Falling out of Heaven

by John Lynch

  ‘That’s more like it,’ he said to me.

  ‘What’s more like it, Mr Farrell?’

  ‘Peace, Mr O’Rourke. Reconciliation.’

  ‘Those are big fine words for a maths teacher, Mr Farrell.’

  ‘Always the joker, Mr O’Rourke.’

  ‘There aren’t just two religions in this country, Mr Farrell. I now realise that there are three: Catholic, Protestant, and Southerner.’

  ‘Droll, Mr O’Rourke. Very droll. It will be interesting to see who you bring to our open day. Men like you never look beyond their own…’

  ‘Men like me?’

  ‘Yes, men like you.’

  As he walked on, I wondered about what he said. It was true I would be hard pushed to find a Protestant who was a friend. I told myself that it just never crossed the radar of my everyday life, but I knew that this wasn’t true. We all lived on top of each other as if we were two colonies of termites fighting over one small hill. I also knew that I had marked Mr Farrell for what he had just said and that one day I would make him pay for the superior way he had looked at me when he had made his last remark.

  The next day I went to the secondary school that lay on the outskirts of the town, where the kerbs changed from green, white and gold to Union Jack red, white and blue within a matter of feet. Above, from every chimney, the red hand of Ulster told anyone who cared to look that they had just crossed into another territory, one where everything was opposite and contrary to the place you had just come from. I knew a teacher who worked in the school; we had trained together many years before. His name was Jeffrey. We had fought the first time we had met; we had got drunk together and had ended up on the floor, our hands trying to rip the opinions from each other’s throats. We had to be separated and calmed down, me by my Catholic friends, he by his Protestant.

  Afterwards we had settled into an uneasy peace with each other, avoiding subjects that could bring us to blows again. If anything we became close, as close as we could given the war that raged in the streets of the city we were studying in. We had both ended up teaching in the same town and now and then over the years our paths would cross. Sometimes we would stop and quickly catch up, at other times if things were tough and dangerous we would nod and move on, knowing that it wasn’t the time for pleasantries, the blood on the ground beneath our feet had seen to that. Our relationship, if you could call it that, was complicated like the place that we both called home.

  I decided that I would ask him if he would like to come to our open day as my guest and maybe even as my friend. I stood in the small office of his school and asked for him. I was told to wait as he had a class but that it was nearly finished. I tried to chat with the school secretary to pass the time, but she just smiled as I rambled on about the weather, gently raising her hand when the phone rang or when someone came in to ask her a question. In the end I gave up and stared at the large photograph of the queen that hung above the door.

  When Jeffrey arrived, he paused in the doorway and looked at me as if he had just seen a ghost.

  ‘Well this is a surprise.’

  ‘Jeffrey.’

  ‘Gabriel.’

  He agreed to come to the open day, he smiled as I asked him as if he had just won an argument I didn’t realise we’d been having.

  I have a hip flask in my pocket. It is my friend. It will guide me through the day ahead just like it has always done. I am outside of the main building of my school waiting for Jeffrey to arrive. Now and then the principal scurries past, full of urgency, his face smiling, his arms outstretched as he greets another arrival. I know that he is pleased with himself, with the big idea of the open day. He had told me it had come to him when he was asleep; it had been a gift from God. So was Hitler, I felt like saying, but I knew better as I was already on thin enough ice as it was. Pray for sunshine, he had said, pray for the clouds to part. So it is with some satisfaction that I watch everyone hurry from their cars trying to get inside as quickly as possible without getting drenched. The event has made the local newspapers and the North’s TV stations, and a couple of journalists and cameramen hover around like flies over a half-eaten meal. I watch as parents arrive with their sons and their Protestant friends. I am taken aback by the glow of optimism in their eyes. I resent it. I feel like telling them that just weeks before we were tearing at each other’s flesh. Jeffrey, when he arrives, warmly shakes my hand and stands with me for a moment before we go inside. We smoke a cigarette together and watch as the smoke rises to join the grey heavy clouds above us.

