Demons (2 page)

roofed in grey-brown corrugated iron, well
over one

hundred years old.

Outside, gravestones rose to life from a
lawn of dry trimmed grass, the last cold beds of Irish men and
women (and their children) who came to build the railway, north to
south. They came to this small, very far-away country from another,
equally small and distant.

Many of the present-day Irish community, our
friends (some of whom were probably descendants of the navvies),
had turned out to farewell Gran.

This wasn’t our first visit to St Brigid’s.
We had come a couple of days before, Mum, Dad and me, to suss the
place out. It was Gran’s wish to be buried here, among the Bradys,
Callaghans, Faheys, Fitzgibbons, Hallorans, Keenans, Kennedys and
Quigleys. Not that Gran knew any of them, not personally, but the
names were familiar. They were names she’d grown up with back
home.

Actually, it was our third visit. Until Mum
reminded me, I’d forgotten that we’d come here when I was little,
to Mass one Sunday, a change from our regular routine. What I
hadn’t realised was that Gran had fallen in love with the place
then, had left instructions in her last will and testament to be
buried here.

I don’t know how she wangled it. I thought
people weren’t allowed to be buried in a cemetery so far from where
they lived. But then, Gran had already come such a long way that
maybe she got some special dispensation for her troubles.

Anyway, that concern seemed trivial now.

Piercing gold flames burnt around Gran’s
coffin, long

yellow candle-fingers dripping wax onto a
half dozen tall, slim, rimu candlesticks. One at her head, one
at

her feet, two at either side. The
candlelight flickered

back from the dark, polished wood; it was
mirrored in the small but vibrant Dublin-made stained glass windows
of the sanctuary. As the priest moved about the altar (Father
‘Missionary’ Brown had been another one of Gran’s demands - she had
met him at some fundraiser or other and luckily he’d been
available) the light fluttered in and out of the gold-woven thread
of his gaudy vestments, their bright, incongruous Indian colours
rippling to tunes played by mournful Irish fiddles.

The Foggy
Dew
.

The Wild Rose of the
Mountain
.

The
(oh so sad, it always made me cry)
Derry Air
.

All the tunes Gran especially loved.

And the words she also
loved. The familiar words of the Catholic Mass. All of its prayers,
chants, ingrained responses. They shifted me into a kind of trance,
too, helped me to be sure of what to say when
really
knowing what to say was
actually impossible.

And the incense! Puffs of heavy sweet smoke
choked the little church and drifted outside. Anyone driving past
might have thought we were on the point of announcing a new Pope;
they might equally have called the fire brigade, or the drugs
squad.

Our lungs were filled. Those lungs that were
still rising and falling, keeping us breathing, keeping us alive.
Gran, on the other hand, was lifeless, dead. No words or songs or
smells could change that sharp-edged fact.

‘
Born to New Life,’ intoned
Father Brown. ‘Our

sister is with Christ now and with the
saints of his

Holy and Universal Church.’

At that moment it all
sounded,
felt
, so
old-

fashioned, so
non
-universal (and
catholic with a small

‘c’
means
universal). It was certainly
different from the everyday Sunday Mass I was used to. If I was on
the outside looking in, I guess it would have seemed to me as if
we’d warped back in time, a hundred years maybe, or even just
thirty or forty.

I was reminded of something Mum had told me
about the masses they used to have when she was little. They were
still said in Latin then and, from the way she had described them,
they reminded me of Gran’s requiem. There were still places you
could go to for a Latin mass, if you wanted to. In fact, Mum had
said they were becoming rather retro-chic.

‘
Would you go to a Latin
Mass?’ I asked her.

‘
Not on your life,’ she
said.

At least the words of Gran’s mass were said
in English, not in Latin or in Gaelic (which Gran spoke). I
wouldn’t have understood either.

If there
had
been any people
around unconnected with the funeral, what would they have thought,
seeing us emerge from the church holding Gran’s coffin
shoulder-high (it was surprisingly heavy, my neck and right
shoulder hurt for days afterwards), dressed and behaving like a
procession from some medieval painting of the Dance of
Death?

Should I have cared? It
was Gran and what
she
wanted that mattered most, not what I thought about it. Yet I
couldn’t help feeling a sense of embarrassment and exposure.
What
would
passers-by have thought? Poor deluded souls, perhaps? All
this ceremony, for
what
?

A song off one of Dad’s old vinyl records
came into my head:

Dead and gone

Life’s a song

So sing it while you
can
.

An extract from Chris’s notebook

Typically, I did some research.

Catholic
comes from the ancient Greek word
katholikos
. This is the
masculine version, although it comes in feminine and neuter forms,
too. But the masculine seems the most appropriate given the male
makeup of the Catholic Church’s leadership. Ironically ‘catholic’
means ‘comprehensive’ or ‘Universal.’

A person of ‘catholic tastes’ is someone
interested in many things. In reality, (and this is my
interpretation, not the words of the online encyclopaedia I used
for my research) Catholics have narrow interests and are
narrow-minded. A Catholic, in the sense of a person of that
religious persuasion, is a limited being, bound by rules and
regulations, making their church’s concept of ‘free will’ seem a
bit like a humourless joke.

If I did ever happen to see that girl again
and had the nous to talk to her, would that mean I’d find her
humourless and her interests narrow and narrow-minded? How much
would I be bothered if that turned out to be the case? Actually,
probably a lot.

Good thing then that I wouldn’t have to
worry about us ever meeting.

A woman of colour

It wasn’t my idea to wear gothic black to
Gran’s funeral. I didn’t want to. I buckled to pressure.

