As he was leaving, Father Pat gave him a wave and a big wink and out he stepped into a town steeped in sun. Everything was cruising along fine. The breadman had arrived at the corner shop and as he strode across the street with a tray of hot pan loaves he said to a woman with a shopping basket that’s one of the best days yet and she said yes it is we could be doing with a few more like that. The petrol pumps were humming away outside the garage and in the sky the clouds sat still. Everyone was going about their business but they weren’t in any hurry going about it and he thought that was just fine because he wasn’t in any hurry to go about his either. It was just then that he met the Dummy, coming past the cinema. His mouth was shaped like an O which of course meant that he was whistling, no-whistle whistling of course but nevertheless merrily whistling along. When he saw Malachy his face lit up with a big grin and he made the shape of his name with his lips. They stood there together for a while and it was good. It was good standing there beside the Dummy with his eyes twinkling and the sun shining all over the quiet happy busy town. A man went by and saluted. ‘That’s a powerful day, Dummy,’ he said, then added, ‘And young Dudgeon! Couldn’t forget you, young Dudgeon! Ha! Ha! Ha!’ They hung about some more, chatting and talking about this and that, at least Malachy did, with the Dummy nodding and lighting up and practically foaming at the mouth with excitement every time Malachy mentioned the slightest little incident about the town. Then Malachy thought he had better be off about his business and he said to the Dummy, ‘And so where are you off to now, Dummy? Off on your travels I expect!’ The Dummy grinned again, even more this time, if such were possible, then stuck a stiff index finger into the air like a mime artist you might see on the television. What he put on then was more or less what you would call a little play. Malachy of course had seen him at these little plays before so it didn’t take him too long to work out what he was trying to tell him. It was clear that he was off out to spend the day at the lake. Malachy said that that would be good. He said that there would be great fun out there. He asked the Dummy was he going for a swim. He said, ‘Is that why you’re going out to the lake?’ But the Dummy said no and shook his head. He was most emphatic in fact. He wanted Malachy to know that that was not the reason he was going out there. That wasn’t the reason at all. To tell the truth, Malachy got a bit confused then, but the Dummy didn’t mind that. He was well used to people getting mixed up and frustrated when he was trying to tell them something. He was never at a loss in such situations. His contingency arrangements were always taken care of, namely an old scrap of paper torn from a child’s copybook on which, with a stump of a pencil, he now scribbled the words, ‘To get some peace’.
Whether he liked to admit it or not, on this occasion Malachy could not make head nor tail of what he was on about, which was why he thought the safest course of action was to laugh away with him and to see the pair of them standing there in the street, with the Dummy chewing the stumpy pencil and laughing away at the same time, you would have been hard pressed not to sign the pair of them up for the circus. In fact by the time they had finished laughing Malachy thought to himself that he had never laughed so much before in his life. Actually he was almost sick from laughing. His cheeks were flushed and he had a pain in his head. As he was crossing the square, he thought to himself, ‘I think I could be doing without all that giddy carry-on for a while, I can tell you.’
On which count he needn’t have worried because only the day after it dawned on him what the Dummy had been talking about. The whole town was on about it, of course. Everyone had seen him just before he did it. Nobby Caslin was running up and down the street like a blue-arsed fly. Of course, as always, there were a few liars who claimed to have seen it coming. In the hotel bar, they said they had always known there was something odd about him. ‘It was only a matter of time,’ they said. But of course everyone knew this was what you might charitably describe as ‘shite-talk’ and in the end they made the right decision and at long last shut their mouths. They said no more about it after that. The laugh of it was that they had found his clothes neatly folded behind a bush on the shore of the lake, and it looked more like his intention had been to pay a visit to the laundry. They were out on the lake for two or three days but in the end they found him. From that day on the lake became known as ‘The Dummy’s Water’ and everyone agreed that that was good, because every time you passed it now you wouldn’t be able to think of anything but the poor old Dummy and his great big happy face. You would stand there listening to the grasshoppers clacking and the birdies singing to their little baby fledglings and as you stared across the flat expanse of the still blue lake, you would think of him deep down there in the silent blackness, tumbling like an astronaut with his eyes staring and his long limbs floating, with two words struggling to clamber from his mouth but never of course succeeding: ‘help me, help me, help me.’
