Lost in Space - Part I

I’m in the passenger seat of Pat’s plum-purple Ford Fiesta watching him shine the beam of a huge flashlight out the driver’s window up at a tiny black and white signpost that will, if there’s a God above in the tar black sky, get us the fuck outta this tangle of bog roads.

Pat squints so hard, his glasses riding up his nose, that he starts to look like the fella in the Jade Dragon who sold me a container of pork-fried rice last night around 2:00AM; me ordering with me eyes ‘cause me mouth stopped working about a half hour after the fella in the Beaten Path sold us a Leed Lemonade bottle full of poteen. 

I draw in a deep breath and try to take a long-hard look at meself … inside. 

“Bally…puckin’…glass!” Pat snorts.  “Sure, Gerty on’y went to Ballyglass for small things, ‘twas Castlebar she done her shoppin’ in.  But, as the fella says, … we must be close.”

It probly around seven in the evening now, and all I want is to get home and sleep of the rest of this hangover.  Me stomach is in tatters; either it ‘twas a bad pint or the combined impact of the twelve pints and the poteen on the way home from yesterday’s rugby match below in Creggs.  It’s always a rough Sunday in Creggs – hard on the body, head and stomach.  Them Roscommon boys are solid and tough; they make you pay dear for your win.  

Then a course, the long-twisty road from Creggs to Castlebar is just knotted with, as our driver said, “the best a pubs, a lad kennit drive a past without stoppin’ in for wan … or two.”   

I woke this morning at twenty past ten; pork-fried rice stuck to me cheek; the bus back to Galway gone an hour and twenty minutes ago; and a cracker of a headache, with the stomach totally wiped out.  

I mope around house all morning, trying not to puke, and not thinking ahead enough to be gone when Da bursts in the door at lunch time.

“Good God man!” he blurts with the alarm in his voice that comes with any small upset. “What are you doin’ still here?”

“Sure, I have no lectures today,” I gave him a weak how-could-you-not-know-that look.  “There’s some sort of a teacher…lecturers meeting.”

His eyes harden enough that I figure when he gets back to the Gards barracks, he’ll call below to UCG to make sure I’m lying.

“I forgot to tell ya … Friday,” I slink off, mutter-mumbling about having to “give sumptin ta wan a the lads.”

My stupid lie was kinda-sorta true in one, unmentionable, way; I mean, I haven’t seen the inside of a lecture hall of a Monday morning since …, probly never: Sunday nights around Eyre Square are just too busy for a lad not go drinking.

My recovery plan was to be on the six o’clock Expressway back to Galway, and out from under Da’s prying suspicion; sleep all the way back and see what a Monday night in Eyre Square might have to offer.  

But then, slouching around town, shoulders slumped, hands in pockets, the stomach heaving little packets of bile up into me mouth, I stopped into the church to get distracted by Pat’s unique view of the human world.  

Pat’s nearly like a second father to me.  I mean, he’s everything that Da’s not, except the two of them would make laugh – but for much different reasons. 

With Da everything is caution and reserve: Run low to ground, always be ready to dart under a rock when the world tries to roll over and crush you.  And the world does that to us – all the time.

With Pat, it’s the opposite: The world seems to come to Pat, revolving around him in a flurry of high energy, chaos and confusion.  He misreads people, signs, omens, but by the force of his personality, he always seems to come out on top. 

I worked for Pat as second-junior-assistant-vice-sacristan all through secondary school: Every week flipping back the long-heavy-wooden seats in the church’s naves, to sweep and polish the parquet floor; prepare the cruets of water and wine, the chalice with the host for the altar boys bring out for mass; get the least-giddy-eejit of an altar boy to light the candles without burning the church down; check the Liturgical Calendar, pick out the right color vestments from the deep closet in the sacristy; then lay the gold-thread-embroidered vestments out in the stipulated manner for the priest’s ceremonial robing; Sunday mornings were spent sliding ten pence and five pence pieces across the front porch’s solid wood table, stacking them into pound high silver-columns, for bagging and banking.

Pat, as a man who stands between three worlds, see things differently than your average sinner. 

He’s heard mass often enough that he can say it himself, and betimes he does; providing backup vocals from his mass-time stand at the carved wooden bench in the sacristy; his deep-bass voice intoning so loudly it flows out into the front seats.

With his own priestly uniform of a black soutane and a white surplice on his Friar Tuckian body, he eases families through funerals with his knows-no-boundaries personal touch; he beams mutter-mumbled compliments to brides as he fixes their headband or cinches a dry-mouthed groom’s tie; he shushes oblivious weeks-old infants at Baptisms so that their adoringly-deaf parents can hear the words mouthed blandly by the priest.

Like the boatman on the River Styx, Pat is no longer fully a lay person, but definitely not a seminaried priest.  

Thus, his relationship with the clergy is … complicated.  

He’s their employee; occasional temporary-devotee to a clerical celebrity; the best judge in town of the veracity of priest’s sermonly anecdote; an erudite historian of diocesan appointments – how, when and, most importantly, why; and he holds an empirical professorship in the field of clerical human frailty.  

Daily, he gets buckets of data for his professorship.

Balancing all week on that precarious threshold that separates the only three worlds allowed to a Catholic – heavenly-heaven; cursed-is-the-ground earth; and hellishly-hell – tends make a fella thirsty.

“We’ll go now below, don’t ya see, ta Father Curran’s mother’s wake,” he says in a this-is-the-plan voice to my still-severely-hungover self around ha’past four.  “They have her laid out below in Headford.”

