Two boys pray that their mother will not go to prison

 
Praying Hands by Albrecht Dürer
‘Kit’ Shevre, his jaw muscles involuntary twitching, his face taut with tension, gave his two youngest sons a look of impending doom. Standing beside him now, his eldest boy Rory, calling on all the gravitas of his 16 years issued a command

“You two go up to the church and say some prayers for her.”

Roland , the youngest boy, looked stricken. JonJo, at 12, his senior by two years, sensing the older brother’s mock piety, bristled. But, none the less, once their father and older brother had departed for Horseferry Road Magistrates Courts, JonJo hustled Roland out the front door and as a light aircraft hovered overhead, the two Shevre children hurriedly made their way up Babington Road to St. Leonard’s Church, to do the very thing their older brother had commanded, to ‘pray for her’.

But once in this cavernous place of homage, where even your breath seemed to echo, it wasn’t the metaphysical that propelled them to their knees; nor was it the belief for these children - aged like decades of the Rosary, that there was some well-disposed thing out there swirling about in the cosmic ether; yes, some beneficence that would answer back. No, they weren’t expecting that; after all, they hadn’t been driven insane by this possibility that their mother would go to

prison; rather, they had been driven into the arms of a brutal reality as if their tiny vessels had berthed with sanity.

“Come on, let’s get on with these prayers,” said the older boy.

“Sssh”, retorted the younger one, as they both dutifully knelt and began ritually mumbling entreaties, petitioning to someone, anyone, to show mercy. And although the younger boy wavered in his expectations, the savage reality of his

situation diverted him from any optimism that a helpful voice would come booming back. So Roland Shevre  continued kneeling in a kind of awed obeisance and in words he could not yet express, he suspected that all that imagery of the ‘bearded one’, and his yearning that he would appear Last

Judgement-like, standing barefooted on a cloud, to a roll of those trumpets, was for the more ‘imaginative’. It wasn’t for two young children, who were about to lose their mother again. For them this day was their Last Judgement for she was

standing up in Horseferry Road Magistrates Court at this moment with the possibility of her going to prison. And it didn’t matter for how long; it would be a lifetime for these children.

Yet in an ‘I must go on, I have to try way,’ the younger boy accepted that the lifting of his mind and heart to God plays an essential role in the life of any good Catholic, which the now lapsed, 10 year old Bosco had once been. So metaphysically surfing on any faint wisp of hope, he continued in this dramatic performance called prayer.

But although dutifully kneeling he was beginning to seethe at the injustice of it all. A kind of metaphysical fury was erupting in him, and why not, for hadn’t he been tyrannised metaphysically. Why was he kneeling here anyway? His mind

was awash with confusions and contradictions, but it wouldn’t stop him pleading like some minute Augustine. ‘Are you there, God? Now, at this moment.’ But then he realised the moment had gone. So he started again.

But he was wondering if dis new moment was like the one which had just gone. Are these moments all the same, are they all the same distance from God? But den he is in that ting, called ‘Eternity’. Dat's where God is. His confusions were ranging on each moment being the same distance from eternity. ‘Where are you God,  are you in bloody time, or are you in a place, kind of... before time? Jaysus are you there at all?’ And he continued furiously debating like the petit Augustine he was, though Augustine only asked the questions that we all ask, then forget. And in consideration akin to this he wondered about God and time. ‘Is he in our time, or an anudder time? But if he is in an udder time, den how can he help me and my mother, because we are in a different time. God goes on forever; he is eternal, but then why the feck aren’t we?’

 At this juncture he thought God irredeemably selfish. Then he began questioning what he was actually praying to, was it a something or a nothing. But hold yer horses there, nutting can’t exist. Can it? Was God the soul, is dat what God is, and

where is the soul any bloody way? So our little Augustine deliberated on, with his elder brother now standing behind, refusing to crook his knee to God or anyone come to dat. What will happen God, what will happen to JonJo and me if our Mam goes to prison again?

Who knows what will happen little fellah. Anyway some day you might be experiencing a higher power of another hue, a visitation which might direct you to a sentiment that it was the ‘bloody soul’ which was anti-life, nihilistic, yes, the soul as a story; a facile yearning, the apotheosis of our sad striving for the eternal. After this visitation you might conclude that God was hiding all that time behind the concept of the soul because he couldn’t face the reality of the atom. You, yeh little sprat, might even stop thinking of life as a coherent narrative and accept it as a roving, meandering flux. Well, you never know, do you?

Behind him, irritating as ever, he could hear the more wayward JonJo, shifting in his bloody skittish way. Still, he tried to concentrate. And you had to for a ting like this. Perhaps if he switched allegiance, and he cast his eyes towards the statue of the dolorous Virgin Mary alongside the fellah himself; for ‘your man’ up there wasn’t the only source.

