The devils diary, p.18
The Devil's Diary, page 18
‘Where have you come from?’ Hugo asked. ‘Don’t you know you’re not supposed to follow us up the hill.’
‘I’m going home to tell Mammy,’ she threatened.
‘Tell her what?’ Brennan laughed.
‘What Jerry did to Mary Rose.’
‘He didn’t do anything,’ McDaid swore with a grin.
‘He lay on top of her. I saw it all. He pulled her knickers down.’
‘Come on, it’s bonfire night tonight. We’ll all go to the top of the hill and pull a cart-load of heather.’ Hugo took Carmel’s hand.
They climbed the hillside to the plateau where the heather was deepest, and he prayed to Mary Magdalene that Carmel would forget what she’d seen. It was a rosy summer evening with the fragrance of wild flowers in the air and the bare strand below forming a sweeping sickle half-hidden in grey-green bent-grass. On the north side of the glen the cornfields and potato patches looked greener than the meadows, the potato tops already obscuring the ridges after being earthed up early. In another two hours every hill and height would be crowned with a bonfire, flames rising hungrily into the twilight, as young men and women made fun and heaped the dry heather higher. It was his favourite time of year, and as he looked down on broken threads of smoke rising from cottage chimneys, he held Carmel’s hand and tried to talk to her as if nothing unusual had happened. They came to a sheltered hollow, and she ran on ahead, skipping lightly.
‘I’m tired of the Game,’ Hugo said. ‘I’m not going to play it any more.’
‘Neither am I.’
‘Was the Rub worth waiting for?’
‘There’s nothing to it. I got no good out of it at all.’
‘Maybe it’s time Arty Brennan and Mary Rose played it on their own,’ Hugo said.
‘Maybe if we don’t play it, Mary Rose won’t want to play it either.’
‘You’d better promise Carmel sweets. If you don’t, she’s bound to tell.’
He followed her over the rim of the hollow, while Hugo joined Brennan, McDaid and Mary Rose. He tried to take her hand, and she told him that she preferred to skip on her own. Concealing his anxiety, he stooped and pulled a clump of heather. It was long, dry, bushy heather with gnarled roots that tore through the soft peat-moss and suddenly snapped, causing him to fall backwards with his legs in the air. When he got to his feet, he saw Carmel on all fours stealing up on a ewe that was lying on her side chewing the cud. The ewe took off across the breast of the hill. Calling to Carmel to wait, he gave chase as the other sheep scattered before him. He followed the ewe through peat-hags and eroded gullies until she finally jumped a cutting and left him standing.
Puffed, he sat down with his head between his legs and cursed the asthma that had stolen the breath from his lungs. Beside him was a pool with darting tadpoles stirring up brown clouds of mire at the bottom. He began prodding their tails with a stalk of melic grass to make them flit and dive as quick as minnows. He lay for a long time waiting to get his breath back, and observed the busy life of the pool which seemed to resemble the life of a teeming city viewed from high up in the heavens.
‘Where’s Carmel?’ Hugo came up behind him.
‘I thought she’d gone back down the hill to you.’
‘I haven’t seen her. Maybe she’s wandered off on her own.’
‘She doesn’t know this part of the hill. She could get lost.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Hugo. ‘That would solve your problem too neatly.’
He cupped his hands and called her name but he got no answer. He climbed a peat-hag to get a better view and called her name again.
‘Don’t waste your breath, it’s short enough,’ Hugo scoffed. ‘She’s probably home by now helping Mother to make scones and telling her the latest about you and Mary Rose.’
When they came in for tea, their mother asked if they’d seen Carmel. Early the next morning a search party from the townland found her body in the lough not far from where she had been skipping. They carried her home and put her lying on a white sheet on the bed. Her fine, long hair was flattened, her lips closed tight over her teeth. She looked pale and unconcerned. Her bright pink dress was a muddy brown.
‘You needn’t worry now,’ Hugo said. ‘I’ll never spill the beans.’
‘If we had carried on looking for her, we might have found her. She’s dead because we gave up too soon.’
Their house was never the same again. Their father talked less and their mother became more bossy and overbearing. They had played the Game with Mary Rose for the last time. On June 23rd, 1955 a phase of his boyhood had ended.
He spent the evening reading a book on Indian philosophy, a parting gift from Dr Sharma. He was not really in a mood for philosophy but he felt that the effort of engaging with an unfamiliar vocabulary would concentrate his mind on the present. He was still reading in bed when Hugo returned from the motel at midnight. He could tell from the way Hugo slammed the front door and the subsequent banging about in the kitchen that he had drunk more than usual and therefore much more than he could hold. He clumped up the stairs and stumbled into Father Jerry’s bedroom brandishing half a cooked chicken in his fist.
‘I saw the light – if you see what I mean. I knew you were still awake.’
He sat on the edge of the bed, tearing at the chicken and licking his fingers after each untidy mouthful. When Father Jerry suggested that he find himself a chair, preferably in his own room, he replied that since his visit was not a formal one the edge of the bed would serve his purpose. His eyes gleamed wildly as he looked round the room. He knew that he was intruding and he disliked himself for being aware of it.
