by Paul Murray
‘I imagine so,’ Ruprecht says, pondering this. ‘Or if you travelled at the speed of light, time would stop, so it would always be today.’
‘Huh,’ Skippy says thoughtfully.
‘The problem in either case is energy. Travelling in time would require gaining access to hyperspace, which costs an enormous amount of power. And the closer you approach the speed of light, the more your weight increases and prevents you from reaching it.’
‘Wow, sort of like the universe is holding on to you?’
‘You might put it that way, yes. But anyway, you hardly want to stop time now, not with mid-term coming up!’
‘Ha ha, right…’
Silence resettles like a fresh snowfall that covers the room. Soon Ruprecht’s breathing turns into murmurous snores and little chomping noises; he’s having the dream where he’s being given the Nobel Prize, which he imagines as a large silver trophy filled with fudge… Ghostly grey-black moonlight creeps through the window; Skippy watches it gleam on his swimming trophy, the photo of Mum and Dad.
And once they’re sure he is asleep, they file into the room and gather round his bed, their long wasting limbs hanging limp by their sides, their rotting breath breathing WE ARE THE DEAD as they grab his hand and pull him up the stairs to a room and a Shape in a bed that lifts its head and draws aside the covers to reveal its body to him, skin faded to the same colour as the bedsheets it rises out of, reaching for him with hands that turn into hands that grip him freezing tight, and its mouth closes on his so he can’t scream or even breathe or wake up Ruprecht, he stretches under the pillow for the pills but they are gone! someone must have come in and taken them! and now the room fills with water and he starts drowning, the hands pulling him down below the surface –
He pulls his eyes open. There is no water, no one in the room except him and Ruprecht. The pills are where they always are. The ghostly almost-light hangs in the room like somebody there. He turns away from it, his hand wrapped around the little amber tube.
It is late when Father Green descends from the Tower. The lights are out in Our Lady’s Hall, but there is moon enough in the windows for him to make his way; although by now, no doubt, he could make it in his sleep, if he were the kind to sleep. This is his favourite time, when the school has gone to bed, and he may finally get to work! The poor will always be with us, says the Lord, so there is always work to be done; he may no longer be a young man, but Father Green has no intention of shirking his duties – and tonight, for the first time in a long time, he feels a tingle of the old vigour! The old sap, rising in his –
What?
He thought he heard footsteps. When he turns round, though, the hall is empty. Of course it’s empty, who would be there, at this hour? Lately his mind has grown fond of tricks like this – shapes coming out of the shadows, strange echoes, as of someone behind him. Perhaps he should speak to the nurse, have her check him over… oh, but think how ‘Greg’ would love that! No, he’ll wait, it will fade away in due course, Deo volente.
Passing beneath the Virgin he crosses himself, then walks down the steps to the basement. His office used to be on the top floor. Now that is a ‘computer room’, and his charitable work is consigned to the underworld. Progress. Father Green hears rumours that if Desmond Furlong does not return, Acting Principal Costigan – ‘Greg’ – intends to demolish the Old Building altogether – that’s right, this same one whose construction Père Lequintrec oversaw, brick by brick, back when there was not a school in the country worthy of the name as far as Catholic boys were concerned. Back when the order was strong, when they had that zeal! Instead of being content to serve merely as window-dressing, at a finishing school for young financiers.
‘Greg’. ‘Call me Greg, please.’ And he, of course, is ‘Jerome’. ‘Jerome, I don’t know how you do it.’ ‘Jerome, you’re an inspiration to us all.’
He turns on the light of the dingy office, opens a draft of a request for donations from corporate friends of the school. How many times has he written this same letter? Tonight though he can’t bring his mind to focus on it.
‘Jerome, just a quick word if I may…’
Father Green had been on his way to the Residence for dinner; he had barely noticed the Acting Principal approach. Typically, ‘Greg’ steers clear of him – one of the old dinosaurs, nothing to be done with him except wait for him to die. And yet here he was – was he? Yes, he was! – interrogating the priest about this business with the boy getting sick in his morning French class! ‘Gather you had a little dust-up with one of your second-years,’ he said.
