Week One

Monday

If John O’Driscoll had been asked whether there was any way in which a week that had begun with him vomiting into a nun’s handbag could finish on an even more disastrous note, he would have laughed the idea off as ludicrous. He would, however, have been wrong, and the fact that his failure to predict the future would come as less of a surprise to those who knew him than it did to him said much for the esteem in which O’Driscoll’s abilities were generally held. For John O’Driscoll was often wrong: in fact, there were those who said that he had made it his life’s work to be wrong about pretty much everything.

To begin at the beginning though, the accident involving Sister Bernadette’s bag and his own bodily fluids happened at the end of an evening that had begun with Duffy’s suggestion of a “quiet pint,” and on that basis alone, O’Driscoll should have known it would end in tears. “Come on, just a quickie,” Duffy had insisted, deaf to his friend’s plea that he had already agreed to spend the evening helping organize a social evening for the old people of the parish. Against all better judgment, O’Driscoll had agreed and in no time the two young men were established comfortably in the back bar of The North Star on Ealing Broadway with several hours of a warm Spring evening at their disposal. When O’Driscoll looked up and saw his friend returning from the bar holding tumblers of whiskey, a series of tiny alarm bells began to ring in his head and had he heeded their warning chimes, the evening might have turned out very differently. But in the conviviality of the moment, the protest he made was but a token one and his doom was sealed.

“Jesus Christ, are you trying to ruin me altogether?” he said when he saw the glasses arriving.

“Yes,” replied Duffy simply. “Anyway, you might thank me for it tomorrow if it finally helps you pluck up the courage to speak to Karen Black. Tell you what, I’ll come with you and help you set up, and I’ll have a little chat with her for you.”

“No you bloody well won’t,” said O’Driscoll, for even though beguiling images of Miss Black filled his every waking moment, the thought of a drink-inflamed Duffy being let loose anywhere near her was a prospect too awful to contemplate.

And so it was that several whiskeys and several chasers later, the two arrived at the church hall of Saint Catherine’s in time to help make preparations for the dance, which was due to start at nine o’clock. An evening spent with a roomful of amorous octogenarians was not the entertainment that O’Driscoll would normally have sought out on a Monday night but, not for the first time, he had failed to take evasive action when the call for volunteers had gone out. There was also the little matter of his teaching contract being up for renewal and he was hopeful that an unassuming yet poised performance at tonight’s event would stand him in good stead when the school’s governing body met in a few weeks’ time to decide the following year’s staffing.

At the gates to the church, O’Driscoll stopped to take stock of the situation and consider the range of strategies that he had devised, over the course of his twenty-nine years, to foster the illusion of sobriety. That these devices rarely extended beyond the expedient of putting a half pack of mints sideways into his mouth, and that, although he himself fondly imagined them to be worldly and subtle, they invariably fooled no one was neither here nor there, for the sense of being master of one’s own destiny implicit in such acts helped O’Driscoll feel sober and that was the important thing. Now he straightened his tie, cleared his throat, burped softly and then spluttered as an unexpected jet of carbonated air raced through his nostrils. He felt in his pocket for a packet of Extra Strong Mints, broke it in two and offered one half to his friend, secure in the knowledge that through this cunning act of deception, their drunkenness would shortly be enveloped in a menthol infused cloak of invisibility.

At the bottom of the steps that led into the dank and forbidding church grounds, there was a small stream and they crossed it with the feeling of unease that ancient travelers might have experienced passing over the River Styx. Nodding a greeting to the ancient Irishman with the Pioneer badge who guarded the entrance like a gnarled and toothless Cerberus, they passed into the warmth of the church hall attached to the school where they both taught. As they did so a familiar aroma, sweet and redolent of hops, wafted across from the far corner of the room.

“Bloody hell, they’ve got a bar!” exclaimed Duffy and it was the existence of this makeshift arrangement in the corner that was to prove O’Driscoll’s undoing two hours and twenty minutes later. As they processed this new information, O’Driscoll suddenly caught sight of Karen Black heading towards the cloakroom and his stomach gave a familiar lurch. Miss Black, as she was known by her Year Four pupils, had joined the school at the start of the year and had immediately mesmerized O’Driscoll to the point where, in her presence, his brain refused to function beyond sending primitive signals to his eyes, imploring them not to stare longingly at her legs, breasts or parts in-between.

By each picking up a stack of chairs and carrying them across the room, O’Driscoll and Duffy contrived to arrive at the makeshift bar seemingly by chance.

“As we’re here, we’ll have a couple of whatever you’ve got,” announced Duffy to a large shape that could be dimly apprehended searching the shelves under the bar.

“Ye will, will ye!” came a well-known growl as the figure unwound and revealed itself to be none other than Father Kennedy, parish priest, school governor, and a man whose sudden terrifying appearance was in danger of reducing O’Driscoll’s bowels, already made watery by the presence of Miss Black, to a state of even greater liquidity. The priest had, over the years, established a fearsome reputation among the Catholic population of West London. He ruled his parish using a system of terror that Robespierre or Stalin would have envied, and on dark nights the mere invocation of his name was said to reduce misbehaving children to quivering acquiescence and send small animals scurrying for cover. And if he was “old school,” as some said, it was only in the sense of having crawled from the primordial slime of some ancient Borstal, carrying with him the value system of that sinister Dark Age.

Kennedy looked at them menacingly from under thick, bushy eyebrows, his great craggy face topped by an unruly white thatch. From flaring nostrils protruded great clumps of nasal hair whose oscillations O’Driscoll watched transfixed, for the movement of these tendrils was said to be an infallible barometer of the priest’s state of mind, and it was common knowledge that when he was angry, they danced wildly.

“Good evening, Father,” said Duffy, for with O’Driscoll examining his spiritual leader’s nose with the intentness of a medieval scholar reading a set of bulbous and hairy runes, it was clear the responsibility for opening verbal proceedings lay with him. “Lovely evening,” he went on with the insouciance which had, over the years, wreaked havoc among the fairer sex of West London. “We’ve come to help you prepare for the social evening. Such good work you and your team do - made us feel guilty so we’ve rearranged our squash match and here we are. Pretty parched though, after our training run, so we thought we’d grab a quick drink of something before getting to work.” As usual, Duffy’s charm had a disarming effect and within a couple of minutes, the two found themselves in the possession of cans of lager handed across by a Father Kennedy who, apart from giving vent to a muttered “Gypsies!”, remained silent.

Not for the first time, O’Driscoll contrasted Duffy’s easy charm with his own tongue-tied awkwardness, especially when dealing with the turbulent priest who was Chair of Governors at the school where both young men worked. His mind drifted back a few months to the church fete of Christmas 1994 and the faux pas which had blighted his first term and from which he was still trying to recover. In an effort to ingratiate himself with the powers that be, the newly-appointed teacher had volunteered to have a large poster printed which could be pasted onto the church noticeboard ahead of the event. Hoping to demonstrate appropriate levels of Catholic piety, but having typically left himself too little time to do the job properly, O’Driscoll had frantically searched the pages of Hymns Ancient and Modern for a suitable inscription. Hastily scanning the titles – Here I Am, Lord, Here at Your Table, Lord, Here I Am to Worship, How Great Is Our God, he had eventually chosen the shortest title, scribbled the artwork himself, rushed it off the printer and pasted up the returned poster with but minutes to spare before the opening ceremony.

And so it was that Father Kennedy had stood in the grounds of St Catherine’s before the great and good of West Ealing, directly in front of a large white poster emblazoned with the legend:

“HERE I AM, LARD.”

As the priest began to speak, few had noticed the words or connected them with him, indeed the outline of his great paunch actually cast a section of the notice board into shadow, although unfortunately for O’Driscoll, not the part that contained the inscription. But before long, a frisson of laughter had started to ripple across the crowd and when Kennedy had turned and read the words his face had assumed an apoplectic hue and he had hurried through the remaining words of his welcome before storming off into the presbytery, flanked on either side by a small scurrying nun.

While this was going on, O’Driscoll had been happily engaged in a daydream involving the rescue of Karen Black from a madman with a machete who had entered the church grounds and was terrorizing stallholders and visitors alike. In the fantasy, he had drawn the lunatic away from the crowd by striding into his field of vision and announcing firmly, “I’m the one you want!” The madman’s eyes had fixed on him hungrily, allowing O’Driscoll to coax him into a quiet area of the playground and wrestle him to the floor and disarm him. He had achieved the whole thing with no damage to himself other than a small but satisfyingly bloody cut on his arm, and Karen had been approaching him with moist eyes and a trembling lip, offering to use her blouse to staunch the flow.

His unhurried contemplation of this rather fetching image had been abruptly terminated by the arrival of Mrs. Goodwin, admin officer from the school office. “You’re the new chap who did the poster, aren’t you?” she announced breathlessly, her nose twitching with excitement. “Oh, dear, I’m afraid you’ve put the cat well and truly among the pigeons. Didn’t you have the proof checked before you sent it to the printers? No? Really! Oh, dear, that was a mistake!” Shaking her head she continued, “I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes when Father Kennedy finds out it was you. In all the years I’ve worked at St. Catherine’s, I’ve never seen him so angry.” She had patted O’Driscoll’s arm consolingly, allowed her nose one final excited quiver and then followed it away with the set air of one who has bad news to impart and is weighing up how best it can be shared with as wide a circle as possible.

As the full horror of the catastrophe had dawned on O’Driscoll, his first instinct had been to throw himself on the priest’s mercy - surely Kennedy would respond favourably to an apology, frank and manly in tone, which accepted responsibility for what was an honest mistake but also hinted at a superhuman work ethic that thought nothing of working long into the night to help the parish. It was even possible, if one allowed one’s flight of fancy to soar to the giddiest heights, to envisage Kennedy, who was after all, only human, seeing the funny side of it.

O’Driscoll tried to summon a picture of a smiling priest chuckling and shaking his head as he said, “Ach, it was only one letter, I suppose, my son,” but it was no use. The O’Driscoll imagination was a hardy organ and routinely processed data that lesser imaginations might have baulked at, but even it had its limits and the power surge that was generated as it tried to create an image of Father Kennedy chuckling, caused it to overload and crash with the loss of all functions.

Nevertheless determined to face the music, O’Driscoll approached the presbytery door and raised his fist to knock. Drifting through the oak of the door, he could hear disjointed words and phrases, faint in tone but unmistakably the issue of Father Kennedy.

