Demons (4 page)

Anyway, this was probably the first time
I

clicked that rules were made for
breaking.

‘
Stupid
rule,’ muttered Gran from her
chair. It was a mutter but an emphatic one.

We all turned to stare at
her. Gran, the dyed-in-the-wool Catholic.
What
did you say, our looks
expressed?

‘
I think we’re all agreed,’
said Dad eventually. He glanced around the room as if there were
church spies listening in. ‘But the Pope’s declared it,’ he said
dramatically.

‘
And I would never disagree
with the Pope,’ said Gran, looking as if she would relish the
opportunity to do so.

I made the discovery then that Gran,
trad-Gran, was perhaps a closet rebel, too. It wasn’t until after
her funeral, super-traditional as it had been, that I realised the
songs she had chosen had not actually been ‘acceptable’ hymns.

I carried on playing priests for ages. I
didn’t stop until I began to sense that it was, after all, just a
game I was playing and not anywhere near the real thing, that I
wouldn’t ever be allowed to become one. But one thing I had learnt
and that was that on matters religious not everyone, not even all
Catholics, agreed

with one another. When I look back, I
suppose a seed

had been sown, a desire created, a challenge
issued. Father Brady had sown the seed, my game playing had created
the desire and, probably unknown to them, my parents and Gran,
especially Gran, had issued the challenge.

Reaching for the finger of God: a memory
bead

Gran is sitting in her favourite armchair. I
am sitting on her lap. In front of us Gran holds an open book.
It

shows a close-up view of one of the pictures
that

Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the
Sistine

Chapel, in the Vatican City, Rome.

Gran tells me the picture
is called
The Creation of
Adam
.

The painting shows God reaching out to Adam.
Or maybe it is the other way round. Their index fingers are almost
touching, but not quite. They are mere centimetres apart.

‘
That,’ says Gran, ‘is how
the world began.’

I look, I listen, I believe.

‘
That’s also how it will
end,’ says Gran. ‘When the day comes, God will reach out for you
and take you to himself.’

I ask a question that unsettles me. ‘But
Gran, what if he can’t reach me?’

Gran harrumphs. ‘He’ll always be within
reach,’ she says. She closes the book. ‘I saw that picture once,
the real thing,’ she says. ‘I went on pilgrimage to the Holy City.
A man let me use his binoculars and I viewed it up close, even
though it was mile-high on the ceiling. One day, Andrea, who knows
but you might go there and see it for yourself.’

I remember very clearly hoping that by the
time I did, God and Adam would have closed the gap and

managed to reach one another.

STRANGE MEETING

‘Hi, remember me?’

I turn around, see the voice, forget to
breath so my heart stops, nearly.

‘
You
do
remember me don’t you?’

How can he think,
believe
, that I
wouldn’t? ‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘it’s just that you . . .’

He interrupts. ‘No don’t apologize. I
just

expected you would
remember. It wasn’t
that
long

ago, was it?’

‘
Of
course you silly bugger, of course I remember. What d’you think I
am Chris, crazy or something? I was only going to say, you took me
by surprise. I never
expected
to see you.’

‘
Is that all?’ He grins,
relieved, pleased, something more? Too sure of himself, anyway, as
always. Assuming perhaps that we can carry on where we left off,
more than three years ago?

‘
Couldn’t have been anybody
more surprised than me Andy. My dog-collared priest of Dionysus. Hi
there, it’s great to see you.’

He comes closer, as if to embrace me, but
stops short, puts out his hand instead.

I take it, it feels warm, familiar.

No one’s called me Andy for ages. (Mind you,
Chris was the only one who ever did.) Andy. Short for Andrea, but
also for Andronikos, Ancient Greek inventor. He built the Tower of
the Winds. A man, not a woman.

Believe it or not these geeky and obscure
classical references will become clear, or clearer, as my story
progresses. Hang in there.

Comparing Life Journeys

Gran came to live with us soon after Mum and
Dad were married, not long before my first birthday.

What a journey for her, all that way, when
beforehand she rarely travelled much further than the next village
(the Holy City excepted). She hadn’t even gone to see Dad off when
he left Ireland for

New Zealand. Unlikely that Rome would have
prepared her for where she ended up.

What a wrench from the familiar into the

unknown it must have been. A train to
Belfast. A

plane to Amsterdam. Another plane to New
Zealand

via Hong Kong. To New Zealand’s most English
of cities. Adding insult to injury!

But maybe not so different
from being born, or transubstantiating one thing into something
completely different?

An extract from Chris’s notebook

What do Catholics believe?

Take the Catholic version
of the Eucharist, for example. This word, too, comes from the
Ancient Greek -
eucharistia
- meaning “thankful” - although what Catholics
have to be thankful for is a mystery to me. Anyway, the Eucharist
is the central part of their Mass, where the priest changes the
bread and wine, representing the Last Supper of Christ, into
Christ’s body and blood.

Yes, I mean
into
. They don’t just
believe it happens symbolically as the Anglicans and others do -
no, that’s not way heavy enough! The stuff actually becomes - don’t
ask me how - the ‘real’ thing. You can’t see it happen, you can’t
taste anything other than bread and wine (sherry actually, on good
authority) but these, after the ceremony is complete,

are apparently just ‘outward forms’.

Well, my question is this, why do they fall
for it? One theory is that because it’s taught in their schools;
another, it’s drummed into them each time they go to church. And if
it seems weird, even to them, they’re supposed to just believe it,
have so-called faith that it’s true. So I have to ask, don’t
Catholics have a

brain between them, can’t they think for
themselves, or have their collective brain cells been sluiced
out?

