‘What, sir, are you doing in here?’
The Sir threw him off. Last time he’d heard Sir was at school – Yes Sir, No Sir, three bags full Sir. Mister Vance, Sir – rich with polite irony and armed with a cane – bend over.
‘Maintenance,’ he said. ‘Curtains.’ He gestured emptily to the still shivering rings and added Ma’am to match her Sir.
‘Can’t you see there are children here?’ she demanded, placing a protective manacle on the shoulder of the one who’d caught him out. Oh yes, he wanted to say.
‘Very sorry, Ma’am,’ he answered, backing away, stumbling into the foot-bath, fumes of disinfectant reaching his nostrils while he fumbled blindly behind him for the door to the pool. The girls tittered. How quickly he had turned from bogeyman to figure of fun.
‘I’ve a good mind, young man …’ Miss Malone began and he thought, I must stop her.
‘The manager told me the pool was free. I’m very sorry, Ma’am. Please don’t tell the manager or else I’ll lose …’
‘Very well,’ she interrupted. He knew she was the type who could not bear abjection. ‘On your way.’
That was when he knew that abstinence was not the answer.
All behind him now. New life, new country, fresh start. Here at the Y on 21st Street, Yelena Markova by his side and a classful of bobbing Guppies in the pool. Leave the flotation devices behind! Learn to synchronise basic strokes! The Y likes to exhort, some old evangelism still at work, even with seven-year-olds. About the age he was when he got his first inkling. You’re kidding, his American friends say, the ones he trusts enough to tell. He’s wary, obviously. You knew at seven? It is the age of reason, he starts, then starts again. Well, I was being groomed. That’s the way it was, even in the Sixties. His Uncle Pascal was a missionary priest in Africa. He appeared first (completely without warning, his mother muttered, and no cake in the house) on a summer’s evening, a beautiful balmy St John’s Eve, when the days only barely surrender to darkness.
‘It’s like Finland here,’ Uncle Pascal had said, as if he were a tourist in his own place. ‘Land of the midnight sun.’
He was very geographical in his references. As if his head were a globe, Gabriel’s mother said afterwards, noting his receding hairline, resentful of his name-dropping. ‘Finland, how are you!’
Uncle Pascal was unlike any priest Gabriel had come across before. He was burly and tanned with freckled hairy forearms, an open-necked shirt you might play golf in, and no sign of a dog collar. And he had a dream, a pipe dream.
‘We’re thousands of miles from water where I am.’ A village in the Sudan. ‘And I was thinking, what we need is pipes, man. If we could import the piping and lay it down, then we could bring the mountain to Mohammed, so to speak.’
He paced, gesturing with one hand, whiskey tumbler in the other. To Gabriel’s ears it sounded like business, not religion. Pascal’s plan was to beg sufficient lengths of pipe from factories in Ireland and export them to his desiccated African mission.
‘That’s a hell of a lot of piping,’ Gabriel’s father said.
‘Granted,’ Uncle Pascal conceded, ‘but it’s a damn sight easier than trying to irrigate with natural resources. My God, man, there hasn’t been rainfall there in three years!’
As if to mock him, the eaves dripped. Outside was all green blur and drench; balmy St John’s Eve giving way to the deluge.
‘What do you think, Gabriel?’
Gabriel, agog at this paunchy man, his red face like impossible plumage, said nothing.
‘I don’t suppose,’ Pascal said to his father but flashing a beady eye on Gabriel, ‘that this fella has a vocation?’
And that’s how it started. Afterwards, Gabriel was never sure. Was it for the piping, or for him, Uncle Pascal had come?
Minnows are his favourites. Darting in quick spurts across the pool. Flashes of brilliance, nipples erect – theirs and his. Can breathe on side and swim back crawl. Advanced beginners, in other words, though the Y is intent on this euphemistic ranking system. But why fish? Why cold-blooded invertebrates when these creatures are all warm flesh and soft surfaces and mouths like damp rosebuds? They’re leggier now, their feet no longer plump cushions of flesh. But when he holds them in the water or catches them under the armpits, the wet slap of their suits excites him. Luckily, the water covers it; covers a multitude.
