The Fields (16 page)

After all the shenanigans on day one, hopes are high for the second part of the retreat. We begin with a few prayers of thanks in the candle-lit sacred space, before Fr Jason moves us next door to a smaller antechamber, promising us a special surprise. Here, in a room little bigger than a box bedroom, and with strip lighting and grass-green carpets, is apparently where the real transformation is going to take place. Fr Jason dramatically drops a large navy-blue paperback bible in the centre of the room, kneels down upon it, looks up to the ceiling, then around to each one of us, and announces that this is where we are going to learn how to speak in tongues.

Naturally, we all nearly crap our pants. Daryl McDonagh immediately asks if it’s going to hurt. Fr Jason ignores him, claps his hands, and calls out for ‘Jacko’ and ‘Fenzer’. Two junior priests suddenly appear at his side, with sleeves rolled up, black shirts unbuttoned at the neck, and no sign of white priestly dog collars. Fr Jason turns to Daryl and says that he’ll certainly feel his head warm up, as the Holy Spirit is entering him from above, but it shouldn’t be too traumatic. Then he turns his face up towards one of the juniors and says, ‘Not unless you’ve got the devil inside you. Then we’re in for a real battle, eh, Jacko?’ He
winks at Jacko as he says this, to let us know that it’s kind of a joke and kind of serious at the same time.

Fr Jason decides that Daryl should go first, just to put him out of his misery. He asks him to kneel, right down on the bible, and then tells us all to leave the room, and to line up neatly along the corridor outside, and in the order in which we fancy being done. I take my time, and am the last to leave. The final glimpse I get of Daryl is of his shaking frame kneeling dutifully on the navy-blue bible cover, while Fr Jason, Jacko and Frenzer hold a left hand each over his head, and their remaining hands on their own hearts.

We stand outside the room in silence. We hear everything. Fr Jason and the lads are praying like mad, groaning and running through the whole repertoire. Mixing up Our Fathers, Hail Marys and Rosary Best ofs, with Apostles Creeds, Eucharistic Prayers and God knows what. Eventually, like one of those wind-up war sirens, they reach a pitch where the words start to blend and they go all Jabba the Hutt on it. Wacka-chucka-wanga-bang-jee-coke-pack-nu-neet-solo-see-mi-nigh dah-teel! None of us says a word. Pilibeen starts to sniffle and blub. And then it comes. Daryl’s voice, super-high-pitched now, but doing the Jabba the Hutt talk and everything. Eeeeeeeee-solo-seee-mi-ni-haaaaa-daaa-teeel-holy-mother-of-god-holy-mother-of-god-holy-mother-of-god seeeeeee-eeeek-a-chunk-cow-a-wookie!

The fellas in the corridor queue, quietly, and with some determination, start swapping places. Everyone wants to go further back.

After ten minutes of Jabba talk, it goes totally silent. The door then swings open and Daryl comes shooting out, face flushed but beaming with pride and happiness, like he’s just been popped out of the best Santa’s Grotto of all time. He beams at each one of us, clocking us right in the eye, and says that it was the best thing ever, totally amazing, and that we’ve got to try it. Blow your minds, lads, he says. Blow, your, minds!

After that it’s pretty much a stampede into the green room. Everyone, even Pilibeen, abandons the queue system and goes charging down to get their fix of red-faced gobbledegook. I, however, stay last in line. And when it comes to my turn I just can’t do it. It’s that simple. I walk into the room, look down at the bible, and stay standing. I tell Fr Jason that it’s not going to happen for me today, and that I worry that maybe I have the devil in me, and that I don’t want my head to explode apart in a big high-octane super-spiritual battle between good and evil that the task of making me speak in tongues would inevitably involve. Fr Jason gives a disappointed look and says that it’s a shame, because after yesterday he was looking forward to my turn the most.

