A Month of Sundays Read online

  Their pre-match ritual consisted of sixteen pints and a large doner kebab, they breakfasted on thousand calorie fry-ups, or, in the case of O’Driscoll and Quinn, worse, and their immediate pre-match warm-up consisted of a couple of fags and a communal bout of coughing. The only way in which they emulated their professional counterparts was in the renunciation of sexual activity the night before a match, but they observed this “love ban” not in a spirit of denial, but because for the most part, they were too unattractive to find a partner for such an act. Players of all shapes and sizes dotted the playing area before kick-off, flopping about like stranded aquatic creatures, and once the game was underway, great gobbets of vomit would line the edge of the pitch as the players evacuated the previous night’s beer, that morning’s breakfast, or both. It was, in short, a scene as quintessentially English as the fabled summer village cricket scene, just a bit less poetic.

  O’Driscoll and Quinn arrived with just a few minutes to spare and before them, an eclectic collection of figures could be seen lumbering towards the field of play, nylon kits straining at the seams. The opposing team was already on the pitch, engaged in a warm-up routine which appeared to involve several players huddling around a single cigarette and after a perfunctory kick about, the match started only fifteen minutes late, which was, for Division 3 of the Chiswick and District Sunday League, something of an achievement.

  Within a couple of minutes of play starting, there was a crashing collision involving Quinn and a rotund skinhead with tattoos and this set up nicely the bruising and over-physical encounter that was to follow. Towards the end of the first half, Sweeney, who was playing in goal, came out to punch a cross and landed a devastating right on his own full back, knocking him out cold, with the ball fortunately sailing past everyone and behind for a goal kick. The application of large quantities of freezing cold water from a dirty bucket had the desired effect, with the left back deciding that unconsciousness was, on balance, an overrated condition.

  As he munched a scotch egg at half-time, Quinn identified the opposing number eight as the player whose pace and movement in midfield was in danger of turning the match against them and the manager looked meaningfully at Rocky, who was known, not without reason, as the hard man of the team. O’Driscoll, squatting on his haunches and sucking air into lungs that years of smoking had rendered unfit for purpose, wondered why it was that grown men indulged in such a cold, wet and generally unpleasant pastime. It was partly the fact that on the rare occasion when one played a blinder, or scored a cracking goal, the resultant high made all the cold, wet and unpleasant times worthwhile, but equally it was the feel-good factor in the bar afterwards whatever the result, the beer flying down and the satisfied feeling of a body stretched to the limits of its endurance.

  Within five minutes of the second half starting, the opposing number eight received the ball in the centre circle and pivoted in preparation to releasing a through ball. At precisely this moment, coming in from the left, Rocky hit him with a tackle whose concussion could be felt on the next pitch. To call it a tackle didn’t do it justice - it was really three tackles in one, involving the simultaneous use of the shoulder, the hip and the foot. The number eight’s frame slid slowly and silently down the length of Rocky’s body and into a crumpled heap on the floor as Rocky raised his arms in mock innocence, directing a “Sorry ref, couldn’t stop, ref!” at the middle-aged official as he approached. The hapless number eight was carried off and the referee awarded the other team a free kick and Rocky, a finger wagging admonition to be more careful - this was, after all in the 1990s, when football was still understood to be a contact sport.

  The foul and its aftermath were the only incidents of note in the second half, and the game meandered to a 1-1 draw, both goals being the result of defensive incompetence rather than attacking verve. As they sat in the cold draughty dressing room afterwards, Rocky lit up a cigarette with the satisfied air of a craftsman who has successfully carried out a particularly challenging piece of work. “Bloody hell, that tackle was dead late, Rock,” said one of the lads, to which Rocky replied with a shake of the head, “I know, I should have done it in the first half.”

