Demons (3 page)

The family rosary

Unless you’re a Catholic you probably have
no idea what rosary beads are or what you are supposed to do

with them.

A brief lesson,
a la
Ms Proctor and
Gran.

A rosary is a string of prayer beads divided
into five groups. Each group has eleven beads, a lone bead followed
by a clutch of ten. There are four prayer cycles to choose from so
you could, if you were a saint or in a masochistic mood, recite the
rosary four times in four different ways. Each cycle is called a
‘mystery.’ They are: The Joyful Mysteries, The Sorrowful, The
Glorious and The Mysteries of Light. The nicest rosaries look like
jewellery. Like necklaces, with pendant crosses hanging from a main
circle.

Praying the rosary was a bit like swaying to
trance music, I discovered. More about that soon.

Gran was a big influence on me.

Before I even started school Gran insisted
that we kneel down to say the rosary aloud every night at home,
before I went to bed. ‘So if you die in the night, you’ll be
received by God, purified,’ she said.

Mum and Dad went along
with Gran (after all, once a year or so Father Brady exhorted
parishioners to pray the rosary and Mum and Dad
had
promised to bring me up in the
Catholic faith, so . . .) but they carried on like big kids,
giggling behind their hands, which made me giggle a little too,
even though I didn’t really understand what was so funny. My knees
hurt and that wasn’t funny at all.

Gran tried to ignore the stifled laughter,
her gaze fixed ahead as we knelt on the lounge floor. Ignoring us
was, as far as she was concerned, a necessary

compromise. Having won the battle to make us
recite her all-time favourite prayer she didn’t feel she could
complain too much if we didn’t meet her own

prayerful high standards.

When I turned five Gran gave me a rosary of
my own.

At first I was confused. I
saw in front of me a cluster of sapphire coloured beads nesting in
cotton wool. I made the mistake of thinking it
was
a necklace. I draped them over
my head before I learned my mistake.

Before Gran pointed it out.

She quickly leaned over
and removed them from around my neck. Luckily, she wasn’t angry, or
sharp, only firm.
Very
firm.

‘
They’re for praying,
Andrea McNamara, not preening.’

Later on, a funny thing happened. Funny in
that no one explained why. During my first year at school, after
I’d already boasted to Ms Proctor about my rosary-saying skills, we
stopped reciting it at home. Ms Proctor was disappointed when she
found out. She didn’t voice her disappointment but I was sure she
looked betrayed by her fallen star.

‘
Why aren’t we saying the
rosary anymore?’ I asked Mum and Dad.

‘
We didn’t think we were
doing it justice,’ replied Mum.

I’d heard the word justice many times before
(I’ll tell you why in a moment) and I already had my own idea of
what it meant, but somehow it didn’t seem to fit in with not
praying the rosary together anymore.

‘
I think we’d be more
serious about it if we said it to ourselves,’ Dad added, also not
very

convincingly.

For a few days I tired saying it by myself
but it was too difficult for a not-yet-seven year old to

sustain. I sometimes made it to the end of a
whole

decade, but more often than not I’d give up
after only eight or nine Hail Marys.

However, for a long time I kept those
sapphire beads, kept them safe in their nest.

An extract from Chris’s notebook

Dear Andrea

I never really thought I’d be seeing you
again so when I did, a short/long three years later, I’d convinced
myself I’d forgotten all about you. Walking into that classroom and
being face to face with you, it was as if the solid ground fell
away from under me and I was left suspended in emptiness, out of
orbit or, like the Greek hero Odysseus in his journeys, being
sucked into Charybdis’ whirlpool, drugged and deliciously
abandoned, like him, in the land of the Lotus-Eaters.

If I believed in miracles I would have
called this chance meeting one. Instead, I called it fate.

After three years, I found out on the first
day that your name was Andrea.

Turning points

The day I arrived on the scene was a turning
point, for Gran if not for me. I don’t remember it of course. Does
anyone?

But I’m told it was on March 17, St
Patrick’s Day. What a coincidence! Mum and Dad couldn’t have timed
it better. St Patrick is the patron saint of Catholic Ireland,
where my grandmother came from and where my Dad was born.

I was Gran’s first and only grandchild, the
one she thought she would never have.

She blessed God and praised my parents, I
think

in that order. And, afterwards, for her to
go on living

in this strange land was never quite so bad,
or strange, again.

I was given all the credit but wasn’t
responsible for any of it.

Working backwards, I was
actually
conceived
in a turning point year, the year in which the South African
rugby team, the Springboks, came and went and New Zealand changed
forever. Mum and Dad met at an anti-tour march. Anti-tour,
anti-apartheid. Dad, aged twenty-six, had come out here to settle,
leaving the so-called Irish Troubles behind. Mum, at thirty, was
ready to settle down.

They were both what you might call
professional protestors. Mum since uni days, and Dad since forever
because, being born and bred in Northern Ireland, he was, as he
described it himself, ‘bottle-fed on the milk of rebellion’.

The day my parents met they were both
wearing motorcycle helmets to ward off the long batons of the
police, they had sewn peace symbol patches onto their jackets and
were carrying opposite ends of the same banner. They were on the
front line and, the following day, on the front page of the
newspaper, battered, bruised and bloodied but unbowed.

Yes, everything changed
that year. For the country and for them, personally. They were
felled by police batons and afterwards fell in love, got married
and, ten months later, hey presto,
moi
.

Daughter of protestors for social, political
and racial justice. Granddaughter of traditional Irish

Catholic matriarch and daughter of Catholic
parents. Good Catholic Girl. Yet even though I hardly ever rocked
the boat, either as a child or as an early

teenager, I’m sure that rebel thoughts had
always run

through my head. I mean, how could they not?
I was

genetically programmed
to
be
a rebel
but, during the

first dozen or more years
of my life, what
sort
of a rebel remained a mystery. I was destined to surprise
everyone, including myself.

