So there you are. That’s Madeira Gardens for you, on the night of the 15th of September 1979. Whatever might have been said about it in the past, what with its stupid bin liners and its garden of nettles and its daft muttering old principal who was half-sodden with whiskey and should have been put away long ago now, with the stench so unbearable as to almost make you faint and the sight of what had once been Raphael Bell swinging away from side to side with its fat tongue sticking out, not to mention the boxes of books and pencils and ink bottles and papers and charts and chalk and letters and roll books and sums copies and all the other junk and rubbish from St Anthony’s thrown around the place, it looked like the Dead School was, at long last, beginning to live up to its name. Creak creak and sob sob. That was all you could hear. It was a sad state of affairs. A sad state of affairs now and no mistake.
Small wonder the cop who came to investigate the report of a break-in nearly shit himself when he saw what he’d landed into.
Love
Across from him the old tramp bared a mouthful of broken teeth and handed him the bottle. ‘Have a drink,’ he said. ‘It takes the pain away.’ Malachy took it and put it to his lips. ‘What happened to you, pal,’ asked the tramp. ‘You’re in a bad fuckin’ way. You’re worse than me. Have the lot. I don’t need it no more.’ Malachy swigged and slipped away.
Standing in the doorway of the bungalow, Marion still looked as beautiful as ever. ‘Can you come in and look after this lot for just a second, Malachy?’ she called to him. He smiled back and nodded as she went back inside. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and left the lawn mower back in the shed. Seamus, the guy next door, leaned over the garden fence and said, ‘Well – there you are. The holidays over now another year. I suppose you can’t wait to get back to the little terriers?’
Malachy laughed. ‘Oh, now,’ he said. ‘They’re not the worst. I have a great class coming into me this year by all accounts.’
Seamus nodded. ‘I hear very good reports about this young fellow Pat Hourican. I hear you’ve been doing powerful things with him altogether.’
Malachy ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that now,’ he said. ‘The way it is with Pat he needs no help from me. I’ll tell you this – if they were all like him I’d be the lucky man.’
‘Do you know what it is,’ he went on. ‘Between yourself and myself I wouldn’t have that job of yours for a pension. I’m telling you, it would drive me astray in the head. As for the old post office now – it’s not so bad at all. But teaching? Not on your life, Malachy, and that’s not a word of a lie!’
Malachy smiled and went inside. Sorcha, Jason and Emer were sitting cross-legged on the carpet. When they saw him coming in they smiled. ‘Well – what’s going on here, you little bunch of gangsters – what’s on?’ he said.
The three of them pulled eagerly at his trouser leg. ‘Daddy, Daddy – it’s Bugs Bunny!’
He sat down and got stuck into Bugs along with them. On the wall there was a framed portrait of Marion and himself on their wedding day. On the mantelpiece a souvenir of Torremolinos where they had spent their first holiday after Marion had Sorcha. A pile of copybooks rested on the table, waiting to be corrected. Marion came in from the bathroom wearing a white towelling dressing gown. She unwrapped the turban around her head and her hair fell free. Behind the rapt children she caught his eye and her lips moved silently.
‘I love you,’ she said and such was the depth of his happiness he almost wept.
Slán Leat
Everyone had expected a good attendance but this surpassed all expectations. It looked like just about every single child in Ireland had turned up. Hundreds and hundreds of kids of all shapes and sizes. There were kiddies from Cork and Kerry, kiddies from the slums of Dublin and kiddies from the mountains of Donegal. And did they look fantastic! Absolutely fantastic! As one woman said, with a tear in her eye, ‘They’re a picture, God love them!’
All the convent girls wore white dresses and flowing veils and the boys starched white shirts and red ties. They carried Papal bannerettes. Each boy had his own set of rosary beads because, as they all knew, that was one of Mr Bell’s special rules – St Anthony’s boys must have them with them at all times, no matter where it was they might find themselves. In their lace veils and white socks, with their hands joined and eyes closed, the little girls seemed as angels come down from heaven. It was indeed a sight to behold.
What worried the organizers of the funeral was where on earth they were going to put them all. The big question of the day was – were there enough hotels in Dublin city to hold all these kiddies? Not to mention their teachers and their mammies and daddies and all the nuns and priests and past pupils and all the rest of them. As one old priest said to another in the foyer of the North Star Hotel when they were all getting ready for the big trip to Glasnevin where Raphael was to be buried, ‘Do you know what I’m going to tell you – I haven’t seen a crowd as big as this since the day of the Eucharistic Congress and that’s a fact!’
Yes indeed, the City of Dublin was on the march and by the holy if Raphael Bell was going into the ground then, as Paschal O’Dowd observed, walking along behind the hearse, there was one sure thing and that was that all his old buddies and pals from years gone by were going to give him one father and mother of a send-off. As the cortège made its way to the cemetery there was no end to the amount of stories that were to be told about the headmaster who was, as one man put it, ‘A legend.’ Everyone agreed. ‘That’s what he was,’ they said. ‘A bloody legend.’ There was the story about the time he had to chase the goat out of the playground. ‘Didn’t one of the tinkers bring a bloody goat to school!’ they laughed. Then there was the time Nelligan got locked in the school over the weekend! It was priceless. The stories went on and on. Then of course there were the more serious stories. About how his class had got the highest marks in the Diocesan Catechetical inspections for twenty years running, and the day the All-Ireland Football Trophy was brought into the school by the victorious captain, a former pupil. Not to mention of course the number of times the choir had been on Radio Eireann. ‘Oh, now,’ they said, ‘you would travel the length and breadth of Ireland a fair while before you would come across a man the like of Mr Bell now, eh?’ That was for sure.
