“I don’t care. You’ll call him by his proper name or there’ll be no forgiveness for you, do you understand me?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Right then. I’m almost afraid to ask but is there anything else?”
“There is, Father.”
“Go on so. I’ll hold on to my chair.”
“It’s a bit delicate, Father,” I said.
“That’s what the confessional is for, son,” he said. “Don’t worry, you’re not talking to me, you’re talking to God. He sees everything and he hears everything. You can have no secrets from him.”
“Do I have to say it then, Father?” I asked. “Will he not know anyway?”
“He will. But he wants you to say it out loud. Just for clarification purposes.”
I took a deep breath. This had been a long time coming but here it was. “I think I’m a bit funny, Father,” I told him. “The other boys in my class are always talking about girls but I never think about girls at all, I just think about boys, and I think about doing all sorts of dirty stuff to them like taking their clothes off and kissing them all over and playing with their things and there’s this one boy and he’s my best friend and he sleeps in the bed next to mine and I can’t stop thinking about him all the time and sometimes when he’s asleep I pull my pajamas down and I have a right go at myself and I create an unholy mess in the bed and even after I do it and think that I might be able to go to sleep I start thinking about other lads and all the things I want to do to them and do you know what a blowjob is, Father, because I started writing stories about the lads I like and particularly about my friend Julian and I started using words like that and—”
There was an almighty crashing sound from opposite me and I looked up, startled. The shadow of the priest in the darkness had vanished and in its place a beam of light was streaming in from up above.
“Is that you, God?” I said, looking up toward its source. “It’s me, Cyril.”
From outside the confessional, I heard shouts and opened the door to peep outside. The priest had fallen out of his box and was lying on the floor, clutching his chest. He must have been at least eighty years old and the parishioners were leaning over him, crying out for help as his face began to turn blue. One of the floor tiles had broken in two next to his head.
I looked down at him, my mouth open in bewilderment, and he slowly raised a gnarly finger and pointed it at me. His lips parted and I saw how yellow his teeth were as he began to dribble down his chin.
“Am I forgiven, Father?” I asked, leaning over him, trying to ignore the stench of his breath. “Are my sins forgiven?”
His eyes rolled in his head, his entire body gave one great convulsion, he let out a roar and that was it, he was gone.
“God bless us, Father’s dead,” said an elderly man who had been kneeling on the floor, supporting the priest’s head.
“Do you think he forgave me?” I asked. “Before he croaked, I mean?”
“He did, I’m sure of it,” said the man, taking my hand now and letting the priest’s head fall rather hard against the marble floor, a tinny sound echoing around the church. “And he’d be happy to know that his last act on this earth was to spread God’s forgiveness.”
“Thank you,” I said, feeling cheered by this. I left the church as the ambulance men made their way inside. It was an unusually sunny day and, truth be told, I did feel absolved, even if I knew that the feelings that I had hidden inside myself wouldn’t be going away anytime soon.
The next morning, I awoke to the news that Julian had been found. A group of Special Branch officers had followed leads that led them to a farmhouse in Cavan and he was discovered locked in a bathroom while his three captors slept outside. One was killed in the ensuing fracas and the other two were under arrest. Missing a toe, a thumb and an ear, the rest of him was still intact and he had been taken to hospital to begin his recovery.
Had I been a person of more religious scruple, I might have believed that God had answered my prayers, but the fact was, before going to sleep that night I’d already committed a few more sins, so instead I put it down to good detective work on the part of An Garda Síochána. It seemed like the most convenient explanation to me.
1966 In the Reptile House
Like Soft Pillows
Although the strict routine was drearily repetitive at times, I found its familiarity strangely comforting. Every morning my alarm would sound at six o’clock precisely and I would engage in a little light onanism before rising at a quarter past. Being first in line to the shared bathroom meant there was no risk of the water turning cold and when I emerged, bare-chested and with a towel wrapped around my waist, there was Albert Thatcher, the young accountant who had the room next to mine, wearing a pair of Y-front briefs and a sleepy expression, which was not an entirely disagreeable way to start the day. Albert and I had been lodgers at the home of an elderly widow, Mrs. Hogan, on Chatham Street for more than a year, moving in only weeks apart, and we generally got along quite well. The building itself boasted a rather odd design. One flat had been purchased by Mrs. Hogan’s late husband some thirty years earlier as a rental property and after his death a dividing wall had been removed to create two upstairs bedrooms. Mrs. Hogan and her son, Henry, however, lived in the house next door—the former entirely mute, the latter completely blind—and yet between them they monitored our comings and goings with all the efficiency of a government intelligence agency. Like conjoined twins, the two were never seen apart, Henry’s arm permanently attached to his mother’s as she led him to and from Mass every morning and up and down the street for his evening constitutional.
On the rare occasions when they ventured upstairs, looking for overdue rent, perhaps, or returning shirts that Mrs. Hogan ironed at a rate of tuppence for five, we would hear their four feet slowly ascending the staircase, the mute leading the blind, and Henry, who seemed to have no interest in anything, would ask the questions that his mother, an inveterate busybody, wanted answered.
“Mammy says there were strange noises coming from upstairs a week last Tuesday,” he said once in a typical exchange while Mrs. Hogan nodded furiously, craning her neck to see whether we had marijuana plants growing in the living room or prostitutes asleep in one of our beds. “Mammy doesn’t like strange noises. They unsettle her something awful.”
“It can’t have been us,” I replied. “A week last Tuesday, I went to the pictures to see Steve McQueen in The Sand Pebbles and Albert was out dancing at the Astor Ballroom in Dundrum.”