Demons (7 page)

real. What on earth was going on?

The voices weren’t hushed. They were loud,
worried voices. Mum’s and Dad’s.

I should have got up
straightaway to find out what the hell was happening but I held
back for as long as I could, hoping that if I could understand what
the voices were saying then I would learn that it was

nothing serious and I could fall back
blissfully to sleep.

Of course, it wasn’t to be. Soon, my door
opened a crack.

‘
Andrea?’

Dad’s voice. Trying not to sound anxious but
full of urgency nonetheless. Trying not to be too scarily loud but
deafening all the same.

‘
I’m awake Dad.’

‘
Good. Gran’s not well,
love. We’ve called an ambulance.’

I sat up. ‘Not well. What d’you mean? What’s
wrong with her?’

I was aware of course that poor old Gran
hadn’t been quite her usual self these last few months. Had
suddenly gone a little greyer, quieter, more distant. In trying to
ignore those realities I knew now that I’d unfairly and
irretrievably ignored her as well. I started to tremble.

Dad came over to me, trying not to stumble
in the darkness.

‘
What’s happened?’ I
said.

Dad sat on the edge of the bed and we put
our arms around each other. His face was wet. He was crying. ‘We
think Gran’s had a heart attack, or a stroke, or maybe both,’ he
said.

‘
Is she dying?’ I asked. My
voice shattered, like a broken mirror.

I felt his head nod, ever so slightly. ‘I’m
no doctor but I don’t think she’s going to last long.’

A vehicle came down our road. A throbbing
engine pounded in our driveway.

‘
Get dressed,’ said Dad.
‘We can all go with her to the hospital.’

He hurried from my room. In a trance I
stumbled

to the chair over which I’d thrown my jeans
from last night. I didn’t put the light on, it was too harsh a
thing to do. The challenge of retrieving clean underwear from the
drawer and a fresh blouse from the cupboard

in the dark meant I could think of something
other than Gran.

Dad, or maybe Mum, was letting the ambulance
people in. They went to Gran’s room, doing what to her I didn’t
care to think about. I flailed blindly about

managing somehow to get my clothes on.

And then, and then, I had to step out of the
room into the light and see Gran being wheeled on a stretcher to
the ambulance, down the familiar hallway into a strange and unknown
world, another wrenching journey. Her mouth and nose were sealed by
an oxygen mask and liquid dripped from a tube into a vein on the
back of her knobby, purpled hand.

‘
Gran!’ I said, wide awake
now, wishing, praying I was still asleep. A lost, wailing
cry.

Prayer. I hadn’t prayed very much the last
couple of years, not since starting a different school and whenever
I still did, it wasn’t in the sure and certain way of before. But
now the conviction briefly returned and I gabbled away inside my
head, praying for Gran to survive, to be well again.

Her eyes opened
momentarily and she looked at me but she didn’t, or couldn’t,
speak. I guess if she’d tried, her words would have become trapped
alongside the misty vapour steaming-up the inside of her
mask.

‘
Mum’s going to follow in
the car,’ Dad said. ‘Will you come with me in the
ambulance?’

I nodded. ‘Is she in pain?’

‘
I don’t think so,’ said
Dad. ‘Not now they’ve started the morphine drip.’

Morphine. So that was what was leaking
into

Gran. She was being drugged up.

We sat on a bed on one side of the
ambulance. Gran lay opposite us.

‘
She will be all right,
won’t she? You didn’t

mean what you said before?’

Dad shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

I turned to the paramedic.

‘
We’re doing all we can,’
he said.

‘
Why aren’t we going any
faster?’

‘
Can’t,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t
be safe.’

‘
But she could die before
we get to the hospital.’

‘
Shush,’ said Dad, putting
an arm round me as I cried into the Irish wool of his jersey,
feeling five instead of fifteen. Neither of us said anything else
for a while. Dad gently stroked Gran’s arm as she lay there, still.
I touched the tip of her left index finger with the tip of my
right. Then there was no more gap between us. At one point her eyes
opened again and she looked right at us, through us, past us,
as

if she’d had a vision of another world. She
lifted her right hand, the one with the drip, tugging the oxygen
mask away from her mouth.

Dad tried restraining her, but the ambulance
man shook his head. ‘It’s OK. Just for a quick minute.’

I didn’t know a quick minute could last an
eternity. As the mask came away, Gran murmured something.

‘
What was that Mum?’ Dad
leaned over to her.

She spoke again. Dad nodded. ‘Too damn
right,’ he said.

Then Gran said, loudly and clearly. ‘Damn
and bugger it!’

And then, without warning, she died.

Famous last words

I’d never seen anyone die before, never seen
anyone dead. Dad had.

‘Why’d you come to New Zealand,’ I’d once
asked

Dad, when I was around nine or ten.

‘
I got sick of being called
a Fenian bastard,’ said Dad.

Maybe he thought that explained everything.
It

didn’t tell me anything at all.

‘
I’d seen too much death
and destruction,’ he elaborated. ‘My two brothers died in the
Troubles. One was murdered by Provos because he joined the British
army and the other was shot by the British simply for being in the
wrong place at the wrong time.’

It still didn’t make a
great deal of sense, not the
reasons
why Dad’s brothers, my
uncles, had died but of course I understood that Dad had suffered
because of it.
Was
suffering all over again because I’d asked. But how could I
have known what the effect of my question would be?

I’d almost always been aware that Dad had
come from ‘somewhere else’, why else did he sound different from
Kiwi Dads? So wasn’t it important for me to know more about
him?

‘
What exactly is a family
tree?’ I’d asked Gran not that long before I tackled
Dad.

‘
It’s the history of a
Family,’ Gran had said. ‘It’s

like a great big tree with
branches extending every-where, but one strong deep root system to
hold it all together.’

‘
Like the tree in the
Garden of Eden.’

Gran looked at me. ‘All trees have hidden
snakes,’ she said unexpectedly.

‘
What’s
your
history Gran?’ I’d asked.

She went even more serious then, her mouth
tightening into a line. ‘It’s a history of injustice,’ she said.
‘It’s a history of being a second-class citizen in your own
country. It’s a history of the loss of sons.

Ask your father Andrea. And one day, go
there and discover it for yourself.’

So I had asked Dad. There was clearly more,
lots more, to our family tree but Dad wasn’t prepared to

shake any more apples off its branches.

Tears were streaming down either side of my
face, like small waterfalls.

‘
What did she say?’ I asked
Dad. ‘What did she say? I didn’t hear her!’

Not her actual last words. Those were for
everyone. ‘Damn and bugger.’ Her last words to Dad, I meant.

Turned out to be those famous lines from a
poem by Dylan Thomas.

Do not go gently into that
dark night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Those
were Gran’s last words to us.

In her coffin, open before the requiem and
shut before the Mass began, Gran’s hands held her rosary. Rather,
we had looped the beads around her fingers. Each bright bead had
been a milestone, on the way to . . . God? Gran had reached all her
milestones. She had nowhere left to go. But had she got there in
the end, where she had expected and wanted to be? Had God reached
her in time and touched her index finger, closing the gap? Who
knows? How can anybody know? It was all very well to believe, as
Mum said

she and Dad did, and as I had always done,
in the Happy-Forever-After place but where was it and why did no
one ever come back to tell the rest of us what it was like?

We buried Gran in St Brigid’s graveyard,
among

the ghosts of her distant past, those people
who had come all the way from Tippperary, from County Kerry and
County Clare, and then we all went home.

I didn’t go back to the cemetery for another
three years.

Part Two: The Joyful Mysteries

An extract from Chris’s notebook

I wondered whether, if Andrea had happened
to see me the day I drove past in the car with Dad, would she later
on have remembered me?

STRANGE MEETING

I can’t help thinking, I’m twenty-two today
and already I feel old. The history of my life seems to have been
written although I know for a fact it hasn’t, it’s only just
beginning.

‘
It’s
so
weird, bumping into you like this,’ says
Chris.

‘
Do you remember the first
time we met?’ I ask.

‘
Yes,’ he says. ‘But . . .
it wasn’t the first time I saw you Andy.’

‘
Not the first time? What
do you mean?’

‘
The first time I saw you,
noticed you, was the day you were coming out of that little church,
the day of your Gran’s funeral.’

I remember that day, only too well. But not
that Chris was part of it.

‘
St Brigid’s?’

‘
Yep. Dad was teaching me
to drive. You were at one corner of your Gran’s coffin.’

I’m amazed, astounded, angry.

‘
I can’t believe you never
told me that! Why on earth not?’

Chris shrugs it off. ‘Probably because I
didn’t want you to think I’d been spying on you. I thought you
might have been embarrassed. I mean it was a pretty medieval
affair. Even you’d have to admit

that. And later on it didn’t seem
important.’

‘
But it was three years
later that we met.’

‘
I know.’

‘
And you already knew who I
was?’

‘
No, I
didn’t
know
. You
were just a face. Seen from afar. The main reason I remembered you
at all was because that day you looked so terribly sad. And alone.
There must’ve been a hundred people there but you seemed to be the
only one.’

‘
Men!’ I said sounding
angry but not as angry as I felt I needed to be. ‘What is it with
them? Can’t they ever tell the truth?’

Chris looks shamefaced. But he rallies
quoting, of all people, Pontius Bloody Pilate.

‘
Ti estin
aletheia
?’ he asks, in perfect Ancient
Greek, of course.

I don’t give him the satisfaction of letting
him translate it for me. This time I pip him at the post. ‘What is
truth? Yeah, right, a damn good question, classics geek,’ I
say.

Portents

My final year at high school - lucky Year 13
everyone called it - started off a drag but blossomed into, among
other things, Chris.

Lucky, unexpected and, I have to say, by
then not unwanted.

Under siege

As you’ll have realised by
now the chipping away of my Catholic faith started even before Gran
died. In fact it probably began
with
Gran when she spoke up for
women being priests, and probably ended when my quick and dirty,
but not insincere, prayers for Gran’s survival went unheeded. I
wanted to
know
she was safe in the Happy-Forever-After place but
no

matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t be
sure. Had

even she been sure?

I’d always thought Gran’s
faith was unassailable but her dying words suggested another
possibility, not only great frustration at having to shuffle off
her mortal coil but doubt. Why else would she have railed as she
did?
Damn and bugger
! Wasn’t it possible, after all, that she had been terrified
of heading into dark nothingness instead of to
Happy-Forever-After?

On top of all that Mum and Dad had left me
to make up my own mind about the things they’d brought me up
believing. Was it any wonder that by the time I met Chris,
atheistic Chris who strongly believed that God was nothing more
than a myth, as fabulous a piece of storytelling as the Greek
legends which he loved but didn’t literally believe in either, that
I had already crossed from belief to doubt and finally to
disbelief? My faith seemed to have become as cold as Gran in her
grave.

By then I felt free, but also empty.

You can’t go back

In town one day I bumped into a few old
primary school friends - well, acquaintances.

‘
You still liking St
Anselm’s?’ I asked them, feeling a bit homesick for their
company.

‘
It’s cool,’ they said. I
found it hard to know if they were telling the truth or not. ‘But
why d’you want to know? You could’ve come with us.’

And that’s true. I could have but I’d chosen
not to. We were miles apart now, literally and figuratively.