And will I want to tackle Andrea on these
questions when, and if, I have the courage to talk to

her? Supposing she even wants to talk to me.
I can

only wish, hope, have - yes, I’ll say it -
have faith, that she will notice me enough to want to get to know
me.

Mum and Dad were rebels, too

Change wasn’t
always
a difficult
concept for me. To some extent I’d been prepared for it, partly
because of sex. I guess this preparation was some help when Mum and
Dad came, as it were, to cast me off.

You would have thought, being Catholic and
of Irish descent, that talk of sex would have been a subject pretty
much barred at home. It wasn’t.

Mum was a nurse, a protestor and an
argumentative sort of Catholic. She taught me about sex, in the
broadest sense, early on. And right from the start she used the
right words for the body parts. Words that, as I discovered later,
some kids treated as strange, funny or as dirty but which to me
were perfectly ordinary.

Mum also brought books
home from the library. Kids’ books. Adults’ books. The sort of
books that
other
people’s parents sometimes protested about and sometimes
wanted to get banned.

‘
Haven’t they got any
better causes to spend their time on?’ Mum would moan.

When I was eleven or twelve we were watching
a hospital training video together of a baby being born. Out of the
blue, Mum said that they’d deliberately stopped at one.

‘
One what?’ I said, knowing
perfectly well what

she was on about.

‘
One baby,’ said Mum. ‘One
child. One you.’

‘
Oh,’ I said. ‘And why was
that?’

‘
Well, I couldn’t face the
thought of giving birth

a second time,’ Mum said, quite honestly.
‘You were

a labour and a half.’

‘
Not a labour of love,
then?’

At that age I already knew what the Catholic
Church’s official line about artificial contraception was. A
no-no.

‘
What about . . .’ I began.
‘How did you . . .?’ at the same time as Mum made a pre-emptive
strike.

‘
I decided I couldn’t
follow the church’s teaching on artificial birth control,’ she
said. ‘It was a matter of conscience.’

‘
OK,’ I said, accepting
that, but storing it away for future reference. I was more
interested anyway in the fact that I’d been an only child by
choice.

‘
You mean, you were too
selfish to have more kids. To give me some company in my
lonely-as-a-cloud life?’

Mum sounded surprised and
a little shocked. ‘I - we - didn’t think of it like that at the
time. Looking back, perhaps it was. But you haven’t really
suffered
, have you?’ she
said. ‘We always let you bring friends home whenever you wanted,
and we made sure you had plenty of chances to interact with other
kids.’

‘
True, up to a point,’ I
said. ‘But because I’ve been an only child I’ve been dragged along
to things I might never have gone to if there’d been
others.’

‘
Such as?’

‘
The marches,’ I
said.

‘
Yes, there’ve been a few
of those,’ Mum admitted.

‘
And the
meetings.’

‘
You
didn’t go to
all
of them.’

I made a quick calculation. ‘I estimate
around sixty percent. Half of them with you, half with Dad.

The other forty percent I stayed home with
Gran.’

‘
We couldn’t have expected
Gran to look after

you all the time,’ said Mum.

I may have gone to many meetings with the
olds but it was true that Gran had looked after me a lot as well.
Gran had been a big influence on my life. I’d always known that,
intuitively, but it suddenly hit home how much of Gran had gone
into the making of me. To borrow Dad’s words, I too had been
bottle-fed on the milk of rebellion and religion.

‘
You fell asleep at most of
the meetings, anyway,’ Mum finished.

‘
Then there were the door
knocks,’ I went on. ‘Begging for money. I was never asked if I
wanted to go on any of those.’

‘
We haven’t done door
knocks for years,’ said Mum. ‘Only when you were little and fitted
into the backpack. And it was always for a good cause.’

‘
I was the child with the
big pleading eyes.’

‘
It wasn’t like that at
all,’ said Mum, indignant now.

‘
Mum, I
was
joking
. The
point I’m trying to make is, if there
had
been more of us kids then one of
you two would have
had
to stay home with us. See

what I mean? Because I was the only one it
was easy to drag me along.’

‘
Yes I see,’ said Mum. ‘I
suppose you’ve got a point.’

‘
I never knew that you and
Dad having one child was so deliberate.’

‘
What
did
you
think the
reasons were? Did you

even give it a thought?’

‘
Course I
did. There could have been heaps of reasons. Maybe you
couldn’t
have more. That
was the worst one. Scary, in case there was something
the

matter with one or both of you. I didn’t
wanted to ask.’

‘
Silly
Andrea,’ said Mum. ‘You know you can ask me
anything
. You haven’t really been
desperately unhappy all these years have you?’

‘
Mum, that’s what my social
studies teacher would call a leading question.’

‘
But
have
you? I need to know.’

I gave it some thought. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not
desperately. But I’ve felt really different because of the way
we’ve lived and the way we’ve done things. Isn’t that bad
enough?’

‘
Bad? No, I wouldn’t call
it bad,’ said Mum reflectively. ‘Not perfect, but what is? Besides,
it’s not always a bad thing to be different.’

Another memory bead

In Year Seven I am
flicking through a school library book -
Important events in New Zealand’s History
- and there are Mum and Dad staring out at me. The book has a
new cover and title so I don’t recognise it straightaway. ‘No!’ I
think. ‘Not that! I don’t want

everyone else to know.’
Their photo in the book has never really bothered me before, but
this time it does. I close the book quickly but for a few weeks
afterwards I wait anxiously in case someone lets the cat out of the
bag by saying: ‘Hey Andrea, did you see your olds in
here?’