by John Lynch
Now and then someone comes and peers through one of the windows at me. They look at me dispassionately as if I was a specimen in a Petri dish. I mustn’t panic. I must stay calm. My sweats are beginning again. I try and remember what the doctor had said to me, she had said that they were just episodes, that they would come and go and that my mind needed rest, that’s all. I slide down to sit on the floor. My brain is racing. I try to ignore it and breathe deeply. Then I wonder if anyone will come and save me, then I realise that they won’t, that’s why they have put me in this room at the end of the world.
The First Man
I am lying on the living room floor of my house, willing my eyes to open. A vicious headache sears across my thinking. My mouth is dry and my hair stuck with sweat. I try to remember the events of the night before but all I see is the taunt of my father’s walk. He moved as if it was a challenge to the watching world.
It is the first thing I remember, it’s the image I always see when nothing else will come, and sometimes it forces its way through like a jilted lover breaking down his ex’s door. He is by a river; I hear its throaty rush, swollen from the spring floods. I see his bare midriff, blue-pink from the cold, his braces hoisting the waistband of his trousers high across his belly. I hear his snorts in the cold morning air, as he looks for a place to wade in. In his left hand is the carcass of a freshly killed rabbit, its head nodding lifelessly against his legs. I see him take on the water, pushing his body against the current, until he is almost thigh deep in it. He looks like a prophet, his head proudly tilted towards the heavens, his eyes fixed on some better place. He dips the rabbit into the water and then produces a long thin knife from his pocket. He holds the rabbit up to look at it one more time and then plunges the knife into it just below its sternum and draws it down its body, leaving a crimson line. I can see the gum-coloured entrails peeping out. He then shoves his hand inside and pulls at the shit and the intestines, ripping them free. I see them squelch and squirm in his grip, he then lets them drop and they are taken by the current.
The hide is next; he strips it from the body and then begins to pull it free. The rabbit is now unrecognisable, its furry bobtail look gone forever, in its place a long veined mass of sinew. Its eyes are large black opals, shiny and unseeing. Then he douses both himself and the rabbit, tilting his body forward so that his head and neck disappear into the swirling current. I remember the slight panic that ran through me the first time that I saw him do it, but then both he and the carcass would reappear, the water falling from them both, his large head shaking it free from his hair and his neck.
‘Bring that in to your mother,’ he would say, handing me the rabbit.
Then he would piss in the water, taking his dick out and watch as the yellow liquid arced into the river’s rush. He would grunt with relief, and his shoulders would drop as he relaxed. I knew that sound; it usually lived in the dead of night when the world was asleep, when his hands took another piece of goodness from my hide. I remember looking away, forgetting about his order to bring the rabbit indoors, my body quivering as the last drops of piss left his body. Then he noticed I was still there and quickly zipped himself back in, his face bloodying with anger.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you bloody perverted or something?’
‘No, Dad.’
‘Then do what I told you to do.’
‘Yes, Dad.’
Later that morning he punched my mother. It was so swift like a striking snake and suddenly my mother was flat on her backside, blood spreading across her chin, her eyes glazing over from the force of the blow. They had been arguing, or rather my mother had been trying to argue, my father just ignored her. We had crept to the doorway of the kitchen, my sister and I holding on to each other’s bodies. We watched as the scene unfolded, my mother criss-crossing back and forth across the kitchen after my father, hectoring and badgering him. I remember the slight flinch in his face as she shouted and postured around him. It was about money or the lack of it and the fact that my father had only just returned home clutching the skinned rabbit, having been missing all night.
The hills beyond the kitchen glowed with the beginning light of day. Neither parent saw us lurking in the shadows of the doorway. My mother said my father smelled of another woman, she said he was disgusting like all Irish men, a waste of time and space, and then he just turned and unleashed his fist, driving my mother’s body across the kitchen floor, her nose busted, and her eyes wide with surprise. For a moment I thought that she was going to laugh, her mouth made the shape, but then it turned downwards like a doll’s face being eaten by fire. My sister pissed herself. I looked down and could see it pooling on the floor between her legs. It spread to my feet and then a trickle began to work its way into the centre of the room.
To this day my sister will query the events of that morning; she buried it deep inside of her, like so many things in her life. When I have pushed her, she only pays lip service to it, leaving the meat of what happened on that kitchen floor where her piss mingled with our mother’s blood. For me that morning is a brand seared on the flesh of my heart. I carry it with me. I wear it. I honour it. I drink myself sick to it. It tells me that the only prayer that works is violence. That one action, my father’s fist on my mother’s face that one moment sits like a lion in the jungle of my thinking.
Pieces of the Day
My eyes are asking them to tell me even though I don’t really want to know. I’m afraid. I can see that it’s bad because they are looking through me, not engaging with me. I turn my head away from them and begin to cry because I realise that I have nothing left to pray to. My face hurts, it stings and I wish I was dead. I am in hospital, I have no idea how I got here, or why I feel this shame, it sits on me like a curse. I can taste it. My brother-in-law asks me how I feel but I don’t answer him, my sister looks away. A nurse bends over me and tinkers with the bedcovers, I think she’s embarrassed. I put a hand to my face and can feel the long thin scabs running down my cheek. A man comes in and stands for a moment, looking at me; I can’t read what he’s thinking so I know that he must be a doctor.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asks me.
