by Shane Dunphy
‘Sure you’re only dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. I seem to remember you didn’t exactly dress up when you were teaching, either.’
‘If I need to climb a tree, or chase after someone who has run off, or restrain one of the lads after they’ve lost control, I can do it in what I’m wearing. I’d like to see you do a restraint in that get-up.’
‘Well, pardon me, I’m sure,’ Sukie said, and moved to the next seat along.
‘Well, you did ask,’ I muttered, and got on with the exercise.
21
The following day, Sukie was not speaking to me, but she was dressed modestly and sensibly in a tracksuit. Max and Glen seemed slightly disappointed.
Our new girl had asked to be permitted to do an activity she had designed with the group after lunch – some kind of relaxation exercise based on yoga, so I offered to do the washing-up. I found myself sharing the job with Beth. She laughed about Sukie’s very obvious change in attire.
‘Well, if you hadn’t said it to her, I would have done,’ Beth said. ‘God almighty, what was she thinking?’
‘Would it be very uncharitable to suggest that she was trying to impress the boss?’ I said.
‘Do you really think so?’
‘Jesus, Beth, I don’t know. Nothing else seems to fit.’
‘Maybe she just wanted to look nice, and displayed, along with a lot of flesh –’
‘I noticed.’
‘I know you did – a genuinely unfortunate degree of immaturity. We all have to learn, Shane. You made your mistakes when you came, the same as anyone. None of us are immune to it.’
‘And did you make your mistakes, Beth?’
‘Of course. I mean, I started out in nursing, so mine were probably of a more medical nature. But yes, I messed up there, and when I found myself involved in working with people with disabilities, I messed up there, too, many times. I think that if I hadn’t met Tristan, I’d still be messing up.’
‘He’s quite a guy.’
Beth smiled at that. ‘He is quite the finest man I have ever met,’ she said, without any sense of irony or embarrassment.
‘You two work well together,’ I said delicately.
‘Oh yes, we’ve been a double act now for years.’
‘It’s great when you find someone you work well with,’ I agreed. ‘It can be a difficult thing, finding a pattern that works for you both.’
‘Have you ever had that?’
‘Yeah, from time to time. But I’ve always had itchy feet. Always felt the need to move on after a while, I suppose.’
‘My husband was like that.’
I mulled over that one. There had never been a mention of a husband before.
‘You were married?’
‘I am married. He ran off on me a very long time ago. It’s ancient history, now.’
‘You never found anyone else?’
‘Oh, there have been others, all right. But no one ever stuck around over the long haul.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Ah, don’t be.’ She laughed – but it was a sad laugh. ‘I mean, sometimes it gets lonely, all right. I remember one New Year’s Eve, I decided not to go out. It was shortly after we’d started Drumlin, so I had very little money, anyway. Well, I’d bought a bottle of cheap plonk, and when those bells chimed, I suddenly realized that I had nobody to sing “Auld Lang Syne” with, or wish Happy New Year to. So I picked up the phone and rang Tristan. Now, don’t ask me how I forgot, but Tristan is very much one of those early to bed, early to rise types, and he’d been in bed since around ten o’clock. Well, when he answered the phone, he read me the riot act for calling at such an ungodly hour. I mean, you just have to laugh about it now, looking back.’
I laughed, more because she was laughing than for any other reason. I didn’t find the story funny. I thought it was very sad.
*
At home time, Sukie called me over.
‘Hey, teacher.’
‘Hey.’
‘Does my outfit meet your approval today?’
I sighed. ‘I’m sorry if I offended you yesterday,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to. If I worded what I was trying to say badly – and I think I did – I really do apologize. Can we bury the hatchet and start again?’
She grinned. ‘Tristan took me aside today, and told me – much more bluntly that you did – that he never wanted to see me dressed like that again on a work day. So I guess you did me a favour.’
‘You’re welcome, I think,’ I said, trying to work out if what I had just heard was an apology or an expression of thanks.
‘What are you doing tonight?’
‘I am watching a movie called Stage Fright, a Hitchcock film – Jane Wyman, Marlene Dietrich, Richard Todd. It’s a classic.’
‘How would you like me to cook you dinner first?’
‘Are you serious?’
‘I want to apologize to you for being such a cow. And I really would like some advice on the ins and outs of this place.’
‘You haven’t said a word to me all day, Sukie, and now you want to make me dinner.’
‘Look, I’m not coming on to you, you eejit,’ she said. ‘You have to eat, I have to eat, I could do with some pointers – I mean, for Christ’s sake, you were giving me a full fucking lecture yesterday.’
‘Okay. Where do you live?’
She told me, and I said I’d see her at seven.
Dinner proved to be spaghetti Bolognese and only partially cooked garlic bread – my host was just out of college, after all. Sukie had a reasonably pleasant flat in town, which she admitted she was having difficulty paying for.
‘I think I’m going to have to get a room-mate if I’m going to keep this place,’ she informed me. ‘The salary is okay at Drumlin, but I’m at the very bottom of the scale.’
‘I’m living way out in the country,’ I told her. ‘My rent is next to nothing. Which is probably just as well.’
