The Last Days of Jack Sparks (5 page)

Di Stefano gives good rage. As an octogenarian, he has much to be furious about in life, ranging from the world’s decaying moral core to having to push when he urinates. Throw in a Vatican-load of righteous zeal and you have a man capable of apoplexy.

Beard and Beardless grimace, fists clenched by their sides. Maddelena’s gaze scorches the side of my face.

The church falls grimly silent.

Grinning broadly, I applaud the assembled players, hands above my head, each clap resounding in the rafters.

‘Chill out,’ I tell them. ‘I’m just enjoying the show. Highly entertaining.’ Tony helpfully translates.

Maria’s reaction is the most curious. Instead of raving about the crucified Nazarene, she looks straight at me. A glint of sun makes those yellow eyes burn as she cocks her head to one side, quizzical. And she
smiles
at me. Everyone else is scowling, but Maria smiles. Still playing the role, I suppose. Improvising.
Riffing
. What a trouper.

She turns to look back across the church at something. I follow her gaze over to that towering stained-glass window on the rear wall. Then her eyes are back on me and she’s got a weird, knowing look on her face. For the life of me I can’t work out what this odd little moment with the window is supposed to mean.

Evidently keen to re-establish the mood, Di Stefano intones what I later discover is an exorcism prayer. Maria ignores him. She’s still looking right at me. Getting sick of her smile and B-movie eyes, I pull out my smartphone. The reception here is patchy, but I grab a scrap of signal.

Di Stefano’s pronouncements and Tony’s translations (‘In the name of Jesus Christ, our God and Lord, strengthened by the intercession of the immaculate Virgin Mary, mother of God . . .’) fade into the background as I check my updates. Social media is the usual heady potpourri of hearts and minds.

‘How long were you in rehab for, dawg?’ enquires
Jack Sparks on Drugs
fan Monky617 (two months is the answer, in case you’re similarly curious – and the only drug I’ve done since leaving is alcohol, which was never my problem in the first place), while PaulTrema8 wants to know what my next book is going to be about (as if the exorcism isn’t a pretty good clue). SpazzDick2, on the other hand, kindly offers, ‘I’ll punch ur fucken head off u arogunt [
sic
] cock.’ I’m pretty sure I blocked him last week, but apparently not. Must have been his earlier incarnation, SpazzDick1.

‘. . . as wax melts before the fire, so the wicked perish at the presence of God . . .’ drones Di Stefano, as Maria gnashes something feral back.

I might seem to shirk my journalistic duty by reading social media during an exorcism. But in the face of this amateur dramatics society play, social media provides a vital lifeline to the real world. Feeling a strong urge to connect, I fire a message into the ether:

‘Probably bad to laugh during the exorcism of a thirteen-year-old girl, right? Well, I just did. You should SEE this bullshit.’

I consider attaching a photo of the exorcism in full swing, then ditch the idea. It might prompt Beard and Beardless to wrestle me to the floor while trying to confiscate my device. I could take them both on, no question, but just don’t need the bother.

Di Stefano seems back on a roll, clutching a wooden rod with a perforated metal ball on the end. He emphasises certain bits of banter by using this device to fling droplets of something at Maria.

‘We
drive
you from us, whoever you may be . . .’

Maria shrieks every time this stuff hits her. Oh yes, he’s bringing out the big guns now. Holy water! Another box ticked.

‘Unclean spirits, all satanic
powers
, all infernal
invaders
. . .’

Maria shrieks again and bares her teeth. ‘Poor Maria,’ she growls. ‘In such pain, locked deep inside herself. She will die before we ever let her go.’

‘All wicked
legions
,
assemblies
and
sects
. . .’

Maria twists in agony as this last triple whammy of water gets her right in the face. Interestingly, her skin reddens, as if scalded. Wonder how they did that. I should pay more attention.

‘Remember what a small boy once told you, about your nieces?’ Maria says. ‘He meant what he said. Believe it.’

Di Stefano shoots a swift, meaningful glance my way, weirdly vindicated.

It’s a great moment. Very clever. I do love a bit of continuity.

Online, there are already over two hundred responses to my exorcism post. Most of these ask whether I’m really at an exorcism or where exactly it is taking place. Some say how scared they’d be to see an exorcism, while others laugh along with me. ‘Are they really still doing that stuff?’ says Domina22 from Cape Town. ‘It’s like science never happened.’