There was a lovely little school band standing by the graveside, near a white-haired priest on crutches who had to have his prayer-book held for him because he could no longer hold it himself. The nuns had assembled the band specially for the day. They were all dressed up in their neat little uniforms and had been practising all morning. They were going to play Mr Bell’s favourite song – ‘Macushla’. Which the nun had told them earlier was the Gaelic word for ‘My Darling’ or ‘My Beloved’. So now they knew. Which in all honesty was about as much as they wanted to know, for as far as they could see, the words of it were just a jumble of old rubbish that made no sense at all, something to do with an old fellow who had nothing better to do than ask his wife to get up out of that and not be lying in the grave! Whatever that was supposed to mean!
Not that they exactly made it any more comprehensible with their rendition which began shortly after the mourners arrived. Just about the most magnanimous thing you can say about their performance is that it wasn’t exactly going to win them the Band of the Year Prize. Between that and the wind whipping away half the words as they were playing, you would have been hard pressed to know what the hell was going on. All you could see were people holding their hats as the prayerbook pages flapped and Mario Lanza Jr put the crows out of business as he sang:
Macushla! Macushla! Your sweet voice is calling,
Calling me softly again and again
Macushla! Macushla! I hear its dear pleading
My blue-eyed Macushla, I hear it in vain
Macushla! Macushla! Your white arms are reaching
I feel their enfolding caressing me still
Fling them out from the darkness, my lost love, Macushla
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Let them find me and bind me again if they will
Macushla! Macushla! Your red lips are saying
That death is a dream and that love is for aye
Then awaken, Macushla, awake from your dreaming
My blue-eyed Macushla, awaken to stay.
What they were raving about, nobody had the foggiest notion. In fact, if you didn’t know better, between the little fellow banging the bass drum and the cymbals crashing and the flutes and tin whistles playing different melodies at the same time, you might well have thought that they were some sort of comedy or circus band that had drifted into the graveyard by accident. Be that as it may the scene was still too much for some people as they looked at the bright hopeful happy faces of the children and then stared at the yawning open hole into which Mr Bell was about to go very shortly. Especially when one of the little innocents gave a shy little wave and said, ‘Slán Leat A Mhaistir’ – ‘goodbye, Master.’
It was hard to know how many people were there. If our old friend Nobby Caslin the funeral expert had happened along, it would have done his heart good. ‘This is more like it, boys,’ he’d say. ‘This is more like the real thing. How many now would you say is here? Five thousand? Ten? I’d go for the ten now. By Christ you won’t get better than this!’
And you wouldn’t have either – if it had happened like that which of course it didn’t for there were no more multitudes and school bands there than Raphael Bell was going to jump up and call out to the gravediggers, ‘Hold on there lads! It’s a mistake! I’m not dead at all!’
In fact, if poor old Nobby had indeed turned up, a more likely class of a speech from him would have been, ‘I seen the time when a schoolmaster the like of him would have pulled in over the six hundred mark and well above it. I mind Master Jack who used to teach in the wee school out by the mountain, died of a heart attack one sunny day and him driving the car up the street. I remember it as well as if it was yesterday. Into a pole and the pair of them killed outright, himself and Reavy the contractor. As God is my judge, the day that man was crated, you wouldn’t have got moving in the streets, that many turned out to pay their respects. It’s a sad state of affairs when this is all that can be dragged out for a Master, a scatter of old biddies, a dying-looking hippy in a tramp’s coat and an auld whinging bollocks of a priest, would you look at him, slobbering away there like a halfwit or what in the hell is wrong with him? Don’t you think now you’d expect a bit more from a clergyman, taking into account the number he’d have put into the ground in his time, if you get my meaning.’
The holy water sparkled in the air as the priest cleared his throat, beginning to read:
I hearken, O Lord, to our prayers, wherein we humbly beseech your mercy, that you will establish the soul of your servant, Raphael, which you have bidden to depart from this world, in the abode of peace and light, and may you command him to be joined to the fellowship of the saints. Through Christ Our Lord Amen.
He then closed the prayerbook and raised his head as he said, ‘Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord’ and then, responding for the throng that could not answer with one voice because it was not there, said softly to himself, ‘May they rest in peace. Amen.’
Malachy, with a big fat shiner on him and looking like he’d been dragged through a ditch backways, turned and walked toward the gate, and it has to be said that his spontaneous impression of Mrs McAdoo’s walk after Thomas’s funeral was not bad at all.