Mary
The Madonna in Sorrow, by Sassoferrato,

Oh no, for hadn’t Roland Shevre been taught since early

infancy, you know, square one, hadn’t he been positively lettered from dotage that we should not only pray directly to God, but also to those who are close to him; those who have the power to intercede upon our behalf.

With that in mind, Roland diverted his gaze from the statue of the Lord Jesus Christ and started casting about for anyone else in the vicinity. Right, not just the bearded fellow. What about the Holy Ghost?

The Holy Spirit depicted as a dove, surounded by angels, by Giaquinto, 1750s.

And the image of a pigeon settling on his hand by Nelson’s Column for his Mam to take a picture came to his mind. So a kind of rodent with wings was troped as the Holy Ghost, was appealed to with “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”

God the Father might help too, he seemed a kindly man, so his next pitch was to an avuncular image. “I pray to you God, the Father, almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and father of yer son, Jesus Christ.”

Then, he looked at the statue of the Virgin Mary again, alongside that of the suffering Jesus and he recalled his more pious days in Ireland walking round the church in Tallaght with the rosary in his hands dutifully doing a grand tour of the Stations of the Cross. He recalled being

especially drawn to the terrible tragedy of Our Lord Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, suffering a bitter agony for our sins. What drama for young eyes, what a tour de force, especially that crown of sharp thorns that was forced upon

our Lord's head and the patience with which He endured the pain for our sins.

El Greco 1580

Roland  continued to pray but he wished, fervently wished he had more faith, but the more he was discovering that this was indeed a cruel and bitter world, the more his faith was crumbling.

Not surprising you were doubting there, little fellah. For aren’t we asked to believe a lot of the ‘bearded one’? Besides, wasn’t ‘your man’ just one in a long line of stoics? And you know the ancient world wasn’t on hold, waiting for a

‘Christian God Man’ to come along and teach it ethics and morality, or give it answers to those perennials, ‘How should I live? How shall I face death?’ And to many ancients the fabricated ‘Jesus’ added only insufferable man made

egocentricity. Do you know what I mean? And besides there was plenty of moral hygiene around anyway before that, you know from ancients such as that fellah, Ovid. For me, speaking for meself, ‘Myths’ are just bollocksing stories, a kind of social glue that endeavours to frame those capricious and skittish ideas of ourselves. Even the bloody ancients wanted us to see the world as a story.

Do you know dat myth; the best known one, the tale of the sun melting those waxen wings of hubris? Now dat’s usually taken to be a salutary tale for the over ambitious; those who thought they could fly too ‘near the sun’. But meself, I prefer to think of Icarus as a man who brought to light a serious constructional defect in the flying machines of the day. Anyway, despite such cautionary myths, from Icarus onwards, men and women have continued to fly too near the sun. And some of those were the ones who had stepped up with astonishing courage to defend freedom in a moment of history that may never occur again.

Here at 15,000 feet, Artur La Brea could indulge himself for a little while in his desire to see beyond the seen. Here, he was free of, how could he put it... the thingness of things. Up here he could bask for a moment or two in the unreality of reality. But then in that dynamite of the tenth of a second, the recall of it would come: the hell of it, the carnage, that screaming, screeching noise, the flying metal, and what was that thud…death? Ah... this is how it happens then.

But once again, by some miracle you had come through it all, now, to find yourself, 30, 20 feet, 18 inches over the tussocks of grass and to bump, jolt to a halt in some English field. Then you would wait, in this extraordinary silence, and then you would hear the birds chirruping; always that, the birds chirruping.

Back in St Leonard’s Church, in an ecclesiastical silence, a 10 year old boy was chirruping to that uber, put-upon female. “Well, you’re a woman and my mother is a woman,” he reasoned, “...do something!” And on he prayed on, “Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our light, our sweetness, and our hope. To thee do we cry. No, dats not right?” Oh, what an imprisonment was this? He started on a different tack. “Remember, Oh most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it

known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help…“                   

So Roland Shevre continued in this desperate vein, a miniature Kierkegaard desperately leaping into the void called ‘faith’. And undertaking this leap he did so in the classic mode, for if ever there was a time for fear and trembling this was it. So he cast his voice into the uncertainty of the unknown, but this time in more direct language. ‘Please, please, don’t let her go to prison, please,’ till the bones nearly came out of his knuckles.