  A couple of hours later, fortified by an after match drink in The North Star, O’Driscoll found himself back at the church helping parents deposit their offspring in that area where the confessional boxes, two permanent and four which had been erected temporarily to cope with the extra demand, had been set up. As the pews filled with serious childish faces and bored adult ones, O’Driscoll saw Karen moving towards the confessional area and his heart lurched. He gave her a thumbs-up to signal that everything was going well and she smiled back at him before sitting several pews ahead of him and to his right. He took his own seat, shuddering at the memory of the preceding Sunday’s fiasco and resolving that this week nothing similar would occur.

  Shortly afterwards, Father Kennedy made his entrance at the front of the church, followed by five other figures wearing vestments who then seated themselves on one side of the altar. Introducing them as priests from a nearby order who had given up their free time to help manage the large numbers expected, Kennedy explained how the service would work. “Thank ye all for coming. We want to make this experience as positive as we can for the little ones.” He smiled in the direction of the children and some of the more nervous began to whimper. “We will therefore be allowing parents to support their children in any way they like, although of course they will not be able to enter the confessional with their young ones. Members of staff will also be on hand to help the children, and as part of that process, they will partake of the sacrament themselves.”

  It was only then that O’Driscoll remembered he himself would have to make an act of confession and he mouthed a not inappropriate, “Jesus Christ!” and wondered whether he would be able to remember the correct form of words. At that moment the phrase, “Bless me father, for I have sinned...” swam into his mind and he heaved a sigh of relief. At least he would be able to begin, and after that it didn’t really matter what he confessed to because the priests didn’t know him and would never meet him again.

  Then he remembered that one of the priests certainly did know him and would be meeting him again and it dawned on him he might be about to enter a place of confession and confide his innermost thoughts to the Ayatollah of Saint Catherine’s, a man he had recently observed hoovering up great quantities of white pudding while flirting (if that’s what it was) with his septuagenarian housekeeper. Fuck that for a game of soldiers, was his initial thought, and he crossed himself at having used profanity in the house of God, whilst wondering whether the church differentiated in its sliding scale of penances between the sin of saying “fuck” in church, and only thinking it. It was an interesting theological point, and one worth discussing if he could only get out of this bloody madhouse.

  He took some deep breaths and forced himself to calm down. The idea of making a confession to Father Kennedy was clearly preposterous, but there were six priests, which made the probability of drawing Kennedy five to one against, excellent odds. Moreover, he could observe which cubicle the cantankerous cleric went into and avoid that one to make even those odds redundant. Breathing a sigh of relief, O’Driscoll sat back to await developments. There might even be an opportunity to indulge in a brief, although of course decorous, bearing in mind where he was, fantasy about Karen, whose delicious rear view he could observe ahead of him.

  The first intimation that his relief had been premature was when he heard sounds indicating the priests were entering the confessional boxes from behind, rendering them invisible to the congregation. O’Driscoll consoled himself with the thought that it was still five to one against. It was as if the roles had been reversed at Cheltenham yesterday and he was now in the role of a bookie, with six runners in the race and only one that would cause him damage. It was easy money really, he reassured himself, but his pulse still quickened as he moved along the pe
w and by the time he was next in line, he observed the six confessional boxes in the way that someone playing Russian roulette might look at the chambers of a revolver. The sight of a small figure exiting one of the temporary boxes signaled that it was his turn, and as he stood up, O’Driscoll took this as a good omen. Kennedy would surely have claimed home advantage and gone into a permanent box rather than one of the flimsy contraptions hastily assembled from balsa wood screens.

  The moment he stepped into the small dark space, however, he recognized with a sinking feeling the same combined aroma of bacon and beeswax his olfactory nerve had picked up in the sacristy the previous week. Mrs. O’Reilly’s devotion to the cleaning agent was so complete that she regularly applied it to shoes, vestments and any other items of clothing which presented themselves before her during her rounds. O’Driscoll’s nerves frayed even further as he recognized the well-known growl, although it was evidently intended to reassure as it intoned the words “Come in my child,” and as he knelt before the wire grill, he struggled to retain his composure.

