The Jewel

by Neil Hegarty

  The place seemed unchanged. It was kitted out in carved wood and stencilled fairy-tale scenes; baskets of scones, of muffins, a top-of-the-range coffee machine added which, Ward thought, certainly hadn’t been there in his day. The stencilled scenes were for the benefit of the adults: there were no children among the clientele, which of course was the point. Just tired-looking tourists, a few suits, Ward, Rob. The owner hadn’t liked children, in Ward’s day: he had explained this to Ward one slack afternoon; explained how he disliked children and didn’t want them in his cafe, but that of course it was against the law to ban them entirely. So instead, he kept them out by means of subliminal messages directed at their parents.

  It worked.

  Ward had loved the place. It had been a refuge of sorts.

  Martin, of course, knew about his past, his childhood, in the same way as he knew about Martin’s past, his childhood, his schooldays. They had talked and talked, talked a good deal until they got their heads around each other. This was a big deal in itself: Ward had been accustomed to going through life clutching a cattle-prod, using it as appropriate. There was no point letting people get too close: that was Ward’s silent motto, his credo, because they were just looking for an opportunity to hurt you if they could, and a cattle-prod meant that they couldn’t do this, or not so easily.

  Don’t have friends, only have acquaintances. His family’s motto. Again unspoken, because the Wards, silent in their semi-detached, pebbledashed suburban Dublin house, were not the sort of people to sit around discussing mottos. They just got on with things, using a minimum of words in their dealings with each other and the world. This was the way of things. That’s just the way of things might have been another motto, because his mother used it a fair bit. It encapsulated her view of the world: that’s just the way of things, they can’t be changed, they certainly can’t be bettered, there’s no point talking about them. By them she meant prices and politicians, the weather and the news from the great outside world that occasionally leaked through the aluminium windows of their semi-detached. It meant just about everything, and it meant that his mother was no fun to be around. Long ago – he gleaned – she had nursed dreams of becoming a primary-school teacher: but she came from the wrong side of the tracks, and her chance of gaining a scholarship to big school was quashed by the snobby nuns, and that was an end to that. No education, no prospects: the biscuit factory for a few years, and then early marriage, and children. And that was it.

  That was just the way of things.

  Martin asked, ‘What about your father?’

  This was over pizza and a bottle of Montepulciano in Tufnell Park. They were on (though who was counting? – Ward was) their fourth date; their previous three had all ended in bed, but now Ward felt himself begin to freeze.

  But Martin wasn’t having any of it. ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘There’s not that much to tell,’ Ward said. He took another slice of his pizza, folded it, took a bite. A little bite and put the slice down again. ‘Well, there is,’ he said, ‘but I don’t suppose you’re going to like it very much.’

  Martin said nothing, just looked at him, his own pizza cooling on his plate.

  Ward’s father was no fun to be around either.

  ‘Not – that,’ Ward said to his pizza. ‘I don’t mean that.’ An effortful snort of laughter. ‘I’m not a complete cliché, you know.’

  Martin took up his pizza again.

  ‘It was just physical, mental stuff,’ Ward said. ‘Really, nothing else.’

  Just. In his peripheral vision, as he trained his gaze on his pizza, he saw Martin nod.

  ‘Sometimes I think I was lucky, really,’ Ward said.

  Martin shook his head. He said, ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He worked in the biscuit factory too,’ Ward said. ‘Daddy did.’

  That was where his mother had ‘met her fate’, as she put it. This was on the occasions she discussed such topics – seldom, and then never. The background to her marriage, their marriage, had to be gleaned. A wedding photo, all slicked, oily hair for the men, and simple lines for the women. A honeymoon weekend in a Wexford caravan, and then a new life. Daddy packed the biscuits into lorries and drove them around, and acted as caretaker, and general helpmeet. He laid the poison to kill the stray dogs that scavenged around the grounds of the factory; he killed the otherwise useful feral cats when they became too numerous; and he sacked and drowned any kittens born inside the factory perimeter.

  A helpmeet: in Ward’s memory, Daddy’s proud declaration that the biscuit factory ‘couldn’t manage without him’.

