The Dead School

  Raphael beamed when he heard that and as the days went by, the puzzles of Pythagoras and Homer and Ovid ceased to be quite so daunting. In the nights the vastness of the dormitory did not seem so oppressive and soon Raphael was first out of his bed every morning, rubbing himself with a rasping towel, eager to embrace the day that lay ahead of him.

  ‘I am so happy here,’ he wrote to his mother some months later. ‘I got ninety-five per cent for my history essay and Father Bourke says it was one of the best he has ever had. Well, that’s about it for now. I have no more news so will end here. Please write soon, your loving son, Raphael.’

  On his first visit home that Christmas, he was the talk of the parish in his big suit and his hair combed back like a real scholar and as Uncle Joe pressed a note into his hand, he heard him say, ‘A few bob for the young fellow who is a credit to his father’s name.’ And when they went to see the horses this time, he found himself on the back of a beautiful black fellow, clearing ditches with the greatest of ease. ‘I never seen a fellow grew up so quick!’ smiled Uncle Joe as he puffed on his pipe. ‘What a pity himself is not alive this day!’

  It saddened Raphael more than anything to see his mother failing, which undoubtedly she was now. But he vowed to redouble his efforts at college during the coming term to make her prouder than any mother had ever been of her son.

  When he scored two goals and three points and took the team into the Munster Colleges Finals, it came as no surprise to anyone. ‘Bell is the best by far,’ the other juniors said. ‘He scored that point from sixty yards out!’

  By the time he reached his third year he had excelled in just about everything. The fresh-faced first years followed him around and wanted to be him. When, at the Halloween party, which took place in the Big Study in 1928, he strode to the top of the hall and stood still and dignified upon the podium before one hundred and eighty fellow students to sing, ‘God Save Ireland’, the spirit of his father momentarily passed him by as if it had floated in from the fields to be with him, and together they brought tears to the eyes of everyone there present with the words:

  God save Ireland said the heroes

  God save Ireland said they all

  Whether on the scaffold high

  Or the battlefield we die

  O what matter when for Erin dear we fall!

  In his fifth year, Raphael was unanimously elected head prefect. Each night he took his place at the desk overlooking the study hall and, checking his watch, signalled to the mute, respectful assembly that the main study period was to begin. It was his duty to maintain discipline and to ensure that the rules of the study hall were respected at all times and, should punishment for misdemeanours such as whispering, distracting other boys or interfering with the silence which prevailed in any other manner whatsoever be deemed necessary, then Raphael would present the offender with a ‘yellow card’ upon which his name would be written, to be presented to the Dean of Discipline after night prayer, and a suitable punishment meted out. It was generally acknowledged that in the administration of this system, Raphael was ‘tough but fair’.

  Even by the way he walked you could tell that Raphael had principles. It was clear to him that students did not respect weakness in a prefect. In any position of authority, be it captain of a football team or anything else, equivocation or uncertainty was as nothing. If you made a decision you stood by it, no matter what.

  An aspect of his character which revealed itself in no uncertain terms when, in his second term as prefect, he encountered the well-known bully Lally, mistreating a junior. Not only mistreating him in fact but brutally assaulting him and then humiliating him by ducking him in the senior grade toilets. Raphael had chanced upon the incident purely by accident but as he watched it, he paled. His heart went out to the poor unfortunate youth as Lally’s rough hands manhandled him and a gaggle of coarse compatriots and Lally mocked him mercilessly. It was the first time Lally had perpetrated so despicable an act, although his reputation was well known. The juniors in fact more or less lived in terror of him. Raphael knew that if he were to report him to the Dean, he would, possibly, manage to talk his way out of it by giving some muddied alternative version of events and perhaps receive nothing more than six or twelve slaps with the leather. Such he had received on previous occasions, obviously to no effect.

  Which was why Raphael stood up to him there and then and said, ‘Leave the boy alone.’ Lally, like all cowards, appealed to his fellow bullies, scoffing, ‘Well, well, if it isn’t Mr Suck. Mr suck-up-to-the-priests Bell. Who’s talking to you, Bell?’

  Raphael hit him one blow and the blood ran from Lally’s face. The junior freed himself and ran off and Raphael lifted his fist again. Lally swore. ‘You made a mistake hitting me, Bell!’ he snarled. ‘I’ll fucking creel you!’

