Page 18 of The Elements
I feel my heart begin to pound faster in my chest. I have studiously avoided catching Jack’s eye since he appeared on the altar steps and have no intention of looking up now.
“No, that decision did not fall to me,” replies Jack after a pause. “Although I was party to it, as I have admitted on many occasions over the last year. It is to my eternal regret that I was. It is a cross that I have to bear.”
It’s interesting to me that he immediately casts himself in the role of the victim. Also, this is the second time he has compared himself to a member of the Holy Trinity. Messianic complexes, I’m sure, are rife in his line of work.
“So, that being the case,” continues Lucy, ignoring his last comment, “do you have anything to say to those eight little girls who that man abused?”
“Leave it alone, sure what’s done is done!” cries a voice from a few rows behind me that I recognize immediately as belonging to Mrs. Duggan. She is not alone in her desire for this subject to be dropped; several others chime in too. And inside, silently, so do I.
“Naturally, my heart goes out to those young women—”
“No, they weren’t young women,” insists Lucy with a lawyer’s need for precision. “They were children.”
“Yes, indeed. Children,” agrees Jack. “And I hope they find the healing they need in the years ahead. With God’s help—”
“Oh, fuck off,” says another voice, one I do not recognize, from the rear of the church, but it is a youthful, male voice. I have nothing to base this on, but somehow I think it might be the voice of Evan Keogh.
“With God’s help, they will get past whatever might have happened to them.”
“ Might have happened to them?” asks Lucy, growing angry now.
“ Did happen to them, according to the courts,” says Jack, correcting himself, and I marvel at how he can make an entirely accurate remark sound as if he’s casting doubt upon the verdict.
“But at his trial,” continues Lucy, and, finally looking up, I see the growing indignation on Jack’s face.
He didn’t come here to be challenged by an eighteen-year-old girl.
He came to trot out his stump speech and drink a few pints of Guinness later with people he thought could ensure his reelection.
“At his trial, you said, and I quote”—and here she unfolds a newspaper clipping she has brought with her—“ Brendan Carvin was a great gift to Irish swimming. Fiercely proud of his young swimmers, dedicated to their advancement, and relentless in his pursuit of funding. His track record at the Olympics alone shows that we were right to appoint him to the job .”
“What I meant by that,” says Jack, raising a hand in the air as if she’s a buzzing fly that needs swatting away, “was that on a purely professional level, if you look solely at the results he achieved, we appointed the right man.”
A murmur of dismay emerges across the aisles—even those who are, by their nature, supportive of middle-aged men and dismissive of young women find this remark problematic—and he raises his voice to be heard.
“No, listen now,” he says, waving a pudgy hand in the air.
“Yes, we got it badly wrong in some ways. We believed Mr. Carvin to be a man of honor. Sure, there was nothing to suggest otherwise. But if you take the emotion out of the story and just separate the man and the job from what we subsequently learned, there’s no one can deny his success in the role. ”
“True enough,” says a man in the second row.
“How many medals did we win, after all, at the Olympics during his tenure? The world is a complicated place, Missy,” he continues, pointing his finger at his inquisitor. “You’ll find that out as you get a bit older and—”
“Don’t patronize the girl!” shouts a woman from the back of the church, and half the audience bursts into applause while the other half, the male half, folds its arms. What is it, I wonder, about sporting success that seems more important to these men than basic decency?
“Look, I don’t think any of us want to get bogged down in talking about Brendan Carvin,” says Jack, clearly eager for us to leave this conversation behind us.
“The man is where he ought to be, in the Midlands Prison, and there he will stay for the foreseeable future. And rest assured there will be more stringent safeguards put in place in the future to prevent something like this from ever happening again. If reelected to Dáil éireann, I will make it my personal responsibility to—”
And then, abruptly, he stops talking. I look up and realize that he is staring directly at me.
In the moment, he’s not entirely sure that I am who he thinks I am.
My eyes meet his and I shake my head almost imperceptibly, beseeching him not to identify me.
He continues to look, perhaps trying to understand what’s happening here—is it me?
If it is, where have I come from? And what do I want?
—then, troubled, uncertain what to do, returns to what he was saying.
“I will make it my personal responsibility to make sure that nothing like that ever happens again,” he continues, quieter now, his confidence and bonhomie noticeably diminished.
“This country has a long and shameful history of people using their authority to destroy the lives of young people, and we cannot allow that to continue. My colleagues and I will put an end to the Brendan Carvins of this world.” He pauses and looks at me, as if to suggest that I am the villain of this story.
“And we will put an end to their enablers too. Those people who knew what was going on and looked away. In my book, complicity is just as bad as the crime itself.”
This goes down well and there’s a sustained round of applause.
I can’t imagine that Lucy is satisfied with the response, for, after all, he is disassociating himself from the very crimes that he helped facilitate, while claiming credit for the medals that Ireland won.
But the meeting is called to an end now and the audience rises to its feet, eager for their pints.
I brush past the other people in my row, determined to get out quickly, and make my way down the nave toward the front doors.
Pushing them open, I can’t help myself. I glance back for a moment, and I see Jack taking selfies with some of the voters, a broad smile on his face.
Perhaps he knows I’m watching, because he looks down at me and the expression on his face changes immediately.
Don’t you fucking judge me , it says. Not you, of all people .