“What the hell does ‘mediocre’ mean?” my father asked.
“Nothing good,” Mammy said. “Fetch me your school dictionary, Gabriel.”
I fetched it and gave it to her, though not before checking in my bedroom.
“It means average or inferior.” She looked aghast at my father.
“Jasus, you’re making a fool of us,” Daddy said. “You’re no good with your hands and now you’re proving you’re no good at the books, either.” He picked up his newspaper and the pages crackled fiercely as he opened it. “Aye, that Fergal’s a far smarter pup than you.”
The very mention of Fergal’s name made my mother go ballistic. “You won’t get your nose out of the bedroom if you don’t swear to improve,” she threatened.
“What are we going to do with you?” Daddy added. “Luksee, if you can’t learn your books, you’re neither good to man nor beast.”
“I’ll do better next time,” I said in a low voice, my mind’s voice screaming at him to shut his fucking mouth. I turned to my mother and froze Daddy out. “Mammy, I will do better, I promise. I’ll pass all my subjects. I’ll beat Fergal and end up in the top ten of the class.”
“See that you do,” said Daddy.
“May I be excused?” I said to Mammy.
“That’s all your father and I want, Gabriel. We want you to be in the top section of your class. You’ve got the brains.”
She paused and ran her eyes over the report card again as if it might somehow have changed for the better. “I’m going to see Father Rafferty and have a wee chat with him. Maybe there’s something we can do to help you.” She glanced at my father. “We’ll go see the priest.”
“I’ve no intention in this world of going to see any priest.”
“He’s your son, too.”
“Luksee, I’m not going near that priest and that’s that. Gabriel’s got to pass the books on his own.”
She went alone. Unfortunately, Father Rafferty couldn’t put a face to my name and told her she should have brought me along. But his not being able to place me was the way I wanted things. Boys avoided him as he walked along the corridors. We darted into classrooms or under staircases, speaking to him only when summoned or when he couldn’t be avoided.
Mother explained to me that he went through my report card line by line before he consulted a big burgundy book in which teachers had written detailed comments. Miss Brown had written I had tremendous potential. Father Rafferty told my mother he’d “watch my progress with much interest.” As she repeated his words with emphasis on “interest,” a new fear entered my heart.
Thirteen
I was grateful for my form mistress’s comments. They dispelled my mother’s fears that I might be removed from the college in disgrace.
And Miss Brown was magnificent. She smiled and joked with me more than she did with the other boys and I was more lighthearted and relaxed in her English and history classes than I was in any other class. She was also lenient when she caught me talking, rendering halfhearted scoldings and calling me a chatterbox.
The other boys didn’t care for her as much and I took it personally if I overheard them muttering she was a “damned Protestant.” That she was Protestant was true, but that mattered nothing to me and certainly didn’t lessen her ability to teach Catholic boys history and English. I also disliked it intensely when they called her cruel names like “Thunderthighs” because of her fat legs.
Martin had her for second-year history and she was partial to him, too. At lunchtime, if our gang happened to be passing the staff room and she was exiting with her friend Miss Quinn, she’d chat about us.
“Gabriel and Martin and these boys are excellent young men,” she’d say. I felt so grown up.
By unspoken agreement, Fergal and I didn’t sit together much in Miss Brown’s class—or any other—in the second term. Suspicion and jealously stalked the friendship. He was now the yardstick of success in my parents’ eyes. Each time I informed my mother that I’d done well in a class test, I wasn’t congratulated until she learned if I’d trounced Fergal. Competition between us was fierce, concealed by smiles and little jokes with jags. I didn’t care that he was more popular with the other boys. I was fully prepared to yield superiority in sports, but academic superiority was an entirely different affair.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to yield to Fergal on the sports arena, either. Mr. O’Dowds, the head of physical education, discovered how fast I could run around the bases during a game of rounders and recruited me to the track and field department. Thus, whereas Fergal trained for the junior football team, I spent two lunchtimes a week with other athletes practicing the one and two hundred meters under Mr. O’Dowds’s watchful eye.