I look at him but don’t answer.
‘The police are here. They’ve been waiting for you to come round.’
Still I don’t say anything. He bends down so that he’s within touching distance of my face.
‘Listen to me. You need help. At the moment we have you on Librium to keep you calm, but you can’t go on like this.’
He looks to my brother-in-law as if to say it is his turn to speak.
‘She says she’s going to press charges.’
‘Why?’
‘What do you mean why? You fucking bounced her off every wall in the house.’
‘Seamus,’ my sister says. ‘Losing it is not going to help anything.’
I close my eyes and her face is there, her eyes widened in terror, her mouth open and screaming. I shudder because I know as the day goes on the image will grow and that snatches of the previous night will shoot into my consciousness like sparks from a bonfire.
‘She says you raped her.’
‘Fuck off,’ I say.
‘No, you fuck off. What the fuck is wrong with you?’
As he says this my brother-in-law lunges at me, my sister grabs him and the doctor stands up, blocking his route to me. They calm him down. I watch as they put their hands on him and soothe him. He leaves the room, he doesn’t look at me. My sister comes and sits on the edge of the bed.
‘This is what we’re going to do,’ she says. ‘We’re going to talk to the police and tell them everything…everything we can remember, after that there is someone else who wants to talk to you, who could maybe help you. He runs a place just outside Dublin where they can help people like you. You can’t keep this up, Gabriel, it’s tearing us apart…Then you can sleep.’
‘I don’t want to talk to anyone,’ I say.
‘Gabriel, this is not a playgr
ound where someone has grazed their knee or tripped over a ball. This is grown-up serious stuff. We’re all worried sick about you. Seamus is at his wits’ end, he loves you, we all do…but this can’t go on.’
She stops suddenly and for a moment just sits there gulping quickly as she tries to stop herself from crying. I watch the battle in her and admire her for her strength, always the strong one, always the pragmatist. When I was younger I used to marvel at how she sewed together the threads of her life, how she marshalled her children and steered her husband’s every move. Nothing was a problem; all were only solutions waiting to happen. I often joked with her that we couldn’t have come from the same womb. She didn’t seem to have the same echo of defeat running through her brain that I had. I reach out to take her hand, and for a moment I can see her debate whether to take it or not, but in the end she does.
‘I just want to sleep,’ I say. ‘Sleep.’
‘First we have things to do. People to talk to. Gabriel…Gabriel…’
I open my eyes. For a moment I try and remember where I am. I look at my sister and realise. She still has that look in her eye, the one that said trouble.
‘The police are here to see you.’
I think about my father and the curse he slipped to me one day when I wasn’t looking. He hid it in my mother’s milk and watched as I downed it in one greedy gulp. I wonder at the insanity, at the violence that sits brooding in me like a spurned lover. I know that I have nowhere left to go, that I have backed myself into a corner, and that I stand on a cliff edge and below me is the black sea where the lost fall, never to be seen again.
‘Gabriel O’Rourke?’
‘Yes.’
‘Gabriel O’Rourke of Temple Avenue?’
‘Yes?’
‘I need a statement from you, sir, concerning the events of yesterday evening.’
There’s pity in his eyes and a faint glint of disgust, but he is doing his best to hide it. I shift in the bed, my sister lowers her head, and the doctor quietly leaves, nodding in my direction as he does.
‘You don’t like me, do you?’
‘It makes no difference what I think, sir. I’m here to take your statement, I already have your wife’s.’
‘She lies.’
He takes his cap off and places it on the bed beside me and runs a hand across his forehead. I can see the line where his flesh has been dug into. He is balding and what’s left of his hair is the colour of straw. He looks at me and waits.
‘Talk to him, Gabriel. It’s for the best,’ my sister says.
I tell him what I can, I describe the screaming and pushing, I talk about the anger rising in me and about the hate I felt for her, but no, I didn’t rape her, she’s my wife, for God’s sake, how can a man rape his own wife. He tells me that doesn’t make any difference, that sex between two adults has to be consensual, married or unmarried. When he tells me this he talks to me as if I am a child. He also says that my wife believes that I have some kind of personality disorder, that she was genuinely worried about my sanity. This stops me and I feel a burning begin inside me, I feel it start in my gut and it begins to spread until it has me by the throat. He asks me if I’m alright, but I can’t answer him. I feel the tears begin to fall; they rush down my face. I want to tell him about the blackness that surrounds my thinking, how it eats into any image my heart offers to my mind.
My head feels heavy. He asks me again if I’m okay and this time gestures to my sister. A sound comes from my mouth, a grunt of defeat. I curl up in the bed, pulling the bedclothes to me like a beaten child, my knees up by my chin. The cop stands and for a moment hesitates, unsure how to react or what to say. Suddenly the doctor is there, I can make out the white coat and the glisten of sweat on his face. Something is stuck into my arm, it stings and for a moment I try to fight it but then a wave of soothing washes over me and I am lowered down to sleep.