“Did ye read that sign? ... What fecking gypsy...?”

There was a pause in which could be heard a soothing murmur, female and obviously issuing from one of the nuns, before the Kennedy bellow rose once more to a muffled crescendo.

“O’Driscoll!”... laughing stock! ... useless fecking tinker! ...”

O’Driscoll’s hand had dropped from the door and he had hurried from the premises, pausing only to revisit the scene of his crime and make a frantic but unsuccessful attempt to unglue the notice.

Dragging his thoughts back to the present and the ongoing church social, O’Driscoll focused his now bleary eyes on the bustle around him. A succession of old people was passing before him and the air held that elusive whiff - part talcum powder, part urine - that he always associated with large assemblies of the elderly. His stomach gave another lurch as he caught a glimpse of Karen bending over a wheelchair, her shapely bottom outlined pertly against the cloth of a pair of black cotton shorts and in desperation, he grabbed another lager from the bar - anything to ward off the erection that previous experience had taught him would inevitably follow. He downed three-quarters of the beer in one go and scanned the room in search of an activity that would keep his mind occupied with pure and chaste thoughts.

His gaze fell on Sister Bernadette, the austere figure who was Mother Superior of the convent attached to St Catherine’s and Deputy Head of the school. Tall and forbidding, she dressed in the same uniform of grey woolen robes whatever the weather or season, while on her head she wore a wimple whose formidable dimensions set her apart from the rank and file of the Order in the way an officer’s pips distinguishes him from the enlisted men. Thus attired, she moved around the school smoothly and with no visible evidence of propulsion, and her upright figure was a familiar sight as it sailed along the corridors. She was no less active at night when her wraith-like form could be observed gliding silently around the convent, its silhouette casting sinister shadows among the cloisters. The unusual headgear and her distinctive carriage, together with a faint but discernible wheeze resulting from childhood exposure to bronchitis, had been noted among the student body and had earned Sister Bernadette the soubriquet “Darth Vader”.

“Anything I can do, Sister?” asked O’Driscoll, again catching a delicious glimpse of Karen in his peripheral vision as he approached.

“Yes, thank you John. You could dance with Mrs O’Higgins,” said the nun, and before he knew it, O’Driscoll was being whirled around the room in the arms of stout, moon-faced widow from Kerry. The evening passed in a blur as dance followed dance and O’Driscoll found himself passed among a succession of elderly matrons as they performed increasingly more complex variations on a dance to which he had been exposed as a child among the Irish clubs that dotted West London. It involved vast numbers of people taking up stations in a kind of giant grid on the dancefloor with others being whirled from one point to the other in a complex but indecipherable series of manoeuvres. By the time he had passed through twenty minutes of this, his head and stomach were whirling and it was only the application of three more lagers from the makeshift bar that restored his equanimity. The rest of the evening became a blurry confusion involving light and movement, and the syncopated rustle of dozens of pairs of plastic drawers as the geriatric crowd buzzed around the floor in a giant incontinent swarm.

The final unraveling of the evening came when, as they began to clear up, Duffy found a half- bottle of Bells behind the makeshift bar. He quickly poured two huge measures into plastic cups and with a “Get this down your neck, son” to his friend, he made as good as his word. O’Driscoll heaved his drink back in one go and within seconds, he knew he had made a terrible mistake. He remembered watching a film where a deranged scientist had dropped a single tincture of one liquid into a huge vat of a totally incompatible one and now as the whiskey lay sourly on top of the bubbling pool of lager, his stomach began to seethe and churn and a deadly chain reaction began.

O’Driscoll swallowed several times and took a series of deep breaths as he fought to exert his authority over the vomit that was seething upwards, but it quickly became clear that the vomit had its own ideas about which one of them was in charge. Looking desperately around him, he sought a route that would extricate him from the impending disaster. The room was half-empty and staff and helpers were engaged in stacking chairs and clearing tables. Blundering towards a door, his route carried him close by the delectable Karen and as he crossed her path, she smiled at him. In normal circumstances that smile would have made all the travails of the day worthwhile but O’Driscoll knew that she could not be allowed to witness what was about to unfold. She would not be smiling for long if he puked on her. The facial contortion he bestowed on her as he passed, although intended as a smile, caused her to jump hastily back.

Just as he got to the door, he heard a voice in his ear. “Ah, John, I was looking for you.” It was Mister Li, the elderly Science master. “You have booked the overhead projector for tomorrow morning. Will you be using it?” Shaking his head wildly, O’Driscoll passed through the door into a short corridor. He made a conscious effort to take long, slow breaths to calm the volcanic mass that was bubbling in his stomach, but all his past experience told him he was fighting a losing battle as the sour, heaving soup began to rise through his esophagus. He had literally seconds to spare when he saw the large canvas hold all resting against the wall. It was filled with exercise books and papers and it was recognizably the property of Sister Bernadette.

O’Driscoll looked wildly around, his hand in front of his mouth as his body convulsed, but apart from Sister Bernadette’s hold all, the corridor was bare, so he took one step, bent over and directed a stream of vomit neatly into the bag. Without breaking step, he reached for the door that led into the courtyard and propelled himself in one movement in the direction of the shrubbery. His momentum carried him into the cover of the bushes where he evacuated the remainder of his stomach, unseen.

Inevitably, he bumped into Duffy ten minutes later as he was attempting to creep away from the scene of his crime. Duffy as always contrived to maintain an air of grace and ease no matter how much alcohol he had consumed. He greeted his friend with practiced bonhomie and before he knew it, O’Driscoll was having the first of a series of “steadiers” suggested by Duffy as the perfect antidote to the earlier accident. The remainder of the night became an incoherent procession through a succession of bars and clubs until he finally staggered back to his small flat in Southall at three o’clock in the morning.

Tuesday

It was not birdsong or the rays of the sun that woke John O’Driscoll the next morning but a chorus of hawking and spitting as the cash and carry that lay below his flat on Southall Broadway opened for business. As he lay in that delicious vacuum that precedes the return of memory, his mind began to untangle the events of the previous evening and drifting at random and in no particular order into his consciousness came a kaleidoscope of images; Karen Black’s delectable bottom... Father Kennedy’s undelectable nostril hair... the mole on Mrs. O’Higgins’s chin... Sister Bernadette’s bag. With a start, O’Driscoll sat bolt upright as the image of Sister Bernadette’s hold all filled to the brim with his vomit appeared in his mind’s eye and as the details of the preceding evening slowly returned to him and incrementally increased his sense of unease, his hand made an unconscious southward journey and began to scratch his scrotum in search of solace.

He was hopeful that he had been unobserved as he evacuated the contents of his stomach, but in the state he had been in, it was hard to be sure. Casting his net wider for evidence of further crimes, he didn’t think his insobriety had been so obvious as to make him stand out in the crowd and he was fairly sure he hadn’t made inappropriate comments to any of the matrons of the parish. He had kept so far out of Father Kennedy’s way that it was unlikely that he had blotted his copy book further there, and most important of all he was certain that his interactions with Karen Black had been so fleeting that he could not have said or done anything to blacken his reputation.

As he scratched around in his scrotal area, his face contorted itself into a succession of strange shapes and a whoosh of air rushed silently from his mouth. He was aware that a range of disturbing mannerisms had begun to manifest themselves when he was in a state of anxiety and although he believed he had the grimaces under control, he could not say the same for the sudden exhalations of breath that escaped from him, sometimes in a silent whoosh but more often in an audible form that can best be rendered into print as “OOST!”

The whole situation was causing O’Driscoll some disquiet for he was not a stupid man and was aware that ejaculating the word “OOST!” at random moments was not a practice calculated to impress the school leadership or improve his prospects of gaining that vital contract extension. And it was unlikely to reduce Karen Black to the sort of quivering pliancy that she occupied in his wilder imaginings. But O’Driscoll was uncomfortably aware that since the last interview he had had with the school leadership on the subject of his future, the noises had begun to appear with greater frequency and, more worryingly, they seemed to be increasingly audible to those around him.

Only the day before, a lady on the 207 bus had received a shock when the otherwise innocuous-looking young man sitting beside her had enunciated suddenly and with great clarity the word “OOST!” Aware of the unease that he was causing among his fellow passengers, O’Driscoll’s anxiety levels had begun to rise and he was about to give voice to another “OOST!” when, realizing the vicious circle he was in danger of entering into, he desisted abruptly. A moment later, he coughed loudly and extravagantly, hoping to cloud at least one of the “OOSTs” in uncertainty, but the damage was done and the lady next to him spent the rest of the journey sitting as close to the corner of her seat as she could without actually falling off it.

He dragged himself wearily back into the here and now and a scant hour later found himself hemmed in a corner of the staff room, listening to morning briefing with a hand over his mouth, desperately trying to divert his beery breath downwards and away from his colleagues.

“A big thank you to everyone who helped with the dance last night,” said Mr. Barnet, the Head. “Just a note to be careful if you are taking the children across to the church hall. Sister Bernadette thinks there might be a vomiting bug going around among the old people...” at this point he heard a violent exhalation of air from somewhere to his right “...so if any pupils start developing symptoms, get them straight home. Now, moving on to the Year Six mass next Sunday - Miss Gillespie, could you continue to work with the choir; Mr. Li, would you mind doing the programme; John, can you arrange to get the hymn books re-covered, they’re looking tattered? Oh, and Karen could you do the flowers again?” O’Driscoll considered this directive as he made his way to his classroom to teach Geography to 5R. He was surprised that, after the fiasco with the poster, he had been considered for a task that involved printing but, on reflection, it wasn’t too bad a job, and would involve him in the minimum of fuss on the day of the Year Six mass, one of the major events of the Spring term.

Later in the staffroom, sipping tea that had come from the communal pot and that was so strong and dark it left rows of little tidemarks on the china of the cup, he listened idly to the gossip that was going on around him. Mrs. Goodwin, the woman who had gleefully informed O’Driscoll of his faux pas with the poster, was holding court and the topic being debated, a recent court case where a homosexual couple had been refused accommodation by the owner of a bed and breakfast, was one that she considered herself well-qualified to discuss on the basis of she and her husband having run such an establishment a generation ago.

“Now don’t get me wrong, we’re very tolerant, me and my Reg,” she was saying. “Very tolerant, and at the end of the day, there’s a lot worse going on in the world, isn’t there? We always knew the ones of that persuasion who came to stay at The Willows, although of course they were a lot less flagrant about it than they are these days. I like that, I mean I can have a perfectly nice conversation with someone without having to think about what he’s got and where he’s going to stick it as soon as I’ve left the room. Take that nice quantity surveyor from Greenwich, he was at it hammer and tongs with whichever young man he’d brought with him, but you’d never have known it to talk to him.”

