Old God's Time

All his working life he had dealt with villains. After a few decades of that your faith in human nature is in the ground. It’s a premature burial, pre-dating your own. But he wanted to be a believer again, in something. He wanted to live in his wealth of minutes, the ones he had left anyhow.

That was the big thing. Father Joseph Byrne and Father Thaddeus Matthews, two jackals in a coop devouring little chickens. Filthy, relentless, feckless men who never paused a moment in their evil. Oh, he had known what was to be found there, in that pristine presbytery. Jackals, snakes, scorpions, monsters.

“People endured horrors, and then they couldn’t talk about them. The real stories of the world were bedded in silence. The mortar was silence and the walls were sometimes impregnable.”

“Enough time goes by and it is as if old things never happened. Things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into old God’s time, like the walkers walking so far along Killiney Strand that, as you watch them, there is a moment when they are only a black speck, and then they’re gone. Maybe old God’s time longs for the time when it was only time, the stuff of the clockface and the wristwatch. But that didn’t mean it could be summoned back, or should be.”

“He still felt the old instinct – professional distance. The curious aloofness he had perfected, especially in the vicinity of bloody crimes. When children were killed, or even animals. When young girls were struck down, felled by fists, by shoes. In the old days, when wives were bloodied and beaten, you were not to go further than the front door. Ah yes. You could check if a person was still breathing, but no more. A child of the house could be lathered into a state of utter distress – you had to leave that alone too. You learned these rules off the station sergeant, off the tough detectives. The lowliest of men were kings of women. Girls fleeing from laundries, children fleeing from orphanages, all had to be returned. There was no statute he knew of requiring him to do so. It was a matter beyond the law. It was what everyone wanted. That was a quare form of policing, but he had never done anything but buckle under. Never done anything, but just the once.”

Enough time goes by and it is as if old things never happened. Things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into old God's time, like the walkers walking so far along Killiney Strand that, as you watch them, there is a moment when they are only a black speck, and then they're gone. Maybe old God's time longs for the time when it was only time, the stuff of the clockface and the wristwatch. But that didn't mean it could be summoned back, or should be. He had been asked to reach back into memory, as if a person could truly do that.

Quoth the raven, never would be. Here was now, a light year removed from that reverberating day, and all the things that followed, all the hard things, the happy things, the happier things. The usual fog cleared a moment from his mind. The small hours were refining him down, like a rough whiskey. What would God want to take from his story, he wondered. St bloody Peter at his gate. What was important in all this, his life, his life, like any other life? He thought suddenly of all the detectives on the earth, and all the detectives that had been on the earth – would it be hundreds of thousands? Would they be herded into the detective enclosure? And made to race against each other like horses? All the detectives – the violent crimes, the rapes, the murders, the con jobs, the robberies, the frauds, the very waterspout, the waterfall, the great flood of crimes in human stories. The hubbub, the hubbub. That had so concerned them all. Like the waterfall in Powerscourt, pouring down, pouring down. And all these men, in all the languages of the world, all the races, all the forces, trying to peer in, to weigh up, to come to conclusions, to strike it lucky, cop a break, to squeak a case through by the skin of its teeth. What was their worth, their own weight? And what was at the heart of it? His life, his little life? The fog edged away from the shore of himself, the sea opened like the stage in a theatre, the helpful sun burned in its element, there was a truth told to him, a truth, in his curious age, in his palpable decay, that there at the heart of it, there at the heart of it, for ever and always, was June. Winnie and Joseph and June. But June.

It was a story of atrocities, certainly. It was almost beyond description, and he had laboured for years not to describe it, to anyone else, and more importantly to himself. Never to allow the little sequence of horrors to play in his brain. Think everything else before he thought of those things. Think of things that did not exist, talk to the tumbleweeds of souls that did not exist. See ghosts before telling that story. Clamp his mind shut with heavy Victorian metal clamps. Now no more. It was no longer possible to be a citizen of grief, his passport to grief was cancelled, he couldn’t enter there. Now he must be brave. Of course, unbeknownst to him, he had been brave all his life. That was true, but not true for him. The main drone of the pipes he had heard under everything for sixty years and more was alarm and confusion, like the very pith of battle. Now that was not so, so much. He wondered was there God involved? Had he been released from his ordeal? He didn’t know. He could be suspicious of the brightness in him, in his limbs, in his almost ecstasy, as being something slipped into him by a medicinal god, like a needle with a vaccine in it. He didn't know. Something else knew. It might as well have phoned him on the telephone. Come in, come in, you can row that boat no more. The current was against you. Here is a little harbour. Rest up there.