Well! Father Green had been so surprised he hadn’t managed to reply; and it must have looked like an admission of guilt, because the Acting Principal proceeded directly into a telling-off – couched, albeit, in all sorts of patronizing flannel: ‘Times have changed, Jerome… sometimes I myself… bear in mind these boys aren’t quite as robust as in our day…’ (In our day! Did he take ‘Jerome’ for such a fool?) ‘Might be more productive in the long run, Jerome, if you went a little easier on them.’
Ah yes. Go easy: the motto of the age. For these children, as for their parents, everything must be easy. It is their entitlement, it is their right, and anything that infringes on it, anything that requires them to lift themselves even momentarily from their cosy stupor, is wrong. They will live their lives without ever knowing want or hardship, and they will take this as no more than their due, sanctioned, somewhere in the vaporous satellite-strewn heavens, by the same amorphous God who brings them Swedish furniture and four-wheel-drive jeeps, who appears when summoned for weddings and christenings. A kindly, twinkle-eyed God. An easy God.
Go easy. Well, that got his blood up, all right! He was within an inch of grabbing ‘Greg’ by the lapels! Damn it, man, do you think that God no longer keeps the books? Look around you! Sin is everywhere! It is more powerful than ever before, polluting, poisoning, corroding like a cancer! The boys need someone to frighten them! They need someone to tell them the truth! That their souls are in peril, that their only hope is to prostrate themselves before God, beg Him for the divine grace to be freed of their wickedness!
But he did not grab ‘Greg’s’ lapels, and he did not say any of this; he merely smiled, promised to mind his temper in future, and to apologize to the boy whose feelings were hurt. It was no great surrender; he is all too aware of the impotence of his efforts. The torments of Hell mean nothing to these boys. Souls, God, sin, these are words from another time. The superstitious ravings of an old scarecrow.
For a long time now Father Green has wondered what he is doing here. The thought of retirement appals him: he has watched too many of his colleagues deliquesce into inertia – men he worked with side by side on the missions, in the heathen wilderness with nothing but their faith to guide them, now pottering about the Residence like gummy smiling zombies, pacifically awaiting death. And yet work – which had always been his salvation – work too has lost its savour. He does not mean teaching: that has never interested him, and today’s boys are worse than ever before, steeped in licentiousness, an orchard of apples rotting on the branch. But in the council flats, on the estates, where he used to see, in the first years after they recalled him from Africa, a kind of promise amidst the desolation – a hopefulness, an honesty, a capacity for change – now the desolation is all he sees. The same problems of twenty years ago: mildewed rooms, sinks full of bottles, children running around half-wild over ground littered with syringes; the same easy capitulations, the same weakness, the same abrogation of responsibility. And here in his office, the same endless scrabbling after pennies, the endless, ignominious banging of the drum.
Perhaps everything he believed for so many years is simply wrong? Perhaps there simply is no grain of goodness in the heart of man, waiting to be brought to the light, perhaps man is base to the core, any flicker of virtue merely a trick of the light, a – what is the word? – a corposant. On his darker nights (and most nights, now, seem dark) he has wondered
if he has not spent forty-four years toiling after a myth.
Is it not strange how a single chance encounter may throw an entirely new light on one’s situation? How an exchange so brief as to appear quite without significance may reveal a way forward, a new path where before there was none? This evening Father Green had acceded to ‘Greg’s’ request and mounted the stairs to the Tower to apologize to the boy whose feelings he had allegedly hurt. It was a nonsense of course – he had been caught speaking obscenely in class for one, and for another these boys had no feelings, they were the very embodiment of the modern age, insensate to the core, and Father Green made his little pilgrimage in the same spirit of indifference and defeat with which he has carried out so many of his duties in recent times. But the moment the boy opened the door – well, too much to call it a Damascene conversion; too much, of course, absurd. And yet it was clear in the instant, that silvered instant on the threshold, the priest had made a mistake. He had made a mistake about this boy, and the shock of it echoed back through him, causing him to ask himself what other mistakes he might have made in the recent past. Because you could see – impossible to describe in retrospect the clarity, the vividness of it – you could see the innocence in this boy’s face. He was diff erent – how had Father Green never noticed it before? Younger than his peers, for one: not yet slipped down the sinkhole of pubescence, still retaining the miniature perfection of the child, his roseate skin unblemished, his gaze bright and unclouded. But that accounted only for part of it. There was a fragility to him, an unworldliness, a purity that verged almost on a kind of anticipatory pain, as of a fruit that if it is touched at all must bruise; and a shadow of grief, perhaps at the iniquity of the world he found himself in, beholding which Father Green had felt moved to a spontaneous tenderness such as he had not experienced in a long time, and reached out to console the boy (recalling it now, he feels this sensation pass through him once more, and in the lonely office his hand unfolds to caress the empty air).
