A Son Called Gabriel

by Damian McNicholl

  Of course, my father didn’t know I felt this way. He would tease me about not wanting to drive machines. “Every house has to have a gentleman who doesn’t like getting his hands dirty, so you’ll be ours,” he said often. I’d laugh and hurt all at once. And ever since the thrashing, I felt angry. I felt so angry that he didn’t try to understand me. And I just couldn’t make the feeling go away.

  While our father went into the administration offices to sign papers for the new diggers he’d come to collect, James and I walked past a long row of ships. Two had strange names that we couldn’t pronounce. I asked a man about them and he said they were Soviet commie ships.

  The dark green water smelled of stale pee and a greasy film of slime, cardboard, and small planks of wood floated between the ships. An old man sat smoking a pipe at the end of a jetty, the tip of his long fishing rod hovering inches above the water. Out of the distant grayness, a ship loaded with blue and rust-red metal containers sailed toward the harbor mouth.

  “Maybe the digger Daddy’s picking up is in one of those containers,” James said.

  “It probably arrived yesterday.”

  I paused and looked at my brother. He was shorter than I had been when I was seven but he was much more confident. James was popular with his friends—they chose him to captain his football team at school—and he was usually kind. Only when he was very angry with me did he tease me about not doing things boys were supposed to do.

  “James, why do you think we do so many things differently?” I asked him. “I don’t like doing the things you like, like playing football and reading adventure books. And why is it I always want to play the Indian when we play cowboys and Indians even when I know they always lose in the films?”

  James tossed a stone at the water and counted the number of skims it made. “They don’t lose when we play, because you’re far stronger than me.”

  He picked up another smooth stone, passing it from palm to palm before fitting it between his thumb and forefinger. The ship was closer now and its movement made the water lap against the pilings. James stooped and hurled the stone. It popped in and out of the water four times and hopped over a floating piece of wood. Skimming was something we both enjoyed, so I searched and found three flat stones. We skimmed and James won, because I couldn’t get one to bounce more than three times.

  “Hey, boys, you’re scaring away my bloody dinner,” the old man shouted. “Get away o’ that.” He spat into the water and began to rise from his seat.

  We ran back to the lorry, where Daddy had already loaded one bright yellow digger with a white roof and scarlet wheels onto the flatbed and was driving another up the skids. The digger’s cheerful colors stood out against the dirty tarmac, dull brown harbor buildings, and the rusted commie ships. After we’d climbed into the cabin, James slid into the driver’s seat, grabbed hold of the huge steering wheel and began to make lorry sounds, pretending to drive us home. When my father finished securing the last digger, he came and stood beside the cabin door while he talked to the harbor clerk.

  After ten minutes, anger welled up inside me. I burned and wondered how my father could be so selfish as to make us wait like this. Winding down the window, I listened, but already knew he would be telling silly stories about people and stuff that had nothing to do with diggers, stuff that meant nothing to this clerk. The clerk looked bored, kept looking toward the office every few moments, but Daddy kept nudging his arm as if the two were best friends. This habit of his annoyed me. I simply couldn’t understand why he nudged strangers while talking to them, or why he had to talk a pile of shite with them in the first place.

  “We need to get home,” I said down to him. “Mammy wants to take me shopping for new shoes.” I struggled to hide my burning. “Let’s go.”

  He looked up for a second before turning back to the clerk, who was glancing at his watch again. “These young ones have no patience,” said my father. “I’ll ‘new shoes’ him.”

  “I have to be getting back to work myself,” the clerk said. “Take care until I see you next time.”

  After he’d climbed into the cab and started the engine, Daddy said, “Gabriel, you see that wee man I was talking to just now?” He curled the tip of his tongue over his upper lip while he turned the steering wheel, glancing often in the long side mirrors and out the front window as he reversed. He’d always start a sentence like this and then go quiet when he was doing something tricky, keeping a person guessing until he’d finished the job—another habit that drove me crazy.

  “What about him?” I said, fighting to stop my voice from rising. I hated having to dig an answer out of him, but that’s what was expected.