  Raphael stood his ground. In his mind he saw his mother sitting in the chimney corner and in the same moment his father dying in the fields, as a coward with a smoking gun laughed above his head. A coward of a Black and Tan with a smoking gun and Lally’s face.

  ‘Go on, Bell – hit me!’ snapped Lally. ‘Mr Big Head Prefect! You’re too afraid! He’s too fucking afraid!’

  Raphael realized that there was really only one thing he could do as already an inquisitive crowd had begun to gather. ‘Meet me in the back handball alley today after dinner. We’ll see then who’s afraid,’ he said softly.

  Lally realized just then what he had let himself in for but it was already too late. ‘Go on, you cunt, you!’ he shouted after Raphael who kept on walking, stiff, upright, with his head held high.

  A junior was dispatched to keep watch for the Dean. There must have been up on one hundred students gathered in the alley that day. Raphael and Lally were stripped to the waist. Cheers rose into the sky. ‘Bell! Bell! Bell!’ Then, ‘Lally! Lally! Lally!’

  Lally was first to strike, a solid blow to Raphael’s left cheek. But Raphael remained steady. A few more blows went wide of the mark. Then Raphael struck home, a fine punch directly on the nose which began to bleed instantly. Lally was horrified by the impact. He stared in horror at the blood on his hand. Raphael’s next punch hit him on the side of the head and the one after that, the left eye. Lally, can you believe it, began to cry.

  The cheers became deafening. ‘Bell! Bell! Bell!’ A surge of pride ran through Raphael as his father’s cheers merged with those of the red-cheeked, triumphant students. The Black and Tan cried helplessly with his bottom lip trembling, ‘Don’t hit me! Don’t hit me!’

  By now Lally was on his knees, his legs having buckled beneath him. Raphael punched him mercilessly until his nose was nothing more than a bloody pulp and then dragged him by the scruff of the neck over to the junior he had treated so badly. ‘Apologize!’ he demanded. ‘Apologize to the boy!’

  ‘I’m sorry!’ blubbered the bloodied Lally. Raphael hit him again. ‘I’ll never do it again!’ he instructed.

  ‘I’ll never do it again,’ choked Lally.

  ‘Let that be a lesson to you!’ snapped Raphael as he pushed him out of the way like the piece of dirt he was and then, buttoning his shirt, took his jacket from an admiring junior and walked off alone in the direction of the main building.

  Bye Bye Love

  It was exactly thirty-nine years later, the day after Neil Armstrong took a small step for himself and a giant one for mankind, that a thought struck Malachy Dudgeon as he was walking past the grocery shop thinking about Cissie. It would have been wonderful if he had grown to like her again. If somehow it had become even remotely like the way it used to be between them, walking along the shore and staring out at the yachts bobbing on the horizon and so on, but it hadn’t, for the old boatshed days were still with him and to tell the truth, if he had arrived home to hear that she had had a stroke, it wouldn’t have bothered him very much. Of course, he was aware that it was wrong to think the like of that about someone who was supposed to be close to you – but so what? She should have thought of that before she threw her
self on the nets in front of the cowman, shouldn’t she? She ought to have given that some thought before she started to make her little visits up to Dr Wilding. Sadly, however, she hadn’t and now it was too late. ‘Way too late, my friend,’ as Malachy now said to himself in his recently remodelled American accent.

  As for Cissie herself, she was more or less at her wit’s end as to know what to do about the way things had gone between them. Once he looked up to see her standing in the doorway of the bedroom with her voice shaking, pleading, ‘Please, Malachy – I don’t know why it happened. Forgive me, for God’s sake – please!’ He looked at her for a long time but he didn’t say anything. There wasn’t a muscle moving in his face. And his eyes – well they were just about the coldest she had ever seen. It was sad of course. But then, as he had discovered some years before, there were lots of things that were sad, weren’t there?

  In the end it did get so bad that Malachy began to feel a bit sorry for her. I mean she was so pathetic. Sitting there going through her tenth or eleventh box of Kleenex, practically throwing herself at his feet. One day she broke down at the kitchen table and began to weep uncontrollably. She told him she had met Jemmy Brady up the town and sworn at him and told him that it was him had caused all the trouble and she never wanted to see him again. ‘It will be all right from now on won’t it, Malachy,’ she wept. ‘Everything will be the way it used to be in this house now that all that’s over.’ For a split second he felt so warm towards her that it was indeed like old times but it was only that – a split second and when it had passed it might just as well never have happened at all.

