The Challenge!

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A sneak preview of the first few pages of my new novel which will be completed in 2025.

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When an Irish parish priest, a Scottish state school headteacher and an English local government politician, none of whom has ever met the others, are invited to a clandestine meeting in the Cotswolds, the question is... why?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.

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Father Dara McGuire, the forty-five-year-old parish priest of the Church of Saint Gonzaga, in the tranquil village of Ballygomera, experienced, for the first time in his ecclesiastical life, a sudden crisis of faith the morning Danny O’Leary disgraced himself in the confessional box. Danny hadn’t been right for some time, poor soul. In fact, he’d been away with the fairies – as his fellow parishioners liked to call it – for the past few years and Father Dara, not one given to the nuances of impaired mental faculty brought about by a love affair with the demon drink, had no concept of how debilitating and progressive alcoholism could be. The undeniable fact is that Danny had defecated in the sacred confessional box and Father Dara McGuire was determined to listen to no one who suggested that the cause may have been entirely unintentional or an unfortunate manifestation of his condition.

‘If there is a God at all,’ the priest mumbled to himself, ‘he’d never have allowed such an abomination to happen. Sure, it would never have happened in Rome!’

So, Father Dara, minutes after the incident, removed his green stole and, without a word, stepped silently from his section of the dark confessional box into the cool, dimly lit interior of St. Gonzaga.

‘Holy mother of God!’ announced a smartly-dressed middle-aged woman, as she opened the door to the confessional and ricocheted backwards as if she’d been hit in the stomach.

‘Father, someone’s committed a gross mortal sin in the confessional! Dear Lord, I need to get some fresh air.’

And with that, she turned and hurried to the door of the church.

Father Dara set off towards the safety of the sacristy.

‘Where are you going, Father?’ asked a young farm-hand, next in the queue of assorted villagers waiting to unburden the crimes that had stained their souls.’

Dara stopped, turned and stared at him. ‘Where am I going? I’m going as far away from this place as I can: a place where not even God can find me and I can get some peace.’

The rest of the queue of penitents looked up from their silent prayers and stared in Dara’s direction, as if one hand had lifted the strings attached to the heads of twenty puppets.

‘Going away, father?’ enquired a female parishioner.

‘That’s right, Mrs. O’Sullivan.’

‘But, what about my confession?’

‘Don’t you worry, Mrs. O’Sullivan, the good Lord knows exactly what you’ve been up to, so no need to share the sordid details with me today.

‘So what about my penance then?’

Dara thought for a moment. ‘Get yourself into that confessional box and give it a bloody good scrub out with disinfectant.’

‘Scrub out the confessional box?’ she enquired in disbelief.

‘That’s right,’ replied Dara, ‘The Pope’s introduced a new tariff, community service.

‘Community service?’ queried Mrs. O’Sullivan. ‘I’ve committed a few venial sins, Father, not GBH.’

Father Dara ignored the plea for clemency. ‘Oh, and five Hail Marys.’

And at that, he turned and walked to the sanctity of the sacristy, smiling mischievously.

        The years had been kind to Dara, for although he was approaching the half-century milestone, the sun had largely overlooked him and thus was free of the ultra-violet damage associated with the compulsive sun-worshipper. The truth was that the sun never shone long enough in Ballygomera for anyone to move a step up the pigmentation scale beyond that of albino. It was said by some, in jest, that the abundance of ginger-haired folk in the village was down to their having contracted a form of rust, courtesy of the incessant horizontal rain. People had often remarked on how much Father Dara McGuire resembled a middle-aged Kenneth Williams, without the flared nostrils and metallic whine.

As he struggled out of the heavy cassock, he leant forward and examined his features in the hefty Victorian mirror that had hung in the Sacristy for almost a century, the top right-hand corner damaged by one of his air rifle-wielding predecessors twenty years before while using the head chorister for target practice. The same deranged priest who had damaged the slates adorning the pinnacle of the centuries-old steeple using, on that occasion, a two-two rifle to shoot at the cockerel sitting astride the weather vane to watch it spin when he scored a direct hit. He was moved to another parish following a complaint from the father of another chorister: something about a pellet embedded in the boy’s thigh.

