He was getting a boner. He tried to hold it down by clamping it between his thighs but this only made the situation worse. It wouldn’t go away. In such a place. When he was here to make important decisions. He got out of bed. The elastic in the waistband of his pyjamas was slack. He bunched a handful of it so that his trousers wouldn’t fall down and reveal his condition. He tried to remember where the bathroom was. When he strayed off the coconut matting the boards were dry under his feet and he was afraid of picking up a wood skelf in the sole of his foot.
It took ages to find the bathroom’s pull-string light. It was an amazing place with plumbing from a different century. Oak doors, brass bolts, brass taps, thick white porcelain. The luxury of any kind of a bathroom made him feel good. By now his thing had gone down and he was able to go without difficulty. It was funny how he couldn’t piss when it was up. He washed his hands with lemon soap. The corridor was even darker on his way back. He had to reach out his hands and touch walls gently to make sure where he was. Then his pyjama trousers would begin to slip and he had to grab them again. He remembered Mary Lawless telling them once about going into a cinema from bright sunlight: she couldn’t see a thing, and she was feeling her way down the middle aisle by doing the breaststroke. She wondered why everybody was laughing — she thought they were laughing at the picture. Then later, when her eyes adjusted, she realised that she could be seen, clear as anything, doing her mock swimming down the middle of the aisle. Like an eejit. He’d had a worse one than that. The day he genuflected, coming out of a row at the pictures. Right the whole way down. Not even a jig of the knee which he could pretend was a football injury or something. It was unmistakable. A genuflection. In the cinema. In front of everybody. Fucking hell.
He found his bed and climbed into it. Getting settled made the bed creak and twang. If that went on for too long guys would accuse him of all sorts of things. One thing really. Brennan’s pulling his plonker. He kept his hands well away from it. They smelled of lemon.
On supper nights his mother served everything with such a palaver. Napkins and paper doilies, tiny sandwiches, sausage rolls and vol-au-vents and mushroom patties, cup cakes and apple tarts.
The same people had been coming to the house ever since he could remember. Mary Lawless and Nurse Gilliland never missed. Nurse Gilliland had retired many years before but for some reason she still got her job title. Father Farquharson made it when he could. Martin saw him as a sultan surrounded by his harem of three women — the master with slaves at his feet. One of whom was Martin’s mother. Mary Lawless called herself ‘the fair and flawless Mary Lawless’ but she was fat and breathless. Nurse Gilliland was the opposite: thin and bony with high cheekbones and her grey hair scraped back in a bun. She wore maroon spectacles with wings. She had a liking for ‘shower-o-hail’ patterns in navy or brown and had manly brogues to match.
‘I was never able to master the high heels,’ she said.
There was always a sense of occasion when the priest was there.
‘And how’s Mary?’ he would say.
‘Aw, poorly enough, Father … When you’ve a body like mine, you haven’t far to go to seek your sorrows’, and she’d lower herself into an armchair on the pivots of her elbows. At the last moment she’d fall and half wheeze, half shout ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph’. When she’d settled in the armchair and arranged her huge bosoms she’d turn to the priest and say, ‘Excuse me, Father. It was a prayer and it was well meant.’
‘I know, I know. You don’t have to tell me.’
‘I’m bate to the ropes this evening.’
‘And you, Nurse Gilliland?’
‘Soldiering on, Father,’ she’d say. ‘For my sins.’ Nurse Gilliland had been a midwife and she said that she’d looked up the wrong end of more women than enough. She’d said that one evening when Father Farquharson wasn’t there. The priest spoke to Martin as to a fellow scholar. Man to man stuff. The parlour, he said, was derived from the French word parler to talk.
‘It’s an entirely appropriate room,’ he would say, ‘for our little coterie. Another French word.’
‘And doesn’t she have the place looking lovely,’ Nurse Gilliland spoke up. ‘It’s a credit to you, Mrs Brennan.’
‘I know some people don’t like the saying, but I must say you have the place looking like a wee palace.’
‘You have indeed.’
‘Martin,’ said his mother, ‘I think it’s that time.’ Martin left the room and put the kettle on to boil. When she heard the whistle his mother came out and made the tea in their largest pot and both of them, mother and son, brought in all the food she had prepared in the afternoon.
