D. Connell - Julian Corkle is a Filthy Liar

My stomach heaved. I ran to the bathroom and splashed cold water over my face until the carsick feeling eased. When my legs felt solid again I went to the kitchen to see Mum. She was boiling water to remove the chicken’s feathers.

‘Mum, I can’t eat that chicken. It was murder.’

‘I’m making a roast-chicken dinner, your favourite.’

‘I can’t eat it for religious reasons.’

‘OK, honey. Carmel can have the drumsticks and wings and John can have the juicy white meat from the breast. I’ll just have those two little flesh oysters from the hollows of its back. They’re probably Elizabeth Taylor’s favourite bits. Your father can have the skin and the pickings on the carcass. There, that’s settled then.’

They were welcome to it. I’d had a religious transformation. It was wrong to eat a murdered chicken. The only chickens I would eat from now on were those from a supermarket. Happy, bloodless things that came in sealed plastic wrappers.

Religion was a non-negotiable subject in our house. We were Sunday Catholics. We didn’t bother practising much of what the priest preached but we went to Our Lady of Miracles every Sunday like the other good Catholics of Ulverston. On the subject of church, Mum and Dad were in agreement. It didn’t matter how crappy things were in real life: once a week we had to pretend to be a normal family.

‘Dad, I can’t go to church today. I’ve had a religious transformation. I had a visitation. Like an archangel, only bigger and shinier.’

Dad was putting on his tie in front of the hall mirror. He looked at my reflection and tightened his lips. I pushed on.

‘I was sucked up into the clouds where I met a man sitting on a large Brazil nut.’

My father raised his eyebrows in the mirror.

‘He looked like Mr Patel from the fruit and vegetable shop but he had long hair.’

Dad frowned and tucked the tail of his tie into his shirt.

‘I’m being called by a higher voice, he said. I should follow the voice, wherever it leads me, even if I have to walk through the valley of death and all that.’

Dad turned from the mirror and gave me one of his looks. ‘I heard a higher voice on the radio this morning. It was Joan Sutherland. Put on your Sunday jumper and get in the car. I’m in no mood for one of your stories.’

Church services at Our Lady of Miracles were a complete waste of time. The priest should have looked good in his glittery frock but managed to completely ruin the effect with a tragic haircut and old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses. Father McMahon wasn’t just a frump. He had absolutely no talent for working a crowd. It wouldn’t have taken much to liven up his sermons: a few ‘A funny thing happened to me on the way to the church this morning’ starters, some audience participation, novelty giveaways. But when Father McMahon talked, people picked lint off their cardigans and dug holes into pews with car keys. The priest lacked showmanship. My mother and I called this quality ‘pizzazz’ and divided the world into those who had it and those who didn’t. Mum and I fell into the first category while Dad and John occupied the second. Carmel was impossible to categorise. Mum said I had so much pizzazz I glowed. This was an exaggeration but I knew what she meant.

A shiny ecclesiastical gown would not have been wasted on me but the priesthood held no appeal. The Catholic Church had too many nutty rules and not enough handsome role models. Father McMahon managed to be even less attractive than the Pope, which was saying something. The best way to get through the hour of what he managed to stretch into half a day was to squint my eyes at the other churchgoers and imagine them without clothes. I’d actually seen my mother naked once when I’d surprised her coming out of the shower and taken in a few crucial points. Ladies had the Stromboli mound, only it was covered by a thatch of what I now knew to be pubic hair. Carmel had explained the mechanics of this anatomical oddity. ‘It’s like Velcro. It helps keep your underpants up.’

I’d done more research and come a long way since the Ralph Waters field trip. I knew for a fact that women had something called the lady hole, hidden away below the Velcro line. Where John got the point on his head, however, was still a mystery.

My father had done nothing to help my research. I’d shared a bathroom and towels with him for over a decade but had never seen him naked, not a pubic hair, not once. I’d seen him with his shirt off a handful of times but no Velcro. The mystery of the adult male had been cleared up by Greg Bean, a boy with Down Syndrome who visited the Ulverston Municipal Baths every Saturday in summer. Greg had the body of a teenager but the smiley temperament of a six-year-old. He had absolutely no concept of modesty and walked around inside the changing shed without clothes, singing, while his brother Denny tried to get him to step into his bathers.

The only times I considered God was when I wanted something expensive or when I was touching myself. If it was the latter case then I preferred to think that God didn’t exist. It made no sense that a higher intelligence would’ve provided such excellent equipment then forbidden me to use it. Masturbation was a key theme at St Kevin’s. We constantly heard about the perils of it from the Christian Brothers who ran our school. I might’ve taken notice if the message had come from another source, but I had no confidence in these particular men of the cloth. For the most part, they were a miserable bunch of failures. They’d given up the worldly joys but didn’t have what it took to become priests. Brother Punt was the school’s anti-wanking fanatic. He gave the religion class twice a week.

‘Masturbation is dangerous, boys. It’s a very difficult habit to break.’

Brother Punt turned his palms upward and spread his hands in front of him with a sweeping gesture. I’d seen a magician on television do the same thing to prove he had nothing to hide. Thomas Owen put up his hand. He was the tallest boy in the class and had permanently chapped lips.

‘What about in the bath, sir? I mean how do we wash ourselves down there ?’ Thomas pointed to the hot zone below the belt of his trousers.

That question would’ve been a joke from anyone else in the class but Thomas didn’t have a ha-ha sense of humour. His mother came from somewhere in Germany.

‘Good question, Owen. I have two keywords for washing yourself. Be fast and be sure. Soap your flannel into a lather and clean your privates with a brisk rubbing motion.’

‘I tried that, sir, but I’m having problems.’

We all knew what kind of problems Thomas was talking about. These were not problems as far as I was concerned.

‘Be brisk, Owen. Do not linger.’

Poor Owen. His problem wasn’t masturbation. His problem was that he thought it was a crime. I knew he had it wrong. If there was a God and he didn’t want us to touch ourselves, he would’ve given us something useless like the joyless mound of a girl. Thomas was making a Gary Jings of himself. He wasn’t supposed to attract attention to himself. His job was to get on with business and keep quiet about it. Someone had to come to his rescue.

‘Do you think Jesus had a problem with…you know?’ I looked Brother Punt in the eye and shrugged knowingly. My question seemed to throw him off balance.

‘What sort of question is that?’ The brother’s hands clamped the edge of the desk.

‘Well, I mean, did they have flannels in those days? When Jesus Christ took a bath and all, do you think he—?’

‘No! Jesus was the son of God.’

The brother was firm on this point. He lifted a hand and brought it down hard on to the desk. Thomas Owen jumped and let out a squeak.