Beard and Beardless hold Maria as firmly as they can, as the exorcism builds to a grand finale. Di Stefano dishes out his pious gems, louder and more forceful than ever. One thing’s for sure: if Maria Corvi
isn’t
giving the performance of her young life, she needs an MRI scanner right away. She froths at the mouth, her irises are nowhere to be seen and her neck appears to have stretched, which must be down to the angles again. Always working the angles, these guys.

Finally she convulses, breaks free of the aides and falls to her knees. Then she regurgitates something red and unexpectedly solid, which hits the ground with an even less expected clang.

Okay, they’ve upped their game. They’ve got me back. Yes, vomiting is yet another exorcism cliché, but I’m curious – why the clang? I crane my neck to see, but this brings no satisfaction, so I spring up, edge past Maddelena and head to the front. I am an audience member evading security and running to get a closer look during a Penn & Teller show.

Beardless gestures for me to stay back, offering a clear challenge. Ignoring him, I strain to see what Maria’s thrown up. There’s blood, some kind of spongy matter . . . and pieces of metal that are hard to identify.

‘You will leave this poor girl,’ commands Di Stefano, ‘this child of Christ!’

The teenager cackles, still on all fours. Strands of bloody drool connect her chin to the floor.

‘You will return to the foul depths whence you came. The power of Jesus Christ compels you!’

The latter phrase may amuse me, but it rocks Maria. As if in response to this upping of the ante, she yells fiercely up at him: ‘Leave us be, Di Stefano! Or we will slaughter this bitch.’

Her whole body spasms and her fingertips dig hard into the floorboards.

I wince as one of her fingernails bends back, strains, snaps.

Her head jerks back and a solid object explodes from her mouth in a torrent of red mist. This startling missile punches into Di Stefano’s left upper thigh and stays there, the end quivering. When he cries out and grabs at it, his own blood spritzes his hand.

Mr Beard steps in between Maria and Di Stefano, as if intending to block further projectiles. Beardless rushes to support Di Stefano, who nevertheless topples backwards and crashes to the floor, banging his head.

I’ve never seen anything with this kind of impact, even in the fiercely unpredictable world of gangs. It’s all so convincingly chaotic that my
Truman Show
theory falters.

For now.

Since we’re in the middle of nowhere, it takes half an hour for paramedics to arrive.

During the wait, Beard and Beardless tend to Di Stefano as best they can. They lay him down along two pews pushed together to form an impromptu bed. He groans, rocks to and fro and mutters prayers in Italian. The aides rip and cut the robes around his wound to reveal a rusty six-inch nail jutting out of his pale, bony thigh. I examine it as closely as seems polite, but it certainly strikes me as real. No prosthetic special effects here.

Interesting. So Di Stefano will go to any lengths to convince an infidel like me that Satan is real – even if it means taking a nail to the leg. Either that, or he and the Corvis actually aren’t in cahoots. If the latter is true, then Di Stefano was just doing his theatrical shtick with a disturbed teenager who swallows pieces of metal, and he has tumbled under the wheels of rough justice.

I inspect the vomit on the floor. Oh, the glamour. There’s another nail there, like the one in Di Stefano’s leg, plus a piece of jagged, indistinct metal. When I go to touch the nail, Beardless barks something that will turn out to mean ‘Leave it alone!’ when I get the audio translated. Happily, Translator Tony is nowhere to be seen, so I feign ignorance while rolling the nail back and forth. It really is made of weighty metal.

‘Do not touch that!’ commands Beard. ‘This is now a police matter.’

‘No no no,’ says Di Stefano, through gritted teeth. ‘I will not press charges against a young girl who does not know what she is doing.’

I suspect the old boy regrets having allowed a journalist to witness an exorcism. This one presumably hasn’t gone as smoothly as he’d hoped. How fortunate, then, that I signed the wrong name on the papers which would have granted Di Stefano copy approval. In case you don’t know, copy approval is when the interviewee gets to read the finished piece and object to certain bits and pieces, which are generally then pruned to suit them. This phenomenon happened to journalism a decade or two back, when some sackless editor caved in and agreed to give some big-shot celebrity that ridiculous power. It has been a blight on the profession ever since, along with other regular mandates such as PRs sitting in on interviews, and questions having to be approved in advance. And you wonder why I moved into books . . .

