Priest

PRIEST

As they were driving by the ex-priest's house Jerome's Da lifted his finger from the steering wheel and he pointed, said, 'That fella's on the way out, they're saying.'
Jerome turned in his seat, saw a foggy greenish hover of light behind the window, almost like a condensation coming from within: his dying breath, Jerome decided, and shivered.
'Riddled, he is,' his Da said. 'They're moving him tonight. Cancer.'
The ex-priest drove a taxi: that's how Jerome knew him; he'd get a lift with him half-day Wednesdays, when the GAA and football teams had training, and the rest could take the afternoon off. That hacking cough out of him had sounded like Da's saw zooming in soaked wood. Jerome would hear him, feel phlegm rattle in his neck.

Upstairs, queasy, Jerome sat down at his desk, opened the dictionary to cancer, watched the curl of the 'c' and the 'r' hunch into a crab's body there on the tawny page. The word had its origin in the word crab. Jerome looked across the garden, over the fence, saw the greeny fenmist look of the ex-priest's window, saw the big snow crab of the cancer picking through him, these fibrey filamenty legs, his sick lungs' rotted-wood colours, ribs and sternum like an old pier.
'Dinner!' called Jerome's Ma from downstairs. He closed the dictionary and went down.

'Well, amount he was putting it about,' Jerome heard Aunty Val saying. 'That wick of his.'
  He was shuffling down the stairs in his slippers, at the little balcony thing in the turn between the stairs' two halves, unsure how he'd be able to eat with all the cancer pictures in his head.
  'Isn't that how Michael Douglas said he got it?' his Ma said. She was over at the stove, ladling Quorn and black bean sauce out over brown rice. 'Eating –' she saw Jerome in the kitchen doorway, cut herself off, said, 'Hi, love.' Rice-pot vapour had her glasses all steamed.
  'Well how's things,' Jerome said to Aunty Val, as he went over to sit by her. Ma and Aunty Val were in their yoga gear, lilac and mauve spandex. They did it off YouTube together – on the grass, when it was bright; inside in the kitchen when it was not. He'd hear their hoots, splutters, gasps of release through the floor, feel his innards cringe. Val learned yoga in Los Angeles. She'd lived there in the mid-80s with her husband Declan till they couldn't stick it anymore out there, the snobs and their cars, obsessed with the car you had, the address you had. She got stopped once by police because she went out jogging along the freeway.
  'They thought I was soliciting,' she said, arms folded. 'The hack of me.'
  Jerome's Da thought the yoga ridiculous and affected, just like the conservatory that his Ma was forever angling for and that he was forever refusing to build; nevertheless, Jerome's Ma pointed out, he looked as ridiculous and affected trying to imitate Zidane past the age of thirty-eight, which he was now, to which he had no reply but to furrow his brow, pull down his sweatband over the furrows, and utter a big 'Tut', before departing at a jogging pace over to Jim Comber's, from where they would drive to five-a-side and leather each other around a gym.

'Thanks Ma,' Jerome said. He took the plate she gave him. Aunty Val asked about school. He told her it was grand. From where he sat he watched his Da tug the good saw back and forth through the heart of a silver birch tree. Seventeen of them they had out front, but Jerome's Da was no longer arsed sweeping up the yellowy starshapes of their seed-pods. Jerome wasn't arsed doing it, either, obviously, but he'd miss the trees, their shivery ghost light, how their twigs pulsed and flushed red in the gusts, how the light reflected off of their trunks and spread a silvery fog around the centre of the copse, like in the Japan in Val's son Donal's videogames. The mood of that light felt identical to the smoky howl of the cars he'd hear at night pelting past on the Bennettsbridge Road, their drony build and fall into howl, same as the PlayStation startup sound.

