Smile

  —Nobody will be late, he said.

  —No, sir.

  —You will all wear white shirts.

  I didn’t have a white shirt. My mother got me one the day before the funeral, when I was at school. It was nearly see-through.

  —You can wear a vest under it, she said.

  I’d stopped wearing vests. I was becoming good at spotting what was cool and what would get you killed.

  A gang of us went to the funeral together. Upstairs on the bus; it was great. We didn’t care about Patch. Not when we were together and the sun was making us squint, even though it was freezing in the bus. We got off a few stops early. I wasn’t sure where we were. We were following Doc because he knew a lane. We liked lanes but there were no good ones where we lived.

  —Was Patch dead? I said.

  —What d’you mean was he dead? said Moonshine.

  —When he came in to hear us, I said.—He might’ve been dead already.

  Moonshine shrugged. There were seven of us walking together. No one thought it was mad.

  —What about the others? I asked.

  —The other Brothers?

  —Yeah, I said.—They might be dead as well. They’re zombies.

  I knew what I’d just done. I’d invented something that would live for years. My own monster, and I was giving it to my friends, the only people I cared about and the only people who really, really frightened me, because of how things shifted, how the wrong word, the wrong shirt, the wrong band, an irresistible smile, could destroy you. You had to have something useful, your size or a temper, or a sister. The Brothers were zombies. Because I’d said they were.

  —The fuckin’ Brothers are fuckin’ zombies.

  —What about the other teachers?

  —No.

  We all agreed. The lay teachers weren’t zombies.

  —They’re only cunts.

  We came out of the lane, onto the Malahide Road. I knew where we were again. We crossed, pushing and running, to Griffith Avenue. The Brothers owned all this. My father had said that the night before, when I’d gone with my mother to see him in the hospital. He said he was impressed that mendicants like the Brothers could hold such vast tracts of land. He’d made my mother laugh. Then he’d closed his eyes. I knew: he wasn’t asleep. I knew: he wanted us to go.

  We walked under huge trees, and past a row of colossal grey buildings. We found the church. We were early. But Tom Jones was there, smoking in his car. He was wearing a black suit and he’d cut himself shaving. We waited for him to get out, so we could follow him into the church before the coffin and the Brothers arrived. We stood a good bit away from his car.

  I looked at Tom Jones as I spoke, and I made sure the others could see that.

  —Can a Brother be a zombie and a cunt? I asked.

  —Shut up, he’ll hear you.

  —No, he won’t.

  I wasn’t sure about that. I could see smoke coming out the driver’s window. I was squeezing years of risk into a few seconds. I’d never get this chance again. I knew that if I became the centre of the day, I might never have to do it again. They’d still call me a queer but they wouldn’t mean it. They might even stop calling me Queer.

  —I’ll ask Fay in Religion tomorrow, I said.—Excuse me, Brother, are you a cunt or a zombie?

  The lads hid behind a few cars and broke their shites laughing. I was thirteen but I felt seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three.

  The hearse was coming. We could see it on Griffith Avenue, waiting to turn on to the hill up to the church. Tom Jones got out of his car. He dropped his butt on the ground and stood on it. The lads made themselves visible again. He stared at us, then walked into the church by the side door. He knew he didn’t have to tell us to follow him.

  The church wasn’t full. It was just a load of Brothers and some of the other teachers, and the Brothers’ housekeeper, Missis Delaney. And one other woman.

  I saw Conkers’s shoulders first. He looked like he was laughing but I knew quickly that he was crying.

  —They were probably boyfriends, Doc whispered.

  It was the worst, and the best. Trying not to laugh. Waiting for the next Ó’Riada hymn, wishing for it, so I could concentrate on the notes and the Irish and Tom Jones’s hands, and forget what Doc had said. The smothered laughter was heat. We could all feel it. The church was freezing – it had been freezing for years – but my face was sweating, and right under my arms.

  Brother Fay wiped his eyes with his fist. He took off his glasses, and put them back on. Another Brother I didn’t know got out of his seat, genuflected, and walked out. We were up in the loft, at the back of the church. I leaned out and saw him taking a packet of Sweet Afton out of his coat pocket.

  They didn’t carry the coffin. They walked behind two men in black coats who pushed the coffin on a black trolley. Brother Murphy, the French teacher, was down there, near the back of the line. He was looking at the black-and-white tiles as he walked. The woman didn’t go; she stayed sitting. The church was empty now, except for the woman and a man at the front who was doing something with leaflets. And us.

  —Sir?

  It was a sixth-year. Hughie Breslin. He was going with Moonshine’s sister. Moonshine said that he had all the Moody Blues’ records.

  —Yes? said Tom Jones.

  —Do we have to go to the graveyard? Hughie asked.

  Tom Jones looked up from his sheet music and stared at Hughie.

  No one even breathed.

  Could a teacher hit someone in a church? Hughie was taller than Tom Jones.

  Tom Jones shifted his eyes and looked at all of us.

  —No, he said.—You do not.

