Our Little Cruelties

by Liz Nugent

  I was so afraid of making an arse of myself. I pushed my sweater to my forehead and sang ‘Amazing Grace’. Without the acoustics of my bathroom, my voice was thin and reedy, but I could carry the tune and hold the notes. While I was singing I could hear people moving around the room, matches being struck, wine glasses clinking, and some low chatter continued. When I finished, nothing happened for a moment and then I tentatively lowered the neck of my sweater.

  Sarah jumped up and hugged me, and Carrie kissed me on the lips. ‘You’re really good, Luko!’ she said.

  Sean, the guitarist, said, ‘Do you want to be in our band? We won’t be singing hymns and shit like that, but you’ve got something unusual there. Everyone I know tries to sing like everyone else, but you sound like … you.’

  Sarah beamed at me. ‘You really should! Their singer just emigrated to Boston. They have gigs lined up already.’

  Sean looked at me. ‘One condition. You can’t fuck my sister, right?’ Sarah reddened and threw a cushion at him, and Carrie stretched her arm so that it encompassed my shoulder. I kept my promise not to sleep with his sister for at least a year, and that’s how the band started.

  Sean was the guitarist and the chief organizer, Alan was the drummer and Jamie was the bass player. We rehearsed in Sean’s dad’s garage, which was decked out with amps, a dartboard, a few traffic cones and a roll of off-cut carpet. The walls were lined with egg boxes to dampen the echo. I felt like I finally belonged. The lads were really kind to me, though they were shocked by my musical influences and thought I was being ironic until I brought along my entire record collection to rehearsals one day.

  ‘Right,’ said Sean, ‘we need to educate you.’

  They lent me their records and I listened to Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Queen, The Who, The Doors, Nick Drake, Django Reinhardt, John Coltrane, John Martyn and Pat Metheny among others. I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with these artists because Brian and Will had some of those same albums when we were growing up. I concentrated on the lyrics, though sometimes the singers screamed them so it was hard to make out what they were singing.

  In the garage, Sean might start with a little riff and then Jamie would join in and I’d hum something that fitted with the music. Gradually, the humming would turn into words that popped into my head and I realized that maybe I was a poet and not an engineer. When Dad had said I could make things, maybe he meant I could make songs. I skipped a lot of lectures over the next few weeks and worked on lyrics and my voice. Jamie taught me how to read music and, before too long, I could pick out the notes on the guitar I’d borrowed from Sean. I smoked joints with Alan, which allowed my mind to expand and tap into elements of consciousness that I hadn’t known were there.

  The strangest and best thing was that while I was working on these songs, the nightmares stopped. The woman in the woods who had haunted me since childhood disappeared. I had long ago learned not to mention these dreams. But, finally, I was released from them. The other side benefit to singing was sex. Girls wanted to sleep with me. I lost my virginity the night before our first gig.

  This gig was in the Baggot Inn and had been booked when the original singer was still with the band. We were called The Wombstones. I don’t know why or who made up the name. The others thought it made us sound edgy and dangerous. I thought it made us sound illiterate. Posters went up all over college and swarms of girls offered to help out with promotion. I was getting nervous as the day approached. It was one thing when it was just us in Sean’s garage, but it looked like this gig was going to sell out. There could be 200 people coming.

  Carrie asked if I’d get her and two friends on the guest list. I didn’t know what a guest list was, but Sean said it would be no problem. Sean asked what I was going to wear on stage. I hadn’t thought about any of this. He and Alan were going to wear eyeliner and spike their hair and they thought Jamie and I should do the same. Jamie thought that was ridiculous because he hadn’t signed up to ‘play with Duran fucking Duran’. In the end we all agreed that we could wear what we wanted and that we didn’t have to go for a uniform look. I wanted to wear my jeans and my usual jumper that Auntie Peggy had knitted. I felt comfortable in it. It had black and yellow stripes across the front and a red back. I’d worn it most days since she gave it to me for my last birthday and there was a hole in one elbow. My hair was long and curly. The girls I knew loved my hair so I didn’t think I should change that. But on the morning of the gig I went out and bought Doc Marten boots because everyone said they were cool.

