by Paul Murray
It’s no secret that Father Green hates teaching, and he especially hates teaching French. Lessons are frequently suspended for tirades – usually directed at Gaspard Delacroix, the unfortunate exchange student – on the subject of France’s decadence. He seems to believe the language itself to be morally corrosive, and most of the class is spent doing grammar, where its grossness can be partly contained; even then, those languorous elisions, those turbid glottals, enrage him. But what doesn’t enrage him? Air particles enrage him. And the boys, with their expensive haircuts and bright futures, enrage him even more. The best they can do is stay quiet and try not to set him off.
Today, however – pace the stories of V. Bailey and M. Gogan – the priest seems in uncharacteristically jovial spirits, full of bonhomie and playfulness. He collects the copybooks and breezes through yesterday’s homework, commenting, accurately, on how dull it is, and apologizing for putting such clever young men to such uninspiring work, which, although he’s probably being sarcastic, they giggle at obediently; he pokes gentle fun at Sylvain, the anti-hero of the French textbook, who in today’s exercise is discussing with his dweeby French friends all the lame places they have been that day using the past tense of the verb aller, before he sets them to work on an introductory letter to a fictitious pen pal while he checks through their copybooks.
Gradually, the oppressive mood in the classroom lifts. In the distance, there is birdsong, and a shaky ascending scale from Father Laughton’s music class. Behind Skippy, Mario very quietly begins to tell Kevin ‘What’s’ Wong how he had sex with his French pen pal’s hot sister last summer. As he elaborates, he starts unconsciously kicking the back of Skippy’s chair. Thin pages flap through the priest’s bony fingers. Skippy, who is still decidedly green about the gills, turns round and stares meaningfully at Mario, but Mario doesn’t notice, being involved in an impressively detailed account of the sexual predilections of the French pen pal’s sister, whom he is now claiming is a famous actress.
Kick, kick, kick, goes his foot against the chair. Skippy pulls at his hair, flushing.
‘What’s she been in?’ Kevin ‘What’s’ Wong asks.
‘French things,’ Mario says. ‘She’s very famous, in France.’
‘Stop kicking my seat!’ Skippy hisses.
Keeping his head craned close to the copybook he’s marking, Father Green lilts to himself, ‘I’m so piiiiimmmmp it’s ri-dick-i-less.’
Instantly everyone stops what they’re doing. Did he just say what they think he said? Father Green, as if becoming aware of this shift of attention, looks up.
‘Stand up, please, Mr Juster,’ he says pleasantly.
Skippy rises uncertainly to his feet.
‘What were you talking about there, Mr Juster?’
‘I wasn’t talking,’ Skippy stammers.
‘I distinctly heard talking. Who was talking?’
‘Uhh…’
‘I see, no one was talking, is that correct?’
Skippy doesn’t reply.
‘Lying,’ Father Green counts on his fingers. ‘Talking during class. Obscenity – do you know the meaning of obscenity, Mr Juster?’
Skippy – who’s rapidly paling, becoming a ghost-frog – hoists a shoulder indeterminately.
‘We live in an age of obscenity,’ Father Green announces, quitting his lectern and addressing the class as if this were a new area of French grammar. ‘Profanity of language. Profaning of the divine temple that is the body. Lustful images. We are immersed in it, we learn to love it, like pigs in excrement, is that not so, Mr Juster?’
Skippy stares back at him queasily. One hand grips the desk, as if that’s all that’s propping him up.
‘I’m so piiiiimmmmp it’s ri-dick-i-less,’ the priest repeats, louder now, in an excruciating American drawl. Nobody laughs. ‘Today while driving in my car,’ he explains in a mock-conversational tone, ‘I chanced to turn on the radio, and this is what I heard.’ He pauses, screws up his face and then relays, ‘Oh baby, I like to play rough, and when I’m pumpin’ my stuff you just can’t get enough…’
Heads sink leadenly into arms: they can begin to see what’s coming up next.