She was dressed in new blue jeans and a white, man-tailored shirt. She wasn’t wearing any make-up, which made her look very young, miles away from the vamp who had arrived at Drumlin the day before.
‘Yeah, Millie told me you’re just volunteering – what’s that all about? I mean, you’re way qualified, aren’t you?’
I laughed. ‘Probably overly so. I suppose you could say that I have far too much education, combined with a major time deficit.’
‘Come again?’
‘I wanted to do something just for me,’ I said. ‘Now, it is a situation that I have discussed at length with Tristan, so let’s just leave it at that, shall we?’
‘Fair enough,’ she said.
‘So what do you want to ask me about working at Drumlin, then?’ I said. ‘Not that I think I’ll be of much help to you. I’m barely in the door myself.’
‘There is one thing that’s been bothering me about the place, but I’m not sure how to even articulate it. It’s a little bit politically incorrect.’
‘Well, it’s only you and me here, and political correctness is often quite over-rated. Just ask Lonnie.’
She sat back and poured herself some more wine. I was driving, so I was on cola.
‘Okay. Could you tell me what the point of it all is?’
‘The point of what?’
‘Drumlin. Doing what we do there.’
‘It’s supposed to be about making the lives of the clients better.’
‘Do we?’
‘Ask Ricki if her life is better. Get Meg to tell you what her days were like before she started going.’
‘I know all that. It’s a nice place to spend a few hours. But I mean really – over the long term. Where are all these people going? Is Dominic ever going to have a job? Is Glen going to get married? Could you see Max living on his own one day? What’s the game plan, when it all boils down?’
‘Jesus, you don’t ask easy questions, do you?’
‘No. Sorry. But it occurred to me yesterday: why bother? Are any of these people
going to amount to anything in the greater scheme of things? Could they ever contribute anything to their communities? Aren’t they just a drain on the country’s resources if we’re really, cruelly honest? Why do we expend time and energy and money in setting up places like Drumlin for them?’
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ I asked.
‘Do you mind going out on the balcony?’
‘Not at all.’
We brought our drinks onto the small balcony, and I lit a Cuban cigar. A friend had brought me back a box of them when he had holidayed there several years before, and I usually forgot I even had them.
‘What you’re asking is one of the big questions about social care – why do we do it? It’s likely that three quarters of the kids I’ve ever worked with are probably going to end up no better off than before I – or anyone else – got involved with them. I mean, I’ve just spent four years working in a place we called Last Ditch House because we knew the families we were dealing with were probably never going to improve very much. But you see, as a civilized society, we have a responsibility, I believe, to try and help those less fortunate than ourselves. That probably sounds very simplistic and trite, but that’s quite honestly what I believe.’
‘No, it’s fair enough,’ Sukie said. ‘But I bet there’s more to it than that.’
‘There is. There’s a girl I worked with once, Mina, her name is. She’s got Down’s Syndrome, and even though she comes from a family who are very well off, and who love her unequivocally, well, she’s had some tough times. She wanted so much to be loved and accepted that she reached out to the wrong people – bad people. She nearly died.’
‘Poor girl.’
‘Mina was attending a workshop, where there were lots of people who meant well, but who perhaps didn’t see just how amazing she was. But Mina made them see. She kept pushing, and telling her family she wanted more, and now she works as a teacher’s assistant in a school for kids with special needs, and she’s very happy. It took some time for her potential to be seen, but finally it was. Now, she is giving something back, and through the fact that her life was made better, she is improving the lives of many others.’
‘Yeah, but –’
‘Don’t you see? Any of our lads could be a Mina. They all have the capacity to become so much more than society allows them to be.’
‘Isn’t that outrageously optimistic?’ Sukie asked.
‘A friend of mine told me a story once,’ I said, blowing smoke rings. ‘He was in prison, see, and they’d all been taken swimming. My friend was, at this time, very, very angry with the world and the way he’d been treated. He was full of rage and resentment, so much so that he was blind to almost anything. This day he was just doing length after length of the pool. The facility had been cleared, because of course the town council did not want the public coming anywhere close to all these dangerous criminals.’
‘Understandably,’ Sukie said.
‘Well, Karl, my friend, had stopped to have a breather, when he spotted this other group being brought in up in the shallow end. They were a bunch of people with disabilities from a centre not unlike Drumlin. It seems having them mixing with rapists and murderers was okay.’
‘Charming.’
‘Isn’t it? Well, Karl went back to his laps. He didn’t much care who else was in the pool, as long as he was left alone. But when he stopped again for a break, he noticed one little guy, a kid of maybe ten or eleven, who was in the deepest part of the shallow end. Why Karl’s attention was drawn to him was because he was moving in a very odd way and seemed to be going round and round in circles. My friend went a bit closer, out of curiosity, and he realized this kid only had one arm. It hadn’t been amputated, he was like one of those kids whose mothers had taken thalidomide – his hand, which was pretty much useless, came out of his shoulder. Karl told me that he had a water wing on his other arm, so he was sort of lying crooked in the water, and he was swimming for all he was worth.’
‘Good for him.’