It was wonderful to be decent at sport. I spent part of Saturdays practicing at home with James as my competition. Even my father seemed pleased I was good at one sport, though he also admitted to knowing next to nothing about sprinting.
I began winning races at inter-school athletic meets and brought back glittering medals. For the first time in my life, I had boys slapping me on the back. “Go, Dynamite! Go, Dynamite!” they’d yell when they saw me in the corridors. I acknowledged their admiration very coolly, as boasters were detested at Saint Malachy’s. But inside I shivered with pride, lapping up every word and wanting more.
Among this newfound recognition, Fergal and I continued to battle in quiet ferocity when it came to schoolwork. When test results or homework essays were graded and handed out, I made a point to ask him how he’d done and what comments the teachers had written in the margins. If he wouldn’t tell me, I figured it couldn’t be good. But I had to be certain. More than once, I persuaded Martin and the gang to keep watch while I sneaked into the classroom at lunchtime and rummaged quickly through his schoolbag to find out exactly what had been written.
For the most part, I did better. Only in useless subjects like Latin and Irish did he do better. Still, I’d rage about it quietly, hardly able to bring myself to talk to him.
Of course, I hid my anger behind smiles. Because lurking deep within my brain was the fear of him remembering and revealing what he’d seen beneath the arch of the bridge.
Just as my athletic wins attracted the magnificent nickname and welcome attention, so, unfortunately, did my soaring grades eventually attract unwelcome attention. I found myself a target of verbal attacks. At first, the insults were plain dumb, silly taunts like “Harkin is a sneaky stew” or “Harkin’s a dynamite stew,” stew being Saint Malachy’s slang for someone who studied too much. But the insults escalated. Soon, stuff about Miss Brown and me began to appear on desks and other places. Nasty things, like “Harkin tries to ride fat Miss Brown but can’t because his cock’s too small” appeared beside the anonymous Shithouse Poet’s latest verses on lavatory walls. I tried to wipe them off, only to discover they’d been written in permanent ink. I also tried to block out the comments, using Pani’s practice of not allowing their sting to affect me. I told myself over and over that my decent nickname countered their words. It proved impossible. Pani must have had abilities I didn’t possess, because the comments still hurt.
Calling a boy horrible names gives better mileage than calling him good ones. Quickly, the taunting started up on the bus ride home, too.
Journeying by bus had never been a good experience due to the complicated travel arrangements. I was one of fourteen boys living in Knockburn, which, because it was a rural, mountainous area, wasn’t well served by public transportation. Around seven-thirty every morning, four other Upper Knockburn boys and I gathered in rain or sunshine at the corner of the Ballynure main road to catch a bus carrying factory girls to their work as machinists in the village of Muckamoney.
The homebound journey was even more chaotic. A fleet of old and new buses, caked mud on their sides and “Wash Me Please” scrawled on their dusty back windows, collected us from the town square, where boys purchased candy and single cigarettes from a nearby shop. It was Belfast
Zoo at feeding time: sixth-formers flirted with convent girls while fourth- and fifth-years taunted Protestant schoolboys who wore dark uniforms much like our own, except their crests weren’t religious and the ties had red, not blue, diagonal stripes.
Our bus terminated in Ballynure, where Pearse’s father had his pub. Because it was too early to then connect with the evening bus taking the factory girls home, the Education Board organized a taxi to transport those who lived in Knockburn. On top of all that, my bus had the questionable honor of being known as the rowdiest bus leaving Saint Malachy’s front gates. No less than four times since my arrival, Father Rafferty had kept us behind after morning assembly to lecture and threaten us due to complaints from bus drivers and the traveling public.
“Gabriel Harkin’s a big lick-my-arse,” Paddy Flannagan, a fellow in my class, shouted down the bus one afternoon. “He wants to screw Thunderthighs but isn’t man enough.”
I was chatting to Aidan, a thirteen-year-old with whom I’d struck up a bus friendship, but my mouth shut automatically and the rest of my sentence backed up behind my front teeth.
“Ignore him,” Aidan said. “Mickey’s put him up to it.”
