Chasing Angels Read online

  Later, as she followed the coffin into the church, where it would lie on the night before the funeral, she had caught sight of a notice advertising the Christmas Dance only a few weeks away. ‘Come and dance the night away!!!’ some enthusiastic believer had painted freehand; three exclamation marks conveying, she supposed, that three times the pleasure was to be had. Then she’d thought of the shoes old Con was wearing in his box and she’d laughed out loud. ‘No’ in they shoes he won’t!’ she giggled. The undertaker’s men carrying the coffin ahead of her turned their heads slightly and looked at her, but made no reply. For some reason she found it hard to control her laughter, her mind seeking out amusement and finding it, whether it was there or not. Before the undertaker had taken Old Con out of the house for the last time, he had asked if she wanted to place anything in the coffin. She stared at him blankly.

  ‘Some people put in a note,’ he had suggested helpfully.

  ‘Whit for?’ she had asked. ‘Sayin’ “Haste ye back” or somethin’? That’s the last thing Ah want noo that Ah’ve got the upper hand at last!’ Then, as she’d looked around the house, her eyes had fallen on Old Con’s collection of religious tat. He had been devoted all his life to the Child of Prague, a figure of the child Jesus wearing an ornate scarlet and gold robe, a crown on his head, his right hand raised in blessing and an orb in his left hand. There were pictures and cards of it everywhere, and statues of every size, Con being unable to pass up the chance of buying yet another, including her favourite little ones inside clear, hard plastic shells, like preserved birds or wedding cake tiers in Victorian times, only in miniature. When she was much younger she’d twist their heads off, replace the tiny mutilated figures inside the plastic tubes and leave them lying around for Old Con to find. He used to go berserk, screeching, yelling and falling on his knees to offer up prayers for forgiveness. Then she had perfected the ultimate blasphemy in his eyes, by performing the Papal blessing over him as he prayed. ‘Whit’s up wi’ ye?’ she’d ask innocently. ‘Ah’m giein’ a blessin’, an’ Ah’m wearin’ a dress just like the boy there! A’ Ah need is the crown and the tennis ba’ in ma hand tae finish it!’ It was the only revenge she was able to get, in those days at least, and it raised her spirits greatly. Beheading the plastic figures had been a vent, she supposed, and performing the blessing was simply enjoyable vengeance.