There was a palpable air of unease in the room. “Who’s doing assembly this week?” asked someone, trying to change the subject, but Mrs. Goodwin was not to be deterred. “Yes, we would have been happy to have that sort at The Willows all the time. Very quiet and well-behaved they were as a rule, no drunkenness to speak of and, according to Reg, surprisingly clean. He said it was like a Turkish bath in some of their rooms the way they were always showering and titivating themselves.” She paused to take a drink and her face took on a thoughtful expression. “Reg said they washed themselves to absolutely abnormal levels, it was as if ... you know ... they were trying to scrub off more than the dirt. He said there was probably some psychiatric reason behind it all, there usually is, isn’t there? No, the only thing Reg said you’d have had to look out for was their bedlinen, you’d have had to keep that separate and wash it under a hotter cycle, because of the different stains.”

The silence which greeted these words was finally broken by a timorous voice saying, “Different stains?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Goodwin “Reg says it stands to reason there’d be different stains with the kind of things ...”

“Who’s for a game of darts!” came a cry from the Science teacher and there was a sudden movement of bodies away from the soft chairs.

“Yes, Reg says you can tell a lot about people from their bedding,” went on Mrs. Goodwin, sipping her drink reflectively as she surveyed her much-diminished audience. “He reckons if there was a T.V. programme - you know like that Through the Keyhole - only you had to guess who the famous person was from their soiled bedlinen, he’d make a fortune.” She paused to take another sip from her coffee and gently nibbled the corner of a custard cream. “You know what my Reg says?” she continued, fixing a birdlike eye on the teenage work experience girl who was sitting, transfixed, opposite her. ‘A fitted sheet tells no lies!’ that’s what he says.”

Later, passing the Cozy Kleen Launderette, O’Driscoll recalled Reg’s syllogism and wondered whether the leadership of the church had thought of incorporating it into Catholic dogma. Perhaps some conclave of portly Italian theologians might even now be applying it retrospectively to the Shroud of Turin. His train of thought was, fortunately, terminated by his arrival at The North Star, where he had arranged to meet Duffy and Micky Quinn for a pint and by the time he joined them, the other two were already seated, Duffy’s neat, well-groomed appearance a contrast to the lumpy dishevelment of Quinn.

To say that Michael Aloysius Quinn left a lasting impression on those meeting him for the first time would be to make something of an understatement. It was as if an ancient Gaelic warrior had been forced out of his animal skins and into a suit of modern clothes and then been hurled unceremoniously and with no respect for his dignity or his enormous girth into the 1990s. A belligerent freckled face sat atop the incongruously-suited body and above rested a dense carpet of matted red hair which had over the years resisted all attempts at cultivation and from which, or so his friends claimed, movements of a suspicious nature sometimes emanated. Below, Quinn’s great paunch fought a running battle with his waistband while the habit he had of hitching his trousers up when deep in thought meant that wedges of stray shirt were forever struggling to escape the confines of his belt.

The three had known each other since childhood, having attended one of those London Catholic schools where red hair and freckles were the norm rather than the exception and where morning registration plodded through the alphabet in a desultory fashion until with the arrival of the letter “O” it suddenly swept into a gallop of O’Boyles, O’Carrolls, O’Connors, and O’Donnells. Each class contained a makeweight quantity of English children and there would be the odd Pole, and an exotic smattering of De Souza’s and Fernandez’s whose precise lineage was unclear, but the bulk of the population was comprised of children of Irish descent.

Although these hybrid creatures adopted the glottal tones of London and used the present perfect tense when speaking of their fights and their trips to watch Arsenal and Chelsea, they knew they were different, a breed apart, and many of them began to identify with the country of their ancestors, especially as they grew older and more aware of the troubled history between the two nations. That they were not Anglo-Saxon they knew, but on visits to the mother country, the reaction to their accents, ranging from “Plastic Paddy” at the friendlier end of the spectrum, to “English Wanker” at the other, left them in no doubt that they were not truly Irish either.

Over the first pint, Duffy and O’Driscoll filled Micky in on the events of the previous evening. “Jesus,” said Quinn when he heard about the surprise package that had ended up in Sister Bernadette’s bag. “I wonder if she noticed when she picked it up or did she end up carrying it all the way back to the convent?”

“Surely she’d have noticed,” said Duffy. “I mean, it would’ve been lapping over the sides.”

“On the other hand it might’ve dried,” mused Micky, “which would’ve made things a bit more complicated when the poor woman got home and got the books out to mark them. They’d have looked like they were written in Braille.”

“Anyway, enough of all that,” said Duffy, dismissing Sister Bernadette and her troubles from his mind. “What was that big dance the old biddies were doing last night?”

“It sounds like one of those celidh things,” answered Quinn, who had spent his childhood among the clubs of Kilburn and Cricklewood. “I heard my old dear talking about it, there’s like this great big square with hundreds of old grannies moving around like ants. I can’t remember what it’s called, The Siege of something.” As he spoke, his brow furrowed in thought and his hand worked away at some disarrangement inside his trousers, causing his left knee to gyrate alarmingly. A moment later, his face cleared and he banged the table, causing beer to slop from the glasses. “Venice! That’s it. The Siege of Venice.”

“Where?” asked Duffy.

“Venice.”

“Venice? It’s not The Siege of Venice you eejit, it’s Ennis.”

“Ennis?”

“Yes, Ennis. It’s in County Clare!”

“Are you sure? I’d swear it was Venice.”

“You ignorant great tub of lard” said Duffy. “What on earth would the old biddies who do that dance have to do with Venice?” He went into a shrill falsetto. “Morning, Mrs. Maguire, I’m just off down into Venice to buy a bag of potatoes, there’s a grand little Spar in the Piazza San Marco. Jesus Christ,” he went on, reverting to his normal voice, “I’m surrounded by idiots.”

Micky hitched up his trousers defensively. “I was sure it was Venice.”

“It’s Ennis,” said Duffy, who was now warming to his theme. “I spent a fortnight there every summer when I was a kid. What a place!”

Quinn shrugged. “Anyway, Ennis, Venice, what’s the difference?”

“I’ll tell you what the difference is,” said Duffy, whose holiday experience clearly still rankled. “Most of Venice is underwater and most of Ennis bloody well should be!”

His friends exchanged glances and Quinn replied, “Thank you, Judith Chalmers. I’m surprised the Irish Tourist Board hasn’t snapped you up. You’re a walking advertisement for the old country. Anyway, apart from the Siege of... wherever it was, did anything else happen last night?”

“Well, I’m afraid our friend here missed another opportunity,” said Duffy. “Instead of laying siege to Karen Black, he spent the whole night swooning in the arms of Mrs. O’Higgins.”

“Jesus Christ, O’Driscoll, are you a man or a mouse?” asked Quinn. “It’s obvious you fancy the arse off her so when are you going to get your act together and ask her out?”

In truth, O’Driscoll’s infatuation was so debilitating that in Karen’s presence, he became speechless. He was aware that to most people she was no more than conventionally pretty, but to him the sum of her parts was overwhelming. She was small and graceful and dark and dimpled, her eyes were huge, her lips cherubic, her voice low and pleasant. She appeared to be without conceit of any kind, she listened with interest to whoever was talking, even Mrs. Goodwin, and when she smiled she revealed a set of perfect teeth. O’Driscoll loved her to distraction but was aware that the strength of his feelings was an impediment to developing things further. If he literally couldn’t speak when she was in the same room, engaging in the kind of witty, sexy banter likely to make her notice him wasn’t really an option, and it was only in his daydreams that he was able to function with the charm and style that was so lacking in his real-life interactions.

“If you don’t get a shift on, John, she’s going to fall for me,” said Duffy. “A girl can only fight so hard.”

O’Driscoll ruefully conceded the truth in this for Duffy accomplished his conquests with the kind of grace and charm that he could only dream about. He had few illusions, therefore, that in the normal course of events, Karen would sooner or later fall prey to Duffy’s charms and although the prospect was terrifying, he could see no way of avoiding it unless some kind of miracle occurred. His only hope lay in meeting Karen in a social situation where his alcohol intake had reached the stage of easy uninhibited wit, but not the point where it had begun the descent into incoherence, but as piss artists the world over know well, this is a finely calibrated line and one that can be all too easily crossed.

“She’d have more sense than to go anywhere near a big ugly fuck like you, Duffy,” he said. “She’s a woman of taste and sophistication.”

“She certainly is,” said Duffy.” I heard someone say the other day that she’s really into literature. You could tell her about that nativity play you produced last year, John, you know the one where the shepherds ended up fighting the sheep and the three wise men didn’t have the brains to find their way onto the stage? That might impress her.”

Later, half-asleep and three-quarters drunk as the bus trundled homewards along the Uxbridge Road, O’Driscoll recalled the remark and the interior of the 207 gradually morphed into a 1950s version of the Orient Express, belching a cloud of smoke into the night sky as it moved slowly eastwards into the mysterious Balkans. Ian O’Driscoll, the famous writer of spy novels, sat deep in thought in one of the train’s sleeper compartments and as he considered the new scene in his latest book, he knew that it was essential he got it just right because beautiful, delectable femme fatale Karen Black would be reading it and if she liked it, the seduction that he had had in mind for some time might move a step closer.

He was describing the first meeting between the master spy and the exotic leading lady, Fanny O’Plenty, but as the scene took shape, he was conscious that his mind was playing tricks with him and that the figures of Fanny and Karen were intermingling so that sometimes he seemed to be describing one and sometimes the other. He was aware therefore that the person he was describing and the person he was trying to impress with the quality of that description were one and the same but as is the way of things in dreamland, there seemed nothing remotely illogical about this. Pausing for a moment, he lit one of his specially blended Turkish cigarettes and sucked the cool, fragrant smoke into his lungs.

For a few minutes, the ticking of the compartment clock marked the leisurely passage of time until, with a decisive movement of his Conway Stewart fountain pen, he wrote,

As she emerged from the sea, dripping with water, her scanty clothing could not conceal the contours of her lithe body and the proud jut of her ripe young breasts...

He stopped and drew on his cigarette, a faraway look in his eyes, before abruptly crossing out the final words and substituting,

...the firm swell of her proud young breasts...