‘Son?’
‘Yes, Daddy?’
‘Has Ciara been talking to you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I…’
‘It’s alright, son…It’s alright.’
‘A little bit.’
‘A little bit?’
‘Yes…A little bit…’
‘Well she mustn’t do that…’
The Shifting of the Earth
The principal is a tidy man. He is known for it. He regularly holds inspection parades in the classrooms, surprising the students, checking them over for hair length, nail chewing and any other lapses that show a boy of weak disposition. He will lecture any culprit in full view of his classmates and recommend detention; the days of beatings are long gone, but I know given the choice which one he would plump for. His name is Jarlath Boyle and he walks as if he is always on his way to some emergency, briskly and with barely concealed panic. He has never been sure of me, I know that, it’s something I live with, but if the truth be told it’s something I take quiet satisfaction from. Flaky is a word he loves to use when something or someone is not up to his rigorous standards. Another is loose, the world is loose and loosening further by the minute and it is our duty is ensure a general all-round tightening. Often he looks at me when he says this, holding my eyes longer than he does anyone else’s. The other teachers on the staff have him read, have him sussed, but I hate games. They tell me I should be more careful, that he has me in his sights, but like so many things it passes me by like an aircraft screaming off to some foreign clime. He dresses neatly, he says it is a reflection of a man’s mind, the outer links the inner is another of his catchphrases. I know he is stalking me, waiting for me to fall, to trip over the long leash of my arrogance.
I know I’m good at what I do and that the kids find me interesting and unconventional, not moored in the dry dust of academia and syntax as some of my colleagues are. I spend time getting to know their interests, the passions they have. I consider some of them my friends; I like their eager minds and unstained hearts. They confide in me, they tell me of other teachers’ methods and the way some of them bully them into learning. This is nothing new to me; I know for example that Mr Farrell the tall County Clare man will stand over a boy breathing threats into his ear until he breaks down in tears. I have often thought of calling him on it, of telling him I find his methods repulsive, but that’s the one thing a teacher must never do, pull his colleague up on his ways of schooling.
I saw it for myself once. I was passing his classroom one day on my way to the staff room when I heard a boy cry out. It stopped me dead in my tracks and brought a cold shiver to the back of my neck. There was something about the sound the boy made that opened something deep within me. So I stood in Mr Farrell’s doorway looking at a scene that had been described to me many times: a young student smothered by the large brooding presence of an older man, his face inches from the boy’s, his large head bobbing imperceptibly as his lips issued their threats. I saw the redness in the student’s face, which I recognised as McKillen, I saw the humiliation, and my blood began to boil. I decided to try charm and coax the big man away from the kid, without alerting either the teacher or the boys in the classroom.
‘Mr Farrell.’
I watched as the man’s head froze and turned slightly in my direction, and then he said without looking directly at me: ‘Mr O’Rourke?’
‘Forgive me for interrupting, but I wonder if I could borrow one of your students for a moment.’
He straightened himself and turned to face me, a slight look of puzzlement on his face.
‘Which one?’
‘Er…Pettigrew…’
‘Pettigrew?’
‘Yes, I just need to remind him of something. Something I didn’t get to tell him in class this morning.’
His face briefly darkened and for a moment I thought he was going to challenge me. He took a step forward, and raised his hands palm upwards as if to say what is this all about? He was caught and he knew it.
‘Pettigrew?’
&
nbsp; ‘Yes, sir?’
‘Mr O’Rourke beckons.’
‘Yes, sir.’
I watched Farrell as Pettigrew came to join me in the doorway. He seemed at a loss. I could see him thinking about turning back to McKillen, the boy he had been terrorising, but then thought better of it and strode to his desk and sat, his long limbs sticking out from its sides. He looked like a long insect that had just settled unsteadily on a large summer leaf. He was pissed off with me I could tell. I took Pettigrew outside into the corridor beyond the jamb of the door. In my mind I could still hear that cry, although I wasn’t sure if it was from me or from McKillen’s lips.
‘What’s going on in there, Pettigrew?’
‘Sir?’
‘With that long streak of piss?’
‘Sir?’
‘With Farrell?’
‘McKillen didn’t know what x was worth, sir.’
‘What?’
‘He hadn’t done his equations.’
‘His homework?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Tell him to do it from now on.’
‘Sir.’
‘Good.’
‘What did you want to see me for, sir?’
‘That was it, Pettigrew…I’ve said it.’
‘Right, sir.’
‘Now go on, get back in there. And if Mr Farrell asks you what I wanted tell him that I’ve given you extra homework for being late this morning.’
‘But I wasn’t late this morning.’
‘What?’
‘I wasn’t late, sir.’
‘Pettigrew, have you got rocks for brains? Pretend you were, for the sake of McKillen, for the sake of all of us.’