Demons (8 page)

A little bit like Gran, I’d moved on.

Like Gran, I had no intention of coming, or
going, back.

STRANGE MEETING

‘When did you get back?’ I ask.

‘
Couple of weeks
ago.’

‘
That all?’

‘
Haven’t got used to the
place yet.’

‘
Course not. Must be really
strange.’

There’s a pause. Chris hurries to fill it,
anxious maybe that otherwise I’ll lose interest in him.

‘
Got time for a coffee?
Something to eat?’

‘
Sure,’ I say. ‘I’m a free
agent. I’m free.’

‘
My shout.’

‘
I’m a big girl now,
remember.’

‘
Irish independence. How
could I forget?’

We cross the tram tracks, head down the
Boulevard.

‘
You won’t have had the
time to find the best eateries,’ I say. ‘There’s a really good
coffee shop near the Arts Centre. They do a mean Greek salad, too.
The feta’s the real thing. Unless of course you’re sick of all
that?’

‘
Sounds perfect,’ says
Chris. ‘Hey, and thanks for not just walking away, even if you are
a free agent.’

I look sideways at him as we walk, thinking,
I could never ‘just walk away’ from you.

‘
I only meant that uni’s
finished for good,’ I say, at the same time contemplating, what is
freedom really?

Is anyone ever truly free?

I’d believed I was, but now look at me. A
slave to memories, like other people are to instant coffee.

Our place

Mum and Dad had given me the choice of
school, so I

made it. And then, high on the freedom
they’d

presented me with, I made another decision
for myself.

The straw that broke the camel’s back
landed, I think, the day I had a conversation with our newish and
much younger parish priest, Father Wright, still on the right side
of thirty, a marathon runner, active in keeping (or trying to keep)
young people in the Church and kind to the elderly. Apparently he
did quite a good funeral, Gran had whispered to me one Sunday and
she ought to have known, having been to not a few funerals of older
friends she’d made since she’d lived here. Father Wright didn’t end
up being right enough for her funeral though.

He’d been our parish priest for about a
year. I still missed Father Brady. I’d come to realise that his
personality had been a bit like Gran’s, old school but also
open-minded and contrary.

I hadn’t twigged this until Mum pointed it
out to me one day. She showed me a small notice in our church
newsletter advertising a meeting of the ‘Women Knowing Our Place’
group.

‘
So?’ I asked, not
understanding its significance. It was there most
months.

‘
Other parish priests
refuse to include these notices,’ she said.

‘
Do they. Why?’

‘
Because the Bishop hasn’t
given his blessing to the group. They’re too radical, that’s why,
too questioning.’

‘
Are they?’ I said, adding
a little glibly. ‘You should be a member if questioning’s what
they’re into.’

Mum had the grace to look caught out. ‘I
am,’ she said.

‘
I didn’t know! Since
when?’

‘
Oh, for the last few
years. Once every couple of months or so I pop along to a meeting
or a liturgy.’

‘
You’ve kept that a
secret,’ I said. ‘And here I was thinking you and Dad had gone off
the boil in your old age.’

True, Dad had been to the social justice
meeting last year to discuss the Pope’s letter but it had been a
one-off as far as I knew, and it hadn’t sounded radical stuff.

‘
They’re hardly into street
marching,’ said Mum. ‘Anyway, I thought you preferred us quiet and
docile?’

‘
It’s not as if you could
drag me along with you, not these days, not anymore,’ I said,
wondering how many more things they were into than they were
letting on about.

‘
It’s thanks to you that I
joined them,’ said Mum.

‘
Thanks to me!’

‘
Yes, you. And Gran,
believe it or not. I always remember when you played priests and
Gran backed you up. It got me thinking more critically about the
role of women in the Church. Anyway, you’re welcome to come along
to a meeting with me, if you want to,’ said Mum. ‘Talk about
questioning!’

‘
I don’t think so,’ I said.
‘No way!’ I added emphatically.

After Father Wright took over, the
advertisement never appeared in our newsletter again.

‘
These young priests,’ said
Mum. ‘Some of them are so conservative. I don’t know why it’s that
way. It’s as if things have started to go backwards. We’ll be
having nothing but Latin Masses again if we’re not

careful.’

She said it almost as if she wasn’t too
concerned, but in my experience that often meant the exact
opposite.

Angling

‘So Andrea, how’re things at school?’

‘
OK Father.’

‘
Not missing all your
friends from primary days since you went your separate
ways?’

‘
I still sometimes see a
few of them,’ I exaggerated.

‘
Of course.’

Why was he asking? What was he leading up
to? Mum and Dad, chatting to other parishioners nearby, could hear
us. They were probably wondering, too.

‘
Besides, St Anselm’s an
all-girls school, it wouldn’t have been the same, it’s not what I
was used to,’ I added.

‘
You’ve got a point,’ he
said. ‘Although they do say that girls achieve better academically
if they’re cut off from boys.’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t let the boys bother
me,’ I said.

‘
Keep focused, that’s the
way to go,’ Father Wright said. ‘And at least we’re still seeing
you at Mass each Sunday.’

‘
Yes Father.’ Pretty
obvious really, what with me there talking to him.

‘
And the youth group. I’m
pleased you’re part of that, still. You impressed me last
week.’

It was true. I had. I had surprised even
me.

Youth Group

I’d been a member of the parish youth group
since it

began. I quite enjoyed the Youth Masses,
which had

cool music (‘happy-clappy,’ as I’d heard
some old people grizzle), as well as the pizza and games evenings.
Apart from a bit of gentle advice on the side, Father Brady had
given the youth leaders pretty much a free hand. But the truth was,
after Farther Wright arrived and took charge, I grew tired of
belonging. Dissatisfied. Father Wright’s mission was, he said, to
help us discover and reinvigorate our faith. Things became more
formal. Less fun and fewer games and more organised discussions but
not, as quickly became apparent, very much debate, certainly
nothing like the debates we’d had at school. I noticed that any
sign of that got nipped in the bud.