  6

  Charles Jacob looked out at me. He was on the phone but he lifted his free hand and called me in. I stood in front of his desk – there wasn’t a chair – and listened.

  —Ah, fuck off now, Frank. Fuck off. Just – I’m telling you. Fuck right off.

  I pointed at the door. Did he want me to wait outside? His eyebrows told me to stay where I was.

  —Frank, Frank. I’m putting the phone down. Now. I don’t believe a word of it – threaten away there. We’ll see – fuck off, fuck off, bye, good luck, fuck off.

  He put the phone down, held it a half-inch over its rest, as if still listening to Frank’s fading complaints, then dropped it.

  He looked at me.

  —How are you?

  —Grand.

  —Good man.

  Charles – he was never Charlie – was a good deal older than anyone else in the building. He’d started a pirate station on the North Sea, or he’d been on the boat for a while. Happy days, happy days. Did you ever try masturbating during a Force 10 gale? He had a family, kids and a wife, somewhere near – he cycled to work – but I never saw them. He was like a big brother, I think. A much older brother, who I hadn’t really known until he came home one day and was suddenly there. Family but strange. Warm, but hard to understand.

  —The time has come, he said.

  —For what?

  —Do you interest yourself in politics? he asked.

  —No.

  —At all?

  —Not really, I said.—No.

  I don’t know why I didn’t just say Yes, and let myself catch up with the lie. Everyone else had done that. The political commentators, the travel writers, the food and wine experts – they’d all happily accepted that they knew much more than they actually did know.

  —Well, Victor, he said.—Now you do. You’re John fuckin’ Pilger.

  I liked that. It was immediate, effortless. I knew he wouldn’t be sending me to Cambodia. Although I already began to see myself there, walking through the killing fields. I was, I remember, very happy. Charles Jacob had done what years of education had never done. He’d paid me a compliment; it still makes
me tingle. I wanted to go home and tell my mother.

  I was right. I wasn’t going to Cambodia. I was going to interview a politician called Aileen Clohessy. Charles Jacob’s wife knew her. They’d met at a wedding. Aileen Clohessy had started crying in the ladies, and she’d ended up talking to Charles. I don’t know why he didn’t take the job, do the interview, himself. He was all body; he couldn’t help it. There was too much of him. Even sitting down, he towered over everyone else, his arms and hands were always in use and up near any ceiling. He was a thug, and aware of it. He took a gamble. He saw something in me – or saw nothing particular in me – and sent me off to do the job. He gave me a phone number, a desk with a phone for ten minutes, and a loan of a tape recorder.

  —I’ll want it on Monday.

  This time I knew exactly what to say.

  —Okay.

  —Monday morning.

  —Fine.

  I got her immediately when I called; she was in her constituency office. She spoke as if she knew the call was being listened to, and as if we’d met before. I loved it. I thought I could hear breathing, the operator listening in, or – the thought sat down and didn’t worry me – the Special Branch. Charles hadn’t told me why I was interviewing a backbench TD but I guessed it wasn’t because she liked Echo and the Bunnymen.

  —She has something she wants to say, he’d told me.

  —What?

  —I think you’ll probably know it when you hear it.

  —Okay.

  —Let me know if you don’t.

  I went to the National Library to do the research and couldn’t quite believe it when they let me in. As I left the front hall, and went deeper in, and up, no one called me back. I felt like I was emigrating. I even looked back. There wasn’t much to find out. Aileen Clohessy had come back from London and taken her dead father’s seat. She’d been in Leinster House just less than half a year.

  I put the microphone on its stand, in front of my mother.

  —What’s your name? I asked my mother.

  —Ah, Victor.

  —Go on, Mam.

  She was delighted. Her son had a job. A real job she could bring to the shops. Victor’s a journalist.

  —Molly, she said.

  —Molly what?

  —Molly Forde.

  —And what do you do, Molly?

  —I’m your mother, Victor.

  Bringing home that Sony cassette recorder was one of the nicest things I ever did for my mother. I had a job that she understood and that wouldn’t have come my way without the education that neither she nor my father had had. The cassette recorder and especially the microphone and its plastic stand were what she’d been hoping for, fighting for, since I’d been born. Charles Jacob was right. In the kitchen of my parents’ house, I was John Pilger. In my mother’s eyes. I told her I’d be interviewing a politician.

  —Oh, Victor.

  She gave one of her noiseless little claps. I can see it now; she was great fun.

  —Who?

  I told her.

  —A woman, she said.

  —Yeah.

  —Be nice, she said.

  —Of course.

  —Do, she said.

  —I will.

  —Your dad would be proud.

  —Yeah, I said.—Would he?

  —God, yes. He’d be floating.

  So I met Aileen Clohessy. She was in the hotel foyer, with a pot of tea and the Independent. She was wearing a blue trouser suit and her black hair seemed stuck on, somehow, not her own. She looked the part, a Fine Gael TD.

  —Is here okay? I asked.

  —It’s fine, she said.