As the pine box was lowered on canvas straps, the white-haired priest was inconsolable and had to be led away. The officiating priest closed his prayerbook and averted his eyes as Father Desmond Stokes was helped into a car outside the cemetery gates.
A light rain swept towards the city.
You Don’t Really Like ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’, Do You?
So there you are, that’s the end of my story and what a sad end it turned out to be, what with brambles and briars growing all over poor Raphael, and nobody ever bothering their backsides to come near him, never mind remark on their Sunday stroll past Madeira Gardens, ‘Do you remember old Mr Bell who used to live there?’ or ‘That house belonged to the headmaster of St Anthony’s once upon a time.’ Even the young couple who lived in it now hadn’t the foggiest notion that it had once been the Dead School, which of course was perfectly understandable, for with its lovely garden full of geraniums and begonias and its beautiful whitewashed walls, you just wouldn’t have believed it possible. But then, of course, there’s lots of things you wouldn’t believe, such as the way things have been going in the town lately, for example. Maybe it’s just as well poor old Raphael kicked the bucket when he did, for I doubt if his heart would have been able to stand up to all the carry-on. It’s got so bad now that if you didn’t know better, you’d think half the country was on drugs. It all started in earnest when they sold the hotel where the bold Packie once upon a time loved to have his couple of wee bottles and the new owner decided that what was needed was a bit of exotic dancing to cheer the locals up. Then came the wet T-shirt competitions, mud wrestling four nights a week, and foxy boxing on Sunday mornings. The priest tried giving out about it at Mass, saying that things had gone too far and he wanted it back the way it was when he was a young boy, when Sunday mornings were a time of togetherness, a special time, a holy time, when you would walk up the street with your mammy and daddy, then get the papers on the way home from Mass before you had your Sunday dinner and settled in to listen to Michael O’Hehir as the ball went high into the clouds and the cheers of the crowd brought joy to your heart. The priest got so excited when he was making the speech that he closed his eyes and went all red in the face as he pounded the pulpit, pleading with them to remember. ‘Do you remember!’ he cried, half-choked. ‘Do you remember those days, my dear people!’
Of course they remembered them, I mean it wasn’t all that long ago. Not that it mattered when it was, for as far as they were concerned, he could stick those days up his arse for they had been listening to him blathering about them long enough and if he didn’t shut up, soon he might be counting himself lucky to find anyone in his stupid fucking church at all. Meanwhile, down went the fish factory with one whack of the wrecker’s ball and up went the Copacabana, the disco to end all discos with its three neon waitresses ferrying cocktails across the roof and high-kicking over the town. Next door is Hollywood Nites video shop and through the open windows Robert Ginty, The Exterminator, takes on all-comers as yet another asshole comes running right into his custombuilt flamethrower and goes, ‘Come on, motherfucker! Come on and die, you slimeball fuck! Fry, fuckhead – if that’s what you wanna do!’
If Malachy had been twenty years younger, he might have got stuck into all this but he wasn’t of course, not any more, as a few of the young lads down the harbour reminded him in the time-honoured tradition one day when he was out with Cissie. ‘Hey, Baldy!’ they shouted, ‘Why don’t you go away and grow some hair, you wee fat cunt!’
Anyway, whatever about twenty years ago, getting stuck in now was pretty much out of the question, for by the time Cissie’s looked after, most of the day is gone anyway. But at least it’s not like in the beginning, when she was going to stage some sort of miraculous recovery, sitting there playing tapes and blathering shite into her ear and getting nothing only the goo goo treatment back. No, that’s all history now. These days he just plays it by ear and waits to see what sort of humour she’s in. If she’s in a bad one, you’ve had it. She’ll just take a swing with her one good hand and send bowl and spoon and the whole lot flying. That can be a right fuckup. Usually, however, one day is pretty much the same as the next. She wakes in the morning and looks at him with empty eyes as he eases her gently out of bed. He’ll wash her first, then dress her and carry her downstairs. She likes to sit by the fire where he feeds her and after that she’ll sleep. Then maybe he’ll read, or listen to Terry Krash. Or watch a few videos maybe. But most of the time he doesn’t bother. He prefers just to sit there, waiting for them
to come again, as he knows they will: a night in a Parnell Square dancehall when he searched the floor and saw that she was there, then held her close as her strawberry blonde hair brushed his cheek and he whispered, ‘You don’t really like “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep”, do you?’, that day in the park when a white unbroken blanket of snow stretched as far as the eye could see and she stood by a frozen river, staring at something far away, then slowly turned and looked into his eyes, her lips about to part to form three words.
The DEAD School
Patrick McCabe was born in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland in 1955. He is the author of the children’s story The Adventures of Shay Mouse, and the novels Music on Clinton Street, Carn, The Butcher Boy (winner of the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Literature Prize and shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize), The Dead School, Breakfast on Pluto (shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize), Mondo Desperado, Emerald Germs of Ireland, Call Me The Breeze, Winterwood, The Holy City and The Stray Sod Country. He lives in Sligo with his wife and two daughters.
Also by Patrick McCabe in Picador
Carn
The Butcher Boy
Breakfast on Pluto
Mondo Desperado
The Dead School Page 27