The conversation that followed was desultory: was the boy feeling better? He was. Did he accept Father Green’s apology for losing his temper? He did. But Father Green had already learned a profound lesson: that despair too is a sin, and a most insidious one, because it obscures those instances of God’s grace that are among us, and leads us into solipsism and hardness of heart. He had allowed himself to be clouded by pessimism, curdled by rage, but God in his mercy had given him a chance to atone. And the nature of his penance is clear: he must help this boy. For here is one who may be helped, who may yet be saved from the depredations of his time – subtly, of course, obliquely, an invisible hand gently steering him towards goodness. One could still do that, couldn’t one, one could still take a boy under one’s wing? And in saving him – Father Green’s mind is racing now – might he not thereby rediscover his own lost path? Might this boy not be the Lot who saves, for Father Green, the profaned city in which he is lost? Even as he asks the question, he hears his heart respond unequivocally, yes! Yes, Jerome, yes!
Was that a – laugh? Did he hear someone laughing, out there in the dark? One of the boys, no doubt – he leaps for the door. But outside there is nothing; only a prickling silence that mocks his paranoia. He holds his head. Late, Jerome, it is late. At this hour one labours merely under illusions.
He turns out the light, sets off back through the school towards the Residence. As he goes he imagines the trials that might afflict a youngster, and how best a concerned friend might help to tease these out. He ignores the curious sense he has that someone is following him. Just another of these irritating tics that have plagued him these last few weeks.
But he knows who it is.
Next morning Skippy’s recovered from his mystery illness, and though initially he’s followed wherever he goes by a chorus of fake barfing, it’s not long before he’s bumped from the limelight by new and bigger stories. It appears that at some point after the final bell yesterday, someone broke into Simon Mooney’s locker and took all his fireworks from inside it. Simon Mooney is staggering white-faced from group to group, asking people if they have any information, but no one does; after all his gloating yesterday it’s debatable whether they’d give it to him even if they did.
The other big news is Miss McIntyre’s announcement in Geography class today of a possible field trip to Glendalough to see the U-shaped valley. This causes quite a stir. A U-shaped valley, made by a glacier! With her!
There was a time not so long ago when few people would have been much moved by the prospect of a U or any other shape of valley. Prior to Mr Ó Dálaigh’s departure for a gallstone operation, the only fact of interest anyone can remember learning in Geography is that there is a town in Turkey called Batman (pop. 131,986; chief industries: oil, food production). But all that changed when Miss McIntyre arrived on the scene. It’s like simply by pointing to things she can make them come alive – make them dance and sparkle, like the brooms and cups and so on in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice – and now the boys can’t understand how they ever found geographical features boring. This new-found interest in the world around them isn’t confined to the classroom either. Under her tutelage, previously non-committal boys, boys who could barely be brought to look at anything unmediated by an electronic screen, have been transformed into Taliban-like ecological zealots. They write furious letters to the directors of polluting companies; they excoriate mothers for driving the half-mile to the shops to buy one (solitary) filo pastry roll; they ruthlessly make away with anything recyclable that is left out of sight for even a moment (unopened cans of Coke, homework) and berate comrades over inefficient use of deodorant spray. Ruprecht, of course, says that these kind of piecemeal measures won’t have any effect, and that even if much more drastic action were taken, which it probably won’t be, Earth has more than likely gone past the point at which the environmental devastation of the last two centuries can still be reversed. But this falls on deaf ears.