  “Aye, you see that wee man, there.” The tongue curled again. “Well, that wee man would buy and sell his mother. He’s also as black as tar. Oh, Jasus, aye, black as tar. That wee man would shoot a Catholic between the eyes as quick as he would look at him. You can’t trust the Protestants.”

  Politics was big in our house at that time. The Catholics were marching in the streets to complain that Protestants were discriminating against us in housing and government jobs. We were also demanding the right to vote. Daddy liked only a few Protestants. He hated Paisley, one of the Protestant leaders, most of all. But he also didn’t like the clerk, because he was a Protestant who would shoot a Catholic between the eyes, and yet he’d talk rivers of shite with him.

  “Why did you talk to him so long, then?” I asked.

  James picked up on my sharpness and gave me a shut up look.

  “I have to speak civil to the Protestants because I have to do business with them,” said Daddy. “You’ll find that out when you’re working. Oh, Jasus, aye, my boy. You have to be civil to them, because they have all the power. That wee man was only civil because I work for a Protestant firm and he thinks I’m a Protestant. Aye, he thinks it’s safe to talk to me. These Larne boys are a black crowd and wouldn’t allow the likes of you and me to live in their town. Jasus, no, they’d burn us out . . . and shoot us in the back as we ran away.” He laughed. “Oh, the dirty Protestants have their day of reckoning coming and I can’t wait to see it. We’re marching in the streets to get the vote and sit in the government. And if they don’t let us sit, well then, sons of mine, the IRA will start a civil war and shoot the whole lot of them.”

  “But killing Protestants is wrong,” I said. “You told me once, I wasn’t to pray for anyone to die. You told me it was wrong. Isn’t shooting a Protestant dead just as wrong?”

  He didn’t answer. He started whistling “On Top of Old Smokey,” instead.

  “Do you like sailing about with your daddy?” he asked after a bit. “I know James does, but do you?”

  My father always moved to another subject whenever he didn’t want to answer. He did it every time Mammy asked him a question he didn’t like. She said that was exactly how he tried to change a subject.

  The taking of my eleven-plus was exciting and panicky. Boys and girls sat two seats apart from one another and we were not allowed to turn over the exam paper until told to begin, at nine o’clock exactly. After the page rustlings stopped, the room became cough-quiet. Despite hours and hours of mock tests, my hands shook. The clock’s tick sounded fast and loud, fast and loud. I looked at Fergal, sitting a row in front of me, and saw that he was already writing.

  A bolt of panic slammed through my body and I charged through the first question, desperate to answer it even before I’d read it fully. “Cow is to herd as sheep is to . . . ” Two of the choices were “flock” and “frock.” I entered a cross in a box and moved on to the next question.

  What I’d done didn’t hit me until after the exam was over, when people were talking about the questions and one girl joked about the ridiculous “frock” choice. The word circled and circled in my brain. I was sure I remembered putting the cross in the box beside it. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid. Beside myself with fear that I’d done the same thing with a lot of other questions, I hurtled do
wn the corridor to the headmistress’s room and told her what I thought I’d done.

  To my surprise, she only laughed and said it was just a bit of nerves, that everyone made a mistake or two under pressure and I was one of the boys whom she expected to “pass with flying colors.”

  My mother wasn’t so happy. She said I’d be a sorry boy if Fergal got a fat envelope in the mail—crammed full of grant information, travel pass applications, and other stuff about grammar school—and I got a thin one when the results came out.

  One Saturday in February, around the time when the results were due, our bandy-legged, Protestant postman walked up the garden path clutching a bunch of envelopes of all sizes and thicknesses. Convinced she saw a small brown envelope in his hands and unable to bear it, Mammy ordered Caroline to open all the letters and fled to her bedroom. The first fat envelope was The Far East, Mammy’s mission magazine; the next, her new family allowance booklet. The third bore the Education Board’s red stamp.

