The Wake (And What Jeremiah Did Next)

by Colm Herron

I kept my two dates at the City Hotel. Aisling was waiting outside for me and I kissed her so long and held her so tight people were looking.

  “Oh thank God. You smell lovely Jeremiah. Are you all right?”

  Red mouth to her red mouth, washed against her unwashed and the smell of last night still off her.

  I took a breath. “I’m fine. What about you? I was so worried.”

  “You know me. Survivor. I’ll tell you later. Will we go inside for a bite to eat? Unless you want to stay and listen to the speeches?”

  Some girl speaking through a sound system outside the Guildhall was calling Derry the capital city of injustice. Clever that. Bit of an exaggeration but still, speechmaker’s license.

  “Naw, we’ll go in, is that okay? I’m starved with the hunger.”

  Inside I found Frank Gogarty and gave him his keys. He had a neat professional bandage on him like a white skullcap and was looking not bad considering, feeling reasonable. I did the introductions but they remembered each other anyway. From the Grandstand. Smiling pleasantries, car’s in Bridge Street, do you want me to show you, not at all, I’ll find it, pleasantries again, thanks, handshakes, goodbyes. People that pass in the night.

  “That’s a really nice man,” said Aisling.

  “Amazing man. You wanted to see the courage of him. He actually owns the civil rights banner that was carried on the march you know.”

  “Owned. I saw it being burned.”

  “Aw dear. Tell us, how long has Frances to stay in?”

  “Two days at least. She’s lucky when I think of it. If I hadn’t seen her and dragged her away it might have been too late you know.”

  “Will we ask for a menu? That food smells lovely whatever it is.”

  +++++

  We heard trouble as we lay together that night. Sometime before we went to sleep it died away. In the morning we listened to the Radio Éireann news about the police invading the Bogside at half two in the morning singing Hey hey we’re the Monkees and beating people up. A man came on saying he rang the police to tell them the RUC were in the street outside kicking in doors and breaking windows and could they send someone.

  But all this was months ago. There’s another kind of chassis now because the prime minister Captain Terence O’Neill had to resign for being too moderate and another branch of the aristocracy has taken over don’t you know, chap I hardly heard of before called James Dawson Chichester-Clark. Aisling reckons he’s going to go at it with both barrels. The place will be like Dawson City, she says, before this cowboy’s finished. She showed me an interview Terence O’Neill gave the Belfast Telegraph after he resigned. I can nearly rhyme it off it’s that good. It’s frightfully hard to explain to Protestants that if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house they will live like Protestants because they will see neighbors with cars and television sets. They will refuse to have eighteen children on National Assistance. If you treat Roman Catholics with due consideration and kindness they will live like Protestants in spite of the authoritative nature of their Church.

  Ah, our Church. He got that right anyway. The authority of the Church that has us bending the knee handed down by boys like Augustine who for the best years of his life got up on everything that moved and rumor had it some things that didn’t and then turned to God for something that would do him for when he was past it. Father of the Church now, biggest slagger off of women ever born after having spent half his life shagging them shitless, declared marriage a necessary evil, evil because it involved a dirty three letter word ending in X, necessary because how else were the numbers in the Church going to get any bigger? God’s ways are not our ways and all that, but what can you do? And who’s this else there was? Of course, their royal highnesses Solomon and David, who when they weren’t writing psalms and stuff for the bible were having it off with whatever took their fancy. Lecturing to the chosen people and lechering with whomsoever they chose.

  And now that I’m on a roll there’s Paul the Sixth in his marble halls in the Vatican popetificating to women that are dying in childbirth and of course our bishop Doctor Farren in his palace across the street from Mickey MacTamm’s barbers with its twenty-five rooms, the palace I’m talking about here, Mickey only has the one if you don’t count the toilet, honoring us with his presence on Corpus Christi and Easter Sunday and the like as he lords it down the middle aisle soaking all and sundry with holy water. And the priests. Hourigan. Swindells. Cullinan. Finucane. My God, how many bad apples does it take to make a barrel rotten? Or is it the barrel that makes the apples bad?