  She had never really got her head round the Child of Prague. A fascination with angels she could understand. They had this ability she had always envied; whenever they felt like it they could flap their wings and take off into the wide, blue yonder. The times she wished she could just close her eyes and wake up somewhere else, somewhere Con wasn’t. In the cold winters, with the ice forming inside the windows and the air so cold in her unheated bedroom that she could see her breath, she would close her eyes and pretend to be somewhere warm. She would lie sandwiched between patched sheets, with a couple of ex-army blankets on top and a coat or two in an attempt to generate enough heat to make sleep possible. But in her mind she was somewhere else, sunbathing in some hot country, swimming in a warm, sparkling blue ocean, walking along a deserted beach at sunset, being washed by a balmy breeze. She had no clear notion of where this magical land might be, that didn’t matter, just as long as it was hot, the kind of place where she’d need calamine lotion to soothe her pale, freckled skin as it turned red, as it always did – Sunnyland, that would do. And, gradually, as she inhabited her fantasy, she’d make herself relax, muscle by muscle, limb by limb, till her teeth stopped chattering, under the gently waving palm trees in deepest Moncur Street. And getting to Sunnyland wouldn’t be a problem, she had already worked that out. The journey wouldn’t involve an aircraft, because no one she knew had ever been on one, so it simply didn’t figure in her Moncur Street life or her Sunnyland one either. Planes were tiny dots you saw in the sky, leaving white trails behind them, or they were props for film stars to be pictured waving from. So it seemed to the young Kathy that sprouting a pair of functional, as well as aesthetically pleasing, wings from the shoulder blades was infinitely more realistic, more interesting, too, than the possibility of flying on an aeroplane anyway. She would’ve given anything to have wings, to be able to fly away to Sunnyland, to anywhere, and disappear. She would look at the angels on the statues in St Alphonsus’s or at school, where the main subject was always someone supposedly bigger, better and, more importantly, holy, with the angels kind of tacked on at their feet almost as an afterthought, gazing upwards in adoration. Why, she wondered, didn’t they realise that their wings gave them an advantage, a skill the holy people didn’t have, something she’d have made better use of if she’d had them? But her angelic days would have to be on a strictly freelance, independent basis, she knew that; there was no way she would consider sitting by the feet of saints, waiting for orders to take to the sky. Winged or wingless, Kathy Kelly had never taken kindly to being ordered about. So she had always liked angels, she could see the point of them, and there was a certain kind of logic to liking them that was entirely missing from Con’s thing about the Child of Prague, for instance. Why would a boy be wearing a dress? And Jesus was Jesus, wasn’t he, the lad from the Holy Land, so where did Prague come into the story? While she was still at school she had discovered that Old Con had no idea who the figure was or what it represented, he simply liked it, and Kathy had taunted him about it for as long as she could remember. Being unable, as usual, to leave the thing alone, she had gone to her favourite place, the local library, to find out about it, and discovered that the original wax statue had been made for a Spanish royal family, who passed it on to some count and countess at their seventeenth-century wedding in Prague. Then the count had died – so much for the figure bringing good luck – and the countess had got rid of it by gifting it to the Carmelites. Over the years it had been destroyed and re-built several times, before being put on permanent display at the Church of Our Lady of Victory in Prague, complete with different robes for different seasons. It reminded her of the dressing-up dolls she had played with as a child, cardboard figures of impossibly beautiful children with shining cherubic faces and mops of irritatingly golden curls. They had paper wardrobes of equally impossibly beautiful clothes, with little tabs at strategic positions that you had to cut round very carefully. The folded tabs held the clothes onto the doll figure and you could change outfits as the mood took you till they fell apart. She couldn’t see the difference between the dolls – who at least promised nothing more than a few hours of harmless fun and dreaming – and the Child of Prague, who demanded adoration in exchange for possibly enriching his followers’ lives in some way, or possibly not, depending on his mood. When she told Old Con that his revered icon was nothing more than a wax dressing-up doll, he rewarded her tenfold by becoming even more beside himself with rage. He screeched that she was making it all up to mock God, the Child, the Pope and all Roman Catholics across the globe, especially himself; well, at least he was right with the last one. He refused to believe the true story she had recounted to him, but when she’d challenged him to come up with an alternative he couldn’t. That was when she realised that Old Con had never had any idea of the figure’s meaning, such as it was, or its background, he just liked it, and it had given her a weapon to use against him for the rest of his life. ‘Ye’ve got a thing aboot blokes in dresses, haven’t ye?’ she’d taunt him scathingly, as Con raged with injured pride. ‘First your HLI kilties, an’ noo this wee guy, the transvestite frae Prague. There has to be somethin’ wrong wi’ somebody who likes statues an’ pictures o’ boys dressed in frocks!’ Knowledge was indeed power, and her knowledge of the Child of Prague drove Old Con wild whenever she aired it, as it was intended to. It was a means of evening up the score for Kathy, or as near as she would ever get, and having it at her disposal, she often thought, had probably stopped her many times from lifting a hammer and bringing it down on Old Con’s head. She still wasn’t sure if that had been a good or a bad thing. ‘Here,’ she said to the undertake
r on impulse, gathering up Old Con’s Child of Prague collection, ‘stuff his gay icon in beside him. Then him an’ the boy in the frock will burn thegither.’

  And so, as he was carried into St Alphonsus’s, in his HLI regalia and wearing the shoes that hurt his feet, she laughed again, listening for clunks and knocks as the collection rolled around inside. She laughed too when two large candles were placed at either end of the coffin.

  ‘They won’t last a minute!’ she said.

