Demons (9 page)

‘
You can
believe if you want to,’’ said Mum. ‘But that’s the crux of the
matter.
You
have
to want to, no one else.’

‘
I don’t know,’ I said
bitterly. ‘It’s all too complicated. Sometimes I think it’d be
easier not to believe in anything.’

‘
Maybe it would,’ said
Mum.

‘
Just enjoy being alive,’ I
said. ‘While you still are.’

Strong in faith?

‘Would you consider being one of the youth
group leaders this year, Andrea?’ Father Wright asked.

‘
I’m not leader material
Father,’ I protested. He’d caught me unawares. My heart rate
increased. This was it, I said to myself, a turning point moment. I
didn’t know it was coming but I had to take a chance on it. It
might never come again.

‘
Never underestimate your
potential Andrea. The church needs competent young women like you
to lead, to set good examples. You impressed me at our last
meeting. You’ve clearly thought about the issues. You’re able to
help other young people think.’

He glanced in Mum and Dad’s direction as he
spoke, as if seeking their support. ‘It’s important to be able to
share your certainties with other young people whose faith may be
less strong than yours. It’s in you to do it Andrea.’

Competent young
women
.

It’s in you
Andrea
.

Those phrases set my rebel heart beating
even faster. Suddenly I felt like my seven-year-old self again,
playing at being a priest. The seed, the desire,

the challenge, suddenly all these three
components

were right there behind me, like guardian
angels, and now it was my time to challenge. I heard myself saying,
as if from somewhere far away, ‘Would me being a youth leader be
good experience for the priesthood, Father?’

I sensed Mum and Dad listening in. No doubt
they’d be wondering, as I was, what on earth (and heaven) had got
into me and what was going to happen next. Honestly, I don’t know
what I would

have done if Father Wright had said, ‘Good
on you Andrea. You’ve got to start somewhere. Youth group leader
would be a good first rung on the ladder to priesthood.’

Father Wright was silent for a moment as he
digested what I’d said. I waited for the blow-up but it never came.
Instead, his face abruptly closed up, his eyes lost their focus on
me and he turned sharply away and began talking to someone else.
Maybe he had no idea what to say to me next. Maybe he needed to
‘ponder it a little more’.

But I had expected
something
, not to be
ignored completely. I nearly spoke again but didn’t. Instead, I
also turned and walked away.

For good. Or so I thought.

Childhood
ambition

‘Why
did you say that?’ asked Dad.

‘
Flashback to childhood
ambition,’ I said. ‘Mum telling me that he censors the church
newsletter. Lots of things. I just wanted to know what he’d
answer.’

‘
Weren’t you the slightest
bit interested yourself in what you were asking?’ asked
Mum.

‘
Not any more,’ I said.
‘Although when I think about it, it does make me mad that’s it’s
still men

only. I didn’t want to be a youth group
leader. I don’t

want to be in the youth group. That’s why I
said it. But that wasn’t the only reason.’

Mum and Dad waited.

‘
I’ve decided I’m not going
back to church anymore either,’ I told them. ‘I’ve lost my
religion.’

STRANGE MEETING

‘You were different,’ says Chris.

‘
I
am
different. Everyone’s
different.’

‘
You know what I mean.
Those other girls in the class, they were like groupies. They all
thought the same, acted the same, wanted the same
thing.’

‘
That’s not fair Chris. You
can’t be in other people’s minds. You don’t know what they were
really like. What they were thinking. No one can. Looking back, I
almost feel sorry for them. Half the time they were caught up in
patterns foisted onto them by other people.’

Especially Becs, foister and foisted. I’m
still in touch with her, which, at the time, would have seemed the
most unlikely of outcomes.

‘
Ah, the Fates again,’ says
Chris. ‘True maybe, but you do know what I’m talking about, don’t
you Andy? If someone pushes, you pull. If they sing, you dance. If
they smoke, you drink. You’re different.’

‘
What on earth are you on
about Chris?’

‘
Nothing really. Just
making hypothetical and silly comparisons. You weren’t on their
wavelength even though you were in the same class, studying the
same subject. I wasn’t ‘one of the boys’ either. Do you know
something, I wondered early on if you were lesbian.’

‘
So did they,’ I say. Becs,
as I eventually

discovered, had hoped I was. ‘And what if I
had been?’ I ask Chris.

‘
The poet Sappho was
lesbian so it wouldn’t have worried me apart from the fact we would
never have taken things any further.’

‘
God Chris, you’re
impossible.’

‘
But then,’ he continues,
‘after we’d been talking for a while I felt I was really getting to
know you, and like you. I liked that you were different. You liked
me for being different. It felt as if we were on the same
wavelength even if we weren’t on anybody else’s.’

I nod. ‘Yeah, that’s what I felt too. No
other boy loved classics as much as you. I liked you for that.
Chatting up girls for the sake of it wasn’t your style.’

‘
I wondered but I never
asked, if it took you long to decide to go out with me?’

‘
I said ‘yes’ straightaway
didn’t I? Well, almost straightaway.’

‘
I meant, had you already
planned to say yes before I’d asked? In case I asked?’

‘
Remember I once told you
that you were arrogant? You haven’t changed. I’d never ever thought
of the possibility.’

‘
Yeah, sure,’ says Chris, a
knowing grin on his face. ‘Have another coffee?’

But of course I
had
anticipated the
question if only to dramatise in my own mind what it would sound
like and what my answer was likely to be. But I wouldn’t have told
him that then. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him now.

Classical studies

Year 13 dragged to begin with because, for
the first time, I found it almost impossible to relate to anyone in
my class. The two girls with whom I’d loosely

hitched up in Year Nine, Michelle and Jo,
had already left school and were working. Jo at S-Mart and

Michelle at Fancy Free Hair.