  And yet. And yet they have me in their thrall still, they seduce me with their sights and sounds and smells, to this day I’m a sucker for their incense and their rituals and their Gregorian chants, they frighten me half to death with their pictures of hell.

  The truth is, reader, I’ve been hearing about hell since I was knee high to a grasshopper and I can’t get it out of my head, that place Our Lady showed little Lucia and the other Fatima children in a vision with its burning blackened demons that used to be people walking about like you and me.

  But then I say to myself, how can this be, who told us about this? Lucia, that’s who, ten years old, poor indoctrinated child, hearing about hell since she was knee high to a grasshopper, imagination going like wildfire, grew up and became a nun and wrote her memoirs that faithfully told of hell again but now in more measured language. It’s like my brain breaks free for a while and tells me the Church is giving me crap but my soul is triggered to shrivel up at certain times when they go on about eternal punishment and it’s always for sins of the flesh I can’t help noticing and not financial corruption like you might get in the Vatican bank for example. They’ve had me twenty-eight years now and it doesn’t look like they’re letting go easy.

  But I started to turn the corner a bit round about the middle of February there, Valentine’s Day in fact. Talk about appropriate. This Spanish priest Father Morales, or Father Juan Francisco Morales to give him his full name, came to the cathedral on some sort of exchange scheme and he was a godsend, a man sent from God whose name was Juan you could say.

  I only went to him in confession because I was stuck seeing Father Finucane was away taking his place in Barcelona. Anyway, the first time I went I told him about sleeping with Aisling, holding my breath like to see how he’d take it, testing the holy water as it were. It turned out he’d the most amazing attitude, so much so I nearly peed my trousers with joy right there in the confession box. You love her? he asked. Yes, oh yes Father, but she won’t marry me, she doesn’t believe in marriage, she says it’s manmade. Then stay with her, he said, and convert her if you can. Pray, pray for her and you will see, God will reward you. But is it all right to go on making love to her, Father? Oh yes, absolutely, this is very important. Always remember that love is the greatest of all things, like the rainbow that God sent after the flood it overarches all other things.

  This man could be mad, I thought, but he could also be exactly what I want. He’s a priest isn’t he? He’s my confessor isn’t he? So then the next time I went I told him about the bondage, breaking it to him in stages if you follow me, and later the three in the bed thing, but that’s only two days out of every seven, Father, and I have to do it to hold onto her. I couldn’t see him right in the dark of the confession box but I’d a feeling he wasn’t batting an eye.

  The fact that he went away with John Pius Allbright at the end of May, to Las Vegas I heard though nobody has ever actually confirmed that, I heard other people saying the Canaries, in no way affects what he told me. If what he said was true for those three and a half months then it’s still true. Just because he turned out to have certain tendencies doesn’t make what he said invalid, right? He didn’t deceive anybody, he never pretended to be heterosexual, not like John Pius did. Married and all too, death on homos Michael Cole was telling me, queer sort of a queer hater he said, never out of the parochial house, lived in the priests’ pockets, prize prick in other words.
Allbright he fell, proud carrier of the canopy over His Lordship Bishop Neil Farren’s head up and down the middle aisle every Corpus Christi and Holy Thursday and so on and so on. Shows you, doesn’t it? I still don’t know what Father Juan saw in him but there you go.

  The other side of the house lapped it up of course but plenty of our own crowd as well. He’s Juan too, some of the vulgar ones said, takes Juan to know Juan, cheap shots like that, but I’ll bet you anything even the holiest of the holiest on our side had a good sniff of satisfaction to themselves when they were going over their rosary beads. It’s the News of the World gene in everybody, that’s what it is, this craving for the gossip. Next to love it’s what makes life worth living I suppose.

  When I think back, John Pius Allbright was a pillar of the church from ever I remember. Actually when I was about ten I used to think he owned the cathedral gates, the ones at the bottom of Creggan Hill I’m talking about. You’d see him there every Sunday in his three piece suit with his big buck teeth like Horatius at the bridge stopping drivers getting into the cathedral grounds if they didn’t have a pass.