A moment later, his pen raced across the page once more, producing,

...the thrusting jut of her firm young breasts...

Finally, putting all his eggs, as it were, in one basket, he wrote,

...the firm, proud jut of her thrusting, ripe young breasts...

He stopped, temporarily exhausted, looked through the haze of cigarette smoke at the words on the page and sighed wearily. Suddenly, he straightened, picked up his pen and with that quickening of the pulse which all artists will recognize, wrote,

As she emerged from the sea, dripping with water and moved with feline grace onto the beach, her scanty clothing could not conceal the contours of her firm, lithe young body. Yet she was more than just a graceful savage, for as she moved across the sand, the keen, darting glances she threw around her suggested that beneath the animal beauty there lurked a shrewd, native intelligence. As she moved forward, her ripe young breasts jutted proudly against the cloth of the skimpy garment that covered her form, the taut fabric straining against the thrust of those splendid orbs.

Fleming/O’Driscoll sat back, satisfied that the passage had given readers a sufficiently nuanced introduction to the multi-layered character that Fanny would turn out to be, and it only remained to turn on the electric ceiling fan and call for another dry martini. When the master spy did pull languidly on the bell rope, however, it brought forth not the deferential, tuxedoed waiter he had expected but a belligerent be-turbaned bus conductor, at which point John O’Driscoll awoke abruptly and scuttled off the bus, realizing after he alighted that he had actually disembarked two stops early.

Wednesday

The following morning found O’Driscoll approaching the presbytery with a lagging step and with the watery bowels that always seemed to precede an interview with Father Kennedy. It was the final planning meeting ahead of the Year Six mass that was held every year to celebrate the achievements of the eleven year-olds who would soon be leaving the school. In truth, the term “planning” was something of a misnomer, for in reality the meeting, like all the others, would simply ratify whatever it was Father Kennedy had already decided and because Kennedy was a man welded so rigidly to his dogma as to make that of the North Korean politburo seem subtle and nuanced by comparison, there were usually few surprises.

Sister Bernadette, Mr. Li, who taught science, Miss Gillespie the music teacher and Karen Black were also attending the meeting and upon entering the room, O’Driscoll’s heart skipped a beat as he noticed the only seat free was the one next to Karen. His attempt to slide into it in one graceful movement caused the table to move suddenly, almost upsetting a glass of water onto Father Kennedy’s lap and the priest stared balefully at O’Driscoll, the hairs in his nostrils danced crazily, but aware that he was in mixed company, he confined himself to grunting something unintelligible and turned back to continue his conversation with Sister Bernadette.

“Hi John,” said Karen, and he felt a tantalizing scent of perfume. “I meant to ask whether you were all right at the end of the do the other night, you looked a bit under the weather.”

O’Driscoll was caught between conflicting impulses. He could milk the “under the weather” query in the hope of getting some sympathy from Karen; on the other hand, Sister Bernadette was sitting only feet away and it was known up and down the school as a shrewd old cat. If she got wind of him not having been well, and put two and two together she might come up with four, which was, in pints, almost exactly the volume of vomit that had ended up in her bag on the night in question.

Opting for a middle course, he croaked out a greeting from lips that had suddenly become as dry as sand. “Hi Karen,” he said. “No, I was OK,” and immediately kicked himself for the banality of his words. Here he was, sitting next to the most beautiful girl in the world, with the language of Shakespeare, Donne and Dryden at his disposal, and all he could come up with was “No, I was OK.” What a wanker, he thought to himself bitterly as he plumbed the depths of his being for something to say and finally, conscious of the growing silence, blurted out the words, “I see West Ham lost again.” Once more he cursed himself for a fool but to his surprise, Karen smiled and replied, “They’ll never get anywhere with that defence.”

“You a football fan?” he asked, surprised.

“Well, you have to use the term loosely if you support West Ham,” she replied.

“West Ham,” interjected Mr. Li suddenly, and with his careful oriental diction, the words sounded like “Wester Harm.” He shook his head, “Never recovered from the loss of John Lyall.”

Not for the first time, O’Driscoll marveled at the way that the game of football could bridge the most unlikely gaps. Here was a petite English rose on one side, and an elderly Chinaman on the other, the three brought together by a shared understanding of the treacherous waters that swirled around in the lower reaches of the Premiership. Mr. Li had taught at the school for several years and was one of that generation of Chinese whose English is self-taught and the result of painstaking labour over battered and tattered textbooks. Like many such students, Mr. Li’s English had an unusual rhythm to it, with formal, linguistically accurate sentences that nevertheless sounded odd to the ears of native speakers.

He had picked up most of his conversational English from old editions of The Gem and The Magnet which had somehow made the journey to his hometown in Hubei province and which depicted a mythical pre-war world inhabited by characters like Billy Bunter and Harry Wharton. It was a world where the sound of rising bell summoned ruddy-faced boys to Greek and Latin prep and the start of Michaelmas term was signaled by grumbling porters decanting trunks onto a quadrangle that echoed to the sound of cricket practice on Top Side. Through much study, Mr. Li had absorbed the speech patterns of these battered tomes and the consequence was that his speech could, at any moment, lapse with disconcerting suddenness into the vernacular of a fantasy world from half a century ago.

O’Driscoll was about to launch into an analysis of the London football scene when he realized Father Kennedy had called the meeting to order. “Thank ye all for coming,” said the priest, “I think preparations are well in order for Sunday.” He turned to Sister Bernadette and his face assumed a benign expression. “Did you want to say anything, Sister?”

“Just that the choir sounded beautiful when I heard them this morning,” said the nun and Miss Gillespie inclined her head graciously at the implied tribute to her teaching. The music teacher had selected the dozen most angelic Year Six girls to line up behind her in the section of the church reserved for the choir, and was to stand in front of them leading the singing. Miss Gillespie was a prim, erect woman of uncertain but advanced years whose interactions with colleagues were formal and reserved and who lived alone and emanated a frigid disapproval when any talk of romance came up in the staff room. She was, in fact, the personification of the sort of spinsterish old maid popularized in fiction, and the subject of much staff banter, “poor sexless creature” being one of the kinder epithets employed by Mrs. Goodwin to describe her.

“How are the programmes coming along, Mr. Li,” asked Sister Bernadette. “Vurr well,” came the answer, “the final proofs have been submitted to Father Kennedy.” At the mention of proofs, the priest snorted and Sister Bernadette gave O’Driscoll a look of sadness and quiet reproof combined in equal measure before saying, “Yes, it is so important that every piece of printing, no matter how small, goes through the proofreading process.”

O’Driscoll had hoped the printing error might have been forgotten, but clearly it loomed large in the minds of the powers that be, and with teaching contracts up for renewal, it was not a happy thought. O’Driscoll was in his second year at the school, but in the newly deregulated world of education, his contract of employment remained a temporary one, with its renewal at the end of each academic year at the school’s discretion. There were a number of others in the same predicament and the shrewder of them had already done the maths which suggested that with next year’s shifting pupil demographic, unless there was a resignation from within the ranks of the permanent staff, one of the four teachers currently on a temporary contract would have to go. The prospect of being that teacher filled O’Driscoll with such dread he was barely able to contemplate it, for it would mean he would never again be able to spend large periods of his life gazing longingly at Karen Black from afar without summoning up the courage to actually do something about it.

But it wasn’t only this that made the prospect of losing his teaching post an unwelcome one, it was also the fact that being employed at Saint Catherine’s laid to rest the thorny issue of what he was to do with the rest of his life. Like many before him, O’Driscoll had drifted into teaching because he hadn’t known what career he wanted to pursue and because he couldn’t be bothered to go to the trouble of researching the jobs market and thinking up what lies to put in the “hobbies and interests” section of his applications. Now that he was in teaching, it seemed to offer him a stable base from which to pursue his true vocation in life, which was spending as much time as he could in the pub with his mates.

He was also aware, in the inconsequential way that the young consider their parents’ feelings if they consider them at all, that his mother and father were rather proud of the ascent their son had made to the rarified heights that the teaching profession still represented to their generation. “My son the teacher” while still not having the social cache of “my son the doctor” or “my son the lawyer” was still a massive improvement on “my son on the lump with McAlpines,” while the catty references made towards one poor soul and her son “on the dole but doing a little illegal drug dealing, wouldn’t you know,” showed how seriously these factors weighed in the world his parents inhabited.

So, it was essential that O’Driscoll try to keep himself on the right side of the school leadership, particularly as staffing decisions for the next academic year would be made by the Easter holidays, only a few weeks away. He hoped his mishap with the poster might have receded from the collective memory but the fact that it was still registering on the ecclesiastical radar was not a promising omen.

“You, what’s your name?” growled Kennedy, and with reluctance, O’Driscoll dragged himself back into the here and now and waited with trepidation for what was to come. “We’re hoping the job we’ve given you will not be beyond your powers,” the priest continued with elaborate sarcasm.

“How is the rebinding of the hymn books coming along, John?” asked Sister Bernadette more kindly, and O’Driscoll pretended to clear his throat to disguise the “OOST!” that had been triggered by the priest’s words. He explained that thirteen of the Ancient and Modern series of hymn books - one for each of the choir, plus Miss Gillespie - had been rebound in red kidron with the title picked out in gold leaf and that the books would be delivered to the church on the morning of the mass. “That sounds lovely,” said Sister Bernadette and there was a murmur of approval around the table. O’Driscoll resolved to guard against the possibility of another mistake but consoled himself with the knowledge that having been once bitten, he would now be twice, if not thrice shy. After all, with such a simple task, what could possibly go wrong?

The conversation meandered on in a similar vein with staff reporting back on their areas of responsibility and, as he listened idly, O’Driscoll became aware that the physical proximity of the lovely Karen was having a disturbing effect on him. At one point, she stirred slightly and he felt a tantalizing waft of scent. Acutely conscious of the fact that her thigh rested but inches from his own, he found to his horror that he was developing an erection. Desperately looking for an image to reverse the convulsion taking place in his trousers, he focused every fibre of his being on the figure of Sister Bernadette as she sat across the room.

At first, this strategy appeared to be having the desired effect, but gradually the thin, angular figure opposite began to blur and a terrible shape-shifting seemed to commence. The face inside the wimple began to change, the cloth of the nun’s habit became deliciously contoured as it filled with the delectable shape of his beloved, and the outfit appeared to have developed an oriental-style slit at the side, through which a tantalizing sliver of thigh could be glimpsed. The figure seemed to envelop him, its slender fingers extended, as from moistened lips a soft voice whispered, “Mother Superior says we’re not supposed to do this, but...”