‘Sure, you’re a handsome beast, right enough, Dara,’ he remarked to himself.

‘Father, who are you talking to?’ enquired Mrs. O’Sullivan, who had slipped into the Sacristy.

‘To God,’ he replied.

‘Sure that confessional’s in a terrible state, Father; a terrible state, so it is.’

‘It is that,’ he replied, ‘and you’ll be rewarded with a few years remission from the tedium of Purgatory, Mrs. O’Sullivan, and that’s got to be something to look forward to at your age.’

‘I’ve no plans to go just yet, Father, although I dare say that the penance you’ve just inflicted on me will have reduced my lifespan quite considerably. Have you a bucket and some disinfectant, Father?’

‘I have that, and before you go spreading rumours, I was not responsible for that abomination, do you understand? It’s not even my side of the box.’

Mrs. O’Sullivan removed her coat, rolled up her sleeves, assembled her armoury and squeezed past the priest. ‘I’m not one to be spreading rumours, Father,’ she mumbled, ‘that’s your housekeeper’s job; she has a right wicked tongue in her mouth, that one!’

Mrs. O’Sullivan stopped and looked back at the priest. ‘Is there anything wrong, father?’

He smiled, still staring into the mirror and drew a comb through the neat undulating waves of his mass of silver hair.

‘Everything’s absolutely fine, Mrs. O’Sullivan. Now, you’d better be getting on with your penance. I’ve some packing to do.’

‘Packing, are you going somewhere, Father?’

‘I am that.’ His departure was known at this stage only to the bishop, who’d agreed to the sabbatical

‘But who’ll listen to my confession?’

Father Dara patted her on the shoulder. ‘My housekeeper will listen to your confession, now be off with you.’

‘Will you be away long, Father?’

‘In the immortal words of the great Captain Oates, I am just going outside and may be some time.’

And with that, he folded his cassock and placed it in the drawer of a large oak chest.

       

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2.

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Headteacher, Patrick (Pat) Buchanan, left his study at Glasgow’s Southside Comprehensive School, closing the door behind him before walking the length of the corridor to the reception desk in the main entrance hall: a corridor that stank with the smell of disinfectant first thing in the morning and food odours from the lunch hall in the afternoon. He walked with a purpose; a march, loud and commanding, revelling in the sound of the tacks in his gleaming brogues slamming into the tiled floor; his parade ground, an audible mark of authority about to be temporarily relinquished, known at this stage only to the chair of governors who’d agreed to the sabbatical.

‘Don’t run! Walk!’ he bellowed at a group of passing apes who were sprinting to the domestic science room to use the scales to measure out small rocks of crack, which they would sell later in the day to the younger pupils and some of the staff!

‘Don’t forget you have a PTA meeting at seven-thirty,’ prompted his loyal secretary, Jeannie, a petite, smartly-dressed woman in her early fifties. ‘Pat, are you listening to me?’ she asked. ‘Are you okay? You look stressed.’

Pat stared at a piece of graffiti prominently displayed on the wall of the main entrance to the reception area, before focussing once again on the face of the woman who probably knew him better than any other.

‘Sorry?’

‘I asked if you were okay,’ she said.

‘Look, can we get this offensive remark removed from the wall, Jeanie, for I’m quite sure if Gerry McHale sees it he’ll never set foot in the place again. We don’t want to lose him, he’s a remarkable history teacher.’

‘He’s only himself to blame,’ said Jeannie. ‘He should’ve stayed faithful to his wife instead of getting involved with what’s her name from the Shipbuilders Arms.’ She paused and let her head slip to the side. ‘Patrick, are you sure you’re okay? You haven’t been yourself this last couple of days.’

‘Aye, sure I’m fine, Jeannie, no problem. Oh Jesus, here’s another one. Who the hell is responsible for all this Graffiti? I mean, how come no one ever sees them doing it? What must visitors think?’

Jeanie began to assemble her cleaning materials which were never far from reach.

‘No idea, Pat, but it must have been done recently. I cleaned five disgusting drawings of a you know what off the wall of the lunch hall yesterday. Anyway, what does that one say?’

Pat moved closer to inspect it before reading it aloud. ‘Peter McGrory is an IRA sympathiser and a perv.’

