My mind flashed to the dirty magazines in the loft. “At school.”
“Boys-a-boys, they learn quicker and quicker at school these days,” Mr. O’Kane said.
All the adults agreed, and the men began talking among themselves again.
But when it was something bad, my mother never let go. She kept on and on until she got to the bottom of the matter. “Who said it at school?”
“It’s so long ago and—”
“You’re a sneak, Gabriel.” Instantly, she seized my arm, pulled me toward the door, and ordered me to my room.
“Don’t be so hard on him, Eileen,” said Uncle Brendan. “Boys of his age are rascals. He did no harm. If that’s all the bad words he learns, you’ll have little to worry about.”
I didn’t want my uncle to think of me as a rascal.
“You’re away and don’t know him like I know him, Brendan.” Mammy’s high pitch caused the room to quiet. Everyone stared at her. “Well, he has to be shown what’s right and wrong,” she continued. “And lying is wrong.”
Uncle Brendan’s eyes moved from her face to the sofa leg.
“Oh, I remember now,” I said. “It was Henry Lynch. He wanted me to say that word in front of the girls. That’s why he and his friends pinned me to the ground and tore off my shirt button at the carnival that time.”
Mammy always said the Lynch’s had filthy mouths and she disliked Henry because he caused me trouble. And what I’d said wasn’t a full lie.
“That’s not the story you told me at the time. You said Henry hit you for no good reason. So, you’re a liar as well as a sneak. I’m glad I listened to your father and didn’t make a fool of myself running to complain to his mother.” She pointed her finger at the door. “To bed, you sneaky liar!”
“I’ve told you where I heard the word.”
“Bed.” She pointed at the door again.
Uncle Brendan stared at the leg of the sofa and Kate the nun was biting her lower lip as she watched him. I started out of the room, making sure I banged the door as I left.
As I lay on the bed, I could hear Caroline and the others talking. A surge of pure hate rose up inside me. I hated Caroline. I hated Mammy. I hated Aunt Peggy. I hated Henry Lynch. And I hated my father for stopping Mammy complaining about Henry to his mother. My head tightened and began to ache. I knelt by the side of the bed and slammed my fists into the mattress over and over. When I finished, the tightness was gone, but I remained on my knees.
“Please, God, please help me. Please kill Henry Lynch in a car crash. Please kill him and I promise I’ll say my rosary properly every night. I’ll even think about each mystery like I’m supposed to.” I didn’t care if anyone heard me. Finally, I said one Our Father, three Hail Marys, and a Glory Be to the Father, just to be one hundred percent sure, in case my own made-up prayers didn’t reach His holy ears. As I was getting up, Caroline came in the room carrying almost half of a fruitcake.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was angry at Martin and I didn’t think James would say the word.” She turned down her lips. Her chin crinkled as she gave me the cake. “I didn’t mean for you to get punished.”
“Well, I did, didn’t I?”
My sister looked at the cake. “I brought you a big slice.”
Fruitcake was my favorite and I knew what she was doing. I pretended to be angry still. “So, I see.”
“Shall I get the others to sneak in and see you?”
I nodded.
Caroline walked up to the open door and stopped. “So I’m forgiven, completely?”
“Only this once.”
Eight
My parents had gone to a wedding in Belfast early in the morning and left Jennifer and Noel in charge of us. They were due to sit the eleven-plus examination in a few weeks. The exam was important. If they passed it, Jennifer could go to Saint Veronica’s Convent and Noel to Saint Malachy’s College.
Saint Malachy’s was a boys’ day school in Desertvale and Mammy said I would be going there. When my turn to sit the exam came, she planned to make me practice eleven-plus questions until they were second nature. She also said Noel and Jennifer wouldn’t pass and they’d have to settle for attending the intermediate school, because their mother preferred talking about people behind their backs to helping her children learn.
That was fine with Noel. He didn’t want to go to grammar school; he wanted to leave school as soon as he was sixteen and join the Merchant Navy, just like his father had done.
