Denying the Faith

By Errol O'Neill

A collection of stories emanating from the experience of growing up, living and working in Australia’s third metropolis. ‘Denying the Faith’ and ‘This Clown’ record the fearful impressions of a childhood spent in Irish Catholic suburbia, reflected upon later in life when the fear has subsided but the guilt remains.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: Jan 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781760410797

Errol O'Neill

Since the early 1970s Errol O'Neill has worked as an actor, writer, director, dramaturg and producer, specialising in the creation of new work for the Australian theatre. He has published many short stories, written chapters and articles for books and journals on aspects of theatre and society, and guest-lectured in tertiary drama courses. He wrote half a dozen political satires for the Popular Theatre Troupe and has written many plays on aspects of Queensland and Australian history, which have been produced by La Boite, Queensland Theatre Company and other theatres in Brisbane and interstate.

Book preview

Denying the Faith

Denying the Faith

Errol O’neill

Ginninderra Press

Contents

Copyright

Map

This Clown

Denying the Faith

Going to Kanga’s

Suburban Odyssey

Throwing Up in Toowoomba

About the Author

Denying the Faith & other stories

ISBN 978 1 76041 079 7

Copyright © text Errol O’Neill 2012

Cover photograph: Richard Jones

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All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for permission should be sent to the publisher at the address below.

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First published 2012

Reprinted 2016

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Ginninderra Press

PO Box 3461 Port Adelaide 5015

www.ginninderrapress.com.au

map

This Clown

On the school tennis courts one afternoon back in sepia memory, I was performing the role of ball boy. I was not playing tennis and scoring points, and working up a healthy sweat. No, that would have been unlikely, as the untalented and the talented in the realm of sport were early sorted out and I was definitely not among the latter. Was I there because I was supposed to be playing tennis and when I got to the court the inevitable happened and I was knocked out of some compulsory serial competition early? Not likely, but possible. Was it just assumed that I was no good at the game and was expected to be ball boy for the more serious tennis-playing boys?

Memory cannot answer all these questions but it does show that at some point I was standing there, having collected some tennis balls at the periphery, holding three in my hand and not having a clear idea of what to do with them.

Father O’Madden came down to supervise. He saw some kids standing around not playing when they should have been playing and called out to them. Why are you just standing there, lads?

We haven’t got any balls, Father.

He looks around and sees me standing there with three in my hand, caught, as I always recall it, in a frozen-forever, Grecian urn moment. Is this a moment of artistic wonder, glazed, and in glorious colour, unchangeable, for all future generations to admire? No. Is this an innocent boy such as Augustine might discover on the beach, not filling holes with sea water but with the symbol of the Trinity in his hand, causing even holy sages to stop and reflect on things eternal? No.

This clown here has three of them! O’Madden exclaims.

Several elements, caught in a moment, a glass-mounted split-second which I have slid under the microscope many times over the years in order to analyse. Not only the visuals, but also the psychology of the incident. The visuals were pretty ordinary. Anyone walking past would have seen nothing extreme. No violence, no shouting, no obvious signs of distress or torment. Just a plain after-school scene with boys and a teacher on the tennis courts. But the psychology written into this moment has taken some years to analyse.

A scene with three parts.

The first part is me standing there with three tennis balls. These were the days when tennis balls were white, not yellow like they are today. I wasn’t thinking too much about what I was doing, just standing there holding the balls. Right hand, left hand, I don’t remember, but from memory all in one hand. I might well have been amazed to find that I could hold three balls in one hand and got so amused by this that I lost concentration on the job I was supposed to be doing. Which was making sure the real tennis players were kept supplied with balls so they could ace one another and demonstrate their sporting ability, and maybe one day follow Hoad and Emerson into noble immortality.

The second part is O’Madden, close by, so that he doesn’t have to shift his gaze much from the direction of the non-playing boys. He would have looked over at them and seen they were not playing as they should have been, and shouted out immediately, Why aren’t you boys playing? And their No balls reply came quickly. Then with a slight turn of his head, O’Madden is able to see me close by with the balls in hand, and then he issues his peremptory derogation. This Clown. He probably didn’t think much about his choice of words; he was just managing the tennis court as he did after school four days a week, making sure the balls which had come off the court got back to the serving end. But the balls weren’t just lying on the ground and he didn’t have to direct someone to pick them up and throw them to the other end of the court, he had a perfectly evident reason that the balls were stopped in their trajectory. It was This Clown. This Clown had intervened to stop the serious business of tennis playing. The serious business of keeping young boys busy so that they didn’t have time to think lewd thoughts. And it was a perfect situation in which to have lewd thoughts. Here was someone saying, We haven’t got any balls, Father. An ideal opportunity to make jokes and indulge in sniggering. But this is serious tennis business. Serious sportsmen don’t make jokes about testicles.

The third part is the innocent, nameless, faceless boys of memory, who should have been advancing every moment towards their place in the Davis Cup, standing idle.

This depiction of the three unlikely estates of this realm looks ordinary enough on the storyboard. Now, let’s get the camera rolling. Here is the black-robed priest with the roman collar and the rimless Irish priest glasses. A slight turn of the head, sufficient to see the Clown, the commoner, the spanner in the works, the one stopping progress through his utter foolishness, his dawdling, his complete lack of ability to