‘Good God, I would never have said Peter was an IRA sympathiser,’ said Jeannie, ‘I’d better get rid of it before he sees it.’

Pat thought for a moment. ‘Well, someone’s got it in for him, that’s for sure.’

‘It’s shocking,’ commented Jeanie. ‘Some of the children are bound to have seen it already.’

‘Jeannie, I’ve more important things to worry about right now than unfounded accusations conveyed via splashes of graffiti, instigated by an army of juvenile bigots and their mentally challenged parents.’

‘Why would they write such things about Peter?’ persisted Jeannie.

‘Oh come on now, Jeannie,’ said Pat, ‘think about it. He’s a single man, slightly camp, teaches drama and he’s a Catholic; not much of a literary challenge there for the juvenile graffiti terrorist with a penchant for public defamation.’

Jeanie slid her hands into a pair of rubber gloves, part of the emergency kit stowed below the reception desk. ‘Yes, I suppose so, but it would never have happened in my day; we’d have been belted silly by the nuns.’

‘You were at a convent?’ asked Pat in surprise.

‘Did I never tell you? They were called the Sisters of Mercy. Didn’t know the meaning of the bloody word.’

‘Well you kept that quiet, didn’t you? So you’re a Catholic too then?’

‘You’d have had a fit, Pat, if your PA had come dancing out the closet and revealed she was a Catholic in a largely protestant school?’

‘Of course not, the school is non-denominational.’

‘Sometimes I wonder. Listen, do you want to know something?

‘Go on, tell me something funny, I need cheering up.’

‘I belong to the largest religious community in the world.’

‘The Catholics?’

‘No,’ replied Jeannie, ‘the lapsed Catholics.’

Pat laughed. ‘Here, Jeannie, give my apologies to the Friends of Southside, this evening; something’s cropped up.’

She smiled and shook her head as she bent down to retrieve a bottle of bleach which had proved, on numerous occasions, to be the most effective weapon in the war against Southside’s Banksies.

‘Do you not think the Friends are going to feel a wee bit peeved, Pat? I mean, after all, it’s your school they’re trying to raise money for.’

‘Hey, it’s not my school, Jeannie, and I wish you’d stop saying that every time I decide to bunk off. These parents have enough to do trying to keep their kids out of the courts, they shouldn’t have to raise funds. If the local authority had approved a reasonable budget, a small group of well-meaning, but deluded, parents wouldn’t have to turn out every month to sort through a mountain of putrid, lice-infested cast-offs. Rubbish that’s dumped unceremoniously in the foyer, in anticipation of raising a bob or two at one of their interminable bloody jumble sales.’

Jeannie laughed, ‘They’ve never made much money because when it’s left in the foyer the good stuff’s nicked within hours.’

‘You mean there’s some good stuff among that heap of junk?’ joked Pat.

Jeannie laughed. ‘Are you speaking about the hundred pairs of wellies, the stone hot water bottles and the occasional nit comb, not to mention the jigsaws with a piece missing? And do you remember that occasion,’ she continued, ‘when a few days before the Christmas Fayre, that trollop, Morag Shoogelsy, waltzed into reception, reeking of cheap perfume and dropped off that shocking contraption still in its Anne Summer’s gift box?’ And do you know what? She had the audacity to remove the batteries, the mean bitch.’

‘I’m away, Jeannie, look after the place; I trust you.’

‘You’ve a deputy to do that, Pat, I’ve enough to do. Is your mobile on in case I need to contact you?’

‘Not a chance.’

Pat went back to his study, removed his academic gown and placed it in the drawer of a large oak chest.

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3.

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​Attired resplendently in her mayoral robes, Councillor Harriett Halderman, sardonically nicknamed Alderman Halderman, by her political opponents in the council chamber of the London Borough of Elmstead, sat staring demurely at the public gallery, waiting until security had successfully shepherded a small party of vocal protesters to the exit. However, one remained. ‘How would you like it, you jumped up cow, if they stuck a porn shop next door to your bloody house, eh?’ shouted a bearded middle-aged man bearing a T-shirt with the words: Never Surrender. ‘I’ve got three kids and they’ll have to walk past that nonces’ paradise on their way to school each morning; it ain’t right!’