Noel stopped humming, licked a postage stamp, and pressed it onto an envelope. “Do you want to see the girls in the dirty magazine again?” he asked, as Jennifer called James up to the kitchen table to correct his sums.
We were playing make-believe school. That’s all Jennifer ever played. Noel had been writing to his pen pal from County Carlow in the Irish Free State. He’d found her address in the pen-friends corner of the Saint Martin de Porres magazine and also hoped to visit and feel her tits one day. I didn’t think it would happen. She’d asked for his photograph in her last two letters and Noel kept pretending to forget to send it. He told me he needed to have better ones taken, but I knew the honest reason was he was afraid she wouldn’t write back after she saw his rotted front teeth.
“It’s raining fierce,” I said, “and Jennifer will wonder why we’re going out in it.”
“I have to post my letter and she’ll do what I say.”
Jennifer had given me geography questions to study. They were about different types of rocks, things Jennifer and Noel were supposed to know and I wasn’t, even though I was now in the senior side of the schoolroom, too.
Noel hadn’t mentioned the dirty magazines for a long time. Since our first trip, I’d always refused to go to the hay nest when he asked. Now, the idea of looking at a naked girl lying on hay bales seemed more interesting than learning about something I didn’t have to know yet, especially with Jennifer punishing me for answering the questions incorrectly. That was another thing about her: she loved to whack us, so no matter how well you did, nothing was ever done to her satisfaction.
“Okay, let’s go.”
Noel informed Jennifer it was his turn to be in charge of me and he was taking me with him to the mailbox, and then we were going to play something else. As Jennifer peered over James’s book, her thick eyebrows moved closer together until a tiny gully formed. “I need to test him first.”
“Afterwards, if Eileen and Harry aren’t back from the wedding when we get back.”
James said he wanted to go, too, but Jennifer said he’d gotten two sums wrong and she needed to speak to him about the mistakes. We left James bawling and ran to the pigsty. Because I was now nine years old and taller, I found it much easier to climb up on the beam. Nor was I frightened of heights anymore.
“Where did you get these magazines, Noel?”
“Somebody gave them to me.”
“Who?”
“Somebody . . . stop asking so many damned questions.”
Noel passed a magazine to me and I flicked through the pictures of women taking off their clothes.
“This magazine’s best,” said Noel, “because it has letters from men who say what they’d like to do with women they see walking along the streets.”
Noel read a letter from a plumber who described what he’d done to a man’s wife while on a house call to mend a leak. After he finished reading, Noel spread the magazine on the hay so I could also see another story unfold in pictures. Two dark-haired girls in frilly white knickers and a man in a dark pin-striped suit were sitting on a brass bed. As Noel turned the pages, the girls’ clothes came off, until they were nude. Then, they undressed the man and got on the bed with him.
As I stared at the pictures, I remembered the beautiful man I’d seen at the beach with the water droplets glittering like diamonds on his tanned legs. I hadn’t thought about him since Uncle Brendan’s visit, but now I saw every detail of his face as if I’d seen it yesterday. I wondered what he was doing
at this very moment, right now, as I was reading dirty magazines in a stale nest of hay.
“That man’s giving her a good pumping,” I said.
“He’s riding her. That’s what your thing’s really for.” Noel looked at me. “Do you want to see mine?”
“Why?”
Noel unzipped and arched his body as he lifted up off the hay and wriggled down his jeans and underwear. I saw the white of his arse glowing in the torchlight. His thing appeared.
“Touch my cock and see what happens,” he said.
“What happens?”
“Touch it.”
I laid my hand on it and it began to grow. The growing stiffness surprised me and I pulled my hand away.
Noel began to stroke it fast. “Take off your clothes.”
“I don’t want to, Noel.”
“Do what I say.”
“No.”
“Look, it’s just to compare,” he said more softly. “Come on . . . just for me.”
As I did, Noel undressed, as well.
“I want you to do to me what the woman is doing to the man in the photo,” Noel said.