I glanced down the bus and saw Paddy sitting two rows from the long back seat where Mickey sat. A short, wiry boy with an elfin face and squirrel eyes, he was allowed to sit near Mickey and Pearse at the back of the bus. Mickey was fifteen, mean, and I’d been wary of him ever since my first day at Saint Malachy’s, when he’d turned and drilled his mahogany-hard eyes into my face as we’d walked along the school driveway. Even some upper-sixth boys, eighteen and in their final school year, were scared of him. Mickey loved to fight and give powerful head butts that a person could hear. They also drew gallons of blood.
“Gabriel Harkin’s a mammy’s boy and wants to be a priest like his Uncle Brendan,” said Paddy, in a singsong voice. “Got any priests you can get to give us a vocations talk, Father Gabriel?”
Laughter rushed down the bus. He was making fun of the fact I attended vocation meetings. I loved to talk to the priests from different religious orders who visited the school to tell us about the religious life. Saint Malachy’s had a strong tradition of producing priests and Father Rafferty liked junior boys to attend these meetings on the grounds they might receive an early call. Even Paddy went sometimes, though only because he hadn’t done his homework and needed to cut class.
Now, I wished I’d kept my mouth shut and not boasted that Uncle Brendan would give a vocations talk when he came home from Kenya in a month. As soon as my parents had received his letter, I had told a few of the boys I’d ask him. I’d said it without writing to ask Uncle Brendan because I figured I’d be able to convince him when I saw him. I’d only said it to impress the boys in my class and also to make Fergal jealous, as his family had no missionaries. But then somebody informed Father Cornelius, the vice-headmaster and head of vocations, who was always looking for priests to discuss missionary work, and he asked for Uncle’s address so he could write and make arrangements. Then came the letter from Uncle Brendan saying he wasn’t coming as he had to go to San Francisco instead. It was a nightmare: I had to tell Father Cornelius before he wrote to tell my uncle what a marvelous idea it was and I had to tell the boys it had been a mistake and he wasn’t coming after all. Finally, Mickey and the others got wind of the whole thing and began to tease me about priests and vocations.
“Hey, Gabriel, why do you really want to be a priest?” said Dermot Hagan, a sixth-former, in his uncouth voice. “You’ll not be able to put your hand up Thunderthighs’s skirt and cop a good feel if you become clergy.”
“Gabriel would rather put his hand up Father Cornelius’s soutane,” someone else said.
It was a joke among the senior boys that Father Cornelius was a poof. I heard them joking about it, though they said he liked blond-haired boys and I was dark.
More ignorant laughter broke out. I tried to block out the whole thing by focusing on hundreds of small, impressed diamond shapes on the back of the bus seat ahead. I willed the boys to lose interest in me, to move on to somebody else.
I didn’t even hate Paddy. He was only mean when Mickey was around. Otherwise, he was a decent chap when you talked to him one-on-one. He was the class clown. He was also a natural at sports due to his wiriness, which was why Mickey and the others liked him. They used him. They put him on their team when they played indoor football before classes commenced in the mornings.
Senior boys intimidated me. From my first-ever sight of them, they’d looked like grown men. They were old, seventeen and eighteen; the backs of their hands were hairy; they had long sideburns and manly voices. I was deferential because that’s what they expected. They made sure juniors feared them and showed them respect, shouldering us aside in the corridors as they thundered by. They ignored us in favor of older boys when we tried to buy goodies at the tuck shop. My deference was one difference between Paddy and me. He didn’t fear them.
“Hey, Mickey wants to know if you’ll give Father Cornelius a feel,” Paddy said to me.
Paddy, I could handle. But Mickey was different. Now he was in on the baiting, the teasing wouldn’t end until we got off the bus at Ballynure. My eyes burned. I’d been staring at the diamonds so long, I’d forgotten to blink.
Paddy laughed again. So did Dermot Hagan, and Pearse, and Jim Hegarty, a senior with a donkey’s bray for a laugh. I hadn’t liked him since he’d drawn the boys’ attention to my schoolbag, which was made of dark brown leather and twice as large and wide as the satchels the other boys carried. On the first morning I’d taken it to school, he’d come up to me as we waited for the connecting bus outside the factory gate.
