by John Owens
Title Page
A Month of Sundays
John Owens
Publisher Information
A Month of Sundays
Published in 2016
by AUK Authors
an imprint of
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2016 John Owens
The right of John Owens to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Dedication
For Ivonne
Week One
Monday
If John O’Driscoll had been asked whether there was any way in which a week that had begun with him vomiting into a nun’s handbag could finish on an even more disastrous note, he would have laughed the idea off as ludicrous. He would, however, have been wrong, and the fact that his failure to predict the future would come as less of a surprise to those who knew him than it did to him said much for the esteem in which O’Driscoll’s abilities were generally held. For John O’Driscoll was often wrong: in fact, there were those who said that he had made it his life’s work to be wrong about pretty much everything.
To begin at the beginning though, the accident involving Sister Bernadette’s bag and his own bodily fluids happened at the end of an evening that had begun with Duffy’s suggestion of a “quiet pint,” and on that basis alone, O’Driscoll should have known it would end in tears. “Come on, just a quickie,” Duffy had insisted, deaf to his friend’s plea that he had already agreed to spend the evening helping organize a social evening for the old people of the parish. Against all better judgment, O’Driscoll had agreed and in no time the two young men were established comfortably in the back bar of The North Star on Ealing Broadway with several hours of a warm Spring evening at their disposal. When O’Driscoll looked up and saw his friend returning from the bar holding tumblers of whiskey, a series of tiny alarm bells began to ring in his head and had he heeded their warning chimes, the evening might have turned out very differently. But in the conviviality of the moment, the protest he made was but a token one and his doom was sealed.
“Jesus Christ, are you trying to ruin me altogether?” he said when he saw the glasses arriving.
“Yes,” replied Duffy simply. “Anyway, you might thank me for it tomorrow if it finally helps you pluck up the courage to speak to Karen Black. Tell you what, I’ll come with you and help you set up, and I’ll have a little chat with her for you.”
“No you bloody well won’t,” said O’Driscoll, for even though beguiling images of Miss Black filled his every waking moment, the thought of a drink-inflamed Duffy being let loose anywhere near her was a prospect too awful to contemplate.
And so it was that several whiskeys and several chasers later, the two arrived at the church hall of Saint Catherine’s in time to help make preparations for the dance, which was due to start at nine o’clock. An evening spent with a roomful of amorous octogenarians was not the entertainment that O’Driscoll would normally have sought out on a Monday night but, not for the first time, he had failed to take evasive action when the call for volunteers had gone out. There was also the little matter of his teaching contract being up for renewal and he was hopeful that an unassuming yet poised performance at tonight’s event would stand him in good stead when the school’s governing body met in a few weeks’ time to decide the following year’s staffing.
At the gates to the church, O’Driscoll stopped to take stock of the situation and consider the range of strategies that he had devised, over the course of his twenty-nine years, to foster the illusion of sobriety. That these devices rarely extended beyond the expedient of putting a half pack of mints sideways into his mouth, and that, although he himself fondly imagined them to be worldly and subtle, they invariably fooled no one was neither here nor there, for the sense of being master of one’s own destiny implicit in such acts helped O’Driscoll feel sober and that was the important thing. Now he straightened his tie, cleared his throat, burped softly and then spluttered as an unexpected jet of carbonated air raced through his nostrils. He felt in his pocket for a packet of Extra Strong Mints, broke it in two and offered one half to his friend, secure in the knowledge that through this cunning act of deception, their drunkenness would shortly be enveloped in a menthol infused cloak of invisibility.
At the bottom of the steps that led into the dank and forbidding church grounds, there was a small stream and they crossed it with the feeling of unease that ancient travelers might have experienced passing over the River Styx. Nodding a greeting to the ancient Irishman with the Pioneer badge who guarded the entrance like a gnarled and toothless Cerberus, they passed into the warmth of the church hall attached to the school where they both taught. As they did so a familiar aroma, sweet and redolent of hops, wafted across from the far corner of the room.
“Bloody hell, they’ve got a bar!” exclaimed Duffy and it was the existence of this makeshift arrangement in the corner that was to prove O’Driscoll’s undoing two hours and twenty minutes later. As they processed this new information, O’Driscoll suddenly caught sight of Karen Black heading towards the cloakroom and his stomach gave a familiar lurch. Miss Black, as she was known by her Year Four pupils, had joined the school at the start of the year and had immediately mesmerized O’Driscoll to the point where, in her presence, his brain refused to function beyond sending primitive signals to his eyes, imploring them not to stare longingly at her legs, breasts or parts in-between.
By each picking up a stack of chairs and carrying them across the room, O’Driscoll and Duffy contrived to arrive at the makeshift bar seemingly by chance.
“As we’re here, we’ll have a couple of whatever you’ve got,” announced Duffy to a large shape that could be dimly apprehended searching the shelves under the bar.