  *

  ‘They couldn’t manage without Daddy,’ Ward said. The playground corner, out of the wind, out of a mizzle that flew with the wind through the air, and two minutes, three minutes, before the teacher rang the great wooden-handled school bell, and they could run back inside and warm their hands and their damp feet against the radiators.

  ‘He says. He said that they can’t manage without him.’

  ‘You hold your corner,’ his mother said to him, that morning. ‘You keep your backbone straight. You answer right back, and don’t take any rubbish from anybody.’ And there, his backbone is as straight as straight can be. He wouldn’t go near the handball alley. He never was picked to play; he’d stay away. And today, an audience: the wind and the rain have kept them all in the corners, in the angle of two walls; an audience today, if he speaks up, if he can keep his backbone straight. ‘Ramrod-straight, is the way to do it.’

  ‘Why, what does your daddy do?’

  ‘What does your daddy do?’

  He lifted his chin, he remembered his backbone. He’d seen the lorry. The size of it! – and the shininess!

  ‘Can I drive it, Daddy?’

  ‘You can not.’

  A sinking heart – but what a chance now to boast about the size of Daddy’s lorry.

  ‘He drives a lorry.’

  Snuffles of laughter, and he turned and stared.

  The biscuit factory smelled of sweetness. Malt and sugar and sugary milk. He’d been there, and they’d given him the broken biscuits in a paper bag to bring home. Sugar, and broken biscuits and milk.

  ‘They couldn’t manage without Daddy.’

  ‘A lorry?’

  And now the ground was slipping away. He’d said something wrong but he didn’t know what it was. The sound of the wooden-handled bell rang in his ears. It clanged and clanged. It cut out the sound of the snuffling laughter. But he saw the nudges, the elbows nudging, the smiling mouths – and not nice smiles, either.

  *

  The biscuit factory was an old-fashioned sort of place. He was able to see this, later: to measure and understand that the blood of its original Quaker owners still coursed in the corporate veins: the management didn’t much like sacking people, and avoided doing so wherever possible. Otherwise, Daddy would have been first to get the boot: the very first. A ‘gulpin’, to use Ward’s mother’s language, meaning a feckless, idle fool.

  ‘And a bit of a drinker,’ Ward said, and Martin nodded, listening and listening.

  ‘So I surmised,’ Martin said. ‘Go on.’

  His brother and sister, Dermot and Anne-Marie, seemed to know how to stay out of the way: leave it to the middle child, the bookworm child, the vulnerable child, to be at home, to see it all, to hear it all. Why hadn’t he been more clever?

  ‘There’s always one,’ Martin said, kindly. ‘Usually, anyway. You wouldn’t believe the patterns. You’d better eat,’ he said, ‘before it gets cold.’ He topped up Ward’s glass. ‘Go on.’

  Ward took another wedge of pizza. ‘They were just smarter,’ he said. ‘Smart enough to keep their heads down, smart enough to leave me and my mother to it. I was a bit of an eejit, really,’ he said. ‘Too pious for my own good, an altar boy as soon as I had the chance, good at school, a total swot: you get it.’

  It wasn’t a question; Martin nodded.

  ‘So I was the one, is the long and the short of
it.’ He looked up now, at Martin looking at him. ‘The eejit who didn’t know how to get out of the way. And here I am now, putting such a premium on cleverness, and I never was clever, not when it counted.’

  Martin held his gaze. Each held the other’s gaze. Ward found himself examining Martin, scrutinising him for signs of shrinkage, a shrivelling from unpleasant facts. But no: nothing like that. No false, cheery bonhomie either. Martin just sat and waited; he showed a bit of respect. This would be OK.

  ‘We moved to the wrong part of town,’ Ward said slowly. ‘By which I mean the right part of town. And there he was, driving a lorry around, and drinking all weekend, and drowning kittens in his spare time, and the middle-class neighbours watching and watching, and,’ he took a pull on his glass of wine, ‘and I think he lost it.’

  ‘You’re making excuses, surely,’ Martin said.

  Maybe he was.

  ‘Go on,’ said Martin, and Ward watched as he leaned forward a little, across the red-and-white checked tablecloth. ‘Go on.’

