The Empty Family (11 page)

The first day I knocked on his door he was busy, but I was struck by how polite he was. When I told him why I had come to see him, he nodded and said that Mr Mulhern had mentioned me to him, and that he too was an admirer of Hopkins and Eliot. He suggested that I come back another time. I remember that I went up to his room every evening after tea for some weeks but he was never there. One day I saw him on the corridor but he did not notice me.

And then one Sunday, when I had presumed that I was travelling to New Ross for a hurling match, I was told that I had been dropped from the subs bench and the bus would be full. I knew it was my own fault for not togging out on the appointed afternoons, for disappearing into the library when I should have been on the playing field, but I was not alone in believing that I had been singled out by not being allowed to travel on the bus as a supporter. Even Donnacha had managed to get on the bus and he had never held a hurley in his life. This meant that I had a whole afternoon empty, from one o’clock, when the bus left, to five, when those still in the school would be expected to turn up for Rosary.

When I went up to Father Moorehouse’s room that afternoon I did so merely as a way of passing ten minutes; I did not expect him to be there. He opened the door brusquely. He seemed preoccupied but once he remembered who I was and how long ago he had promised to see me he invited me into the room. I had been in other priests’ quarters, but these were different from the rest. The main room was smaller. It was full of books and papers and LPs piled on desks. I could see no television but there was a record player and there were two speakers resting against the wall. Father Moorehouse had been working at a desk. He moved some books and pamphlets from the short sofa and made space for me to sit and then he began to talk. I had no idea what I had expected him to say, or why, in fact, I had been sent to see him, but I need not have worried. His voice was soft; he smiled when he stopped to think, looking for the right phrase, and a few times he would take a note of something he had said so that he would not forget it. I wish I had taken notes too, but I remember clearly some of the things he said that day because I wrote them down as soon as I left his presence. He said: ‘We must turn our bewilderment in the world into a gift from God.’ He said: ‘We must merge the language of our prayer with the terms of our predicament.’ He said: ‘We must humbly understand that consciousness belongs to each of us alone, it is part of us as much as it is part of God.’

He asked me about prayer and when I said nothing interesting he found me books and warned that some of them were not Catholic books but they might help me understand Hopkins and Eliot. He asked me if I had read John Donne and I said that I had not. He told me I must and he quoted some lines. By the time I left his room, I had books by Lancelot Andrewes, Jonathan Edwards, Simone Weil and Fulton Sheen. He suggested that I come back even before I had read these books because he would like to talk to me more about faith and about prayer. I thanked him and I left.

I suppose it must be said that my interest in Patrick Moorehouse’s mind, and my fascination at the points he made and the terms he used and the writers he quoted from, were entirely sexual. But maybe it should be said only once, and perhaps whispered or put into parentheses, or consigned to the realm of the obvious. At that time, no one knew that a sixteen-year-old boy and a priest twice his age could or would have sex, and so it never awoke as a thought in my conscious mind. Now, I have to say, even now, the idea of it – of Father Moorehouse naked, for example, or Father Moorehouse with an erection, or Father Moorehouse’s tongue – is exciting. I regret that I did not put more thought into it then.

Instead, I tried to read the books he gave me. They were difficult, and I was glad that he had given me permission to go back to his room before I had finished any of them. I had found some essays by Eliot in the library and a book about his religious belief and his poetry and thought that this might be an excuse to go to Father Moorehouse’s room again, maybe with passages marked that had puzzled me, to see what he thought.

The next time I found him in his room I was surprised to see Gráinne Roche and a friend of hers. They were both sitting on the sofa. Father Moorehouse got a chair for me from what I supposed must be the bedroom. I knew Gráinne, of course, from the debates. Now Father Moorehouse informed me that she was asking the same questions as I was and he was glad both of us had met in his room to discuss matters of faith rather than in the false world of the debating chamber. Gráinne was very quiet and appeared almost embarrassed. Father Moorehouse completely ignored her friend, who seemed not to notice, or not to mind. When he stood up, he made it clear that he had to go. All three of us left before him, the girls to walk back downtown, me to return to the study hall.

