The Oracle at the AdelphiBy David GardinerThis story may be reproduced in whole or in part for any non-commercial purpose provid

Ishicheli John ChickLit

The Oracle at the AdelphiBy David GardinerThis story may be reproduced in whole or in part for any non-commercial purpose provided thatauthorship is acknowledged and credited. The copyright remains the property of the authorIt was only when Satan Coil died that any of us discovered that Satan hadn't been his real name. He died in 1956, the year that the Russian tanks rolled in to Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution. Of course the Hungarian Revolution was of no concern to me, I was nine years old and what I cared about was my new black Raleigh Junior bicycle, the TV set with the huge mahogany cabinet and the miniscule, blurry and often rolling black-and-white picture, and the Glenalough Adelphi, the local cinema that was owned and managed by Satan, where my friends and I spent every Saturday afternoon, transported to other lands, other times and other lives by the magic of the flickering screen.The idea of a cinema being owned and operated by Satan was one that must have appealed mightily to the local Roman Catholic hierarchy, it may even have been them who gave him the nick-name, but I suspect that it emerged more from his habit of running up and down the cinema aisles during the Saturday matinees when the building was taken-over by hordes of runny-nosed pre-teenage youngsters intent on admitting their friends without tickets through the fire-doors, while brandishing a high-powered flashlight and screaming at them in his thick Galway accent to "Sate in yer sates!". It was but a short step from "Sate-in" to the popular familiar name for the Prince of Darkness. And the Prince of Darkness, in a manner of speaking, is exactly what he was.Satan was not a well man during the time that I knew him. He had been tall, and may even have been handsome in his earlier years, but by the beginning of my cinema-going career he had become unnaturally lean and bent-over, wore a permanent hang-dog scowl on his scrawny pallid face, and seemed always to have last shaved a couple of days prior to any encounter. He spoke in little short bursts, punctuated by attempts to catch his breath, each of which resulted in a cough-like gulp from somewhere at the back of his throat. One could chart from Saturday to Saturday the decline in his ability to climb the stairs to the projection room.Looking back across the decades to those distant Glenalough days, things become obvious that were far from obvious at the time. I could make a good stab now at putting a name to the condition from which Satan suffered, but more importantly perhaps I can see some of the underlying causes for the slow atrophy of his will to continue. Satan had originally come to Glenalough and purchased the Adelphi in order to be close to Dilly Morgan, the Widow Morgan, as we knew her, Sean Morgan's mother. Sean Morgan was a couple of years older than me, a street-wise thick-set ginger-headed boy with a penchant for bullying, whom nobody liked but many secretly admired at the coarse Christian Brothers Primary School at the south end of the town. Whether the Widow Morgan was really a widow, or whether this was a courtesy title awarded to any woman who found herself alone with a child in the hypocritical and moralistic society of 1950s Ireland is anyone's guess. There were even rumors that Satan Coil might have been Sean's father, but we discounted that theory on the simple grounds that everyone knew that the Coils were Protestants, and the idea of a romantic liaison between a Catholic woman and an unbeliever was even more unthinkable than the notion of f*********n itself. More likely Sean was the result of some ill-fated affair in Ms. Morgan's teenage years, and Satan, whose devotion to Dilly was perfectly genuine, hoped that despite his apparent disqualification on religious grounds he might still merit consideration as a suitor to a Catholic woman who was, after all, somewhat damaged goods herself. In the event Dilly Morgan never, to my knowledge, showed the smallest interest in Satan's amorous advances, and drifted into middle-life in the sole company of her thuggish son, the two of them living in one of the smallest cottages within the town boundaries of Glenalough, on the bank of an overgrown, littered and rather foul-smelling stream that only flowed if there had been a few days of heavy rain in the mountains. The cottage was called "Riversdale House".As well as being unlucky in love, the value of Satan's business investment and the income that it generated declined rapidly and steeply during his years in Glenalough. He often complained that it was the Roman Catholic Church that had engineered his ruin, because although Glenalough was technically within the Protestant dominated and British ruled state of Northern Ireland, it was a border town and peopled predominantly by Catholics. This Catholic/Protestant divide was enormously important in every aspect of Irish life then and still is to this day: about twelve years after Satan's death it led t

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