Pursued by Nollaig, Father Balance raised his hands and approached the caravan with grave intent. Birds squawked and gravel crunched underfoot as he stepped forward to mutter a blessing. He swung the thurible around the wheels and then the windows, and then round the back, as if there was a preset routine for such things, an off-the-peg setting for a caravan blessing that was second nature to any priest. Within a few minutes the deed was done, and we dispersed in the joyful knowledge that some small part of God’s portable power was now embedded in our caravan.
Such were the perks of knowing so many priests. When I was a child, it seemed as though my dad knew every priest in Ireland. This is because he knew every single priest in Ireland. Irish priests happen to be my father’s specialist subject. By this, I do not mean the Irish priesthood, as in the history and customs of that institution (though on that topic, too, he is undeniably strong). I mean the literal, individual priests. Each of them. By name, location and family connection. Ireland’s small population, combined with my parents’ energetically devout Catholicism, put them on friendly terms with most of Ireland’s clergy during that extensive period of the twentieth century when Ireland was a net exporter of priests.
It’s worth explaining just how comically, parodically Catholic my parents were. They weren’t just avid churchgoers and committed in their home lives, they also gave readings at Mass and served as eucharistic ministers, handing out communion to parishioners. They worked within various Catholic-flavoured remits: charities, prayer groups and councils that gave a papist slant on marriage, vocation and youth outreach. My mother spent her entire professional career teaching in Catholic secondary schools, and my father volunteered as treasurer of our Catholic primary. More memorably still, there was a short period in the late nineties when he taught computer skills to the nuns who lived in the attached convent. We more than once visited Catholic sites like Lourdes and Knock on family holidays and experienced the true scalding heat of boredom at large, outdoor Masses in the wind and rain of holy fields. Before I was born, my parents took the opportunity to embark on a cross-continental trip that took in not Florence and the Louvre, Barcelona or the Algarve, but the many and splendid Marian shrines of Europe.
There was also, let’s be honest, the fact that they had eleven cardigan-wearing little children, arguably the most solid credential that exists within Catholicism short of holy orders. They were paragons of piety, and aspired to raise the lower-middle-class ideal of a good Catholic family. If only one of us had managed to spot a statue of the Virgin Mary riding a bike or smoking a fag, it’s a fair bet my mother would be a saint by now. Unfortunately, after the golden years of the early twentieth century, during which it seemed that barely a week went past without such a sighting, the boom was over by our time, strangely coinciding with the advent of reliable compact photography.
It’s sometimes hard for me to work out whether we were ourselves especially holy, or if we simply lived through a particularly holy time for my mother, when her faith gained greater expression in the face of death. I was well into adulthood before I realised that in every single memory I have of my mother, she was living with cancer, or the fear of its recurrence. But while it does seem that her faith was strengthened by her illness, it’s also true that she was very committed to begin with. The Catholicism of my parents leaned less on dogma and more on a generalised sense of gratitude, humility and fellowship, and an emphasis on family and community. They didn’t go for diatribes about hell, sin, masturbation and abortion. We did hear about that stuff in school and at Mass – most especially abortion, which was almost always described as part of ‘the culture of death’, to use the church’s favourite phrase of the time – but even then only infrequently.
Insofar as evil was ever mentioned to me as a child, it was less in relation to touching myself or fancying boys and more to do with present, quotidian sins, like making fun of people with disabilities or becoming involved in paramilitary violence. On this latter point, my parents were particularly clear. Contrary to the narrative often pushed by outside chroniclers of the Troubles, the sectarianism we saw everywhere growing up was not so much religious as tribal. In Derry, a Catholic didn’t mean someone who had internalised the virgin birth and the transubstantiation of Christ’s corpse into a sliver of cheap, waxy, haunted wafer. Catholic in the common parlance merely meant someone who was born of Catholics, no matter what their feelings about Christ’s literal existence, or their opinion on the Second Vatican Council. The Catholics who made up the IRA were almost exclusively Catholics in this sense, and the same was true of all the Catholics mentioned on the news after each round of murders. They were Catholics in that they were not Protestants, and vice versa. My parents, on the other hand, were Catholics in the more full-strength prescription of the term, and lived the values of tolerance, kindness, mercy and forgiveness that perhaps organised Catholicism didn’t represent at the time.
The local farmers were less forgiving of Nollaig than we were when he graduated from mauling frozen chickens to killing and eating their sheep. It shouldn’t have been surprising, perhaps, since he had for a while been growing more bold, nipping at visitors and issuing growls and even bites that had long since progressed beyond playful. One cold, wet Sunday – again adding fuel to the whole Protestant theory – Nollaig killed a sheep a few fields over and was put down. I don’t believe a vet was involved; it was instead agreed that Nollaig should be presented to the farmer himself, so that he could have a full, frank conversation via shotgun. We weren’t exactly distraught, but our neighbours threw street parties. We suddenly had that disquieting realisation that everyone within an eight-mile radius had hated him as much as they loved us. I guess it was the dog-owner’s equivalent of when your friend breaks up with her boyfriend and everyone finally tells her that his beard is disgusting and that podcast of his is going nowhere.
Perhaps inevitably, we entered into a rebound relationship, taking in an Alsatian/Labrador cross named Bruno, who was everything Nollaig hadn’t been. Bruno was a girl who we initially thought was a boy, hence her name. We twigged she was a girl when it became clear she was pregnant. It seemed as though she had come from nowhere, but now I wonder if she had been a stray notch on Nollaig’s bedpost who, after keeping as far away from her psycho ex as possible, swooped in and nicked his bed once he was out of the picture. She was quiet and kind-hearted and immediately proved more popular than poor Nollaig, but often flinched from contact, especially from men, which made us think she’d had a troubled time of it. Desperate to love and be loved, I saw in her a kindred spirit, and doted on her unreservedly. Since my mother’s death, we each sought the opportunity to project our neuroses onto the family pet, and here was one that finally seemed aware of our presence. For those of us suffering a lack of attention, we adored her steadfast fascination with everything we did. For those of us who wanted space, we had a little underling we could chase from any rooms we entered, with an alacrity that suggested we might want to do the same to some of the house’s human occupants.