We went all over the city together, to the Vatican, of course, and the Pantheon, and the Forum, and the Villa Medici – oh, everywhere that was worth seeing. Domenico could have been a professional guide, so knowledgeable was he and so eager to show me round. It wasn’t all sightseeing, either. He took me to cafes and restaurants off the tourist trail, where we ate real Italian food, not those ‘feelthy, feelthy’ pasta dishes, as Domenico used to say, that they palmed people off with, at disgraceful prices, in the big popular places around the Spanish Steps and on the Via Veneto.
I remember clearly a little bar we went to one afternoon that Domenico said was more than a hundred and fifty years old, with chipped mirrors and a black-and-white tiled floor, and little high round tables of green marble that you stood at. We each had a glass of Frascati wine, crisp and almost colourless, and a plate of Parmesan cheese between us, that was all, but the occasion was one of the high moments of my life. I’d never known such – such bliss, before or since. Isn’t that strange? Just a glass of wine and a bit of cheese, and I was in heaven.
Then I made a mistake. One night, Domenico and I dressed up in civvies and he took me to a dive in a back street in Trastevere, across the river. The place was crowded and filled with smoke – in those days the Italians smoked nothing but American cigarettes, when they could afford them, Camel and Lucky Strike, they were all the rage – and there was a smell of drains and sweat and garlic. I drank too much Chianti, and ended up in a room somewhere at the back with a dirty mattress on the floor, and a kid who couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve, though he certainly was no innocent, young though he was. Anyway, there was a police raid – they were looking for a foreigner who had killed a girl – and the next thing I knew I was in a police station, with no Domenico anywhere about to help me, trying to explain that I was a clerical student, from Ireland, and that I certainly hadn’t killed any girl. They wouldn’t believe me, because I was in mufti, with no dog collar. By then I had sobered up, I can tell you.
Eventually a priest came down from the Irish College, a big Kerryman with a red face, who vouched for me and got me out, after a couple of hours of non-stop talking. He brought me back to the convent near the Circo Massimo where I had been staying. In my innocence I thought that would be the end of it, but of course I was sent home in disgrace – I never got to see the Pope, though I pretended I had, I’m ashamed to say – and was called up to the Archbishop’s palace in Dublin to be given a going-over by John Charles in person.
The worst of it was, he let me know, that not only had I gone on a skite and got drunk and made a spectacle of myself in front of a crowd of Italians – His Grace didn’t have much time for foreigners – but that the Italian police, half of whom were communists, had caught me in a ‘compromising position’, a full newspaper report of which had to be suppressed by officials at the highest levels of the Vatican. All this His Grace told me, those thin lips of his white with fury. He laid it on hot and heavy, and I left the palace with my ears burning. I was only a young seminarian, remember, and still terrified of anybody in authority, and there was nobody more authoritative than His Grace the Archbishop.
Mind you, I’ve learned a thing or two since then. For instance, I’ve heard rumours about McQuaid himself that make me wonder if it was righteous anger that got him so hot under the collar that day, or something else, such as envy, for instance. But enough of that, I’m not here to spread scandal.
So, anyway, it was Siberia, for me.
At this point, I have to make a confession. Ginger, even before he was cleaned up, or especially before he was, reminded me of the street urchin I was caught with that night in Trastevere. It wasn’t that there was the slightest physical resemblance between the two of them, except for a sort of slack, sulky look around the mouth that they both had. All the same, the minute I saw Ginger I was reminded of that night in Rome, in that dirty back room in that place on the far side of the Tiber.
I’ll say this much, and I don’t care whether you believe me or not, but I’d never have dreamed of getting into bed with him, with Ginger. Never, may God strike me dead this minute. I had too many memories of the nights when I was little and my father would come to my room, with a bag of Fruit Drops or Liquorice Allsorts in the top pocket of his pyjamas, and make me swear not to tell anyone – ‘It’s just between you and me, Tommy lad, isn’t that right? Just between you and me and the wall.’ He didn’t come every night, and I know it will sound strange, but the nights when he didn’t were almost worse than the ones when he did. It was the anticipation, you see, the anticipation and the fright. I’d lie there, hour after hour, afraid to let myself fall asleep, listening for the sound of him tiptoeing across the landing. You know the way a wedge of light falls into a bedroom from outside when the door opens? I’ve never been able to see that without getting a shiver down my spine.