But, he adds, wise to the end, there are more ways than one to skin a cat. And then he sends Jacko and Fenzer out of the room. He pulls up two chairs and we sit down and talk. He asks me what was going on yesterday, and I say nothing. He reminds me that anything I say here, in this quiet green room, is in the strictest confidence, and that he’s not the police. I give him a few tasty morsels, while making sure to withhold the big guns. I tell him about Helen Macker and the ball, and how it seemed that she knew what was going to happen to me way before it did. This gets Fr Jason strangely excited, and he gives me a big lecture on how time isn’t actually linear, how we don’t actually move in line from ‘a’ to ‘b’ to ‘c’. Instead, he says, life and time is more like a giant pepperoni pizza, just flat out there before us, totally stagnant, unmoving, and we live each event in the pepperoni slices on the pizza, occasionally pinging from slice to slice, but not actually traversing the pizza with purpose. Time, he says, is the great illusion, and God is both the pizza maker and the pizza.

Helen Macker, he says, was probably one of the gifted few who can see the entire slice of pepperoni all at once. In the olden days she would’ve been a mystic, a prophet, or a witch. Or a
god? I ask. Never, he says, reminding me that there is a difference between being able to see the whole slice of pepperoni at once and being able to survey the entire pizza.

He then asks me, leaning close, if I’ve heard about the multiverse? And when I look at him as if he’s still speaking in tongues, he says that there’s a million million universes going on right now. And God created them all. And in every one of those universes there’s a me and a him going about our daily business, only this one here is the only universe where me and him are actually sitting in a quiet green room having a chat about the multiverse. In all the others we are doing all the other possibilities that could ever happen in every choice we ever made at every step along the way in our lives. And so, he says, in one universe he’s probably still an alkie. And in another he mightn’t even be living in Ireland at all. He might’ve gone to America to be with his sisters. And you, he says, meaning me, you mightn’t be on the retreat in one, you mightn’t even be going to St Cormac’s in another, and your parents, in yet another, might not have even had you.

I tell him that it’s mad, and that it’s hurting my head to think about, and he says that it’s God’s truth, and just the way the universe, or, ahem, multiverse, works.

I tell Fr Jason that this is all new to me, and dead interesting, and that I think he’s one of the best priests I’ve ever met, and that I want to hear more. But instead of answering me, he looks me in the eye and says, dead serious, and totally out of the blue, ‘Who is Father?’

In my head I go, Oh, for feck sake!!! Not him again!!! Because it was like I had almost forgotten everything to do with O’Culigeen at that moment. And I was almost enjoying it all, and thinking about life, and time, and pizza slices and the multiverse like any of the fellas jostling and messing in the corridor outside. Fellas with normal problems, that is. Like being force-fed table-scraps in front of full-length mirrors. Normal fellas who had normal lives
ahead of them, with chatty wives and squeally kids, and days where they drank a bit too much and cursed the givers of childhood scars but nonetheless had happy gatherings at Christmas and Easter with all hatchets buried. The very mention of ‘Father’, on the other hand, is like pulling the chair right from under me. I get a bit of a pukey feeling in my stomach, like I’ve a better chance of throwing up right now than mentioning that abominable fecker’s name, so I just shoot up in my place, tell Fr Jason that I can’t tell him anything, and then run out the door, like how Carl Lewis would’ve run if he was being chased by the dog in that film about a dog that only bites black fellas.

I know Fr Jason isn’t going to leave it at that. He’s been to Africa after all. He’s seen cannibals in action. He’s not afraid of anything. And I know he’s on my side. He won’t rest until he finds out about ‘Father’. At least, I think that’s the plan.

My fourteenth birthday arrives at something near an all-time low-point in my life. Drudgery in school, me getting worse and worse, and falling out of favour with every teacher on staff, and getting pucked in the arm on a daily basis by Jack Downs. Elsewhere O’Culigeen’s post-rape chats have gone completely off the scale. Sometimes, in fact, I think he’s raping me just so he can have the post-rape chat. He gets me to lie beside him in the sacristy, on a DIY mattress made of rough red cushions pushed together and covered in a purple picnic rug, and he lights up a fag, or a ‘sneaky smoke’ as he calls it, the big prat, and starts banging on about all his plans and dreams for the future.