  At the soundcheck in the venue, there were a few people milling around, bar staff and the house sound engineer. We soundchecked and got used to playing through a PA – it was louder than anything we’d tried before. We were going to sing seven of our own songs and three covers: Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and, for fun, a rocked-up version of the theme tune to Neighbours. Sean said we’d look like pricks if it seemed like we were taking ourselves too seriously.

  We stayed in a tiny dressing room upstairs above the stage, with beer crates for chairs, while the venue filled up. The others drank beer, but I felt sick and could barely swallow. I tried to do some vocal warm-ups, but my thin voice sounded strangled to me. Alan sparked up a spliff and handed it to me. ‘You need to relax, man. It’s only a gig.’ They had been playing together and with other bands for two years already but none of them had been the lead singer. That morning, Mum had given me her tuppence worth of advice: ‘Oh, your first concert is always awful, but you have to do it, before you get a second one. I think I had three gin and tonics before I went on and was way off-key by the second song. Of course, my first concert was with a full orchestra and not in a pub.’ Mum came to fame as the runner-up in a national song contest before I was born. She often told of how the winner of the contest had disappeared into obscurity while she’d had a long career, though her songs hardly got any airplay now and she didn’t write any of them herself.

  My new Doc Martens were tight and pinching me and I was sweating in my woollen jumper and we weren’t even on stage yet. The few pulls of the joint made me dizzy and I had a desperate urgency to empty my bowels. I scurried to the filthy toilet along the corridor, sweat now pumping from every pore. When I’d finished, I flushed the toilet and looked in the mottled mirror. Sean hammered on the door.

  ‘Luko, it’s showtime! Let’s go.’

  ‘Give me a few seconds,’ I said as I repeatedly rinsed my hands under the cold tap, trying to throw cool water down the back of my neck. My face was a pale sickly blue. I closed my eyes for a few seconds and, when I opened them, the woman from the woods was standing behind me in the mirror, grinning manically. I ran out of the bathroom, terrified and shocked, shaking my head. Sean grabbed me by the shoulders. ‘We’re going to be great. Rock the place, okay?’ And I didn’t want to tell him that my nightmare had just crawled into my day and that everything was going to be shit.

  A huge cheer went up as Alan led the others on to the stage. They banged out a few noisy chords while I stood shivering in the wings, rooted to the spot, afraid to open my eyes in case I saw her in the crowd. Sean came back off stage and pulled me forward into the spotlight. I peered through my fingers and the room was thronged. I was afraid of crowds. Prolonged whistling and cheering filled my ears. The set list was taped to the floor in front of my mic and I looked down at that because I was afraid to look at the faces.

  Alan clicked his drumsticks and Sean strummed. I missed my cue to sing and Jamie looped back on the bass to start again. I couldn’t open my mouth. I couldn’t breathe. On the third round, Sean edged over to me. ‘Get a grip, don’t fuck this up on us. Turn your back, if you need to, but sing the fucking song, man.’

  I turned to face Alan behind me, glowering over his drum kit. They did another round of the intro and I raised the microphone to my mouth. The voice that came out of me was not one I recognized. Alan looked shocked, though he smiled encouragingly. I sang the whole number in this d
eep timbre, but the lyrics were not the ones I’d written and rehearsed. They were words spewed with hate and violence and aggression. When Sean played out the final chords, I could not stop myself and repeated the last line over and over – ‘I need to kill you all … I need to kill you all … I need to kill you all …’ – and then the force that had occupied me left suddenly and I slumped to my knees and keeled over sideways on the floor.

  The crowd was rapturous and started to chant my name: ‘Luko! Luko! Luko!’

  I felt weak and empty. Sean and Jamie pulled me to my feet. ‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, but it’s working. Keep doing it,’ said Jamie. I looked at Sean in desperation.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he said, perhaps more sensitive to my sweat-soaked body, my blue-tinged skin and my obvious trembling.

  He ambled over to Alan and Jamie and they improvised some ambient jazz tune that had been dropped from the set list the week before.