  Seizing the envelope from my sister, I tore it open and took out a bundle of pink, pale green, and white application forms. I ran to my mother’s room where she sat with her fingers stuffed in her ears on the edge of the bed. Her eyes searched mine. I looked at the floor.

  “Jesus, you’ve failed. You’ve failed, and I thought you’d get into grammar school like Brendan and go on to be a priest.” She paced between the bed and vanity twice. “What will he think of you, after being told you’re so brainy?” Her voice was shriller than a barn cat’s at night. “I knew you’d failed as soon as you came home and told me you’d got that frock and flock question wrong. You’re stupid, that’s what you are. Well, there’s nothing for it now. It’s off you go to intermediate school with Noel and Jennifer and the rest of the failures.”

  Unable to keep a straight face, I told her the truth. “I passed, Mammy.”

  She touched her heart and sat on the bed again. “You cheeky nab. You almost gave me a heart attack.” She reached out for the forms. “All my novenas have been answered. You’re a good boy, Gabriel. I knew you had the brains.”

  She glanced at Caroline, who had followed me into the bedroom. “And you, my lady, you’ll have to follow your brother’s lead and pass when your turn comes.” She paused as she riffled through the sheaf. “Did you ask the postman what thickness of envelope he had for Fergal?”

  “I did, but he said it wouldn’t be right to say,” said Caroline.

  Mammy’s lips thinned. “Sure it’s as little as he could do to tell a body whether it was fat or thin.”

  As it turned out, Fergal and Cousin Connor passed, too.

  My father was very proud of my achievement and told everyone who visited that I was going to grammar school. It was great to hear him boast—so great, that I forgave him everything and promised myself never to be angry with him again. Uncle Brendan wrote after he learned the news, saying how proud he was of me, and inquiring if I still wanted to be a hairdresser like I’d told him once. He added “ha ha ha” at the end of the question. That made me laugh. I wondered why the hell I’d ever thought to be a hairdresser in the first place.

  Granny Harkin, who always said “plus-eleven” instead of “eleven-plus” no matter how many times I corrected her, slipped me five pounds, but my mother took it from me as soon as she left.

  “We’ll use that to help pay for your uniform.”

  She allowed me to keep the ten shillings that Granny Neeson had given me, an amount that made her furious on account of the fact that my grandmother had pots of money, I was the first grandchild of hers to pass the exam, and Granny Harkin had given me more. She complained about it to Aunt Peggy, who nodded but gave me nothing but advice on how best to study hard.

  The last few weeks of August were a whirl of activity as I prepared for Saint Malachy’s. Because entry was automatic upon passing the exam, the school didn’t interview me. My first contact with the school came by way of a welcome letter from the headmaster, in which he included a copy of the school rules. My mother was not happy to read she had to buy me two pairs of sneakers: one pair for sports and another for wearing in class, because outdoor shoe soles scuffed the polished floor tiles.

  We visited the outfitters who supplied the uniforms. The assistant was as polished as his dark wooden counter at selling clothing, but Mammy knew all his tricks. He watched her face as he stated the prices and offered other choices when she shook her head and pretended she’d buy the shirts and charcoal pants at a factory shop. He was also full of fake praise when I tried on the cheaper type of permitted blazer. It had no slits at the back like Martin’s.

  “I don’t think it will do,” I said. “Martin’s has slits.”

  “You can get one with panels next time,” said the shop assistant. He emitted a horse-like whinny as he winked at my mother.

  “You’re going there to learn, not for a fashion parade,” Mammy said.

  That wasn’t exactly true. Martin, who was now in his second year, had told me I must on all accounts get pants with flared bottoms. He’d told me that he and his friends were the school’s trendsetters and he’d managed to persuade Auntie Celia to buy him a pair with fifteen-inch flares.

  “What can Celia be thinking?” Mammy said, after I fished out a pair of the fifteen-inch ones from the rack and held them up for her to examine. “They look like curtains.”

  Things grew even worse for me when the assistant informed her that two items she was inspecting, a gorgeous black-and-royal-blue scarf with a thin white stripe and a peaked blue cap, weren’t compulsory attire.