Anyway, I won’t keep on about it, only to say that’s why I would never get into Ginger’s bed. I couldn’t think of him lying there in the dark, the way I used to, holding on to the sheet as if it was the edge of a cliff, with a terrible river raging below me, or a forest on fire. No, I couldn’t have done that to him.
I’ll tell you the way it was, and I hope you will believe me, for it’s the truth.
We had to discipline the lads, and we had to do it ourselves, otherwise there was no alternative but to send them to Harkins, and I certainly wasn’t going to let Harkins anywhere near my Ginger. I’ve no doubt a few of the Brothers got a kick out of beating the poor chaps, with a cane or a leather strap or, sometimes, with their bare fists. It was the way things were done – rough justice for all. And as I’ve said already, we were all inmates in that place.
I remember there was one young Brother, name of Morrison, I think it was, who for a whole year after he came to Carricklea refused to hit the boys at all. He was a pacifist, I suppose you’d say, and was very strict in his opposition to corporal punishment – sweet Jesus, I was about to write capital punishment! We had taken in a pair of tinker twins that year, the Maughans, terrible bruisers, the two of them. One of them, Mikey, had lost an eye at some point in the past, and that was about the only way you could tell him apart from his brother, Jamesy. Mikey was the worst of the two – oh, a terrible fellow, unmanageable altogether. A day came when he got on Brother Morrison’s nerves so badly that Morrison lost his rag completely and dragged him out of carpentry class into the corridor and beat the living daylights out of him, in the process nearly knocking out his one remaining eye. The door of the carpentry room was a good two inches thick, made of solid oak – they knew how to build, those Victorians – but they said you could hear the thumps of Morrison’s fists on Mikey’s face, and poor Mikey’s grunts, as clear as if the two of them were in the room.
That evening, in what was called the Commons, where the Brothers used to get together for a well-deserved drink after teatime, poor Morrison, looking very ashamed of himself, came creeping in, and what did the others do but start up a solemn handclap. ‘Welcome to your senses, since you’ve come to them at last,’ one of them said to him – Harkins, I imagine – and they all gathered round him, raising their glasses in a toast and slapping him on the back. I suppose it was understandable, in a way. We had to stick together, and keep the likes of the Maughan twins in check, otherwise there’d have been anarchy.
I wasn’t there that evening, I’m glad to say. Would I have joined in congratulating the lapsed pacifist? I hope not, but honestly, I’m not sure. Weren’t we all brainwashed the same way?
Anyhow, end of digression.
The thing is, I had to give Ginger the odd wallop, for he was no angel, that’s for sure – how could he have been, given all he’d seen and suffered in his short life so far? Misfortune, which should teach us to be decent to one another, makes brutes of us instead. That, at least, has been my experience.
I wonder if I should stop here. I wonder if I have the stomach to go on. But I owe it to Ginger, and to myself, to tell the thing the wa
y it happened. Without confession there’s no absolution. Mind you, as I’ve said, I don’t think of myself as a great sinner, though I know that’s for the good Lord to judge.
The trouble was, Ginger, when you hit him, looked so – I don’t know. So vulnerable, so small – so fragile, you might say, though he was the size of a bull calf and was anything but delicate. All the same, anyone with half a heart would have had to take pity on him, and comfort him, after a beating. You see, a boy who has been hurt is so appealing, that’s the thing. The way Ginger would cringe, and try to turn away and lift up one shoulder to shield himself, the way those slack, swollen-looking lips of his would tremble, the way the tears would stand up in his eyes – above all, the way he would try to seem not to mind when I hit him, the way he’d try to be brave, and manly – all that was, well, I can only say it was irresistible. And then of course I’d have to take him in my arms and put my hands on him, because I wanted to make the pain stop, wanted to make him feel better. But afterwards I’d get annoyed, not to say angry, because he had looked that way and had made me do what I did, and I’d have to beat him again, to try to make him stop being the way he was, and then he’d hunch himself up again, with his arms over his head, to protect himself, and try so hard not to cry, and all the rest of it, that the whole thing would start up again, and would go on, until the two of us were exhausted, and it would be over, until the next time.
