Conor Fitzgerald - Fatal Touch

“At the age of eleven, I acquired a reluctant stepfather called Manfred Manning. I call him my stepfather but at the time of his appearance he was married to another woman whom he could not divorce, this being Ireland and then being then. He finally chose to leave his first wife when she was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. She lasted almost three years, which may be some sort of record, perhaps hanging on to spite them, perhaps hoping he would come home at least for the final part. When she died, Mother and Manfred were holidaying in Edinburgh, a city I have yet to find a reason for visiting.

“After a Protestant primary education, my mother sent me, aged 12, as a boarder to Clongowes Wood College. It seems strange the Jesuits should take in the child of such an immoral woman shacked up with a bigamous Prod, but the reason is simple enough. Manning made a large contribution toward the building of a new wing and my mother lied about everything. She told them she was married, and though admitting her husband was a Protestant, insisted she was bringing me up Catholic. She might even have produced some false paperwork to prove it.

“The summer before I went, she gave me a crash-course in Catholicism, bringing me to mass, and shuffling me up the aisle to communion. Tongue out, eyes downcast, no chewing, it is supposed to be the flesh of Christ. Yes, Henry, it is a revolting concept, but it helps you not to chew. She explained confession to me, too, and warned me to hold back on some issues, notably religious doubt and my paternity. It was expected, she said.

“She told me in some detail about the first communion party I never had, and the gifts of money I never received from relatives I had never met. After a while, I began to remember all these events that had not happened, and I realized how easy it was to paint a fictional past.

“The most surprising thing I learned during my conversion to temporary Catholicism was that God was a soft blue woman. Cabinteely Catholic Church, to which my headscarfed and unrecognizably pious-looking mother took me to learn the ropes, had a tondo image of Jesus set into the pier to the right of the altar. A red sanctuary lamp hung over the altar and a second tondo image, this one of a gentle-looking person in blue, was set into the left pier. Now, as the Protestants had given me enough instruction about God’s three-in-one-person trick but remained tight-lipped about Mary, Mother of God, my interpretation was: Jesus on the right, the Holy Ghost in the middle, and God was the blue-shrouded woman on the left.

“I was soon disabused of the notion, but images are stronger than words. God was then and is sometimes even now an azure Bellini-esque woman…”

Blume turned over the page and looked in dismay at a web of crossings-out and insertion marks.

“I can’t make this out, but I think I’m going to skip ahead. This is no good to us. You’ve hardly taken any notes, I see. Are you following?”

Caterina looked down at what she had written.

Blume flicked forward a few pages. “This section seems to come to an end here.”

“You may as well read it through.”

“The Jesuits may have designed the myth of the Immaculate Conception, but the Irish chapter of the order was keen to make sure we boys understood this was basically a goddess created for peasants. One problem, explained Fr. Ferchware, was this: If Mary was conceived and born without sin, for that is what Immaculate Conception means, is it not, Treacy? (It is, Father), then she had no need of the salvific intervention of her son, Jesus Christ, did she? Don’t try to answer, child, just tell me, the grammatical term for that question.

“A trick question, Father.

“A rhetorical question, you godless reprobate. I shall continue. So if there was already one perfect person in the world, Jesus Christ could not have been the Universal Savior. We might conclude, therefore, that His universality is imperfect and that He is therefore imperfect and He cannot be God. And what does this demonstrate?

“The evident limitations of logic and the frailty of human reasoning in the face of the divine, Father.

“Good man, Treacy.

“The thing about the Jesuits is they started off their history as a sort of special operations force, often poised to stage a military coup within the Church, but ended up teaching geography to schoolchildren. I think that-and chastity-drove most of them mad.

“I was expelled at 16. The immediate or ostensible cause was my poisoning of O’Leary, a gap-toothed red-faced thug who thought he could make my life a misery because I was not so good at rugby. I patiently waited for him one afternoon behind the science wing, opened that very year and contributed to by my stepfather or whatever he was. When O’Leary eventually came by, he was on his own. Looking back with the forgiveness of years, I suppose he was not the worst type of bully. He didn’t have a gang; he didn’t spend his time looking for me. It was casual, off-handed bullying, made possible by his size. I hit him over the head with a rock as he walked around the corner. He stood there and rubbed his head like a cartoon character doing a double-take, so I hit him again, on the temple, and down he went. I sat on his chest and opened up three paper twists of powder I had taken from the chemistry lab. The first contained tartaric acid, basically sherbet without sugar, and I held his nose and poured it into his gaping mouth. It fizzed, and he choked and I told him it was arsenic. The next packet contained bicarbonate of soda, which I told him was plutonium. While not generally available to Irish schoolchildren, plutonium was such a scary new word back then that I thought its dramatic reach would bridge the credibility gap. The last package contained copper sulphate, which I had taken for the beauty of its color, and this, unfortunately, was toxic, though not deadly.

“I hadn’t figured O’Leary for a snitch but the plutonium and arsenic had him worried. Even then, his babbling report might not have been taken too seriously were it not for the black bruise on his temple, his blue tongue, and terrified eyes. Everyone stood ceremoniously on the pebbled driveway as the ambulance drove away with O’Leary inside accompanied by the headmaster.

“As I was packing my bags, Fr. McCarthy came in holding his black ‘biffer,’ a leather strap weighted with lead. He administered twelve strokes to each hand, aiming also to hit the wrist. He left saying, ‘We’ve all known the truth about you for some time, Treacy.’

“A biffer works on the hands rather like a coronary stroke, managing to impart pain and numbness at once. With my throbbing and fumbling hands, I was unable to complete my packing, still less close my suitcase and bring it downstairs to the front door, and I think it was this more than anything that caused me to become so upset. At any rate, it was Fr. Ferchware who came up and found me, finished packing my suitcase for me and accompanied me to the front door. Before we went out, he told me, ‘There’ll be a lot of people looking at you, Henry. You don’t want to go out with a face like that.’ He took a startlingly white, sharply folded, and perfectly clean handkerchief from his pocket, and handed it to me. ‘Dry your eyes, blow your nose.’ The handkerchief smelled of lavender and sunshine, the smells of France, Italy, and my future. I filled it with gray snot and salt, the color and taste of Ireland and my past.

“ ‘Who is coming for me?’ I asked. ‘Is it my mother?’

“ ‘No, son, they’ve sent a taxi.’

“When I was younger, each month was a compact unit containing so many events and changes that they had to be compressed just to fit. But now an entire year can drift by empty of significance. I thought when I started this I might be able to unpack some of those compressed events and examine them in detail, but I find I have forgotten most of them. Life then was brimming, but I still have to pass over years as if they had hardly happened at all.