The Omen

Mum and Da weren’t to know that Damien would become synonymous with the devil. David Seltzer the screenwriter for supernatural horror The Omen, starring Gregory Peck as Gregory Peck turned down the chance to put the child at the centre of the story in Damien Omen II. It had been one of the highest grossing films of 1976. Falling in the box-office success The Exorcist, 1973, which was so scary my big sister Jo walked out of the La Scala in Clydebank before the picture finished. Like Tam O’Shanter, but horseless, with the devil and all his witchy hordes chasing her, she ran home to Mum. The Sunday Post screeched cinema goers committed suicide rather than go and see The Exorcist on the big screen, and the film set had burned down during filming. Jo would never play with an OUIJA board again, or try and talk to the dead, unless they were saints safely locked up in heaven. Both films showed to scoffers that being a Roman Catholic was the only sure way of keeping the devil at bay and God on his heavenly throne.

I knew this anyway, sleeping in bed with blankets pulled tight around my neck and a crucifix dangling my neck after watching Dracula on the telly—even though I wasn’t meant to. A black-caped Christopher Lee drew my eyes to the telly until I became hypnotised by dread and excitement.   I’d no more will power than the buxom blonde in a nightdress who continually pinned herself against the window, before opening it to let in a stray bat, that turned into a wolf in bat’s clothing.

I’d another strategy for keeping Dracula at bay, or at least buying myself time to run into Mum and Da’s room next door. Pulling blankets away from my wee brother, Bod, and leaving his neck a snackfest for wandering nightcreatures. Ensuring crosses and crucifixes were weapons in my possession. Once bitten, twice shy. And I didn’t plan to be bitten.  

 David Seltzer admitted he might have made a mistake in not writing the script for Damien Omen II. Easy money, or so he thought, not knowing about the jinx factor, relating to Damien. Seltzer had a notion that he would have set it with Damien as a child in the White House, but this was long before the election of the psychopathic, narcissistic man-child and 45^th American President. He didn’t need to throw his nanny from the balcony. And his alliance wasn’t with cartoon Satanists but the KKK and Christian fundamentalist right. The moron’s moron made the prospect of Armageddon look too real with the Doomsday clock moving ever closer to midnight.  But it wasn’t all bad news. A common belief among the Christian fundamentalists was that Jesus would step into the breach in the Rapture, much like Van Helsing with his crucifix and holy water to save the day and the righteous waving their American passports.

Before the fall of the Bastille in France, 5^th January 1757,  another Damiens, and iconoclast, tried to change the world by killing one of God’s chosen, King Louis IX. He inflicted a slight skin wound on the king, who was stepping from his carriage before his knife was taken from him.  

Roberts Francois Damiens, a 42-year old servant had committed the crime of lèse-majesté—harming the king’s majesty. As above, so below. Harming the king’s majesty didn’t just extend to personal injury, but to his property and reputation. To malign the king was to injure him. The ancient regime, dating back from Roman times, ran along the rails of class and hierarchy. Slaves had to be tortured before their testimony could be heard and admitted into law. Only slave owners or aristocrats were assumed capable of sophisticated thoughts, or sophisticated crimes. Evidence of night watchmen who could have identified the murderers of the Russian monk, Grigori Rasputin, during the reign of the Romanov dynasty, for example, was ruled inadmissible. His attackers were Russian landowners and aristocrats.

The French justice system demanded a confession before a criminal was sent to the scaffolding. Damiens could not admit to attempted regicide. He had to be tortured first before he could admit he was admitting it. Trying to knock somebody off their perch, and that other Scottish truism, mind, it could have been much worse clash in the old fashioned warning: you’ll be hung, drawn and quartered.

Damiens’s right hand that held the dagger that stabbed at King Louis IX was burnt.

Arms and legs and thighs torn with pincers.

Damiens’s wounds were treated with a brew of hot oil, molten lead and pitch.

His arms and legs tied to four horses. His sinews stretched until they snapped. But this took over an hour, with doctors intervening to ensure dismemberment didn’t kill him too quickly. Damiens died when the second of his arms came away and his remaining sinews severed by a knife to spare the horses. Only then was the King and his majesty avenged. For those running for office on a strong law and order ticket, Damiens committed no further crimes against the King or any other of the king’s subjects. The moron’s moron went home to think again.

My second, or middle name, Damian, heralded a world of saints and sinners. I was Christened John, but called Jack. That was a salve to my grandad, my da’s da, who was also Christened John Joseph, but also called Jack. We visited him most Sundays in Linnvale after attending Holy Mass.

Mum prompted me, when I was wee, before we climbed the stairs to their house, ‘What’s your name?’  

‘Jack,’ I’d say.

‘That’s right, don’t forget.’

I didn’t. I grew pretty good at remembering my name, but not so good at remembering other people’s names.  

Dressed in our Sunday best. Da in his shirt and tie. Mum her fawn rain-mac buttoned up to the neck over her frilly white blouse and her bag over her shoulder. Pushing the pram. Our hair brushed, our shoes shone. Nowhere to go and nothing to do, but we had to do it anyway.

Grandda’s house was the upper storey of a council house in Kirkwood Avenue, three bedrooms. I’m not sure if it was my cousin or aunty and uncle had a room each. John Joseph, Jack, had remarried Eileen after my da’s mum, Mary had died.

Eileen had worked as a shop assistant in the same shop as my mum and had introduced her to my da. My mum had introduced da’s best mate Jim to her sister Phyllis.

My da had been born in Northern Ireland, County Durham, and had a younger brother Gerry and a sister Mary. Grandda had been described as a labourer in Northern Ireland, but in Glasgow as an engineer’s machinist. Skilled work and better paid. He’d lost a wife and he’d lost a leg, but he’d gotten a new life and a new wife.  

A story was that he’d fell drunk underneath a tram, but whether that was true, or not, I don’t know. He got compensation and that set him up.  Da called his da ‘an auld cunt’, and I felt the same way about mine.

John Joseph flung my old man out of the house when he was fourteen. My da walked the ten miles to the City Centre to stay with his auntie, my (dead) grandma’s sister. But he always came back, as I came back.

 Sitting at the window seat, watching telly, while Mum and Da argued in the kitchen. Voices rising, higher and higher. Mum wouldn’t back down. She fell to the floor when Da punched her, knocked her out.

I jumped up and raced out the front door without a jacket. Up the street past Parkhall shops. I kept going past Duntocher Road and the Kilbowie Roundabout, towards Old Kilpatrick Hills. Determined I’d never go back. Never back down. Imagined my mum dead. Shivering, but nowhere else to go. Crying. Imagined myself dying. I was ten, then.

All the lights in our house on. Party atmosphere when I returned. Auntie Phyllis and Uncle Jim slipped my brothers and sisters glasses of ginger and crisps, assured me everything was going to be alright. We’d be fine. I’d be fine.  I guess we were. It didn’t happen again.