Breakfast on Pluto (12 page)

It was quite common for student priests to awake some minutes before the actual peal of the morning bell. It is a habit they acquire. It is a habit which is good, providing you
as it does with some moments to reflect upon the day which is about to come. A short time in which to privately commune with your Saviour to whom you have effectively dedicated your life. None of
which is relevant in this case, as Bernard has been awake not for some moments but since 3 a.m. And is in quite a state, I’m afraid. It is as if his life has entered a new, potentially deadly
phase. For, if the nocturnal visitations of Foundation Garments and Diaphanous were a source of dread which he valiantly attempted to dispel with his multifarious bull-like charges into the wind on
so many football fields, what new strategies could he employ to negotiate the wiles of the one in whose black and whirlpool eyes he had hopelessly swum, nay flailed. And who like a snake had
svelte-slid from his bed with the words: ‘Same time tomorrow night, darling,’ to vanish then beneath the crucifix of the Saviour who from the blankness of the wall reproached him with
huge sadness, before he could even utter the words he wished to say to her: ‘No! Not tomorrow night! Or any night! Go away! Go away for ever!’

Was it any wonder his bedsheets were practically liquefied, what with the perspiration and other unnamable body fluids. Not least of which were of course those lachrymose emissions which
streamed so long and hard they might well have had as their geneses the extirpations of entire continents. ‘Why! Why! Why!’ he chided himself as he dabbed those undryable eyes with a
twisted little spear of the sodden bedsheet. ‘Because you failed!’ the Saviour replied, with a stony expression that would chill your blood, because of course you rarely saw it on that
selfless face, ‘Because you fell!’ And no baby ever cried, in a lonely dormitory or anywhere else, as did that once dying-to-be-a-priest boy named Bernard McIvor. Who, from that day on,
summoned all his resources to face those silkfloating apparitions which late in the nights came to blink their spectral pools again and whisper and who, ever after, to this end, devoted himself
almost entirely to prayer and spiritual reading (
Restraint And Denial – A Handbook For Clergymen
).

None of which proved any good, did it, when one frosty unspectacular morning his new young housekeeper who resembled Mitzi Gaynor (he didn’t know it, of course, being
completely unaware of the film star’s very existence! – Musicals? Occasions of sin!) leaned across the table to give him his breakfast (Ah! Yummy rashers! Eggs too! Powerful!) and set
off an atomic explosion in those serge trunks once again, with the result that his spiritual reading had all come to nothing, a thought no doubt shared by the bubble-cut girl now pinned against the
wall, wondering what exactly was going on down there in that place where only moments before she’d found herself but somehow now had floated far away!

When Terence came in I was screaming his name (Daddy’s – Bernard’s – whatever the fuck you want to call him) and was tearing the pages into pieces,
crying: ‘I’ll fucking kill him! I’ll cut his fucking cock off and burn his church down with him in it!’

The blood was pulsing in my head so fast I thought I’d get a haemorrhage. Only for old oaken-arms I probably would have! He gave me tea and calmed me down and told me what I’d have
to learn.

‘You’ll have to learn to forgive,’ he said. ‘For if you don’t, you know what will happen?’

‘What, Doctor?’ I croaked, for my outburst had exhausted me.

‘It will destroy you,’ he said as he handed me the tea.

A tear came into my eye when he said it for I knew it was true and I would have loved to be able to do it (not because of its destroying me but because it was right, and deep down I knew that)
but I couldn’t and the more I thought of it the more the blood came coursing to my head so that whenever I’d write I’d find myself clutching the pencil so tight I broke the lead
how many times I don’t know, hundreds.

Mr and Mrs Johnny Bergin loved Saturday night. Especially in November when you could look out at the frost starching the beautiful countryside rigid, as you thought to
yourself: ‘Isn’t it lovely to be in here now with a big fire on, listening to the wireless and not a thing to worry you now you’ve been to confession and the good Lord is looking
down on you thinking: “Now there’s the Bergins – I’m pleased with them!”’