Swimming made him feel clean. All that purging, the showers before and after, the baptismal plunging in, the transubstantiation of a new element. It saved him from bullying at school. He was small and wiry, a late bloomer, and he’d had some success. Relay medals at schoolboy meets, mostly. He was never going to be a champion. His stroke was workmanlike, not stylish. He had no acceleration. Anyway, he didn’t like the competition – all that thrashing about, the turbulence, swallowing great green mouthfuls of chlorinated water. No, he preferred an empty pool, watery sun-scribble on the ceiling, an empty lane ahead. That was his primal instinct – to be wet and alone.
Fish can dive from a kneeling position. His heart sinks each time the water parts to receive, unaided, the sleek spears of their beautiful bodies. It means he can no longer touch the trembling small of their backs or count the knobs of their spines arched like an eternal question mark.
‘Ready?’
He delights when, at the last moment, flustered, they lift their heads or lose their concentration and are consumed in the torrid explosion of a belly flop. Failure endears. Success means they move on.
As he has. He’s not Gay, or Gabriel or the priest in the family any more, but Gabe, standard dependable bloke. Regular guy. He can’t opt for total denial, of course. There’s the accent, though there are only a few words left now that have remained uncontaminated. The flat A in bath, car, and father. If anyone asks him does he miss home, he says no immediately without hesitation. Because what is home now? Not the jagged outlines of a small island on a map, or the fusty seminary with the nineteenth-century beams still reputed to be infected with TB. Not even the house he grew up in, now no longer in the family. When he thinks of Prosperity Drive, it’s the hollowed-out scoop of dried earth under the swing in the back garden he remembers. Cracks in the dried mud like fault lines, parched as Uncle Pascal’s desert, carved out by the foot-dragging of years. This was the place you had to return to when the flying was done. A whole new generation must have been launched from that old green chipped frame by now. Girls, he hopes. And when he’s asked about Ireland, what comes to mind is the sheep field, though he doesn’t talk of what happened there.
The sheep field was an overgrown plot at the end of Prosperity Drive, officially out of bounds. Why it was so called Gabriel didn’t know; he’d never seen any sheep there. It was a piece of scrub, high with reeds and scutch grass and middens of dumped clay and builders’ rubble sprouting with loosestrife and valerian and sometimes poppies. The thrill of the place was that you could get lost in it. He was lost there that summer’s day lying on his stomach in a scratchy hollow resting on his elbows and gazing up at the sky muddled with cloud when he heard a rustle behind him. Alarmed, he rolled over and stared up at a figure turned to silhouette because it stood between him and the sun. When his eyes adjusted he saw it was a woman, a woman he vaguely knew. People called her Aggie. She was his mother’s age and known to be odd. Harmless, they said, simple. Most of the time she sat in the window of an abandoned shop in the village on a kitchen chair staring out at the passers-by, as if she was the last item of stock as yet unsold. (By the time he left school the shop had become a Chinese takeaway and who knew what became of Aggie?) Her hair, the colour of faded heather and cropped like a man’s, stood on end, her pale eyes popped, there were gaps between her teeth and her face was dirty. Boys he knew said Aggie wore no knickers.
Gabriel had never seen her outside and that was what gave him the biggest fright. To see her here, standing over him, with her soiled gabardine coat and her bare legs stuck into a pair of unlaced shoes.
‘What are you doing
?’ she asked. She had a flat, phlegmy voice. That was a surprise – one of the other rumours about Aggie was that she was a deaf mute. The fact that she could speak made him afraid.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘Were you swimming?’ she asked, though it wasn’t like a question. There was no rise and fall to her voice, no hint of animation.
‘But there’s no water,’ he said. It was true what they said of her, she was a sandwich short of a picnic.
‘There doesn’t have to be water,’ Aggie said. ‘Turn over and I’ll show you.’
He hesitated.
‘Go on,’ she said. He rolled back on to his stomach and she lay on top of him. He felt winded by the weight of her and smothered by her rancid stink. That was why he didn’t cry out. But he wasn’t sure he would have, even if he could. This was the very reason children were warned not to go into the sheep field. Strangers might nab you. But no one mentioned women. Aggie’s arms circled in arcs at the corner of his vision as if she were doing the front crawl. He turned his head away.
‘That’s right,’ she whispered in his ear, ‘breathe to the side.’