‘I confess to finding myself a little confused –’ Father Green scratches his head in a caricature of puzzlement ‘– as to what the fellow meant, and I made a note to myself to ask one of you boys. What stuff is he pumping, Mr Juster?’
Skippy just gulps.
‘Puuuummmmpin’ it,’ the priest hums to himself. ‘Pummmpin’ it real good… Could it be petrol? Is he perhaps a petrol attendant? Or perhaps he is referring to his bicycle? Is that what the song is about, in your opinion, Mr Juster? Is he referring to his bicycle?’
Skippy quails, his nostrils flare in and out, deep breaths –
‘IS HE REFERRING TO HIS BICYCLE?’
Clearing his throat, Skippy replies in a faint high voice, ‘Maybe?’
The priest’s hand slams on ‘Jeekers’ Prendergast’s desk like a thunderclap; everybody jumps in their seats. ‘Liar!’ he roars. The last of his earlier jollity and good humour has fallen away now, and they realize that it was phony all along, or rather a darker manifestation of his ordinary rage, waiting for its inevitable moment.
‘Do you know what happens to sinful boys, Mr Juster?’ Father Green sweeps his blazing eyes about the room. ‘All of you, are you aware of the fate that befalls impure hearts? Of hell, the endless torments of hell that await the lustful?’
Eyes study folded hands, evading his fervid gaze. Father Green pauses a moment, then changes tack. ‘Do you enjoy pumping your stuff, Mr Juster? Do you like pumping it rough?’
A couple of people snicker in spite of themselves. The boy does not reply; he is gazing at the priest open-mouthed as if he can’t believe this is happening. Geoff Sproke puts his hands over his eyes. The priest, enjoying himself, pacing the boards in front of the blackboard like a barrister, says, ‘Are you a virgin, Mr Juster?’
This, class, is what’s called a double-bind. Note the formal perfection of its construction, the work of a real expert. Obviously Skippy’s a virgin – Skippy’s about as virginal as they come, and will probably stay that way till he’s at least thirty-five. But he can’t admit it, not with a classroom of boys looking at him, even if ninety-five per cent of them are virgins also. Neither, though, can he deny it, because the person asking is a priest, who expects all good Catholics to remain virgins until they are married, or at least is pretending to expect this for the purposes of his little game here. So Skippy merely wriggles and shivers and breathes noisily as his interrogator advances a step or two down the aisle.
‘Well?’ Father Green’s eyes twinkle at him merrily.
Through clenched teeth, Skippy says, ‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’ Father Green, in performer mode now, repeats incredulously, with a comical wink for his audience. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’
‘I don’t know.’ Skippy stares back at him, his jaw wobbling, trying not to cry.
‘You don’t know what you mean when you say you don’t know?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Mr Juster, God hates a liar, and so do I. You are among friends here. Why not tell us the truth? Are you a virgin?’
Skippy’s face is shaking and sore-looking now. Five minutes remaining on the clock. Geoff shoots a desperate look at Ruprecht as if he might know what to do, but the light has fallen to make opaque blanks of his glasses.
‘I don’t know.’
The indulgent smile fades from the priest’s lips, and the thunderclouds regather in the room. ‘Tell me the truth!’
Actual tears roll down Skippy’s cheeks. No one is snickering any more. Why can’t he just give Father Green what he wants? But Skippy keeps saying, ‘I don’t know,’ like a halfwit, turning greener and greener, making the priest angrier and angrier, until he says, ‘Mr Juster, I am giving you one last chance.’ And they see his bony hand curled up into a fist on Jeekers’s desk,
and they think of the fifth-year with the stitches and all of the other dark legends that swirl serpentine around the priest, and in their heads they scream at him, ‘SKIPPY, FOR FUCK’S SAKE! JUST TELL HIM WHAT HE WANTS TO HEAR!’, but Skippy is clammily, woozily silent and around him the air is full of sparks and the priest’s eyes glitter at him hungrily like wolf eyes, and nobody knows what is going to happen, and then the priest steps forward, and Skippy, who is swaying slightly in place, abruptly straightens, bolt upright, opens his mouth and vomits all over Kevin ‘What’s’ Wong.