Which were no longer the words he was using to Malachy as he stood before him now after all these years, any more than it was the Dummy he had once known. For now the smile on his face was bitter and twisted and as he repeated the sentence, Malachy wept and begged him not to but it was no use, again the soft words came, ‘Your father did it after me because he thought it would bring him peace. He thought the waters would close over him and there would be no more pain.’ Malachy was close to weeping as he went on. He was going to go on for ever. ‘But there is!’ snarled what had once been the Dummy. ‘There is and there always will be! As he knows now! At the bottom of that lake he knows it now! Go and join him if you don’t believe me! Because it’s true! For all eternity he will rot there in pain – as I did! And now you! You too! Do you hear me? Do you hear me, Dudgeon! Throw yourself into the water if you don’t believe me! Then you’ll know! Then you’ll know once and for all! Go on, Dudgeon – do it! Swim into the darkness where you belong! Swim until you die! Do you hear me? Do you hear me! Die, fucker, die!’
The sweat was streaming off Malachy as the orderlies held him down. For days after he remembered nothing. They told him he had been screaming. A woman’s name by all accounts. Marie or Mary. Marianne maybe.
For the first month he couldn’t stop shivering. He was terrified to sleep. He was afraid the Dummy would come again. ‘You’re afraid of a Dummy,’ laughed Stephen Webb. ‘Kyle – he’s afraid of a silly Dummy!’
‘Tee hee hee,’ laughed Kyle.
Thus, in overheated rooms and infinite corridors, the days went by.
Bray Head
The whole of Dublin city must have decided to go out to Bray Head that day. As they lay together on the grass, close by the hush of the sea, he brushed her closed eyelids with the petals of a daisy. She smiled, then rolled over on her stomach and tried to push him away as she cried, ‘Don’t! Don’t do that!’ He kissed her on the ear. ‘We’ve got to go back, Malachy,’ she said. ‘I have to finish my essay for Ed. Psych.’ He put his arm around her waist and she turned her face to his, then put her arms around his neck and he kissed her on the lips.
Fever
She had been up half the night. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Malachy,’ she said. ‘One minute I’m all shivery and the next I’m sweating all over. I must be coming down with something.’ Her face was flushed and her brow shone with sweat. ‘Get back into bed and I’ll go down to the chemist’s,’ he said. He didn’t go into work that day. He rang in and said he was sick. He knew Bell didn’t believe him but for that one time in his life he didn’t care. On the way back from the chemists he bought a bag of coal and lugged it all the way up Rathmines Road. The snow was coming down thick and fast and by the time he got home, the hands were about to fall off him. ‘Is that you – is that you, Malachy?’ said Marion in this shaky voice. ‘Don’t worry – it’s me all right,’ he said. ‘Dudgeon the coalman.’ ‘Oh, Malachy,’ she said, half in this world and half out of it. He built up a huge fire and in no time the room was flickering with warm shadows. Then he made a pot of hot broth and fed it to her from a spoon. She touched the
back of his hand and said, ‘I love you, Malachy. You’re so good to me.’ He smiled and said, ‘Come on now, ma’am – eat up. We’ve got to get this fever out of you.’ After that she slept and he sat there reading and watching her as she turned over in her dreams. Outside, the snowswept city was a thousand miles away and in that room of warm shadows they were the only two people in the world and it really did seem back in those first few weeks they spent living together as if that was how it was going to be for evermore.
Bell’s History Lesson
Man did she laugh as he sucked the match between his teeth and spun the chamber. ‘I’m sorry, honey,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing you can do or say.’ He was wearing his Jack Nicholson shades. He flicked the match away. ‘I’ve gotta take the motherfucker out.’ He knocked on the door and out came Bell. ‘What can I do for you?’ he said. Malachy sighed and shook his head. Then he took off his shades and repeated, ‘What can I do for you – well how about that!’ He was still laughing when he stuck the gun in Baldy’s back, gave him a kick on the arse and told him to get the fuck inside. ‘You can’t do this to me! You can’t do this to me!’ was all you could hear.
