Bridget say to me, ‘What time are you meeting the curate?’
Opening the wrapper with my teeth, I say out of the side of my mouth, ‘Ten minutes.’
Bridget’s mouth drops open, and she looks a bit simple. I’ve told her before about her slack jaw but she never listens. ‘Wish it was me. Trouble is, I wouldn’t, couldn’t, for the love of God, say or do a thing fer just gawking at him.’
‘That’s what you do most Saturdays in here, Bridget Costello. I get tired of looking at your sour ugly puss, and you smelling like a bloody midden. Don’t they have hot water up at the orphanage? If I was younger and had the energy I’d take a stick to you. Now stop your crack, git out back and bring me those beans.’
Bridget pulls a face behind the old woman’s back. Mary turns just in time to catch the last of it, and looks ready to kill. I can’t help laughing, which infuriates the old bitch even more. Bridget smirks.
‘You –’ she points at Bridget – ‘git! That is, if you want to keep yer job. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, why can’t an oul’ woman have some peace in her old age? Worked all me life, fer what? To be pestered by young hooligans like you two.’ She steps down from the ladder with a wheeze.
‘Out of me shop and out of me sight, Kate O’Sullivan. Go on off with you, else you’re going to be late for the curate, and for the love of God that won’t do.’
As I step out of the shop on to the main street I spot Maggie Murphy coming out of the post office. Quick as a wink I bend my head, but not quick enough. She sees me and makes a big thing of sticking her nose in the air and turning her face in the opposite direction. I want to laugh and shout to her and anyone else who happens to be listening that her husband is a dirty old bugger who plays with his own sausage in the back yard lavvie, and doesn’t bother to wash his hands before going back to the front shop to serve sausages that are full of rancid pork fat and blood from the tins of cow’s liver to colour them. If folk knew what Mad Murphy put in his sausages they’d never eat another one as long as they lived. In fact, I’m surprised anyone lives very long after eating them.
As I lift the latch on the churchyard gate I still have the lovely taste of chocolate in my mouth. I lick my lips and stuff the Mars Bar wrapper into the back pocket of my skirt. It makes a scrunching sound as I walk briskly up the path towards the sacristy at the rear of the church. After one rap, the door creaks open and he’s there before me, in all his bloody glory, smelling for all the world like lemon sherbet. I wish I could pluck up the courage to ask him about that smell. I promise myself I will one day.
Silently I urge him to speak first. It’s not often I’m tongue-tied – actually, never – so this is a whole new experience for me, this odd feeling of uncertainty, and the shyness that’s giving me a sharp pain in my chest. I’ve been afraid before, many times. I’ve had the fear of God put into me by Mother Thomas and her partner in religious teaching, Mother Paul. Paul is to Thomas what I suppose Himmler was to Hitler. Often I’ve said to Bridget that the pair of them would have been kicked out of the Gestapo for cruelty. But this feeling is different, the butterflies in my stomach are similar, but I don’t have the horrible sinking sensation or the jelly guts I get anticipating what she, or they, may do to me.
With a short nod the curate says, ‘Come in, Kate.’
I step past him into the small vestibule that leads to the sacristy. It’s dark, but then all churches are dark. That’s another thing I don’t understand: if church is supposed to be a place of joyous worship, why did God make his houses so bloody gloomy? The only good reason I can see for going to church is to shelter from the rain, dry off, and hope it has stopped by the time Mass is over.
I follow Father Steele into the sacristy. When he stops in the centre of the room I stop a couple of feet behind.
He says, ‘Wait here a couple of minutes.’
I nod, and watch him leave by a door on the opposite side of the room. A few minutes later he returns. He’s changed from the chasuble soutane, taken off the amice and alb, and is now dressed simply in a plain black soutane. He’s carrying a small leather bag and a set of keys. Without a word, I follow him out the same way we came in. He locks both doors behind us, and we fall into step side by side down the narrow path that rings the cemetery.
‘It’s a grand morning, Kate.’
‘It is that, Father.’
We both sink into silence once more. I sense he’s feeling a bit like me, unsure and uncomfortable. I wonder why I’m feeling this way; to be sure, I didn’t feel so stupid and tongue-tied the first time I met him in church. I suppose it’s because I’m starting his portrait, something I’ve been looking forward to for three weeks. I want to relax, but the more I try the less it seems to work. My heart is beating faster than normal, banging against my chest, a bit like when I’ve been running, only we’re walking at a leisurely pace. Strange, this feeling, very strange. We continue to walk in silence until eventually I take a deep breath and dare to ask, ‘Where are we going, Father?’
Looking straight ahead, the curate says, ‘To my house. I thought it would be peaceful there. Mrs Flanaghan, the cleaner, doesn’t come in Saturdays, else it wouldn’t be quiet at all … no, not at all.’
I smile, I know Biddy Flanaghan. ‘You’re right there, Father. She can talk the hind legs off a donkey.’
He nods. ‘Two donkeys, or maybe four.’
The talk of Biddy breaks the ice and I feel a bit better.
As we walk up to the front door of Coppice Cottage, the curate’s house, I’m thinking what a sad little place it is. This God-like priest should be living in a dazzling white mansion with long windows and sweeping lawns, something similar to Cashel Manor, the grand Georgian house on the edge of the village. It was built by Lord Anderton’s English ancestors; the po-faced Lady Anderton and her snooty daughter still live there when they aren’t floating around fancy parties in London. According to Angela O’Brian, a girl who used to sit next to me in class, the house has twenty bedrooms (she knew because her mother had cleaned them) and six bathrooms. Mrs O’Brian even had to dust the flowers in every room; not wild flowers – nothing so common – but specially imported flowers from far-flung places, like Casablanca and the Caribbean.
I follow Father Steele into the hall – well, you can’t really call it a hall, more like a passage, grey-walled and narrow with stairs leading straight up to the first floor. He leads the way through a stout wooden door; it’s low and he has to duck. The door opens on to a small square room, which looks a bit like my headmaster’s study at school: lots of books and papers stacked unevenly on groaning bookshelves. A single floor-to-ceiling window overlooks a ragged bandage of untidy lawn broken by a small pond and a couple of fruit trees.
The curate stands facing me in front of the fireplace. The black grate behind his feet is shining, like a shilling up a darkie’s bum, as Lizzy Molloy would say, and so are the brass dishes on the mantel; the desk you can see your face in and the window is gleaming like in the Windolene advert. Biddy has been busy. Above the mantelpiece the Sacred Heart of Jesus drips great globs of scarlet blood, and on the opposite wall the Virgin Mary in a long flowing dress is wearing her ever-present benign smile.
‘So, what’s it to be, Kate: do you want me sitting or standing? Sure, it’s awkward I’m feeling either way.’
‘It’ll be no good, Father, the portrait that is, if you don’t relax. You would do better if you sat or stood somewhere you feel most comfortable.’
With