Both were saving to travel. Boys, beaches
and surfboards were in their schemes and dreams. On the odd
occasion I tried to imagine myself surfing too, waiting for the
next big wave to carry me somewhere exotic but then, I’d never been
greatly into beach culture so the imagining did me little good.

I felt at a loose end. I hadn’t been to
church for more than two years and had quickly lost contact with
the youth group members. Mum and Dad had eventually started going
to a different parish altogether. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t
because they were in any way ashamed of me or let down that I
wasn’t going with them any more. It was because they had discovered
a parish priest who both openly supported the ‘Women Knowing Our
Place’ group and was very active in social justice issues.

I thought the emptiness I was experiencing
would soon go away yet strangely it didn’t. I missed the security
and reassurance of what I had believed in but, at the same time, I
knew I couldn’t go back to the way things had been before. I’d made
my own bed and now I had to lie in it.

However I’d often thought
about the priest-playing days and, just lately, I’d made a
connection between the game I used to play and Michelangelo’s
painting
The creation of
Adam
, which Gran and I had long ago looked
at together. When the mysterious, magical transformation in the
Mass took place it somehow sealed the tiny but, at the same time
significant, gap between God and Adam. It made everything
right
. That fingertip
touch, I decided, allowed for the possibility of a
Happy-Forever-After

place. Without it,
Forever
would be
impossible.

Schoolwork wasn’t easy but it wasn’t too
difficult either. Truthfully, not much of it held any great
interest. Most of it seemed pointless, except history because we
were studying Ireland and the 1916 Easter Uprising, something Gran
had always gone on about, had in fact lived through as a baby, if
babies can be said to live through events like those - and
classical studies, because of the fact that Chris turned up to that
class.

Our classical studies teacher, Ms Shapiro,
was an enthusiast. She’d once worked at an archaeological dig in
Athens and really knew her stuff. More importantly, she was good at
enthusing other people even if they’d chosen her class thinking
classics was going to be an easy option. It wasn’t.

The class was tiny to
begin with. The first morning only five girls turned up and we
wondered if it might be scrapped altogether. Then, a few minutes
later, three boys, this time from the private school just up the
road, came in and immediately they seemed to fill it with
their
largeness
.

Only one was any good
looking (an opinion shared by all) and he didn’t seem to notice or
care less that all the girls instantly fell for him. I remember he
gave me a lingering stare (yes, I
know
, but sometime you have to fall
back on one of the literary clichés. They make the most sense) when
he first walked through the door.

The boys bagged desks at the back and by the
time they’d settled down another five minutes had passed.

Ms Shapiro took everything in her stride.
She began by outlining the year’s course.

‘
We’ll start with an
overview of Greek history, take a look at some masterpieces of
Greek building - ’

‘
The Acropolis?’ said
Becs.

‘
Without
a doubt,’ Ms Shapiro said, ‘but others as well. For our Greek drama
we’ll study a play by Euripides called
The
Bacchae
before moving onto Roman history,
art, architecture and engineering. If I think you’re up to it and
if you’re keen to do a bit of extra work’ - we all groaned on cue -
‘then maybe we’ll enter the University’s Classics Competition at
the end of the year. Sound all right?’

We nodded and murmured non-committedly. All
except the guy who’d looked at me.

‘
What
about
Greek
engineering?’ he asked, sounding more enthusiastic than the
rest of us put together.

Ms Shapiro raised an eyebrow. ‘Anything in
mind . . um?’ she said, looking down at her class roll.

‘
Chris Stuart,’ he
said.

‘
Ah,’ said Ms
Shapiro.

‘
I was thinking of the
Horologium,’ Chris said.

One of the other boys
sniggered like a year nine. ‘
Whore
a what?’ he whispered to the third boy beside
him, loudly enough for us girls to hear. It was
pathetic.

‘
Ah,’ said Ms Shapiro
again. If it was a trick to catch her out - almost but not quite as
babyish as the whispered innuendo - she was up to it. ‘The famous
work of Andronikos of Kyrrhos,’ she said. ‘We’ll meet it when we
come to look at the Agora. You might like to make it the focus of
your first term essay Chris.’

Chris wasn’t at all deflated by this
suggestion. ‘I’d love to,’ he said, completely genuinely.

‘
Good,’ said Ms
Shapiro.

‘
What’s the Classics
Competition?’ asked Roxy, as usual a few steps behind.

‘
It’s an inter-school
competition,’ Ms Shapiro said, ‘run by the university’s Classics
Department. Good fun but not for the faint-hearted.’

She offered it as a challenge, one that I
expected Chris would have accepted straightaway, except he clammed
up when he clicked that the rest of us were, indeed, a
faint-hearted lot.

Ms Shapiro picked up a
pile of books from her desk. ‘And here are copies of
The Bacchae
. Although we
probably won’t get to it until the beginning of term two, it
wouldn’t do you any harm to start reading it now. It’s not
particularly long but it may be different from the sort of plays
you’re used to.’

‘
If we can handle
Shakespeare we can cope with anything.’ said Becs.

‘
It’s OK,’ said Chris,
refusing his copy. ‘I’ve got my own at home.’

I turned quickly to look at him and found he
was staring right back at me.

Later on, after class, Becs said she thought
Chris looked like a Greek god. ‘Pity about the name,’ she said.

‘
What’s wrong with it?’ I
asked.

‘
Stuart?
It’s just so
plain
. So ordinary.’

‘
Which god does he remind
you of?’ asked Sarah.

‘
Dionysus?’ suggested Roxy who, flicking through
The Bacchae
, had come
across a picture of a cool looking Greek god.