His passion, he says, is travel. He’s never been anywhere but he wants to go everywhere. He sucks on his fag and goes on about sunsets over the Pacific and what it must’ve been like to be a Polynesian tribesman in a little leather boat sailing through giant thirty-footers. And then he tells me how the Polynesians discovered America before the Americans, and how you could sail today from Tahiti to New Zealand by using the stars alone as signposts. Imagine that, he says, tossing the hair on my forehead lightly, and pointing his fag-tip upwards, as if we’re lying back and looking up into some gorgeous galaxial vista
and not just the dirty yellow ceiling of his own private rape room.

Every now and again it gets really bad, and he asks me to come away with him. He says that he’s going to get a transfer out of this dump, all the way to Papua New Guinea. And that’ll show them, he says. By ‘them’ he means his brothers back home in the bog in Sligo. He says, hugging me tightly, that they were mean bastards growing up, and that they made his life miserable and did terrible things to him. Unspeakable things, he says, half crying and kissing me on the temples.

At this point I always ask a few questions. Because this is the danger zone. This is the moment where he could be thinking about having a double-dip, and so you have to be careful. You go a bit silent, and his mind wanders, he starts to heavy breathe, and before you know it, you’re screwed. Literally. So a few choice questions, nothing too heavy, just enough to pull him off target, is always the best option.

I ask him what his brothers do now, and he tells me that they never left the farm, and that they run it together. Bastards. Shagging sheep all day, eh? he says, giving me a nod that says we know what these bogmen perverts are really like, don’t we? I say, yeah, quietly, and add, none too convincingly, ‘Feckin sheep shaggers.’ Then before I know it, O’Culigeen is back up on his feet, trousers tightly locked around his waist, business as usual. He gives me a hug and a kiss, and ruffles my hair again. Mission accomplished.

The questions, of course, don’t always work on O’Culigeen. And if they don’t, and if he’s still getting a bit breathy, I’ve learnt that my best bet is to leap up and flick on the telly, and hope that something will catch his easily catchable attention. A news report. A GAA match. An old film. I got him once with an old John Wayne cowboy flick on UTV, where Wayne’s son, called Matt, who’s a real softie but a nice fella, takes over the cattle
drive, and sends Wayne himself off on his own into the desert. But Wayne survives and comes back to fight the softie son in a big final punch-up that goes on for ever but is stopped by a woman with a huge gun who tells them both to stop fighting and explains to them that they love each other deeply and that’s why they’re fighting in the first place. O’Culigeen was hooked from the minute it blurred into focus on the screen. But it wasn’t because it was filled with big hairy men punching each other and saying that they loved each other. No, it was a bit in the middle that got him, just before the softie son called Matt sends John Wayne off into the desert, to face certain death. John Wayne is standing by his horse, getting ready to meet his maker, when he suddenly turns to Matt the softie son and, instead of saying, ‘Oh Jaysus please, don’t do this, spare my life! Please!’ he goes even tougher than ever and does a big huge speech about how his softie son better spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder, because he’s going to survive this particular crisis, he’s going to get back on his feet, then he’s going to spend his own life tracking down his softie son, and then, finally, when he finds him, he’s going to kill him. He ends the speech by looking away from his son, and hissing quietly into the distance, ‘I’m gonna kill you, Matt.’

O’Culigeen was mesmerised. I could see his little head nodding on his neck, like he totally got it, like this was touching him on only the deepest possible level. Or like he and John Wayne were the only two men on the planet who knew what was what.

At home, I try to act as if the coming of my fourteenth birthday is the most brilliant thing ever to happen me since getting my first pube. I have pubes now too. Not like the big bushy cavemen in the Natural History Museum, where there’s so much hair that you can’t even see the mickey, but enough to make a difference. O’Culigeen, who is the only person, funnily enough, who gets to see me that way, makes all sorts of snarky comments about me
becoming a big filthy buck, now that I’ve got pubes. But then he adds, real creepy like, that he won’t have to start shaving me just yet.

