He looked bewildered, as if he really hadn’t a clue. ‘Maybe, er… you know, the right woman didn’t happen along?’ He attempted bravely.
‘Is that what you really think, John Joe?’ she asked with a horrible smirk.
He let his hands fall in a gesture of helplessness. ‘’Tis, I suppose.’
‘I don’t think so, John Joe,’ she said. ‘Now, I asked you on Friday if you had ever lost your virginity. Are you prepared to answer that?’
He just looked at his boots, not even peeping up from under his bushy eyebrows.
It was clear that Josephine wasn’t going to have the same kind of success with John Joe that she’d enjoyed the previous day with Neil. I suspected that there wasn’t anything to discover about John Joe.
Wrong.
‘Tell me about your childhood,’ she suggested cheerfully.
Jaysus, I thought, what a cliché.
John Joe looked blank.
‘What was your father like?’ she asked.
‘Ahhh,’tis a long time since he kicked the bucket…’
‘Tell us what you remember,’ she said firmly. ‘What did he look like?’
‘A fine big man,’ he said slowly. ‘As tall as the dresser. And he could carry a bullock under each oxter.’
‘What’s your earliest memory of him?’
John Joe thought long and hard, staring far back into the past.
I was very surprised when he actually began to speak.
‘I was a gossur of three or four,’ he said. ‘It must have been September, because the hay was in, and standing in little ricks in the field below, and there was the harvest smell in the air. I was making sport on the flagstones, firing a stick around, with one of the pigs.’
I listened in amazement at John Joe’s lyrical description. Who would have thought he had it in him?
‘And for a bit of crack, I got the notion in me head to land the pig a belt of the stick. So I did and, didn’t I get the suck-in when I kilt it shtone dead…’
And who would have thought this frail old man had it in him to kill a pig?
‘PJ started crying like a woman and went running in, “You’re after killing the pig, I’m going to tell Dada on you”…’
‘Who’s PJ?’ Josephine asked.
‘The brother.’
‘And were you frightened?’
‘I suppose I was. I suppose I knew ’twasn’t advisable to be going round killing pigs. But when Dada came out, he took a look and the next thing, he’s scarthing laughing and says “By the living jingo, but it takes a big man to kill a pig!”’
‘So your father wasn’t angry?’
‘No, indeed he was not. He was proud of me.’
‘Did you like it when your father was proud of you?’
‘I did. ‘Twas powerful.’
John Joe was positively animated.
I reluctantly began to admire Josephine, she certainly knew what people’s triggers were. Even if I wasn’t sure where she was going with this John Joe/father thing.
‘Give me one word to describe how your father made you feel,’ she told him. ‘It can be anything. Happy, sad, weak, clever, strong, stupid, anything at all. Think about it for a few minutes.’
John Joe thought long and hard, breathing through his mouth in a very annoying fashion.
Finally he spoke. ‘Safe,’ he said firmly.
‘You’re sure?’
He nodded.
Josephine seemed pleased.
‘Now, you referred to PJ “crying like a woman”,’ she said. ‘That sounds quite contemptuous of women. What I mean is, it sounds like you haven’t much resp…’
‘I know what contemptuous means,’ John Joe interrupted. His slow, heavy voice carried pride and irritation.
I could feel the rest of us sit up in our chairs in surprise.
‘Are you contemptuous of women?’ she asked.
‘I am!’ He astonished us all by answering immediately. ‘With their whingeing and their crying, always needing to be minded.’
‘Hmmm.’ A knowing smile played on Josephine’s un-lipsticked mouth. ‘And who does the minding?’
‘Men do.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because men are strong. Men have to mind the others.’ ‘But you’re in a difficult position, aren’t you, John Joe?’ she asked, a strange light gleaming in her eyes.’ Because even though you’re a man, and supposed to do the minding, you like to be minded yourself. You like to feel safe.’ He nodded warily.
‘But women can’t take care of you, that’s what you think. To be properly safe a man would have to take care of you.’
For a few moments she let all kinds of questions and answers hang in the air.
What’s she getting at? I wondered frantically. Surely, she couldn’t mean…? She wasn’t implying…? That John Joe is…?
‘Gay.’
‘Or “homosexual” is a word you may be more familiar with,’ she said briskly.
John Joe’s face had gone grey. But, as I watched in jaw-dropped amazement, there wasn’t the flurry of furious, drooling denial that I expected. (‘Who are you calling queer? Just because you’re an oul’ dyke of a nun who hasn’t ever seen hide nor hair of a man’s naked lad…’ etc., etc.)
John Joe looked resigned, more than anything else. ‘You knew this about yourself, didn’t you?’ Josephine looked closely at him.
To my further astonishment John Joe shrugged wearily and said ‘Yerra, I did and I didn’t. What good would it done me?’
‘You could have become a priest,’ I almost said,’ and had your pick of the boys.’
‘You’re sixty-six years of age,’ Josephine said. ‘What a very lonely life you must have had until now.’
He looked exhausted and heartbroken.
‘It’s about time you started to live your life properly and honesdy,’ she went on.
‘It’s too late,’ he said heavily.
‘No, it’s not,’ Josephine said.
Visions of John Joe swapping his antique, black, shiny suit for 501s, a white T-shirt and a shaved head swam before me. Or John Joe in a check shirt, leather chaps and a handlebar moustache having exchanged milking cows for dancing to The Village People and The Communards.