The Dead School

  Mr Boylan shook his head. What had transpired was that his own car was out of action, and he was expecting a lift, but as soon as he heard the toot of the horn outside, he had found himself in such a state of confusion between saying goodbye to his wife and grabbing his coat that he had left not only the beef behind but also the tomato and cheese. He shook his head again and stared wearily into the desolate nothingness of the Tupperware container. ‘What class of a cod am I at all?’ he wondered.

  Everyone sighed. It was a dreadful thing to have happened. But they all sympathized with him. Many’s the time the same thing happened to ourselves, they said.

  After that, they all shared their lunches with him and he cheered up considerably. ‘All’s well that ends well,’ he said.

  Malachy didn’t say anything. He was too busy staring out the window thinking about Webb and Collins. He was eating a sandwich too. Not that it made any difference what he was eating. He might as well have been eating a slice of cardboard for all he could taste of it.

  Snowflakes

  The kiddies were lined up in the playground, all neat and tidy with their starched white shirts and their red ties and their rosary beads.

  Mr Bell paced up and down with the bell covering his hand like a big brass boxing glove. The silence in the playground was immense. Cranky seagulls hobbled about fighting over crusts and crisp bags. Mr Bell was waiting. Even though everyone was quiet, it still wasn’t good enough for him. He waited one minute then two minutes then three minutes. It was hard to say for certain how many minutes he waited. Then he cleared his throat and seemed to look into everybody’s eyes at once as he said, ‘Do you realize what I have spent my morning doing? Do you realize I have spent my whole morning down on my hands and knees scrubbing the boys’ toilets? Do you realize that! How many times have I told you that you are not allowed to do wee wees on those seats! How many times! Are you animals? Is that what we have in the school – animals? I don’t know the culprits now but by God if I ever find out, life will not be worth living for those boys! It will not be worth living – do you hear me!’

  Suddenly he roared, ‘Pick up that paper!’

  A boy out of Mr Boylan’s class picked it up and dropped it into the wire waste basket. Mr Boylan glowed with pride.

  Then Mr Bell said they could go inside. He was looking at Malachy’s class like a hawk of course but the joke was on him because they filed in as good as gold. After they had said the prayer, the boys sat down as quiet as mice. It was time to do some spellings so Malachy said take out your spelling books. He always gave them twenty spellings in the test. He started off with the easy ones first, getting harder as they went along. The last word on the test was ‘incident’. That would fox them for sure. Then he said turn your books face down and started correcting them one by one. Some of the boys got very good marks indeed. Tom got fifteen. Eamon got sixteen would you believe and Pearse and Seamus a terrific nineteen each!

  Kyle Collins was ‘pssting’ over to Webb but Malachy just ignored him. He had about had it with Collins. If he wanted to waste his time at school, why should he worry? So when he had Kyle’s marked, he beamed and said sarcastically, ‘Well done, Kyle – five marks!’

  After Kyle he marked Joseph Hanratty’s and then Stephen Webb’s. Was there no end to the boy’s impertinence? Looking over at Collins trying to make him laugh when his teacher was correcting his spellings. It was hard to believe. Trying to make another boy laugh while his teacher was standing right beside him! With that stupid smirk of his. Oh for God’s sake! laughed Malachy to himself and threw the copybook down on the desk. He clicked his pen and said, ‘My, my, Stephen you have worked hard, haven’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes, Mr Dudgeon,’ replied Mr Kiss-Curl-Butter-Wouldn’t-Melt-In-My-Mouth Oh No.

  ‘You have indeed,’ continued Malachy. ‘I mean your work is so neat, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, teacher,’ said Stephen.

  Malachy chuckled. You should have seen Stephen’s face when he did that. You didn’t expect your teacher to chuckle when he was talking about spellings, did you? You certainly didn’t! Stephen was taken so much by surprise that he was at a loss for words – and that was something you didn’t see very often!

  Malachy smiled and then chuckled softly again.

  ‘Your work is definitely neat and no mistake, Stephen,’ he said. Then he lifted up the copybook and showed it to the children.

  ‘Look how neat it is, everybody! Look!’

  They all looked up to see and then Malachy tore off a little piece at the corner of the page. Just a tiny piece. It fluttered down and landed on top of Stephen’s head. Then he tore off another piece and another piece and they all landed on Stephen’s head like little paper snowflakes. He could have gone on doing that till doomsday but he had far more to do than waste his time on the likes of Webb so he told them to take out their Maths books. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘who can tell me how many sixes there are in seventy-two?’

  Young Reilly’s hand was up like a shot.

  ‘Yes, Martin. How many do you think?’ said Malachy.

  ‘Twelve,’ replied Martin excitedly.

  ‘Correct!’ Malachy said and wrote it on the blackboard – Twelve.

  Then he told Martin to sit down and tried not to look down at Webb because if he did he wouldn’t be able to keep in the laughing, the stupid-looking brat sitting there with the pretend-snowflakes all over his head and his big eyes looking up, why me sir I did nothing sir oh would you just shut up Webb you stupid little bollocks for that’s all you are you see ha ha ha!

