Читать книгу Falling out of Heaven - John Lynch - Страница 12

I see her holding my young body down, her hand on the nape of my neck, forcing me to spit out the prayer. I remember her body shaking as she implored heaven for release.

‘Holy Jesus, we implore you…Holy Christ, fruit of the vine…’

‘Holy Jesus,’ I said, echoing her.

‘Holy Jesus…The one true Lamb…The one true God…Enter me, Lord…Fill me with the sweet Glory of your Love…Come to me, Jesus, in Love, in Sorrow.’

‘Mammy,’ I would say. ‘Mammy.’

Her eyes would glaze over, the look I used to see in the eyes of fish I caught, as they lay on the riverbank and death passed over them. Her head would move from side to side and a film of foam would cover her lips. I would hold her hand and squeeze it until my knuckles whitened. I felt as if I was holding on to her as she dangled above a steep drop and that I was her last hope.

Then I would feel her leave me, it passed through her body and into mine, the feeling of absence, of flight. She was no longer mine; she was beyond me. She had passed into trance. Then the noise would pour from her. Words half known, bastardised and tangled, child words, woman sounds, all fell from her lips, and God, always God, the word that kept coming, kept shining through like a flame on a dark hillside. It would last for minutes sometimes, her mouth working, sweat forming in the small well between our clasped palms.

I knew better than to say anything, I just kept my head bowed and waited for the storm of words and emotion to pass. Then she would fall silent, her body flopping forward as if she was a puppet whose strings had just been cut. The first time she did it, I panicked, thinking her dead. I had grabbed her, pulled at her white face and tugged at her hands.

‘Mammy, Mammy, I’m frightened.’

Then she would sigh and open her eyes and regard me. I would see myself reflected there, I looked so small and scared.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘The Lord is with us…All these things, son…All this pain…It’s sent to try us…’

‘Yes, Mammy.’

‘God sees it all…Remember that…There is nothing He doesn’t see.’

‘Yes, Mammy.’

I wanted to tell her that I understood even though I didn’t. As I knelt over her like a doctor tending a patient I remember wondering why I couldn’t see what she saw, feel what she felt. Why was I different, why had God excluded me?

‘Don’t tell your father,’ she said. She always said it.

‘I won’t.’

‘Promise?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good boy.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘What, son?’

‘That. The…praying.’

‘It’s like…’

‘Does it hurt?’

‘No, son…It’s beautiful.’

‘Do you see angels?’

‘Well, not really…I see light…I see the light…’

‘What light?’

‘It’s hard to explain.’

‘Try.’

‘Well…I see…I feel the power of God’s love…It’s like the summer sun on my face, only it’s forever, not just one season, or one day…And deep down in my heart I know that everything happens for a reason…That all the good things and all the bad things they all enter our hearts for a purpose. I suppose I feel safe…Like I’m on a big white cloud.’

‘Is Daddy there with you?’

‘Sometimes…’

‘Why only sometimes? Does God not like him?’

‘Don’t talk like that, son…God loves all his creatures, bad, good or otherwise.’

‘Does he like him even when he…’

‘When he what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What are you trying to say?’

‘When he does really bad things?’

‘Son, that’s when God loves him most of all.’

Code, that’s the way we live, tapping out cloaked messages to the ones we love. We never say it, the thing of something; we never tear the secret from its cave and lay it at the feet of the ones nearest to us. All those years ago as I sat with her she told me that God was by us, that He knelt with me. I felt the rage rise in me, and I wanted to tear down her belief, smash the altar of her faith. I wanted to stand and tell her that God didn’t exist and that if He did He was more like the devil than anything else. How could He be all love? How could He love the pig man who ruled our house as if he was an agent of the damned?