  Which suited Malachy just fine. For if on a Sunday morning in the hotel long ago, he had been afraid to whisper the words ‘I love you’ to his father, in case they would wither and die on his lips, he knew one thing for sure and that was that he wouldn’t be having that problem ever again, for from now on it was bye bye love as far as he was concerned, be it with his remorse-eaten mother or anyone else. He had more sense than to let himself go down that road again didn’t he oh yes but of course he did.

  He Said Nothing

  Not that it was all bad back in those days – indeed in many ways Malachy was happier now than he had ever been. For a start, Alec and his crew were no longer a problem, having long since lost interest in him and now directing their attentions towards some other poor stuttering unfortunate whose mother with a bit of luck was making mysterious Sunday morning visits to boat-houses. Jemmy Brady was still to be seen about the place but sad to say he was a shadow of his former self and if someone had told you that once upon a time he had been considered something of a whizz kid in the prick department, all you would have been able to do was laugh your head off. Nowadays just about all Jemmy was able for was falling about the place with an old brown coat on him and a bottle of whiskey in a paper bag, muttering and raving to himself: Not that Malachy gave two fucks what he did, for he was too busy enjoying himself. He spent long days in the café listening to Donny Osmond and looking at women. Women who were never going to mean anything to him because of course he had too much sense for that. Sunny days on the fairgreen with the blue sky over you and your whole life stretching out like a highway. ‘So – what’s the story?’ his buddy Kevin Connolly from The Terrace would say. ‘Where are we headed tonight?’ and Malachy’d reply: ‘Let’s go hear Horslips in Carrick!’ Horslips were jigs and reels on speed as you boogied all night long and went half-crazy shaking your head and Kevin Connolly yelled over at you ‘Shakin’ All Over!’ and man were you shaking all over or what! Then it was out into the warm air and an open field with the dawn coming up as the Carrick women called, ‘You will come back and see us, won’t you?’ and you both cried, ‘Sure girls – see you next time OK?’ as you roared off into the morning.

  In many ways it was the Summer of Dreams and when the exams were all over and the call came to teacher-training college you just could not believe it. ‘Can you believe it?’ you said to Kevin Connolly who flicked the cigarette and said, ‘You gotta be kidding. You a teacher? Man, it’s crazy. Now why would you want to do a thing like that?’ Malachy didn’t know. And man, did he care. It was just another of those exams he’d done and if they were dumb enough to ask him to join the club, well then who was he to argue. As long as it got him out of the town once and for all, that was fine by him. He sailed through the interview the following week but man did he feed them some bullshit about being devoted to a career of teaching children. ‘Whee-hoo!’ laughed Kevin Connolly as they fell out of the pub that night, ‘I gotta hand it to you – you sure can bullshit your way into things – Master Dudgeon!’

  The summer drifted by. In the café Donny Osmond smiled at you from the wall, a row of gleaming teeth. ‘Now why would you want to do a thing like that?’ asked Donny. And did you know? Of course you didn’t. At seventeen you didn’t know and didn’t care. Why should you? You just wanted to climb the highest peak in town and cry out across the rooftops, ‘It’s over, man! I’m gone!’ and so you would be, a puff of smoke into the future and the past all bundled up and buried, kicked into the grave where it belonged. Kevin Connolly and you got drunk, man you got so drunk and when you embraced he said, ‘It’s all yours now, man! You’ve got it all!’ and the tears, man, they ran down your face.

  The last days, maybe they were the saddest when Cissie tried her damnedest to raise it from the ground, what had once been between them. She sat there looking at him, knowing there was nothing she could do now for she had done everything. She stared at him with her eyes so raw and red and said, ‘Do you remember the way it used to be, just you and me, the pair of us shopping up the town. Do you ever think of them days now, Malachy?’

  He said nothing.

  The day he left Kevin stood in the town square by the purring bus and handed him a copy of Midnight Cowboy as he said goodbye. Malachy leaned out of the window and said, ‘Looks like it’s goodbye, kid!’

  Kevin shot him with a gun-finger and said, ‘Yep! You make sure and write me all about those Dublin chicks now – you hear?’

  ‘You better believe it,’ grinned Malachy.

