‘IF THE VIRGIN Mary was assumed bodily into heaven, then where does She go to the toilet?’
‘What did you say?’ Daddy is looking at me.
‘If the Virgin Mary was assumed bodily into heaven, then where does She go to the toilet?’ and my father has hit me before I see his hand move.
This was shortly after we came back from Ada’s, when I was in the height of my religious phase.
I remember it because, although my father used to hit his children all the time, more or less, it was never personal. He might slap three at a time and let the fourth go or he might stomp among us with his hand raised as we ran, shrieking, around him. The boys were different, of course, but in the main my father hit us, not because he was in charge, but because we were in charge. That is why, when Kitty starts throwing accusations around about hitting, I can not quite sympathise.
But, BOK! the sound of all sound being sucked away from the side of your head, a numb silence that is cut through, after a while, by an expanding ring of pain.
The question was almost worth it, though-because it is the only evidence I possess that our father was a Catholic. Of course Mammy is a Catholic, in the way that Mammys are, but for fourteen years or so I sat by or behind my father, on a wooden church bench, every Sunday morning and in all that time I never saw his lips move. I never heard him pray aloud, or saw him bend his head, or do anything that might be considered remarkable were he sitting on the top deck of a bus. When it was time for Communion he stood at the end of the bench as we trooped by, like letting sheep out at a gate, but I don’t know if he ever followed us up to the Communion rail. My father attended church in his official capacity. If I went looking for his personal belief I would not know where to begin, or in what part of his body it might inhere.
I think about him at Liam’s removal. Ernest is on the altar in his priestly robes. The embroidery down his front has a Mayan theme, and he looks very fine.
The diminishing Hegartys are sitting in the front row in order of age. Ernest enjoins us all to pray and I place my father’s stubby hands together, I fumble them a little around his lips, ‘Oh Lord,’ I say in his voice: but it all lacks conviction-which is to say, his conviction. My father was never pious and I do not think he was afraid of hellfire-so when he had the sex that produced the twelve children and seven miscarriages that happened inside my mother’s body (which is kneeling now at the end of the line), then that was all he was doing-he was having sex. It was nothing to do with what the priests told him or didn’t tell him, it was just something he needed to do, or wanted to do; it was just something he felt he deserved.
He did love my mother. There is always that unpalatable fact-the fact that my father loved my mother, and she loved him right back. But he did not love her enough to leave her alone. No. My father, I suspect, had sex the way his children get drunk-which is to say, against his better judgement; not for the pleasure of it, so much as to make it all stop.
This is the nearest I can get to the impulse that made the child who now lies in the coffin in the centre of the aisle. Because Liam, in his box, is a boy again. He does not fill it more than three-quarters of the way down. The years are drifting away from him. The years are being metabolised, until he pees the last of them out, standing by the railings of the Basin in Broadstone, at nine years old.
Wheee!
All the Hegarty children have a hangover, including the one in the box. It is a very peaceful, precious kind of feeling; a swelling of the senses, between pain and warmth. Liam has the biggest one, of all, of course, because Liam finally got really wasted. He got a skinful. Liam finally got out of his head. He will be sleeping his one off, for a while.
At the end of the line, Mammy has been rendered transparent by sweetness and suffering. Bea stands beside her, attending church in an official capacity, just like Daddy used to do. Next is Mossie who says the responses out clear. The rest of us mumble and are silent. On one side of me, Kitty is hunched and fervent (but fervently what-that is the question), while on the other, Ita sits, her a mind like a stone.
I try to believe in something, just for the heck of it. I pluck some absolute out of the air, some expanding thought that will open in my head like ether-God, or the future, or the greater good. I bow my head and try to believe that love will make it better, or if love won’t then children will. I turn from the high to the humble and believe, for many seconds at a time, in the smallness and the necessity of being a mother.
But it’s all a bit nice, for a Hegarty. Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find-blood, nails, a bit of anguish.
So I catch my anguish. I look at Liam’s coffin and try to believe in love.
Not easy.
I do remember God’s love, that year in Ada’s when I was eight, and Liam was nine. I remember it very clearly. Sister Benedict told us to take Jesus ‘into our hearts’ and I did, no problem. I check my heart now, and I find that there is still a feeling there, of something hot and struggling. I roll my eyes back under my closed lids, and there is the sense of opening in the middle of my forehead. The chest thing is like fighting for words and the forehead thing is pure and empty, like after all the words have been said.
There now.
Belief. I have the biology of it. All I need is the stuff to put in there. All I need are the words.
After Daddy hit me across the side of the head, he turned and walked away, in utter silence. He may have shocked himself. He certainly shocked me. But the truth was that I did not believe in heaven then, and never would. And when I thought about hell, it was just very quiet.