I don’t let anyone else see them, but in the house they nonetheless know that the times they are a-changing when I say that I don’t want any toys for my birthday. Mam can’t believe it, and keeps saying in panic, ‘And what about all your
Star Wars
figures?!’ As if I had signed a contract to agree to play with
Star Wars
action figures until I was fifty, and now all the neighbours are going to find out when the police come to arrest me for abandoning Han, Chewie and Luke in Hoth costume. My new suggestions for presents are very precise. They range from the twelve-inch remix of ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ by Bronski Beat, to a pair of sunglasses, with or without mirrors, but with the same shape lenses as the cops wear in
Chips
. Plus I ask for my first bottle of aftershave – not that Old Spice rubbish that Dad wears, but the new stuff, Kouros, that Sarah came home reeking of recently, and Siobhan said was from Philip O’Malley who’d been necking her all evening against the ping-pong tables in Mount Merrion Youth Club.

I also ask for my first two proper books, real books that adults read, and not the teen guff that Mam always leaves on my bed, featuring action men from the RAF on the front, holding women with busty blouses in one hand and a sub-machine gun in the other. No, these two are corkers, and have come straight from the source.
The Zen of Physics
, first of all, is a Fr Jason recommendation. He passed me on the bike, going through the mucky shortcut behind the brothers’ monastery a couple of days after the retreat, and asked me what was my favourite bit. When I said it was the multiverse chat his eyes lit up and he said he was thrilled to have found a fellow convert and promised that he’d lend me his OTHER bible, called
The Zen of Physics
.

Talk about molecules and atoms! Jaysus wept! he says, adding
with a nod to the sky, Bless me, Father! He then tells me that it’s all in there. The multiverse, the pizza theory and much more. Like? I ask. Like how we can be in two places at the one time, he says, beaming now. Like how there are dimensions in the world that we can’t even begin to see or comprehend. And like how we can use our minds and our thoughts to change the nature of the reality around us.

That’s it, I’m hooked, and I can’t wait. I whack
The Zen of Physics
down on my birthday list, and it gets all sorts of snooty comments from the girls. Mam tells them to leave me alone, and is clearly impressed, hoping, I guess, that this one book will witness a sea change in my plummeting performance at school. The other book is called
The Story of the Eye
. I have no idea at all about the exact contents of this one, but I know that it’s got to be a bit mad, considering it’s the one book that O’Culigeen has in the sacristy that isn’t a Goddy book. And it’s one that he’s always teasing me with, toying with it, flicking through it and cooing and laughing and chuckling to himself, and then telling me, no way, it’s not for little eyes as pure as yours. Then he sticks his nose back inside, and starts gurgling happily away to himself. He says he’s read it hundreds of times and never gets bored of it, but he wouldn’t dare show it to anyone else. They might get the wrong idea. But because me and him are so close now, there’s no reason to keep anything hidden from me. And then he adds, real smart arse like, Except what’s inside the pages.

He makes such a song and dance about the book, and he seems to get such pleasure from not letting me read it, that I decide to completely sicken him by putting it, smack bang, on my birthday list, right above
The Zen of Physics
. I know, for a fact, that Mam isn’t going to read it anyway. Because I know, for another fact, that she’ll barely have time to buy it, wrap it, and stick ‘from Claire and Susan with Love’ on the gift tag. I know this because she’s been organising little family meetings recently,
where she stands up against the countertop and tells us that she’s reaching breaking point with the amount of housework she’s handling, without a tumble drier! (she says this last bit while glaring at Dad). Looking after six all-eating, drinking, clothes-wrecking, money-sucking monsters is a nightmare, she’ll say, at her lowest point, with the bottom lip wobbling. And that’s not including his nibs! (Again, another dagger.)

We’ll usually end these meetings by agreeing to do more housework, and sometimes we even write out a rota for dishes and hoovering. It never lasts long, though, and Mam always ultimately slips back into pole position on the chores front. Which means, for a fact, that she will not have a single minute before my birthday to even flick through the contents of
The Story of the Eye
. The birthday itself, unfortunately, is a different matter.

