The Little Red Chairs (4 page)

‘But you are sending an incendiary message … it’s the red rag to the Gallic bull,’ the priest says bluntly.

‘Ah,’ the doctor exclaims. Now he understands, he has grasped the nettle, he no longer sees through a glass darkly –
Sex Therapist
is the bogey.

‘Why not erase it!’ he says to his distraught interrogator.

Nothing could be simpler. He will have new cards printed, that will set down the rigorous disciplines and methods of his practice.

‘Hallelujah … the Bishop will sleep sound tonight,’ says Father Damien, much too cravenly.

‘We will all sleep sound tonight,’ the doctor replies as he wipes the spray from his lenses with a clean, dry handkerchief.

They are almost in agreement, except for one final hurdle. Father Damien envisages himself in the Bishop’s palace, in the drawing room, the Bishop with his icicle eyes and his pointed nose, the parish priest perspiring, and all the other priests on edge, grilling him. The important thing now is to get clarity on the difference between Catholic and Orthodox churches.

The doctor welcomes the question, admitting to differences and quasi-differences down the centuries that led to schisms and dualism, adding that many of them were a mere matter of interpretation, but scholars on both sides were reluctant to concede. As an example, he said that to one, God was essence and to the other, God was experience, but to both Plato was the thief of truth and Christ its messenger. He then glories in the insoluble
marriage between the churches, when in 1964, at Vatican II, Pope Paul VI met with Patriarch Athenagoras, to finally settle their differences, and proclaimed to the whole world, ‘Now we are breathing with both lungs.’ Rome, as he went on to say, was more empirical, orthodox more mystical, Hell was a spatial place to one and to the other it was the soul’s despair at the exclusion from the sight of God. For the mystical supper of communion, Rome have leavened bread or
zyme
, and for the orthodox, unleavened or
azyme
. Yet both churches could trace their roots back to Holy Scripture, when in AD 310, the Emperor Constantine saw the Chi-Ro sign in the sky, the XP signifying the first two letters of the Greek word for Christ. Henceforth he was directed to fight under the Christian standard, which he did, securing a victory over Maxentius and subsequently asking to be baptised. Proof of his conversion was that his remains were laid to rest, alongside the Twelve Apostles, in a sarcophagus, at Patmos, deeming him the Thirteenth Apostle.

At the mention of Patmos, Father Damien thinks of sunshine, turquoise-blue waters, cedar woods and the remains of the saints, snug under glass and gold, white satin tucked around their chins to disguise the shrivelled yellow of their skins, emanating Holiness. But he is shocked to hear that all those remains are gone, not a bone, not even a rib left, from centuries of war, looting, pillage and plunder.

‘What about relics?’ he says aghast.

‘What about relics!’ is the answer and they both sigh.

Father Damien is already wording his report for the Bishop and the Fathers. They will buy the matter of breathing with both lungs, bridling a bit at Hell being a spatial place to Rome and to the orthodox despair at the exclusion from the sight of God,
but Vatican II will be his trump card. He will keep Plato out of it. They will be intrigued to hear about Constantine’s remains alongside the Twelve Apostles. Constantine, who also had a vision of the Transfiguration at Mount Tabor, the same vision as revealed to the Apostles who followed Christ.

‘I am wondering …’ he says aloud and the doctor wonders for him and with him. It’s like this. He, Damien, would like an olive branch extended to the community. Suppose they hold a public meeting, not from the altar but say in the back room of TJ’s, where the faithful could fire questions and be given answers, clear up any grey areas that might persist.

‘You mean a Q & A,’ the doctor says enthusiastically. He is anxious to get acquainted with the local people because he intends to make Cloonoila his home, sensing in it that primal innocence, lost to most places in the world.

That clinches it for Father Damien. He has a sudden impulse to embrace the man, represses it, kneels down on the wet grass, reciting from the Creed –
God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, Consubstantial with the Father
. The doctor repeats the prayer in his own tongue, much to the edification of the little ratty dog who has momentarily quit his yapping.