‘You’re a man of the cloth, Jerry,’ he hiccuped. ‘Now you’re in pyjamas; the cloth is hanging up in the wardrobe. No soutane, no biretta, no stole, no big, black missal under your arm. Now we can speak as equals without giving either offence or quarter.’
‘I think it’s time you went to bed.’
‘You don’t know how funny you look in pyjamas. It’s strange to see you look like any normal man.’
He belched deliberately and patted his stomach with the palm of his hand.
‘You were always too close to Father, that was half your problem. Father wasn’t the hero you imagined. He was never exposed to the unfamiliar, never plagued by uncertainty. He trained to be a country doctor and a country doctor he remained. Now, I’ve travelled in strange places and thought about him in strange circumstances, and felt his presence in my life as a dead limb that never belonged to me. He’s a wooden leg that keeps me standing up but won’t bend when I want to sit down. Father Jerry, you and I, we’ve both got a wooden leg.’
He chucked Father Jerry under the chin and laughed through a mouthful of chicken.
‘Never touch me. You must respect the holy ground between us.’
‘Think of your bed as a bishopstool and of me as a pope laying hands on you, conferring sacramental graces to strengthen and uphold you in the nightly fight against evil thoughts and impure fantasies. Surely you must recall Olga’s bottom in her skin-tight leotard.’
Father Jerry tried to get up but Hugo immediately pinned his arms under the bedclothes.
‘I came in to talk to you. We never talk, so now be quiet and listen to your younger brother. I was thinking of Mother last night, a good woman. I won’t hear anything said against her. Father was a dreamer but she had her head screwed on. She was an original thinker, not your common or garden, craw-thumping Irish mother. She didn’t want you to become a priest, now did she? “There’s only one good reason for going in for the priesthood,” she said. “And that’s to get to be bishop. Jerry, you’re not bishop material.” She didn’t laugh, she meant it, every word. You must wonder now if you should have taken her advice. She gave us more than Father ever did. We’ve got her restlessness, her sense of misery and dissatisfaction. All we lack is her single-mindedness. If we had that, you’d be archbishop by now and I’d be running my own coffee plantation. It’s a fatal combination: Father’s unworldliness and her unhappiness. Jerry, me boyo, we’re sunk.’
Hugo was leaning over him, holding him down in the bed. He turned his head away and said, ‘You’re talking a lot of nonsense. You’re too drunk to talk anything else.’
‘You didn’t love Mother, you hated her.’
‘Of course I didn’t hate her.’
‘Do you remember the colour of her eyes.’
‘They were grey.’
‘I knew it, I knew it,’ Hugo crowed. ‘They weren’t grey, they were a luminous black, just like a woodcock’s.’
‘They were grey,’ Father Jerry quietly insisted. ‘Grey with little green specks.’
‘Do you remember the colour of Carmel’s eyes?’
‘Brown like her hair.’
‘Brown like her hair! Her hair was black.’
‘You’re trying to annoy me. I’m not saying another word.’
‘Let me tell you why you don’t remember. You hated her, just as you hated Mother for loving her. Carmel was your twin sister. She looked like you and you looked like her. Mother kept you in skirts till you were seven, to keep you looking alike. You had curly, black hair then, just like Carmel. You rejected your first pair of trousers, you said they made your legs itch. Father made you wear them. So now it’s time to ask yourself why you’ve taken to the cassock. Did you see it as the only respectable way to get back into skirts? You were jealous of Carmel, you wanted to be a girl like her. Finally, you must ask yourself if you willed her death that day –’
‘I told you I’m not talking to you.’ Father Jerry almost shouted.
‘Mother sensed the truth. She didn’t like you. Do you ever wake up in the night and say, “My mother didn’t love me”? I’ll bet you don’t. You’ve hidden the horror of it from yourself. Your whole life is only an elaborate act of concealment.’
He leant forward as he laughed. Slaver ran down his beard and fell on the sleeve of his pullover. Father Jerry tried to swing his legs out of bed. Hugo put one hand in under the covers and gripped him fiercely above the knee.
‘Now, let’s see if little Jerry has got any tickles left in him. Poor sister Carmel lost hers a long time ago.’
Father Jerry writhed in the bed, while Hugo kept him down with the full weight of his body.
‘You won the Game once. It was your finest hour, and of course you never knew. What was it like? Hot or cold? I’ll bet it was cold. It put you off. Confess. It put you off. And for evermore it had to be a life of self-denial, or rather self-delusion, for how can you truly deny yourself something you don’t truly desire. That’s the secret of your priesthood: not doing. No sex, no cakes, no fun, no ale. Why not go the whole hog and deny yourself milk and biscuits? You have no desires and no appetites. Just consider. There would be rejoicing in heaven if you shook the foundations of this frozen house with a good randy woman and did something that went against the grain of your miserable nature. What is the use of pretending that you’ve turned your back on the world at great personal cost, if you see the world as a stinking cesspool? Oh, I should have been a priest. It would have been a daily and nightly struggle. That’s where the meaning is, in the struggle. All else is only drift and self-indulgence. If I were a priest, I’d work in the sewers, I’d bloat my body with all the filth and stench of humanity.’