  “Bless me Father, for I have sinned,” he began, trying to disguise his voice, and then ground to a halt. The next line of the incantation was supposed to inform the priest how long it had been since one had received the sacrament, but O’Driscoll quailed at the thought of saying, “It is twelve years since my last confession”. The alternative would be to lie in the confessional, and enough latent Catholicism remained from his childhood to make this a distinctly unattractive proposition. He struggled to find a way through this theological minefield, but just when he was in danger of becoming completely unmanned, O’Driscoll suddenly saw the light. “Bless me Father, for I have sinned,” he repeated, but he now spoke in a voice that was assured and confident, “It is one week since my last confession.”

  The moment he heard the words, “And do you have anything to confess?” O’Driscoll replied with lightning speed, “I have lied, Father,” and then sank back with a sigh of relief. He had cancelled out the lie by confessing to it, and what’s more, by confessing to it within seconds of telling it, so surely it hardly counted? There was, reflected O’Driscoll at this point as childhood memories came flooding back, much to be said for the Catholic Church’s attitude towards the redemption of sin. You could, when it came down to it, do what you liked all week as long as you confessed it at the weekend, thereby entering into a state of grace and ensuring the salvation of your soul should you be unfortunate enough to get run over by a 207 on the way home. You could even plan a sin and have it expunged from your record by the simple expedient of saying, “I am sorry.” O’Driscoll was far from being the first member of his faith to reflect that this was a most convenient arrangement. Staunch Catholics down the ages had used it as a guiding star to orientate their moral compasses and generations unborn would, no doubt, continue to do so.

  Having admitted to his confessor that he had committed the sin of telling whoppers, O’Driscoll was conscious of a growing silence in the tiny dark space and realized he needed as a matter of urgency to fill it. And something else was troubling him - the need to somehow disguise his voice so Kennedy would not be able to identify him as the perpetrator of the crimes to which he was about to confess. Racking his brains for a regional accent to disguise his voice, he remembered an interview on Football Focus the previous day with the footballer Paul Gascoigne, and, his mind latching greedily onto that image, he plunged, without further thought, into a Geordie dialect, or the nearest approximation of it that he could provide.

  “Well, Father,” he began, and was rather pleased that he had contrived to pronounce “father” to rhyme with “blather”, “the thing is, Father...,” he went on, frantically racking his brains to think of a sin to confess and the vocabulary with which to confess it. “I... I... OOST!” he blurted out, and realizing that this was not a very promising start, took a deep breath and made a conscious effort to gather himself together. At that moment a thought - nonattendance at church - occurred to him and he once more latched greedily onto what seemed a nice, safe topic.

  “Well, Father,” he said again, wrestling with the syntax necessary to frame this concept appropriately, “the thing is, Father, I ... er ...I divven ...er... I divven bin gannin doon to chorch, like.”

  The effect of these words on the other side of the grill was to produce a lengthy silence which was eventually broken by Kennedy saying slowly and clearly, “If English is not your first language my son, we can still help you...”

  “Noo, noo, Father, man,” said O’Driscoll desperately. “I’ll taak a bit more sloo, like,” he went on, adding, after a slight hesitation, “... though, but!”

  He was beginning to realize Geordie may not have been the best dialect to choose - the only words he could think of were “bonny lad,” and “pet,” either of which, if spoken to the priest in the current setting, might lead to a misunderstanding. By now, it was too late to substitute another regional accent, he would just have to do the best he could with the one he had.

  “Well, Father,” he began again, feeling that at least with this form of address, he was on safe ground. Trying to make his voice sound less like Paul Gascoigne and more like Alan Shearer, he went on, “Well, I’ve bin neglectin’ the missus and the bairns a bit, you naa, going oot on the toon drinking the broon.”

  He stopped at this point, aware that it now sounded as if he was delivering his confession in rhyming couplets, but as he opened his mouth to continue, he became aware that some kind of disturbance was taking place outside the cubicle. An adult voice could be heard speaking in tones both cross and imploring, “Now Michael, you promised you would and it’ll only take a few minutes.”