He gave him another kick up the hole and then got down to business. ‘Shout: I am a bollocks!’ he said to him and gave him a poke with the gun. For a minute it looked like he wasn’t going to. ‘No, I won’t!’ he shouted. A few jabs more with the shooter put an end to that bullshit however and before long he was hopping about the place like nobody’s business, shouting ‘I am a bollocks! I am a bollocks!’ for all he was worth.
After that he made them tea.
‘This tea is too weak,’ Malachy said. ‘Make more.’
‘Yes, sir,’ says Bell and off he goes.
By the time they were finished, there wasn’t a peep out of him.
‘I hope you’ve learned your lesson, asshole!’ snorted Malachy as he stuck the shooter in his belt. ‘Otherwise – you’re history! You got that?’
‘Yes, sir,’ says Bell and hung his baldy head.
‘Let’s go, girl,’ he said and laughed as he squeezed her hand and they headed off up Grafton Street to Stephen’s Green.
Head in a Box
Another favourite after a belt of the afternoon medication when you were feeling nice and woozy and smiling at nothing out the window was Marion and yourself driving around in a beat-up truck with a head in a vegetable crate in the back, except that this time it wasn’t Alfredo Garcia’s, it was poor old Bell’s. Boy was he getting a hard time these days! Malachy shifted gears and shouted, ‘Hey, Meester Bell – how you like eet back there? You theenk ees nice being in a box, no?’
‘Let me out! Let me out!’ shouted Bell. ‘You can’t do this to me!’
‘Maybe you should have thought a leetle beet about that before you fuck around with me in your school, no?’
Man, what a laugh that was! Cruising in the dust and the head just going crazy in the heat. Especially when they stopped at a roadside diner and all it could see through the bars of the crate was Marion and Malachy sipping an ice-cold beer as they called ‘So how you feeling now, Mr Bell? You feeling OK in there?’ and gave each other a kiss to drive him twice as mad. It was crazy. It was a crazy dream.
Rathole
Raphael and Malachy had both retired from society in or around the same time, and now, as the minutes turned into days and the days turned into months and the first year came and went, it was hard to say which of the pair of them was the worst. I suppose to Malachy’s credit, if he did shuffle about the place with a big fat mopey head on him, at least he didn’t keep his room like a rathole, which was all you could call No. 53 Madeira Gardens these days. Yes, it was a right old dump now and no mistake. Damp streaks on the walls, cobwebs on Our Lady’s eyes, rotten fruit and stale bread in the kitchen, not to mention the hundreds of empty bottles that were lying about the place. A sorry-looking tip now and no mistake. Not that its owner was any better. A right-looking candidate now to be running any school, private or public or dead or alive or any other kind.
Maths Lesson
You don’t use a stick or a pointer in the Dead School. Instead you use big old-fashioned iron tongs. That soon puts manners on the boys. Raphael stood at the blackboard and roared. He slammed the heavy tongs-pointer down on the desk again and again. ‘No! No! No! There are not five sevens in forty two!’ He wiped the gleaming beads of sweat off his forehead with the flat of his hand and shook his head in exasperation. There was a bubbly froth on his mouth as he looked up and yelled, ‘What are you doing Connolly for the last time do you hear me – put that pencil down! You needn’t think you’ll come in here with any of your lip for by God I’ll put the smirk on the other side of your face and don’t think I won’t! You won’t do it here, indeed by God you won’t! You’ll not get away with anything you want here my friend – if that’s what you want go on down to Evans. She’ll let you do whatever you like! Divorce – of course you can, young Connolly! Drugs – would you like some? Of course! I happen to have some right here in my handbag. Is that what you want, Connolly? Is that the way you want to behave? Well you won’t! Not here. Not in my school, my friend!’
The tongs came sweeping down again in a huge arc and nearly broke the table in half.