  *

  The long weals rubbed and rubbed against his shirt. Daddy had broken one of the cane kitchen chairs. He had broken it against the wall, so that splinters flew, and then he had taken one of the broken cane legs and beaten Ward with it.

  The cane leg was yellow, and shiny with varnish. It shone yellow in the yellow of the kitchen light. His mother – no, she didn’t scream. You couldn’t scream, otherwise the neighbours might hear. So she spoke instead, low.

  ‘Don’t belt him.’

  Usually she was the one belted.

  ‘Don’t, don’t belt him.’

  ‘If he won’t eat his potatoes, then he has to be belted,’ Daddy said. And the chair didn’t make too much noise when it broke. It was only voices that made noise. ‘Take off your shirt,’ Daddy said.

  ‘He’ll eat everything after this.’

  ‘Take off your shirt.’

  And then the air was filled with yellow.

  After that first evening, Daddy seemed to get into the swing of it. He kept the cane leg: it was special, and just long enough, though not too long. The cane left red marks, but it didn’t leave blood, and that was alright. And he only did so much beating. He stopped after only a few whips. He knew how to do it so that nobody would see or hear anything.

  Later, his mother rubbed cold, pink lotion into Ward’s back. Dermot was asleep in the upper bunk, or pretending to be asleep. It was pretending, Ward knew: but his mother spoke in a whisper anyway.

  ‘We’ll just ignore it, and it won’t happen again,’ she said. ‘Your father has a temper on him, that’s all. Just a temper. You’ll eat your potatoes after this, love, won’t you?’

  He ate his potatoes, after that, but the cane was kept, handy, and used now and again. Always on his back, on his buttocks, where the red marks could never be seen. ‘I’ll beat the queerness out of him, if it’s the last thing I do.’

  And it was the same when he pulled his mother by her hair about the place: he would grab a handful of hair at the very top of her head. Nobody could spot anything if you did it this way; and when he punched her, he did it above the hairline. There was never any need for the bruises to show.

  ‘Stop it, Daddy.’

  ‘“Thtop it, Daddy,”’ and Daddy would go for him, instead.

  Or, as well as.

  Daddy, you bastard.

  Daddy wasn’t always drunk when he set to them with his fists and his cane, and with his grasping hand. Only sometimes. It was worse when he was drunk, but it was also better: you could count the minutes before he fell asleep on the sofa. Ten minutes, twelve minutes, fifteen minutes: he never reached fifteen minutes. Anne-Marie and Dermot would stay quiet upstairs, but Ward couldn’t: he couldn’t leave his mother alone; he had to sit on the stairs, and watch through the bannisters as Daddy arranged his broad, golden signet ring on his finger, and began to push, to thump it into his mother’s head, until she fell over.

  ‘My head’s ringing,’ she would say, would whisper. ‘Stop now.’

  Once Ward said to her, ‘Can we not go away?’

  She looked scandalised. ‘We can’t do that. And go where? Where would we go?’

  Although, they did go away. Once. They went to the chip shop. Only once, when Daddy had been very bad, and taken the barometer from the wall in the hall, and smashed it against the bannisters until it broke into very many pieces. Its shining face, and its silver and iron inside bits, spread out across the hall floor.

  The barometer had been a wedding present.

  He fell asleep soon afterwards: and she came up the stairs, very quiet and very calm, and bundled them all into trousers and jumpers and coats, with their pyjamas still on, and warm underneath their clothes, and they left the house together, and caught the bus down the hill towards town, and got off the bus at Cafolla’s, and went in and sat down, and she ordered chips for them all, and milk, and went and brought down the squeezy plastic round tomato-bottle of ketchup from the silver counter, and they had their chips and drank their milk, all silently, and she sat there, saying nothing and watching them, and crying only a very little bit, and when they finished, she lifted her chin the way she did when her mind was made up, and she gathered them up again, and paid, and left, and caught the bus again, up the hill to the corner of the road, and they went back into the house, and stepped over the dead barometer in the hall, and past his snoring, and back to bed again.

  His bed was still a little tiny bit warm.