Then they stand, wipe their knees, and with the camaraderie of men who have at last understood one another, begin to breathe, to the mantra of Pope Paul and Patriarch Athenagoras –
Now we are breathing with both lungs
.

The heavens opened, the rain came slanting and vengeful as they walked back in silence, puddles slopping about their feet. Near the promenade they come on Fidelma, the draper’s wife, all muffled up in grey raincoat with a squirrel collar, a wet sheen on her face.

‘What are you doing out on a rotten morning like this?’ Father Damien asks.

‘I love it … I love the rain,’ she says as she passes and the doctor acknowledges her with a regal bow.

‘Lovely woman … lovely Christian family,’ the priest says when she is out of hearing and they continue, buffeted this way and that by the raging storm.

At the car park, they find that both sets of windscreen wipers have been ripped off their cars and thrown on the ground and the priest’s new radio has been stolen.

‘Youths … nothing better to do,’ Father Damien says, as if he is responsible for the morals of the entire community. With pride, he hauls out a tiny cell phone and rings a garage in Sligo, where he has a contact. He listens, smiles, ends his call and recites in lofty incantation,
‘He will send his angels and they will gather.’

Sister Bonaventure

No fanfare, not even a reporter from the local newspaper and certainly no photographs, as the doctor believed that a person’s soul was stolen by the influence of a camera. So it was just a tasteful sign in black lettering, on white parchment, announcing that Dr Vladimir’s clinic would open on Tuesday 22 February. In smaller print it said
Holistic Healing in Eastern and Western Disciplines.

He was there almost a month, but still something of a stranger, a curiosity, glimpsed in the very early morning, his trouser legs rolled up, gathering stones from the river and on other mornings, he went with the shearers to gather seaweed for his massages and body wraps. Herbs and tinctures from China, India, Burma and Wales were despatched day by day and the postmistress, the town Sphinx, said that some of the stuff had a smell of cow dung.

He walked a lot and sometimes, after a long stretch, he sat on the bench over at Strand Hill, in his big overcoat, beside the letterbox that read
Poop Scoop
, sat there spouting verses in Latin as big waves came faithfully in. No one approached him in his reverie, until one day, Taig, an eager pupil, dared ask him whose poetry it was. He was told it was Ovid, a poet of the third century who had been exiled from Rome to the Black Sea. In his poems, he cursed and pleaded with those who had banished him, yet was always asking to be allowed home. So like Ovid, he too was a poet and an exile.

Fifi his landlady got to be familiar with his tastes, lamb or pork with red cabbage, which she bought in a jar from a supermarket, and crepes with different fillings, including a curd cheese with sugar. His wine was ordered from a vintner’s in Galway. At night, he pored over his medical journals and encyclopaedias and sometimes, very late, he went up into the woods with the big flash lamp to make phone calls. He had two cell phones, one for work and one that was private and in these late calls she often heard him shouting, up there in the woods, yet at other times laughing when talking to a comrade. He played a stringed instrument called the gusle and recited some of his poems on Sunday evenings in the front room, she being his only audience. Some he translated for her and she found them very macho, rigmarole stuff about bullets being slender and majestic and strapping wolves coming down from the hills. It was not like Yeats, no, not like Yeats’s wandering waters in the pools above Glencar.

Smoke rose from the chimney in his clinic and stacks of logs had been neatly piled in the front hall, yet no one had the courage to cross that door. In the end it was Sister Bonaventure who decided she would be the guinea pig. A nun, she had no fear of him and his Latin charm, prided herself on her free thinking, liberated as she was by the humane teaching of Pope John. John was her man. Yes, nuns, like everyone else, had to move with the times.

