceful state of mind? No, thanks. I want the rest of me there too. I want heaven to be a place I walk around, not somewhere you float about on puffs of cotton-wool consciousness. I want heaven to be earth without the duff bits.

I was never sure exactly what Da thought. He told tales
sometimes
about the Christian Brothers who taught him in Ireland and how they beat the devil out of you with a switch if you
stumbled
over the Lord’s Prayer. And how the priest would lift the latch on your door and walk in as if he owned the place, and how Mammy always said the priest took the place of God and you must therefore do everything he said. Da said he lived in terror of the priest because he took Mammy’s words literally and thought if the priest told him to jump from the top of the Post Office roof in Donegal town, sure he’d have to do it.

He still went to church of course. He was enough of an old Irish Catholic for that. I can picture him still kneeling in these very pews, his chin resting on his hands. Sometimes you would see his mouth move in silent prayer, but mostly he was just still, staring at the altar. He made Sarah and I go, though I think as far as I was concerned, he knew the writing was on the wall.

He took to going to the Saturday-night vigil but I always used the excuse I was washing my hair and doing my makeup for going out and that I would go at twelve on Sunday. I’d leave the house at quarter to twelve and then go and drink coffee and read the papers in Roberto’s, the Italian café that was a short walk from the church. Sarah knew, of course. I don’t think she ever missed mass in her life. She was always so prim and
disapproving
, but I used to tell her to keep her mouth shut or I’d tear her Ronan Keating poster into a hundred pieces and feed it to one of Mr Curtis’s yappy little dogs.

Later, when I was in my twenties, and Da and I had our nights with a bottle of wine between us, I knew he wasn’t sure about God. He wanted to believe all right. But whether he ever did, really deep down inside himself, I don’t know. I think he had his moments, usually sentimental ones at midnight mass, when his heart and his eyes filled up with it all, and for that moment he believed. But he said God was a civilising force on people whether He existed or not. He was very conservative Da, really, in some ways.

“You’ll come back to the church Becca,” he used to say. “You’ll come back to it when you’re older.”

Is this the moment? I try making a little bargain with God. I’ll come back, if You just make everything all right again. Not bringing Da back, because I know he can’t come back, not now. But maybe a sign. Let me feel a presence. Not my heavenly
Father’s
, just my earthly one’s, because right now I have no sense whatsoever of his existence and the emptiness terrifies me. I close my eyes, trying to pray. I close them so tight the blackness explodes into grey patches of shooting light. I open them again. I don’t know what to say. I try again. “Please,” I begin. “Please God… Da,” and I stop. Please. God. Da. Three words that get as close as I can to a prayer.

The old lady in the headscarf is having trouble getting up from the side altar. She sways as she stands, waddling up the aisle on heavy, bowed legs, her shopping bag over her arm.

“All right, hen?” she says as she passes, not waiting for the answer.

I can’t wait for an answer either. The heavy wooden door bangs shut behind me and the evening sunlight nips my eyes after the gloom. Maybe Da is in there somewhere among the flowers and the melted candle wax. But if he is, I can’t find him.

Des is waiting in the car for me and Sarah, but I walk right past him and out the gates and back along the tree-lined avenue to the main road. I head to Da’s house without stopping.
Somewhere
in the recesses of my brain I can hear Des shouting to me but I keep on going. It is only a ten-minute walk but by the time I turn the key in the lock, I am sweating slightly with the heat and the exertion and a new sense of purpose.

Half an hour later, the phone rings. I sigh, expecting it to be Sarah. It’s Peggy.

“Sarah is very upset,” she says, her voice thin and tight.

Bloody typical of Peggy. I’m never upset, of course.

“Yeah, well we’re all upset, Peggy.”

“How do you think she felt being left in that room with Father Riley? She sat for half an hour with him before she realised you weren’t coming back. And she said you were rude to him.
Honestly
Becca, you’re so
selfish
sometimes. You just go your own way and to hell with everyone else. It’s always been the same…”

On she witters. On and on. God, I could write the script. I’ve been hearing it long enough.

“Becca!” she says sharply.

“What?”

“Are you listening? I said I think you should come over here tonight.”

“I’m tired, Peggy. I’ll sort a few things out here and then go to bed. I’ll come over tomorrow.”

“You’re being ridiculous, Rebecca. Why are you staying there on your own? And whatever are you thinking of, trying to sort things already? There’s no need for that. You’re only going to
upset
yourself. Charlie and I will take care of that. Come on now,”
she says, beginning to wheedle, “there’s no need for you to be in that house alone right now.”

It is the way it was throughout our childhood. Peggy being bossy and knowing what was best; Sarah being reasonable and compliant and doing what she was told; and me being pushed to the outside for daring not to. Peggy always wanted her little brood round her where she could see them and count them, whereas I was forever wanting to wander off and examine the secrets of the reeds in the hidden end of the duck pond.

“Sarah wants you to come over,” she adds. “Though God knows she has reason enough not to want to set eyes on you tonight. We’re all here. Des too.”

Christ, that settles it then. Peggy knows from the silence she is losing.

“Haven’t you made your point now, staying there last night by yourself?”

“What point?”

“Charlie!” says Peggy sharply. “Charlie, come and talk some sense into this girl.”

I can hear Charlie mumbling some protest in the background.

“Just talk to her Charlie, for heaven’s sake!”

I hear him take the phone. He clears his throat.

“Becca?”

“Charlie.”

“Peggy thinks you should come over.”

Dear old Charlie.

“I know Charlie and I would, but I’m just so tired I think I’ll have an early night and come over tomorrow if you don’t mind.”

“She’s just worried about you,” he says, almost apologetically.

“I know.”

“You’re all right now, Becca?”

“I’m fine, Charlie.”

“Rightoh. I’ll put your Aunt Peggy back on.”

“Brilliant, Charlie,” I hear Peggy say sarcastically, as she takes the phone.

I’m not entertaining Peggy any more. She’ll keep chipping away if I let her.

“Peggy, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say firmly.

“Right,” she says, hard and clipped, and I raise my eyes. I love Peggy. I do, really. Beneath that brittle exterior, she has a soft heart. Her heart is warm and squishy, like half-melted chocolate. But she has a tendency to punish emotionally when you don’t do exactly as she wants. Always has had. When Sarah and I were in trouble as children, Peggy just had to turn the frozen mitt on and Sarah would crumble. She’d run to Peggy with big
unspilled
tears in her eyes and bury her face in her lap and Peggy would relent and take her ‘special girl’ on her knees, and then look from the corner of her eye to see how I was reacting. It was water off a duck’s back to me.

There is a bottle of wine in the kitchen cupboard. I open it and pour a glass. After Peggy’s call I think I need it. I think about putting some music on but I don’t think I can handle it, hearing music from Da’s sound system and him not here.