One night, a couple of months after Gran had
died, he gave us a question to talk about.

‘
Strong in faith. Yes or
No?’

To help us, Father Wright put on a CD by a
band I hadn’t heard of (luckily it wasn’t just me, no one else
seemed to have heard of them either) and played a track called
‘Losing my religion.’

‘
Why’s it like that?’ he
asked when the last note had faded away. ‘What’re the pressures
that are causing young people to abandon the church?’

To begin with, no one said
a word. We weren’t used to Q and A sessions and it seemed to me
like a trick question anyway. After all, it wasn’t as if
we’d
abandoned the
Church, otherwise we wouldn’t have been at the Youth Group meeting.
Would anyone other than me have thought of this possible (unvoiced)
answer? ‘Maybe it’s because of people like you, Father.’

The song had an impact on
me though. I realised it was true. Just like the singer of the song
I
was
in a
corner. The spotlight was on me. And it wasn’t only Father Wright
who had swung it onto me but Gran

and my parents and now it was me, myself and
I.

At first I’d been annoyed when Father Wright
asked his question. I would have preferred to talk about death,
Gran’s death. What it meant.

Bigger, more important, questions than the
one he’d picked.

Why did people have to die?

What happened to them afterwards?

Where did they go, really go? If not to a
Happy-Forever-After place, then where?

Anywhere? Nowhere?

Out of a kind of empty blueness I was scared
to realise that I didn’t believe any of it anymore. It had all
become too much like one of Dad’s long ago bedtime stories about
leprechauns and their shimmering rainbow pots of gold. Whenever the
story came to an end there was no gold at the end of the rainbow
after all or, if there was, it turned out to be an illusion that
vanished when the rain stopped. God’s finger was never going to
come into contact with mine.

The silence was starting to sound too loud,
so I said what I was thinking. ‘Perhaps young people leave the
Church because they’re scared that what they’ve been taught to
believe in isn’t true anymore.’

The other youth group members looked
seriously worried as Father Wright pondered this.

‘
That’s deep Andrea,’ he
said to me. ‘Subtle. I have to admit it wasn’t an answer I’d
expected. I’d predicted some of you might say a sense of anger or
frustration or dislike of so-called Church rules. Maybe outside
influences or young people just not caring enough anymore or caring
too much about

other things. But, the fear factor, that’s
an interesting

slant on things. I’d like to ponder on that
a little more. Perhaps we all should, before we meet again. And
next time we can try to unravel the knot a little more. Thank you
Andrea.’

Why was he
thanking
me? Hadn’t he
understood properly what I’d said? Hadn’t he realised that I was
talking about myself?

At least Father Wright hadn’t yet ruled out
pizza on youth group nights and now he decided it was time for
those. So my last Youth Group meeting didn’t end on a completely
sour note.

Sticking to the rules

I’d asked Mum and Dad why
they carried on going to Mass, especially when they didn’t always
stick -
hadn’t
always stuck - to the rules. Why pretend they believed in the
Church that wrote the rulebook?

‘
We do believe in it,’ said
Dad. ‘We’re not pretending. We might take the mickey out of it from
time to time but that doesn’t mean anything.’

‘
Did you ever tell Father
Brady or Father Wright that you had only one child by deliberate
choice,’ I asked him.

‘
How did . . .?

‘
I told her,’ said
Mum.

‘
Well, no,’ said Dad, ‘but
that wasn’t any of their business.’

‘
Even if one of them had
asked you?’

‘
Of course. Still nothing
to do with them.’

‘
They might have said it
was.’

‘
Tough,’ said
Dad.

‘
Or gay rights?’ I
said.

‘
The Church supports gay
rights,’ said Dad.

‘
Not if they go the whole
way,’ I said.

‘
No, but . . .’

‘
Look at it this way,’ Mum
interrupted, ‘Belief in God isn’t necessarily the same as belief in
the Church or in priests. They’re human too and fallible. Our
belief in God has to be something much deeper than any institution.
That’s where it all starts. In yourself.’

‘
But how
can you
know
?’ I
asked.

‘
You can’t,’ said Dad.
‘That’s why our belief is called faith, because faith is something
you hold on to despite a lack of proof. To be honest it’s what
helped me all those years ago when everyone and everything back
home was being blown up and destroyed.’

I mulled that over.

‘
Wouldn’t
that have made it
harder
to believe in God?’ I asked.

‘
I guess it was for some
people,’ Dad agreed. ‘Not in my case though. Gave me something to
hope for. I held onto the faith because I wanted to.’

‘
Ever since you’ve lived
here you’ve been involved in all sorts of protests,’ I reminded
him. ‘Rallies, marches, meetings. How’s that any different from
what you left behind?’

‘
Of
course it’s different,’ said Dad. ‘Coming to New Zealand didn’t
mean I was trying to escape but here you
could
protest without being scared
of getting a rubber bullet in your back or getting thrown into
gaol. Well, for the most part,’ he added, remembering the turning
point year when he and Mum had ended up in gaol overnight. ‘And
protests are a sign of hope in the world even if people are divided
about the issues. Faith, hope and love. The three most important
things. More important than any rule books.’

‘
So why did you tell me I
had to make up my own mind about what I believe,’ I said to them.
‘If you believe, why stop encouraging me?’

I knew it wasn’t as simple as that even
though at

the start I had badly wanted it to be.