A Month of Sundays

by John Owens

  By eight a.m., O’Driscoll was showered, dressed and in the grip of an attack of galloping paranoia. The last traces of the tequila that had been such a source of sustenance the night before were now exiting his system, leaving his internal mechanism at the mercy of random, jumbled images and thoughts. The looks that he had the night before judged to be admiring ones, could just as easily have been an embarrassed reaction to the sight of someone making a colossal fool of themselves. How could he have seen Karen’s downcast expression and refusal to meet his eyes, as some kind of demure, 18th century come on, when it was clear to any fool that she was merely embarrassed by the actions of an idiot whose drunken antics had dragged the good name of the school into the mire?

  By nine o’clock, John O’Driscoll was prowling the corridors of the school looking for someone who had been at the town hall the night before so he could gauge how criminal his misbehaviour had actually been. He remembered a phrase that had stayed with him after last year’s staff trip to see Macbeth, “O full of scorpions is my mind,” and he wondered bitterly whether whatever it was the Scottish nobleman had taken on board matched the paranoia generated by the after-effects of a dozen tequila slammers. He spied Sister Bernadette in the distance but as he moved towards her, she swept into an adjacent corridor, leaving him to conclude that she had seen him coming and been so horrified by his behaviour of the night before that she had been unable to face him.

  In the distance he saw Karen, walking down the corridor towards him. “Morning, Karen,” he said, trying to make his voice sound as casual as possible while waiting for the aversion of eyes and embarrassed body language that would signal his disgrace.

  “Oh, hi John,” she answered, “how are you feeling today?”

  He immediately concluded that she was referring to his condition of the night before, but trying to keep his voice even, answered, “Not bad, thanks. A bit knackered, to be honest.” There was a slight pause before he screwed up the courage to ask the question whose answer might determine his whole future at St Catherine’s. “How did you feel it went last night?”

  “Fine,” she replied, “but can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.”

  “I just wondered, were you on medication or anything?” she asked.

  His heart dropped into his boots but he tried to keep his voice light as he answered, “Actually, I did accidentally double the dose of my red pills, and I think they may have reacted with the blue ones that I’m only supposed to take when I get psychotic. Was it that obvious?”

  “No,” she laughed as she replied, “not to anyone who doesn’t know you well, but you did seem a little...odd now and again, very opinionated and, well, you interrupted Father Kennedy a couple of times.” She laughed again. “He looked quite cross the second time.”

  This was beginning to sound like it hadn’t been the unmitigated disaster that he had feared. Karen had noticed that he had been a little different from normal, but she did not give the impression of someone who had found his conduct reprehensible. In fact, she was talking to him in terms that were interestingly relaxed and friendly.

  “You don’t think Father Kennedy was too pissed off?” he ventured.

  “Not at all,” she replied, “I heard the bishop complimenting him on the quality of his young staff as they were leaving.”

  O’Driscoll felt his knees go weak with relief and he resisted with difficulty the urge to grab Karen and shower her on the spot with kisses of gratitude as she continued with a smile, “So those happy pills didn’t do you any harm after all.”

  “Actually,” he confessed after a moment, “it’s interesting what you said earlier because I was on a kind of medication last night.”

  She looked at him enquiringly and he went on, “Well, we were in The North Star and... things got a bit out of hand ... it was Duffy’s fault, really ... and... well, before I knew it I’d had ten tequila slammers.”

  Karen put a hand over her mouth and her eyes widened as she said slowly, “You’d had ten tequila slammers?”

  “Actually it might have been twelve,” replied O’Driscoll in the interests of honest disclosure, “and of course there were the few pints we’d had at the start of the evening.”

  He filled her in on the sequence of events that had ended with him addressing a town hall meeting with enough alcohol in his system to incapacitate a rhino. “Actually,” he concluded, “when I woke up this morning, I had no idea whether I had insulted Sister Bernadette, importuned Miss Gillespie, or offered to elope with Father Kennedy. You will confirm that I didn’t do any of those things?”

  “No, but you were giving the bishop some decidedly ambiguous looks,” said Karen and she joined in his laughter. “Bloody hell,” she repeated in awe. “Ten tequilas before going to a public meeting with Father Kennedy! You do lead a charmed life, John.”