Needing a reason to avoid, at all costs, the sending-you-back-to-Galway-stuffed-full dinner that Da is likely deep-fat-frying back at the house, I do what I do best: I agree, silently.

“We better go so,” Pat shrugs his black wool greatcoat onto his girthy torso, grabs his porkpie hat, and, with hands that constantly tremor, places it gingerly onto his bald head.  “There could be a traffic jam below in Ballinrobe, don’t ya see, two cows, a few sheep and a donkey heading back to the stable, huh?  Just like Bethlehem, huh?  We might stop into Art O’Neil’s for wan on the way home.”

Sitting into the Fiesta, I take a regretful swallow, having somehow forgotten the impact on my nervous system of being Pat’s passenger.  

He revs Henry Ford’s littlest engine until it screams in agony.  

With an entirely unpredictable timing, we lurch into Chapel Street barely avoiding the front wheels of a huge Sandy Geraghty lorry.  

Leaning forward to look in the mirror, we both see Sandy’s driver shaking his head and fist at us.

“Good Jesus, where did that blaggard come from!” Pat shakes his own fist in the mirror at the truck driver.  

 We trundle down Chapel St, the Fiesta and the lorry both in second gear, to a symphony of combustion engine agony.

“Don’t ya see now, ‘tisn’t safe ta drive the roads a Mayo no more, not with them big lorries full a dirt comin’ around every corner.  I’ll be up to the Gard’s barrack about that blaggard tomorrow.  Get his number, what is it at-all-at-all-at-all; DIS 7 … what’s the rest of it.”

First, I feign shortsightedness, then I give in, kinda-sorta, and write the digits down in the wrong order on the back of an old ESB bill that Pat yanks from the pile of paper jammed between the front seats. 

With a running monologue on the generally inferior driving habits of Castlebar-barians, we alternately scream and jerk along Main Street, down Castle Street, swooping up to the chestnut tree lined Mall.  After a no-stop left onto Spenser Street, we hit Station Road with enough revs to make third, or thirtieth, gear.  Finally, as we summit the hump-backed railway bridge, the rev counter gets a breather, as Pat shifts up and we’re launched for Ballinrobe.

“Sure, this country ruined, don’t ya see, … ruined,” he shakes his head slowly as we pass the turn for the Rugby Club – at the memory of which my stomach issues another bilious delivery.  

“‘A great little island,’ they do say to me when I’m abroad in Leeds with Mick and his friends.   Don’t ya know, out for a meal, a nice bit of roast beef or lamb above in …, in…, in wan a them fancy places.  An’ t’Englishman, Cyril or Cecil was it, sipping a glass a sherry, like a woman would, God-forgive-me, but why wouldn’t he have a real bleddy drink?  An’ says he to me, says Cecil: ‘A great little island ya have over there Pat.’  Don’t ya see – oh, no, no, no, no.” 

To my hangover-anxiety’s extreme anguish, he turns to stare at me, lifts his left hand off the steering wheel and wags his thick-trembling forefinger over and back slowly

“This country is ruined, ruined.  Now they had a story in the Inda…pendent t’other day, some blaggard ray…, rape, … he raped a woman on the side of a city street.  In Dublin a course.  Yeah, some poor girleen going home late wan night from work, an’ this blaggard come runnin’ out of a dark alley, an’ he pulls the skirt and the knic…, t’underwear, don’t ya see, offa her.  An’ he rapes her right there in the street.”

He hits the steering wheel so hard my body tightens involuntarily.

“The baaastard should be bate within an inch of his life!” he car-yells.  “‘N then I’d bring him into court, I don’t care if he’s black n’ blue all over.  Within in the court, I’d sentence him to a flogging.  We should brin’ that back; oh, t’English weren’t wrong about that.  Nathin’ but a loincloth on, …. ‘n I’d baaate him to within an inch of his life for a second time.  Then he can go an’ rot within in Mountjoy for the rest of his miserable life.”

He wipes the back of his hand over the sheen of sweat built up on his forehead.   

“Sure, that poor girleen, she’ll never be the same.  Ah no, no, no, ‘tis terrible what this ‘great little island’ lets them away with.  The paper said they went an’ let the baaastard off with five years, because of ‘mitigating family circumstances;’ I’d show him mitigatin’!”

He lifts his right hand off the steering wheel and shakes his fist at the criminal element of Ireland lurking behind the stonewalls and hedgerows in the Mayo darkness.

“Oh, if I was the Minister for Injustices, I’d …, them bleddy baaastards,” he car-yells, opening his mouth wide, teeth showing, “I’d flay them to within an inch of their lives – the shaggin’ lot of them!

He shakes his head so vigorously the Fiesta starts to drift across where the white line would be on a bigger road.

“Then, let ‘the defendant’s counsel,’” he does a creditable imitation of a Dublin 4 shithead accent, “complain as much he likes.  Bleddy shaggers in sheep’s wigs, an’ them driving their Jags out to the Golf Club for lunch.  What about the poor girleen from Revenue?  That’s where she worked don’t ya see, the poor divileen.  I’m sure she’s a fine girl, but don’t ya see, in that bleddy Revenue office, an’ I’m speakin’ from personal experience now.  There’s some others in there are right … baaastards!”

Thus, we traverse thirty miles of the infinite universe, powered along the twisty, dark roads of Mayo and Galway by Pat’s steering-wheel-slapping, indignant anger at a republic slipping inexorably into moral declination.

From the passenger seat I barely hear Pat’s monologue, as the personal anguish of the mother-of-all-hangovers opens for me a glimpse of my infinitely small role in this universe. 

To be continued …