There was consternation around the table as with a strangled yelp, John O’Driscoll suddenly leapt to his feet and left the room in a hunched, crablike scuttle, knocking against the table again and sending a dollop of water onto Father Kennedy’s notes. “Ah, feck,” growled the priest before hastily clearing his throat and bestowing an apologetic leer on the females present.

It was a good five minutes before the door reopened and John O’Driscoll shuffled awkwardly to his place with the muttered words, “Sorry, cramp.” It had taken that long to restore himself to a state of physiological equanimity, and he had managed the feat by focusing his imagination on the least alluring person he could think of and when that didn’t work, refining the image to make it even more repulsive. That he figure conjured up turned out to be Margaret Thatcher in a black chiffon negligee took him aback somewhat, but having, as it were, no better material to work with, he decided to give it his best shot. And so it was that Mrs. O’Reilly, Father Kennedy’s elderly housekeeper cum cleaner came upon a lanky young man who appeared to be undergoing some kind of religious experience for he was kneeling in a corner of the corridor with his face to the wall chanting, “The Blessed Margaret... The Blessed Margaret...!” He then made a noise which she was unable to identify but later compared to the sound of air rushing out of a vacuum cleaner.

Around the table, the few remaining items were dealt with and Father Kennedy finished the meeting with what he evidently considered to be a pep talk. “Thank ye all again for taking the time to come over. I don’t need to tell ye how important this mass will be for the school and the parish. Bishop McCarthy himself will be there, and I’m sure ye’ll all do ye’re best to make sure there are no hitches,” with a pointed look in O’Driscoll’s direction, adding, “and the service is one that we can all be proud of.”

As people began to gather their possessions, Karen placed her hand lightly on O’Driscoll’s arm. He could feel the soft pressure of her fingers and, still reeling from the events of the last few minutes, fought to concentrate on the words she was saying. “By the way, John,” she said, “I heard that you were interested in the theatre.”

“Yeah, I go occasionally,” he replied, wondering what was coming.

“Well,” she said, and he had never been more conscious of her physical proximity, “it’s just that I’ve got these two tickets for Antony and Cleopatra at The National and I was wondering...”

For a moment the room swam around him as O’Driscoll digested the implication of her words. “I’d love to come...” he began, his heart thumping in his chest. “Shakespeare’s one of my...” he stopped, as he saw an expression close to panic appearing on her face.

“No, no,” she said quickly, “It’s just that...” the words tumbled over one another in their hurry to get out, “you see, there’s been a change of plans and I ... we... won’t be able to go, so I was wondering if you’d like them?”

The expression “his blood ran cold” was one O’Driscoll had heard many times but until that moment he had never realized how accurately it described the sensation he was experiencing. Desperate to say anything to remove the panic-stricken look from Karen’s face, he gabbled, “Oh, of course. Saturday night. Great! I’d love to take it... take them... the two of them. I can take my... I mean, I can take one of my... brilliant. Thanks.” He swallowed an “OOST” that had begun to form in his diaphragm and finished lamely, “I’ll get them tomorrow.”

As he scanned the room to work out the quickest way of extricating himself from the situation, he realized the eyes of the others were on them and that the whole excruciating exchange must have been witnessed by them all. With a hurried farewell, Karen headed towards the door and as the rest of the group gathered their possessions prior to departing, O’Driscoll became aware that Father Kennedy’s little piggy eyes were resting on him with an amused gleam in them. “Well, Mister O’Driscoll,” said the priest with the self-satisfied air of a porker who has yet again successfully avoided the market van, “you seem to bring as much success to your personal life as you do your professional one.”

O’Driscoll trawled his consciousness for a suitably withering put down, but having considered, “Fuck off, you ignorant old twat,” and, “Shove it up your great fat hairy arse,” he rejected both and chose instead to contort his face into its most fearsome configuration and fire the resulting grimace off in the direction of his tormentor’s departing back. With this action safely executed, he made good his own escape, wondering not for the first time why it is the crushing rejoinder never seems to emerge when we need it most.

Thursday

The beer and the conversation in The North Star flowed easily and within a couple of hours had moved on to the Conservative government that had ruled the country for as long as anyone could remember, and which was hanging tenaciously on to power, despite a series of sex scandals that had ravaged its ranks.

“We’ll never get the bastards out!” said Duffy, who was apt to become pessimistic when drink had worked its way into his system

“I dunno,” said O’Driscoll. “Ever since John Major started his back to basics campaign, every Tory MP in the country seems to have gone sex mad. They’ve been rogering anything that moves - constituency agents, diary secretaries, research assistants - you name it, they’ve shagged it. Things have got so out of control that some of them are even sleeping with their own wives.”

“Sleaze or no sleaze, the people of this country are too thick to vote the Tories out,” proclaimed Duffy with mournful satisfaction.

Duffy’s girlfriend Faith had brought her friend Maureen along and the girl leaned across and ruffled Duffy’s hair. “Don’t be so pessimistic,” she said. “You never know what might happen once those new guys Blair and Brown get on the case.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Duffy. “In fact, does anyone fancy a tequila slammer to toast the end of Tory misrule?” The idea met with general approval and before long, the table was awash with glasses, segments of squeezed lemon, and granules of salt. Micky, attempting to throw salt over his shoulder for good luck, landed a handful in Maureen’s face and she screamed in mock horror. Chaos replaced order as the tequila disappeared, and by 9.30 a chorus of “The Red Flag” was competing loudly with a series of verses telling the story of how four and twenty young ladies from Inverness in Scotland attended a gathering where they all underwent a life-changing experience. The landlord looked on lugubriously, consoling himself with the thought that the group, although loud and drunk, were never obnoxious or aggressive to other customers and that his bulging till was all the evidence he needed of what their presence would do to his takings on a quiet Wednesday night.

Realizing he was out of money, O’Driscoll slipped out to visit the cash point machine located a couple of minutes away. He was in the euphoric condition attained when significant quantities of hard alcohol have been imbibed in a short period of time and it was in this happy state, a couple of minutes later, that Sister Bernadette, Miss Gillespie and Karen Black happened upon him as they hurried through the precinct.

“John O’Driscoll!” exclaimed Sister Bernadette. “By the grace of God, it’s a miracle! Can you give us just half an hour of your time to help the school. Father Kennedy has arranged a public meeting to showcase the good community work that the church and school does in the parish. We’re holding it in one of the town hall meeting rooms, and lots of groups are attending - the old people for whom we did the social evening the other week, for example - and there’s a reporter there from the Ealing Gazette, and one from The Catholic Herald too. We’ve asked some staff to come along and take part in the question and answer session - Karen and Miss Gillespie here - and we were to have had Geoff Turnbull, but he called an hour ago to say that his daughter has been taken ill. Father Kennedy was anxious that we have a representative from the male staff to show how everyone is behind the community work the school does. You know how people get these stereotypical images of how primary schools are all run by do-gooding middle-aged women. We were nipping round to see if Mr. Barnet was available, as he lives up towards Ealing Common, but if you could give us a half an hour, we’d be so grateful. It would just mean sitting at the front with us and answering questions about the work the school does.” She stopped to draw breath after what, for her, had been a long and impassioned speech, quite different from the measured tones she usually adopted. “It would be very helpful to the school,” she continued, lowering her voice slightly, “and I’m sure Father Kennedy would be so pleased that it would be a personal feather in the cap for you.”

Sister Bernadette stopped speaking again and the three figures, representing as they did womanhood in all its diversity, stood looking at O’Driscoll expectantly. John O’Driscoll was not a complete fool, and in the normal course of events, realizing he had just spent upwards of three hours in the pub, he would have run a hundred miles rather than get involved with a scheme that was filled with the potential for drunken indiscretion. But the condition O’Driscoll was in at that moment was a truly dangerous one. He had taken on board industrial quantities of hard liquor, but only in the recent past, and was in a state of heady optimism and euphoric goodwill towards all humankind. He looked at the three faces in front of him, Sister Bernadette wearing a look that was almost imploring, Miss Gillespie wearing a look that was almost human, and Karen gazing at him with a diffident, appealing look that turned into a smile.

It was the smile that did it, melting O’Driscoll’s heart completely, and a few minutes later, he found himself sitting on a raised dais at the front of a half-full meeting room in the town hall. The chairs were arranged in a semi-circle facing the audience, with Father Kennedy in the middle, flanked on either side by Sister Bernadette and Miss Gillespie, with O’Driscoll and Karen occupying the seats at either end. O’Driscoll had crammed a wedge of extra strong mints into his mouth on the way across the road, and with that precaution safely observed, sat gazing benevolently out at his audience.

“Thank you to Father Kennedy for outlining so cogently the range of activities carried out by the church and school,” said Sister Bernadette. “And now it’s over to you, the audience. We have asked a cross-section of staff to be available to answer any questions you may have, so feel free to ask them anything you’d like.” She briefly introduced the teachers and then made a gesture suggestive of opening the floor for questions. There was an uneasy pause, before an elderly man asked whether the school had plans for a pilgrimage to Lourdes next year. Father Kennedy answered in the affirmative, saying funds had been made available from the diocese to subsidize the trip, and following his gaze, O’Driscoll noticed a figure clad in ecclesiastical purple who he took to be Bishop McCarthy sitting in the second row, wearing an unworldly smile.

Here was an opportunity to put right any damage that he may have unwittingly done following the unfortunate incident with the poster and he resolved to make sure he showed by his answers what a special place St. Catherine’s was. In fact at that moment, as waves of tequila coursed through his veins, O’Driscoll was filled with an overwhelming love for the school, for the church and for the whole of humanity in all its myriad forms. The next question was from a pious-looking elderly lady in tweeds who asked whether the knowledge that God was always with them was a help in the good work that was being done in the community. Father Kennedy answered that naturally God’s love was a tremendous solace, underpinning as it did every good deed that was done in the parish.

“We would expect no other answer from those called to Holy Orders,” said a supercilious-looking young man with a notebook who was obviously one of the reporters, “but I wonder, could we have a comment from one of the lay members of staff?”