  Other things occurred as a result of my having passed the exam that I didn’t expect. Now that I was starting grammar school, my mother began treating me as if I were already eleven. I was allowed to wear long trousers anytime I chose, even during the hot summer days. Mammy also told me she would no longer barge into the kitchen when I was sitting in the tin bath on Saturday wash nights.

  Neighbors treated me differently, too. They didn’t just think I was brainy, they knew it now. I had passed a government exam. That was the proof. Old people told me I was definitely as brainy as my uncle Brendan, that I’d go just as far if I kept on the straight and narrow like him. All I had to do was follow Uncle Brendan’s example and my life would be “charmed” like his.

  PART TWO

  September 1970–October 1978

  Ten

  I saw the beautiful gray stucco building with its churchlike windows, green copper roof, and large brass cross rising into the early morning sky as I stepped off the bus. Adjacent to it was another double-story structure of salmon-colored brick, with windows trimmed in moss green and a flat roof that looked far too modern in comparison. Attached to the highest gable of the older building was the Saint Malachy’s crest, a white bird with outstretched wings symbolizing the Holy Ghost hovering above an open book containing Latin words, the same crest as the one sewn on the breast pocket of my blazer. The other new pupils and I followed the older boys up a long driveway flanked by slender arborvitae, behind which were three tennis courts on one side and a football field with H goal posts on the other.

  “Old Quackers is already here,” said Pearse, a fifteen-year-old boy walking with his friend just ahead of Fergal and me. “His car’s here.”

  Quackers was their nickname for Father Rafferty, the headmaster. I could see his orange-red car parked beside the glass main entrance doors.

  “Why’s he called Quackers?” asked Fergal.

  Pearse threw back his head and laughed, the ends of his thick hair catching on the dandruff-flaked collar of his blazer. “Because he’s a priest and crazy about ancient Greek and religion. But he’s most crazy about using his tickler.”

  “Tickler?” I said.

  “His strap,” said Pearse. “It’s got a piece of steel sandwiched between the upper and lower leather strips, so your hand gets an extra tickle for free.”

  I couldn’t believe Pearse was saying such terrible things about a priest.

  “You’ll be
meeting him and the tickler soon enough, now you’re officially prisoners in this shitehole for the next seven years.” Pearse looked at his friend. “Right, Mickey?”

  “Dead right,” said Mickey, a boy of about five foot six with an oval face. His eyes were so hard they could drill holes in mahogany. Though his legs were bowed like our postman’s and he had hands almost down to his knees, he walked tough with his chest puffed out. He was also wearing his indoor white sneakers outside, which the school rules forbade.

  “I wonder which of these motley runts will be the first to get acquainted with the tickler’s bite?” Pearse asked. He looked at Fergal and me.

  Pearse was from Ballynure, a small Protestant town four miles from Knockburn where the Protestants and Catholics rarely socialized. Eight Catholic families lived in the black stone, two-story houses in the upper part of Main Street, the unofficial Catholic end of Ballynure, though some Protestants didn’t want any living in the town at all. Just before the Twelfth of July every year, a day when the Protestants marched in the streets of towns with drums and fifes to celebrate King William of Orange’s victory over the Catholic King James in 1690, unknown persons in Ballynure painted Union Jacks on the walls of the Catholic houses to upset them.

  After it was certain I would attend Saint Malachy’s, my mother had taken me to Ballynure to speak to Pearse about the school. Pearse’s father owned a pub—three rooms on the ground floor of their home that only Catholics frequented. Protestants who weren’t “saved” had their own pub. While we waited for Mrs. Brennan in the gloomy hallway decorated in chocolate brown paisley wallpaper, the stink of beer and cigarette smoke wafting in from the public bar, Mammy kept tut-tutting because she hated alcohol.

  Pearse had been very friendly when we met for the first time in the parlor, with its velvet curtains and heavy chairs with carved claw feet. He’d even made my spirits rise by telling me what a great place Saint Malachy’s was, that I’d learn German, Irish, and a host of other fascinating subjects.