The Holy City (12 page)

Leaving behind her a city in ruins.

A city now which is almost as ancient as the old Cullymore, as we approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. I have to say, though, that it's wonderful to have returned here after all this time, to have come back once more to the place of one's birth, one's own hometown, where, effectively, one was formed. Not that you'd recognise it — not in a million years. At least not at first. For, considering the speed of the changes that have taken place over the past two decades, it makes that of the sixties seem little more than a sluggish crawl.

It really all began with the advent of the prosperous nineties. Why, it might even be said that it's inaccurate to describe the place as a
town
any more, for what it is, more than anything now, is a satellite suburb of the city of Dublin. With people who, in my time, years ago, would have gone and had themselves a brain haemorrhage if you had dared to suggest that they travel more than twenty miles beyond their home to work now thinking nothing of a four-hour round trip daily. To toil in the many new basilicas of the future, the numerous financial hubs, call centres and silicon-chip compounds which have sprung up in the last decade or so — the brash fortresses of the prosperous new century.

Yes, ‘the good times' of old, they seem so remote — so down at heel and dowdy as to be almost downright embarrassing for many people — now about as welcome as my daddy, Stan Carberry, turning up drunk at a Thornton society wedding. I have to say, though, in all honesty, with some small measure of wisdom at my disposal, the sagacity of age, call it what you will — that I largely tend to concur with this view. Even the Beatles seem to me somehow manufactured, their public image laughably contrived. With those incorrigibly gormless beaming smiles and semi-idiotic playground antics.

No, if you want ‘the good times', there is no better period in which to be alive. Nobody will bother you — you can more or less do whatever you like. Because the great thing is that — no one will
care.
You can rest assured there will be no intervention. It makes the assertions of sixties freedom look so childish. Why, you don't even have to leave your room. It's all right there before you on your computer screen, a virtual highway replete with infinite, intoxicating possibilities. Even for someone of my advanced years. Of course there are the usual complaints, most notably by members of my own generation. The — ha ha! — trendsetters of yesteryear.

Since moving to the Cottages I have heard nothing from them but a succession of dreary whines. Yes, since time immemorial, you can always rely on the over-sixty-fives. If you paid any serious attention to them, you'd probably be too afraid ever to bother even getting out of bed. For fear of being murdered or stabbed — by the hordes of drug addicts
and ex-mental-hospital crazies who purportedly roam the streets of our towns and cities.

All of it, as always, paranoid nonsense, of course.

By my reckoning, in fact, in my experience, I would have to say that never in its history has Ireland been a safer place. Or, for that matter, more contented with its lot. It's just age, I guess, as it always tends to be, and I daresay that, if I hadn't been so lucky in my life, I would probably have ended up the very same way.

If I hadn't been more fortunate than the great majority of the residents in these apartment buildings. The Cottages, as the complex is called, is a gated community of flats located near Barnageera village — not far from the Co. Dublin town of Rush, where St Catherine's Hospital is, in fact, situated — and which contains, unknown to the majority of the residents, a number of people similar to myself. Former patients of the hospital, that is, who, in the very same way as I, have been cured — but are still monitored, from time to time.

Although, to be honest, I am not aware of being watched or spied upon. There have been no prying eyes that I have identified, and I'm as happy and contented here as I think I really could possibly be. And for that, thanks I think, mainly, are due to another old friend from my hospital years — Mossie Phelan, great old trouper that he is. But who has been through his own share of trouble too, believe me. His own quota of social ostracism. He was accused of being a paedophile, you see — vilified and slandered to a quite appalling degree, really. And yes, it's him I have to thank for
my recent good fortune. For it was he, my old friend Mossie, who eventually made the scales disappear. Made them consummately fall from my eyes. To the point of embarrassment, actually, to be honest.