I hope you see the point I’m trying to make here. It was an endless circle – first the box on the ear or the smack across the face, then the flinching and the cringing and the unshed tears, so that I’d have to grab him and hold him to me again – a circle I couldn’t break, I couldn’t. It wasn’t my fault. I know it wasn’t.
It happened the first time one day in June, on the Feast of Corpus Christi. I’ve always loved a procession. From my earliest childhood, the sight of a line of Legion of Mary girls all in white walking solemnly along and strewing rose petals in front of them from a basket, and the boys slow-marching behind them, in their short-sleeved white surplices and long black cassocks, all that never failed to move me, almost to tears, and sometimes, even, I would cry. I never feel nearer to God than when I see a choir of children and hear them singing ‘Tantum Ergo’ or ‘Sweet Heart of Jesus Fount of Love and Mercy’. Of course, I shouldn’t need that kind of thing to support me in my faith, and I don’t need it, really. It’s just that there’s something deeply affecting in the sight of a solemn ceremony of the Church enacted by children, with all their childish awkwardness and innocence. I never minded when the girls giggled or the boys nudged each other and sniggered. Who would mind such things, except maybe Harkins and his like? I saw, in this harmless irreverence, a proof of the gravity of the mystery that was being celebrated, the mystery of God made flesh and offering up that flesh to insult and torture and torment, so that death would be undone and we, God’s children, could go on to live forever in the afterlife.
Does that make sense? It does to me.
It was beautiful weather on the feast day that year, the sun shining in a heat haze over the sea and the air shimmering above the bog, and the mountain – the ’Effin mountain! – so clear I thought I could make out the sheep grazing on its slopes. There was a choir of girls from the towns and villages round about – we had to keep an especially vigilant eye on the older boys that day, I can tell you – and our fellows as well, all scrubbed and clean and on their best behaviour.
The procession started at the school gate and went down by a boreen to the seashore and then back up again through a meadow and over to the stone church on the headland – they say that church dates back to the twelfth century – where Mass was said by me and the local parish priest, and Communion was distributed, and then we all processed back to the school, where a big trestle table was set up on a grassy space at the side, with tea and sandwiches laid out, and lemonade was served, and biscuits and cakes. Ginger and another sturdy young fellow, I can’t remember his name, carried the banner with the image of the Sacred Heart on it, and two tassels trailing from the lower corners right and left and held up by two girls from the Junior Infants class at the Loreto Convent over by the lake, and me walking behind with the lovely weight of the aspergillum in my hand – I love that word, aspergillum – sprinkling holy water right and left. It was so affecting, that day, hearing the children’s voices wavering in the breeze coming in from the bay, and smelling the scent of the rose petals the Loreto girls were strewing, and looking up into the blue sky and seeing the little white puffs of cloud sailing steadily inland.
I hope it won’t seem blasphemous if I say that I think what happened in the vestry, when the procession was over and the girls had gone home and our boys were dismantling the trestle table and clearing away the leftover food – there wasn’t much of that, needless to say – was in a way a continuation of the rite we had all just finished celebrating. There was only Ginger and me in the vestry. We could hear the sounds above us of the last of the clearing up being done, and of Father Blake, the parish priest, driving away in his Hillman Minx, but down here, in the basement, all was dreamily quiet and tranquil. Ginger had pulled his surplice over his head – he was wearing only shorts and a string vest underneath it – and was about to take off his cassock when I put my hands on his shoulders and made him look up at me. He just stood there, with his face raised, his eyes wide open, and it seemed to me he knew what I was going to do, knew I was going to lean down and kiss him, and pull up his vest, and put a hand inside his cassock, and down into his shorts, and then make him turn around, so that his back was to me.