‘This is no criticism Mrs Brennan,’ said Mary Lawless, ‘but a wee sprinkle of salt would help the mushroom patties tonight.’
‘Excuse me, constable!’ said Mrs Brennan. ‘But I hate being criticised for doing something I intended to do. When I was cooking them I was thinking about our blood pressures. And I put the salt cellar down.’
‘You were just right,’ said Father Farquharson. ‘Too much salt is a danger to us all.’
‘I read about it in Woman and Home,’ said Mrs Brennan.
‘I didn’t know you got the Woman and Home.’
‘I was in the launderette.’
‘Oh.’
‘I thought that those who liked their salt on the strong side could add a little more — a little shaking, if you like. Whereas those who have no option cannot remove the salt.’
‘My granda used to smother every bite he ate with the stuff,’ said Mary Lawless. ‘He just held the salt cellar over his dinner like this.’ She demonstrated. ‘His dinner had to be almost white before he’d start into it. And he lived till he was eighty-seven.’
‘Crumbs! He was fortunate,’ said Father Farquharson.
‘It’s a complaint of the developed nations, is the blood pressure,’ said Nurse Gilliland.
‘The world is ill divid.’
‘There’s those that have.’
‘And those that haven’t.’
‘Put the priest back in the middle of the parish,’ said Mary Lawless. Nurse Gilliland put the salt cellar back in the centre of the tray. ‘I’m just realising what I said.’ Mary Lawless put her hand over her open mouth. ‘Excuse me, Father. That was an expression we used in our house all the time. For putting the salt back in the middle of the table. No offence meant.’
‘No offence taken,’ said Father Farquharson. Nurse Gilliland picked up the salt cellar and scrutinised it.
‘It’s a one-holer. If you’re so concerned for our blood pressures you should get a different kind of a salt cellar. One with lots of wee holes. Like for pepper. Then less will come out.’
‘Not if you shake it for longer. Like Granda.’
‘Could you not use a pepper shaker for salt then?’ asked Mrs Brennan.
‘I suppose you could. There’s no law against it …’ said Mary Lawless.
‘I’ll maybe try it some time. Experiment a bit.’
‘Where would we be without science?’ said Father Farquharson, laughing.
‘Up a gum tree.’
‘Father, have you ever been to the Dead Sea?’
‘No, I have not. I have been to Lourdes and Knock but I have not been to the Holy Land. It’s an ambition of mine to go — some day before I die.’
‘They say you can’t sink, what with the concentration of salt,’ said Nurse Gilliland.
‘Isn’t that called buoyancy?’
‘Or floating — to you and me. It’s the same thing when all’s said and done.’
‘Yes — you can float and read your Irish News.’
‘And find out who’s dead. And which priests have been to what funerals.’
‘When were you in Lourdes, Father?’
‘Nineteen fifty-eight. The year Pope Pius the Twelfth died.’
‘Here’s a thing I’ve been meaning to ask you, Father. Pope Pius the Twelfth — does that mean he was … does that mean there
were eleven other Popes called Pius?’
‘It does.’
‘Would you credit that?’
‘Was there a run of them?’
‘I suppose so. I haven’t studied it. That could be an interesting research project for Martin here. The naming of popes.’
There was a long pause.
‘I don’t know about the rest of you,’ said Mary Lawless, ‘but some of the happiest moments of my life have been spent doing jigsaw puzzles.’
His inability to sleep was annoying him. And it was even more difficult to sleep in a state of annoyance. He tried to think of soothing things that were not sex. Of warm water. Of firelight. When he was very young, every Saturday night he’d be given a bath in the kitchen. The fire would be built up to heat the room and music on the wireless turned on. They had a green bath made of papier mâché, which hung in the coal hole. His mother filled the bath from the big kettle and cooled it with tap water poured from an enamel bucket. Sometimes after the music an English comedian would come on. That was a bad sign because he knew that before long his mother would switch off.