  There were people coming and going but we were in a corner, almost behind a heavy, tied-up curtain. I took the recorder from the case my mother had given me when I’d been accepted for UCD. I plugged in the mic and put it beside her teacup.

  —Testing, testing. Just tell me your name, please.

  —Aileen Clohessy.

  —I’ll just check that – sorry about this.

  —Take your time.

  She smiled when she heard her voice being played back.

  —That’ll do us, I said.—So.

  So.

  I did a good job. I have to make that claim, although few who remember the whole thing would dispute it. I need to assert it, to myself – for myself. I felt good throughout. It was like finding a football in the grass and discovering that I could control it, use it precisely and unpredictably. She told me about her father’s death – because I asked her to. It was beautiful, asking and then listening as the answer flowed. And it did flow. She spoke of the shock, the phone call from her younger brother to her neighbour’s flat in Crouch End; the plane home, gathering the money for the fare from friends and cousins; being collected at the airport, still expecting to be met by her father; the drive west, the devastation, the hurt, still expecting to hear his voice almost a year later.

  —What were you doing in London?

  —Living, she said.

  She smiled.

  She worked for London Underground. Advertising.

  —The ads on the walls?

  —No, she said.—Advertising for the service itself. I started on the Jubilee Line.

  She’d loved it, loved London, loved her father. She couldn’t remember too clearly the meeting in the good room at home when the big party men had told her that she’d be inheriting her father’s seat, that she’d be running in the by-election. She remembered wanting to give her mother a boost; it was the day after the funeral. She remembered wanting to please her father. She remembered realising that the seat would be hers only until her brother had graduated and taken a teaching job in the constituency. Was that alright? the men wanted to know; did she understand? Not really, she told me. She didn’t feel there’d been a choice. She’d done what was expected of her, to make some people happy and to make others just go away.

  She smiled again.

  —How has it been? I asked her.

  She made a noise I became familiar with years later. We all do, as we get older around others who are also getting older. The noise was laughter, but mirthless. I thought, and think, she was in pain.

  She wasn’t a politician, she said. Or, more accurately, she wasn’t an Irish politician. She was no good at the clinics and funerals. The night-time driving. She’d got used to city life, the bus and Tube commute – the employee concession and all. She missed London.

  She hesitated.

  —Boyfriend? I asked.

  It was the only stupid thing I asked, I think.

  —No, she said.—Just the life there.

  She wasn’t cut out for the politician’s life, she said. It wasn’t in the blood, after all. I’d read, I told her, that the other sitting Fine Gael TD in her constituency was very impressed with her. That, she told me, was because she kept her mouth shut, did what she was told, and would never stray into his end of the constituency. She’d known almost immediately that she had no interest in making a name for herself or in being the one the journalists would want to befriend.

  —I knew the first day, she said.—When I was brought into the chamber and they stood and applauded. It was lovely. Mammy was in the gallery. And my brother. They couldn’t have been nicer. But I just wanted to run away. I was nearly sick – vomited, I mean. I’d never even gone back to empty my flat.

  —In London?

  —Yes.

  It was a nightmare, she said. Literally. She blamed no one.

  —What about the politics of it? I asked.

  —What do you mean?

  —Well, I said.—Do you believe in what Fine Gael stands for?

  There were silent seconds then, and I knew she was getting herself ready to cross a line. I remember listening to the tape later, and knowing the his
s was a prelude to something big; and not just later, but then, in the hotel foyer, as the silence was being recorded. There was the sound of a till being opened in the bar, and laughter, two men laughing; I hadn’t heard or noticed them at the time. I was looking at her and I knew I’d found my career.

  —Some of it, she said.

  —Not all of it?

  She shook her head.

  —What about the referendum? I asked.

  It was 1983, just three weeks – I think – before the first abortion referendum.

  She seemed to relax. She didn’t exactly slump but she looked as if she’d finished saying what she was actually only starting to say.

  —It’s dreadful, she said.—I hate it.

  —Why?

  —I had an abortion, she said.—I’ve never regretted it.

  —Does your family know?

  She shook her head.

  —No.

  —And this is on the record?

  She nodded.

  —Yes, she said.—I’ll tell them.

  She’d had the abortion six years before, when she was a second-year student in UCD. She’d had a fling with a guy, one of her lecturers. He wasn’t married or anything like that; he was four or five years older than her. She’d liked him; she didn’t think she’d loved him. It had been quite open. They’d held hands in public, around Belfield, a few times. She’d even met one of his old girlfriends in the student bar and they’d laughed about sharing him. She’d known it wasn’t something that was going to last, and then she’d found out she was pregnant. He’d gone with her to London, her first time abroad. They’d gone across for four days. She’d had the abortion.

  —No details, she said.

  —Fine.

  I remember saying it. I remember liking the way the word had sounded.

  She’d liked London. It was why she’d moved there after she’d graduated. She’d been expected to do the H.Dip, and to go back home to teach.

  —But you didn’t.

  —No.

  —And now you’re a TD.

  —I’m resigning.