Notes from a Coma
Page 4
People will tell you that JJ was a lucky lad, a lucky child having the life he had compared to what it might have been; that’s one of those careless things people say without thinking. But he wasn’t and he isn’t. JJ’s never had a day’s luck in his life. Anything that was given to him with one hand was taken away with the other. You’ve only to look back at all the time that lad spent in hospital when he was a child or to that day in the church to see that he would never have a day’s luck in his life …
There were only a few of us in the church that day. It was the middle of a Sunday afternoon and JJ and Owen were making their debuts as altar boys. It was a bit of an occasion, as you can imagine, otherwise I wouldn’t have been there. Nor would Anthony either who was beside me in the seat. It was afternoon benediction and the idea was that the two boys would have their first try-out in front of a small audience; if anything went wrong there wouldn’t be too many people to see it and not much embarrassment for the lads. All I remember hoping was that it would be over quickly and that we’d get away to watch the second half of the match—Mayo were playing Sligo that day in the Connaught final.
A few minutes before three JJ walked out of the sacristy carrying this long taper to light the candles on the altar. There was these two candelabra things at either end of the altar, ten candles on each of them reaching up to the centre in a kind of arch effect. JJ lit the right-hand one first, standing and leaning on his tiptoes to reach the last two or three. Then he went over to the one on the left. He lit the first five or six and was stretching up to the top ones when it happened. The cuff of his surplice must have caught on one of the lower candles. As quick as lightning this orange flame shot up his sleeve towards his shoulder. JJ jumped down from the altar shaking his arm, trying to put out the flame. Of course this only made things worse, fanning and spreading the flames to the rest of his body. I was out of the seat in a shot, racing up the aisle, pulling off my jacket. JJ was now dancing around in front of the altar, waving his arms and screeching, almost covered in flames—you’d think to look at him he’d just grown these big orange wings. I threw the jacket over him and wrestled him to the ground. It seemed like all this went on about half an hour but from the moment he walked out with the taper in his hand to the moment I put the jacket over him I’d say less than a minute and a half had passed. When I turned him over on his back he was all black and smoking. His surplice had been burned away entirely but as far as I could see there didn’t seem to be too much wrong with him. He just lay there black and charred with smoke rising off him. Anthony pushed me aside and Father Scallen came charging out of the sacristy. Anthony had JJ sitting up with his arms around him.
“JJ!” he shouted. “JJ!” He put his hand under his chin and turned his face up. “JJ …!”
JJ just sat there wreathed in smoke and I saw that the hair on the side of his head and across his scalp had been badly singed.
“Stand back, let him have some air.”
Maureen pushed into the crowd, shoving us aside. “Get him something to drink. Owen, get him a glass of water.”
JJ was sitting there with no sound out of him. There were these long weals along the backs of his hands but they didn’t seem to be giving him any pain. Maureen took his hands, turned them over and lifted his face so that she could see the marks on the side of his head.
“This child needs the hospital,” she said. “These hands are going to blister. Get this black thing off him.”
Anthony sat in the back of the car with JJ on his knees wrapped in a coat. Maureen sat in beside me and I put the boot down. We were lucky it was a Sunday afternoon—there wasn’t any traffic on the road and we pulled into casualty about thirty minutes later. The nurses whisked JJ away with them and Maureen strode off behind them telling them she was his aunt.† I was alone in the corridor then with nothing to do except get a cup of tea and try to read the Sunday papers. There were only a few people in the coffee shop—a few patients going around in dressing gowns and a few gasúrs running about the floor with bags of crisps and ice lollies. Maureen and Anthony came back after about two hours. They looked a bit happier in themselves.
“He’s settled now,” Maureen said. “He’ll sleep for the rest of the day.”
“What did they say?”
“They said he was a lucky lad. Just his hands and his hair. They think he might have some scorching on his lungs but they’ll do tests on that tomorrow.”
“Did he say anything himself, did he talk?”
“He said a few words. Just that his hands were sore and that he had a hot feeling in his chest. But it doesn’t seem to be troubling him too much. I think they are more worried about the shock than anything. They bandaged his hands and put something on his head. He’s sleeping now.”
Anthony pulled in beside me. “I’ll come over in the morning to check on him. I suppose there’s nothing else we can do for him this evening. The nurse said he would sleep till morning.”
“There is nothing we can do,” Maureen repeated. “I’ll come over with you in the morning if you like.”
I could tell Anthony was glad she’d said that. He drew his hands across his face and clasped them on the table in front of him. Then he spread them wide and looked at both of us. “Of all the things. And in a church too, of all the friggin’ places.”
I had no answer to that nor did anyone else either I’d imagine. I gathered up the paper and made to go. “It’s just one of those things, Anthony. Nothing you or I or anyone else could have done.”
