Paddy Gets a Wake-Up Call
I am a pensioner in my late sixties living in a modest three bedroom house in a small private estate on the Southern outskirts of Dublin, but at the time of the events I am about to relate I was living in a studio apartment on the second floor of a retirement home on the north side of the city.
I am a solitary person by nature and could only take the other residents of the home in small doses, so I tended to avoid going down to the communal room to mix with them. They in their turn, never sought me out for inclusion in their company, so it was a mutually accepted antisocial standoff.
My insular disposition could be attributed to the fact that I was reared in a very dysfunctional family. Both my parents were alcohol abusers and fought alternately, depending on circumstances, over the fact that they had drank all their money or that there wasn't enough money to go drinking. My siblings and I suffered no physical abuse, but the nonexistence of affection and compassion or ordered discipline in our formative years scarred each of us in his or her own different way. I have not seen or heard from my sister or three brothers since we buried our father more than twenty years ago! He died, as did my mother two years before him, from alcohol related illnesses!
This neglectful upbringing impacted on me such that, by the time I reached my late teens, I was drinking heavily myself and my psychological and perhaps, genetic make-up, was such that, from the very day I started to drink I was on a slippery downward slope into alcohol dependence. I was considered by all who came to know me, even in those early years, to be a brooding introvert, best left to his own devices and by the time I reached my mid-twenties, I was diagnosed by one professional in the field of substance addiction, as a 'functioning alcoholic'.
I was able to function enough to leave Ireland in nineteen sixty nine and go to London where I found work as a labourer on the building sites. It was a lonely existence, an endless round of working, drinking, sleeping and back to work the following day to perpetuate the miserable cycle. I consider myself to have been saved from this wretched existence and cured of the imprecation of alcohol abuse by a woman I met when I was thirty one, named Martha, whom I later married and who bore me two children. I intend to go into my life with my now deceased wife and my two children, from whom we had become estranged long before her death, in much more detail in other chapters where it will have more relevance.
Suffice it to say for now that it was Martha's strength of character and her faith in her Catholic religion that rescued me and kept me on the straight and narrow for the following thirty years. She introduced me to God, instilled in me the importance of church attendance and prayer on a daily basis to keep the Devil's influence out of my life. I trod the path she'd hewn for me through the tangled undergrowth of alcohol temptation and sexual desire relentlessly, even after she died of cancer twelve years ago.
When I returned to Ireland a few years after her death in a London hospital, I continued to attend daily morning mass at my local chapel and never lay my head down to sleep at night without reciting the Lord's prayer and a few Hail Marys. That was until the following events changed my life forever and I realized how much of a misguided soul, my dearly departed Martha was, and how much I had contributed, by my passive acceptance of her dogmatic rule over our household, to the creation of another dysfunctional family and the estrangement of my own two children. I have formed the opinion that blind devotion to a supernal cause can be just as harmful as addiction to an earthly vice, and more odious given that devotion is a choice, addiction is not.
Prior to the events which follow, I had my daily routine of morning mass, walks in the Phoenix Park not far away and my daily newspaper and books to read. I was physically comfortable and secure, with adequate stimulation for my modest intellect, but I was immensely bored. I say I was bored and not lonely because that wasn't, in effect, my emotional state, but I sometimes found it difficult to fill the empty hours of the evening if there was nothing good on the television, which was mostly always.
There you have it, all the pertinent circumstances, for this part of the story, of my past life up to that point, a few weeks after my sixtieth birthday, which had fallen on the eighteenth of July two thousand and eight.
It was an unseasonably chilly July afternoon, if chilly July afternoons can be considered unseasonable in Ireland, when I received the visit that would ultimately drive me from my previously pious path and onto a more, ethically questionable but heterogeneously enlightened highway. The devil's highway, my Martha would have called it, no doubt, but one which would lead me back into the embrace of my beloved children. A highway to that end could be, for me, nothing other than a righteous path to redemption and forgiveness, acceptance and tolerance and one I was happy to take and remain steadfastly on.
At first I thought the young lady was an official of some sort from the housing association or other such institution, perhaps a health inspector, as we used to get them occasionally. I estimated her to be in her mid twenties, she was attractive, with long black hair, about my own height of five nine in a pair of shiny black high-heeled shoes, the sort my Martha would have described as nonsensical and inappropriate. She was dressed businesslike in a dark, pinstriped knee-length skirt suit over an open necked blouse and her legs were clad in dark, sheer-nylon tights. I surmised they were tights, assuming that a lady of her obviously important position would not demean herself by wearing 'nonsensical and inappropriate' stockings.
My appraisal of her attire and general appearance at the time was merely an attempt to discern her purpose for being at my door and not a superfluous inspection of her qualities as a member of the opposite sex.
"You are Mr Murphy, aren't you, Patrick Murphy?" she asked rhetorically when I queried if she was at the right address, obviously she was already privy to the identity of the resident living in the apartment to which she had been dispatched, for whatever investigative purpose she had to perform.
"Yes, I am." I confirmed, a little brusquely, not being naturally disposed to open sociability, as previously outlined.
"May I come in," she asked with a broad, full toothed smile which dimpled her cheeks in a somewhat, alluring manner.
"Yes of course." I replied, my antisociality not descending to the depths of being impolite or rude. I stepped back and opened the door fully for her to enter.
