A Month of Sundays
Page 22
“Yes.”
“John, are you asking me out?”
“Er, yes”
“On a date?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, I would like to go out on a date with you tomorrow.”
It would be hard to do justice to the effect these words had on John O’Driscoll. The woman he had longed for with all his heart from the moment he first set eyes on her had just, unless his sensory organs were playing tricks with him, agreed to go out with him. He realized that he must try to retain some semblance of composure so, endeavouring to give the impression of a man to whom the arranging of liaisons with beautiful women was a daily occurrence, he put his hands in his pockets and leaned casually against the tea urn. Unfortunately, he forgot that the urn was still attached to a trolley, with the result that he, trolley and urn shot across the aisle and landed on the floor against the opposite wall in a tangle of arms, legs, lids and crockery.
“Remind me to make sure it’s not a self-service restaurant we go to on that date,” said Karen as she helped him up, “or I don’t suppose either of us will last the night.”
Having made hasty arrangements as to time and place of meeting, Karen hurried off to find some replacement crockery, but not before bestowing on him another kiss, this time magically on the lips. She left behind her a John O’Driscoll in something of a daze at the events of the preceding few minutes. Karen Black was going on a date with him, he was going on a date with Karen Black. Whichever way he said it and however many times he said it, the words had a magical quality to them. Now John O’Driscoll was something of a realist and he realized that on all past form, he would mess this opportunity up by booking the wrong restaurant, or using the wrong utensils, or falling head first into the soup, or by doing something so stupid it couldn’t be foreseen. But in spite of all this, it couldn’t be denied that he was actually going on a date with the beautiful Karen Black, and the surge of energy that he felt coursing through his body, if not quite an epiphany, gave him some hope that, for once, he might not cock the situation up.
In a spontaneous gesture of celebration, he ran down the corridor like a footballer and punched the air, but being John O’Driscoll, his punch missed its intended target and collided with the reverse of the board that was serving as the backdrop to the altar. The contact caused the board to rock gently backwards and forwards and resulted in one of the giant Lego letters dislodging itself from the surface and dropping forward into the folds of the purple cloth that lay on the floor. In the heat of the moment and in his eagerness to find his beloved, O’Driscoll did not notice this accident, but Mrs. O’Reilly, lurking malevolently in the shadows behind the altar, did.
Twenty minutes later, Father Kennedy rose in front of a packed congregation to commence the service of celebration. He stood for a moment, arms outstretched, his giant figure framed by the board behind him and, rocking almost imperceptibly backwards and forwards, began to speak. As he enunciated each word with elaborate care, the messages that had been affixed so carefully earlier in the day were outlined starkly against the purple of the cloth behind him:
BY THE GRACE OF GOD
I HAVE A DR AM!
It took a few minutes for the congregation to connect the message with the figure standing in front of them, but slowly and incrementally, a frisson of laughter began to ripple its way across the church. It took a few minutes for the priest to discern something was amiss and to realize the cause of it was the board behind him.
Half an hour later, O’Driscoll, basking in the glow of his recent conquest, was standing at a sink in the church kitchen with his beloved next to him. They were engaged in washing several hundred dirty cups and saucers, a task which would normally have had no appeal to O’Driscoll, but now seemed charming and delightful in its simple domesticity. It was while he was thus engaged that an excited Mrs. Goodwin came bustling into the corridor and, nose twitching and eyes darting, informed him that yet another calamity had happened in the church and that, having had the blame for it laid squarely at his door by Mrs. O’Reilly, Father Kennedy was on the warpath.
Amplified by the church’s acoustics, a strangled cry of “O’Driscoll!” echoed maniacally around the walls and along the corridors and a moment later, it was followed by a muffled bellow that sounded like “Fecking sabotage!” The volume of the second cry told O’Driscoll that, like a predator approaching its prey, the priest was getting closer to his victim, yet curiously as he waited for the arrival of his nemesis, he felt a strange sense of detachment. The waves of panic he should have been feeling were conspicuous by their absence and, as another muffled cry that sounded like “Interfering gypsy!” echoed down the hall, O’Driscoll realized something strange was happening to his bowels. The something strange that was happening was that nothing was happening. He checked again and yes, he could say with certainty that his insides were resolutely refusing to liquefy.
Having earlier ruled out the assertion that he himself might be having some kind of epiphany, O’Driscoll wondered whether his bowels might be undergoing one. Could a set of bowels experience an epiphany? It was yet another one of those interesting theological question that seemed to punctuate his life, but O’Driscoll reflected that now would not be a good time to raise it as a subject for debate with Father Kennedy.
At any rate, he suddenly realized that his bowels were free! And not just his bowels, for he himself was free. He knew not why but he no longer walked in fear of the maniacal minister and no longer cared what happened about his job or his future at Saint Catherine’s because he now knew in some indefinable way that everything was going to be all right and that the future would take care of itself. At that moment Parnell strolled by and gave O’Driscoll a look very different to the one he had turned on him the last time they had met. It was a look that might have passed for a wink, the sort of look one elderly roué might have given another as they sat in their club, the sort of look Errol Flynn might have exchanged with David Niven after a hard day’s shagging.
O’Driscoll looked at the display board upon which were displayed the final words of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Those uplifting final words had been used in a million situations but O’Driscoll was fairly sure that they had never before been applied to a collection of intestines. As he looked at them, he realized how perfectly they represented the momentous journey his own bowels had made in emancipating themselves from the tyranny of Father Kennedy:
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God almighty we’re free at last!
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