Which is ironic when you think that for that whole first year after he came to St Catherine's I had stubbornly refused to engage with the man, even to acknowledge his presence on the corridor.
Disgusting paedo,
I used to think, in exactly the same way as everyone else. Hanging's too good etc. etc. It was only when I got to know him and he began to tell me all about his experiences as a Catholic priest that I began to sit up and pay serious attention to the unfortunate man. With it soon becoming very plain indeed that Mossie Phelan was most certainly not a disgusting paedo and a damaged human being worthy of hanging but was extremely sincere and genuine in what he was saying.

And not only that — but also knew what he was talking about. And as far as he was concerned, I remember him telling me, it was not untrammelled hedonism or selfishness that was at the heart of the malaise of the modern world.

— No, he said, it's not that at all. It's religion, Christopher.

He went on then to describe himself as a born-again fundamentalist. But a fundamentalist atheist, not a Christian. Subsequently plying me with various tomes on the subject. Notably
The God Delusion
by one Richard Dawkins.

The great thing about it all, though, was that Mossie wasn't pushy. The way that he saw it — you could take them or leave them, his views on the subject. But he left you in no doubt as to his distaste for Christian dogma — that of Catholicism in particular. He was invigorated, he told me, by the Church's recent troubles, and derived great satisfaction from watching it teetering along helplessly as it went, pawing its way through this fast-altering epoch like some burlesque, bleary-eyed drunk.

— Collapsing, now a pathetic superannuated colossus, as we enter the new world.

It was this man and he alone who facilitated my entry into this ‘new time', enabled me to find a place in this bewilderingly changing world, side by side with my fellow human beings. Indeed who knows, without the assistance of Mossie Phelan, I might never have been in a position to vacate that old White Room, and find myself here in this fine apartment of bliss rediscovered. Lying here beside the charming Vesna Krapotnik every night, enjoying our own ‘good times' here in our very own little club, our lounge — womb of ecstasy, where I peruse my treasury nightly, and together we recite Stevenson's ‘Escape at Bedtime'. Ably assisted in our continued pursuit of ecstasy by the voice of Tony Bennett, a tasty daiquiri and, as always, a little puff on a Peter Stuyvesant
{the international passport to smoking pleasure).
Not forgetting, of course, my old friends the stars. Who, reliable as ever, twinkle beyond the blue-domed ceiling. As the pages of
A Child's
Garden of Verses
rise and slowly fall and I gaze into the eyes of my dearly beloved Vesna.

I will always remain eternally grateful to Mossie Phelan for all of his moral support in the past. For showing me things and never harbouring resentment for my offhand treatment of him in the beginning. Quite simply, without him, I don't think I would ever have survived. Most certainly, would never have reached the place where I am now — having a wife like Vesna and a love-nest quite as sumptuous as this.

I mean, who, back then, would ever have dreamed of owning not one but two state-of-the-art Bravia flatscreen plasmas. Not to mention the state-of-the-art paper-thin Macintosh computer that the authorities have generously donated to me. Which provide me with endless hours of compelling entertainment.

The young instructor — complete with tufty sixties beatnik beard — was even good enough to spend a long time giving me a Mac demonstration. So now I literally spend hours on the machine. For my generation, I would be inclined to suggest, I think it has taken the place of the old-time steam radio. Gone now are
Dear Frankie, Hospitals' Requests, Down the Country
and
Intermediate Girls' Hockey,
and in their place
Big Brother
and
Oprah
and
Celebrity Love Island
and
Makeover Special. Happy Househunters in the Sun
is a particular favourite of mine. As well, of course, as the many new websites one tends to discover almost daily.
Perfidia.com
is the one I continue to access on a regular basis, communicating with others who happen to be online
for the same reason as myself. People who've been hurt in a similar way, who've been on the receiving end of treachery in love, with people they have formerly adored — the very same as I had Vesna.

It used to pleasure me greatly, back in St Catherine's, joining with Mossie in denouncing Catholicism. I think it was only after meeting him
(Fucking God! Fucking Martin de Porres! Fucking love! Fucking Jerusalem!)
that I began to realise I was approaching a time when my emotional troubles would at last be behind me. In other words that, at last, I would be cured. Not only that but completely so.

