Demons Read online

  my skinny shoulders.

  I couldn’t read very well yet so I made up some of the words, while others I knew by rote from all the Masses I’d already attended. The actions I had by heart too: lifting the host and chalice, presenting them to the congregation, bowing and kneeling, kissing the altar, distributing communion.

  And the Eucharist. Where it happened. Transubstantiation. The miracle at the heart of every Mass when the priest changed the substance of ordinary bread and wine into the real body and blood of Christ.

  Transformation. An instance of seemingly magical, inexplicable change. That was the whole point of being a priest and saying Mass. I loved being able to do it.

  Mum and Dad and Gran lined up to receive the hosts, more small round circles cut from cardboard, or sometimes pieces of white bread whose flabby dough I had squashed flat-as-flat with the palm of my hand, pressing out rounds with a small smooth-edged biscuit cutter. Dad almost choked on a piece once. I made them come back for seconds, otherwise it looked as if there were hardly any people in my

  congregation. When they got tired of it, I fed my teddy bears and dolls, as well as imaginary worshipers. Not quite the same as the real thing, but.

  ‘Why can’t girls be priests?’ I persisted.

  ‘That’s the rules,’ said Dad. ‘Men only.’

  ‘It’s a silly rule,’ said Mum, maybe taking her

  cue from Gran or (and this was more likely) letting the protesting side of her nature take over from the Catholic. After all, it was her and Dad’s stronger side.

  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

&
nbsp; 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?’

  Happiness

  Did Mum really not know what it was like to be

  different when everyone else around you was the same?

  ‘We’ve always wanted you to be happy,’ she said.

  Something in her voice made me forget about myself and ask: ‘Does that mean you haven’t always

  been happy?’

  ‘No one’s ever happy all the time,’ Mum said, evasively.

  ‘That’s not a proper answer. In fact, the way you said it makes me think there’s something you’re hiding.’

  ‘I wasn’t very happy when I was at school,’ she said. ‘But you knew that.’

  ‘The mad, kid-strapping nuns. Yes, you told me about them. Why didn’t they make you stop wanting to be Catholic?’ I asked her.

  Mum shrugged. ‘They almost did, but I’ve always been a bit stroppy and I decided I wasn’t going to let them. But they definitely changed the way I thought about religion. They were strict but that had the effect of making me much more easygoing.’

  I snuggled up to her, the way I had when I’d been much younger. ‘What about you and Dad?’ I asked.

  ‘What about us?’

  ‘Have you two always been happy?’

  ‘Always? No. As I just said, no one ever is. But most of the time we have been. Still are. Which is all anyone can reasonably expect.’

  ‘But . . . ?’ I persisted.

  I’d learnt, going on marches, to meetings and on door knocks, to be persistent.

  ‘Things haven’t always been easy,’ Mum admitted, looking around the room in case someone

  was listening to our conversation. But there wasn’t. Mum chose her talk times well, knowing that I didn’t particularly want Dad, or Gran, to interrupt our talks about periods, intercourse, childbirth and the rest. The

  topic today had turned in a different direction but it was still private nonetheless.

  ‘What things
?’

  ‘Well, Gran for instance.’

  More about Gran

  That did surprise me. Gran had always been there and, in particular, had always been there for me. OK, she could be pushy, a grump and a nuisance at times, and if anyone was a Catholic with a reasonably large capital C it was Gran (except I knew by then that part of it was an impression she liked to give, an act) but despite everything, I loved her more than I could say. We all loved her, didn’t we? What connection did Gran have with unhappiness?

  ‘Your Gran’s not the easiest person to have around,’ Mum said by way of introduction.

  ‘No,’ I said slowly, considering this, ‘I guess not but she’s not difficult either. Not really difficult. Is she?’

  ‘Depends what you mean by difficult. You’re not as involved with her as I am.’

  Wasn’t I! ‘She’s independent,’ I said. ‘Always has been.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Mum. ‘She speaks her mind.’

  I grinned, the childhood memory of playing at priests coming back to me and, with it, Gran’s implied criticism of the Pope and church rules. ‘Woman power!’

  Mum didn’t grin back.

  ‘Power,’ she said. ‘That’s it in a nutshell. Your

  Gran’s always been a woman with power - and I don’t mean of power, they’re two separate things - and it’s not something she’s been able to give up easily, if at all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Before she came to live here with us she had her

  own home.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘She had status in the village.’

  ‘She’s told me the stories. Including how she once hid an IRA man in her basement and all that.’

  ‘Look Andrea,’ said Mum, ‘when I met your Dad and we decided to marry, Gran wasn’t only sad that she was going to lose her last remaining son to a strange country and a strange woman, she was really pretty angry.’

  ‘I suppose she would be,’ I said. ‘I mean, my two uncles were killed by the British and she was going to be left all alone. She probably hoped Dad would come back one day. She never thought he’d get batoned standing next to a beautiful woman, not to mention a strange one.’