But a perception in him was challenging his desperate yearning; for this 10 year old had some kind of vague intuition that he had been ‘culled’ into Catholicism. And not now of course, but in the future, if he got through this hell, he might speculate what was this half-naked figure doing up there? Look at it, a plaster statue three, four times the size of me, and all that blood seeping down the martyred face from the impaled crown of thorns, and the coup de grace spear pierce in his side. What the hell was this imagery? All this torture on display. In a patchwork approximation his thoughts hovered on questions he could not yet express. Was it a paean to sado masochism? I mean, what was the difference between him up there and the shaman, or the witch doctor or magic which belong to a medieval age.

Yet here, in this age, the year of our Lord 1955, we are permitted to, exhorted to, believe in the supernatural. “Will you intercede, will you? She’s done nutting really wrong, nutting really bad. Dear God, you have the power.” Behind him his disrespectful and irreverent brother kept muttering. “Calm down, JonJo, will you?”’.

“Fecking stupid, this is. What fecking good is this going to do?” JonJo responded.

Then at his little brother turned away to pray again, a kind of anguish crept upon the older boy, a kind of panic, an existential terror of being out of control, it was like some black tar creeping all over him. It was her that caused this. She would be standing up in court, in the dock, or in a cell down below the court. Fuck, fuck it. Why did you have to do that? I will never forgive you for this. He looked up at

the statue of the suffering Christ on the crucifix and thought of a song not yet written:

But there's one thing I know, Mam

You blocked out my sun,

And even Jesus up there, would never

Forgive what you have done.

He looked again at the younger boy, with his mitts clasped so earnestly. Too serious, too serious by half. He could almost hear his younger brother as he hovered on this naïve precipice; that black hole of thinking called prayer. Thank

fuck he didn’t, because if you believed you got sucked in forever; never again to embrace, well, you know, freedom, the freedom of not knowing, anything. Look at him kneeling there, what good will it do? For JonJo it was far simpler, the

world was a mess and it was obvious that it had been cobbled together in a hurry; God probably left his younger brudder to do it.

So JonJo, as if scudding along on a cloud himself, summarised the role of his maker. Yeah, that God, too busy rushing around the fecking clouds. There is no God! He went on like a little pocket of fury…no God to help us and while I’m at it…what is this feeling, it’s creeping up on me. ”Oh feck, here it comes, oh no, feck this…my breathing.” He yanked at his collar. This collar was tight. It was far too fecking tight. “Me breathing, me breathing, I’m finding it really hard to breathe, I really am…’ and now this thing pulling at his neck, as if, ‘Jesus’…JonJo gasped. His younger brother turned around, alarmed at the collar tugging, fidgets behind him,

“...it's stopping me breeding, Jesus, if this doesn’t stop, Jesus, I am going to die, I really am. I really am.”

Roland , faced with this new responsibility, acted with panicky rashness, after all, his older brother was supposed be looking after him. He quickly ascertained the problem. This ting with JonJo...he had started to do this ting when their mother first got into ‘trouble’. Best try to calm him, try to calm him down, ”Stop doing that, will you? Stop pulling at your neck like that. Do you know you’re doing it. Do yeh?” Roland barked like a baby seal as he tried to set aside his own alarm at

being further abandoned.

“Shsh.”

They both looked across at the admonishing pensioner.

“Feck off, you auld eejit.” JonJo mumbled. “Come on, let’s get out of here. I can’t breathe in here.”

So the two boys got off their knees to this God, not yet speculating that there are billions of Gods in the world, as thick as herring roe; most of them too small to see and who never get worshipped at all, at least by anything bigger than bacteria. They're the micro Gods - the spirits of places where snail trails cross, the gods of micro-climates down between the grass roots. Not the arboreal, that simplistic causal explanation of root, tree, branch, but the evanescent, the countless blades of grass interrelating, waving, interacting in the wind; not something that exists, not certainty but the ‘uncertainty’ that is the new Inquisition, the auto da fe that

immolates Descartes.

René Descartes

Portrait after Frans Hals, 1648.[1]

We are entangled, therefore we exist. Repent René boom the high priests of uncertainty, before this torch ignites these twigs. But then again, even if the flames did engulf him, René will still be seen gesturing from his

pyre for centuries to come.

The trailing smell of incense that appealed to the olfactory part of the soul still hung from the early morning Mass. For a moment the boys looked confused, as if they could not deal with the altitude after having been on their knees for so long.

As they departed from the church, to orient themselves, Roland ritually dipped his hand in the holy water and felt the coldness sitting on his brow as he blessed himself. JonJo did the same with a disbelieving grunt, and even this dipping of small hands into water seemed to be caught like a bird in a net of spiritual acoustics.

But their mother. like some other former inmates who were wrongly convicted and who happened to be Dubliners  would soon be in Holloway Prison, this time for a year.

Oscar Wilde Photograph taken in 1882

H

Holloway Prison c.1896
Opened	1852