‘I’ve no idea why people always have to let themselves down. Every time.’ Afterwards he put on clean underwear. But when he got older — he reckoned it was when he grew hair — his mother gave him the money to go to the public baths. There they gave him a crisp corporation towel and a slice of red carbolic soap. Most times he brought a fluffy towel from home and stood out on the other one. In first year at grammar school he learned to swim. A breadth. Then a length. He then always took the choice of going to the swimmers instead of the public baths, where all the old men went. If he didn’t get to the swimmers he washed, stripped to the waist, at the kitchen sink.
One day a week after school he took a bag of washing to the launderette and he’d sit there listening to the drone and tumble of the machines until one would go into fast spin and vibrate the floor beneath his feet. He’d flick through women’s magazines pretending not to linger over the underwear adverts. They never got magazines like that in his house. On the way home his bag of washing was much heavier.
And that night he would watch his mother smoothing. What a strange verb — smoothing. She would splash water from a bowl, sprinkling it by shaking her wet fingers. The iron would hiss over the damped material. There’d be tiny clicks against buttons and the creak of the ironing board when the pressure of the iron was put on it. The board had an asbestos pad at one end and the flex made a noise against this as it was pulled backwards and forwards. The radio low in the background. The bag of entangled washed stuff from the launderette on the one side and on the other the neat pile of warm and folded clothes smelling of soap. Smoothed. Like when she moved the furniture — a complete transformation.
A vocation would completely change his life, would give him a sense of direction, a goal. To devote his life to religion, to helping others. To take up a life of prayer. His mother would be so proud of him. At home there was a Black Magic chocolate box full of photos of him at the various stages of his childhood. With hands joined in prayer, wearing a white armband on his sleeve after First Holy Communion. A similar set for after Confirmation but now as a soldier of Christ. Join hands for the camera. Brave enough to take the slap on the cheek from the Bishop. It was stupid, really. Beforehand there had been such a fuss in his class. The kids exaggerated everything. He hated that. They went around acting the Bishop, taking a swing like John Wayne in a fist fight. Making slap noises with their mouths and collapsing sideways on to the ground. It was symbolic — like the forty days and forty nights. He hadn’t felt a thing when the Bishop had tapped his cheek. Will you fight to keep the faith, was all it meant. And who wouldn’t do that? He tried to imagine photographs of his ordination in the Black Magic box.
The thing about falling asleep was that you never knew when it happened. There was no other human activity like this. You knew you were doing things or else you couldn’t do them. Falling asleep was an intentional act of giving yourself up — allowing yourself off the hook. Sometimes it was not intentional: sometimes people just dozed off. But you could never say from this point onwards I am asleep. Or in the next few moments I will be asleep. Moments of fudge were necessary. The instant of entry into sleep was obscure. Hidden, the way an eyelid covers the eye. His mother was there but there was not a tree in sight — it was a kind of heath. It became utterly dark and he kept reaching for the strap of her handbag but instead kept clasping her hand. She was annoyed and slapped his hand away. ‘Stop that you!’ A machine approached, its noise becoming louder and louder. They knew they must get out of its way but did not know which way to escape because the driver could not see them in the darkness. And before he knew it, he was in the machine, somehow scooped up, parted from his mother. He was in a cockpit of a sort and the pilot was talking to him, giving him instructions, telling him that everything was going to be all right and that on no account was he to panic. No matter what happened. The flying machine was a cross between a wire and balsa wood biplane and a helicopter. And the wind was rushing past him. Little bits of material were tied to the cross struts so their wind speed could be judged. There was a chattering rotor above his head and beneath him he could see hills and dark forests. Roads and rivers threaded between pocket handkerchief sized fields. And when he looked up again he was not in the cockpit but standing on the wing. He was holding on to an inflated yellow life jacket but that was for saving him at sea. Quite useless for this situation. There was nothing to save him from falling through the air. The plane banked to the right and he began to feel himself sliding. He saw the flash of a car windscreen travelling the road miles below. As well as banking the plane was putting its nose down and he was beginning to slide forward. His grip tightened on the life jacket until his knuckles and fingers were white. But to no avail. He fell. The plane flew on and he was falling from it. His stomach swooshed. He was so terrified he could not make a sound. It was as if his vocal cords did not work. Eventually after what seemed ages he did manage to howl. So much so that he wakened himself and became conscious so quickly that he heard the tail end of his own howl. His first thought was that he had broken the silence.
