‘Oww! Christ!’ That was me, in immense pain. It was hard to keep my voice down and sit still because of it. Deano and I had this crazy, stupid competition where if we could catch the other person off guard, we gave them a dig with our heels into their shins. His was the desk on my left and seeing as I amleft-footed and he was right-footed, it was a fair game. If the other person was daydreaming, as I had been, you could reach out your leg, line it up on their shin and give them a sharp backheel. Usually the distance and the angle meant that it was not easy to get a really hard blow in, but I’d been distracted enough to let Deano come half out of his desk and deliver a vicious one. I’d have a massive bruise there, right on the bone, no question. His grin was slightly nervous; he knew how bad it had been.
‘Mr O’Dywer, have you something to share with the class?’
‘No, sir.’
‘And yet I am convinced that I heard an exclamation from your direction. Can you explain that?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Curious. We shall continue in the hope that you can subdue your passion for poetry.’
For the next ten minutes we had to act as model students, all diligence and alertness. In any case, there was no point trying to get Deano back straight away; he’d be on guard. But when Dog Face was asking Debbie Healy about the significance of the alliteration of ‘barrowy brawn’, I felt my chance had come. It was a good old kick, but something was wrong, I didn’t feel shinbone against my heel and there was no suppressed yelp from Deano. In fact, he was grinning a big wide toothy smile. As I looked at him, half intrigued, but half angry with thwarted vengeance, Deano raised his trouser leg. Tucked into his sock was a shin pad.
‘Cheatin’ rat,’ I whispered. He put his head down and pretended to be reading his book. The longer I glared at him, the more his shoulders began to shake. Soon he was wracked with chuckles, unable to meet my eyes, delighted at being one up on me. His mirth overcame my righteous indignation at his cheating, and it set me off too, anger giving way to laughter. Our giggles were irresistible, especially given that we had to keep an eye on Mr Kenny, who was extolling in passionate phrases the sonnet we were studying. Each time I felt the laughter had passed and my lungs were able to take in a deep draught of air, I would look over at Deano, whose moist eyes were sparkling with the effort of containing himself. He would look at me and we would start chuntering again. It was a dangerous game and that, precisely, was why it was so funny.
‘Mr Dywer, you are amused by this sonnet? You find Hopkins displaying humour in it? Would you care to elucidate your insight for the benefit of us all?’
‘No, sir.’
‘I rather thought not.’ Mr Kenny walked down the aisle of the desks to stand between Deano and me. Never did he look more canine than when he sank his jaw deep in the jowls of his chin in order to look down at us.
‘What’s this?’ He pointed to a picture of a ploughman that accompanied the poem in my book. Some previous owner had drawn all over the ploughman’s face, adding huge ears, glasses, a moustache and a beard. I didn’t reply. I just kept my head down. After a short pause in which we held our positions, Mr Kenny turned on his heel, to walk slowly back up to the front of the room. This was slightly worrying. An outburst would have meant that the issue was over.
‘Class Five A2. Books are a valuable human inheritance. A book is like a chalice that contains the most precious substance of all, knowledge. Properly treated, books will last centuries, passing on the thoughts and emotions of our forebears. To treat your books disrespectfully is to belittle the efforts and achievements of some of the greatest literary minds. Liam O’Dwyer, come up to the front of the classroom please.’
‘Sir?’
‘You heard me. And bring your book.’
This was bad, as Zed made clear from the wide-eyed expression he gave me during my long walk up through the desks. Right from the start of the year we’d been kept apart, Zed put up the front, me at the back.
‘Show the class what you did.’
‘What, sir?’
‘Show the class what you did to your book!’ His voice became angrier, a flush crossed his cheek.
‘The drawing, sir? That was in the book when I got it.’
‘You, O’Dwyer, are a philistine and a liar. I saw you and Kirwan laughing at your picture. Five A2, you have among you someone who would spit on one of English literature’s most sensitive souls, spit, I say, on a man who poured his life into his writing, only to have uncouth louts like O’Dwyer draw filthy pictures all over his poems. How would you feel if your book was scribbled on with such disrespect?’
This was getting to the point where I was fed up. Not only was I innocent but Mr Kenny’s hatred of me had led him into making a very pompous rant. I began to search around for a universe to move into, just a plain, simple, boring literature class with no fuss, when I suddenly felt dizzy with an involuntary move. The feeling was as nauseating as Mr Kenny’s self-righteous lecture.
‘O’Dwyer.’ Mr Kenny stood up and leant right over me, face ferocious. ‘Give me your pen.’
‘What, sir?’ All the time I was scrambling around to find a universe that would allow me to duck out of this scene. Horribly, they were all closed off to me, shrouded in darkness; only those with the frothy-mouthed teacher could be seen. Thrashing around in them was like drowning.
‘Your pen.’
There was no escape, which was something even more frightening than the fact that Mr Kenny had lost the run of himself. I handed him my biro.
‘Here’s a lesson for you, O’Dwyer. How would you like to be written upon, to be mocked?’
The pen shot out at me and drew a mark above my lip. The class went totally silent, horrified.
