Demons Read Free Page B

betrayed by her fallen star.
    ‘ Why aren’t we saying the
rosary anymore?’ I asked Mum and Dad.
    ‘ We didn’t think we were
doing it justice,’ replied Mum.
    I’d heard the word justice many times before
(I’ll tell you why in a moment) and I already had my own idea of
what it meant, but somehow it didn’t seem to fit in with not
praying the rosary together anymore.
    ‘ I think we’d be more
serious about it if we said it to ourselves,’ Dad added, also not
very
    convincingly.
    For a few days I tired saying it by myself
but it was too difficult for a not-yet-seven year old to
    sustain. I sometimes made it to the end of a
whole
    decade, but more often than not I’d give up
after only eight or nine Hail Marys.
    However, for a long time I kept those
sapphire beads, kept them safe in their nest.
     
    An extract from Chris’s notebook
    Dear Andrea
    I never really thought I’d be seeing you
again so when I did, a short/long three years later, I’d convinced
myself I’d forgotten all about you. Walking into that classroom and
being face to face with you, it was as if the solid ground fell
away from under me and I was left suspended in emptiness, out of
orbit or, like the Greek hero Odysseus in his journeys, being
sucked into Charybdis’ whirlpool, drugged and deliciously
abandoned, like him, in the land of the Lotus-Eaters.
    If I believed in miracles I would have
called this chance meeting one. Instead, I called it fate.
    After three years, I found out on the first
day that your name was Andrea.
     
    Turning points
    The day I arrived on the scene was a turning
point, for Gran if not for me. I don’t remember it of course. Does
anyone?
    But I’m told it was on March 17, St
Patrick’s Day. What a coincidence! Mum and Dad couldn’t have timed
it better. St Patrick is the patron saint of Catholic Ireland,
where my grandmother came from and where my Dad was born.
    I was Gran’s first and only grandchild, the
one she thought she would never have.
    She blessed God and praised my parents, I
think
    in that order. And, afterwards, for her to
go on living
    in this strange land was never quite so bad,
or strange, again.
    I was given all the credit but wasn’t
responsible for any of it.
    Working backwards, I was
actually conceived in a turning point year, the year in which the South African
rugby team, the Springboks, came and went and New Zealand changed
forever. Mum and Dad met at an anti-tour march. Anti-tour,
anti-apartheid. Dad, aged twenty-six, had come out here to settle,
leaving the so-called Irish Troubles behind. Mum, at thirty, was
ready to settle down.
    They were both what you might call
professional protestors. Mum since uni days, and Dad since forever
because, being born and bred in Northern Ireland, he was, as he
described it himself, ‘bottle-fed on the milk of rebellion’.
    The day my parents met they were both
wearing motorcycle helmets to ward off the long batons of the
police, they had sewn peace symbol patches onto their jackets and
were carrying opposite ends of the same banner. They were on the
front line and, the following day, on the front page of the
newspaper, battered, bruised and bloodied but unbowed.
    Yes, everything changed
that year. For the country and for them, personally. They were
felled by police batons and afterwards fell in love, got married
and, ten months later, hey presto, moi .
    Daughter of protestors for social, political
and racial justice. Granddaughter of traditional Irish
    Catholic matriarch and daughter of Catholic
parents. Good Catholic Girl. Yet even though I hardly ever rocked
the boat, either as a child or as an early
    teenager, I’m sure that rebel thoughts had
always run
    through my head. I mean, how could they not?
I was
    genetically programmed
to be a rebel
but, during the
    first dozen or more years
of my life, what sort of a rebel remained a mystery. I was destined to surprise
everyone, including myself.
     
    Photo opportunity
    Funny how one thing leads to