  I remember the time I got a car first I applied for a pass because Mammy was acting up about her legs and said she couldn’t walk the two hundred yards to the cathedral but no, John Pius wouldn’t give me one, said there were a limited number of parking places in the grounds and our case wasn’t deserving enough but I could park round by Great James’ Street and bring Mammy in through the sacristy if I wanted. I didn’t really care because that way was just as handy but she said Maud told her John Pius only gave passes to his friends so I challenged him one day, on principle you understand, and he’s blanked me ever since. I’m not even sorry for his wife because she’s a prick too. At least there’s no children. But you want to see the cathedral grounds now since he’s gone. Things have gone to pot, who gets parking seems to be down to natural selection, the survival of the thickest you could say.

  +++++

  I got a letter from Pearse last week.

  Jesus Christ you wouldn’t believe it man, you can breathe here. Do you see that town over there, that town was suffocating me. You should get out, I’m telling you. I’ve got a job till July in a nondenominational school and it’s great. The children are barking but it’s great. I’m busted half the time paying a fortune for this rat trap of a flat I’m in but it’s great. Derry gave me the pip, I reckon it was Derry put me on the drink in the first place listening to people that had the backbone of a fruit fly not to mention the culture of a cockroach. And that’s not even talking about the Father O’Flynns that have brought the place to its knees. The whole bloody country’s down with rabies if you ask me with their medieval religions and politics, emphasis there on the eval.

  Tell us this, did you ever wonder how in hell Ireland turned out so many great writers? Well that’s it. I’ve just said it, they turned them out. On their ear. Bloody well chased them. I don’t think there’s another place in the world celebrates mediocrity the way Ireland does.

  Anyway I’m on the wagon again, back with AA and all. I’m going to whack it this time. You know what else is wrong with the ones in old Oireland Jerry? They’re hooked on the colonial yoke, that’s what, it’s the serf thing, minds frozen in aspic. I’m not counting you and the other dreamers I saw taking on the cops that day I was leaving, absolutely not, you and them are deemed extremists by the high and wise, but sure you know that anyway don’t you?

  Even the ones over the border in the so-called Republic of Oireland that are supposed to be shot of the Brits can’t get enough of the queen and of course their excuse for a parliament in Dublin is nothing but old wine in new bottles, did you ever hear them talking? The rubbish? And you know what it is? Their minds were that long in jail they’re like a man when he’s let out after whatever number of years gets all jittery and goes and starts rattling at the prison gate to be let back in.

  Or you know what it’s like? It’s like those sad cases that would do anything nearly to get the shite beaten out of them by some dominatrix. God knows who our fellow countrymen would get to abuse them if the miracle ever happened and they got browned off with Queen Lizzie and Holy Mother Church.

  You’ll have to excuse the rant Jerry boy but it’s only when you get out of that place that you really begin to see it for what it is and then the anger wells up. By the way I take it you escaped the attentions of the Stormont delegates at scenic Burntollet? Somehow I couldn’t see you letting yourself get a second dose after Duke Street. More important, are you getting ass? Because nobody deserves it more than you. What about that mad Marxist that got you batoned? She’s probably the only thing that’ll save you from Rome. Then hand in your notice and get her to come to Manchester with you. No security of employment here as far as I can see but sure security is the enemy of progress.

  Take it easy,

  Pearse

  No address. How does he expect me to write back?

  +++++

  So we’re living here in sin next to Mickey MacTamm’s shacked up in the shadow of Saint Eugene’s. And the clergy are on to me, I can see it in their eyes, how their eyes avoid mine. At the time of writing they haven’t made a move but I suppose they’d be within their rights to sack me for giving scandal, Catholic teacher in Saint Ignatius’s Primary School dragging their name in the mud and so on. Maybe when the bishop holds his next monthly meeting of the parish priests of the diocese over there in the parochial house and they’re shooting the crap about this and that, maybe then the subject of Jeremiah Coffey will come up.