  Reclaim the Night

  Meanwhile Evans carried on with her plan to destabilize the school. Which, as far as Raphael was concerned, was what she was hell bent on doing. Whether she was or not didn’t matter. As far as Raphael was concerned, that was what she was doing and that was that. She had wangled her way onto the Parent’s Committee for one reason and one reason alone – to manoeuvre herself into a position of power whereby she could tell people what to do and advance her own foul and dirty-minded ambitions because that was all they were, just like her, foul and dirty-minded. How could anyone do what she did – take a little baby and murder it, kill it stone dead and then go on television and boast about it? Because that was what she had done. He saw it with his own two eyes. He had been sitting there in the parlour reading when Nessa turned on the television to watch – would you believe it – The Terry Krash Show for which she had lately confessed to having an affection. This depressed him but it came as no surprise. He knew the day she had insisted on his purchasing the infernal machine that it would all come to a bad end. The programme was devoted entirely to International Women’s Year, which, apparently, 1975 was.

  It was only when he looked up from his book a second time that Raphael saw, to his astonishment, that one of the panellists, representing some group or other, was Evans. When he saw her, he nearly had a heart attack. The same woman who had been haunting his office since the beginning of the year with her takeover schemes and plans now spewing her dirt out on a television screen in front of the whole country. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I had an abortion. I had an abortion when I was seventeen years old and I see no reason why, as a citizen of this country, I should be villified for that. As far as I am concerned what I do with my own body is my business.’ And that wasn’t all she had to say. Oh no. Mrs Evans had a lot more to say than that. She was only getting warmed up. Herself and her cronies had smuggled condoms into the Irish Republic, she said. ‘The Holy Catholic Irish Republic!’ she said sneering. Then she opened her bag and took out a handful of them and she threw them into the audience. Laughing. Laughing! That was only the start, she said. The next plan was to open a family planning clinic in Dublin. Any woman who wanted to would from now on be able to take control of her own body. As he listened to her going on and on, Raphael felt sick. He hated the way her lips moved. He hated the way she waved her hands. He hated her eyes. The more he looked at her the more he got a pain in his head, directly over h
is right eye – throb throb throb, thanks to her. Why did she not bother Nessa? he asked himself. Was it just him?

  When he asked her, Nessa said the soul of Mrs Evans, like everyone else’s, was her own responsibility. She would, please God, eventually see the error of her ways and repent, she said. The nerve over Raphael’s eye started throbbing twice as much. ‘She won’t!’ he cried. ‘You don’t know her! She won’t stop! Not until she has destroyed everything! Don’t you see that, Nessa! Why can’t you see it?’

  Far away, Terry laughed and clapped along as Evans and her buddies sang a song of solidarity. They invited all women everywhere to join them at the Reclaim The Night march against rape to be held in Dublin. Raphael had to go to the toilet. He thought he was going to vomit. But he didn’t. He just stood there over the bowl with his eyes glazed.

  Bombshell

  Raphael’s worst fears came true on what was probably the most traumatic day of his life – the 25th of November, 1975. Evans had been telephoning to organize an appointment with him all week and had been so insistent that in the end he had to capitulate. When she swanned into his office swinging the bag and sat herself down with her diary and her fancy accent, to his amazement he found himself stammering. He tried to look her in the eye but again to his astonishment found that he couldn’t. Before he knew it, she was talking away nineteen to the dozen about how this could be done and that could be done. He hardly heard the half of what she said. It was as if nothing but a crackling fizz was coming out of her mouth, seemingly with no end. Every so often she’d get up and walk around with her hands in the back pockets of her blue jeans. Snippets came to him all right – ‘We, the parents’ and ‘Child-centred curriculum’. But for the most part she made no sense at all. Not until the end anyway, when she dropped what might be called the ‘bombshell’.

  The Parents’ Committee had decided that it was no longer appropriate for the students to bring rosary beads to school. Neither did they feel it was realistic for them to be asked to wear starched white shirts and red ties. Was it, they had wondered, entirely necessary for them to line up in the military-style formation to which they had become accustomed – after all, it was 1975. What did Mr Bell think, she inquired.

  What did he think? What did he think? He couldn’t think. He was speechless.

  When she said, swinging her bag over her shoulder as she did so, ‘I’ll leave it with you’, he still hadn’t replied. He watched her stomping out the gates like she owned the world and straight away dialled the number of the presbytery. Fortunately Father Stokes was at home. As he spoke to him, Raphael tried to disguise the tremor in his voice. At first he thought he was hearing things. Then he thought maybe he had got through to someone else. ‘This old thing has come up again and again,’ said the voice. ‘Sure maybe it’ll be for the best, Raphael.’

  Raphael could feel himself going cold all over, having realized by now of course that he hadn’t dialled the wrong number and that he was indeed talking to his old friend. ‘These people,’ went on Father Stokes, ‘sure they’re desperate altogether. They know so much about their legal entitlements they’d tie you up in knots. Sure if that’s what they want, let them. Anything for a quiet life, Raphael. It’s changed times since you and me started out, that’s all I can say. By the way, are you for the match in Croke Park Sunday?’