Aunty Val tapped her chin with her index finger, said, 'Still and all. It's the quiet ones, isn't it?'
  'He had those kiddy fiddler glasses hadn't he,' said Jerome's Ma, as she got another plate together for Aunty Val. 'Those ones that darken in the light.'
  'He said he'd stopped urinating,' said Val. 'That'll be the prostate.'
'Or something around there, anyway.' His Ma brought Val her plate. 'Was it Thailand he was forever in? Or Bali?'
  'It's all the one, isn't it, to them,' said Val. With her fork paused over her plate she squinted at the light-up-inside chunk of adelite crystal aglow on its wood plinth by the table. She shovelled up Quorn, as his Ma sat down at the head of the table. 'Still, that farmer lad's married to the mail-order woman from Vietnam who runs the nail salon isn't he. And she seems happy.'
'I've no problem with that,' said Jerome's Ma. 'Long as everyone's being looked after.'
  'She's very happy,' Val said.
  Jerome stirred a rice clump around in a pool of sauce till it dissolved, left each grain saturated greasy black.
'Her husband, he's the one used to drive the Escort around with no passenger seat in it?' Jerome's Ma said.
  'And no door.' Val shuffled towards her plate, one leg crossed over the other. 'Now he's very different. He looks like he's had a wash.'
  'And she must be very.' Jerome's Ma neatened the load on her fork with her knife. 'Well. Relieved. To be here.'
  'It's just about getting it out of their systems in a normal way,' Val said.
  'That one priest we had left the ministry for a young one,' said Jerome's Ma. 'I had to respect that nearly.'
  'The one in Fiachra's,' said Val. 'Yes. Father Trendy. He was in biker leathers more than the soutane.'
  St. Fiachra's Jerome knew. It had the great big concrete Christ all but nude above the altar, hair cropped like a lad about to climb into an electric chair. Behind him the cold blue and lilac and green shreds of the stained glass were a whispering forest his ghost was lost in.
  'But he did give it all up for the young one he met,' his Ma said. 'You have to say fair play.'
'Otherwise,' said Val, and bobbed her eyebrows, pulling her face into a meaningful grimace.
'Did youse have dodgy priests?' Jerome asked.
  'Dodgy-dodgy,' said Val, and weighed it up, with sideward nods of the head. 'I wouldn't say, no. We'd one call round to the house because Tommy was reading Dennis Wheatley novels with the devil on the cover.'
  'He'd a red face and black glasses,' his Ma said. 'And had B.O. He looked like a priest I saw in a nightmare once.'
  'But the Franciscans never did anything to Tommy or Richie or Ger when they were in Gormanston,' said Val. 'Even though we knew.'
  'That the place was riddled with nonces?' Jerome said, scooping up rice.
  'You can't say that word,' his Ma said.
  'Well, we knew and we didn't,' said Val.

What came back to Jerome then was the long slow waning of day, rose-coloured light on the stone at the back of the CBS, a lilac fog then, brass flash of the windows, and the taxi waiting outside the school. He felt the odd lad looking at him funny as he approached the car: we weren't a taxi-getting family; there were rumours the Traveller kids got their taxis paid for by the government, but Jerome was reliably informed by Mickey Ward that this was bollocks.
  'I wish they would,' he said, with a click of the tongue. 'Cunts.'
  When Jerome got in the ex-priest's Honda Accord he nodded and said, 'Grand evening for it isn't it', in a voice utterly totalled by Rothmans; the air, too, redolent of them. Through the windows firs blurred past, the fuzzy ends of their branches resembling to Jerome nothing more than a whole load of asterisks clumped together.
  'You on long today, then, Father?' Jerome said to him.
  'You're my last,' he said. 'Which reminds me.' They veered onto the forecourt of the Blackquarry Service Station. 'Tank her up for tomorrow.'
  While he was at the pump Jerome saw the glove compartment was doorless. Inside was a Mary Black tape stacked atop a Mary Coughlan one, as well as a blank one with track names stitched in tiny blue cursive. All the numbers beside the track names were encircled, and the songs were all in quotation marks. The neatness of it made Jerome admire him.
  When he came back he held bowled in the palm of his hand a pair of Creme Eggs.
  'Don't be telling your Mammy you ate one before your dinner,' he said, peeling free a tongue of foil from around the fat waist of his. 'Or she'll land the pair of us in jail.' A tarry laugh ensued.
  Only one odd thing struck Jerome and this was how he ate his, uncapping the egg with a gnash, then wallowing in the tongue, with such aplomb that Jerome saw his tongueskin's craquelure up top, as well as the veiny morass of its underside. A snorkeling noise followed. Then the fondant was gone. A scald of embarrassment went through Jerome, as though it were his fault for seeing the tongue. It was like the time he'd walked in on Grandad standing naked in the shower, the big pale butterbean of his body, grabbing for the towel, the pair of them going, 'Sorry! Sorry!' Or the time he'd walked in on his Uncle Joe injecting himself in the arse for his diabetes, then stammered, 'Get. Get out' out of him.
  The scald rolling through him from such memories was enough to silence Jerome, keep him there with the eggs softening in his hands, which rested knuckles down over his dick and balls, just in case. All around was the thought-canceling monody of the wheels on the road.
  By now we were at the right turn past the Dales B&B: near home, far from the tongue. Craquelure: that was a word from art, deep-buried since his Ma used to give tole painting classes because they’d no money. But up it had leapt, and plaqued itself over what Jerome had seen: the sound of the word, the look of his tongue.
  'Now,' said Father Dan, and pulled the handbrake, an elastic creak. Over went the rolled-tight fiver and Jerome muttered his thanks for the Creme Eggs.
  'Don't be bruiting it abroad that I gave you one,' he said, chuckling, leant forward, till it seemed to me his big red lid filled the whole car window.
  'You gave me two,' Jerome said.
  'The second's to keep her quiet,' he said.
  None of this made sense to Jerome, but he said, 'I see', all the same, then hailed him with a slowly lifted and dropped hand. Jerome did not give his Ma the second Creme Egg. He ate it at eleven o'clock break next day. It had softened, the chocolate gone all claggy.

