Mondo Desperado (6 page)

Wiser perhaps to confine oneself to that question which is put with the greatest frequency, namely: ‘Which was your truly most unforgettable, most traumatic experience?’ Instantly
that eliminates those days which have with the passage of time become suffused with an orange-amber glow and which, far from being traumatic, have served to act as a soothing palliative to the soul
in troubled times.

But as each human being on this earth knows, and knows only too well, there are other days; suffused with no glow, orange or amber or otherwise, but shot through with a pervading, monochromatic
greyness, a sliver of which unyielding, ungenerous colourlessness, no matter what swirling obfuscating clouds one attempts to contrive as a protective shield or cloak, inevitably shines through.
Yes, I have experienced such days in the course of my long career. Events have occurred which mean that, but for God’s grace and the power of human prayer, I should not be sitting here today
in this enormous Chesterfield chair, imbibing moderate sips of my Dubonnet and nibbling the occasional Ritz cracker so thoughtfully prepared for me by my housekeeper, Mrs Miniter. I should not be
here today, girding myself to begin this tale – which to date I have related to but a single soul, a genial young student who visited me some months ago, keen to hear of my past experiences
in a long and varied career. Initially, I was most reticent, but he was an intelligent young man, and his bright-eyed enthusiasm and eagerness eventually won me over. Yes, in the end I capitulated
and told that young man, Hughie Turbot, the selfsame story I am about to relate here. Of how, as a young bishop in the diocese of Car and Clash, I ordained what I took to be a fresh, energetic
young curate, well versed in both theology and pastoral care, champing at the bit to begin work with his flock in the parish of his birth, but who, in fact, turned out to be not remotely like that
at all and to be in fact, the Horned One, the Beast, call him what you will – the Devil, in other words.

Of course, if I had advanced such a theory back then, in the dear glorious days beyond recall, when the students were arriving in droves at summer’s end to begin the new term at St
Mackie’s Seminary, people would have said I had taken leave of my reason. ‘What – Packie Cooley the Devil, your grace? I’m afraid you must have received a little too much
sun over the holidays!’ And indeed, if I am honest, I can genuinely see why they might have harboured such a consideration. For on that first evening when I myself first set eyes on him, just
about the very last thing on my mind was any notion that he might be the evil one. Yes, he was a handsome lad indeed, young Packie, with a fistful of golden copper curls that tumbled with some
abandon across that high polished forehead of his, and upon his lips that evening, that bright – and to us, it seemed, entirely guileless – smile to which we would soon become
accustomed. No, the only thing black about Packie Cooley in those days – precious innocents! – was the spanking new soutane which his mother had bought specially for him in a clerical
outfitters in Dublin and which flapped gaily about his legs as he chased the greasy leather football across the moistened expanse of the junior field, crying aloud with all the excitement of a
young child: ‘Ah, lads! Pass it to me, will youse, lads! Give me a welt of it!’ How we laughed when a near-superhuman effort on his part to intercept – especially on damp days
such as this – the oft-recalcitrant orb as it made its way across the leaden skies ended in disaster as he completely misjudged the path of its trajectory and ended up face down in a very
large patch of sodden earth in the centre of the field which had the consistency of the blancmange regularly served up to us for dessert, and then raised himself up on his fists as best he could,
appearing for all the world as some kind of primeval Mud-Man of whose exploits you might read in a child’s penny comic. Little did we know, of course – how could we – that this
was but an exasperatingly cunning ploy designed to win our sympathies and affections – which it undoubtedly did, for it is to that single incident the heart-warming cry which was to become a
feature of the college’s corridors and quadrangles, ‘Good man, Packie!’, may attribute its genesis. It was to be the first of a number of many conniving strategems spawned for no
reason other than to completely obliterate any suspicions that might attach themselves to the person of Packie Cooley and reveal his true identity – His Satanic Majesty, Diabolic Walker Among
Men!