For the rest of the term, then, and for some of the following year, I had permission maybe once a week or once a fortnight to take time from the study hall and go to Father Moorehouse’s room. It was presumed, I suppose, that I was being groomed for the seminary, although Father Moorehouse never mentioned that possibility. Most times when we met by arrangement Gráinne was there too, often with a friend or two friends but sometimes alone. A few times another guy from my class, who later did spend time in the seminary, came. He was clever and asked intelligent questions.

Donnacha, on the other hand, had no interest in poetry or theology. I must have talked to him about what I was reading but perhaps not much because I have no memory of us ever discussing what went on in Father Moorehouse’s room.

It is hard not to squirm when I think of some of the things I said in that room. Father Moorehouse sometimes spoke about complex matters, about God’s role in chance and choice, in accidents and in decisions made on the basis of free will, about faith and its paradoxes. He loved words like paradox and ambiguity, he loved speculating, and he often turned to poems or books to help him as he went along. At the end, and sometimes at the beginning, he asked us to pray out loud, to follow him in finding words to match our feelings. I have no memory of any of Gráinne’s friends ever doing this, but she did it and so did I. Father Moorehouse disliked cosy platitudes, as he called them, and simple stories. He pushed us all the time towards working our doubts and fears into sentences, towards using only the most precise metaphors. Sometimes we would kneel, sometimes face each other directly. Only one of us would speak. Occasionally he would ask us to address God personally, sometimes as though God were in the room with us, other times as though he were far away, a distant presence with whom we needed to communicate urgently.

It was awful, some of it, like Teilhard de Chardin crossed with Donovan or bad Bob Dylan. I know that Gráinne must remember how involved I became in it, how profoundly I talked to God! One of my greatest worries when she came to Dublin was that I would meet her somewhere and she would remind me, or start telling others, all about it. Or even that she might remember phrases or moments. Instead, strangely, her silence on the subject made me wish to avoid her even more, and made me uneasy now as I sat opposite her in the Tea Room as the wine was poured and the starter served.

‘We got one of your things out on DVD and watched it one night when the boys were out,’ Gráinne said. She sounded for a second as though she and Donnacha were meeting me in order to discuss the screenplay.

‘The boys go to dances,’ Donnacha said. ‘I have to wait around the corner in the car for them so as not to make a show of them.’

‘I hope you found the film true to life,’ I said.

‘We thought
The Silence of the Lambs
was bad. I mean it gave Donnacha nightmares. But yours was worse.’

‘It didn’t give me nightmares,’ Donnacha said.

‘It did. It gave you nightmares. You don’t remember because you were fast asleep for them, but I do because I had to listen to you.’

Donnacha looked at me and smiled.

‘I have never had a nightmare in my life. It would take more than a film to give me a nightmare.’

‘What was your film called?’ Gráinne interrupted.

‘
A Raw Deal
,’ I said.

‘It was raw all right. I mean – the dentist’s chair! How did you think of it?’

‘The director added it. I didn’t think of it.’

‘I thought you wrote it.’

‘Originally I had something much worse.’

‘I don’t want to hear,’ she said.

‘I hope you didn’t ever let the boys see it.’

‘God knows what they’re looking at. Except in our house the computer is in the kitchen, so at least we know what they’re looking at there.’

‘Ruins all the fun,’ I said. ‘The smell of cooking is bad for a computer as well.’

She sipped her wine and ignored me and looked all around the restaurant. I wondered when she would get to the point. In her company there was never exactly silence, even when nothing was being said. The way her eyes took in the room made a sort of noise. I noticed a red patch, almost a rash, becoming more obvious on her neck. Suddenly she seemed nervous.

I had never worked out what to do if she asked me straight out if Donnacha and I had ever been together. One night – and it must have been the night I spent most time in their company since they came to Dublin – we were in a bar in Donnybrook and I was almost drunk and had probably made one joke too many at the expense of decency. I sobered up quickly, however, when, once Gráinne had gone to the bathroom, Donnacha turned and spoke to me with lines that sounded like something from a bad play.