Ma eased forward over her empty plate, her hand on her chin, her elbow on the table, her body turned so that her spine was loose but straight, the way the yoga video told her to. She plucked at a pad of the Chinese money-plant growing on the sill nearest her chair.
  'Same with next door,' she said. 'We knew and we didn't. When we were up at choir in the crow's nest of Patrick's and I said to Maggie Cody he was after having a stroke or something, and Mike the guitar-player put up his eyebrows and went, Him? We couldn't say much in the church obviously but. Well. Impressions were communicated. And he dilated on it then after, Mike did, told me about all the trips he'd made to Thailand since he'd left.'
  'Been defrocked,' said Val. 'I think the word is.'
  Jerome hopped a steamy bite of fake chicken back and forth between his gums and said, 'He was always sound to me.'
  'I know you liked him,' his Ma said.
  Jerome shrugged, said, 'Yeah, I mean, like. He never did anything.'
  'Untoward,' said Val.
  'Yeah,' Jerome said. 'No.'

Upstairs, later, in the dark, Jerome pulled the blankets over his head and read a Tintin by the light of his Beano Club torch, the way he wasn't meant to. He was thirteen now, and he still wasn't meant to, but he'd been doing this since he was seven. REM's 'Man on the Moon' came on again on the radio he'd robbed from the shower. They played it seven times a night on Atlantic 252, felt like, because they'd a new album out soon that needed hyping, since it was likely to be shite, according to Jerome's cousin, Dónal. Jerome didn't mind, though; he liked the sandy ache in the man's voice, the warm black starsprent nothing of desert sky that his voice seemed to peter up through in order to reach Jerome out there on the other side. But, instead, the song that night reached him across a hollow that he felt inside himself, rather than out there in the distance.

Driving to school next morning with Ma she slowed by the house and there it was, a black silky-looking bow wrapped around the knocker, and a laminate card saying the neighbour's name over his photo and a black cross beside it. The hollow he'd felt in his stomach the night before filled with a sloshy yellowish emulsion: pure unease. His car was still outside, his smell still hovering inside it.

After school that day Ma and Jerome walked up High Street past the Christmas display in Sherwood's: a train on a track looping around a town of amber windows and snow-heaps, stars stuck to a backing of navy paper to do for a sky. Being in town when it was dark always gave Jerome a cold feeling under the ribs. Chimney smoke left a cold cut feeling under his ribs with every breath that went in. A wind chased up the ends of the beeches planted on William Street and made the twigs kick like drowners' legs. Above them beside the candied orange of a fanlight he saw long red velvet curtains sway, and, inside, a swinging lamp, scrolled and Persian looking.

There weren't many in St. Pat's Church, where the vigil was to be held. Jerome was able to see all the way over the rows to the red and black tile mosaic showing the funeral of a bishop with a long beard and a crozier. And there it was, the next-door neighbour ex-priest's coffin, lying there plump and tawny before the altar. A Paschal candle flickered at the bottom end. The interbraided smell of the wood and the smell of the incense made Jerome picture chicken en croûte cooking. They knelt near the back, Jerome and his Ma, and he thought of the white softening rot of him in there, that body he'd been. Behind and above the altar was empty. Nobody stood there.

Last time he'd gotten in the taxi Jerome had asked him what the word ‘jubilant’ meant.
'It means delighted,' he said, in a deep voice tarry-cottony with the smoke of the lit Rothmans wagging from his lip. 'An ecclesiastical word. The Apostles were jubilant at Pentecost when Our Lord reappeared to them in the forms of fiery tongues.'
This seemed about right, because it sounded warm to Jerome, that word jubilant. The texture of this definition became inseparable from the sound of his voice, the cosy purpley smell of his clothes: that warmish fug of cigarettes and a brand of clothes detergent that was different from the one Jerome's Ma got.

Going out after the sky had inked up. A bit further down the street from St. Pat's, Kieran's College's two-towered chapel made a hulky black shape against the sad blue of the air. Jerome brought up in his head the train in Sherwood's window chug-chugging around the sideways eight shape of the tracks. Lemniscate, that was called. He couldn't get the picture to stick. He kept seeing the softening white body in the coffin, starting to leave clearish white stains on the black priest clothes Jerome pictured him buried in. His face was impossible to picture: Jerome's mind wouldn't let him. The image cut off at the white of his collar.
  'They told me at the school today that it was peaceful,' Ma said.
  'Yeah?'
  She nodded, looking straight ahead.
  'A soft going,' she said, her voice sounding old-fashioned, heavily Irish for a moment, as though repeating something she'd gotten off the telly or the radio or from her Da, his Grandad. She did that sometimes and it made Jerome feel odd, the fabric of things ruched and hooked and about to rip, reveal that adults weren't really adults, just people copying each other, the way his sister and him had copied Power Rangers kung-fu moves and then got banned from watching it after his sister knocked a tooth out of him.