  “I read somewhere that Churchill used to have a whiskey and water before giving a speech,” he replied. “It’s really only an updated version of that.”

  She smiled and the acuteness of her proximity and the warmth of their shared laughter made him abandon all his inhibitions. “Karen,” he blurted out, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you...” but even as he spoke, he remembered the expression on her face when he had misunderstood the offer of the Shakespeare tickets and his nerve failed. His mouth began to open and close like a fish but all that emerged was a strangled “OOST!” and although he attempted to disguise the “OOST!” by breaking into a prolonged fit of coughing, he could see from her face that it hadn’t worked.

  Now he had another problem: Karen’s proximity was beginning to produce disturbing stirrings in his trousers, and it was only by conjuring up an image of Mrs. Thatcher at the dispatch box in a basque that he was able to reverse the process. At that moment, one of Karen’s pupils rushed up to say the class was waiting for her to unlock the door and she headed down the corridor wearing an expression he was unable to read. Looking around, he realized that Miss Gillespie and Mr. Li had materialized next to him and for the want of something better to say, he asked the elderly music teacher if she was prepared for Sunday’s Year Six mass.

  “My girls will be ready to do the school credit, I hope,” she said with a wintry smile. “The hymn books will be ready for use, I presume, Mr. O’Driscoll?” He hastened to assure her they had been delivered the day before and had been placed, still in their packaging, at the entrance to the pew where the choir would be seated.

  “I’ll help you unpack them, Miss Gillespie,” he finished, “if I get there before the start of the mass, but I’ve got a family commitment and it might be touch and go.” The “family commitment” consisted of the extra couple of hours he hoped to spend sleeping off Saturday night’s drinking session, but she was not to know this, and O’Driscoll was reluctant to give up any more of the weekend than he absolutely had to. With a frosty nod, Miss Gillespie moved off, leaving O’Driscoll and the elderly Chinaman together.

  “Have the preparations for Sunday’s mass gone as planned, John?” asked Mr. Li.

  “As far as I know,” replied O’Driscoll.

  “It’ll hopefully pass off without incident,” said Li with a twinkle.

  O’Driscoll knew he was referring to the cock-up with the poster but he did not begrudge his colleague the reference. Rather, he felt there was a fellow feeling between them because of an incident that had occurred a couple of days after the fete, during the end of term carol service. Mr. Li had been acting as master of ceremonies and things had been progressing uneventfully until he had stood up to announce the penultimate carol, that perennial favourite, ‘Away in a Manger.’ He made the announcement with his usual clarity of speech, but unfortunately pronounced the final word to rhyme with “banger” and this had been the cause of an immediate and sustained outburst of hilarity among the student body. The laughter had rippled up and down the pews
and teachers leapt to their feet and stared threateningly along the lines of pupils, but the laughter had now gained a momentum of its own and it had taken the arrival of Sister Bernadette, sweeping into the room like an avenging Jedi, to quell the disturbance.

  The mirth had not been confined to the student body and parents and members of staff could be seen wearing carefully suppressed smiles, but Father Kennedy, when informed of the faux pas, by Mrs. Goodwin had not been amused. Wasn’t it bad enough, he was alleged to have thundered, that he was surrounded by ‘tinkers and gypsies’, without having to cope with ‘heathens’ as well!? Mrs. Goodwin’s own take on the whole thing had been the rather cryptic observation that while you could take the man out of the Orient, you couldn’t take the Orient out of the man, an aphorism apparently inspired by that noted anthropologist, her husband, Reg.

  The incident left O’Driscoll with a kindred feeling for the elderly Chinaman, if for no other reason that they shared in the opprobrium of the cantankerous cleric. He smiled at Li’s enquiry about the mass and said, “If anything goes wrong on Sunday, I wouldn’t like to be in my shoes.” His tone was playful but an image of Father Kennedy’s nasal hairs performing a wild but synchronized fandango flashed across his mind and he resolved to put his mind at rest by checking the missals one final time before the service started.