‘Gráinne doesn’t know anything about us,’ he said.

I shrugged.

‘I’d like to keep it that way,’ he said. He had been drinking as well and there was a hint of accusation.

‘Well, you’d better not tell her then,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t that be the best thing?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘You mean – I shouldn’t tell her?’

‘I mean you should never say it to anyone. Anyone at all.’

‘I never have.’

‘I’m glad to hear that.’

I remembered, during that scene, how soft and biddable alcohol used to make him when he discovered it first, when he was nineteen or twenty, how funny he could become, and how uninhibited, once the light was turned off in my flat in Harcourt Terrace. I remembered that nothing made him happier when he had had a few drinks than to have me lie on my back while he knelt with his back to me and his knees on either side of my torso. He would bend as I pushed my tongue hard up into his arsehole while he sucked my cock and licked my balls.

What was strange about him later, when he would come to stay for a weekend, was that he remained part of the culture that produced him. In that culture no one ever appeared naked. In the school, there were doors with locks on each shower, and a hook to hang your clothes within each shower cubicle. Only one guy, who was from Dublin, would strip off after a game of hurling and then move bravely towards the shower. Everyone else, even in the dormitory, moved gingerly. And Donnacha, including when he was very drunk, wore his underpants to bed. A few times I enjoyed tossing his underpants across the room when he was not paying attention so that in the morning he would have no choice but to wander naked in search of them. I knew he was burning with embarrassment at the idea that I was lying in bed watching him.

Observing him now, I could sense that nothing was different. He probably slept in pyjamas, sitting each night at the side of the bed and edging them on without standing up. He was someone who never saw any reason why he should change, who lived as he was meant to live, who could be trusted, who never in his life had wanted anything more than what he had.

When the main course was served and we had ordered a second bottle of wine, Gráinne began to speak.

‘I don’t know if you have been reading my pieces on the Hierarchy,’ she said.

‘I look at the pictures.’

‘Seriously,’ she said. ‘I thought it was time. There has been a great change and I wanted to write about that.’

‘You mean that Mass is on Saturday night as well?’

‘Stop making fun of me! I mean that there is a new humility among the Hierarchy. All of them know the Church has made mistakes.’

‘You mean they’ve decided to stop fucking altar boys.’

‘Hey, here now,’ Donnacha said. ‘You’re in a posh hotel.’

‘I mean,’ Gráinne said, her face becoming redder, ‘that they know they are servants of the people, and servants of the truth.’

‘You sound as if you’re on
Saturday View
,’ I said.

‘I’ve seen the archbishop a number of times. I was involved in an advisory group to his predecessor.’

‘For all the good that did,’ I said.

‘He did his best. No one anywhere else did any better. But what I am saying is there has been a change, a real change.’

‘Lovely,’ I said.

‘But it was something the archbishop said that stopped me in my tracks,’ Gráinne said. She had put her knife and fork down and I thought I saw tears in her eyes. This, I said to myself, is unbearable.

‘He said that it was important not only for the Church now that the truth be known, but it was something that the Church of the future would demand from us. The Church of the future would, he said, stand for truth.’

‘I see.’

‘I came home and I spoke to Donnacha, and then with his support I spoke to the boys and then all four of us knelt down and prayed and we asked our Saviour to guide us, and then we decided that the truth should be known. And I want nothing to do with tribunals of inquiry and I want no compensation but I can no longer hide the truth.’

‘What is the truth?’ I asked.

‘And I need you to know before I speak out,’ she said. ‘The priest in question is no longer in the Church and there have already been other allegations against him.’

‘Which priest?’

‘You know which one,’ she said.

‘I don’t.’

‘Which one do you think?’ Donnacha asked.

‘You tell me.’

‘Patrick Moorehouse.’

‘Are you saying you had sex with Patrick Moorehouse?’ I asked. I quickly wiped the beginning of a smile from my face.