This was O’Driscoll’s opportunity and he wasn’t going to miss it. “I absolutely agree with what Father Kennedy just said,” he began, “and those of us seeking to do God’s work from, shall I say, a civilian perspective, (there was a gratifying murmur of laughter at this) are conscious of how much we depend on the love of God to help us.” Emboldened by this start, he went on, “Of course, there are many competing kinds of love in the world, as I am sure you are all aware. There is the love of a parent for its child, and...” here he paused and favoured the audience with an indulgent smile, “... there is, of course, the love of a child for its parent.”

This public speaking was straightforward, he thought to himself and his voice took on a louder, more confident tone as he gazed benevolently out at his audience. “There is also the love of a woman for a man,” he continued, risking a look across the line of chairs to where Karen was sitting, and noticing her eyes were cast down in a way that appeared to be at once demure and at the same time distinctly arousing. He really must take her to one side after the show and declare his love for her, he decided, the liquor reaching the core of his being and inducing an overwhelming feeling of goodwill to all of mankind. He paused for a moment, where was he, mustn’t lose his thread?

“As I was saying, there is the love of a woman for a man and...” he stole another covert glance at his beloved, “there is the love of a man for a woman.” He wondered whether this would be a good time to illustrate to the audience how powerful this love could be by sharing with them his feelings for Karen, but decided it wouldn’t be appropriate just yet.

“But,” he continued, endeavoring to demonstrate by his words the strength of his support for the school, “it is the love of God that underpins everything we do at St Catherine’s. It is evident in the way Sister Bernadette prepares the confirmation class with such attention to detail and,” he searched for another example, “it is there in Father Kennedy’s address to the infant class who are preparing for their first communion. When he describes the infinite pain of hellfire and the unspeakable horror of eternal damnation as he prepares the little ones for the trials ahead, one has only to look at the expressions on their little faces to know that it is a moment they will remember all their lives.”

O’Driscoll concluded and sat back, satisfied with his efforts on behalf of the school. He really did seem to have a gift for public speaking, he reflected with an inward smile. Returning his attention to the meeting, he realized that Sister Bernadette just finished answering a question about the R.E. curriculum.

“I absolutely agree with Sister Bernadette,” he said in the same measured tones he had used earlier, nodding his head emphatically. “R.E. is a subject with an extremely high profile at St. Catherine’s, thanks to Sister Bernadette, and we must not forget the beautiful... the ... er ... excellent assistance given to her by Miss Black here, on my left.” As he indicated Karen’s presence with a languid wave of the hand, he glanced once more in her direction, but as before her gaze appeared to be fixed resolutely on the floor in front of her.

She looked incredibly desirable in a demure, Jane Austen-ish way as she sat there with downcast eyes and hands clasped in front of her, and as anyone familiar with Miss Austen’s work knew, that modest aspect was but a mask that concealed the passionate nature that lay beneath. O’Driscoll felt a wave of sympathy coursing through him at the thought of all those heroines forced to sit at the breakfast table making polite conversation about the price of linen or lace when in reality they were aching to be taken out to the stables and given a good Darcying. His feeling of oneness with the rest of humanity was now so strong that he wanted to sing at the top of his voice and whirl Karen from her seat and dance her around the floor, but realizing that this might interfere with the smooth running of the Q and A session, he confined himself to agreeing vocally and emphatically with the next five answers that were given by other members of the panel.

When it came time for closing remarks, he agreed “emphatically” with Sister Bernadette on the benefits of good school/parent relations, he agreed “absolutely and totally” with Miss Gillespie on the importance of good music teaching in the curriculum, and he agreed “absolutely, totally and fundamentally, if I may say so,” with Father Kennedy’s views on fully engaging parishioners in the work of the church. As the meeting meandered peacefully towards a conclusion, he contented himself with the satisfying thought that he had done good and altruistic work for the school while also earning himself some useful credits with the powers that be.

Relaxing now that proceedings were almost over, he saw a final opportunity to end the meeting with exactly the right note of informality. Bishop McCarthy had been called to make a final summing up and, after praising the work of the staff and governors of the school, had finished with the words, “...and, we are all members of God’s family.”

“If I could echo the bishop’s words,” O’Driscoll said, forestalling with an airy wave of the hand Father Kennedy’s efforts to intervene, “and speaking as a member of the staff at Saint Catherine’s, I can say that is exactly how we see ourselves (he would enter just the right note of levity to bring things to a satisfactorily light hearted conclusion). “We are a family at Saint Catherine’s, a bit of a dysfunctional family to be truthful, the kind of family with skeletons in the cupboard, and secrets to hide.” That got their attention, he thought with satisfaction, and indeed there was a perceptible stirring in the audience. He even thought he saw one of the blokes with notebooks scribble something. “But, if I may say so...” and here he thought an indulgent smile would be appropriate, “like all dysfunctional families, we keep our dark secrets hidden away and present a united front to the rest of the world.” He leaned back in his chair and noted with satisfaction that his final remarks had produced a ripple of appreciative laughter and even a smattering of applause.

“Thank you, Mr. O’Driscoll!” said Father Kennedy with what seemed a little more emphasis than was strictly necessary and O’Driscoll reflected that the priest was possibly feeling a little outshone by his young co-panelist. He must remember in future to allow others the opportunity to share in the limelight and win some plaudits for themselves, or as many as they could get without having his natural talent.

The overwhelming feeling of satisfaction that proceeds from a successful public performance had now reached the core of his being and he made a point of shaking hands with his fellow panelists and assuring them what a success the evening had been, after all he didn’t want them to feel overshadowed just because he had stolen the show. He had just finished shaking the bishop’s hand for the third time and was casting around for another arm to begin pumping when he realized the progress of the group had taken it out of the meeting room and they were outside in the street. Father Kennedy and the bishop were heading towards the church, Karen was in the process of getting into the car of the elderly woman with tweeds who was obviously dropping her home, and only Sister Bernadette and Miss Gillespie remained.

“Well, John,” said the nun, “we didn’t realize we must have taken you away from your friends when we met you. You’ll want to get back to them, I expect.”

Glancing at his watch, O’Driscoll realized it was only ten o’clock and that the interlude in the town hall had occupied a bare half-hour. Resisting a sudden urge to give Sister Bernadette a kiss - the Jedi Council would probably take a view on such a breach of protocol - he shook her hand warmly, and that of Miss Gillespie, and made his way to The North Star, where events were unfolding even more raucously than when he had left. He reckoned that he was about four tequilas behind everyone else and, as another chorus of “Georgie Graham’s red and white army” echoed around the bar, he wasted no time in making up the deficit. The rest of the evening passed in a blur and he could not have said what time it was that he tumbled at last exhausted into bed.

Friday

It was just after five a.m. by the luminous dial on John O’Driscoll’s watch when he raised a tousled head and allowed the memories of the preceding evening to coalesce into something approaching chronological order. What he remembered was a good night in the pub, in the middle of which he had performed with surprising grace and confidence during the session at the town hall. Perhaps he had dominated things a tiny bit but, well, fortune favoured the brave, and he remembered some very demure, butter-wouldn’t-melt images of Karen that he couldn’t help feeling boded well for the future. With that, he lapsed back into unconsciousness.

It was just after six a.m. when O’Driscoll next cast a bleary eye at his watch and turned over, reflecting as he did that his mouth was feeling exceptionally dry. That would be the tequila, he thought, and hadn’t he done well to perform so well at the meeting, considering how much of the stuff he had taken on board. There was, however, a nagging doubt in his mind about the town hall session. Had he talked too much, he wondered? He had certainly interrupted Father Kennedy on one occasion, something he would never normally do. On the other hand, there was the applause that greeted his final intervention, which had to be a good sign, and on that positive note sleep again overtook him.

The hands on John O’Driscoll’s watch stood at seven o’clock when he awoke suddenly, instantly aware of a troubling knot in the pit of his stomach as his mind began to replay scenes from the town hall Q and A. The applause which only an hour ago he had attributed to his easy wit could just have easily been a mocking response to his ineptness, while what he had imagined to be admiring laughter now seemed more likely to have been titters of derision. The more he thought about the evening, the more he shrank from the memory of his performance and waves of anxiety began to course through his system.

By eight a.m., O’Driscoll was showered, dressed and in the grip of an attack of galloping paranoia. The last traces of the tequila that had been such a source of sustenance the night before were now exiting his system, leaving his internal mechanism at the mercy of random, jumbled images and thoughts. The looks that he had the night before judged to be admiring ones, could just as easily have been an embarrassed reaction to the sight of someone making a colossal fool of themselves. How could he have seen Karen’s downcast expression and refusal to meet his eyes, as some kind of demure, 18th century come on, when it was clear to any fool that she was merely embarrassed by the actions of an idiot whose drunken antics had dragged the good name of the school into the mire?

By nine o’clock, John O’Driscoll was prowling the corridors of the school looking for someone who had been at the town hall the night before so he could gauge how criminal his misbehaviour had actually been. He remembered a phrase that had stayed with him after last year’s staff trip to see Macbeth, “O full of scorpions is my mind,” and he wondered bitterly whether whatever it was the Scottish nobleman had taken on board matched the paranoia generated by the after-effects of a dozen tequila slammers. He spied Sister Bernadette in the distance but as he moved towards her, she swept into an adjacent corridor, leaving him to conclude that she had seen him coming and been so horrified by his behaviour of the night before that she had been unable to face him.

In the distance he saw Karen, walking down the corridor towards him. “Morning, Karen,” he said, trying to make his voice sound as casual as possible while waiting for the aversion of eyes and embarrassed body language that would signal his disgrace.

“Oh, hi John,” she answered, “how are you feeling today?”

He immediately concluded that she was referring to his condition of the night before, but trying to keep his voice even, answered, “Not bad, thanks. A bit knackered, to be honest.” There was a slight pause before he screwed up the courage to ask the question whose answer might determine his whole future at St Catherine’s. “How did you feel it went last night?”

“Fine,” she replied, “but can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“I just wondered, were you on medication or anything?” she asked.

His heart dropped into his boots but he tried to keep his voice light as he answered, “Actually, I did accidentally double the dose of my red pills, and I think they may have reacted with the blue ones that I’m only supposed to take when I get psychotic. Was it that obvious?”

“No,” she laughed as she replied, “not to anyone who doesn’t know you well, but you did seem a little...odd now and again, very opinionated and, well, you interrupted Father Kennedy a couple of times.” She laughed again. “He looked quite cross the second time.”