The next morning he thought of washing his face with one hand, while the other held up his pyjamas. So he dressed before washing. It was a weird experience to see so many boys half stripped at the basins washing their faces and scrubbing their teeth, without speaking a word. There was the sound of water escaping down plug-holes and of toilets being flushed, of wet feet slapping around on the marble floor.
He walked the corridor to the sacristy.
‘Good morning Mr Brennan,’ Father Albert was waiting for him, his fat face smiling and shining. He was going up and down on his toes. ‘I know we shouldn’t be talking — but it is the Lord’s business. Let’s get you kitted out.’ They went into a dressing room off the sacristy. Some cupboards, a low bench and a row of coat hooks. ‘What size of a lad are you?’ Father Albert produced a black soutane and handed it to him. ‘This is the biggest we’ve got.’ Martin looked at — it was far too small. ‘Go on — try it on.’ He got into it, just about, but it cut up into his armpits and his bony wrists hung whitely out from the sleeves.
‘Naw,’ Martin said. ‘I’m too tall.’
‘A growing boy. Just a minute.’ Father Albert opened one of the cupboards and produced a scarlet soutane. Oh Jesus — no. He’d be like a choir boy, like something off a fuckin Christmas card. ‘This will definitely fit.’ It did. And he gave him a white lace surplice to wear over the top of it. He had never seen lace of such a complicated sort: tumbling at the sleeves and saw toothed around the waist. It was like a tablecloth on a queen’s dinner table. The Redemptorist touched both Martin’s shoulders and held him at arm’s length. Then took a further step back.
‘That’s you. Perfect.’
He was going to have to parade out in front of the school like this. A door slammed outside.
‘There’s Father O’Malley now. Come along Mr Brenna
n, come along.’
The Redemptorist hurried Martin out of the dressing room. Condor was standing in the robing room, his head bowed, before the elaborate dressing table. Father Albert asked him if he knew where everything was. Condor nodded. Father Albert gave him the key to the tabernacle, saluted Martin and left. It was only then that Martin fully realised he was going to serve mass for Condor.
When he had finished his prayer Condor slid a hand into his pocket and took out some change. It rattled as he set it to one side.
‘The sound of Mammon,’ he said. If anything, his voice was even deeper in the morning. ‘The noise that prompted the Lord to throw the moneychangers out of the temple.’ From his other pocket he took a bunch of keys and a hanky. A second dive produced a box of Swan matches and a thing pipe smokers had — a thin probe, a tamper and a spoon, all in one. From his breast pocket he took two pens and set them beside the other stuff. ‘Why do we have to carry all this junk?’
The drawers of the dressing table were huge, like the ones in geography for storing maps — big enough to take the vestments laid flat. The handles were of brass and when Condor pulled the drawer and let go of them they swung making tiny clacking noises. He put on a white alb which covered him to the toes of his polished shoes. He uncoiled the white cincture from the drawer where it lay like a curled snake.
‘Silence and sanctity are twins. What have you on your feet, Brennan?’ Martin showed him his leather shoes. ‘Have they no gutties about this place? I remember lads with nails in their boots, steel tips — thought they were hard men. Well, on the altar I made them wear gutties. When you’re serving mass you should be like a wraith.’
Condor walked through to the other dressing room and rummaged beneath the bench and produced a pair of white gym shoes. ‘What size do you take?’ Martin told him. Condor remained squatting. He smelled of tobacco, even through the alb. His teeth were yellowed from smoking the pipe, especially the lower ones, like thin brown stalks. Mahogany teeth. ‘Here. Try those.’
They were too small but they didn’t hurt enough for him to refuse to wear them. He could smell a feet smell off them as he tied the laces. They were very flat. When he went back into the sacristy Condor had all his vestments on. The priest reached for his handkerchief and thrust it up his sleeve. Martin had only seen women do that. Nurse Gilliland in particular. Condor indicated that he wished to go and Martin led the way onto the altar, his hands firmly joined. He kept staring at the marble floor as he walked. He didn’t dare look at any of the boys. He could feel the heat rushing to his face, knew his blushing was like a reflection from the red soutane.
The Anatomy School Page 3