“Yuck. I don’t want to do that.”
“I’ll do it to you next and you’ll see how nice it is. That’s why other boys do it to one another. It’s just so good.”
Noel lay back and placed his hands under his head. The rain crashed upon the zinc roof like a hundred beating drums in the darkness. Way back in one corner, a steady stream of drops leaked through a hole and fell into something hollow. Slowly, I moved my lips closer and closer until they touched his thing.
“That’s it, Gabriel.”
His voice was croaky. As he raised his upper body to watch, I got a whiff of his sweaty underarms and began to heave. Quickly, I leaned over the edge of the nest and vomited.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“I want to go home.”
I sat up and shivered. The hot sourness in my nose and throat stung, my eyes watered and the smell of my sick made me want to vomit again.
“Keep doing me.”
“I want to go home and do Jennifer’s test.”
“Keep doing me.”
“You didn’t wash under your arms and you stink and that’s what made me sick.”
Noel sprang up as if stung by a wasp. “Put on your clothes and let’s go. We’ll come back another time and I’ll teach you to play the doctors and nurses game instead. Would you prefer to do that?”
“What is it?”
“You take off your clothes and I’ll be the doctor and examine you and then you do the same to me. Loads of boys play that game, as well. Would you like to play that?”
“I’ll do that game.”
“But this is a secret between us. You must keep it as much of a secret as the magazines.” He stared at me fiercely. “If you tell, I’ll have a word with Henry Lynch, and then both of us will gang up on you.”
As Mammy had predicted, Noel and Jennifer failed their exams and had to go to the intermediate school where the pupils wore gorgeous burgundy blazers.
After Noel did the other kind of examination on me, I found I liked it a lot. We played doctors and nurses every time he asked. We always began by looking at the magazines. As the months passed, Noel got me to do new things to him. After I’d done him, he did the same to me, so we’d be even. I didn’t vomit anymore, because Noel washed himself and his skin now smelled of soap.
The nasty part of our game was thinking about Noel’s rotten teeth touching me there and the beautiful part was the lovely pains. I enjoyed the lovely pains. They came after Noel had been playing with my thing for a bit. The pains were powerful strong and not like any other pain I’d ever had. They built up slowly inside until they took over and I felt like a prisoner in my own body. The lovely pains overcame all my thoughts and made me forget about everything. But after they ended, I didn’t want Noel to touch me anymore. Then, my thing would be sore and not sore at the same time. That’s the best way I can explain it. Sore and not sore at the same time.
Other feelings would also come, feelings that made me whip my clothes on, make excuses, and leave, because I needed to get away from Noel. I couldn’t bring myself to talk to him about these lovely pains. All I knew was I enjoyed them, but I couldn’t understand why I was having them—or why they changed quickly into bad feelings that made me need to leave until the next time.
Rain had fallen for two days and the river was black and flowing angrily. It had burst its banks in low places. Many of the fields were waterlogged and cows stood sadly in matted groups underneath dripping branches, their shins deep in mud, steam spewing from their nostrils like smoke.
The chugging snorts of the old generator at the back of our house made me very nervous. Mammy was worried that rain would pour through the leaking roof and mix with the diesel and snuff it out. Sometimes, the lights flickered and solid black lines rolled up the TV screen. Each time it happened, my mother leaped from her chair and cursed Daddy because he hadn’t fixed the leak. Finally, she lit two pearly candles she had waiting on the windowsill.
My sister, brother, and I hated the heavy rain and spluttering generator because it led to arguments after Daddy lost his temper. Nuala was three and didn’t understand, so she just watched them with huge eyes. I wished I could fix leaks. They weren’t massive—but the arguments were. They always reached a point where Mammy wanted away from the “wilderness”—her word for Knockburn. She’d threaten to take us away and live in a town, where there was proper electricity and flush toilets. That sort of chat would make my father even angrier, until he’d curse furiously and tell her to clear the fuck away with the bunch of us.