No one normally cares about my presents. I open them, pile them up in the corner near the green-topped flip bin, and then get ready to cringe at the cake, candles and chorus ceremony. Here Fiona will have made something dry, hard and chocolatey in Home Ec, which will be loaded with all fourteen candles, and there’ll be whoops and cheers, and even Dad, head out of his hands for long enough, will join in the chorus. So I’m as surprised as anyone when I see Susan rifling through the pile, flicking through
The Zen of Physics
and then settling on
the Eye
. Her face drops in seconds. She does the opposite of the O’Culigeen face, which is all smiley, licky-lipped and excited. Hers, instead, is a bit sicky. She passes it to Sarah, who also does the anti-O’Culigeen face, but reads even more furiously than Susan. At this stage Mam is up on her feet and fussing around Dad, making sure he’s got sugar for his tea, and a fork for his cake – although he never uses it, and prefers to just ram the whole slice, no matter the size, right through the wide open mouth until the front of the piece hits the back of his throat and his lips close down over his fingers.

Sarah, the big cow, after five or six pages, has read enough, and promptly hands the book over to Dad. Now Dad – who has been out selling office furniture all day, all week and all his life it seems, and has barely enough energy to keep his eyes open at teatime – often gives the impression of being a man who is out of the loop on his home turf. Though he jokes, at parties, with a glass in his hand and a contented smile playing on his lips, about being surrounded by women and being all on his own in a female fortress, in other quieter moments, when he has no one to impress, this is in fact exactly what it seems like for him. He’ll often walk in the door, just as everyone’s scraping through the last bit of skin on the rice pudding bowl, and give us this one big collective look that says, Who the feck are yiz all!? Or else he’ll play the poor-me card, when he finds himself a stranger to his own children in thoughts, words and deeds, and he’ll say, mock hurt, Oh yes, tell your mother everything and tell me nothing! As if Sarah and Siobhan are going to jump on his lap the moment they reach the table and say, Guess which fella I snogged in Blinkers last night?

So, naturally, when he reads a couple of pages of my birthday present, he nearly has a seizure. I will discover later, when I fish it out from underneath the gravy-stained muck in the grey garden bin, that the book is unsparing in detail. Typical O’Culigeen, the big filthy pervert, to fall in love with a tale that’s non-stop mickey action. I get a particular chill when I read the bit about the priest getting strangled to death while he’s being friendly raped by the girl – I can’t help feeling that this is where O’Culigeen got the inspiration for his choking habit. I don’t know what pages exactly Dad landed on, but whether it was the mentaller being raped by the horny fella and girl together, or the gang bang in the drawing room, or the girl shoving a castrated testicle into her fanny, it is safe to say that this was not what he was expecting to read around my birthday table, and in front of a dry brown
chocolate sponge with blue candles and ‘Happy Birthday Jim’ written across it in pink icing.

The biggest surprise, however, is that he doesn’t go bonkers. He doesn’t lash out at me, or chase me around the table and up the stairs (although I’ve sneakily pushed my chair five inches backwards and angled it away from him, just to give me a head start in case). No, this time, he simply looks up from the book, then slowly over at me. But instead of anger, his face is riven with sadness. He stands up, with book still in hand, and quietly leaves the table, head bowed. Like a man defeated. We all, me and the girls and Mam, pass glances to each other in silence, as if to acknowledge that we have witnessed a man who has truly, and literally, buckled under the burden of the last straw.

Now, the girls have theories about this. And later, much later, if they’re feeling a bit mean, and thoughtless, and if they’re tracing aloud the arc of Dad’s illness, and pinpointing the moment when he finally gave up on life, when he began to sink back into the sadness of sickness, they will point to this moment. Him, walking out of the kitchen, clutching a copy of
The Story of the Eye
, with his heart broken, his wife ignored, his daughters alienated, and his son a sex-obsessed nutjob.