  Raphael didn’t answer the question. He had no intention of answering it and hung up the phone at once. He didn’t want to talk about football. What would he want to talk about football for? What he wanted to know was – what was going on? Had everybody taken leave of their senses? He felt like screaming. What was wrong with Father Stokes? He thought for a minute he could hear Evans laughing.

  He was on the verge of running off out the door and going up to the presbytery and tackling the priest head on. ‘What do you think you’re doing!’ he would yell at him. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Which he might have done had a knock not come to the door and the postman handed him an official brown Department of Education envelope, the contents of which informed him that the inspector who had recently visited the school had been deeply disappointed by the standard he had found there, particularly with regard to the work of one teacher, in whose case it was, he felt he had to say, ‘appalling’. It was hoped that this state of affairs would be rectified and the reputation of St Anthony’s Boys’ N.S., once considered among the top five Dublin schools, be restored.

  O

  That night, or rather that morning, in the wee small hours between four and five o’clock, a little baby came floating in the door, in through the parlour, out into the hall, all along the carpet, up the big stairs one by one into the room of Raphael Bell, Raphael Bell and his wife Nessa née Conroy the woman he loved so true, hovered about then floated away and came back again to smile at the Master, give him a great big gummy grin, a lovely slurpy babby smile that would warm the cockles of your heart and then pull its lips right back behind its ears before the blood started to pour and its legs collapsed and its fingers fell off and all the flesh went into clay as the words that came out woke the poor old schoolteacher squealing ‘I’m Maolseachlainn! I’m Maolseachlainn! And you’re my Daddy! Hello, Daddy! Hello, Daddy!’ as bombs blew far away and Daddy cried because all the horses were dead and because he knew that he himself had perished in a lonely field and had gone to his grave to lie cold and alone not for Jesus not for Mary not for Evelyn not for Ireland not for Nessa not for Raphael not for the teeming unborn sons and daughters like constellations of stars that streamed into infinity but for that which young Brennan got for his sums each and every Monday morning, a great big royal duckegg, a bloated circle gawping blindly from a blackboard, a shameful zero. Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.

  Love in the Grave II

  When you’re in love you think it can never end. You think the idea of love ever going into the ground is ridiculous. You say to yourself, ‘Imagine a time when we’re not together. It can’t be done. When you are as much in love as we are, it can’t happen. It just can’t happen, my friend.’

  It can, of course. It happens all the time. Exactly when it starts is always hard to say but once it does before you know it, you’re standing looking at a tombstone with that old familiar word on it. Funny how it happens really. It’s not as if the one you love comes up to you and says, ‘Darling, there’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you. You remember – that love business between us – it’s all over I’m afraid.’ That’s not the way it happens at all. It’s much more banal than that. Ask Packie Dudgeon. She doesn’t look at you the same way any more. Smile when you say certain things. You tell yourself nothing’s wrong, but you know there is – oh, yes. You know all right. It’s hard to say exactly how but you do. Just as Packie did all those years ago as he sat in the half-light of the kitchen with the shine in his eye, dreaming of a love he’d once known, now buried deep in a grave his poor stupid old son Malachy swore he’d never stand over.

  Environmental Studies

  With the nerve going tick tick tick, Raphael read the report for the seventh time:

  Environmental studies is considered to be one of the most vital components of the new curriculum. Obviously, however, not in this class as I saw very little evidence of any attention being paid to it. The nature table, for example, was practically bare. This, it would seem reasonable to argue, is hardly an indication of environmental awareness. Indeed, it might be said that it is simply another example of the general air of disorganization which pervades the classroom as a whole.

  Raphael was walking around in circles now. What was he expected to do? What was he supposed to do for God’s sake! Write back a scorching letter to the inspector explaining to him just what was going on and what he had to put up with? That would look good, wouldn’t it, having to admit the like of that! Dear inspector, I am sorry to have to tell you that the teacher I employed some six months ago to take charge of Class Three is completely and utterly hopeless and, to be perfectly honest with you, if I had the ch
oice I would not put him in charge of the school toilets.

  That would look good, wouldn’t it? That would really send St Anthony’s reputation soaring. That would look well sitting on the divisional inspector’s desk in the Department of Education!

  Raphael slammed his open hand down on the desk and the more he thought about the position Dudgeon had put him in, the fiercer his rage became. How dare he! he snapped. If he was to send a response the like of that into the department, the inspector would laugh in his face. What respect would he have then? A lifetime’s respect come to nothing – because of this! Because of Dudgeon! It wasn’t good enough! It simply wasn’t good enough!

  That was what was going through Raphael’s mind, which explained why he left the office looking he was about to burst a blood vessel, indeed a series of blood vessels, and stormed off down the corridor into the classroom. This time he had really had enough. This time it had gone as far as it was going to go.

  Horslips Are Playing in the Stadium