‘Stand still boy!’ Mr Kenny’s shout was ferocious and his hand grabbed the hair at the back of my head, holding me in place. The pen hurt as it covered my chin, my cheeks. Around my eyes he drew circles for glasses. At last, he released me, stepping back to admire his handiwork. My face burned, not with pain but humiliation. Never had I been so ashamed. Tears came to my eyes and it was even harder to check them when I saw intense satisfaction in Mr Kenny’s expression. Frustration and anger welled up inside me. If I could have found a universe where the roof fell on his head and killed him, I would have moved to it. But everything was closed to me, everything except this moment, this suffering.
The bell rang and Mr Kenny promptly swept out of the room, leaving a totally stunned class behind him. No one even coughed.
At last I felt an arm on my shoulder. It was Zed.
‘Come on, mate. Let’s try to get that off.’
He steered me out and down to the toilets.
‘What a lunatic. That’s gotta be illegal. What a complete gobshite.’ Zed was trying to console me, but I was so shocked and outraged I couldn’t speak.
It took a while for the shame and anger to subside. When it did, I found a very different emotion creeping up on me: fear. Someone had trapped me in that moment, bound me even more tightly than the day of the Valentine’s card, and if they could do that, what else could they do?
***
The way Mr Kenny had gone to town on me probably fuelled what happened two days later. Our form teacher was Mr Brown, the French teacher. He was strict, but pretty fair, so we had a certain amount of respect for him. One morning, as he took the register, Hazel Cartwright put her hand up.
‘Hazel?’
‘Sir, when are we getting information about our class trip?’
‘Ahh.’ Mr Brown closed the register and stood up. ‘I’m sorry to say that since there were no volunteers to take you, there will be no class trip.’
This news was a shock and an audible murmur spread around the class. All fifth-year classes got a trip away, usually to Paris or some European city. Of course we had to pay, but it was supposed to be great craic, at least that’s what all the sixth years told us. Some of our class had been saving already, even though we didn’t know where we were off to.
&n
bsp; ‘Sir?’ Hazel called out to him just as he was reaching for the door.
‘Hazel?’
‘Why don’t you take us?’
‘I dislike class trips. But as it happens I felt sorry for you all and did offer that if another member of staff would accompany us, I would be willing to take you, providing our destination was in France.’ He looked at us over his glasses. ‘Unfortunately your reputation is such that my offer was declined.’
With that, Mr Brown hurriedly left the room, perhaps a little ashamed about the betrayal of our class by the other teachers, or perhaps he felt he had been indiscreet in telling us about the attitude of his colleagues. It was understandable of course, and I was as much to blame as anyone. Actually, I was more to blame than the others. I’ve told you how being able to move allowed me to terrorise Mr Kenny. Well, there was other stuff too.
We used to have ‘morning prayer’ at our school. One of the nuns, usually Sister Rita, would speak through the tannoy system before registration, offering us a few thoughts every day, about who should be in our prayers. She was good on the stories of saints and also on reminding us about those worse off than ourselves. Soon after the start of fifth year, Zed and I had gone to her and explained that we wished to do the ‘morning prayer’. It wasn’t easy, but I had moved us to a universe in which she had agreed. For two weeks we played it dead straight, even looking up information in the saints’ calendar, but then we started to push it a bit.
‘Friends, today we would like you to remember in your prayers the people who make the little bolts that attach the school radiators to the walls. It is easy to overlook such small devices, but they are indispensable to the whole system. Without them, we would not be warm in winter. So when you say your prayers this morning, please give a thought to those who work day after day in their factories around the world, making small screws and bolts. They too deserve our thanks.’
That kind of invitation to prayer can go on for a long time if you say it right, with proper sincerity. While I was fairly good at it, Zed was pure genius. His speciality was in making up new responsibilities for the saints, like Saint Cuthbert, the patron saint of dinner ladies. In some ways it was amazing that we lasted nearly a month before we were brought before the headmaster and slaughtered. Although we never really said anything too bad, the whole school had caught on to us and were laughing throughout prayer; our mates were dying to see what we would say next. By the end of the month, even the dimmest of the teachers had figured it out and we were busted.
It was that kind of activity which was rebounding against us. I could go on, but the point was that our class now felt a huge sense of injustice. Even though I had lost a lot of ground over the Valentine’s card, everyone was sickened by what Mr Kenny had done to me. On top of that came the shocking news that we weren’t getting a trip away. Funnily enough, it was those in the class who were usually the quietest who got the most worked up. After registration we had double history with Miss McClernnas, who was decent enough, but we couldn’t concentrate.
‘Five A2, will you settle down?’ She kept stopping the lesson to call out to us in her northern accent. ‘What’s got into you all?’
Hazel put her hand up. ‘Miss, why won’t you take us on our trip?’
‘Take you lot? Why I wouldn’t take you down the park, let alone out of the country. God knows what you’d be up to.’ She laughed, but we didn’t.
Miss McClernnas was very sober by the time she left us, closing the door behind her with a shake of her head. No sooner had she gone than Hazel Cartwright picked up her desk and carried it over to the door. The three fifth-year classes are in a wing together. There is one corridor that connects the rooms to the main body of the school. Usually we barrelled out at morning break, because it only lasted fifteen minutes, but today Hazel stopped us.