Photo opportunity

Funny how one thing leads to another.

Mum and Dad kept a photo album with
clippings about the various justice issues in which they were
interested and in which they had been involved. Everything from the
anti-tour demos to keeping New Zealand nuclear free, from gay
rights to land grievances. The only photo of them in the justice
context was that first one. A few years after it was taken it
appeared (with their permission) in a high school textbook. When
some local teachers,

who knew Mum and Dad, saw
it they invited them to take part in classroom discussions. They
agreed. I guess they saw it as an opportunity for evangelising.
Later on, in new editions of the book, Mum and Dad were even quoted
describing their experience of the events. They didn’t exactly
become famous, but they did become
known
.

Rebel acts

At age thirteen I opted for the State school
over the Catholic all-girls’ college.

At age fifteen, the year Gran died, I had a
major crisis of belief and decided to abandon my religious
upbringing and beliefs.

At age seventeen, Year 13, my last year at
school, I met Chris.

That final year, three of the Mysteries, the
joyful,

glorious and the mysteries of light, were
all rolled

into one.

I’ll take you there, soon. But, first, none
of these acts of rebellion might have happened if it wasn’t for the
game I played when I was small.

Priestly rites/rights

When I was seven I wanted
badly, desperately,
sincerely
to be a priest. Other kids my age at Mass got
bored quickly but for some reason, I never did. Maybe it was
because I fell in love with the mystery and drama of it all, the
colours, the words, the actions. Too much so, perhaps. I’m sure
that was why, when Mum and Dad so unexpectedly untied the rope that
had held me fast to them I felt, and fell, adrift.

Because Dad was a great storyteller I was
already well programmed to like stories. A lot of the gospels that
Father Brady read each week had stories in them, called parables.
And what happened at the Mass was a kind of storytelling in
itself.

Some masses were extra special. Easter Mass
when all the lights were switched off and everyone held candles.
Christmas Midnight Mass, with its smell of Christmas lilies, its
carol singing and the moist piece of Christmas cake handed out to
everyone when it was all over.

As I’ve said, our parish priest Father Brady
was quite an old man. He did everything slowly and reverently but
his sermons were as short as he was, and sometimes even funny. He
didn’t ignore the kids at Mass either. He tried talking to us using
words we understood.

When I was seven I wanted to be like him (in
all ways except old). Already when I was seven, I didn’t just want
to be part of the mystery and the magic, I

wanted to
be
the mystery and the
magic. Not to

mention that saying Mass standing up as if
on a stage

was also a lot more fun than saying the
rosary on my knees.

Mum and Dad but, curiously, not Gran,
laughed. Big joke, Andrea. They didn’t seem to understand that I
was as serious about becoming a priest as only a seven year old can
be. In other words, deadly.

‘
Only men can become
Catholic priests,’ said Mum. ‘You know that.’

‘
Why?’

‘
It’s a mystery to me why
they’d want to,’ said Dad, giving Mum a significant cuddle.
‘Whatever the reasons, they miss out on life’s good
things.’

I had no idea at all what he meant.

Gran did. ‘Don’t talk like that,’ she said
to him. ‘Priests are called to a Higher Good.’

‘
They’re welcome to it,’
said Dad. ‘All due respect to them, of course.’

‘
Leave the girl alone in
any case,’ said Gran. ‘She can play at being priests,
surely?’

‘
Of course,’ said Mum
surprised. ‘If she wants to.’

I did.

Gran helped me get the things I needed.

She transformed an ordinary cardboard
apple

box into a golden tabernacle for the Holy of
Holies, turning its side flaps into doors, which I ‘unlocked’ with
an old key discovered in the back of a drawer.

Gran extracted a thin card from one of Dad’s
as yet unopened birthday shirts, drew and cut out a chalice shape,
as well as a big round host.

Christ’s blood and body.

Bright priestly vestments - green, purple,
red (not white I decided, too boring) - were hanks of material

rescued from the St Vincent de Paul rag bag,
chopped

to my size with Gran’s hefty scissors and
draped over

my skinny shoulders.

I couldn’t read very well yet so I made up
some of the words, while others I knew by rote from all the Masses
I’d already attended. The actions I had by heart too: lifting the
host and chalice, presenting them to the congregation, bowing and
kneeling, kissing the altar, distributing communion.

And the Eucharist.
Where
it
happened.
Transubstantiation
. The miracle at
the heart of every Mass when the priest changed the substance of
ordinary bread and wine into the
real
body and blood of
Christ.

Transformation. An
instance of seemingly magical, inexplicable change. That was the
whole point of being a priest and saying Mass. I loved being able
to
do
it.

Mum and Dad and Gran lined up to receive the
hosts, more small round circles cut from cardboard, or sometimes
pieces of white bread whose flabby dough I had squashed
flat-as-flat with the palm of my hand, pressing out rounds with a
small smooth-edged biscuit cutter. Dad almost choked on a piece
once. I made them come back for seconds, otherwise it looked as if
there were hardly any people in my

congregation. When they got tired of it, I
fed my teddy bears and dolls, as well as imaginary worshipers. Not
quite the same as the real thing, but.

‘
Why
can’t
girls be priests?’ I persisted.

‘
That’s the rules,’ said
Dad. ‘Men only.’

‘
It’s a silly rule,’ said
Mum, maybe taking her

cue from Gran or (and this
was more likely) letting the protesting side of her nature take
over from the Catholic. After all, it
was
her and Dad’s stronger
side.