  ‘They will last for twenty-four hours,’ Father McCabe intoned solemnly.

  ‘Ah doubt it!’ she giggled.

  Father McCabe shook his head, his face a mask of distaste. What he didn’t know was that Old Con had pinched candles from the chapel all his life for the next time the family’s electricity got cut off, and it often did, because Con had better things to spend their money on, all of them alcoholic. He didn’t see purloining the candles as theft, even if he never went out of his way to inform his parish priest; he was one of the faithful, one of the family, so it was probably a kind of honour among thieves as far as Old Con had been concerned, she thought. So she had a mental picture of a hand emerging from the coffin in the quiet silence of the night, clutching the candles and dragging them, one by one, into the dark recesses with him and the Child.

  Later, in the vestry, where the priest had wanted to discuss the finer details of the funeral service the following morning, a man had knocked on the door and come in.

  ‘It’s you, John,’ Father McCabe had said. ‘Thanks for coming. We’ll need the usual people tomorrow for the service. Could you round them up and be here for ten o’clock?’

  John’s silent nod veered dangerously near to a bow as he left, and Kathy asked who he was.

  ‘We have a faithful band of parishioners we can call on to attend services like this,’ Father McCabe explained; he meant funerals where there might be few mourners, or where the faithful might be in the minority. Couldn’t have heathens taking up pew space. If he had his own back-up troupe, then the niceties of the service would be performed as they should, with the congregation giving their responses on time, getting up, kneeling and sitting down on cue and knowing all the words of the hymns.

  Kathy laughed at that too. ‘You’ve hired “Rent a crowd”?’ she asked. ‘That’s terrific!’ She mopped at her eyes, once again unable to hold in the laughter, unwilling to even try, come to that.

  ‘For God’s sake behave yourself,’ the priest said, ‘and show some respect.’

  Well, that was good, coming from him; respect indeed, given what she knew about him. Still, she’d hold her fire on that, for the moment anyhow. ‘Look, wee man,’ she replied, still laughing, ‘Ah’m the wan doin’ the decent thing here. Ah’m havin’ Auld Con done as a Catholic, but Ah don’t havtae, ye know. Ah could just as easy get him done withoot a’ the mumbo jumbo. Ah could just stand up at the crematorium, announce “Game over” an’ press the button.’

  Father McCabe glowered silently at her. He was a portly little man with wild, bushy white hair that seemed to be only just contained by the pom-pommed biretta he wore at all times. One of his habits, when he was thinking, was to hold the biretta aloft with his thumb, and scratch his head with the fingers of the same hand, revealing the shiny, pink dome of his bald head underneath. It always came as a shock, because the vigorous white growth that was visible ear-to-ear gave the illusion of a full and luxuriant head of hair. The whites of his watery blue eyes had a glistening hint of yellow, the result, she had always suspected, of giving the communion wine a fair whacking when no one was about, and they were completely surrounded by heavy folds of skin, so that from a distance he seemed to be wearing thick-framed, legless spectacles. He was never without a cigarette, held downwards between the thumb and first finger of his right hand, with the lit point towards the palm, as though he was trying to hide it. It was, she thought for some reason, the way gangsters she’d seen in films held their cigarettes. In moments of deep conversation, when regular drags at the cigarette weren’t possible, he would reluctantly nip it out and place it behind his right ear, half-hidden in the white hair, and over the years a little reddish patch had grown, coloured by the smoke and the nicotine. As far as she could tell his appearance hadn’t altered in all the years she had known him. He hadn’t so much aged as gradually faded somehow, but you’d still know it was him, even if you hadn’t seen him for years. Whatever modernising ploys had been tried by the spin doctors in Rome, he had remained untouched; he still wore his long black robe and biretta and on his feet a pair of beige boot slippers, with zips up the front. She had never known him to wear shoes, and no matter when she saw him the slippers seemed to be exactly the same as the last time, with no more or less apparent wear, even if, like now, decades had passed. If she were any judge he still muttered the mass in Latin under his breath too, like in the good old days.