Councillor Halderman, not one to tolerate that degree of rudeness under any circumstances in what she considered, as Mayor, to be her personal domain, picked up the gauntlet.  ‘Do you really think,’ she replied, ‘that you’re doing your cause any good, sir, by addressing me in that manner? I’d appreciate it if you would address me - particularly if I should have the misfortune to encounter you again - as Madam Mayor or Councillor Halderman, rather than you jumped up cow. I fear you’ve been reading too many nursery rhymes.’

There was a gush of laughter from the public gallery, while the assailant shook off the hand of his wife who had grabbed his elbow in an attempt to pull him outside.

‘But nothing’s being done about it,’ he continued. ‘You people keep putting off the decision to grant what’s his name a licence when it’s blatantly obvious to the community that it’s the wrong place for a dirty book shop. This ain’t Soho you know, love.’

Councillor Halderman moved to correct him. ‘May I ask your name, sir or shall I call you love? I might even stretch to mate or bruv.’

‘I don’t see what my name’s got to do with anything, but it’s Jim, if you must know.’

‘Well Jim, it is so much more civilised when we can address one another in an appropriate manner. I would much prefer to address you as Jim, rather than, say, aggressive intellectually-challenged scumbag.’

Laughter in the gallery was followed by a spontaneous burst of applause from her supporters of which there were many, the majority of whom attended full council meetings specifically to watch her in action, finding it more entertaining than the television soaps.

Jim looked around him for much needed support, but there was none. He stared intently at his adversary. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Granted,’ announced Harriett. ‘Now, Jim, for your information, I understand that Soho is a very different place since the heady days of the sixties; not that I’ve ever been to Soho and…’

Jim was quick to interrupt her. ‘Well you do surprise me. You never worked there then?’

Harriett ignored the continued provocation. ‘It is, I believe, a hive of creative media activity, of musical production, and of film and television acclaim. As for the deferment of the application to open an adult bookstore within the jursidiction of this local authority, a decision will be taken after the Licensing sub-committee’s site visit.’

Jim was growing more agitated by the minute and his wife, sensing danger, attempted bribery to pull him away. ‘Come on love, we ain’t gettin’ nowhere by arguing. Let’s go an’ ‘ave a drink, eh?’

Jim stood his ground. ‘What do you need a bleedin’ site visit for anyway? If you lot give it the thumbs up it’s going to be slap bang across the road from the boys’ technical school.’

‘And your point is?’ pressed Harriett.

The bloody kids’ll be their best customers, peering in the windows, and then you’ll get the first year kids getting the sixth formers to buy God knows what.’

Harriett, with great affectation, slowly placed her reading glasses on the bridge of her nose, shuffled some papers in front of her and held a sample aloft. ‘I’m very well aware of that criticism, Jim, but not all of these letters are ones of objection. There are some that support the proposal.’

‘Yeah, probably from the kids themselves!’

More laughter from the gallery.

Jim continued. ‘And there’ll be some from their teachers, no doubt. Bloody weird bunch teaching in that place, I can tell you. There’s the R.E. teacher, what’s his name, thinks he’s the bleedin’ Archbishop of Canterbury. You should ask the kids what he likes!’

Harriett moved quickly to caution him. ‘Now, be very careful, Jim, slander is expensive.’

‘You think I give a toss?’ shouted Jim.

‘Clearly not,’ replied the mayor.

Jim and his wife left the gallery.

        After a few matters were discussed under ‘any other business’, Harriett brought the meeting to an end. She stood up, removed her reading glasses, gathered her papers and signalled to all, by way of a bow to councillors on both sides of the chamber, that she was ready to leave. The mace bearer stepped forward and escorted the mayor out of the chamber, whereupon she retired briskly to her parlour. Once inside, she locked the door and poured herself a generous measure of gin. Only a chosen few were aware of her intended sabbatical, including the deputy mayor, the chairman of the local conservative association and the chief executive of the council. The press department and their PR gurus would take care of any enquiries during her absence.  She poured another generous measure of gin into the glass,  folded her mayoral gown and placed it in the drawer of a large oak chest.