Ken Bruen - Priest

The Daily Mirror, 26 June 2003

The priest case was heavy on my mind and I asked myself,

‘What do I care?’

Priests and I hadn’t exactly a good history, but you grow up Catholic, they have you. Deny all you like, they own your arse, and maybe my interest in this was because of my father. He always had respect for the clergy. He didn’t like them — who did? But he used to say,

‘Their job isn’t easy and our job is to support them.’

I didn’t believe that any more, but I still believed in him so I decided to have a look at the case. Just maybe, I could achieve one thing he might be proud of.

Was I deluding myself? You betcha. But it’s what I do best, and who knew? I might even gouge back some iota of respect for my own self.

I scoured the libraries, collected all the back story I could. I read till my eyes hurt and I got what the Guards had gotten.

Nothing.

Did that deter me?

Did it fuck.

If it had been easy, I’d have left it there. I determined to stick with it. If I’d known then where this initial resolution would take me — into the heart of the Irish soul — would I have turned away?

Probably not.

I never did before.

That pain-in-the-arse adage about those who ignore the past being doomed to repeat it — they wrote that for me. If I’d known all the torments of the past, the lost love, the humiliation, shame and the oddest friendship on the face of God’s earth that awaited me, would I have acted differently?

With knowledge aforethought, would I have said,

‘Nope, not for me, thanks, I’ll preserve what little sanity I have.’

Alas, I’d have still walked that road of unhappy destiny.

Why?

Because I’m an eejit and, worse, a stubborn one.

Sister Mary Joseph was wringing her hands. It was her birthday, she was seventy years old, and though she never told anyone when the date fell, offering it up for the souls in Purgatory, she did allow for one treat each year — Häagen-Dazs, strawberry shortcake, large tub — and ate the whole shebang in one fell swoop. This year, she was too worried to eat. She was, in fact, worried sick. She’d known about Father Joyce’s little temptations and had seen the altar boys crying, in obvious distress, but she had never told a soul. She was a nun, it wasn’t her place.

As Father Joyce’s little temptations grew uglier and more obscene, she had to bite her tongue and pray for guidance. She couldn’t go up against a priest, it was unheard of, and so she stifled her conscience, turned a blind eye to the state of the altar boys. Now, with the murder of Father Joyce, she began to wonder if perhaps the madman might come after her. She took out her heavy rosary, stayed on her knees for hours, and still the fear and trepidation only increased. In bed that night, she cried for the boys, and for the loss of the ice cream too, melting away slowly beneath her bed. She could swear she heard it trickle.

I was standing at the Salmon Weir Bridge, seven in the evening. A late sun threw beams across the water. It made me yearn — for what I’ve never known, and probably never will.

Peace, perhaps.

You stand on that bridge and you get a sense of the sheer vibrancy of the city. When I grew up, it was a village — you knew everyone and, more important, they knew you. And as the saying goes in Ireland, they knew all belonging to you. If you had a brother in jail, they knew. If your sister was a nurse in England, they knew. It was truly parochial, with all the baggage that entails, the good and the bad. You couldn’t have a pee without your neighbour being aware of it. But it also lent a spirit of care. When a family had trouble, the neighbours rallied round. There were no nursing homes to stash sick, elderly relatives in. This industry was a growth area now.

Nowadays, I could walk down the main street and not know one person. What you did notice was the sea of non-nationals. As a child, I never saw a black face outside of National Geographic.

More promising was the fact that a black woman, from Nigeria, was running for the city council. She hadn’t a hope in hell, but give it time. I found that encouraging.

I saw a figure in black shuffling along like an injured crow, with smoke billowing behind. I wondered for a moment if I was hallucinating — they’d given me some pretty strong dope in the hospital and there were bound to be side effects, none of them good.

I wiped my eyes and realized it was a priest. Not just any priest but my nemesis, Father Malachy. I’ve hated few men as much as I hated him.

You’re in some state, as a Catholic, when you hate a priest. They say there’s a special place in Hell for priest-haters. The guy who took the head off the murdered priest, he was in for a real roasting. He’d be kebabbed.

My mother and I, we had a tortured relationship — she tortured me. And always in her miserable life there was Father Malachy, cooing and cajoling, leading her on to greater acts of piety. For piety, read interference in the lives of others. That I was drunk and a failed Guard was fuel for her daily martyrdom. He encouraged her in the belief and we had some epic battles. He usually got the last word in, and it was nearly always,

‘God forgive you, because only God could.’

Nice, eh?

He looked like he usually did — as if he’d been pickled in nicotine. Last of the dedicated smokers, he lit one with another, and didn’t even know he was smoking any more. It was as natural or unnatural as blinking. His face was deep lined, and his eyes were bloodshot. An air of desperation clung to him, or maybe I was just wishing that. He said,

‘By the holy, ‘tis the bold Taylor.’

And we were off.

I thought,

‘Who needs this shite?’

Said,

‘Fuck off.’

You use such words to a priest, you’re already damned, but in my case, how much more damnation could they pile? The devil had me in hock to his arse as it was. I knew a little about philosophy, truth to tell I knew a little about most things. It was the bigger picture, as the Yanks say, that eluded me.

Sören Kierkegaard talked about man’s condition on earth being caught between insoluble tensions.

Fucker nailed me.

Malachy stared at me and I snapped,

‘What?’

‘I need your help.’

I laughed out loud — not a laugh that had the remotest connection to humour or warmth, but the one you heard in the mental asylum, bred from pure despair. I asked,

‘What, they caught you pilfering from the poor box?’

He leaned on the bridge, as if he needed physical support, said,

‘I’m serious. That poor man who was beheaded. .?’ and trailed off.

I shook my head, said,

‘Don’t tell me about it, pal, none of my business. You ask me, they’re not beheading half enough of ye.’

He gathered himself, moved off, said,

‘I’ll talk to you again when you’re sober.’

I roared,

‘I’m not drinking.’

And wished I was.

He paused, then,

‘Why do you never address me correctly?’

‘What?’

‘I’m a priest, you should address me as Father.’

‘You’re not my father. Christ on a bike, that you should be anyone’s father. What a curse that would be.’

If he’d called me son, I’d have thrown him to the salmon. Little did I know my whole life was about to be immersed in the whole father-and-son dynamic of — should that read, dysfunction ?

Remember Cat Stevens, a very successful singer-songwriter who returned to his Islamic roots and changed his name? They’d re-released his classic song, ‘Father And Son’. The fates, you might say, were fucking with me big time, but was I listening? Was I fuck.

On the bridge, to my left, was the cathedral. Some irony that it had previously been the city jail. Further along was the university, and you could hear the high jinks of the students, carried along a stray breeze. Staring down into the water, you could see the salmon, swimming against the tide, like meself. Our new prosperity had added the obligatory pollutants and the fish were as diseased as my nature. It never ceased to lift my spirits a bit to watch those beautiful salmon, almost swaying against the current. Made you almost wish to be a poet.