  ‘Sort yourself out, but don’t leave the stage.’ He handed me a pint of lager. I drank it down in one go, eliciting another cheer, and then I leaned down and took off my boots and pulled the jumper off over my head. Bare-chested and barefoot, I turned to face the crowd. I nodded at Sean. I was ready.

  19

  1983

  I had been praying hard for Mum’s immortal soul because she had committed adultery and I didn’t want her to go to hell, but a few months after I saw her in bed with Nicholas Sheedy, when William tried to tell me I hadn’t seen it, I knew she was still carrying on with other men because I was looking out for it. I tried to talk about it to William, but he told me to shut up. He said Mum couldn’t help it if men fancied her and that it was Dad’s fault for not paying her enough attention. But the way she’d put her hand on my teacher’s knee or sometimes when she was on television and I’d see how she looked at other male guests on The Late Late Show, I knew she was having bad thoughts. I knew I had to make bigger sacrifices.

  Kneeling in the pew after the others had raced out of church after Mass, I stared up at Jesus on the cross, begging for some sign that my mother would not be damned to eternal fires. His blue eyes were raised heavenwards, his hair and beard were matted with blood and the crown of thorns was crammed on to his head like barbed wire. It must have been agony. Each arm was stretched out, impaled at the hands, and his feet were pulled together at the bottom of the cross, staked by a giant nail that pierced both ankles. I often stood like that on my bed for an hour or more, arms outstretched, feet crossed, trying to imagine the suffering that Jesus had endured for us.

  Halloween was imminent. Mrs Turner next door always threw a tea party for the local children. She was kind and decorated her house with woolly cobwebs and made fairy cakes with scary faces. All the children on our road attended and some of the parents came too, bringing sweets and games. We would all dress up in masks and bob for apples. Mr Mulcahy lit fireworks in the garden. It was always good fun. This year, William and Brian said they weren’t going – one of the older boys at the top of the road was having a fancy-dress disco – but I wanted to go to Mrs Turner’s.

  Dad was away and Mum was at home, but she never took much interest in Mrs Turner’s parties, though at that time of year she did allow us to take certain items from her dressing room – old costumes from shows she’d been in or elaborate hats. We had all worn her Robin Hood costume and her top-hat-and-tails outfit from when she’d been in Cabaret.

  Instead of using Mum’s stuff, I decided to work on a costume of my own. It only took a day or two and I mostly did it in the shed after school so that nobody would bother me and I could keep it a secret. Also, I could use Dad’s gardening gloves. Out of the autumn rose bush, I’d selected several thorny branches to form a crown. I didn’t actually want it to hurt so I had a cushioned thing for the top of my head. I had a hand towel to wrap around my waist, like Jesus had on the cross, but I wore my underpants beneath it and I was barefoot. I was really cold, but it didn’t matter. I defrosted some sirloin steak from the freezer and squeezed the blood out of it to run down my face. I could have done a fake beard, but I wanted this to be taken seriously. I needed everyone to see what Jesus had gone through for us.

  With a red felt-tip marker, I dug deep into the palms of my hands and on to the front of my feet. I had planned to stand in the pose of Jesus in Mrs Turner’s living room. I wasn’t going to take part in any of the games. I was going to stare at the ceiling and say nothing. I knew somebody would call my mother and she would understand then that I was doing this for her. I crept into the house and called out to Mum that I was going next door. ‘Great,’ she said, and I heard her turn up the volume on Blockbusters. She always turned up the volume on the TV when she didn’t want to be interrupted.

  I inspected myself in the hallway mirror. I was disappointed. The blood was real, but it wasn’t mine. I tiptoed back into the kitchen, took the cushion from my head and jammed on the thorny crown. It scratched and scraped but didn’t hurt as much as I expected. I took the bread knife from its block on the windowsill. I clamped my mouth shut while I stabbed at first one hand and then the other. The pain was real, but I needed to go deeper. I could really only manage a superficial wound on my right hand, but on my left, I jammed my hand up against the point of the blade. Blood poured from it. I steadied myself by the sink for a moment. The shock of the pain was awful and I hadn’t even done my feet yet. I felt dizzy when I bent down and then I realized I mightn’t be able to walk next door if I stabbed my feet. I decided against it and crept out of the back door, biting my lip and trying to stop tears of pain from spilling down my cheeks.