‘M-maybe she’ll take us to the U-shaped valley and then we’ll never come back here,’ flushes Victor Hero.
‘She can make ice seem warm,’ Bob Shambles says dreamily.
But the biggest news of all comes just before lunchtime, when the boys emerge from History class to find that a rash of posters has appeared all over Our Lady’s Hall.
‘HALLOWE’EN HOP’
END OF TERM SECOND-YEAR MIXER WITH ST BRIGID’S
SOFT-DRINK REFRESHMENTS
ALL PROCEEDS TO CHARITY
Beneath these words is a crudely executed graphic of a Frankenstein’s monster jiving, soft drink in hand, beside an old record-player.
‘What the hell is a Hop?’ Mario says.
‘I think it’s like a dance,’ Niall says, frowning. ‘A kind of dance, from days of Yore?’
‘Or a dance for one-legged people?’ Geoff surmises.
‘It’s a Hallowe’en disco for the second-years from the two schools,’ Dennis says. ‘My brother told me about it.’
‘A disco?’ Skippy says.
‘They do it every year,’ Dennis says. ‘Everyone dresses up.’
‘Holy shit,’ Mario says.
‘This is excellent!’ says Niall.
‘A ghoul for every boy,’ Geoff says in his zombie voice.
Up and down the corridor boys are excitably making the same discovery, much to the chagrin of the Automator, who snaps at them to quit stalling and get to class, then realizes it’s lunchtime.
‘I’d better buy some condoms,’ Mario says. ‘This Hop will be a serious beavershoot.’
‘It’s going to be Spook-tacular!’ Geoff says in the voice.
‘Will you stop that?’ says Dennis.
‘Juster!’ Someone’s calling Skippy. It’s Howard the Coward, hailing him from across the hall. What can he want?
‘I wonder how many condoms I will need?’ Mario ponders as Skippy trudges away. ‘Probably I should get a couple of boxes, to be on the safe side.’
‘Make no bones about it –’
&nbs
p; ‘God damn it, Geoff –’
‘We’re going to have a wail of a time!’
Leaving the Automator’s office yesterday evening, Howard had little intention of following through on his promise to talk to Daniel Juster. The Acting Principal loved to issue orders, but that was usually as far as his interest extended, meaning that if Howard could just keep out of his way for the next couple of days, there was a good chance he’d forget their entire conversation. This seemed to Howard, who didn’t see why he should be lumbered with extra work, to be the best course of action – until this morning, when a very strange thing had happened.
He’d stayed up late the night before to finish Goodbye to All That, and in his second-year class today he decided to begin with a brief excerpt from the book before wrapping up the First World War and moving on to the Easter Rising. Graves’s account bore little resemblance to the barren history textbook. It fluoresced with imagery – the skeletons in the craters in no man’s land, picked clean by the rats; a wood full of German corpses, whose overcoats Graves brings back to his trench for blankets; the officers-vs-sergeants cricket game, with a rafter for a bat, a rag tied with string for a ball, and as a wicket, a parrot’s cage, ‘with the clean, dry corpse of a parrot inside’: every page contained some nightblack gem.
After reading aloud for a couple of minutes, Howard became aware of an unusual silence. Instantly he was on his guard. A silent classroom, in his experience, meant one of two things: either everyone had fallen asleep, or they had planned some sort of a trap and were waiting for him to stumble into it. When he scanned the desks, though, the boys appeared fully conscious, and there was no hint of impending attack. It dawned on him that this must be what is known as an attentive silence. Attempting to conceal his surprise, fearful of breaking the spell, he continued reading.
The book held their attention right up to the end; when the bell went, Howard had the giddying sensation of actually having imparted knowledge. It was an unexpectedly replete and heartening sort of feeling – so much so that when he spies Juster now, examining a poster for the Hallowe’en Hop, instead of turning in the other direction he decides to call him over. He watches the boy shuffle across the hall, and readies an avuncular smile.