‘Bring your desks.’
She made us take them out into the corridor and pile them up against the one door that led to the rest of the school. Once we got into the idea, we did a pretty good job.
‘The side door.’ Jocelyn led the way to where a door led out to the back field.
‘Wait.’ Debbie Healy and two of her friends went into Five B and we could just about hear them. ‘All of you had better get out. We’re blocking the doors.’
‘Yeah, good idea.’ Zed went to Five C. Deano and I came along. ‘Hey, you lot. Grab everything you want and get out, because we’re taking over.’
By this time, the corridor was full of curious fifth years.
‘Hurry, hurry!’ We hustled the other classes along. It was time for our moment of revenge. Once our blood was up, we got into the mutiny properly, finding that the big cupboards were amazingly light when you had lots of people lifting them. There was no question of anyone getting into the building once we’d put those massive obstacles up against the doors. Personally, what surprised me the most was seeing Hazel leading it all. It was like watching Barbie rioting.
‘This is deadly,’ Zed muttered as we tested the barricade, and I had to agree. We’d never done anything like it before; no class I knew had done anything like this.
Up until the end of break, we had all been loud and excited, stopping to ask each other: ‘how long are we doing this for? What are we going to demand?’ As soon as the bell rang, though, we fell silent. Most of us returned to our own classroom. It felt wide and empty with nothing but our chairs and bags in it.
Thump! Thump! The teachers had realised they were blocked out and were trying to budge the doors. No chance. All the same, we rushed back out to the barricades to check.
The other fifth classes were milling around the windows, jumping up to see what was going on. They were making a lot of noise, as if break time were still going on. It was when they suddenly went quiet that we knew the teachers were outside.
The Monk, the headmaster himself, was visible through a window in Five C. We had inherited the nickname from those years which had gone before us and had called him it, probably on account of his ragged beard. Although, there was a criminal too, in Dublin, a gang leader, and maybe he’d got the title that way.
‘Liam O’Dwyer, I see you. Come and open this door right now!’
I nipped out of sight.
‘Cover up the windows!’ ordered Hazel, and soon the ledges were filled with our bags, preventing the teachers from seeing inside.
The rest of the day flew by. Each time we checked our watches, we’d say, ‘That’s geography gone’, or ‘that’s chemistry over’. The teachers were pleading with us through the doors and windows, saying we were only hurting ourselves, reminding us of the coming exams. Michael Clarke and a few others were going around saying we should end it. They were afraid of being expelled. But we pointed out to them that if we all stuck together, the school just couldn’t expel everyone.
For a while the Monk tried reasoning with us, with Hazel shouting back through the door in response to his questions. She kept demanding that the school promise us a trip away, but all the headmaster would do was point out that our undisciplined behaviour was exactly why no one would take us. He did promise to look into the issue, providing we took down the blockade, but only the doubters were willing to settle for that.
The best fun was imagining the reaction of the rest of the school. At break time they all must have come over to our buildings to see it for themselves, because we could hear the excited chatter outside. It was pretty amazing really, for us to be doing this, I could hardly believe it. I hadn’t even had to move to get to this universe. Here it was; strange things do happen on their own.
Finally, at quarter to four, we put everything back. The teachers had given up trying to get in, so they didn’t even notice. At final bell, we walked out proudly, congratulating each other.
‘Good job, Hazel.’
‘You too, Zed.’
There was a group of our teachers standing beside the Monk, watching us as we left.
‘Liam O’Dywer, in my office, now.’ The headmaster’s voice wa
s quiet, quiet but full of menace. The rest of the teachers looked pretty grim too, with the possible exception of Mr Brown, whose eyes were twinkling as though he were suppressing a smile. Did he approve of our protest? I hoped so, but I couldn’t expect any help from him. I was going to be in big trouble and it was time to search the universes to see if I could find a way out.
‘Sir, Liam had nothing to do with it.’ Unexpectedly, Hazel stepped up to my side. A bunch of my classmates had stopped to watch. I have to say, even now, writing about it, I get goose-bumps when I think about the way she spoke out on my behalf. You have to bear in mind that I had nothing to lose really. My parents were used to me being in trouble. But Hazel, she had never been in trouble in her life. If her parents had seen her that day, they would have freaked. Trying to defend me was brave, much braver than anything I had ever done, because of course I could always move out of real hassle. Or at least I could have until recently.
‘Hazel Cartwright, go on home.’ The Monk glowered at her.
‘But, sir, it’s not fair to pick on Liam.’
‘It’s all right, Hazel. You go on, please.’ Only for the sincerity of my voice did she back down.
‘You too, Dean Kirwan.’
To save anyone else from getting themselves into trouble, I set off for the headmaster’s office. He quickly followed and the small group of teachers and my classmates broke up.
Once inside the Monk’s office, he had me stand in front of his desk, while he looked over my file, out and ready-to-hand.
‘Not long ago, O’Dwyer, you wouldn’t have been able to sit for a week after that disgraceful exhibition.’ He glared at me as if inviting me to read his thoughts and the violence in them. I looked straight back at him but I said nothing.
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