Just after the lights flickered really badly and Mammy rose again, someone banged on the front door. Though only five-thirty in the evening, it was pitch-dark outside.
“Who the hell can that be in this weather?” Daddy said, as he rose to answer the door.
“Maybe somebody come to fix the roof,” my mother said. She turned to me. “Gabriel, go and see who it is. I’m in no mood for company. If it’s visitors, come in quickly and tell me so I can clear off to the bedroom.”
I went, my father trailing after me. Mr. O’Kane stood at the door as sheets of rain swept past the overhead lamp like the fast-turning pages of a book, the streaky drops changing to liquid silver as they caught the light. The tiny veins in his cheeks were turned blue-black by the driving wind, and water dripped like a leaking faucet from the tip of his nose.
“Harry, the Lynch boys went fishing after school and they haven’t come home, and the mother’s beside herself wey worry,” he said to my father, his voice out of breath as he reached the end. He swallowed hard. “I’ve never seen the likes of the river since I was your lad’s age.” He nodded in my direction. “We’ve found a fishing rod, but there’s no sign of them. They’ve already got people combing the banks, but more are needed.”
“Fetch my wellies, Gabriel.”
“May they be spared and found safe,” Mammy said. She paused and watched my father squeeze one foot into a Wellington. “Harry, be careful at the river. We don’t need you to get drowned.”
I’d been saying my Henry prayers for almost a year now and wanted them immediately undone. I’d really tried to avoid Henry, but it wasn’t possible; the school playground was small and I’d also see him at concerts and other Knockburn events.
But he didn’t annoy me every single day. Some mornings, his seat would be empty and I’d wait, sizzling with electricity, for fifteen minutes after the bell rang and class began. No one was ever later than fifteen minutes to school. I’d watch the clock until the big hand passed the quarter after and if he hadn’t come by then, I’d be fine. There were also days when he was at school and left me alone, but even those days were filled with worry, because I didn’t know if he would eventually pick on me. Every time I saw him come toward me, my stomach turned into a jumble of living knots.
I’d learned not to look him in the eyes.
The thing was to stare at his chest until he finished prodding and pushing me about. Standing still made me feel ashamed, because I knew I was afraid of him. But later, in the quiet of my bed, I was king, as I recited my Henry prayers for him to die.
Now that it might have happened, I realized I didn’t want it to. I didn’t want anyone to die. Wanting Henry dead had been a way of releasing my anger. Also, I had only one more year of primary school to go and then Henry would be history. I’d pass my exam and go to grammar school, where everything would be different. Henry wasn’t smart; he was bound to fail. He’d end up going to the intermediate school like Noel had and I’d be at Saint Malachy’s with no more fears, surrounded by boys who really liked me.
I felt sweaty cold now. My heart leaped at the very thought of the word “dead.” I tried to swallow, but couldn’t. As I watched my father put on his anorak, my mind screamed to God, begging Him not to have listened, begging Him to spare Henry and his brother. After Daddy left, my mother suggested we say another rosary. I fell on my knees.
“We’ll say the sorrowful mysteries on account of poor Henry and his brother, Gerald.”
“I don’t want to say another rosary,” Caroline said. “We’ve said one, so we’ll just tell God right now it was for Henry. He’ll know. They were already in the river at the time we were saying it.”
“Shut your mouth, Caroline,” I said. Her thinking was dead dumb at times. “Don’t you want them to find him alive?”
Mammy looked at me as she blessed herself.
I prayed harder than I’d ever prayed. I didn’t allow my mind to wander as I concentrated on Jesus’s agony in the garden and His long Crucifixion. I even said the decade my father would have said if he’d been present.
Afterward, we waited for two hours, but Daddy didn’t come home. Mammy sent me to bed. I couldn’t sleep. I kept tossing and thinking of Henry in the swirling water, the black-eyed trout gaping like they did when we took them from the river after my cousins and I poisoned them. I prayed until the wheels of a car passed over the cattle grid at the main gate and then I got up and raced into the living room.
A Son Called Gabriel Page 9