This was beginning to sound like it hadn’t been the unmitigated disaster that he had feared. Karen had noticed that he had been a little different from normal, but she did not give the impression of someone who had found his conduct reprehensible. In fact, she was talking to him in terms that were interestingly relaxed and friendly.

“You don’t think Father Kennedy was too pissed off?” he ventured.

“Not at all,” she replied, “I heard the bishop complimenting him on the quality of his young staff as they were leaving.”

O’Driscoll felt his knees go weak with relief and he resisted with difficulty the urge to grab Karen and shower her on the spot with kisses of gratitude as she continued with a smile, “So those happy pills didn’t do you any harm after all.”

“Actually,” he confessed after a moment, “it’s interesting what you said earlier because I was on a kind of medication last night.”

She looked at him enquiringly and he went on, “Well, we were in The North Star and... things got a bit out of hand ... it was Duffy’s fault, really ... and... well, before I knew it I’d had ten tequila slammers.”

Karen put a hand over her mouth and her eyes widened as she said slowly, “You’d had ten tequila slammers?”

“Actually it might have been twelve,” replied O’Driscoll in the interests of honest disclosure, “and of course there were the few pints we’d had at the start of the evening.”

He filled her in on the sequence of events that had ended with him addressing a town hall meeting with enough alcohol in his system to incapacitate a rhino. “Actually,” he concluded, “when I woke up this morning, I had no idea whether I had insulted Sister Bernadette, importuned Miss Gillespie, or offered to elope with Father Kennedy. You will confirm that I didn’t do any of those things?”

“No, but you were giving the bishop some decidedly ambiguous looks,” said Karen and she joined in his laughter. “Bloody hell,” she repeated in awe. “Ten tequilas before going to a public meeting with Father Kennedy! You do lead a charmed life, John.”

“I read somewhere that Churchill used to have a whiskey and water before giving a speech,” he replied. “It’s really only an updated version of that.”

She smiled and the acuteness of her proximity and the warmth of their shared laughter made him abandon all his inhibitions. “Karen,” he blurted out, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you...” but even as he spoke, he remembered the expression on her face when he had misunderstood the offer of the Shakespeare tickets and his nerve failed. His mouth began to open and close like a fish but all that emerged was a strangled “OOST!” and although he attempted to disguise the “OOST!” by breaking into a prolonged fit of coughing, he could see from her face that it hadn’t worked.

Now he had another problem: Karen’s proximity was beginning to produce disturbing stirrings in his trousers, and it was only by conjuring up an image of Mrs. Thatcher at the dispatch box in a basque that he was able to reverse the process. At that moment, one of Karen’s pupils rushed up to say the class was waiting for her to unlock the door and she headed down the corridor wearing an expression he was unable to read. Looking around, he realized that Miss Gillespie and Mr. Li had materialized next to him and for the want of something better to say, he asked the elderly music teacher if she was prepared for Sunday’s Year Six mass.

“My girls will be ready to do the school credit, I hope,” she said with a wintry smile. “The hymn books will be ready for use, I presume, Mr. O’Driscoll?” He hastened to assure her they had been delivered the day before and had been placed, still in their packaging, at the entrance to the pew where the choir would be seated.

“I’ll help you unpack them, Miss Gillespie,” he finished, “if I get there before the start of the mass, but I’ve got a family commitment and it might be touch and go.” The “family commitment” consisted of the extra couple of hours he hoped to spend sleeping off Saturday night’s drinking session, but she was not to know this, and O’Driscoll was reluctant to give up any more of the weekend than he absolutely had to. With a frosty nod, Miss Gillespie moved off, leaving O’Driscoll and the elderly Chinaman together.

“Have the preparations for Sunday’s mass gone as planned, John?” asked Mr. Li.

“As far as I know,” replied O’Driscoll.

“It’ll hopefully pass off without incident,” said Li with a twinkle.

O’Driscoll knew he was referring to the cock-up with the poster but he did not begrudge his colleague the reference. Rather, he felt there was a fellow feeling between them because of an incident that had occurred a couple of days after the fete, during the end of term carol service. Mr. Li had been acting as master of ceremonies and things had been progressing uneventfully until he had stood up to announce the penultimate carol, that perennial favourite, ‘Away in a Manger.’ He made the announcement with his usual clarity of speech, but unfortunately pronounced the final word to rhyme with “banger” and this had been the cause of an immediate and sustained outburst of hilarity among the student body. The laughter had rippled up and down the pews and teachers leapt to their feet and stared threateningly along the lines of pupils, but the laughter had now gained a momentum of its own and it had taken the arrival of Sister Bernadette, sweeping into the room like an avenging Jedi, to quell the disturbance.

The mirth had not been confined to the student body and parents and members of staff could be seen wearing carefully suppressed smiles, but Father Kennedy, when informed of the faux pas, by Mrs. Goodwin had not been amused. Wasn’t it bad enough, he was alleged to have thundered, that he was surrounded by ‘tinkers and gypsies’, without having to cope with ‘heathens’ as well!? Mrs. Goodwin’s own take on the whole thing had been the rather cryptic observation that while you could take the man out of the Orient, you couldn’t take the Orient out of the man, an aphorism apparently inspired by that noted anthropologist, her husband, Reg.

The incident left O’Driscoll with a kindred feeling for the elderly Chinaman, if for no other reason that they shared in the opprobrium of the cantankerous cleric. He smiled at Li’s enquiry about the mass and said, “If anything goes wrong on Sunday, I wouldn’t like to be in my shoes.” His tone was playful but an image of Father Kennedy’s nasal hairs performing a wild but synchronized fandango flashed across his mind and he resolved to put his mind at rest by checking the missals one final time before the service started.

Saturday

It was midnight in a night club on the Uxbridge Road whose name O’Driscoll couldn’t remember, and the place was heaving with talent. Duffy could pull without trying and often did. He claimed sometimes he only went through with the subsequent act out of politeness, but O’Driscoll had to concede that, Duffy apart, the lads were not a company designed to set the hearts of the ladies beating. He himself was tall, gangly and uncoordinated with, in the words of an ex-girlfriend, “the face that launched a thousand shits,” while Micky Quinn was all curly red hair and freckles, his lumpy shape bulging and expanding into whatever space his ill-fitting clothes would allow. The other two lads were no oil paintings either but what they all shared was that grey-white Irish skin colouring that resembled semi-digested porridge and which no exposure to the sun could darken or make attractive.

With the last slow dance trailing away to silence, O’Driscoll watched as Quinn, after much resolute trouser hitching and several false starts, finally approached a girl he had been eyeing up, the whole performance calling to mind a bull which has spied a particularly fetching heifer in an adjoining field and is pawing the ground preparatory to having a run at her. The girl had watched his display of wheeling and curveting with a stony countenance and met his opening remarks when he finally did arrive with a reply so brief and terse that its import could not be mistaken. While all this was going on, Duffy’s figure could be seen in the distance exiting the premises with something blonde and svelte in suede attached to its arm. O’Driscoll wondered anew how Duffy did it - he could and often did spend the whole evening apparently propping up the bar with the lads only to disappear right at the end with some stunner. The remainder of the party gathered in the foyer, their failure on the romantic front not weighing too heavily on their shoulders, and it remained to be decided what to do with the fag end of the evening.

“Do you still have that bottle of Jack Daniels at your flat?” asked Rocky.

“I do indeed,” said O’Driscoll, brightening, “and what’s more, we have the perfect number for a friendly game of poker!”

* * *

It was five a.m. in O’Driscoll’s flat and the card school was over. Quinn was asleep in the flat’s only armchair, great trumpeting snores echoing around the room as his chest rose and fell. Sweeney had gone home and Rocky was crashed out on the bed next door. O’Driscoll sat in a chair at the table and as he poured himself a final drink, he reflected on the evening behind them and how single-sex education in Catholic schools could produce such comically maladjusted adults. Growing up without any meaningful contact with girls of their own age meant that as teenagers, the boys had no coping strategies when they did finally have cause to interact with the opposite sex. It wasn’t a problem for the good-looking lads, they simply got pulled whether they liked it or not, but for the unlovely, the tongue-tied and the socially awkward, into all of which categories O’Driscoll placed himself firmly, it could be years before they were able to form meaningful adult relationships. At this moment, and as if to reinforce this point, Quinn stirred in his sleep and delivered a fart that seemed to shake the room to its foundations.

Floating in that half-world that precedes sleep, O’Driscoll smiled to himself as he recalled the “Venice/Ennis” misunderstanding and the comic misconceptions that can result from young ears mishearing the words of adult talk. His mind went back a decade to his teenage years and to The Girl. She had come across from Ireland by boat and train to spend a week with his sister’s friend Sinead and she had a fragile, elfin beauty that knotted his stomach and made the breath catch in his throat. He had watched from a distance - six-feet two inches of tongue-tied, adolescent gawkiness - until one summer day the girls came calling and she floated down his garden path, the late-afternoon sun turning the soft down on her arms into strands of iridescent gold. She had that dreamy, ethereal quality that exceptionally beautiful people sometimes have and his whole being was consumed by a yearning to be with her, talk to her, hold her, kiss her, but he had no idea how any of these miracles might be achieved when she wasn’t even aware of his existence.

It was known that she came from a family of staunch republicans and that she wore that badge with a pride as fierce as any Cumann na mBan warrioress and he instinctively felt if he could only show her the same republican fire burned in him, she might turn those cornflower blue eyes on him with something more than mild curiosity. But in truth, his knowledge of the history and culture of his native land was derived almost entirely from listening to the eight LPs, six by The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem and two by The Dubliners, whose scratchy rhythms crackled from the back room of the family home every Saturday night in a relentless, lonely loop.

The girls had reached the pond at the bottom of the garden and he knew if he didn’t do something soon, it would be too late and they would be gone. And then he Gods smiled on him for as the girl bent down to examine a lily, her hand slipped into the pond and came up covered in a thick, black ooze and he remembered the Blackened Hands, the ruthless gang of cutthroats who had terrorized Ireland and whose crimes were alluded to in sombre tones whenever the elders of his family gathered.

“The Blackened Hands - a name steeped in blood and treachery.”

“And the whole thing the work of those creatures Churchill and Lloyd George, may God forgive them.”

“A ring of Crossley Tenders around Cork while the city centre burned.”

“And the arrogant so and so’s standing there as bold as brass stopping the firemen from putting out the flames.”

“Ah, but they reckoned without Tom Barry and his brave boys.”

“Down into the mire they went to fight for Ireland’s freedom.”