Break Time
When he wasn’t beating algebra and the history of Ireland into his charges, Raphael would wander about the house in a half-daze. He’d sit there in the kitchen chuckling to himself, thinking what a fool he had been all those years ago to believe that he was important. He knew now how important he was. Just about as important as one of the spots on the heel of mildewed bread he was eating for his lunch, as John McCormack sang his heart out on the old gramophone the way he had done that day when Glorificamus was beamed into the sky and one million people sank to their knees, uttering those words which Raphael had whispered to the young woman he had loved so much,
Macushla! Macushla! Your sweet voice is calling
Calling me softly again and again
Macushla, Macushla, I hear its dear pleading
My blue-eyed Macushla I hear it in vain.
and she had turned to him and held him close, his own dear Nessa. Now dead. In the grave. Yes. Her face eaten away. Not Nessa any more.
The record played all day long. That was why it was in bits. There were so many scrapes and scratches on it you couldn’t hear half the words. Not that Raphael cared. From her wooden plinth, Our Lady looked down upon him with pitying eyes. ‘What are you looking at?’ he said and started chuckling again. They thought they were going to break him completely. They thought they were going to wreck this school too, didn’t they? But they weren’t, you see – that was where they were wrong. He laughed. ‘Oho no!’ he said. ‘Your wrecking days are over, my friends! Well and truly over – make no mistake about that! Do you hear me?’ he barked and then, when he was satisfied, threw the rest of the bread away and went back to class.
Army Surplus Greatcoat
To tell you the God’s honest truth, Malachy would have been just as happy to stay in the hospital for the next ten years, for by now he was well into the swing of things and there was nothing he liked better than smoking his roll-ups and listening to his records, then off for a walk around the grounds and back in to watch telly or just sit by the window and dream away. But the doc was having none of it and said that eighteen months was more than enough for anyone to be stuck in a place like this so once again it was the boot for Mr Dudgeon and down the avenue of Friern Barnet Mental Hospital he went, off on his travels once more. They got him a flat in Stoke Newington and a job in a pub in Camden town. The job was good for a while but then one day he let a heap of crates fall and they told him to get the fuck out he had nearly killed the barman. But he didn’t mind. ‘Fuck you too, man!’ he said back to them. What did he care? This was London town for Christ’s sake! Jobs were ten a penny. You could leave one and walk into another the same day for Christ’s sake.
But he didn’t stay in the next one ver
y long either. He was supposed to pack hamburgers into boxes, and for a while it was OK. Then one day he just didn’t bother going to work. In the end he got fed up altogether going looking for jobs. He knew he could exist on the dole and the allowance they gave him for the flat so fuck it he said to himself and just spent the day smoking and listening to his records. He listened to them all day long. Horslips and Mott the Hoople. Mott the Hoople sang the songs of summer’s end, when you drifted through the college grounds with your sweater knotted and your folder under your arm and you didn’t give a fuck about anything in the wide world.
Outside London heaved as Malachy tried to steady the roll-up in his hand.
The day he met Chico coming out of Piccadilly Circus tube, he couldn’t believe it. It was only when he heard him speak that he believed it was him at all. ‘Hey, Malachy – how are you doing for fuck’s sake!’ Chico said. They went to a pub and Chico told him they’d all long since left the squat. The Prince, believe it or not, was back studying at university. Chico himself was working for Lloyd’s as an insurance underwriter. ‘The suit, man!’ said Malachy. ‘I can’t believe it. You look like me in my fucking teaching days!’
‘I guess,’ laughed Chico as he downed a lager. Then he patted his briefcase and said, ‘Well, I gotta go. It was great to see you, Malachy. You mind yourself now – you hear?’
The sun was streaming in the plate-glass window as Chico vanished into the crowd. Punk music blared from the jukebox and all about Malachy orange-haired youths in tartan struck poses and snarled at nothing. Malachy felt the warm, comforting arms of four pints around him and smiled as he looked at himself in the mirror. His long, lank greasy hair was way past his shoulders. Sure it was crazy to be wearing a green army surplus greatcoat on a blazing hot summer’s day. But who cared? Who cared what was crazy to wear on a hot summer’s day, blazing or otherwise, as he ordered another pint and said to the punk beside him, ‘The Clash, that’s not music, man. Horslips – now there’s a band, there’s a fucking band, man!’