The first time Halley set eyes on Howard was at a showing of The Towering Inferno. When she heard about him, her sister had wondered aloud how much of a future you could have with someone you’d met at a disaster movie. But at that point Halley wasn’t feeling picky. She had been in Dublin just over three weeks – not so long that she didn’t still get lost all the time on the infuriating streets that kept changing their names, but enough to disabuse her of most of her illusions about the place; enough too, with the deposit and first month’s rent for her new apartment, to separate her from most of the money she’d brought, and cut the time available for soul-searching and self-finding quite drastically. That afternoon she’d spent in an Internet café, reluctantly updating her résumé; she hadn’t had a conversation since the night before, a stilted exchange with the Chinese pizza delivery boy about his native Yunan province. When she spotted the poster for The Towering Inferno, which she and Zephyr must have watched twenty times together, it was like catching sight of an old friend. She went in and for three hours warmed herself in the familiar blaze of collapsing architecture and suffocating hotel guests; she stayed in her seat until the ushers started sweeping round her feet.
Standing on the kerb outside the cinema she unfolded her map of the city, and was scouring it for any place that might serve to use up the next couple of hours when a taxicab hurtled by and whipped it out of her hands. The map flapped madly up into the air, then swooped back down to spread itself over the chest of a man who’d just come out the cinema door. Halley crimsoned with embarrassment, then noticed that the man – bewilderedly unwrapping himself from the two-dimensional image of the city, so it looked almost as if he’d popped out of the map himself – was kind of cute.
(‘Cute how?’ Zephyr asked her. ‘Irish-looking,’ Halley said, by which she meant a collection of indistinct features – pale skin, mousy hair, general air of ill-health – that combine to mysteriously powerful romantic effect.)
The man looked right and left, then saw her cringing on the far side of the cobbled street. ‘I believe this is yours,’ he said, presenting her with the incorrectly folded map.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Didn’t I see you inside at the film?’
She nodded vaguely, pulling at her hair.
‘I noticed because you stayed right to the end. Most people leap out of their seats the instant they see the credits appear. I always wonder what they’re in such a hurry to get back to.’
‘It’s hard to comprehend,’ she agreed.
‘Yeah,’ the man said, pursing his lips reflectively. The conversation had reached its natural conclusion and she knew he was considering whether he should leave it there in its brief, formal perfection or risk ruining that perfection by attempting to bring it a stage further; she found herself hoping he would take the chance. ‘You’re not from Dublin, are you?’ he said.
‘Hence the map,’ she said, and then, realizing this sounded acerbic, ‘I’m from the United States. California originally. But I’ve come from New York. What about you?’
‘Here,’ he said, gesturing at the surrounding streets. ‘So – where was it you were looking for?’
‘Oh,’ she said. Not wanting to admit the dismal truth, that she had been looking merely for a destination, any destination, she squeezed her eyes tight shut and tried to remember one of the little triangles on the tourist map. ‘Uh, the museum?’ There was bound to be a museum.
‘Ah right,’ he said. ‘You know, I’ve never been there since it moved. But I can show you where it is. It’s not far.’ With a shall-we gesture, he turned, and she followed him downhill to the quays, a fracas of trucks and bus stops and seagulls. He pointed upriver at the far bank. ‘It’s about half an hour’s walk,’ he said. ‘Although, actually, I’d imagine it must be closing soon.’
‘Oh.’ She weighed her options. He was around her age and didn’t seem psychotic; it would be nice to have a conversation not predicated on pizza delivery. ‘Well, is there anywhere nearby I could get a drink?’
‘Never a problem in this town,’ he said.