Her fingernails grazed the spears of dry grass flattened beneath them. He saw how filthy they were. He could feel the nylon stuff of whatever she was wearing underneath her coat against the back of his legs and something else – soft, damp, tufty – pressed against his buttocks. She swam a full length, after which she was exhausted. Gabriel found he had bitten his lip and associated the blood with whatever had been going on. For several minutes they lay there, so still that Gabriel wondered if she were dead. But then she stood up and fixed herself; he could hear her. He was about to raise his head and look behind him but she said no, commandingly.
‘Remember,’ she said, ‘Lot’s wife.’
So he lay there, hectic and flushed, with a damp patch on the front of his shorts, until the sun went down and he was cramped and hungry.
‘What have you been doing?’ his mother demanded crossly, pointing to the dried blood on his lip.
But he couldn’t say, except that it had been pleasurable, Aggie’s rank body up against him, pressing down on him and producing a sensation he knew only as perilous ecstasy. It never went any further with Aggie, though he returned every day that summer, and so did she.
Flying Fish (50 yards front and back crawl, breast and dolphin kick) can evade him; they can swim away. Anyway, they’re already beginning to lose their allure. Buds of breasts, down on their upper lips – and below – and an idea of themselves not tied up with trying to please him. He can still mentor them pool-side, though.
‘Stretch your arms, fingers steepled, bend at the waist – like so, here.’
He places a hand gently on their shivering rumps or on their rubbery caps – their heads sheathed in condoms – and sometimes, with the merest tip, he can help launch them into mid-air, into that extravagant distance between bank and water.
On holidays from the seminary he would give the girls on Prosperity Drive rides on his black bike. They called him Father and liked to wear his bicycle clips as bracelets. He lifted them on to the crossbar, then sitting behind them – it was like spooning – they would take off in the direction of the cancer hospital. The other forbidden territory of his youth. He had a regular lap – through the wrought-iron gates, up the drive lined with chestnuts as far as the Chemo block and round by the kiosk. This was a pagoda-shaped little hut, like a house in a fairy tale, set in a swathe of rose beds, a folly left by the previous owners. St Jude’s had once been a Big House owned by a Quaker crowd in trade. They’d called it Prosperity House. The upwardly mobile handle was all that was left of the place. (That was the trouble with home, bits and pieces of the scattered past always nosing their way in.) He would wonder as he pedalled these girls around if it had fucked them up growing up so close to the house of death. It had done something to him: made him doomy, prone to darkness.
The girls used to love those cycle trips. Those Elworthy kids, especially. They had it strict at home, and no father. They were mad for it. Then there was that little spitfire with the red hair, Ruth, was it? Names escape him. She was a screamer. When they built up speed she practically yodelled. When the wind blew through that mane of hers, he would catch strands of it between his lips. Invariably, it tasted of salt.
Sharks: Well, they speak for themselves. Teeth bared and ready to devour you. They’ve turned into frogmen with goggles – even the girls – muscles hardening for the adult class they will soon join. Muscles repel him. He keeps himself in shape – well, he has to – but he doesn’t want to touch a version of himself. All those breasts and bulges, the uncertain voices, the ungainly exuberance. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t go near them. They’d whiff it off you, the yearning, the desperation.
It was boys just like these who had been his downfall at the seminary; they had made advances and when he’d … no, let’s draw a veil over that, shall we?
‘The fact is, Gay,’ Father Dowdall, the director of vocations said, all unctuous candour, ‘you just don’t have it.’
As if being in the priesthood was a talent contest and he lacked star quality.
In retrospect, he was relieved. The burden Uncle Pascal had placed on him a lifetime ago had finally been lifted. And it was something to tell his parents.
‘They didn’t want me.’
His mother looked forward to the prospect of grandchildren. His father, benignly gaga in a nursing home, was too far gone to pass any comment. Lilian, his sister, was frank in her relief.
‘Thank Jesus you’ve left those bloody druids. Weirdos every one.’
He’d wondered who he’d been trying to please all these years.
But it wasn’t that simple. The seminary had cultivated in him a vision of himself, avuncular in soutane, pacing the schoolyard, gathering the children to him with a benedictory hand. A kindly figure, someone they could look up to. It seemed impossibly messianic to him now, a thin, vague dream, as naïve as Uncle Pascal’s pipe-laying, though not half so extravagant. But he found he missed it, the promise of salvation, the costume of trust.
