The Divine Ryans by Wayne Johnston

Author:Wayne Johnston
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446465592
Publisher: Transworld

10

Momary did not appear in my dreams any more frequently after my defeat at Mary’s hands, but she was more frightening than before, more witch-like, it seemed to me, pursuing me with outstretched arms, almost close enough to look over my shoulder and see my Methuselah, on which I clamped one hand as I ran. Mary had told everyone of my defeat, but no-one had been more tickled by it than my mother, who said she hoped it would teach me a lesson. Uncle Reginald assured me that what he called my ‘day’ was coming, but Aunt Phil took every possible advantage of my low spirits, almost convincing me to write a letter to Father Francis.

One Saturday, not long after what had become known as ‘the showdown on Fleming Street’, I was home by myself when Aunt Phil came back from Reg Ryan’s and told me we were ‘going out’.

‘Where?’ I said.

‘Never mind,’ she said. Taking me by the hand, she led me to the bathroom, where she performed emergency grooming. Standing me on a stool, she bent me backwards over the sink, somehow manoeuvred my head beneath the tap, then turned the water on, the cold water, which matted my hair to my head, so that when she finally released me and had me face the mirror, I looked like some grade-school vampire. She had me put on my blazer and my slacks, then took me by the hand again, leading me out of the house and down Fleming Street.

‘Where are we going?’ I said. ‘We’re not going to Reg Ryan’s are we?’ Aunt Phil said nothing.

‘Mom said you’re not supposed to take me any more,’ I said, recalling, as Uncle Reginald put it, that my mother had declared a ‘moratorium’ on wakes.

‘Your mother gave me her permission,’ Aunt Phil said. I tried to pull away from her but she held my hand tighter.

When I thought of all those establishments Aunt Phil might have owned and which I might have had free use of throughout my childhood, the fact that she owned a funeral home was very hard to take. She had been dragging me off to Reg Ryan’s since I was five, my parents having not so much approved of her methods as overlooked them. I felt it was entirely possible that I held the world record for most dead bodies seen by a nine-year-old, most time spent in the company of dead people. If it was enough that other boys observe Ash Wednesday once a year, Uncle Reginald once asked her, why did I have to go to wakes once a month? Children, but boys especially, Aunt Phil told him, could never be reminded of their mortality too often.

Aunt Phil believed that men were superior to women, but that, in the very thing that made them superior, lay also the flaw that could destroy them. Men were stronger, yes, but with that strength came pride. It was pride, she said, that had flung Satan headlong from heaven into hell.

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