  ‘There are two ways to view today,’ he says.

  ‘I know,’ I say.

  Peace and Reconciliation

  My hip flask is empty. One of my students is standing in front of me. The boy has just asked me a question but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was. So I just stand there grinning at him, muttering something about it being an auspicious day. I was fine until the wine had appeared. I was pleased with myself, I had faked it very well, telling anyone who I happened upon that I was glad that the fighting was over. Jeffrey had left around an hour before. He had done his bit, applauding politely when the speeches were made about all of us being one and that love and not hate was the way forward. When he left he had come up to me and looked deep into my eyes and asked if I was okay.

  ‘Fucking sure, my old friend,’ I had said.

  ‘Come outside with me.’

  ‘Why, do you want a kiss?’

  ‘Don’t be a prick. Come on. Why don’t you have some coffee? A couple of cups,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want coffee.’

  I got the feeling that Jeffrey wanted to say something else as we stood there in the damp air. I remember looking into his eyes and realising that they were different. They used to be clouded like mine but now…It had bothered me all afternoon that he had drunk nothing except water.

  ‘I don’t drink anymore, Gabriel. I had to stop.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I’m saying maybe go easy. It doesn’t help anything, it only makes them worse. I should know. I nearly lost everything, Gabriel. Believe me.’

  I knew it, the bastard was weak, couldn’t handle it. I looked at him and I remembered that night long ago when we rolled in the slops of other people’s beer and discarded cigarette butts.

  ‘I don’t need help from your kind,’ I’d said.

  ‘What do you mean my kind?’

  ‘Your kind…Your side of the fucking street…’

  ‘Oh fuck off, Gabriel. That’s such a load of bollocks, Look at where we are, look at what we’re celebrating. Listen…’

  But I didn’t wait to hear anymore, I turned and walked back into the hall. You see, I didn’t want to miss the local politician’s speech about peace and reconciliation.

  Black Daffodil

  My sister is feeding her. I watch as the spoon pushes at her closed mouth. I see the look of surprise in her eyes as the baby food oozes across her pursed lips and drops in blobs onto the kitchen table.

  ‘Come on, Mammy. You must eat.’

  She nods as if she just about understands what’s being said, like an infant who is hearing language for the first time. We had been told that this would happen, it was my sister who first warned me as she had seen it time upon time at the hospice, and the doctor had confirmed it. Her brain would begin to shut down motor functions such as swallowing, walking, even smiling. Her illness had entered a new deadly phase and neither my sister nor I was quite ready for it.

  I join my sister, moving from the doorway of the sitting room to kneel by her side.

  ‘Talk to her,’ my sister says. ‘It’ll help. She likes it when you talk to her…’

  ‘Mammy. It’s Gabriel. Mammy?’

  ‘Gabriel?’

  ‘Yes, Mammy, Gabriel.’

  ‘Sweet little daffodil.’

  ‘Yes, Mammy…’

  ‘Sweet…Sweet…’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it time?’

  ‘For wha
t, Mammy?’

  ‘For the game to end?’

  ‘What game, Mammy?’

  I see her look at my sister, her eyes widening in disbelief. She shakes her head and then chews on her lower lip.

  ‘There are angels in the television, son…They talk to me at night…’

  ‘No, Mam…’

  ‘Yes, I hear their wings beating…I see them glow…They glow, son…’

  ‘If you say so…’

  ‘God loves me…’

  ‘Yes, Mammy, he loves you…’

  ‘You don’t know, do you?’ she says.

  ‘Know what?’ I ask.

  ‘Tut…Tut…Tut…Wee fella doesn’t know…Wee fella never knew…Wee fella lives in a pie…Tut…Tut…Tut…’

  We look at her. We’ve lost her, whatever moments of lucidity we had from her have gone and in their place is the childish gibberish that breaks our hearts.