  In the morning, the barometer was gone.

  So, that was the only time she’d left: and that was only to take them to the chip shop. After that, she hardly ever lifted her chin again.

  ‘Yes,’ Martin said, ‘I see.’

  Ward couldn’t, he said, remember everything, every detail. He couldn’t remember, in fact, long stretches of his childhood: there were holes like honeycomb. ‘Nothing,’ he said, looking at Martin, then shifting his gaze left and down onto the red-and-white tablecloth, the ruby depths of the wine, the cooling mushrooms on his pizza. ‘I mean, I know what happened – but I can’t actually remember. It’s a very strange sensation.’

  Martin said that this was what happened in response to trauma: the brain closed down, shut sections of itself off, it was all about protection. It was fascinating, Martin said, what was happening nowadays: the research into how the brain and one’s memory worked under conditions of stress. The neurological researchers had discovered all sorts of interesting things about how neural pathways fired, how they opened and closed at such times. Martin talked about disassociation. About exactly what the brain did to keep itself safe. The brain was pretty great: it knew what to do and it did it; and later, when life was safe (or as safe as it was ever likely to be), it provided the means to open up the neural pathways into memory, into experience. It understood that a permanent blank was not much use, though a temporary blank was, and acted accordingly.

  ‘Which is pretty cool, I think,’ Martin said, and Ward agreed. It was pretty cool.

  Later, Ward set about remembering – recovering – his lost memories. He wasn’t surprised by their content, when they eventually emerged: events took place in a loop. A beating, and another beating. The queerness being beaten out of him. Thtop it, Daddy. A cane, usually. Sometimes Dermot’s hurley stick, though this was for special occasions, because the bruises left by ash wood proved slower to clear from the skin; and they were all the colours of the rainbow, and had to be explained away.

  ‘What else?’ asked Martin.

  A steadily increasing sense of brutality, as though his father had a dial in his head and was turning it up, slowly, to see how high it could go: which accounted for the closing of the neural pathways. But he realised that one form of brutality was just the same as another, regardless of that ghostly dial. Brutality was brutality, however you looked at it – and having looked at it, and examined it, and understood it completely, with professional assistance, Ward was happy to set it aside. There was no need for these me
mories to define who he was.

  ‘Go on,’ said Martin.

  The violence stopped – not when he reached a certain age, or when he stretched sufficiently to be able to look his father in the eye. It carried on well into Ward’s teens, past the age when he ought on paper to have been able to defend himself. Better that he put up with the strikes and the punches and the welts and the dark bruising, than his mother have to take all of it instead.

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ said Martin. ‘That’s the way it works.’

  The beatings stopped, in fact, only when his mother died, and when his father began to drink so very excessively that he could no longer adequately handle a cane, or a chair leg, or any weapon. When he stopped representing a credible threat.

  ‘Gosh, this is all so interesting,’ said Martin.

  Ward carried his father’s coffin, when the time came. There was no need for any dramatics about it all.

  Later, much later, when Martin’s paper was published in the Lancet – the paper which helped to establish his reputation, the paper peer-reviewed and found wanting on no counts, the paper about forgotten-and-remembered trauma, about brain science, about healing and empathy and peace and clinical repair-work, as though the brain were under the bonnet of an old car, for the likes of Martin to tinker about inside of, the paper which sealed Martin’s position professionally and at the clinic, the paper the existence of which I (Ward thought, again and again and again) myself knew nothing about until its appearance – later, much later, Ward tried not to mind. As Martin said, this was Ward’s tangible contribution to their future, to their financial security, to the good life they’d have together.

  ‘I mean, talk about silver linings,’ said Martin, and smiled. ‘I’ll take you on holidays.’ Now they could get a real top-of-the-range Danish kitchen. ‘Right?’

  ‘You might have asked.’ How sullen I sound, thought Ward, like a spoiled child.

  ‘What, and have you say, No thanks, darling, I’d rather not?’

  ‘You might have asked.’

  Martin rose, folded his Times. ‘You’ll feel differently in a few days,’ he said. ‘I think that this is part of the healing process; and you will too, in time.’