  I walked in through Mrs Turner’s front door. ‘Oh my word!’ said Mrs McCarthy from three doors down. ‘Luke Drumm, you win all the prizes today. That’s absolutely fantastic.’ She called the others to come and take a look while I moved into the front room and positioned myself beside the mantelpiece, looking heavenwards. ‘He’s bleeding,’ said Marian from number 42, who used to be in my class at primary school. Mrs Turner laughed nervously. ‘Well, Luke, that is something else, but aren’t you cold? I hope that fake blood is going to wash out of my rug!’

  I said nothing, just threw my arms outwards like I’d practised.

  ‘It’s real blood!’ said Marian as the drips from my left hand pooled on the dark-green rug at my feet.

  ‘Mother of God, she’s right!’ said Mr Mulcahy. ‘He’s bleeding. Get a towel, Martha, quick!’

  Mrs Turner swept all the sweets off the table, grabbed up the tablecloth and tried to wrap it round my hand. I tried to wrestle her away. I didn’t want my pose to be disrupted until Mum came to see it. But Mr Mulcahy lifted me off the ground and forced my hand down so he could wrap it in the tablecloth. Children were screaming and running around and the adults were all looking at me, horrified. I remained calm. I didn’t speak or yell or cry. I suffered in silence as our Lord had. Somebody had gone to get Mum from next door, and she arrived crying out, ‘Oh my God, what has he done now?’

  I smiled at her and showed her my hand. ‘I’m just like Jesus,’ I said. ‘I’m atoning for your sins.’

  The room went quiet for a moment until Mr Mulcahy volunteered to take me to A&E. Mum didn’t get it. She was explaining to everyone, ‘Oh, he’s a trial to me! Look, he can’t be in that much pain if he’s smiling. He takes the Bible very seriously. He’s completely daft. I don’t know where he gets it from. The other two are fine, you know …’

  I think I must have passed out at that point.

  Dad was by my side when I woke up in my bed later. He hugged me close. ‘Luke,’ he said sternly, ‘you have to get this Jesus stuff out of your head. You’re a good boy. You don’t need to prove yourself to your mother and me, or to anyone. From now on, you are only going to Mass once a week. And no more confession. You’ve become a little … obsessed by all this and it’s not healthy. Why would you stab yourself and hurt your beautiful hands? God wouldn’t want that. He would want us to be happy.’

  A few days later,
Dad and Mum and I had a meeting with Father Martin. He confirmed everything Dad had said. ‘Jesus wants us all to be happy, and you know, Luke, half those things you tell me in confession are barely sins at all. You really don’t have to atone for much.’

  ‘But what if I have to atone for other people?’

  ‘Other people have to make their own choices, Luke, we can’t be responsible for them.’

  I felt a weight lift off my shoulders. But only temporarily.

  At home, Brian and William were half amused and half impressed by what I’d done.

  ‘You’ll end up in a loony bin one day,’ said Brian.

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Mum said.

  20

  1997

  We don’t sit around in pyjamas all day, weaving wicker baskets. That’s about the only stereotype that doesn’t ring true. The rest is pretty accurate: the thrice-daily medicine cart that keeps us from harming ourselves and each other, the catatonia of some patients, the extreme hostility of others, the group sessions and the twice-weekly one-to-ones with your designated psychiatrist. I wasn’t in a locked ward and I had not been committed but that doesn’t mean I wanted to stay. I was simply too scared to leave.

  The record company were paying for this month-long stint, but they had said this was my last chance. The cancelled gigs and my erratic behaviour were untenable, apparently, and my old friend and manager, Sean, had made it clear that if the next smaller UK tour did not go well, he would be finished with me. I could hardly blame him. The meltdowns, manic episodes, psychotic highs and deepest lows had been a severe mental strain on everyone I worked with. There were several musicians who now refused to work with me. Tour managers had come and gone. I barely knew the names of half the people who shared the stage with me. And I needed a break. That’s how I saw these ‘residencies’. A rest for my body and my mind. I didn’t understand how other people could get along without them.