mns  2005-05-30 09:17  Miscellaneous Pieces   

My mother was an ardent fan of the theatre, and when I was nine I became her theatre companion – a weekly pursuit that lasted for five years.
Every Tuesday evening, we had dinner early, and then opening the hall door, she would say, ‘Look at the moon.’ And I would respond, ‘Look at the stars.’
And off we’d go.
I loved those Tuesday nights – it was a special time between my mother and me. I sat quietly, learning that there were some plays which captured me, and some I couldn’t begin to comprehend. There were nights when I would trail home behind her, tired and disillusioned. But I hung in there, and finally I struck gold. The very first time I saw one of Michael MacLiammoir’s one-man shows, I was hooked. I skipped down O’Connell Street, past Nelson’s pillar frantically asking questions because I was smitten with the notion of Dorian Gray.
I couldn’t understand why someone would not want to grow up. Growing up meant becoming like my mother and father, and that seemed attractive. ‘He didn’t want to grow old,’ my mother explained as I danced like a dervish beside her.
‘But Granny and Grandad are old,’ I said, ‘and they’re happy.’
I was bewildered. Here was something I couldn’t understand at all.
‘He didn’t want lines on his face,’ she said. ‘So he made a pact with the devil that his portrait would age instead of him.’
First thing after school the following day, I dug out a photograph of myself, and in the manner of Dorian Gray I took it up to the top floor of our house. My idea of the devil was so terrifying that I kept saying over and over, ‘I’m not making a pact with you – I’m only putting this up here, just to see what happens, because I don’t want lines on my face either.’
The next week we started Scéal Seadhna in Irish class, and to my horror, the devil appeared in it. I got this terrible feeling I was being given a warning – such was the theatrical fancifulness of my mind. Worse was yet to come – I had to read aloud, and images of fire, and a man with horns, and a tail with an arrow on the end of it, and a gigantic pronged fork danced before me, the heat of the flames scorching my imagination.
The moment I got home I headed for the top floor and endeavoured to remove the photo from behind the skirting board where I had carefully slotted it.
Suddenly it slipped further down and disappeared completely.

I was panic stricken. I kept reminding myself that I had done nothing
wrong – all I had done was to put a photograph behind the skirting board, and Dorian Gray wasn’t real anyway, my mother had said that. She’d said he was a character in fiction. But I could see MacLiammoir’s face as he told the story of Gray’s perpetual youth while the painting in the attic aged.
‘Dear God,’ I prayed.
I feared eternal damnation.
Over the next weeks I tried with tweezers, pliers and knives to prise the skirting board apart and salvage the photographic image of me … to no avail.

The years have passed and they are all gone – my grandparents, Nelson on his pillar, MacLiammoir, my austere father and my laughing mother… even the house where we once lived has long been reduced to rubble.

Hopefully the photograph and my pact with the devil went with it.