Demons Read Free

points in people’s lives are
like the beads on this handmade rosary of mine,’ she’d said. ‘Each
bead is different, unique. Each is important in its own way because
each is a milestone on the road to God. Remember that Andrea.’
    ‘ Yes Gran.’
    I don’t think it would
have occurred to me to disagree with her either, not then and not
at any time actually, but if I had thought of doing so I would nevertheless have
kept any rebellious ideas to myself. Gran was usually sweetness and
light, lovely, but if you seriously crossed her she could be as
sharp as tacks. A scary matriarch.
    ‘ The colours are pretty,
too,’ I said.
    ‘ Just like people’s lives,’
said Gran. ‘As they should be.’
    ‘ Pretty?’ I
asked.
    ‘ Full of colour,’ she said,
rather surprisingly.
    ‘Remember that.’
    I did.
     
    Forever
    Here is an example of my
thinking way too much about religion.
     
    Was being small-c catholic
close to, or very different from, being big-C Catholic, a member of
(big capitals) THE CHURCH OF ROME? Being catholic means you embrace
everything, the world, the stars, the universe, in time and out of
time.
    What if the Catholic Church was
nothing more than just another institution - ‘God-begun, man-run’,
as Mum often said - and, as with any human institution, subject to
laws of destruction and decay? And if the Catholic Church could
die, how close to death was it? And, if it died, what about the
small matter of its central teaching about life after death, life
everlasting, our eternal place in space? Would that still hold true
or would the possibility of Heaven (which at home we called the
Happy-Forever-After place) die with the Church?
    Did any of these questions
matter? Did they bother anyone much, Catholics included? I can’t speak
for anyone else. All I can say is that they mattered to me.
They bothered me.
Sometimes my head got tired of the roundabout way in which all
those bothersome thoughts swam around in it.
    The notion of the Happy-Forever-After place
had been in my head so long I couldn’t shake it out, even when I
got the chance.
     
    Contradictions
    When I was twelve, going on thirteen, and it
was time
    for me to move to high school Mum and Dad
said I could chose whether I went to Catholic St Anselm’s,
    girls only and way across town, or the
nearest State
    school, mixed gender and much closer to
home.
    I couldn’t believe it at
first. Choose !
    ‘ You’re old enough now to
start making up your own mind about these things,’ said
Mum.
    I guessed she was talking about more than
just which school I went to. It was as if there was a hidden
current flowing beneath her words. I could sense the cool, freeing
rush of water without actually sighting it
    ‘ What things ?’ I asked, to make it clear.
    ‘ We aren’t going to insist
you believe what we believe, not when you can think for yourself,’
said Dad. ‘That’s something we decided years ago.’
    I shouldn’t really have
been too surprised but I did start to feel uneasy, as if I was a
life raft that was just about to be untied from the boat it had
always been attached to. What was going on?
    ‘ We promised we’d bring you
up Catholic,’ said Mum.
    ‘ When you were baptised,’
Dad added. ‘And we’ve done the best we can, given the sort of
people we are. It’s going to be up to you now. What you decide for
yourself to be and what to believe in.’
     
    Learning to pray
    I went to the local Catholic primary and
intermediate school just down the road from where we lived. One
hundred and ninety-two kids, six and a half teachers, and a priest
who lived in the presbytery across the playground, an older man
named Father Brady. Some
    of the meaner kids laughed behind his back
and called
    him Farter Brady.
    Mum had gone to my school too, when she was
a
    kid. Those days, she said, it was run by
nuns, fierce, red-faced women, as she described them, who wore
    dark habits encircled by wide black belts
into which
    they poked their heavy,