encounters with evil 2 the skangening

This happened in July 2014.

Sitting in the front room of Margaret Roche's house in the town of Newbridge.

The widow Roche had just served me a cup of coffee and a plate of sandwiches.

I ate and drank.

My mind began to swim.

Reason and context went hither and yon.

Time ran into treacle.

As my head lolled on my shoulders, I realised she had drugged me.

I could see her watching with a basilisk stare.

I had time to wonder: What will this thing do if I go unconscious?

My mind focussed on a table where she had on display an array of kitschy religious objects.

Little varnished wooden crosses, plastic statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary, prayer cards, rosary beads, a model of Padre Pio, some figurines of the Lord.

In the middle of all these objects was an obscenely genitally explicit statue of a naked woman in orgiastic ectasy pleasuring with an object.

I hadn't noticed it before.

Right there in plain view.

"That's quite a statue Margaret," I murmured as my faculties began to shut down.

"Oh my daughter gave me that," she said, her voice coming from far away. "I don't know what it's doing there."

I gathered my strength, stood up, walked to her kitchen, splashed water on my face, and left her house.

It took about a week for the effects of whatever she'd given me to wear off.

Then the withdrawal symptoms kicked in.

Withdrawals symptoms means I was hooked.

I describe those symptoms as being the feeling that every cell in my body is screaming for something and I don't know what it is.

There was a good deal of good old fashioned pain involved too.

Of course I didn't know what she'd dosed me with.

The withdrawal symptoms and constant pain of cold turkey ended after four days.

Then I had another three weeks in a kind of spiritual limbo, a feeling of detachment not unlike the effects of shock.

During this period I read from the New Testament every day. Sometimes a whole Gospel. Sometimes a letter of Saint Paul. I have heard claims that these accounts contain the truth of the universe and I figured it could do no harm to have that in my head along with any poison Margaret Roche had put there. The hope was that the truth of the universe would outweigh and then dissipate the poison. So it proved. On the day I reached Saint Paul's Letter to Philemon, I was symptom free.

As the veil lifted an interesting rather rueful reflection came to me. During the past three years, I'd engaged in public polemic with a young Independent Newspapers feature writer called Ian O'Doherty.

At one stage his employers suspended him and even considered firing him as they were worried he had left them exposed to a libel suit by identifying me in his column to his readers.

He was restored to the pages of the Irish Independent only after I made it clear I had no intention of sueing the newspaper group, and nor did I have any wish that Ian O'Doherty should lose his job.

Fortunes of war.

But how much of my vituperation during that fairly rough and ready polemic was me and how much of it was Margaret Roche's drugs doing the talking?

Addicts have told me that my experience with withdrawal symptoms indicates she'd been poisoning me with her drugs regularly over time not just on one occasion.

Some of them have even suggested that the narcotic she gave me may have been towards the extreme end of the spectrum of illegal drugs.

We'll know on judgement day.

A few years later I was at a church service for a young woman who had died in tragic circumstances.

At the end of the service the congregation stood and I heard singing from a few pews behind me.

I thought I recognised that particular soulless warble.

I turned.

It was her.

Margaret Roche kept singing but favoured me with a mocking smirk.

Slowly, deliberately, letting as many of the congregation who cared to notice, see precisely what I was doing, I sat down.

I don't stand for scum.