Maureen and Anthony walked ahead of me to the car. A red-faced man with a little girl in a red dress was coming the opposite way. She was struggling under the weight of a big bunch of flowers. I asked the man how the game went. He threw his eyes up to heaven.
“A draw,” he said. “They threw it away.”
* The images are by now familiar, part of the nation’s dreaming. Shot in real time and relayed across five countries and four time zones they come across, even in memory, as pure theatre. Solemnised and ritualised, the live transmission shows them walking down the slipway in single file. Spaced at three-yard intervals and moving between the guards on the pier side and the soldiers in the slipway.
Point man is twenty-four-year-old Swede Haakan Luftig. One-time leader of Doctrinal Corpse and boy soldier in the Scandinavian death-metal wars of the early nineties, he now stands convicted of four charges of copyright infringement. Six foot four, goateed and expressionless, his long-distance stare is fixed on a point somewhere in the middle of the fjord. His T-shirt, stencilled in fifty-two-point Day-Glo Gothic, tells us that Christ is a Cunt.
Behind him comes Emile Perec, twenty-four and convicted in Lille of seventeen driving offences while in charge of a public-school bus. In the grey light Perec has the pallid look of one who has spent too much time under artificial light—a snooker player or lab technician perhaps. Beneath his outsize shirt, however, is the greyhound physique of a man who at one time represented the future of French middle-distance running.
Third up is Jimmy Callanan, a twenty-six-year-old Scottish nationalist, sentenced to fifteen months at the Old Bailey for driving a white Mercedes bearing diplomatic number plates and tax and insurance discs registered to the Republic of Pictland—a two-acre field of scrubland outside the town of Arbroath.
Second last is Didac Jorda. Sporting the colours of FC Barcelona, he is the only one with a smile on his face. His career as a locksmith with los servicios sociales de Cataluña is on hold while he serves out an eight-month sentence for carrying a concealed weapon inside the Bernabeau Stadium.
Last up is JJ O’Malley. Eyes fixed to the ground, he moves with a stiffness which has everything to do with an easy sense of embarrassment at being the focus of such drama. The clueless onlooker would pick him out as the one carrying the most grievous sin. It is all the more ironic therefore that he is the only one of the five not carrying a criminal conviction. His very innocence, in fact, is one of the conditions of him being here as he is.
A hand-picked elite, lured here by professional curiosity and a time-and-a-half pay deal, they shepherd their charges one on one through the cloudless echoing topography of this three-month interregnum. Their own essential cluelessness, the impossible empathy gap, proves no hindrance to the essential tasks of provisioning and orienting their subjects through the staging posts of this journey.
Confidentiality clauses bind them into their supporting role. However, like any elite happy in their work, they have their own anthem. Stitched together from snatched phrases off the webcast, in five-part harmony and to the tune of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” …
MRIs wing through the skies
On broadband straight and true
Drawn down to LEDs
Plasma monitors too.
PETs and encephalographs
All our readings true
Oh-oh tidings of comfort and joy
Comfort and joy
Oh-oh tidings of comfort and joy.
It needs work but it’s to their credit that they’d be the first to admit it.
GERARD FALLON
The altar boy from hell?—yes, I remember that. Don’t ask me who put it on him but from what I remember it was on him the first day he came to this school. The funny thing about it is that he never really was an altar boy. That day he went on fire and was nearly destroyed—that was his last day ever in a church as far as I know. But that’s how it is in a small town like this, an incident like that can mark you in more ways than one.
I’d say in thirty years of teaching JJ O’Malley was the brightest young fella I’ve ever come across; the brightest by some distance. This school’s never had a student with his abilities across the whole curriculum—our very own genius. Of course we’d seen those exam results of his and marvelled at them but it was one thing seeing them and another thing entirely coming face to face with the lad himself. There was nothing he wasn’t good at, no subject he wasn’t better at than any of his peers. Maths, physics, geography, literature, you name it, there was nothing he couldn’t turn his mind to. He flew through any exam he ever sat without breaking sweat: brains to burn as they say.
But of course not everything interested him. The science subjects, maths, physics, chemistry—he had little enough interest in anything built on formulas or that argued towards definite conclusions. It was the discursive ones that drew him out and got him excited. English, history, religious instruction, civics—anything that led to argument and debate and multiple interpretation—that’s where he was in his element. And of course he was the bookish sort too who liked flourishing big jawbreakers of words. Ontological for instance—you won’t hear too many fifteen-year-olds coming out with that one. No, nor secondary school civics teachers either. I remember going to the dictionary for that one and I remember as well being none the wiser after I found it.
“There is an ontological and ethical priority established in the first paragraph,” JJ repeated nervously.
“I’ll take your word for it, JJ. But could you render that into plain English for the rest of us?”
He leaned forward on his elbows then, his hands clasped on the desk. This was a bad sign; JJ was about to get up on one of his hobby horses. If past form was anything to go by the class would pass in a blizzard of words and ideas and most of it would be lost on everyone around him. Still though, it was always worth seeing JJ vexed with the world and in full flow.