Coaching had been a practical solution. How else could he have earned a crust – a failed priest, fit for nothing? He’s imparting something valuable, useful. Survival, life-saving skills. Salvation in another guise. Look, he’s not a pervert. He’s not hurting anyone. He doesn’t scour porn sites, he has never so much as kissed a child. Once or twice there may have been an accidental brush of their lips on his cheek, but he has never, ever initiated anything. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about trust – his; and innocence, theirs. His solitary pleasure, their unknowingness; just like with Aggie that summer in the sheep field.
GRACEFULLY, NOT TOO FAST
FIAEVI SJ XLI HSK!
This is how the world appears to the illiterate
Ruth stands under the legend she has just written on the blackboard. It is an Infants classroom so even though there are only five adults in the room it seems crowded because their outsized limbs are squeezed between the yellow tubular arms of the child-sized chairs or squashed under the low tables. There are drawings pasted on to the walls, abstract splotches or keenly symmetrical houses. In the Play Corner there is a raised sandpit where upturned buckets, saucily showing off their crenellated bottoms, jostle with jauntily anchored spades. Above the coat hooks, which line three walls of the room, the letters of the alphabet are drawn on large white cards with an accompanying illustration. A is for apple, B is for book.
Ruth could have had the pick of any of the rooms in the school but Senior Infants is a deliberate choice. It reduces her students. They don’t fit here; they are too big. Depending on their own experience, they will either be swamped by nostalgia or – and this is Ruth’s hope – will relive some of the terror of the infant’s first day of school, the bawling distress, the inexplicable abandonment.
It is a winter’s evening. A hangover of slush is banked on the sills of the high schoolhouse windows, spookily irradiated by
the sulphurous glow of the street lights. It is wintry within too. The ancient radiators are tepid and everyone, including Ruth, is wearing an overcoat. Next door there’s the busy homeliness of Experimenting with Watercolours, festive clinking of brushes in jars clouded with spools of Prussian Blue and Burnt Sienna; in Room 2B the plaintive chorus of Basic Italian – c’è una banca qui vicino? But here it is silent, and uncomfortable.
Ruth surveys her latest group. She prides herself on being able to read them. There is a young man, about nineteen or so Ruth surmises, unfortunate carroty hair partnered with a pale, pocked face. (Jasper Carrott, she thinks, but only as a mnemonic device.) A plump woman with a sculpted chestnut-tint perm, clip-on earrings like bulbous saucers and a soft, weak chin, sits at the very front, her hands clasped together like a Victorian songstress. Beside her is a fresh-faced woman in her thirties, a mother of young children, Ruth guesses, armed with a notebook. Her ash-blond hair is cropped for practicality’s sake, but is stylish, nonethless. There is the ghost of a package holiday tan on her face. A placid, moon-faced girl with fair ropy plaits (like a figure on a Swiss barometer) peering over granny glasses sits tentatively in the middle row three seats back. She will be zealous and shy, Ruth decides, probably a reader at Mass, a frequent volunteer at the offertory procession. An elderly man sits at the back of the class. He has the ravaged looks of a drinker. Beneath the false bloom of those ruddy cheeks lurks a pasty-faced, malnourished invalid suffering from a terminal loss of appetite, she suspects. He has thinning hair half-heartedly spread over his pate and the unkempt air of a widower or a late divorcee; he has not been touched for a long time. This is Ruth’s raw material, the blind leading the unlettered.
Ruth Denieffe was a bit of a prodigy. (In retrospect that sounded like a qualification but out of the mouths of maiden aunts it had been coolly admiring. A bit of a prodigy.) She was sent to the College of Music for piano lessons when she was seven. At eight she was attending singing lessons. By the age of ten she had performed on the radio. Hers was a precocious talent. Her father was immensely proud of her. When she looked back on those early years she remembered little joy in performing; but she savoured his quiet, enormous pride in her. It was his form of love. At great expense she was sent to Mr Jozsef Polgar for singing lessons. She remembered the first time her mother led her up the overhung path to his house. The garden was kept rather than cherished. (It was a time before garden centres.) The house was in what was later to be dubbed the Jewish quarter, when the school at the corner of Mr Polgar’s street was converted into loft-like apartments and the dingy little bakery became a place of pilgrimage for atheists to buy pastries on a Sunday morning. But back then it was merely a huddle of worthy red-brick streets backing on to the canal. A sign on Mr Polgar’s gate showed a line drawing of a fierce-looking Alsatian and a sign which read BEWARE OF THE DOG.
Prosperity Drive Page 3