Ceili & the Priest.

Even on an evening like this with all the things going well and the good guy buying her drinks and taking her places she only dreamed of Ceili knew it couldn’t last she knew that it was all just one of those passing phases that she dreaded as a girl like the fact that her mother was going to die of cancer and her father too maybe of some heart disease if she was unlucky enough to outlive them and she knew then that she probably would and live to regret all the things she said and the things she did and how even the small sins of her childhood would later haunt her and torment her in her sleep and the vision of the priest Father Dulkenny with his stern features and his black rosary hanging from his thick belt and his eyes like dark olives and that thin lipped spoken utterance after confessions and how he always wanted her to say the Pater Noster five times in a row with a couple of Aves thrown in for good measure and the smell of the incense lingering in her nose as she knelt in the chapel and felt the priest’s hand about her buttocks and pretended nothing happened and her mother wouldn’t have believed her anyway not him being a priest and all with the words of herself meaning less or little against the holy Joe words of the priest she mused gazing up at the sky and seeing how far away the stars looked and how it was said that Pascal dreaded that vast expanse of night sky and her father would have surely have beaten the backside off of her if she mentioned such a thing about the priest especially in those days before the Vatican shake up or even later so she kept stumm and said nothing kept it to herself and when she knelt in chapel after that she made sure there were others around if she could dreading an empty chapel with the possibility of things happening again and as the evening air entered her lungs it brought back the evening outside the chapel where she was cornered by the priest and he told her she was a sinful girl and would go to Hell if she so much as told the lies again and that God wanted her to be silent and say nothing and that if her words were heard God would be angry with her she remembered weeping at the thought of Hell and all that fire and demons and not seeing her mother again not feeling her mother’s arms about her of her mother’s goodnight kisses or hear her father’s words of praise if she did well and told no lies and ate all her cabbage and said her prayers and having lit a cigarette she stood by the open window and exhaled the grey smoke and gazed out at the ever darkening evening sky and listened to the sounds of the far away traffic and distant voices of others either happy in Dublin City or suffering in the Hell she often dreaded out there somewhere in space where the priest she hoped resided with his black rosary burning a hole in the heart of his ever lying soul and behind her from the gramophone Zoot Sims was playing on his saxophone.1