  ‘The least you could do was to let him be buried in St Kentigern’s with the rest of his family, with his mother and sisters, with his wife,’ he said, establishing his credentials as an intimate of her family, and emphasising the last word, in an attempt to bodyswerve her question by provoking an argument on something else. An old ploy, that one.

  St Kentigern’s; she hadn’t been there since the day before she had escaped. The memories flooded her mind and she shook her head to banish them, turning her attention back to Father McCabe. ‘Aye, well,’ she smiled at his disapproval, ‘if anybody knows aboot ma family, wee man, it’s you, Ah’ll gie ye that. Ma Granny always said ye were a great help tae her when she was married tae the Orangeman. Accordin’ tae Aggie, whit she woulda done withoot your support a’ they years didnae bear thinkin’ aboot. She said it often.’

  ‘Easy, Kathy,’ she chided herself silently. ‘The time will come!’

  Frank McCabe looked at her. ‘Your grandmother was a fine woman,’ he stated. ‘She was loyal to her faith and kept it alive even after she made her mistake and, when she could be, she was reconciled with the Church.’

  ‘Ye mean when the Orangeman died? That’s ma Granda, ye know, an’ that’s a helluva nice way tae put it, “her mistake”.‘ she shot back at him, feigning hurt. ‘But then, him bein’ a heathen, no’ bein’ really human, like, he wouldnae matter that much, would he? Ah don’t know why ye didnae just set the dogs oan him. But Ah’m sure yer God blessed yer Christian charity in waitin’ tae he died a’ by hissel’, a few plenary indulgences marked up there, surely!’ She’d never met her grandfather, known to one and all as ‘the Orangeman’, as though even mentioning his name would incur the wrath of Rome, he’d died long before she was born. For all she knew he could’ve been a monster, and neither had she any time for his kind of bigotry, but it always annoyed the good Father to hear her defend him, so she did.

  Frank McCabe didn’t answer her, but instead continued with his usual lecture. ‘You, on the other hand, never had to fight for your faith, you had it handed to you on a plate, and you turned your back on it!’ he accused, stabbing a stubby, nicotine-stained finger in her direction. He hated having his authority either challenged or demystified, even after all the years she had been doing it to him.

  ‘Put that finger doon or Ah’ll bite it aff at the knuckle!’ she replied tartly, smiling to herself at the priest’s angry expression. ‘Dae ye no’ get bored sayin’ the same things ower and ower? Ah mean, Ah don’t think either wanna us will ever convince the other. Surely you don’t, dae ye? The difference is that Ah don’t really care a mad monkey’s fart aboot convertin’ you, so that’s you lost the argument before it’s even started, because you dae care, daen’t ye?’

  Father McCabe made no reply.

  ‘Checkmate!’ she thought gleefully. ‘But as for buryin’ the auld sod beside wee Lily, you’re not on. Ah think my mother deserves no’ tae have him lyin’ beside her,’ she said quietly. Then she raised her voice again. ‘Besides, for a’ you know,’ she said merrily, ‘it might be time for another miracle. Y’know, wi’ the trouble ye’re havin’
these days tryin’ tae force folk intae yer wee club, an’ tryin’ tae keep them there even if they’ve been born intae it. At this very minute some big daft angel might be scoutin’ aboot, tryin’ tae find some way o’ reversin’ the trend, so tae speak, an’ he could see Con lyin’ there, an’ decide he’s the very man tae restore the numbers of yesteryear! He might decide Con’s unfortunate demise is the very dab, an’ afore ye know it he’ll have Con risin’ frae the grave! This dump could become the next Lourdes, wi’ bus loads o’ people comin’ tae see the place where Lazarus Kelly jumped tae his feet! Noo, dae you think that’s a chance Ah’d be prepared tae take?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Naw, naw, there’ll be nae burial for Con. Ah’ve never been sure about angels, so it’s the burny fire at the Linn Crematorium for him, just in case!’