All of which were truly successful, for not once did the truth occur to myself, or my esteemed second-in-command in those days, Fr Buttkins McArdle. With whom I earnestly found myself in
agreement when, having poured the Dubonnet for our nightcap one evening in my study, he angled his elbow and, leaning on the heavy marble mantelpiece, turned to me and with his eyes glittering,
said: ‘Do you know, your grace? I think the calibre of men we’re getting is improving every year. I quizzed that young Packie Cooley up and down in Latin class and be cripes if he
didn’t come up trumps every time! As true as I’m standing here with my elbow on this mantelpiece, I don’t think there’s a Latin verb in the dictionary but he’s
conversant with it!’

Of course, if Buttkins were to say the exact same thing to me now, I know what my reply should be, ready and waiting to leap off my tongue. ‘Aha!’ I would cry. ‘But do you know
why that is, Buttkins? Because he is the Devil! And if the Devil is not knowledgeable in the art of the ancient languages, then I ask you – who is? Who is, I ask you!’

But Fr McArdle isn’t here today, of course, having thrown himself off the roof of St Mackie’s some years ago in the throes of a mid-life crisis concerning the validity of his faith
and his relationship with his Maker, and so my words are as wishful thinking, nothing more. And the truth is, dear reader, that the reply which I made to my gentle deceased friend and colleague in
faith on that occasion long ago was: ‘Packie Cooley is as brainy a scholar as ever strode through the portals of St Mackie’s, Father. And as far from committing the sin of pride as
Castlebar is from Dingle.’ And to which my old friend, tilting the meniscus of his dark beverage, mused softly: ‘Now you’ve said it. You’ve said it now and no mistake, me
old butty!’

I would soon come to rue those words! How can I begin to impress upon you, dearest reader, how it galls me to this day to think that I, who had been – not a rock! but a virtual
slab
of
granite
to my beloved students, should have been deceived by the smiling cherubic complexion of a football-playing ‘angel’ whose heart seemed to burst with passion for both
his peers and the human race in general. But who, in truth, was the leavings of the celestial barrel, a handful of Mephistophelian scrapings whose soul was as nothing more than a piece of canine
excrement you might tread underfoot when you were pacing the perimeter of the football field in the company of your colleagues at the end of a long teaching day. Surely, dear readers, even amongst
the fallen themselves there must prevail some form of hierarchy. One must surely believe that even within the breast of the wickedest succubus there gleams some tiny star of hope, of goodness.

*

But not within that of Packie Cooley. For, as it gradually and inevitably became clear to me, he was no unspectacular drone in the armies of Hades. Would that he had been! Would
that he had, gentle reader!

By now, I feel certain that it is evident as to why these reminiscences continue to trouble me so. Had Packie Cooley been nothing more than a humdrum private in those black, smoking regiments of
the expelled, perhaps there might have been a tiny glimmer of the hope of which I have spoken earlier. But what I didn’t realize – along with the fact that it was by now already too
late to do anything even if I had! – was that I was dealing with no casual, insouciant, part-time agent of the shadows. What I now harboured within the walls of my beloved seminary –
which I would have realized had he not so effectively fashioned winkers for me with his – as I now can see it – reptilian charm – was the very President of the Damned, the Earl of
Nothingness – Satan himself!

*

The first indication I had that Fr Packie Cooley might not exactly be who he said he was came on a dark night in the year 1961, not long after the terrible news had arrived that
some Irish soldiers had been brutally done to death by members of the marauding Baluba tribe in the Congo region of Africa. I had just concluded my spiritual reading and was making my way along the
main corridor to my room when I became aware of a presence close by, and upon turning the corner leading to what was affectionately known as the Big Corridor, to my astonishment found the student
in question (he was by now a subdeacon) chuckling away to himself as he held the newspaper, as large tears coursed down his flushed, excessively mobile face, spattering the newsprint of the paper
which he held before him. ‘Packie,’ I gasped, ‘oughtn’t you be in bed?’ ‘Yes,’ he coughed as he began his reply, ‘but I was so upset at this dreadful
news that I simply couldn’t sleep. Did you read about it yourself, Father? You know what they did to those poor soldiers, don’t you? They ate them! It’s beyond words! It’s
just too much to bear!’

With that, he covered his face with his black-clad arm and fled down the corridor, the echo of his muffled sobs lingering in the silence long after he had left the building.