“What the fuck is this?” he’d asked.
“My new schoolbag.”
“Hey, fellas, come and take a gawk at this fucking spectacle.” Ha ha ha. “Harkin’s carrying his brains in a fucking mobile library.” Ha ha ha.
After the boys had formed a circle to gape at my bag, he’d seized the strap and affected straining noises as he tried to lift it. The boys had roared. Fergal had laughed, too.
“Mickey thinks you want to be a priest to hide the fact you’re a poof,” Paddy called down the bus.
My ears rang like a tuning fork. Bad scenes whizzed before me: Noel and I in the pigsty; Fergal seeing me on my knees at the bridge; Henry pointing and calling me a sissy; my knee prints on the sand.
“Ignore them,” Aidan said. “If you react, you’ve lost. They’re baiting you. They want you to react and won’t let up if you do.”
But Aidan didn’t know what Fergal knew. Then his eyes flicked suddenly upward and I turned to see Mickey standing in the aisle beside me.
“Move over,” he said to the two second-year boys in the seat across the aisle. They obeyed instantly, squeezing into the wall of the bus as if trying to become part of its lining. Mickey sat sideways, leaned toward me with a hand on each knee, and smiled like he was my best friend.
“Pearse and me think you shouldn’t let that wee cunt treat you like that,” he said out of the side of his mouth, indicating Paddy. He took a quick drag of his cigarette and expelled the smoke brutally. “Sure, he’s that short, his arse is barely above the ground. Come back with me and beat the shite o’ him.”
Mickey’s tone was one of silky compassion, his face ruthless calculation. All he wanted was a scrap of flying fists and blood.
As I regarded his dry, cracked lips, I wanted to slap his mouth hard enough to draw blood. Another thought instantly replaced that one: I wanted him dead. I wished he’d drop dead right on the filthy bus floor so I could dance on him. A murderous thought came next: If I had a knife, right here, right in front of all the boys, I’d stick it in his gullet and kill him.
The viciousness of my thoughts made me lightheaded. But I couldn’t control them. They were as insistent as other thoughts I often had, thoughts I did put into action, like stepping on every third flagstone as I walked down the street. Or reaching a certain tree
or gate before the count of ten. I acted on those because, if I stepped on every third flagstone or reached the tree before the count ended, I’d get the grade I wanted on an exam, or whatever it was I needed at the time. Those thoughts were insistent and wouldn’t leave my mind until I did what they demanded. They compelled me.
The thoughts about killing Mickey circled in my mind in the same way. They terrified me, because I feared I’d turn them into acts. Sweat broke out over my chest and back and I felt my shirt stick to my skin.
“Come on, Gabriel,” Mickey said. “Let’s whip the runt’s arse.”
His voice brought me back into control.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said. “Thanks for the advice, but I don’t want to get into any trouble with the busman for fighting.” My voice would not stop trembling.
“We’ll form a wall to shield both of you.” Mickey narrowed his mahogany eyes and curled his lips so the cigarette dipped from one side of his mouth. “The bus driver will never see yous and yous can go at it ’til your heart’s content.”
“I’ll leave it all the same, Mickey.”
Mickey’s eyes bore into mine. Disgust mixed in with the hardness.
“Get back to your seat, Mickey, and leave Gabriel alone,” a voice said. “Pick on someone your own age.”
It was Finbar, the bus prefect, and I could have wrapped my arms around his waist at that moment. A boy of quiet authority, Finbar had facial scars from old acne. Some boys called him “Colander Head” behind his back. He was in the upper-sixth, expected to do very well in his final exams and go on to Oxford University.
“I’m not fucking well doing anything to him,” Mickey said, rising with alacrity. “We were only chatting, Gabriel, weren’t we?”
I remained quiet.
“And what might be the nature of your chat?” Finbar pressed.
“This and that.”
A Son Called Gabriel Page 14