How am I supposed to describe the anguished tenderness I felt for him, there in the afternoon light of the vestry, amid the smells of the sacred vestments, of candle grease, of Communion wafers? How am I to say how beautiful is the sight of a boy bending over, on trembling legs, his face pressed into a rackful of vestments and his two hands lifted, clutching the heavy embroidered cloth, making little whimpering sounds and jerking and shaking from head to toe as I pounded myself against him, pounded and pounded, my eyes fixed on the back of his neck and my hands around his chest, caressing him, holding him upright, holding him against me, this warm pale shivering creature who for those few moments was mine, was mine alone – was me. Who, I say, who could adequately describe what that was like?
Don’t tell me you know about a thing until you’ve done it. And don’t tell me that, having done it, you won’t want to do it again. Don’t point your finger at me and call me names and say that God will punish me. So few of us know what it’s like – more than you’d think, but few, all the same – we who live in the secret, enchanted world, where everything is forbidden and yet sometimes, on some rare and magical occasions, everything is allowed.
How long did we get to spend, Ginger and I, in our private paradise? Not even a year, but I can’t complain. Paradise for me, certainly, but what about him? He cried afterwards, every time – he was only nine – but I got used to it. And I’m convinced I helped him. He needed to be loved, whether he knew it or not. How many of us, at that young age, could have said what was good for us, what was right for us? Ginger must have had some sense of pride at having been picked out and made my special one. That must have been a source of pleasure for him. I have to believe that, and I do.
There were plenty of other candidates I could have chosen. Word must have got around, at certain levels anyway, about Ginger and me. As the summer wore on and gave way to autumn, I began to notice that I had accumulated, without any effort on my part, a little band of – what will I call them? Acolytes?
In every institution there’s an unofficial hierarchy. It’s natural – even the choirs of angels are ranked in strict order, from your poor old workaday guardian angel at the bottom, all the way up to the six-winged seraphim, the burning ones, who serve the Lord God directly. Carricklea wasn’t the holy realm of Heaven, however, and the pecking order was fixed on the basis of physical courage, ruthlessness and sheer cunning.
In my t
ime, the boss among the boys was a little blond-headed tyke by the name of Richie Roche, who can’t have been more than thirteen. He ran the place like a mafia boss, dishing out favours and punishments through a network of henchmen whose wages were paid in cigarettes, Mars bars and dirty pictures – God knows where they came from. All this was known to the authorities, even to Brother Muldoon, the head man, but nothing was ever done about it, for the simple reason that the system worked. Richie kept order in the place, and order and a peaceful life was what everyone wanted, not only the Brothers and the boys, but the grocers and the newsagents and the sweet-shop owners who supplied the school, and who made a handsome profit from the system. I sometimes wonder if in fact Richie and Brother Muldoon were in cahoots – it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if it was the case. The Lord, and his ministering seraphim, work in ways unknown to us ordinary mortals.
Anyway, below the level of Richie and his band of hoodlums there was a group of half a dozen or so unfortunate poor creatures who crept about like mice, devoting all their energies to not being noticed and thus avoiding the worst of the bullying that went on. These were the ones I noticed had taken a shine to me, smiling at me in the corridors, and offering to run errands for me, and working harder than anyone else in the Apologetics class that I conducted on Saturday mornings. I hate to say it, but they were complete little tarts, and of course I would have nothing to do with them, except the odd time when an opportunity arose that was too good not to take advantage of. There was one little doe-eyed fellow I cornered now and then in the boiler room, and gave him what for up against the hot-water pipes, just to teach him that if you’re constantly asking for it, sooner or later you’re going to get it, and you may not like it as much as you thought you would.
But mostly I left the mice alone, for didn’t I have Ginger?
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