“Ye will, will ye!” came a well-known growl as the figure unwound and revealed itself to be none other than Father Kennedy, parish priest, school governor, and a man whose sudden terrifying appearance was in danger of reducing O’Driscoll’s bowels, already made watery by the presence of Miss Black, to a state of even greater liquidity. The priest had, over the years, established a fearsome reputation among the Catholic population of West London. He ruled his parish using a system of terror that Robespierre or Stalin would have envied, and on dark nights the mere invocation of his name was said to reduce misbehaving children to quivering acquiescence and send small animals scurrying for cover. And if he was “old school,” as some said, it was only in the sense of having crawled from the primordial slime of some ancient Borstal, carrying with him the value system of that sinister Dark Age.
Kennedy looked at them menacingly from under thick, bushy eyebrows, his great craggy face topped by an unruly white thatch. From flaring nostrils protruded great clumps of nasal hair whose oscillations O’Driscoll watched transfixed, for the movement of these tendrils was said to be an infallible barometer of the priest’s state of mind, and it was common knowledge that when he was angry, they danced wildly.
“Good evening, Father,” said Duffy, for with O’Driscoll examining his spiritual leader’s nose with the intentness of a medieval scholar reading a s
et of bulbous and hairy runes, it was clear the responsibility for opening verbal proceedings lay with him. “Lovely evening,” he went on with the insouciance which had, over the years, wreaked havoc among the fairer sex of West London. “We’ve come to help you prepare for the social evening. Such good work you and your team do - made us feel guilty so we’ve rearranged our squash match and here we are. Pretty parched though, after our training run, so we thought we’d grab a quick drink of something before getting to work.” As usual, Duffy’s charm had a disarming effect and within a couple of minutes, the two found themselves in the possession of cans of lager handed across by a Father Kennedy who, apart from giving vent to a muttered “Gypsies!”, remained silent.
Not for the first time, O’Driscoll contrasted Duffy’s easy charm with his own tongue-tied awkwardness, especially when dealing with the turbulent priest who was Chair of Governors at the school where both young men worked. His mind drifted back a few months to the church fete of Christmas 1994 and the faux pas which had blighted his first term and from which he was still trying to recover. In an effort to ingratiate himself with the powers that be, the newly-appointed teacher had volunteered to have a large poster printed which could be pasted onto the church noticeboard ahead of the event. Hoping to demonstrate appropriate levels of Catholic piety, but having typically left himself too little time to do the job properly, O’Driscoll had frantically searched the pages of Hymns Ancient and Modern for a suitable inscription. Hastily scanning the titles – Here I Am, Lord, Here at Your Table, Lord, Here I Am to Worship, How Great Is Our God, he had eventually chosen the shortest title, scribbled the artwork himself, rushed it off the printer and pasted up the returned poster with but minutes to spare before the opening ceremony.
And so it was that Father Kennedy had stood in the grounds of St Catherine’s before the great and good of West Ealing, directly in front of a large white poster emblazoned with the legend:
“HERE I AM, LARD.”
As the priest began to speak, few had noticed the words or connected them with him, indeed the outline of his great paunch actually cast a section of the notice board into shadow, although unfortunately for O’Driscoll, not the part that contained the inscription. But before long, a frisson of laughter had started to ripple across the crowd and when Kennedy had turned and read the words his face had assumed an apoplectic hue and he had hurried through the remaining words of his welcome before storming off into the presbytery, flanked on either side by a small scurrying nun.
While this was going on, O’Driscoll had been happily engaged in a daydream involving the rescue of Karen Black from a madman with a machete who had entered the church grounds and was terrorizing stallholders and visitors alike. In the fantasy, he had drawn the lunatic away from the crowd by striding into his field of vision and announcing firmly, “I’m the one you want!” The madman’s eyes had fixed on him hungrily, allowing O’Driscoll to coax him into a quiet area of the playground and wrestle him to the floor and disarm him. He had achieved the whole thing with no damage to himself other than a small but satisfyingly bloody cut on his arm, and Karen had been approaching him with moist eyes and a trembling lip, offering to use her blouse to staunch the flow.
His unhurried contemplation of this rather fetching image had been abruptly terminated by the arrival of Mrs. Goodwin, admin officer from the school office. “You’re the new chap who did the poster, aren’t you?” she announced breathlessly, her nose twitching with excitement. “Oh, dear, I’m afraid you’ve put the cat well and truly among the pigeons. Didn’t you have the proof checked before you sent it to the printers? No? Really! Oh, dear, that was a mistake!” Shaking her head she continued, “I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes when Father Kennedy finds out it was you. In all the years I’ve worked at St. Catherine’s, I’ve never seen him so angry.” She had patted O’Driscoll’s arm consolingly, allowed her nose one final excited quiver and then followed it away with the set air of one who has bad news to impart and is weighing up how best it can be shared with as wide a circle as possible.
As the full horror of the catastrophe had dawned on O’Driscoll, his first instinct had been to throw himself on the priest’s mercy - surely Kennedy would respond favourably to an apology, frank and manly in tone, which accepted responsibility for what was an honest mistake but also hinted at a superhuman work ethic that thought nothing of working long into the night to help the parish. It was even possible, if one allowed one’s flight of fancy to soar to the giddiest heights, to envisage Kennedy, who was after all, only human, seeing the funny side of it.
