Therapy

and shaking out her hair. “Thank the Lord.” The paradoxical nature of this remark didn’t strike me, and in any case my attention was fully absorbed by her hair. I had never seen it unrestrained before, fanned out in shining waves over her shoulders. She seemed more beautiful than ever. Conscious of my gaze, she blushed, and said she must introduce me to Father Jerome. Mrs Kavanagh seemed to have disappeared.
    Father Jerome was the younger of the two priests who ran the parish, though he wasn’t exactly young. He didn’t look at all like our school chaplain or any other clergyman I had encountered. He didn’t even resemble himself on the altar — for it was he who had presided over the service just finished. He was a gaunt, grizzled Dubliner, with nicotine-stained fingers and a shaving cut on his chin which he seemed to have staunched with a fragment of toilet-paper. He wore a long black cassock that reached to his scuffed shoes, with deep pockets in which he kept the materials for rolling his own cigarettes. One of these he lit with a pyrotechnic display of flame and sparks. “So you want to join our youth club, do you, young fella?” he said, brushing glowing wisps of tobacco from his cassock. “Yes please, sir,” I said. “Then you’d better learn to call me Father instead of sir.” “Yes, sir — Father, I mean,” I stammered. Father Jerome grinned, revealing a disconcerting gap in his stained and uneven teeth. He asked me a few more questions about where I lived and where I went to school. The name of Lambeth Merchants’ had its usual effect, and I became a probationary member of the Immaculate Conception parish youth club.
    One of the first things Maureen had to do was to explain the name of her church. I presumed that it referred to Mary’s being a virgin when she had Jesus, but no, apparently it meant that Mary herself was conceived “without the stain of original sin.” I found the language of Catholicism very strange, especially the way they used words in their devotions, like “virgin”, “conceived”, “womb”, that would have been regarded as bordering on the indecent in ordinary conversation, certainly in my home. I could hardly believe my ears when Maureen told me that she had to go to Mass on New Year’s Day because it was the Feast of the Circumcision. “The feast of what ?” “The Circumcision.” “Whose circumcision?” “Our Lord’s, of course. When he was a baby. Our Lady and Saint Joseph took him to the Temple and he was circumcised. It was like the Jewish baptism.” I laughed incredulously. “D’you know what circumcision is ?” Maureen blushed and giggled, wrinkling up her nose. “ ’Course.” “What is it, then?” “I’m not going to say.” “You don’t really know.” “Yes I do.” “I bet you don’t.” I persisted in my prurient interrogation until she blurted out that it meant “snipping off a bit of skin from the end of the baby’s widdler,” by which time my own widdler was standing up inside my grey flannel trousers like a relay-runner’s baton. We were walking home from the youth club Sunday social at the time, and fortunately I was wearing a raincoat.
    The youth club met twice a week in the Infants’ School attached to the church: on Wednesdays for games, mainly ping-pong, and on Sundays for a “social”. This consisted of dancing to gramophone records and partaking of sandwiches and orange squash or tea prepared by teams of girls working to a roster. The boys were required to stack the infants’ desks at the sides of the room at the beginning of the evening, and replace them in rows at the end. We had the use of two classrooms normally divided by a folding partition wall. The floor was made of worn, unpolished wood blocks, the walls were covered with infantile paintings and educational charts, and the lighting was bleakly utilitarian. The gramophone was a single-speaker portable, and the records a collection of scratchy 78s. But to me, just emerging from the chrysalis of boyhood, the youth club was a site of exciting and sophisticated pleasures.
    I learned to dance from a matronly lady of the parish who came in on games nights (when Maureen was seldom allowed out by her parents) and gave free lessons. I discovered that I was surprisingly good at it. “Hold your partner firmly!” was Mrs Gaynor’s constant injunction, one I was glad to follow, especially when Maureen was my partner on Sunday nights. I danced mostly with