Had that been all, it is likely that I should have thought no more of it, but when I examined the newspaper – which in his ‘distressed’ state he had discarded on the window
ledge – I noted that onto the image of one of the unfortunate deceased military had been added a crudely drawn pair of spectacles and ludicrously thin moustache, and beneath that again, a
barely legible scrawl which formed the words – my head lightened –
Irish stew! It’s tasty!

The strangest of feelings enveloped me as I stood there in the half-light of evening, as if a ghost-snake were making its way with infinite but lithe patience up and down the length of my spine.
The tragedy is that I did not acknowledge the import of this sign, shot through with foreboding as it most surely was, but simply shook myself and folded up the newspaper, popping it into the
waste-paper basket as I proceeded on my way to the Sacred Heart dormitory.

The next incident took place in the sacristy on the 11th of November 1962 when I was doffing my vestments, having completed my celebration of Mass. I was in quite high spirits – it was a
truly beautiful morning, with spears of golden sunlight seeming to impishly fence with each other above the mosaic in that bright and airy room – and was looking forward to my religious
instruction class with my students, humming ‘
Juxta crucem! Misericordiae!
’ quite absentmindedly, I have to admit, when I perceived at my feet a most extraordinary sight.
Initially, the opinion that I formed of this spectacle was that it was but random flecks of foam perhaps dislodged from the jaws of a hastily shaved, unfortunately tardy colleague, but I was forced
to revise this – an unjustifiably hasty assumption in any case – almost immediately when I realized that what my eyes were gazing upon were nothing other than the tiniest fragments of
printed paper. But not only that – for what lay beneath me, on those polished tiles, were pieces removed from the most holy missal! My perplexity deepened. Who could have done this thing? I
asked of myself again and again, turning the fragments – some of them actually compressed until they had become hard pellets – abstractedly in my hands. It was then I looked up to see
him standing there above me – Packie Cooley. Instinctively one is alert to the mysterious energies which often pass between human beings. An intense current which can be revelatory, combining
now with a grey nimbus of cloud which seemed to form itself like a mask before his eyes, veiling his normally fresh complexion as if to say: ‘The man you are looking upon is not Packie
Cooley! For he has ceased to be that man!’

By this point I was emotionally overwrought. I cast my eyes over the tattered remnants of what had once been a beautifully hand-stitched gold-embossed religious book and cried: ‘Who could
have done this? Who?’ Then – gloriously, in a way, weakening, I became aware at that very moment of his stifled yet unmistakable sobbing, and felt his comforting hand fall upon my
shoulder, as he said: ‘Now more than ever the Church needs us, Father. There is no knowing the extent to which our enemies and the enemies of the one true established Church will go.’
Flushed as I was, in my heady emotional state, I found myself clasping his hand – idiotically, as is now only all too evident – and, as if I had been personally and single-handedly
responsible for snatching a soul in danger from the trapdoor that led to the Pit itself, cried aloud: ‘Yes, Packie! It’s so true! What you say is so, so true!’

Instead – if only I had done it! – of slapping him across the face and crying: ‘Don’t lie, you hypocrite! You did this! You did it, Cooley! You! And for one reason and
one alone! Because you’re the Devil and it’s your job!’

But, whether or not through the gathering of so many anxieties within me like so many atomic gases, it was not to be, and I feel no pride, readers, none at all as I look back upon it, that
half-hour in an early morning sacristy where we stand together, collecting ill-fitting pieces of creased and irretrievably torn tissue paper, Sellotaping and aligning them, those forlorn fragments,
as best we could into an approximation of what that sad, blasphemed publication had once been.

Many times since have I reflected that had I acted on either of those two occasions – it is with tormented soul and guilt-drenched heart I have picked up Conrad’s tales of guilt and
cowardice in the face of adversity, I assure you! – perhaps the scorch-footed march of the fork-tongued soul-taker would have been halted. But it was not to be! My eyes were as blind as those
of a bat long since in thrall to the demon grape, the pail from the well of moral courage drawn up once more, hopelessly empty, as the career of ‘Fr Packie Cooley’ proceeded apace, nay
hurtled.