O’Driscoll tried to summon a picture of a smiling priest chuckling and shaking his head as he said, “Ach, it was only one letter, I suppose, my son,” but it was no use. The O’Driscoll imagination was a hardy organ and routinely processed data that lesser imaginations might have baulked at, but even it had its limits and the power surge that was generated as it tried to create an image of Father Kennedy chuckling, caused it to overload and crash with the loss of all functions.
Nevertheless determined to face the music, O’Driscoll approached the presbytery door and raised his fist to knock. Drifting through the oak of the door, he could hear disjointed words and phrases, faint in tone but unmistakably the issue of Father Kennedy.
“Did ye read that sign? ... What fecking gypsy...?”
There was a pause in which could be heard a soothing murmur, female and obviously issuing from one of the nuns, before the Kennedy bellow rose once more to a muffled crescendo.
“O’Driscoll!”... laughing stock! ... useless fecking tinker! ...”
O’Driscoll’s hand had dropped from the door and he had hurried from the premises, pausing only to revisit the scene of his crime and make a frantic but unsuccessful attempt to unglue the notice.
Dragging his thoughts back to the present and the ongoing church social, O’Driscoll focused his now bleary eyes on the bustle around him. A succession of old people was passing before him and the air held that elusive whiff - part talcum powder, part urine - that he always associated with large assemblies of the elderly. His stomach gave another lurch as he caught a glimpse of Karen bending over a wheelchair, her shapely bottom outlined pertly against the cloth of a pair of black cotton shorts and in desperation, he grabbed another lager from the bar - anything to ward off the erection that previous experience had taught him would inevitably follow. He downed three-quarters of the beer in one go and scanned the room in search of an activity that would keep his mind occupied with pure and chaste thoughts.
His gaze fell on Sister Bernadette, the austere figure who was Mother Superior of the convent attached to St Catherine’s and Deputy Head of the school. Tall and forbidding, she dressed in the same uniform of grey woolen robes whatever the weather or season, while on her head she wore a wimple whose formidable dimensions set her apart from the rank and file of the Order in the way an officer’s pips distinguishes him from the enlisted men. Thus attired, she moved around the school smoothly and with no visible evidence of propulsion, and her upright figure was a familiar sight as it sailed along the corridors. She was no less active at night when her wraith-like form could be observed gliding silently around the convent, its silhouette casting sinister shadows among the cloisters. The unusual headgear and her distinctive carriage, together with a faint but discernible wheeze resulting from childhood exposure to bronchitis, had been noted among the student body and had earned Sister Bernadette the soubriquet “Darth Vader”.
“Anything I can do, Sister?” asked O’Driscoll, again catching a delicious glimpse of Karen in his peripheral vision as he approached.
“Yes, thank you John. You could dance with Mrs O’Higgins,” said the nun, and before he knew it, O’Driscoll was being whirled around the room in the arms of stout, moon-faced widow from Kerry. The evening passed in a blur as dance followed dance and O’Driscoll found himself passed among a succession of elderly matrons as they
performed increasingly more complex variations on a dance to which he had been exposed as a child among the Irish clubs that dotted West London. It involved vast numbers of people taking up stations in a kind of giant grid on the dancefloor with others being whirled from one point to the other in a complex but indecipherable series of manoeuvres. By the time he had passed through twenty minutes of this, his head and stomach were whirling and it was only the application of three more lagers from the makeshift bar that restored his equanimity. The rest of the evening became a blurry confusion involving light and movement, and the syncopated rustle of dozens of pairs of plastic drawers as the geriatric crowd buzzed around the floor in a giant incontinent swarm.
The final unraveling of the evening came when, as they began to clear up, Duffy found a half- bottle of Bells behind the makeshift bar. He quickly poured two huge measures into plastic cups and with a “Get this down your neck, son” to his friend, he made as good as his word. O’Driscoll heaved his drink back in one go and within seconds, he knew he had made a terrible mistake. He remembered watching a film where a deranged scientist had dropped a single tincture of one liquid into a huge vat of a totally incompatible one and now as the whiskey lay sourly on top of the bubbling pool of lager, his stomach began to seethe and churn and a deadly chain reaction began.
O’Driscoll swallowed several times and took a series of deep breaths as he fought to exert his authority over the vomit that was seething upwards, but it quickly became clear that the vomit had its own ideas about which one of them was in charge. Looking desperately around him, he sought a route that would extricate him from the impending disaster. The room was half-empty and staff and helpers were engaged in stacking chairs and clearing tables. Blundering towards a door, his route carried him close by the delectable Karen and as he crossed her path, she smiled at him. In normal circumstances that smile would have made all the travails of the day worthwhile but O’Driscoll knew that she could not be allowed to witness what was about to unfold. She would not be smiling for long if he puked on her. The facial contortion he bestowed on her as he passed, although intended as a smile, caused her to jump hastily back.