  Saturday

  It was midnight in a night club on the Uxbridge Road whose name O’Driscoll couldn’t remember, and the place was heaving with talent. Duffy could pull without trying and often did. He claimed sometimes he only went through with the subsequent act out of politeness, but O’Driscoll had to concede that, Duffy apart, the lads were not a company designed to set the hearts of the ladies beating. He himself was tall, gangly and uncoordinated with, in the words of an ex-girlfriend, “the face that launched a thousand shits,” while Micky Quinn was all curly red hair and freckles, his lumpy shape bulging and expanding into whatever space his ill-fitting clothes would allow. The other two lads were no oil paintings either but what they all shared was that grey-white Irish skin colouring that resembled semi-digested porridge and which no exposure to the sun could darken or make attractive.

  With the last slow dance trailing away to silence, O’Driscoll watched as Quinn, after much resolute trouser hitching and several false starts, finally approached a girl he had been eyeing up, the whole performance calling to mind a bull which has spied a particularly fetching heifer in an adjoining field and is pawing the ground preparatory to having a run at her. The girl had watched his display of wheeling and curveting with a stony countenance and met his opening remarks when he finally did arrive with a reply so brief and terse that its import could not be mistaken. While all this was going on, Duffy’s figure could be seen in the distance exiting the premises with something blonde and svelte in suede attached to its arm. O’Driscoll wondered anew how Duffy did it - he could and often did spend the whole evening apparently propping up the bar with the lads only to disappear right at the end with some stunner. The remainder of the party gathered in the foyer, their failure on the romantic front not weighing too heavily on their shoulders, and it remained to be decided what to do with the fag end of the evening.

  “Do you still have that bottle of Jack Daniels at your flat?” asked Rocky.

  “I do indeed,” said O’Driscoll, brightening, “and what’s more, we have the perfect number for a friendly game of poker!”

  * * *

  It was five a.m. in O’Driscoll’s flat and the card school was over. Quinn was asleep in the flat’s only armchair, great trumpeting snores echoing around the room as his chest rose and fell. Sweeney had gone home and Rocky was crashed out on the bed next door. O’Driscoll sat in a chair at the table and as he poured himself a final drink, he reflected on the evening behind them and how single-sex education in Catholic schools could produce such comically maladjusted adults. Growing up without any meaningful contact with girls of their own age meant that as teenagers, the boys had no coping strategies when they did finally have cause to interact with the opposite sex. It wasn’t a problem for the good-looking lads, they simply got pulled whether they liked it or not, but for the unlovely, the tongue-tied and the socially awkward, into all of which categories O’Driscoll placed himself firmly, it could be years before they were able to form meaningful adult relationships. At this moment, and as if to reinforce this point, Quinn stirred in his sleep and delivered a fart that seemed to shake the room to its foundations.

  Floating in that half-world that precedes sleep, O’Driscoll smiled to himself as he recalled the “Venice/Ennis” misunderstanding and the comic misconceptions that can result from young ears mishearing the words of adult talk. His mind went back a decade to his teenage years and to The Girl. She had come across from Ireland by boat and train to spend a week with his sister’s friend Sinead and she had a fragile, elfin beauty that knotted his stomach and made the breath catch in his throat. He had watched from a distance - six-feet two inches of tongue-tied, adolescent gawkiness - until one summer day the girls came calling and she floated down his garden path, the late-afternoon sun turning the soft down on her arms into strands of iridescent gold. She had that dreamy, ethereal quality that exceptionally beautiful people sometimes have and his whole being was consumed by a yearning to be with her, talk to her, hold her, kiss her, but he had no idea how any of these miracles might be achieved when she wasn’t even aware of his existence.

  It was known that she came from a family of staunch republicans and that she wore that badge with a pride as fierce as any Cumann na mBan warrioress and he instinctively felt if he could only show her the same republican fire burned in him, she might turn those cornflower blue eyes on him with something more than mild curiosity. But in truth, his knowledge of the history and culture of his native land was derived almost entirely from listening to the eight LPs, six by The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem and two by The Dubliners, whose scratchy rhythms crackled from the back room of the family home every Saturday night in a relentless, lonely loop.

  The girls had reached the pond at the bottom of the garden and he knew if he didn’t do something soon, it would be too late and they would be gone. And then he Gods smiled on him for as the girl bent down to examine a lily, her hand slipped into the pond and came up covered in a thick, black ooze and he remembered the Blackened Hands, the ruthless gang of cutthroats who had terrorized Ireland and whose crimes were alluded to in sombre tones whenever the elders of his family gathered.