Halley had left New York, her job and her friends and come to Ireland without any real plan, other than to be elsewhere, and vague notions of plumbing her own depths and writing some as-yet unconceived masterpiece; now, as she took a seat in the warm, dim, hops-scented snug, she already wondered if her true reason had been to fall in love. She’d grown so sick of the life she’d been living; what better way to forget all that than to lose yourself in someone new? To literally bump into someone, a stranger amid millions of other strangers, and let yourself discover him: that he has a name (Howard) and an age (twenty-five) a profession (history teacher) and a past (finance, murky) – every hour revealing more of him, like a magical pocket map that, once opened, will keep unfolding until it has covered the whole of your living-room floor with places you have never been?
(‘Just be careful,’ Zephyr said. ‘You’re so bad at these things.’ ‘Well it doesn’t have to be anything serious,’ she said, and didn’t mention that she’d already kissed him, on a bridge over some body of water she didn’t know the name of, before exchanging phone numbers and parting for the night, to walk around in the maze of heteronymous streets till she found a policeman who could tell her where she was; because Halley believed that a kiss was the beginning of a story, the story, good or bad, short or long, of an us, and once begun, you had to follow it through to the end.)
In the following weeks they returned to the little cinema in Temple Bar and saw many more disaster movies together – The Poseidon Adventure, Airport, The Swarm – always staying right to the end; afterwards he led her through the boozy city, its rusting, dusty charms, its rain. Working out of her guidebook, they saw the bullet holes in the walls of the GPO, the forlorn, childlike skeletons in the catacombs of St Michan’s, the relics of St Valentine. As they made their way, she imagined her great-grandfather walking down the same streets, cross-referencing the landmarks with tipsy yarns her father used to tell at the Christmas table, even while she laughed with embarrassment at the obese lines of her compatriots at the genealogy stand in Trinity College, where family trees were sold on elaborate parchment scrolls that looked like university degrees, as though conferring on their buyers an official place in history.
Later, sitting in the pub, Howard would make her tell stories about home. He appeared to have spent his childhood watching bad American TV shows, and when she described the suburb she’d grown up in, or the high school she’d attended, his eyes would iridesce, assimilating these details into the mythical country that invested the CDs and books and movies stacked around his bed. Much as she appreciated whatever mystique her foreignness gave her in his eyes, she did try to convey the mundane truth. ‘It’s really not much different from here,’ she’d tell him.
‘It is,’ he’d insist, solemnly. He told her that he’d once thought of applying for the green card and moving over there. ‘You know, doing something…’
‘So? What happened?’
‘What happens to anyone? I got a job.’ He’d drifted into a position in a prestigious brokerage in London – drifted was his word, and when Halley challenged it he told her that most of his class at Seabrook had ended up working in the City, or in corresponding high-finance positions in Dublin or New York: ‘There’s a kind of a network,’ he said. Salaries were lavish, and he would in all probability have been there still, neither loving nor hating it, if it hadn�
��t been for the cataclysm he’d brought down on himself. Cataclysm was his word too; he also referred to it as a blowup and a wipeout.
After this cataclysm, whatever it was, he’d returned to Dublin and for the last couple of months had been teaching History at his old school. It was plain when she met them that Howard’s parents – although, he said, they had enrolled his younger self in Seabrook as a conscious effort to bump the family a few rungs up the ladder – regarded teaching there as an unambiguously downward move. Dinner chez Fallon was a riot of cutlery on good china amidst long lakes of silence, like some unlistenable modernist symphony; beneath the prevailing veneer of politeness, a seething cauldron of disappointment and blame. It was like eating with some Waspy clan in New Hampshire; Halley was surprised at how un-Irish they seemed, but then most things in Dublin she found to be un-Irish.
She’d always suspected his relationship with Seabrook to be more complicated than he made out; it wasn’t until they’d been together almost a year that he told her about the accident at Dalkey Quarry. To her it sounded like the kind of drunken disaster so typical of the lives of teenage boys, but for Howard, it became clear, everything that happened before and after was cast in its light. She began to wonder why he had gone back to the school – was it to punish himself? Some kind of atonement? It was as if, she thought, he were trying to deny the past and embed himself in it at the same time; or deny it by embedding himself in it. She didn’t know how healthy a situation this was; whenever she tried to talk about it, though, he’d get irritable and change the subject.