  ‘Wee fella…So serious…So angry serious…Wee black daffodil…’

  ‘Mammy…Mammy…’ my sister says.

  She cocks her head as my sister speaks and puts one of her fingers to her mouth as if to say, I will be quiet, I am all yours. In her eyes there is that open trusting look she puts on when she thinks we want to talk seriously to her.

  ‘You can’t stay here any longer, Mammy…It’s too dangerous…Too upsetting…’

  ‘Right you are…’

  As she says this she tries to get to her feet, her eyes scanning the room for potential threat, her mouth widening in terror.

  ‘No, please, Mammy. Please,’ I say.

  She sits back in her seat, gently puts her head back so that she is looking up at the ceiling. She breathes through her mouth, long deep sighs going in and out, in and out. The tears when they come run quickly down her face, and down the creased folds of her neck.

  ‘This is bloody impossible,’ my sister says.

  I don’t look at her; my eyes are fixed on my mother. I know that she is back with us, that somewhere she is aware of what she has become.

  ‘Oh no…’ she says. ‘Oh no.’

  Farrell’s Undoing

  I knew that he had been watching me. He was fascinated by my fuck-you attitude. I was everything he wasn’t and it drove him up the wall. I suppose it began when I interrupted his class to stop him terrorising one of his pupils. For weeks after that, now and then, I could feel his eyes on me as if I was one of those cryptic puzzles that you find at the back of the serious newspapers. I knew that he wasn’t sure whether he wanted me as his friend or his enemy. I didn’t have the same quandary. I was good with people; Farrell knew this and it irritated him. He would watch as I encouraged students to think, to write, to express themselves in any way that they saw fit. I would tell them that rules were there to be blurred, what was important was that they took life by the balls, grabbed a hold of it. I talked like that once. I thought that I was fearless. Now I know better. So it became Farrell’s mission to get to know me, to find out what made me tick. I knew all I needed to know about him, he was a bully. It took him a couple of weeks but eventually he worked his way up the teachers’ dining table until he was sitting beside me. He would crack jokes about teaching, about Gaelic football, women, anything that would give him an in. He suggested that maybe we spend some time together, maybe have a meal to chew the fat so to speak. I said that was a good idea. We went to a Chinese restaurant in the centre of town and ordered sake with our food, that was my idea. Before long he had loosened up and the starchy Farrell gave way to a sloppy, vain man who talked about all the women he’d had. It was because he was over six feet tall and that well, you know, he said, leering at me across our Peking Duck.

  ‘No, I don’t know,’ I had said.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘The taller the man, the bigger the…’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It’s simple maths, you see.’

  ‘Of course. And you would know.’

  ‘You’re right there, Mr O’Rourke.’

  He ate like someone who hadn’t seen food in a long time, packing his mouth with rice, bits of fried seaweed, dim sum, anything that was to hand. Then he would sit there and chew, making tiny humming noises like a large child happy to have something to put in his belly. As the evening wore on, he became more and more unravelled, loosening his tie and raising his hand to wipe the beads of moisture that gathered on his forehead. His eyes shone as alcohol came and broke down the frigid reserve that he faced each day with and he began to talk about his wife. I had heard rumours about her. She was dead, I knew that much. She had committed suicide. It was a while ago just before he had moved North. No-one knew the exact story but I do know that a few fingers had been pointed Mr Farrell’s way. He told me that she had suffered for years from crippling depression. She found everything difficult, nothing enthused her. It was terrible, he told me, like living with someone who was already dead. That’s tough, I said to him, very tough. Yes, he said, he had been teaching in a school just outside Dublin and had returned home one day to find her hanging from the stair rail. It was strange, he said, to open the door and see two shoes that he knew so well just hanging there in mid-air. It was unreal, comical almost. He paused as he told me this as the memory welled up in him to sit glistening in his eyes. Tough, I said again, this time more quietly.