She and three other nuns now lived in one wing of the old convent, the major part having been sold off for a school, and as she put it, quoting from scripture,
The sparrow hath her house
and so they settled in. Faithfully each day, unless she happened to be gallivanting, she was able to get her school lunch for three euros, the same price as the children paid; meat or fish with a vegetable, potatoes, boiled or mashed and what more did anybody
want. She never drank. She had seen the harm and the woes that drink wreaked, families torn apart and farms auctioned off for half of nothing. So as to set a good example, she wore her total abstinence pioneer badge on her lapel. She no longer dressed in a nun’s habit, except for the veil, which she called her ‘bonnet’. She wore a navy skirt, navy jumper, black stockings and good strong black shoes for the journeys she made to isolated places, up by roads and bog roads, where she wouldn’t dare risk her little Mini, her chariot of freedom. The four nuns had their different duties, she doing charity work, visiting the sick, bringing Holy Communion in her wooden pix to those who were crippled and housebound. Sister Austin did the grounds and the gardens and Rosario took classes in Science and Geography, which meant that she was the most earnest. Poor Pius, who was the eldest, did the altars and the sacristy, helped the parish priest and the curate, laid out their vestments and lit the candles for Mass and benediction. Bonaventure loved her charity work, tireless at raising money for causes. She collected stamps. Always badgering people for stamps, especially from faraway places, which she then sold to a bureau in Dublin, using the money for a water scheme in East Africa, from where she received letters of profuse thanks and photographs of children with infectious smiles. She also made jams, which she sold at a car boot sale on Sundays. At first she was a bit of an oddity, with her nun’s veiling, standing behind a fit-up counter, but once people tasted the jams, which she put for them to sample, on tiny squares of water biscuit, business flourished. The ‘apogee’, as it was described in the local paper, was her marrow jam with chunks of crystallised ginger.

Her appointment was for eleven o’clock and all that morning she prayed that she was doing the right thing and not sullying
her body. She took extra care when she showered and with the big powder puff, dusted herself with lily of the valley talc, a gift from Mona at Christmas.

He answered the door himself and bowed as he welcomed her in. He was wearing a loose-fitting blue overall, which gave him the likeness of a monk. A fire blazed in the small upstairs grate of the waiting room and they paused to have a brief conversation, she saying there was nothing that seemed quite so vacant as an empty grate and he regretting that the chimney smoked, but that the builder assured him with a good coat of soot on the back breast, the smoke would travel upwards.

She halted before a glass cabinet, staring at all the medicines – drops in glass-stoppered bottles, blue jars, their insides silvered from the powders they were filled with, see-through bags with herbs and grasses, bits of bark and forked roots that reminded her of a picture in Rosario’s science book of the mandrake that shrieks when dug up. All of a sudden she felt uneasy. This was more incriminating than she had imagined.

The treatment room itself was a temple, lights so very dim and intriguing, and sacred music issued from the four corners. Out of the open mouths and empty eye sockets of wooden figures, gods and goddesses, plumes of light poured, gold one minute, then blue, then rose pink, at the touch of a tiny switch, which he held in his hand, the Magus, as the ex-Schoolmaster had called him.

He left her alone to undress, saying she could leave her panties on, if she wished, or he could give her a paper pair. She opted to leave her woollen on and then cautiously undressed, having to sit on a stool to roll down and remove her tights. She nearly fell off that stool twice, because of the way it swivelled. On a side bench
were two big saucepans, one fitted with an electric element to heat water and one with stones, a great mass of stones, smoothed to various sizes and shapes, smooth as pumice and tiny chinks of white marble.

She lay on her back, peeping through the slits of her almost closed eyes, for fear of any hanky panky. He looked like a devil, or maybe a Red Indian, because of a bandana that kept the hair out of his eyes. Yet warmth flowed from his hands when he touched her and sought out the various knots and nodules and cricks. When he leant on her chest and caused it to ease under his weight, she feared she might dissolve altogether. His hands were so capable and so far-reaching and it was as if he had more than two hands, so that gradually she felt herself giving in to it, with him persuading her to let go. He placed stones on the flab of her stomach, which he had not touched, and ran the sides of other stones along her veins, the heat just this side of burning, her insides warm and gooey and as a precaution, she uttered a quick ejaculation to her Corpus Christi and the Holy Innocents.