  “The Blackened Hands - a name steeped in blood and treachery.”

  “And the whole thing the work of those creatures Churchill and Lloyd George, may God forgive them.”

  “A ring of Crossley Tenders around Cork while the city centre burned.”

  “And the arrogant so and so’s standing there as bold as brass stopping the firemen from putting out the flames.”

  “Ah, but they reckoned without Tom Barry and his brave boys.”

  “Down into the mire they went to fight for Ireland’s freedom.”

  “A flying column lay waiting on the road at Kilmichael.”

  “And a few minutes later, those same brave articles were smiling on the other side of their faces!”

  In the young O’Driscoll’s mind, the chronology of events was uncertain, and he suspected it was equally so among the adults relating the tale, for sometimes the burning of Cork would precede the ambush at Kilmichael, while at other times the sequence of events was reversed. But what never changed were the sepulchral tones employed and the gloomy relish with which the story was told. The narrative left a deep impression on him and he had often pondered on the origin of the murderous gang’s name. Had it derived from a secret mark, like the black spot in Treasure Island, or was the title merely symbolic of the dark acts carried out in the name of the crown? As he looked at the girl’s arm covered in mud up to the elbow, he saw his opportunity and blurted out, “You’d bette
r wash that off or we’ll think you’re one of the Blackened Hands.”

  “Wha’?” she replied, for although she had the delicate beauty of a fairytale princess, she spoke with the guttural vowels of Dublin’s north side.

  “You know... the Blackened Hands,” he repeated, “the ones who came over from England during the troubles.”

  She looked at him evenly for a moment and then speaking slowly and deliberately and enunciating each word carefully, said, “It’s not the Blackened Hands, you gobshite, it’s the Black and Tans.”

  She finally turned those cornflower blue eyes on him and as he squirmed under her gaze, he saw an expression of mild distaste appear on her face, the sort of look that someone examining a vaguely interesting but physically repellant insect might wear. Even though a decade and a half had passed, he still cringed at the memory of that look and he allowed himself a wry smile as he reflected on the power that some images have to transcend time and space. On that note, and with the rumble of Quinn’s snore providing a suitably martial commentary on his thoughts, O’Driscoll drifted into sleep and into the coming day.

  Sunday

  The next morning, leaving Quinn sleeping on the sofa and snoring fit to wake the dead, O’Driscoll jumped into his battered Ford Cortina and made his way to St Catherine’s, only to find the church deserted. Realizing his bleary eyes had misread the time on his watch and that he had, in fact, arrived an hour early, he thought he would try to turn the situation to his advantage and in the process, create the impression of someone whose religious faith is so strong that it literally propels him out of bed on a Sunday morning by knocking on the sacristy door and announcing himself.

  As he arrived at the well-remembered door, he quailed momentarily but, hearing muffled voices coming from inside and realizing that the door had been left slightly ajar, he entered. O’Driscoll’s nostrils were immediately assailed by an aroma comprising in roughly equal parts of bacon and beeswax, for Mrs. O’Reilly, Father Kennedy’s elderly and irascible housekeeper, had traditional views on matters domestic and coated every surface with the waxing product during her daily cleaning routine. O’Driscoll could still hear muffled voices but they were clearer now and appeared to be coming from the half-open door to the living room. He was debating whether he should signal his presence by coughing tentatively or take the bull by the horns and move authoritatively into the room when he realized that he was being observed from across the hallway by Parnell, Father Kennedy’s cat. Named in honour of Irish nationalism’s great 19th century champion by Mrs. O’Reilly’s husband, Parnell had been recruited several years before to deal with some church mice that had been unwise enough to stray into Father Kennedy’s domain. Having dispatched the unfortunate rodents forthwith, Parnell had turned his attention to the feline population of the parish and set about them with an alacrity that his famous namesake might have envied, and soon no property in the parish was to be found without one of his progeny sunning itself in the garden. Parnell regarded O’Driscoll inscrutably for a few moments, licked a paw fastidiously and then wandered off in the direction of the bins.