Don't tell me Mick was devoted to the Mass, Cathleen thought
as Father Jerry climbed the steps to the pulpit. That's what
they said about my friend Angie when everyone knew the only
thing she was devoted to was sticking pictures of Grace Kelly
on her bedroom wall. Don't say he loved the Eucharist. Mick
Brogan loved a bet and a pint and me.
She bowed her head as the sermon began.
'Mick and I played together as children and his house was like
another home to me.' Cathleen heard her mother in law's sudden
intake of breath. 'And when I see all your faces, I know that
this matters.' The priest spoke quietly, holding out his hands
in a gesture that took in the whole congregation. Cathleen looked
up.
'Being here matters.' Father Jerry's voice was stronger, his
words carrying clearly to the upper balconies and the back of
the church. 'Because Mick Brogan mattered.'
He held the pause for a couple of heartbeats.
'The world goes on outside,' Father Jerry continued. 'There's
trains still running, men working, women cooking. Ordinary life
goes on but in here, in this church, right now, it stops. Not
for long, but long enough to say goodbye.'
Cathleen felt the priest's clear grey eyes on her and couldn't
look away.
'I know that no words can comfort his young wife or his mother
who has travelled all the way from south west Ireland to be
here. But Mick is home now, not home to Farran - the village
where he grew up - or to the home he made for himself in London.
But to the home we're all going to where we'll find one another
again.' The priest looked around the church and then back at
Cathleen. 'We're on the same journey and Mick has gone on ahead.'
'Didn't I tell you he has a terrible way with words?' Grandma
Brogan whispered. The old woman was crying. Cathleen put a hand
to her own face and was surprised to find that it was wet.
On
love
Later
he studied her sleeping face, half buried in the pillow, and
very gently held up a section of her hair, allowing the light
to shine through it. He let it fall through his fingers as he
looked at her, and thought that he would lie like that all night,
but at some point he must have drifted off to sleep because
he woke with a start while it was still dark.
For a moment he didn’t recognise where he was, although he knew
instantly all the places it couldn’t be: not the gloom of the
Diocesan House or his book lined room in Verona, nor the white
washed walls of the seminary dormitory or the lonely bedroom
of his solitary childhood. No, he was drifting in a ruby night,
silent except for the occasional late night bus on the street
below and the cadence of Cathleen’s breathing.
So, this is what it’s like, he thought, sharing space and skin
and air. I never knew.
He touched her arm and she moved, wrapping herself around him.
I’ve come home, he thought. I’m home.
On Ireland
…they soon left
the world of roads and street lights behind for the countryside where high black hedgerows,
silhouetted against a black sky, rose up on either side of the car.
Cathleen breathed in the smell of grass and the sweet smoke of a turf fire that was warming a home somewhere
in the dark.
This is Ireland, she thought. Not her Ireland, not dirty, garrulous Dublin that seemed to have been made up
of broken pavements, rent books with pages missing and pub tables that needed a good wipe.
This Ireland was another place, the place the songs were sung about.
It was Mick’s Ireland and Jerry’s, and the Ireland she wanted her daughters to have. It was the Ireland
that they were about to lose.