Now that the show’s over, Maria has returned to her normal self. The whites of her eyes are white again and her neck appears the conventional length, although the redness on her face remains and that broken, bleeding fingernail looks painful. Sitting with her mother across the aisle, she looks frightened and bewildered, firing off questions in Italian. Maddelena fights back tears as she tries to answer those questions, while using a handkerchief to dab blood from around Maria’s mouth.

Feeling the heat of Maddelena’s long, hard stare, I try to explain how I was laughing at the situation, rather than at her daughter. Without Tony present to do his job, the distinction doesn’t register. When I ask what her next move will be, she manages some English: ‘I don’t know.
Maybe
doctor.’

‘That’s good,’ I say. ‘It’s good to try all options.’

I want to add, ‘Especially as, you know, your daughter’s just puked blood and metal,’ but surely that’s self-evident.

‘Signor,’ says Di Stefano from across the aisle. This sounds like a summoning, so I search for Tony. I find the work-shy bastard outside, standing on grass, gazing along the side of the church towards the cliff edge, with cigarette smoke billowing from his nostrils. I’m telling you this part for a reason: Tony actually
starts
at the sight of me, confused and shaken, instinctively touching the small cross hanging around his neck. It reminds me how very powerful things like exorcisms can be to believers. He pulls himself together and follows me back in, tossing his cigarette aside.

The Beard Brothers have staunched the priest’s bleeding as best they can, but he’s pallid. His aides whisper to him in Italian, presumably advising him to forget about the stupid journalist and conserve his strength. Yet the question on Di Stefano’s mind is too pressing to wait.

‘Why was the exorcism funny?’

Those dead eyes burrow right into me.

At this point, if I was a Louis Theroux or a Jon Ronson, I would nervously pop my spectacles back up onto the bridge of my nose and utter something evasive, most likely in the form of another question. (
Eleanor: I know you and Murray don’t like me mentioning these guys in print, but I heard Ronson slagged me off on the radio last week. He didn’t mention me by name, but blatantly cast aspersions in my direction. And in the Fitzroy Tavern, one of Theroux’s flunkies couldn’t resist telling me all about Louis’ book sales and viewing figures and asking whether I’d landed myself a TV series yet. So as far as I’m concerned it’s open fucking season.)
Instead, I tell Di Stefano I laughed because his exorcism struck me as a pantomime.

Di Stefano absorbs these body blows with dignity, for a man stretched awkwardly across a pew in a torn dress, with a filthy piece of metal sticking out of him.

‘But I suppose that’s the way I see all religion,’ I add. ‘I’m an—’

‘Atheist,’ interrupts the priest. ‘Yes. I know about you. An atheist and a drug addict.’

He groans and clutches his leg with one liver-spotted hand. I’m glad he’s in pain. Because I’m not a drug addict, whatever they told me every day in rehab. Much like religion, drug addiction is for the weak. Right here, right now, on this bright, chilly afternoon, I feel in control. I feel good. Great, even. Haven’t even thought about cocaine, my number one fix, in a long time.

Beardless intently reads the small print on the packaging of some painkillers. He and Beard debate whether they can give Di Stefano more before the ambulance gets here.

‘At first,’ I tell Di Stefano, ‘I thought Maria was in on the deception.’ I glance at the nail and the wound. ‘But now, I don’t think so.’

‘Well,’ says the priest, ‘then we have changed your mind in some way. But I assure you, there has been no deception here. The only deception is in your mind.’

Sidestepping that odd, tit-for-tat playground comment, I say, ‘Seriously, mate, can’t you see she’s mentally ill?’

Di Stefano’s selective deafness kicks in. ‘A word of warning,’ he says. His voice may be slighter now, having lost its boom, but nevertheless I wonder if he’s about to threaten me. ‘You can laugh at the Church, no problem. We are laughed at every day. But when you laugh at . . .’

His eyes flit across the church.

‘At the Devil?’ I ask, raising my voice for Maria’s benefit as much as anyone else’s, hoping she and Maddelena will understand. ‘There’s no such thing as the Devil!’

Di Stefano makes a kind of horse’s whinny. I think it’s supposed to mean I’m treading on thin ice with The Man Downstairs.

Across the church, Maddelena stands alone. She must have been keenly eavesdropping on our conversation, because only now does she realise that Maria is no longer beside her. The woman’s hair flails as she scans the church.