  The bus pulled out and Malachy strained to hear as Kevin called after it, ‘Master Dudgeon – can you believe it!’ and then that was that, goodbye town for ever I’m gone and that’s the way it’s gonna be as trees and shops and other towns by the score sped past and Midnight Cowboy Joe Buck Malachy Dudgeon sailed on down the freeway of his mind into the heart of the midday sun with the sound of Harry Nilsson singing ‘Everybody’s Talking’ ringing in his ears.

  St Patrick’s Training College

  Way back before Harry Nilsson was a gleam in his father’s eye, on the 5th of October 1930 at the age of seventeen, Raphael Bell climbed out of the hired car that had taken him from the station and, waving goodbye to the driver, turned and took his first look at the grounds of the training college which was to be his home for the next two years. As he walked up the avenue listening to the birds singing in the sycamore trees, he felt he would faint with excitement. He could not believe that it was actually happening and he was at last embarking upon the career that he knew now without doubt to be his true vocation. He registered at the main desk and was shown to St Brigid’s Dormitory, not unlike the one in which he had spent five years in St Martin’s. When he found himself alone, he slipped to his knees and said a silent prayer to Our Lady. He felt like weeping he was so happy.

  Outside the birds twittered in the twilight as bicycles sped homeward all along Drumcondra Road.

  The Philosophy of Education

  Malachy had arrived there too of course. But what he was looking at in the year of Our Lord 1973 was not exactly what had met Raphael’s eyes way back in those good old days. He would have had a heart attack if he had seen what was going on; the place was swarming with women and all you could hear was rock music blaring out of the canteen. If the bursar who had been in charge in Raphael’s time had seen them at the like of that, he wouldn’t have been long putting an end to
it. He’d have run the lot of them out of the college, the whole bloody lot, for if they weren’t prepared to dress and act like people who were in charge of children, and to attend to their Euclid and Ovid, then they weren’t worth having. That was what he would have said. But there wasn’t anyone saying that now. As a matter of fact, there didn’t seem to be anybody saying anything about anything. By the looks of things, the place had gone like everywhere else in Ireland these days. You could do what you bloodywell liked. Which indeed appeared to be the attitude of one Malachy Dudgeon who right now was doing exactly that, sitting in the lecture hall chewing a pencil and staring off out the window watching the world as it made its way on by. The lecturer paced up and down with his clipboard and fixed his glasses on his nose once more as he tilted his head to one side and said, frowning, ‘Rousseau says that children are not vessels to be filled.’ Malachy didn’t care what Rousseau said. Outside two girls with folders and their hair tied back with flowery scarves sat on the steps. Their sweaters were knotted about their waists and they were laughing. The mature student sitting next to Malachy took a dim view. ‘Drug addicts,’ she said, ‘for that’s all they are.’

  Then they went back to their scribbling and Malachy took a look out at the adddicts. They were leaning against the flower beds, clutching their folders to their chests, still laughing away. The taller addict’s skirt swished about her heels as addict number two nodded in agreement. The way she nodded said, ‘I’m cool. I’m just about as cool as you can get. Not because I’m on drugs. I’m just cool – you know?’ Of course she was. She was a second year. Part of the cool bunch who draped themselves around the record player and looked around the canteen at everybody else as if to say, ‘We’re second years – OK? We’ve done just about everything there is to do. All you got to do is make sure and remember that. You just remember that and you’ll be fine. Meanwhile let me get on with smoking my drugs if you don’t mind.’ All day long they kept that record player going, just sitting there and listening and looking cool. It wasn’t that easy looking cool you know. It wasn’t just any old bollocks who could do it. You didn’t jump up and shout ‘This is a fantastic song!’ or ‘This is the best song this year!’ Oh, no – you couldn’t be seen doing that. What you did was hide in behind a big pile of hair and emerge every so often to remark ‘Nice drumming that’ or ‘Like the guitar break there’. Then you vanished back into your haystack for another hour or so. Another thing you could do was peer over your shades now and again and take a look around you like everyone in the place apart from your mates was some kind of human garbage. Then you chuckled to yourself as if to say, ‘What a sad, pathetic bunch of miserable little people!’ before you flopped back into your chair, picking up an album sleeve and starting to investigate the back of it for interesting facts about the bass player or perhaps some cryptic clues to something mysterious hidden inside the lyric sheet.