Illywhacker

"What would a fellow like you want to talk about God for?"

He was right, of course, but I was surprised by the venom when he said it. It puzzled me even more as to why he came to see me and I might have been kept in suspense a lot longer if I had not blundered into the matter by mistake. I mentioned – in connection with what I now forget – Sergeant Reg Moth.

Moran was standing there with one of Leah's letters hidden inside an Oxford Dictionary, pretending to look up some word or other while all the time he was prying into my private life. But when I mentioned Moth, his mouth opened and his brow furrowed.

"You didn't call him that?"

"Call him what?"

"Moth."

"I might have called him Sergeant. Sergeant, or Moth, or Sergeant Moth." I shrugged.

He was such a big man and it was a very small room so his moods always seemed too bulky for the space. They pushed at me, bumped at me, seemed as if they would swamp or suffocate me.

"He cannot stand the name," he said, shutting the dictionary with the letter still in it. "It drives him mad. You would have hurt him if you called him Moth."

"His own name."

He put the dictionary back in the shelf and – an annoying habit of his – lined up the spine exactly with the edge of the shelf. "His nickname," he corrected me. "Aren't you going to ask me why?"

"Why?"

And suddenly all his big solemn red-faced officiousness was gone and he was grinning at me like a schoolboy. "The Moth – because if there's a light on, he'll turn up." He giggled. "I shouldn't laugh. It's my own brother after all."

Of course he was the loony's brother. Of course he was. He had that same square head and bulging eyes. "Well, well…"I said.

"Come on, Badgery," he smiled. "Don't pretend you didn't know." He started to lower himself on to my damaged heater, changed his mind and went to the bunk. His smile pulled at his face as tightly as his buttoned-up suit pulled at his big footballer's body. "I saw the way you looked when I told you about the little fellow on the mushroom. You knew what I was alluding to. You understand my intention."

"Father, I swear, I understood nothing."

"But what could you swear by – that is the thing. Perhaps you might tell me later, but I saw at the time that you understood my point, that my brother would not look at devilry, that he did not think such things were even possible. You appreciated the irony."

"Now you call it devilry."

"Of course it is devilry, man. Or would be, if I had not made it up. Do you think God makes tiny men to sit on mushrooms? Of course it is devilry, and you know it too."

I felt disappointed. I had liked that little man on the mushroom more than I knew. I asked him why he made it up.

"To trap you," he said, clapping his big hands together, and giving me that white picket-fence grin. "I know you've got that thing in a bottle somewhere. I thought if I told you that story, you'd bring it out. But, like my brother says, you are cunning as a rat."

I was an old man, decent and frail. I put the cap on my pen. I smiled. I showed him my lovely violet eyes. "Come, Father, we're both grown men."

He withstood the powerful blast of affection I sent his way. "Are we?" he said. "Are we? Are we now, men? Reginald came to me up at St Joseph's. I was taking a class. He came to the door. He said to me, 'Michael, I have seen the devil.' You know his voice, loud and rough. 'I've seen the devil,' he said. I thought he was drunk. God forgive me, I was angry because he interrupted my class. I saw the tears in his eyes and I denied him. I never got on with him, Badgery. He was never a happy man. He would not let God into his heart. Always the Moth. It wasn't the bribes he was after when he pestered the illegal drinkers. It was the company. They knew that, of course. That's why they gave him his name.

But now he can look back on those times, when he was sneaking round Flanagan's backyard, arresting people and letting them off for a quid, he can look back on them as happy times. Father Doyle has heard his confession, but he has no peace, other than what he can get out of a whisky bottle. There have been policemen up from Sydney to witness his behaviour."

I didn't know which brother was the maddest. There is no doubt, however, that the priest was the biggest, by a good two stone. "Father," I asked him, "do you really think I'm the devil?"

"Perhaps you're just a witch."

I took the bottle out of my pocket where I'd had it all along. I held it out towards him. He would not look at it. He peered away from it, into the corner, as if he was looking for cockroaches. "Is that it?" His voice was quite excitable.

"It is."