‘Absolutely. Karl had never had any contact with people with disabilities before, and none with children since he was one himself. But he said this kid just captivated him. He couldn’t take his eyes off him. He told me that what struck him, like a punch in the gut, was the iron will he saw in that little boy. There he was, in way over his head, with a water wing encumbering him more than anything else, but by God, he was going to swim for all he was worth.’
I paused to tap some ash off the tip of my cigar.
‘Do you understand what I’m saying, Sukie?’
‘I think so.’
‘Every single one of the lads in Drumlin have faced more challenges and had more shit thrown at them in their lives, than you or I could ever understand. Yet they abide. They take on the world with a smile and a spring in their step, and they give of themselves with a remarkable generosity. They all have it in them to make the lives of those they interact with better. Look at me, for example.’
‘What about you?’
‘When I came to Drumlin, I was a mess. I’d had a fairly horrendous run of luck, and I had run away from my life. I have to say that being around the guys has made me feel a hell of a lot better.’
‘Really?’
‘Really,’ I said. ‘The truth is, whatever is going on in Drumlin, it’s a special place. They’ve got something happening there that is worth being a part of. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more active representation of true integration before. The fact is, in Drumlin there is true equality. All the barriers society puts up, all the prejudices and all the preconceptions we have, Tristan has stripped them all away.’
‘And that’s reason enough to work there?’ Sukie said.
‘It is for me,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to decide whether or not it is for you.’
She smiled, and patted me on the arm.
‘Thanks, teacher.’
‘You’re welcome. I hope you were listening carefully. I’ll be asking questions later.’
22
I was woken the next morning by someone knocking loudly on my front door. Actually, knocking is too mild a word. They were hammering. When I didn’t answer immediately, whoever it was moved to the window that looked out from my living room, and clattered on that.
‘Okay, hold your horses, I’m coming!’ I said, dragging myself out of bed and pulling on my dressing gown. I glanced at the clock on my phone as I went: it was seven a.m.
As I opened the door, my early-morning caller shoved his way in, knocking me aside.
‘Where is she?’ Max (for it was he) demanded, stomping up the hallway and into my kitchen.
‘Where is who?’ I asked, genuinely puzzled and not a little bit annoyed.
‘Where Sukie?’ he asked, coming right up and jabbing me in the chest.
‘She’s at her own house!’ I said, starting to get angry. ‘What the hell is wrong with you, Max? I’m not due in work for another two hours, and neither are you, so I’d appreciate it if you’d please get back on your bike and go home. Your mother will be worried sick.’
‘Sukie my girlfriend!’ Max said, standing firm and crossing his arms over his chest. ‘She love me!’
‘Sukie is not your girlfriend, and she barely even knows you, Max,’ I said. ‘I’m sure she likes you a great deal, but you are being unreasonable.’
‘You go on a date with her,’ he said, his mood becoming even more agitated.
‘If I did, it would be none of your business, Max,’ I said. ‘But as it happens, I did not.’
‘You go over her house last night,’ Max was shouting now. ‘I see you. I follow you.’
‘You followed me?’
‘On my bike.’
‘You followed me on your bike? Are you out of your mind?’ I asked.
‘I hear her say to you she cook dinner. She say that yesterday.’
‘Yes, she did. And I went over to her flat, and we had a nice evening, but she is not my girlfriend, Max. I am far too old for a girl like Sukie to be
interested in. She’s new and she’s a little bit lonely here, and she wanted to talk, that’s all.’
‘You have her here!’
‘No, I do not!’ I said, shouting myself now. ‘I want you to go, Max, before I get really annoyed.’
I saw the punch coming this time, and dodged it easily. As his fist went past me, I grabbed him by the elbow and spun him, so I had a grip from behind. With my hand in the small of his back I shoved and ran him out the front door, which was still open, before he had a chance to do anything about it.
‘You and I will talk about this again, Max,’ I called after him as he cycled away, cursing me loudly.
As it happened, Max did not arrive in to Drumlin that day, or the next. By the time he did return, I had other things on my mind.
PART 6
Every Blooming Thing
Now this is the law of the jungle, as old and as true as the sky,
And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.
From The Law of the Wolves by Rudyard Kipling
23
I had taken to visiting Lonnie at weekends. He always pretended that my calling was a huge inconvenience, and clattered about his little kitchen making tea and finding biscuits, but I knew he was delighted. More often than not on a Friday, just before leaving for the bus, he’d ask, ‘I suppose you’ll be dropping in to make my place look untidy on Saturday?’
‘Ah, I’ll probably call over,’ I’d respond. ‘I think I’ll bring my own chair this time, though. Yours are all so teeny, I’m afraid I’ll break one of them on you.’
‘You know there’s a difference between tall and having a fat arse, don’t you?’
‘Is that what they say in Lilliput? Bless.’
I wanted Lonnie to talk about his life before Drumlin. He had ample reason to be angry, and there was a bubbling under-current of rage in every word he uttered, yet it remained unspoken, and I was afraid that if he did not get it out of his system, it might get turned inward and destroy him. I was also fascinated by the fact that he was so knowledgeable and well read.