  “Don’t want to!” answered a childish voice loudly, “It’s dark and smelly in there, and anyway I don’t like that man, I’m scared of him.”

  “But it’s only Father Kennedy?” responded the adult voice. “What is there to be scared of?”

  “He’s fat and hairy and ugly!” came the emphatic rejoinder. “And I’m not going in there!” It was evident that some physical pressure was being applied for there came the sound of a fierce struggle and a moment later, the walls of the flimsy confessional began to gyrate wildly. Within a couple of seconds, the seesawing motion had gained such a momentum that the whole contraption began to rock back and forth on its axis and, accompanied by a loud tearing sound, it suddenly collapsed around the priest and his confessor, leaving them sitting in splendid isolation less than a foot from one another. It was hard to say which of them was the more surprised, but as the priest cast his mind over the confessional conversation that he had just taken part in, and it dawned on him who his confessor had actually been, his face darkened with anger and his nasal hairs commenced a monstrous tango.

  “O’Driscoll!” he breathed and he struggled to find words to express himself as the full weight of the transgression revealed itself to him. Eventually, he managed to spit out the words, “You, O’Driscoll! It was you all along!”

  O’Driscoll’s mind raced as it sought desperately to find a way out of the nightmare. For a moment, he considered claiming that he had just stumbled into the confessional box after colliding with a man in a black and white striped shirt carrying a bottle of brown ale, but even he realized that this would not wash.

  Father Kennedy was working himself up into a fearful lather and his face grew purple with righteous anger as he hissed, “O’Driscoll, you have profaned the confessional!”

  “No, you don’t understand,” protested O’Driscoll, but the tide of the priest’s anger rolled over him.

  “You have made mockery of a blessed sacrament with your... games,” thundered Kennedy. Still frantically seeking an exit strategy that would allow him to escape with his life, O’Driscoll wondered whether, because his speech had obviously been so incomprehensible to the priest, he could claim he had been speaking in tongues. Perhaps if he lay down and rolled about on the floor shouti
ng out random bits of Geordie, they might consider him “born again” and proclaim it a miracle. But even as the thought struck him, he remembered that the Catholic Church didn’t really do speaking in tongues and born again and things like that, they left all that stuff to the Protestants. The only remaining device he could come up with was to faint on the spot, and hope when they eventually revived him, his indiscretion would, in the general confusion, be forgotten.

  But it was too late. Kennedy was so incandescent with rage that although the resemblance to a pig was still apparent, he now looked like a porker who has been fed so much protein-enriched food that it is literally about to explode. “You will burn in hell for all eternity,” he roared and there was a silence in the church as he gathered himself for his final sally. “O’Driscoll!” thundered the priest, his voice thick with rage as he delivered his coup de grace. “You are a tinker and a gypsy!”

  Not for the first time, O’Driscoll wanted to ask the priest why he differentiated between two words that were to him interchangeable terms used to describe travelling minorities, but looking at the priest’s face, he decided now would not be the time to make such a semantic enquiry, and anyway, there was no time for further conversation, for Kennedy swept away from the confessional area and was gone, his vestments rustling reprovingly in his wake.

  As he bent down to play his part in repairing the chaos caused by the falling screens, O’Driscoll’s heart sank. Word would spread like wildfire that he had blasphemed against the church and made a mockery of all it stood for by impersonating Paul Gascoigne in a confessional box. It was, put like that, a damning charge and one that would surely end once and for all any lingering hopes he might have had of getting that contract for the following year. He would thus face a bleak future, unable to continue worshipping the woman he loved from a distance without being able to summon the courage to actually do something about it and equally unable to fund the trips to The North Star that he considered so important to his emotional wellbeing. As he surveyed the carnage around him and reflected that they would probably blame him for the collapsing confessional box as well, John O’Driscoll felt a familiar sensation - it was the churning of his bowels as once again, they began the metamorphosis that would reduce them to liquid form.