Just as, later on, I came to see vividly that the very same conclusion could now be applied to the feelings I'd once harboured for a certain young fellow called Marcus Otoyo. It had been stupid of me, I now realised, ever to have dwelt for so long on the so-called ‘otherness' of his personality. To have ascribed all sorts of exceptional qualities to Marcus's nature, purportedly intense spiritual feelings which had existed nowhere except within the confines of my own suggestible imagination. What I came, more than anything, to conclude was that, in fact, what had been taking place with that seventeen-year-old boy was that I had been projecting my own needs and desires on to him. And was using both him and the textures and colours and beliefs of Catholicism to try and find a place, I suppose, a home for my own particular ‘excitable passions'.

For which, up until that point, I had found no parallel apart from the pages of James Joyce's novel. And which
now, when I think of, tends only to make me laugh. So adolescent does it seem, I mean. Especially when you consider that its author — who was the last word in vehemence — had eventually renounced that very faith, with some theatricality quite publicly disdaining it, after all his talk of ‘absolution', ‘restitution', of ‘tremblings' etc., of ‘myrde' and ‘lavender'.

Not to mention the ubiquitous ‘swooning souls'!

What's great about age is that you at last see things clearly. You review your life and what you see is the comedy. As you flush at the things you believed when you were young. When so replete are you with possibility that you'll tend to believe in almost anything that's available, and the more romantically impossible the better.

Appraising it now, in retrospect, it seems clear that the only reason Marcus Otoyo had been reading
A Portrait,
in fact, had had it in his possession at all, was because he had no choice — it being a prescribed text on his examination course at school.

After a few little chats in the hospital, it didn't take Mossie long to spot the problem.

— You're certainly more a natural Catholic than you would be a Protestant, Christopher, I would have to say, he told me, for a Protestant would have planned the whole thing rationally — as they always do, as it is in their make-up to do. You, on the other hand, capitulated almost entirely to your emotions. To longings, in fact, plainly evident in your unrealistic, would-be Joycean elevation of a mildly
interesting and reasonably intelligent but otherwise unremarkable adolescent. He was just an ordinary growing boy, C.J. You mythologised him: imagined him out of all existence, that's all. You're a hopeless romantic, to a ludicrous degree. There was nothing special about Marcus Otoyo, as you subsequently discovered. He was merely a diligent scholar with an admittedly fine singing voice but a very ordinary intelligence, even if he did display a certain facility with words in his letters and other writings. But you over-valued that too, I think, Christopher. Yes, you did. It too was no more remarkable than a lot of the musings of the average spiritually inclined youth. Disappointing, perhaps, but those are the facts. Which, of course, you understand now.

What a wonderful man Mossie Phelan was — and to think of how his intuition and cleverness had been wasted for so long on so much superstitious Catholic mumbo-jumbo, really: ascensions, miracles, transubstantiations, the mystical body, the communion of saints and all the rest of it.

It's hilarious, really it is. Hilarious, for sure, if it wasn't so — well, so damned embarrassing, really.

But it's all over now, and in the end that's, as always, all that matters.

I think if you were to ask me what the thing I most admire about modern life as it's lived in this the early part of the twenty-first century is it is the single simple fact that no one now would dare impinge on another's privacy. No one claims the right to interfere. Not like the old days when
one's life seemed to be lived under the shadow of omnipresent detectives, Pinkertons indeed — effectively one's neighbours. Of every hue and colour, from old ladies in housecoats to fat men in darkened bars. Everyone was watching, cupping hands and delivering judgements. Now that's ended. They don't care enough. About your business, the details of your private affairs. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that no one cares about anything any more. Gossip has died and a strange peaceful silence overhangs the Plaza, with the only interruption being the static of the rotating plasmas, but which no one is aware of as their presence is constant. While, under the awning, the host-heads continue to abide,
en famille,
passing wine across the table. It's like a clean breath has passed invisibly across the world. Effortlessly, it seems, ending generations of smalltown tittle-tattle, and with it all the concomitant hypocrisy.