I was 12 years old but still I knew I knew something more than the old ones when Father Coyne made me scour the pews, to strafe for wayward souls after Midnight Mass, Christmas Eve, in 1983. Father McKeown had absconded, and Father Eckersley was too long in the bathroom, so Canon Coyne handed me his vestments with pink, shaky fingers as he urged me on to lock up.
There was a massive Byzantine mosaic mural behind the altar that glistered even in the dark. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Dead, judging eyes staring down on us, on me. All knowing. It was awesome in a bad way. Like they were waiting to be reanimated. I had seen some “Sinbad” films, and “Jason and the Argonauts.” I had fretful dreams of being squished between giants’ digits.
The whole place still smelled of incense. It made me want to genuflect, but that was the point, I guess. They wanted us to bow and scrape whilst they sipped and scarfed the coffers. Of course, I think this now. Back then I was as petrified as the marble altar and always in some kind of reverie brought on by all the gold, frankincense and stunning internal murmurs of that nonexistent god frightening the bejeesus out of my every slumbering moment. Did I believe in any of this nonsense? It was all real though. I was here. If other people believed there must be something.
Then I heard the cough.
“Hello?” I spoke.
“Hello.”
That’s not true. There was no answer. There was no echo in the chancel. There was just a man asleep on the bench. A man I had seen before. A man I had mentioned before somewhere.
This man had big ears, a big nose and was wearing tweeds. I had a rush of panic. It was Himself!
I had a knowing, and then weirdly, a sadness. Or a sad weirdness. I knew who he was. It was Himself! But I didn’t know him. I had seen him before, a lot. I wasn’t me then though, I was older. I was with him and he was with my dad. My dad came back for a minute because he had seen Himself too, he said, everywhere he had ever lived, this other man had popped up, appeared before us. In Wolverhampton and Balham and Kearsley and even back home in Bandon. I would only ever talk about Himself to my dad. But that was then. And dad is not now or never will be again.
All this came like a rush into my 12-year-old being as the big-eared, tweed-wearing enigma raised himself from his slab stone pillow and grinned at me. He saw right into me. He knew everything about my past, present and future, I understood. He drooled through his toothless grin and slowly raised a pointed finger in my direction, but he did not speak.
I ran from that place, two blocks home, cassock billowing behind me in the wind and I never went back.
The author writes as Phil O’Sofa at anthonycmurphy.substack.com.