  Even if they decide to keep me on rather than airing Ignatius Loyola’s smear-ridden linen in public I know I’m never going to get promotion but I’ve got Aisling which is more than all the heads and deputy heads in the world put together could ever even fantasize about in a million years. Or the priests and bishops in their finery and fancy cars. Or the pope and his cardinals with their vassals and serfs running round tending them hand and foot.

  And Mammy? Mammy will just have to lump it. I know she’s down on her knees half the day and night and she’s never out of the cathedral lighting candles to Saint Monica that her son will do an Augustine. No chance of that, not for now anyway Lord. Maybe if I get a sickener, pick up some kind of infection from Frances, I’ll turn out to be Augustine Mark 2 but somehow I doubt it. She should be grateful actually, Mammy that is, she’s got Majella McAllister staying with her now. Remember her? The Majella that French-kissed me at Maud’s wake? The same girl would have stayed for nothing because she’s been lusting after me since we were about nine and she’d do anything for me. I’m talking literally here.

  “Five pounds a week all right Majella?” I asked her.

  “That’s too much Jeremiah. You’re far too generous.” Her big brown heifer’s eyes were eating me up the two minutes I was standing at her door making the offer. Invited me in and all but the last time I was in there she pulled my trousers down and I ran home crying. So I wasn’t going to take the chance. She’s a very strong girl, muscles on her like, who do you call her, Boudicca, be all right maybe if you were desperate.

  “When could you start?”

  “Anytime you want Jeremiah. I’m on my own now since Daddy died and I’ll be glad of the company. I’d start tonight if you wanted.”

  I’ll say she would. She knows the score about me and Aisling but her attitude is she’s prepared to wait. In the meantime she’s keeping my bed warm. Mammy put her in the back room but she only stayed there the first night because the bed was too lumpy she said. So now she’s in my room. It occurred to me as soon as I walked away from her door actually that she looked like one of those ones that would be right and thorough with the cleaning and dusting and all and it wouldn’t take her long to ferret out the black plastic bags with God knows how many pairs of dreamspattered underpants and three pajama bottoms if not more in them. And the Woolworth’s bag behind the bath. And I don’t think I ever got rid of the pair of corduroy trousers I ruined with that girl from Bishop
Street. Wherever they are, too late now. The whole thing’s sort of embarrassing but no doubt she’ll put them to good use.

  So for now anyway, routine. Aisling won’t get married but we do everything a married couple does near enough — except for the Malone Road and the cat of many tales that is, both of which look as if they’re going to go on awhile yet — plus I’ve turned into a bit of a community activist, out there trying to get the rioters to go home, real do-gooder, scared I’m going to get my head in my hand some day if I look at them sideways though.

  And then there’s the other kind of fear which is far worse. Juan Antonio’s spirit is still there but it struggles sometimes and I’m asking myself how much longer I can go on believing there’s no such thing as that kind of mortal sin as long as it’s done for love. The fear comes out of the dark when I waken up in the middle of the night certain times and think, What if I died before the morning, where would I go, does every penny of this not have to be paid back? And then I touch the brown scapular I’ve been wearing since the Carmelites gave the retreat in May and I feel better. Aisling’s okay about it, amazingly okay actually, but she says I shouldn’t wear it in bed, it would serve me right if I got strangled making love with it on. And where would you be then? she says.

  I wish I had her certainty about hell not being there. How is it people are so different? I can hardly stand the sight of some of the priests now but I still need their rites and their penances. I take the partial indulgence granted by Pope Benedict the fifteenth to those who devoutly kiss the scapular with a pinch of salt but I believe the virgin Mary’s promise to Saint Simon that whosoever dies wearing it shall not suffer eternal fire and also her revelation to Pope John the twenty-second that all who wear it will be released from purgatory on the first Saturday after death. And then sometimes I’m thinking, wise up, there are no Saturdays in purgatory (only Mondays Aisling says), these things should have gone out with Santa Claus, you’re a grown man for Christ sake.