Chapter 13
‘Well Brendan, what about a drive?’
My dad could pick up on my moods but had absolutely no idea how to deal with them.
Instead of trying to talk about things he’d suggest something like a walk, a film or food.
Since getting my provisional driving licence and getting insured on his car, going for a drive was the latest addition, which he’d been suggesting several times a week since September.
I guess I needed the practice for my test and I guess he needed to feel like he was doing something to help me.
‘Before it gets too dark?’ he said, jangling the keys at me.
Mum was still in bed in the roof space from her night shift the night before and, as had now become routine, wouldn’t be getting up until late, allowing no time to spend with Dad and me as she rushed about getting ready for the next night shift.
It was hard to be in the house with Mum not being the Mum we knew from before Granny died.
Maybe Dad needed the driving lessons too but for different reasons.
‘Yeah alright,’ I said.
We’d been doing our lessons in the car park of St Matthew’s church.
There were no weeknight Masses so it was usually empty, free for me to attempt three-point turns, trying not to stall every five minutes.
In those December late afternoons it was gold-pink light at the beginning of our lessons and black as night by the end.
It was on the cusp of that night darkness when I came to yet another chugging stop.
‘Stall number five,’ Dad said, ‘you’re bad but you’re not that bad.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Ah I’m only coddin’ you.’ That was his way of saying he was only joking.
I didn’t start up the engine immediately and neither of us said anything.
I was probably supposed to fill the silence with words.
Words that told the story of my first day with Ronan.
Words that my dad would listen to with great attention before he said some back to me.
And then his words would somehow take all the disappointment away.
But that’s not something we do very well where I come from, so we sat in silence as a car drove down the main road that ran alongside the car park; its headlights flashed across our faces then turned us red with its taillights as it sped away.
I remember watching a film one time, an American one, and it had a scene where a dad was teaching his son to drive.
The dad was saying things that sounded like instructions for the car but you could tell they were really instructions for life and it looked like the son understood what his dad was really saying.
I’m not sure if the son passed his driving test or not but I remember the film had a happy ending.
I looked over at my dad. He was staring out the window looking up at the darkening sky.
‘Drops down quick,’ he said, meaning the light, ‘no stretch in the day a-tall.’
I started the engine up. The headlights on full beam stretched out across the empty car park and illuminated the dark stained-glass windows of St Matthew’s on the other side.
I let the handbrake off, clutch down, shifted into first gear, gently lifted my foot off the clutch while pressing lightly on the accelerator and moved slowly, very slowly, forward.
I kept smooth, steady and straight. When we reached the other side with the grey stone wall of St Matthew’s ten feet or so away, I pressed my foot on the brake, shifted into neutral, pulled up the handbrake and settled my feet on the floor.
‘Can we go home now?’ I said.
We were both staring ahead at the church through the windscreen.
‘Aye, let’s call it a day,’ he said. ‘Or a night,’ because it was so dark it felt like night.
We unbuckled our seatbelts in unison and opened our doors to swap places.
We crossed each other in front of the car like spotlighted actors on a stage.
I looked down to shield my eyes and saw Dad’s boots pass mine across the ground.
A glint sparkled where he’d stepped. It looked like a piece of metal.
I bent down to pick it up. It was a holy medal, round and silver, no bigger than my thumbnail.
I could feel raised bumps on one side of it, probably moulded with an image of some saint like those kinds of medals usually are, but I couldn’t see it properly because of how tarnished the silver was.
It must have fallen from a parishioner’s pocket on their way to or from Mass.
I held it in the headlight beam to get a better look.
‘What’s that?’ Dad’s voice came from the dark where his shape was just visible by the driver’s side door.
‘It’s a medal,’ I said into the dark, ‘a holy medal.’
‘Let me see,’ he said, coming forward and flicking into sight as he entered the light again and took the medal in his rough hand. ‘Oh that’s one of them medals off someone’s rosary beads – you remember your granny had one on hers?’
‘It’s on the ones she gave me.’
‘Aye it’s, eh, it’s a what-do-ya-call-it, a holy relic; it’s got a bit of cloth off one of the saints or the Pope or someone inside, just a wee bit of something, a wee fragment.’
‘Oh right,’ I said as if I didn’t know what it was, ‘just like a wee bit of the Pope’s robe or something like that maybe?’
‘Aye or something maybe the Pope blessed or something and someone – some priest maybe in Rome or somewhere – put it inside a medal with a wee window on it, you see it there?’ he said, holding the medal up and displaying the glass circle in the middle of it with a piece of white cloth inside.
‘So then whoever owns this has a piece of the real deal, you know, because I’ll tell you what, for some people believing isn’t enough, they need the genuine article. ’
‘Even if it’s only a wee bit like that?’
‘Even just a tiny wee bit,’ he said. ‘Do you want to keep it or what or what do you want to do with it?’
‘Well I have Granny’s one anyway, do you want it?’
‘Augh no sure the house is coming down with all them things.’
I didn’t know what he meant by that. Mum had kept a lot of Granny’s religious things in a shoebox up on the shelf in their bedroom cupboard, maybe he meant that.
‘OK, I’ll just leave it back where it was then, and maybe whoever lost it will find it again.’
‘Dead on,’ he said, and walked back into the dark and I heard the car door close.
I bent as if to place the medal back on the ground but kept hold of it and slid it into my back pocket as I straightened and walked out of the light and into the dark to sit in the passenger seat with my dad for him to drive me home.