'I don't know if I liked him,' Jerome said. 'Father Dan I mean. After all the stuff you and Aunty Val were saying. But I still feel weird.'
  'It's still just,' Ma began. 'Well. anything familiar. Going away.' She started the car, jiggled the gears, took them in reverse out of her parking space. 'Leaves a hole.'
  It seemed to take ages to get out of the town even though it was small. The streets were so tight. All the windows seemed dark. Jerome saw nobody. He wondered were we dead maybe, but then a jogger pelted by them outside the church, her headlight waggling, the antenna of an anglerfish. It was quiet in the car but for the motor's numbing hum and drone. Coming up Blackquarry Jerome turned in the seat to look back at St. Mary's, the big four-spired shadow of the steeple, a shadow on a shadow.
  'Eighty-nine churches in the diocese,' the priest had said to him once, while he'd craned in the seat to take in that same view. 'Above forty inside in the town. And two cathedrals on top of that.' He'd given his tarry chuckle then. 'Too many to fill; that's why they're empty.'

Out then in the dark arms of the countryside roads, theirs one among many; all over the country were little lit-up cars like Jerome's and his Ma's, and all the lives inside of them were as full and pulsating and tingly and eager to continue as theirs were: and as desperate, as sudden in their ending, maybe, as the lad from Jerome's class Jamie Broderick's had been – killed by a car, pucked out of being by the bonnet of a Corolla, him on his bike, cycling back from evening study in the dark. Jerome's one memory of him was Ms. McGrath going around the class before Christmas that year asking what everyone's favourite Christmas song was. Jamie had said the Wizzard one, 'I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day'. The unguarded look of joy on his face, saying to her, 'I don't know why, it's a good song': silly-giddy, that elastic shrug. That and all the other songs he'd liked had been inside him, curled up warmly nuzzled inside the furls of his brain. Like a week later he'd been hit by the car. To think about it tightened Jerome's chest. For a moment or so he tried it out, that nothing feeling, tried to picture how the songs in him flickered once and went out, forgotten, lost. The end: black cold void waste, alone on a dark arm of road. But he could only hold his breath for about twenty seconds before the panic burn came and he'd to suck in a breath that brought such relief he thought he might cry. When Jamie Broderick had died in his school it'd been the same as with Father Dan, Jerome hadn't liked him much because he'd stood on Shane Power's chest once, and, when Jerome'd pushed him off, he'd gotten a dig in the gut that dropped him. But he was familiar, Jamie, and the subtraction of him from things made him think how maybe that was just life, one thing subtracted then another then another till you were the one subtracted. First it was the outer ring, the grandparents, then the aunts and the uncles and then Aunty Val and then Da and then Ma and then Jerome first, because he was older, followed by his sister, a ring waiting to come apart in the dark.

When Jamie Broderick had died they'd all walked out behind the coffin, row after row trickling into the nave. A sick feeling turned over in Jerome's belly, thinking of road safety adverts, all those red body bags laid out on an empty motorway's clean monochrome diagrams, that orangey red, the colour of the word warn in his head ever after. Walking out after the coffin he'd kept his eyes front to watch Jamie bobbing around on his father and his mother's shoulders, but also so he wouldn't see the lit-up coffin kept to one side of the pews, the one where they kept the wax-encased bones of Saint Victoria Martyr, an effigy made in the nineteenth century and presumably never repaired because the head on it had taken on the bulgy look of a sunfish. Her head was canted back on a puce satin cushion braided with gold and hung with tassels. Her hair was crowned with ceramic roses which had lost their tint. Her eyes and mouth were agape in numb ecstasy, more nude and thus obscene than the pleasure you'd see in porno, even, somehow. Two bloaty wax hands cradled a chalice supposedly of her blood. The base of that chalice rested in the ruched cloth of her lap. Anytime Jerome looked at her she turned the liquid of his knees to glue, made his innards shivery.

From his Ma's car CD player came one of the more melodic metal songs off the mix that Robbie White had burned for him. He'd picked it because it wasn't so loud that she'd ask Jerome to pick another CD, and he hadn't one, there was only her Norah Jones in the car.
  'What's that one?' Ma said.
  '"Creeping Death".'
  His Ma gave a stiff smile and said, '"Creeping Death", right.'
  'Should I turn it off?'
  'If you wouldn't,' she said.
  'No, no,' he said, the low smoky unction of his own voice surprising him. He reached for the dial, dropped the volume way down. 'I don't mind at all.'

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