“The problem is that the constitution contradicts itself in the preamble, the opening paragraph. It recognises not itself but God as the Supreme Authority, the source of all laws including itself. The phrase …”
“I don’t see the problem, JJ. The constitution is the bedrock of civil law in this country, just as it is in liberal democracies the world over.”
“No, it is not and that is exactly the point. God is the foundation of civil law in this country.”
He was clasping his hands under the table now to stop himself trembling. You could see he loved these discussions but you could see also that he was almost afraid of himself. He told me once he suffered from a kind of mind-racing—what he called his mindrot meditations. Sometimes ideas would come to him in the middle of the night and keep him awake till all hours, chasing after them to wherever they led him—up blind alleys and down dead ends as he put it himself. This sounded like one of them.
“Granted so that is the case, JJ. Go on. You’re coming to the crux of your argument.”
“Supposing someone was to stand up here in this classroom or somewhere else and claim that he was God and that he had evidence to prove that this was indeed the case. Then there would be a problem.”
“Only if he disagreed with some article of the constitution.”
“Exactly, suppose he did disagree. Suppose he woke up one morning vexed for some reason or hung-over from a feed of drink and he said give me another look at that constitution. So he reads through the whole thing and somewhere along the way, it doesn’t matter where, he says stall the digger this has to be changed, I can’t stand over this. So he takes out a pen and strikes through an article and rewrites it. Now in that case there wouldn’t be a thing anyone could do about it, it’s his constitution as it says itself. It wouldn’t even have to go to the people.”*
“JJ, if God were to appear here in the half-parish of Kilgeever He would have more things on his mind than amending the constitution. And as for sinking pints up in Thornton’s …”
The class collapsed in guffaws.
“Spirits would be His drink, wouldn’t it, sir?” someone called from the back of the class. “Top shelf.”
“No,” someone else said. “Wine would be His drink, wouldn’t it, sir, that cheap Italian stuff? Or that stuff monks brew in monasteries. I’d say you couldn’t keep it drawn to Him if He got started.”
JJ looked down at his desk. I waited for the laughter to die down.
“JJ, if God were to sit down and rewrite the constitution there wouldn’t be a problem. By definition God is all good and virtuous so anything He wrote would be on the side of good, both private and public, and hence unarguable. It would be interesting, however, to find out just how near or far our constitution diverged from the Divine Law. De Valera would be interested; he’d be up out of his grave in a shot.”
“There wouldn’t be a problem if God was true to your definition of Him …”
“You don’t accept the definition? God is God, JJ.”
“I’ll go along with it for the sake of argument. The real problem arises if there is no God. Supposing someone was to stand up with definite proof that He did not exist—then the arse and foundation would fall out of the whole thing. All laws in this country would be groundless. No one would be bound by them any more.”
“That doesn’t follow. In that situation all we would be left with was the law of the land without divine source.”
“No, this is an interim constitution. It is predicated on God’s existence. It gets its authority from God and is directed towards God: it begins and ends in God. Now if God is absent then it collapses and has to be written again. We’d have to start from the beginning.”
“Interim or not, JJ, it has served the country since 1937 …”
“With twenty-eight amendments.”
“OK, twenty-eight amendments. That doesn’t discredit it. Constitutional amendment is part of an evolving democracy. Even if I accept your argument the onus is still on you to prove that God does not exist and that is where you’re stuck.”
JJ shook his head. “My point is that there is a denial of intellectual conscience in the constitution. The opening sentence, article six, it runs right through the whole document. The faithl
ess are blackballed from the off and that is a denial of the very freedom and dignity it purports to uphold. It does not legislate for the faithless. Under its own terms they are quite literally unconstitutional or, to use Cearbhall O’Dalaigh’s phrase, repugnant to the constitution. They can hardly be classed as citizens.”
The bell went and the rest of the class began gathering up their books. Not for the first time they’d found themselves lost in the wake of JJ’s reasoning. I needed a breath of fresh air myself.
“Time out, JJ,” I said. “We’ll continue this another day. Is this another of these mindrot meditations?”
“It was just an idea,” he said, “just an idea I had.”
“I’m impressed. You don’t believe in God or the constitution?”
“It’s not that I don’t believe in them, it’s just that I have no faith in them.” His face brightened suddenly. “Suppose …”
I opened the door. “No, JJ. Suppose and suppose and suppose. Some other day.”
I often think of that discussion in light of what’s happened these past three months. Everyone has a theory about JJ, not just here in this town but throughout the whole country. You know yourself all the think pieces and editorials that have been written about him. All that guff about the alienation of young men in a feminised world, trying to tie his coma into the rising number of suicides in eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds. You could turn yourself inside out reading them and still have no clue at the end of the day who or what they were on about.