Which was only right and proper, for in all of Tyreelin, you would not have found nicer, decenter people than the Bergin family. Mr Bergin’s eyelids were drooping a little bit as he sat in
the armchair, partly because of the hypnotic motion of the flames in the grate but also because he had been working hard all day on the new estate of houses which was going up at the edge of the
village. Mrs Bergin smiled as she looked over at him, then went back to reading her Sacred Heart Messenger. She was reading the thoughts of St Anthony. He was her favourite saint. How many prayers
she had said to him over the years, only God Himself would have been able to say. And not one of them had she ever regretted, as she often remarked to her neighbours. ‘Any safety pin I ever
lost, any shilling coin or prayerbook – good St Anthony always helped me find it.’ As she thought that again now, she rested her hands on her lap and whispered another little silent
prayer. Outside, a dog barked and then all was quiet again throughout the village. She smiled to herself as she heard her only daughter moving about upstairs, and thought then of her little boy
James, as he would have been, who had been born dead a year before Eileen. How wonderful it would have been to have watched them grow up together, James at his football and Eily (as everyone
affectionately called her) at her music. For how she just loved music. As her husband Johnny had often said: ‘How it doesn’t put her astray in the head, I don’t know! For I
couldn’t listen to it!’ But that was her life, wasn’t it? As soon as she had her books done – it was straight up the stairs to put on those records of hers that she bought
for 1/6 in McKeon’s shop and leaf through the magazines –
Picturegoer
,
Screen Parade
,
New Faces of the Fifties
– God bless us, where did she get them all? But
sure what harm did it do? Didn’t the nuns tell her if she kept at her work the way she was going, she might well end up at the university, and how many Tyreelin girls had ever been able to
say that? Which was why, when she heard the floorboards above her head creak and the strains of Vic Damone singing ‘Stay With Me’, or ‘On the Street Where You Live’ coming
down the stairs, Mrs Bergin just went on with her sewing and stitching and said to herself: ‘That’s Eily.’ Which is exactly what she said when the occasional neighbour remarked:
‘You don’t mind her going to these hops every Thursday, Mrs?’ ‘I do not,’ she says. ‘For that’s Eily.’ Who, from the day she had been able to walk,
had never uttered a cross word to her mother. And who hadn’t the slightest hesitation in agreeing to help out Sister Lorcan when she told her of Mrs McGlynn’s (the priest’s
housekeeper) mishap. ‘Wasn’t she coming down the hill from the presbytery – you know what the frost’s been like – and didn’t she go and slip outside Pat
McCrudden’s gate!’ In fact, what she had said was that she would be more than glad to assist Father Bernard in Mrs McGlynn’s absence – especially when it was only a matter
of making his breakfast, and doing one or two other chores.

Which she now deeply regretted, of course. Except that her mother didn’t know it. Had noted, it is true, her daughter’s seeming lack of interest in record-buying over a period of
months and her suspension of attendance at the hops for which she once would have truly died. And which to Eily herself seemed almost a thousand years ago now, although it was only a matter of
months. Since she had strolled through the streets of the village with her housecoat on underneath her black coat and her check scarf tied around her head, thinking: ‘If I save up all the
money Father Bernard gives me, I’ll be able to buy the top ten records in the hit parade.’ And who knew – perhaps even the long player of the film
South Pacific
!

‘I love Rosanno Brazzi,’ she said to herself as she walked past Mulvey’s pub. ‘I love him and I love his music.’

The music she was singing as she fished around in the foaming suds of the presbytery kitchen wash-hand basin for her broken fingernail. ‘After all – we don’t want Father
Bernard to get it in his breakfast!’ she laughed to herself. Just as she felt the tippy tips of his fingers brushing against ever so slightly as he went past, never for even a second thinking
to herself: ‘I know what that means! It’s just a prelude to later on in the parlour, isn’t it, when he’s going to come after me with that great big screaming stalker of
his!’

As indeed – why should she? Which is a pity, all the same, for at least then it might have made some sense to her, being pinned up there against the wall – with a forty-year-old
clergyman sliding his tootle in and out of her at a furious rate of knots. ‘Who is this girl?’ she kept asking herself as she looked down from a height at the creature whose head kept
bumping off the table leg. It wasn’t her, that was for sure, for she kept pleading: ‘Stop! Stop!’ It was obviously someone else, someone else who looked like her. She hoped it
wouldn’t upset her, that she might not regret it some day. Because Eily knew that was what it did, that sort of conduct. Her mother had told her. Not in so many words, of course. And
especially – most especially with a priest – even if it was the priest’s fault. All Eily could think was: ‘I’m glad it’s not me!’ Because she was saving
herself for marriage. She might dance at the hops and everything – but marriage to her was something pure and clean and wholesome. White as driven snow. Not at all like what Father Bernard
was doing right now. That wasn’t it at all. Why was he doing it, though? she wondered. It made her cry to watch him as he continued.

But not as much as it made her cry when she realized just who it was, i.e. that it
had
been her all along. You can imagine the shock she got. Crying: ‘Why! The girl
is
me!’ and then of course, the baby coming – the biggest shock of all!

What it would have been like if her mammy’d known or somehow seen behind the big clothes, she could only imagine. Indeed, in her mind, already had done many times – seeing her
mother’s face to the fore of the throng in the middle of Tyreelin Square, the faces twisted with a hatred she had never before seen. Her own mother joining in with them as they cried:
‘Hang her! Hang the bitch!’ and Eily Bergin dangled from a lamp-post. It was silly, of course. It could never happen! It was just her imagination working overtime! What was she going to
do? Giddily she thought: ‘What should I do? Scoop it out with a wooden spoon perhaps?’ That made her laugh. ‘I might only get its eye,’ she said, spluttering mucus into her
hand.

In the end, the baba slid out nice and easy. On that very November evening when Mr and Mrs Bergin were sitting cosily by the nice log fire. Not exactly at that time, but a few hours later, in
the early hours of the morning. What Eily could not get over was – one minute, there’s nothing there and the next – a whole human being! With little thin arms and little thin legs
and soft browny hair and an oval face. And looking so yummy! ‘I want to keep him! I want to keep my baby!’ she wanted to howl. But she couldn’t do that!

Anyway, Father Bernard had told her what must be done. He’d been so nice and kind in the end of it all. In the beginning he’d been nasty. ‘You’re not keeping it! Are you
mad?’ he’d bellowed like a bull. She thought he was even going to hit her. Especially when she cried.

‘Stop it! You hear! Stop that crying now!’ Having to shake her until she stopped! Which was silly of her – she knew that now. After all, she was sixteen. It was time she saw
sense.

As she did now, once more strolling through the streets but this time with her Rinso box of baba tucked beneath her arm. Obviously, she was terrified she was going to meet someone – such
as Sonny Macklin on his way to work, perhaps. ‘Where are you going with that box, Eily?’ Or even worse – who knew? ‘Let’s have a look at what you have inside
there!’

It was hard not to cry but she had brought lots of tissues and, in any case, by the time she reached Ma Braden’s, she wasn’t quite so bad. Most of her tears had dried away. So she
just left baby in his box and then went off for ever. But where did she go? No one knows! Was she killed in an accident? Did the Holyhead ferry sink? Why – it’s a mystery!

Poor old Mr Bergin – he went out of his mind, you know! You’d be out walking and you’d come across him talking to a cow. ‘I don’t know if I told you or not, but my
Eily – she’s a divil for these pop records. God bless us and save us, to see her up in that room of hers, dancing – you’d have to ask: “What’s the world coming
to?”’

Mrs Bergin it didn’t bother for so long and when the stroke took her away, everyone said it was good, which in a way it was.

So that morning, and in particular the part of it between 3.00 and 3.20 a.m., was not what you’d call a good one for anyone.

Except Hairy Braden the Baby Farmer, of course – for whom it meant twenty pounds a month – sometimes twenty-five!

Not that there’d be much chance of Hairy showing gratitude, pulling up the leg of her drawers, dragging on the cigarette-holed dressing gown and flinging the door open before sweeping up
the cardboard box and standing there as she whistled through crevassed teeth: ‘Another hooring beggar’s get!’ as poor Puss went: ‘Miaow!’

As she did for all and sundry now, so sky-high giddy since she’d left Louise’s she seemed to work non-stop! ‘O please, please, buy me Biba!’ to some
hunk she now would cry, as lashings of cash upon her were laid and her kohl-rimmed eyes misted over with desire as into hipster trouser suits she slipped, blouson tops and milkmaid maxis, enough to
drive her poor man wild! ‘O miaow, my darling!’ she cried. ‘So kind to Pussy are you that I really, truly must adore you as no lady ever did!’