“A flying column lay waiting on the road at Kilmichael.”

“And a few minutes later, those same brave articles were smiling on the other side of their faces!”

In the young O’Driscoll’s mind, the chronology of events was uncertain, and he suspected it was equally so among the adults relating the tale, for sometimes the burning of Cork would precede the ambush at Kilmichael, while at other times the sequence of events was reversed. But what never changed were the sepulchral tones employed and the gloomy relish with which the story was told. The narrative left a deep impression on him and he had often pondered on the origin of the murderous gang’s name. Had it derived from a secret mark, like the black spot in Treasure Island, or was the title merely symbolic of the dark acts carried out in the name of the crown? As he looked at the girl’s arm covered in mud up to the elbow, he saw his opportunity and blurted out, “You’d better wash that off or we’ll think you’re one of the Blackened Hands.”

“Wha’?” she replied, for although she had the delicate beauty of a fairytale princess, she spoke with the guttural vowels of Dublin’s north side.

“You know... the Blackened Hands,” he repeated, “the ones who came over from England during the troubles.”

She looked at him evenly for a moment and then speaking slowly and deliberately and enunciating each word carefully, said, “It’s not the Blackened Hands, you gobshite, it’s the Black and Tans.”

She finally turned those cornflower blue eyes on him and as he squirmed under her gaze, he saw an expression of mild distaste appear on her face, the sort of look that someone examining a vaguely interesting but physically repellant insect might wear. Even though a decade and a half had passed, he still cringed at the memory of that look and he allowed himself a wry smile as he reflected on the power that some images have to transcend time and space. On that note, and with the rumble of Quinn’s snore providing a suitably martial commentary on his thoughts, O’Driscoll drifted into sleep and into the coming day.

Sunday

The next morning, leaving Quinn sleeping on the sofa and snoring fit to wake the dead, O’Driscoll jumped into his battered Ford Cortina and made his way to St Catherine’s, only to find the church deserted. Realizing his bleary eyes had misread the time on his watch and that he had, in fact, arrived an hour early, he thought he would try to turn the situation to his advantage and in the process, create the impression of someone whose religious faith is so strong that it literally propels him out of bed on a Sunday morning by knocking on the sacristy door and announcing himself.

As he arrived at the well-remembered door, he quailed momentarily but, hearing muffled voices coming from inside and realizing that the door had been left slightly ajar, he entered. O’Driscoll’s nostrils were immediately assailed by an aroma comprising in roughly equal parts of bacon and beeswax, for Mrs. O’Reilly, Father Kennedy’s elderly and irascible housekeeper, had traditional views on matters domestic and coated every surface with the waxing product during her daily cleaning routine. O’Driscoll could still hear muffled voices but they were clearer now and appeared to be coming from the half-open door to the living room. He was debating whether he should signal his presence by coughing tentatively or take the bull by the horns and move authoritatively into the room when he realized that he was being observed from across the hallway by Parnell, Father Kennedy’s cat. Named in honour of Irish nationalism’s great 19th century champion by Mrs. O’Reilly’s husband, Parnell had been recruited several years before to deal with some church mice that had been unwise enough to stray into Father Kennedy’s domain. Having dispatched the unfortunate rodents forthwith, Parnell had turned his attention to the feline population of the parish and set about them with an alacrity that his famous namesake might have envied, and soon no property in the parish was to be found without one of his progeny sunning itself in the garden. Parnell regarded O’Driscoll inscrutably for a few moments, licked a paw fastidiously and then wandered off in the direction of the bins.

“Will you be having another rasher, Father?” From the half-open presbytery door came a female voice which O’Driscoll recognized as belonging to Mrs. O’Reilly, but it was a softer, gentler version of the harsh tones she usually adopted. There was a short silence and then, somewhere between a murmur and a grunt, an answering, “I will.”

Mrs. O’Reilly continued in a soft breathless voice quite unlike her usual one, “And I’m sure you could make room for another couple of pieces of white pudding. It’s Galtee - your favourite - got specially from the market, and you do need to keep your strength up, what with three masses to say and the sick to visit as well.”

O’Driscoll had not until that moment imagined that the priest’s duties included calling on the infirm and couldn’t help feeling that the prospect of a visit from Father Kennedy would be enough to induce a complete recovery in any invalid with an ounce of sense. Perhaps Lazarus himself had been anticipating a visit from some biblical version of Kennedy - it would certainly account for the alacrity with which history’s most notorious malingerer had restored himself to health and vitality.

“I’ll just be having a couple of pieces of the white pudding,” came Kennedy’s voice, adding, “I wouldn’t want to be getting a corporation, now,” and through the half-opened door, O’Driscoll saw a large ecclesiastical hand patting a large ecclesiastical stomach.

“Not a bit of it,” crooned Mrs. O’Reilly. “Sure, a man has a much greater air of dignity when he is carrying a little condition, not like those skinny articles you see around these days. Now Father, there’s the last sausage there,” she continued, pushing it onto his plate, “t’would be a shame for it to go to waste.”

“Ah Mrs. O’Reilly, you’ll feed me to death if I’m not careful.”

“Go on with you! Now Father, will you have another cup of tea - the pot’s still warm?”

Still debating whether to move authoritatively into the room and declare himself, or to creep back down the hall and escape, O’Driscoll looked around and noticed that Parnell had returned and was once more regarding him with studied insolence from across the corridor. Under the cat’s unnerving stare, his nerve failed completely and he beat a hasty retreat, entering the church, which was now open, a few moments later.

John O’Driscoll was not normally a young man who sought out the limelight but, aware of what was at stake and unable to contemplate the thought of what life would be like if his tenure at the school came to an end, he steeled himself and swept around the church on a number of spurious pretexts. He made an unnecessary journey to the pew where Miss Gillespie and the girls were sitting, and ostentatiously went through the motions of checking the hymn books, looking surreptitiously across at Father Kennedy to see if his presence was being noted. The priest returned his look and muttered, “O’Driscoll,” by way of a greeting, but as Bishop McCarthy was at that moment standing right alongside him, he then had no option but to introduce the bishop to O’Driscoll, which he did with a short description of the role that the young teacher was to play.

“Rebinding the hymn books, splendid, splendid!” said the bishop in the cultured tones of the Irish east coast. “One finds that events such as this are so much more successful when the burden of preparation is a shared one.” Rubbing his hands enthusiastically, he went on, “I am reminded of the passage from Matthew where Our Lord first spoke to the Pharisees on the subject of...” But it was no use, O’Driscoll had left him in body and spirit. He had just seen Karen on the other side of the church looking ravishing in black, and with a muttered apology, he retired to a pew at the back where, unnoticed by the congregation, he would be able to indulge in a solitary daydream.

There was a perceptible increase in the bustle and movement around the church as the service time grew near. Altar boys scurried up and down the nave and teachers checked for the umpteenth time that their pupils were sitting, well-behaved and quiescent in their places. In a radical new departure for Saint Catherine’s, a video camera had been purchased, which would film the events of the service, and by some strange alchemy, project the moving images onto a huge screen which had been erected at the back of the altar. It was cutting-edge technology for 1995, and Father Kennedy was proud of the minute detail with which it would record the sacred proceedings ahead.

As the mass began and Kennedy’s nostril hairs, each three feet high and whirling furiously, were projected in all their glory onto the screen, O’Driscoll drifted into a delicious reverie. Fanatical separatists from an obscure central Asian territory had overrun the church and within minutes were set to detonate the industrial quantities of explosive strapped to their bodies, causing massive devastation and loss of life. John O’Driscoll had volunteered to undertake the task of opening negotiations with them and Karen was trying desperately to prevent him going into the church.

“But John,” she said, her bosom heaving (Heaving! - that was one that O’Driscoll/Fleming hadn’t thought of!), “you can’t. It’ll be certain death.” She took a deep, shuddering breath and said in halting tones, “And what about... us... I’d thought that we ...”

O’Driscoll was never to know what was to follow that “we...,” because at that moment he was jerked out of his reverie by a commotion at the front of the church. Mildly annoyed at having his fantasy so rudely interrupted, he looked ahead to see what the cause of the disturbance was, secure in the knowledge that, whatever had gone wrong this time, at least they couldn’t pin it on him. It took him a couple of seconds to make sense of what was happening and then the blood froze in his veins and the ground seemed to shift beneath his feet. An “OOST” began to form in his diaphragm, but died unborn and unlamented around his larynx, for the most emphatic “OOST” ever uttered would not have conveyed a fraction of the horror he was feeling at the images unspooling before his disbelieving eyes. At some point, the cameraman must have changed position because a picture of the choir was now being projected in enormous detail onto the screen behind the altar. Elderly spinsterish Miss Gillespie was standing in front with the twelve girls, all chosen for their radiance and innocence, in a line behind her. Each was holding a large red missal, upon which could be clearly seen, huge and picked out in gold leaf, the inscription:

HYMENS

ANCIENT AND MODERN

As the realization of what had happened hit him, O’Driscoll’s brain went numb, his mind refusing to work other than to wonder inconsequentially whether it was the Ancient Greeks or Romans who had coined the phrase about the Gods making merry in their mischief. He couldn’t remember, other than to reflect that the group of deities entrusted with his care must be possessed of particularly capricious senses of humour, for with cruel symmetry they had once again chosen to change the meaning of a message completely by altering just one letter. For O’Driscoll, the outcome in either case was the same, immediate disgrace and ignominy, followed by banishment to the edge of the ecclesiastical universe, and any hopes he might have held for a future at St. Catherine’s would surely be consigned to the same outer darkness.

There was a buzz of noise around the church and Father Kennedy could be seen looking behind him, eyes squinting as he tried to make out the inscription projected on the huge screen. O’Driscoll watched in horror as the realization of what had happened slowly dawned on Kennedy and the piggy eyes that he knew so well began to relentlessly quarter the area, scanning each pew as they narrowed their field of search. Meanwhile, the object of his search stood transfixed, like a rabbit caught in headlights, until finally, after what seemed like an age, the priest’s eyes alighted on him. Kennedy’s nostril hairs began to dance a demented hornpipe whilst one of his hands made a gesture towards O’Driscoll that was assuredly not a sign of the cross. As the priest’s mouth worked in a manic but silent pantomime, O’Driscoll saw rather than heard his name being invoked in a wrathful ecclesiastical bellow and his body began to experience a familiar sensation - the frantic fizzing and churning in his bowels as they began the process of turning to liquid.