‘It’s bloated enough already.’
‘Ah, the priesteen has delivered himself of a cliché … I’d become an outcast for Christ’s sake, a man apart in all his sores and boils, because there’s no regeneration without degeneration. Time and example would tell. In my old age I’d become a salt-lick for the faithful, they’d come to me for the minerals of spiritual growth, and as they went away restrengthened, they’d say, “This is one salt-lick that hath not lost his savour.”’
‘Have you done?’
‘Is that your answer? Just another cliché. I’d like you to know that the clichés came later. There is none to be found in the parables of the New Testament. Christ was intelligent. The apostolic succession is a succession of donkeys.’
Father Jerry closed his eyes and pretended to sleep.
‘Ah, you’re dreaming again, dreaming about Olga. Sing her praises. Hosanna in excelsis. She was worth six of Mary Rose. Remember how she breathed, and how you listened to the breathing above the words. And remember those strong legs and shoulders. She’d lead you into hell and carry you back again without wilting under the burden. In the village they spoke of “Father Jerry’s Romance” but you didn’t have the courage of your lust, now did you? As you sit in the confessional listening to the lurid ins and outs of the flesh, will you fondly enumerate the sins you failed to commit with her?’
He drove his hand up Father Jerry’s leg. Father Jerry jumped a foot off the bed and Hugo fell back with the bedclothes on top of him. His head made a hollow sound as it struck the skirting.
‘Out, out, out.’ Father Jerry shouted. ‘If you don’t get back to your room this minute, I’ll ring the police.’
‘The police won’t believe you.’ Hugo laughed scornfully as he got to his feet.
‘Don’t put me to the test.’
‘It won’t look good, a priest who preaches charity evicting his only brother at two o’clock in the morning.’
‘I meant what I said, I’ll say no more.’
Hugo crossed the landing and stood on the far side of the stairwell.
‘You sold your birthright when you sold the ancestral home,’ he shouted. ‘Now you’re home and homeless. And homesick too. You’ll never do any good here, so why don’t you follow the hippies over the hill. You’re homesick because you’re youthsick, because nothing ever happens twice.’
He made a prolonged belching noise and slammed his bedroom door.
Father Jerry locked his own door and put out the light. He lay awake in the dark all night, waiting for the first glimmer of dawn. In the morning, as he left for Mass, he knocked on Hugo’s door and told him that he had less than an hour to pack his bags.
Chapter 17
When he came back from church, the Land Rover was no longer in the driveway. He went straight upstairs to Hugo’s room to find the sheets and blankets folded neatly on top of the mattress. The wardrobe was empty, the carving of the sheep-woman gone, and the pile of unwashed socks and underclothes had vanished from the corner. With a sigh of relief he went downstairs and ground a handful of coffee beans in the kitchen. He could hardly believe that Hugo had left so quickly, so quietly, and so early in the morning.
He decided to spend the day about the house and luxuriate in his new-found solitude. He went from room to room and stood by each window in turn looking down on the sea, the Glebe and the village to the east. The parochial house was built on a height; all was under his eyes. A sentence from the Summa plopped into his mind: ‘That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly, they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell.’
‘Are there any saints, even in heaven?’ he asked himself, as he turned away from the window.
He took his copy of the Divina Commedia into the garden and sat beneath the trees with his back to the light. The October sun struck sharply through the branches and their leaves cast shadows that ran up and down the yellowing grasses in front of him. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita … In the middle of the road of life I found that I had strayed into a wood so dark … As he read in the warmth of the morning, a more joyous life gradually began to wake round him: thrushes, robins, sparrows hopped above his head. Bird song surrounded him. A tiny field mouse crossed the clearing at his feet. The heat of the sun on his neck, the dappling movements of quivering foliage, and the impromptu warblings in the background gave him an intimation of rightness and wholeness after the unspeakable events of the previous night. Gradually he relaxed a little. It was well past noon before he closed the book on his knee.
In the spring what he liked best about the garden was the discordant racket made by visiting rooks. Every year they came to build in the ash trees and rend the air with tuneless cawing. From his window he would watch them swooping in with twigs in their beaks, and sometimes he would smile at the sight of a ‘criminal’ rook stealing a twig from an unattended nest. With steady concentration he wondered if the tribe had a system of punishment for discouraging such outlaws, but try as he might he could not cleanse himself of the memory of Hugo’s drunken ramblings. He tried to imagine the rooks in spring again, then in late autumn when their big black nests disfigured the bare forks of the branches, and finally the return of the birds to the rookery at the beginning of winter … It was no good. With a gesture of impatience he got up and went back to the house.
That evening he went to Hugo’s room to remove the sheets for washing. Beneath the folded blankets he found his brother’s diary, after which he made a thorough search of the room. The diary was all he had left behind. It contained an entry for the previous day which he read with difficulty because it had been written in a hurry:
