carpe diem

At a personal level I don’t like funerals much. Life everlasting gets a trifle wearing. Leave it the professionals and all that. I brief the priest on the phone. ‘Stanley Fisher here,’ I say into the mouthpiece. I expect him to know who I was, well, who I am to be more exact, since it’s not me that’s kicked the bucket, but my dear old Dad. I’ve be up for three nights after he’d been found dead behind the door. Bit of a cliché there. But we’ve all got to go somehow and somewhere. He wasn’t keen on a nursing home. And who could blame him. The prices were outrageous. Over £2000 a week and counting. He’d worked all his life and there was little point at the end of it pissing it into somebody else’s bedpan.  Making sure the police, ambulance men, doctor and funeral directors were all pulling in the right direction and pulling their weight was my priority. Dad would have appreciated that.

                ‘So what is Mr Fisher’s, seniors, first name and date of birth?’ the priest, Father Something or Something, asks. I wasn’t sure if he was Irish or a Paki as he’s a tendency to mumble. I get that a lot, people phoning me at home, at all hours, and trying to sell me something. Usually, I leave the phone unmanned and let them ramble on. Costs them money, you see. They don’t like that. Sometimes I indulge them and we have a little chat. Then they hang up sharpish. But they always phone back. I listen for the tell-tell signs of background chatter from places like Mumbai. There’s more English speakers in India than in England The problem is, of course, we can keep them out at the border. History has proved the Channel to be one of nature’s great barriers. God given. And no need for maintenance. Although they fling themselves at trains and hide away on trucks very few actually get through. We need to be ever vigilant as they swarm at the other end, but there seems little point in these stringent, but necessary measures if they can just put on a cassock and dog collar and find a comfy berth in some leafy manse. I had to put Father Something or Something on hold before I put him right about that. I suppose it’s a matter of demographics. No sane white person believes in God. Apart from the Americans, of course, pledging allegiance to everybody and nobody as long as there’s something in it for the bit of ‘I’ in the sky and a bit more for those calling the shots. At least the local Neanderthals are a practical bunch, finding loving consolation with the thud of the letterbox and their Giro falling onto their doormat. 

                We arrange a date to meet. Before I went any further and I commit any money up front I wanted to know more about his Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. It seems to me like boiling an egg without boiling it. He tried to explain it in gobbledygook. Sticky situation.  ‘What’ the point, man?’ I ask. I don’t ask about the Virgin birth.

                Of more importance was all that rubbish about Catholics not being allowed to be cremated. Then they were allowed to be cremated. ‘How can you change something like that at the drop of a hat?’ I want my Dad to be cremated in Dalnottar, as per, his wishes. ‘God’s good with a dustpan, or he isn’t?’

                He mumbles about changing times. Catholic doctrine. How it presumed on the day of the last judgement God would need to have reassemble our human body to be judged and in a more sophisticated society we’ve moved on from the idea of the need for a corporal body. I let him speak. Well, I’m an expert on that. Look what happened to me, I want to say, but keep my mouth shut. But it did worry me. Not worry, worry, me. Just a passing thought. I suppose that’s the Irish in me, always worrying. Going to hell in a hand basket and all that. It’s funny how after a schooling in the world like mine I can always conjure up a vision of hell quite clearly. I suppose the existence of an unreliable narrator like old Nick implies the existence of the opposite. But there’s a built in limit of what you can believe. After Santa is unmasked, you find out your parents are human, and my father isn’t bigger than your father, then it’s all downhill. Old Nick seems like a bit of light relief.

                I had about twenty minutes to drill him in my father’s life, his up and downs, so Father Something or Something could get up in his pulpit and give his usual spiel about how great he was and how he was going to a better place. He seems stupid enough to be a priest and to believe it.

                ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking,’ I say, there is something in his tone, ‘but are you homosexual?’

                He splutters. ‘What a strange question. You must be awful upset.’

                ‘Not at all.’ Then quickly add. ‘Well, I am a bit. I’ve not slept for a while.’

Gay men have vicious tongues, especially in my line of work, and they all know each other. You can’t be too careful. But apart from the heavy breathing down the line, he seems to have taken it in good part.  Turns the other bum cheek and all that.

‘I’m bisexual,’ he says, pausing, ‘but celibate’.

‘Does that mean you don’t sleep with underage altar boys or girls?’ 

‘No it means I’m celibate.’

‘Well, you’ve got to admit your church hasn’t got a very good track-record on that type of thing. It’s all on record in the Vatican you know. The cover-ups. The glossing over of sexual violence since Adam met Steve. When you weren’t burning old women that happened to be conveniently poor enough not to kick up much of a fuss you were podgering young boys…

It takes me a few seconds to realise that he’s hung up. I phone him right back, but all I get is the ring tone, then I’m asked to leave a message. That I certainly do.