The Brothers' Lot (20 page)

There was a momentary lull as the boys tried to figure out exactly what to do. Then there was a slight shift in the silence. To a more experienced ear than Mr. Devlin’s it would have signaled danger, but he noticed nothing. It was that crystalline moment when the boys understood, intuitively as a unit, that Devlin did not know what he was doing and had not really prepared the class. Lack of total control was like a gasoline smell in the air and the boys could sense it almost immediately. They were on.

It was only a matter of time before Mr. Devlin dozed off. He had done it before and all the signs were there. There were the red eyes, the one day’s worth of stubble shading his cheeks, and the general hungover delicacy with which he moved. All they had to do was wait.

Finbar was surprised by the care with which the boys conducted themselves. He would have expected any hungover teacher to get the noisy treatment: the squeaking of boots on the floor, the crashing Geometry sets. It was not until Devlin actually dozed off and began to snore softly that Finbar understood: they were in a science lab with unlocked cupboards.

The first to go was McDonagh. All the others seemed to know what to do. They huddled over their experiments looking like they were working while McDonagh got on his hands and knees and made his way to the back of the lab. Lynch was the alarm giver and sniffed twice in quick succession when Devlin appeared to be waking. When the danger passed, Lynch gave one long sniff and the sounds of creeping among the workbenches resumed. Finbar watched one of the cupboards open as if by remote control and then McDonagh’s hand reached inside. There was a short fumble and then the boy’s arm withdrew, the cupboard door closed, and he crept back to his place. He put something inside his jacket and resumed his part in the tableau vivant of Young Boys at Science Experiment.

Scully got up next and slid down to the floor. He waited for Lynch’s all-clear sniff and then crawled silently toward the back of the lab. Finbar glanced round the class to see the intentness with which the boys were all cooperating. It was something he had not witnessed since he’d come to the school.

Again the cupboard door opened, but this time Scully emerged from behind the last workbench. He took a careful look at Devlin, then turned to look inside. When he shifted back he had his hands carefully cupped; instead of crawling, he tiptoed silently back.

As the boy slid onto the stool, Finbar could see the shiny liquid in his palm. Scully rested his hands on his knees and carefully cradled his precious cargo of mercury.

After that Egan went and seemed to take ages searching in a second cupboard before returning with a test tube filled with clear liquid. Then Lynch himself went while McDonagh kept watch. