Homebush Boy (12 page)

I must say again, lest this sound too much like the account of some sect even more frantic than we were, that there was a lot of pity for people who were as God-marked as Father Byrne and this girl. No one except lunatics like myself wanted to have these experiences. They were out of kilter with the sunny suburb, at odds with the
genius loci
of Homebush/Strathfield on the edge of the age of Rock and Roll.

Mr Frawley, who knew people close to Father Byrne in Lewisham Parish, who had also been close to him in Strathfield, later told us a gloss on the tale. Late one night, just before the recovery of the girl from the bush became known, while Father Byrne prayed in Saint Thomas's Lewisham, in a church long vacated by his more worldly colleagues, he had actually suffered a vision of the Virgin Mary. Once more, a mixed blessing in itself. The officials of the Church did not approve of visions and treated them with extreme scepticism. They put a burden of proof on the person claiming to have witnessed them, subjected them to all manner of tests and examinations, suspected them of demonic possession. And all this before such psychiatric terms as
hysteria
or
schizophrenia
had come into common usage in the church; that is, long before Freud's breath was felt on conventional Catholic orthodoxy.

Mr Frawley himself pitied Father Byrne the way people pity a lone polar explorer who perishes of his vision. In that, again Mr Frawley was not at all like a member of a charismatic sect, who having seen others talk in tongues
wants
to talk in tongues himself.

Father Byrne was now under as much suspicion as eccentric Monsignor Leonard, who came to Strathfield sometimes to say Mass and who gave away his shoes or his coat to vagrants or dipsos. Christ's counsels in this regard were in most people's minds not designed for literal interpretation in Homebush Road. A baroque extreme of vision in a non-Italianate locale – that was the inherent problem of what Father Byrne had seen.

At the very time of his vision, the sleeping girl from the bush woke up in the nearby hospital with a new feeling of well-being, and called the night sister, a nun who looked at the dressings and became a witness to the sudden, unexplained remission the girl was now in. The wound amazingly gone!

This remarkable, imagination-hijacking event nonetheless needed to share the early Sydney winter with other questions. The question for example of Rugby League. At St Pat's – as already intimated – we played
rugby-à-treize
, thirteen-a-side Rugby League, which in Eastern Australia was the chief game and which was largely our map of heroism and the universe. Running with and passing bladders filled with air to teammates was to sport what GMH was to poetry, what Bernadette Curran was to ethereal beauty. The Brothers taught us to play splendidly; lightning backline movements, determined forwards. St Pat's teams were always bringing back State Championships from the August knock-out competitions at the Sydney Cricket Ground. I had participated in one such victory the year before, in a team coached by Brother Markwell, a lean Queenslander who tended to admire the industrial groupers.

In the eight-stone team – that is, the one hundred and twelve pound weight limit – we had been sublimely schooled and disciplined. The ball rattled out along the back line into the hands of a boy centre who would later play for the Australian national Rugby team, the Wallabies. Then, after drawing his man, that is, sucking in the defender and committing him to a tackle, the future Wallaby would give it to our winger, who was a future Commonwealth Games sprinter.

We had played the game which qualified us for the final on the prodigiously sacred turf of the Sydney Cricket Ground, and then had beaten a Marist Brothers team on the Sydney Cricket Ground Number Two, winning the trophy by a single try. This was a wilder success than I'd ever imagined in my asthma-ridden pre-pubescence.

Now – at the beginning of a new season – I was all set up to try out for halfback or five-eighth (the English called if fly-half) for the First XIII.

My father had been a great five-eighth on the Northern Rivers of New South Wales. Late into my manhood, old gents with sun cancers on their faces would come up to me and tell me how good he had been. One of them once said, ‘He was one of the best five-eighths I ever saw, but he used to come the knuckle.' He had a reputation for putting in punches on the blind side, safe from the referee's gaze. He was always a fiery man, and even much later in his old age, walking with a stick, was willing to take on people who offended him. Willing to
come the knuckle
.

My father had played in four premiership teams for Taree Old Bar Rugby League Club, an awesome outfit in the bush in the 1930s, one that was not beyond stacking its team with famous visiting players from Sydney, offering them an introduction to the local girls and a skinful of beer. He also played for Central Kempsey. Once, when his Irish mother was very ill, his sisters had asked him not to play, but he had anyhow and dislocated his collarbone. He hid the fact from them and carried the injury untreated. In my childhood he still carried a strange socket in his collarbone, from a peculiar way the bones settled themselves.

The trial for the First XIII was to be played on the oval itself, before interested spectators – parents, brothers, the occasional exquisite Santa Sabina girl. Curran came down for games on the oval on a Sunday afternoon – it was only a three hundred yard walk from the bungalow where the Curran women stored their beauty and cleverness.

My father had been so proud of me approximating his earlier competence in the game that in the past few years he often invited his cousin Pat, who was the family's success, a graduate of Sydney University and a lawyer in the western suburb of Granville, to see me play.

As the Christian Brothers of Ireland had made a long journey to Australia, so had this Northern English game, Rugby League. In Huddersfield, Yorkshire in 1893, a number of interested parties had separated away from the Rugby Union, which we liked to call with inverse snobbery ‘the gentlemen's and dilettantes' game', and formed a new league which enabled workers from the mine and the mill to be paid for the time they lost in playing the game, and to be compensated for injury. It took more than a decade for League to move on to Sydney, where the great Test batsman, Victor Trumper, was one of its earliest promoters. In eastern Australia the teams which went over to Rugby League became the most popular, crowd-pulling teams. Rugby League remained a working-class, Christian Brothers sort of game. The grammar schools which were an imitation of Eton and Harrow, and the Jesuit Schools which imitated Stonyhurst, played the original Rugby, the fifteen-men-a-side game, itself a marvellous version of football too and one I would later come to love with almost equal passion.

This evolution and social context of the game of Rugby League led to my running onto the oval on a given Sunday, wearing a jersey of black and white hoops, convinced of the significance of what I was doing and observed by my hopeful father and his cousin Pat.

I found it hard to get going in that game. I had a sense that my tackling was more than adequate, but I felt leaden-footed in attack. Brother Markwell had taught me to watch the direction people's legs were stepping – in talented footballers, a step off the right or left foot could take the hips away from where you were sure they were. Due to this training, I brought some big lads down but didn't make much headway when I had the ball, and despite my best efforts, didn't often get near the ball either.

A Freudian would say that I was awed by the presence of these two old warriors, my father and Pat.

After the game, Dinny McGahan told me that he would start me at five-eighth in the Thirds just for the moment. He was sure that I could work my way up to the Seconds if I got back some of my form of the previous year. Walking home by the normal long route – Matt's, the Frawleys', orating, referring to poetry, discussing Graham Greene's new novel
The Heart of the Matter
with Mr Frawley – I was near to making up my mind not to bother playing this climactic year. It was partly vanity – the ignominy of starting in the Thirds. But there was wisdom to it also. I was busy enough. My companionship with Matt already kept me occupied. I could claim resurgent asthma, from which I had been thankfully free for the past four years. Each of the Brothers knew it had been the curse of my earlier adolescence, and that I had very nearly died from a bout of it in Kempsey at the age of five.

The next day I approached Dinny McGahan and told him the lie. He who had introduced me to the history of Fascism, to the
Anschluss
, to the courses of World War I and World War II.

‘Brother,' I said (I'd given up the diminutive ‘Bra' commonly used by younger boys and by the farting-and-innuendo crowd), ‘I think I'd better miss Rugby League this year. I've got the asthma coming back.'

I may even have quoted Dr Buckley, our local physician, who had brought me out of earlier attacks and spoken calmly to my mother. Since Buckley treated the Brothers and the nuns for free, his name operated as an impeccable medical authority.

I would regret not having the humility to play in the Thirds. All my life I have retained a curiosity about whether I would have been good enough for the Seconds or even the Firsts. The Seconds were pretty good players after all.

In any case my winter was now clear. I had no excuse for not by year's end writing poetry as sublime as GMH's, no excuse for not training with Matt until he was ready to run against boys his own age for not or achieving some other form of transcendence.

Sleek Monsignor Loane was enraged by the very book Mr Frawley and I had already discussed.
The Heart of the Matter
was doing great business and even Pelligrini's Devotional Bookseller had it on sale. Monsignor Loane and other parish priests would quickly enough give it a bad reputation.

‘It has nothing,' said Monsignor Loane from his pulpit, ‘no merits in terms of plot comparable say to the great Sir Walter Scott or Charles Dickens. The concerns of its central character, a British District Officer in an African colony, seem to be predominantly to do with fornication and the destruction of a Catholic marriage. This
novel
holds out an apparently theologically sound theory that even the soul bent on self-destruction can be redeemed in the last seconds of its existence. The fact remains that God extends his mercy only to those who have shown good will at some point of their lives, and not to a man like this District Officer who shows nothing but callousness at every stage. This book exploits the concept of redemption and sanctifying grace as if it were a party trick. I urge all parishioners under conscience to advise their families and friends against its seductive argument. The new edition of the life of Saint Therese of Lisieux makes better and more valid reading.'

‘But I've already read the Greene book,' I said to Mangan and the Frawley girls outside.

‘Well, of course you have,' said Rose Frawley.

‘You can't be scrupulous about it,' Mangan advised me, laying his bright brown medieval eyes upon me. Perhaps he saw that I already had the beginnings of a neurotic scrupulousness.

I think they all knew that I had the makings of a possible zealot. In a remote city, in a former colony not yet fully recovered from colonial status, I feared I had caused some lesion in the universe by reading a book condemned by Monsignor Loane, a priest whom – unlike Father Byrne – I didn't particularly respect. For a second in that sun-drenched year so rich with promise, I suddenly feared the loss of myself through the reading of the book, exactly the way GMH feared the loss of himself if the huge grandeur of his poetry were released on the world. He didn't want his poems on his slate when he faced the great cosmic sifting.

Graham Greene had succumbed to a typical and blessed writer's temptation of writing about the mysteries of mercy as they bore on the souls of the weak, the venal, the concupiscent. According to the Monsignor, while pretending to be devoutly Catholic, Greene was tainted with secularism, with the adoration of the things of the age – science preferred to theology, modernism preferred over works of the Fathers of the Church, and repentance after fornication preferred to chastity.

The Church made it all very hard for writers and readers, if you took its edicts literally. The Vatican had its Index of Prohibited Works which included such apparently harmless tales as Alexander Dumas'
The Three Musketeers
, on the list presumably because of its bias against Cardinal Richelieu and its romanticizing of duelling. Secularism was everywhere, and those books in which it was presented had the immediate honour of being put on the Index.

The next Saturday night I went up to St Martha's again, entered the confessional and confessed, not to Monsignor Loane but to the curate, that I had read a Graham Greene novel. I knew it was no grave matter but couldn't help confessing it, as if behind my exultance in life lay a thin-lipped fanatic. ‘That's not necessarily a bad thing,' he said. ‘It's a Christian duty to inform yourself, as long as you balance it with devotional reading to protect yourself mentally from some of the things portrayed.'

The priest was probably wondering why I didn't confess the normal things, the lusts and masturbations. But Celestials didn't go in for that sort of thing.

It was wonderful always to come out of the confessional, having told the truth, irrespective of whether the embarrassing announcement were the reading of Graham Greene or the inchoate desiring of a girl. James Joyce had written definitively on the exaltation of a
good
confession, the internal horror of a
bad
one. How joyful the long, treading-on-air walk down Homebush Road, the readiness with which Hopkinsesque imagery sprang to mind in the immaculate soul.

Sometimes Matt came to St Martha's wanting to confess. I would take him to the door of the confessional, guide him down on to the little kneeler by the grille, and close the door behind him. The doors of the confessionals of Strathfield were designed to click shut on ball-bearing locks, and so they were a mixture of the latest fittings and the most ancient Sacrament.