  We went back to his house after dinner. By now he was drunk; I was too but I was more practised at it. He stopped many times on the long walk to his home and wagged his finger at me, telling me what a fucker I had been to him. I know, I said, you’re right. I don’t like you, you’re a pain. This made him laugh, a harsh dry laugh that made me think that he hadn’t seen love in a long, long time. The more I drank, the stiller I became as if a vast desert had opened up inside me and I stood on its fringe looking at the distance I would have to travel.

  As he fumbled for the key to his front door, I remembered that he had a daughter and that one of my colleagues had said that he treated her appallingly. It was no surprise; I saw the way he was with his pupils. He was punishing the world for what had happened to his wife. I knew that rage. I recognised it in myself. I remembered my neighbour May and how we had broken her that night long ago when the moon stuttered in and out of the clouds in the sky above our heads.

  His house was immaculate and ordered. There was a large armchair in the living room. In front of it was a pair of slippers, neatly placed. On the arm of the chair was a folded newspaper. On the small dining table was a vase with a single rose in it. He paused and looked at it and said: ‘She’s a good ‘un is my Majella. Come in, come in, O’Rourke.’

  He went to a cabinet in the corner of the room and rooted around inside it until he found what he was looking for. It was a half-full lemonade bottle.

  ‘Poteen. Our gift to humanity.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve had this for fecking ages. Must be you, O’Rourke. Must be you brought it to my mind.’

  There was mischief in his eyes as he said this, and also a judgement which brought a kick of anger to my gut.

  ‘How about tea…to chase it down with?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Oh feck that.’

  ‘Honestly…’

  He went to the small corridor leading off from the room we were in and shouted up the stairs.

  ‘Majella. We have a guest.’

  He swayed slightly as he re-entered the room and put his hand on the back of one of the dining room chairs to steady himself.

  ‘You had me that fecking day you came into my classroom. You had me good, you bastard. Don’t think that I’ve forgotten.’

  I smiled and reached over and took the bottle of poteen from him, unscrewed its top and put it to my head.

  As soon as his daughter entered the room I saw him point to the kitchen. She stood there for a second in her pyjamas before obeying. I watched as she filled the kettle, insolently wiping the sleep from her eyes. She was thin but well proportioned and I could glimpse the half-moon curve of one of her breasts a
s she put some cups, saucers and glasses down on the dining table between us. Farrell must have seen me looking because he told her to go and put a dressing gown on. Just before she did she looked at me for the first time.

  It wasn’t long before the poteen claimed Farrell. He was talking to me about the North, one of his favourite subjects. He told me that we had made the whole fucking thing far too complicated. Look at the South, he said to me, look at the South, busy, prosperous forward-looking.

  ‘We don’t fecking want you. Do you follow?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Us. The Republic. No fecking interest. The lot of yous, Catholic, Protestant. We no more want you than a hole in the head.’

  As he said this he burped, it was part food, part air and his eyes glassed over as if someone had just hit him a blow on the head. He looked at me for a moment. I knew that he was trying to remember what he was saying. He raised a glass of poteen to his lips but he only managed to get it halfway before he gingerly put it back on the table. When he fell his large head cracked against the floor and a small bit of food appeared on his lips. I sat on, raising the poteen to my lips. After a few minutes I saw her standing at the bottom of the stairs. I knew that she had been watching me for a while. She was wearing some panties and a light bra; I could see the dark points of her nipples through it. She didn’t say anything but just kept her eyes on me with such surety that I thought it wasn’t the first time that she had done this. This was her way of tearing him down, of ripping his authority to shreds. He would find out, I knew this; everything done in the dark comes to the light sooner or later. Something flickered in me, a moral flag fluttering on the horizon of my mind, but it didn’t last long. I followed her upstairs and watched as she undressed and then turned to face me, the full soft nakedness of her youth on display. I remember smiling. I wanted her purity. I wanted to cram her innocence into my mouth, to devour every piece of unblemished goodness that I saw in her eyes.

  Water