Nothing heavy mind you, in fact it was
probably only

in my own head that I felt any pressure, a
sensitivity to other people’s emotions and expectations more

than anything else. I didn’t want to upset
anyone. I didn’t want to get upset.

Even though I was fifteen (just) at the
time, I still

mostly did what Mum and Dad asked me to.
Strange, given that they were pretty stroppy, independent,
assertive people themselves. They wouldn’t have expected me to be
so compliant. So why was I, you ask? Habit? Afraid of hurting their
feelings? I was an only child. A couple of years earlier I’d found
out they hadn’t wanted any more kids. They’d stopped at me. Perhaps
I didn’t want them to be disappointed in the only one they did
have.

Still, I would have preferred to see Gran
off in emerald green. Black wasn’t right for her. She was a person
who loved colours. I knew that because of what she’d once told me
about her rosary beads.

‘The turning points in people’s lives are
like the beads on this handmade rosary of mine,’ she’d said. ‘Each
bead is different, unique. Each is important in its own way because
each is a milestone on the road to God. Remember that Andrea.’

‘
Yes Gran.’

I don’t think it would
have occurred to me to disagree with her either, not then and not
at any time actually, but if I
had
thought of doing so I would nevertheless have
kept any rebellious ideas to myself. Gran was usually sweetness and
light, lovely, but if you seriously crossed her she could be as
sharp as tacks. A scary matriarch.

‘
The colours are pretty,
too,’ I said.

‘
Just like people’s lives,’
said Gran. ‘As they should be.’

‘
Pretty?’ I
asked.

‘
Full of colour,’ she said,
rather surprisingly.

‘Remember that.’

I did.

Forever

Here is an example of my
thinking way too much about religion.

Was being small-c catholic
close to, or very different from, being big-C Catholic, a member of
(big capitals) THE CHURCH OF ROME? Being
catholic
means you embrace
everything, the world, the stars, the universe, in time and out of
time.

What if the
Catholic Church
was
nothing more than just another institution - ‘God-begun, man-run’,
as Mum often said - and, as with any human institution, subject to
laws of destruction and decay? And if the Catholic Church could
die, how close to death was it? And, if it died, what about the
small matter of its central teaching about life after death, life
everlasting, our eternal place in space? Would that still hold true
or would the possibility of Heaven (which at home we called the
Happy-Forever-After place) die with the Church?

Did any of these questions
matter? Did they
bother
anyone much, Catholics included? I can’t speak
for anyone else. All I can say is that they mattered to me.
They
bothered
me.
Sometimes my head got tired of the roundabout way in which all
those bothersome thoughts swam around in it.

The notion of the Happy-Forever-After place
had been in my head so long I couldn’t shake it out, even when I
got the chance.

Contradictions

When I was twelve, going on thirteen, and it
was time

for me to move to high school Mum and Dad
said I could chose whether I went to Catholic St Anselm’s,

girls only and way across town, or the
nearest State

school, mixed gender and much closer to
home.

I couldn’t believe it at
first.
Choose
!

‘
You’re old enough now to
start making up your own mind about these things,’ said
Mum.

I guessed she was talking about more than
just which school I went to. It was as if there was a hidden
current flowing beneath her words. I could sense the cool, freeing
rush of water without actually sighting it

‘
What
things
?’ I asked, to make it clear.

‘
We aren’t going to insist
you believe what we believe, not when you can think for yourself,’
said Dad. ‘That’s something we decided years ago.’

I shouldn’t really have
been too surprised but I did start to feel uneasy, as if I was a
life raft that was just about to be untied from the boat it had
always been attached to. What
was
going on?

‘
We promised we’d bring you
up Catholic,’ said Mum.

‘
When you were baptised,’
Dad added. ‘And we’ve done the best we can, given the sort of
people we are. It’s going to be up to you now. What you decide for
yourself to be and what to believe in.’

Learning to pray

I went to the local Catholic primary and
intermediate school just down the road from where we lived. One
hundred and ninety-two kids, six and a half teachers, and a priest
who lived in the presbytery across the playground, an older man
named Father Brady. Some

of the meaner kids laughed behind his back
and called

him Farter Brady.

Mum had gone to my school too, when she was
a

kid. Those days, she said, it was run by
nuns, fierce, red-faced women, as she described them, who wore

dark habits encircled by wide black belts
into which

they poked their heavy, wooden crucifixes,
like swords. She still remembered their names and would recite them
like a litany. Sister Joan, Sister Carmel, Sister John Bosco,
Sister Mary, Sister Bernadette, Sister Andrew. They were not only
fierce, said Mum, they were also tougher and meaner than most of
the toughest, meanest kids. They belted kids including Mum once
when she’d been only a tiny bit naughty.

Mum’s description made me feel scared of
them even though I’d never met them and never would. Because the
days of the black-belt nuns were over. They’d all got old, retired,
gone mad (according to Mum, who still felt bitter about the
treatment she’d received from them) or died. There were hardly any
new nun recruits, not surprisingly. The school didn’t have any nun
teachers at all when I was there.

I used to think my school was a pretty
normal, everyday, common-garden school. I believed that every kid,
no matter which school they went to, got taught how to pray.

Young Ms. Proctor taught us religion,
including prayer formation. One day she started teaching us the
rosary. She was very pleased when I said I already knew all about
it. We prayed it at home, I explained. How many families did that
anymore these days, she said. Not many, if any. She must have
thought I was going to be a star student. I liked Ms Proctor a lot
and was very sorry that, not long afterwards, I had to let her
down.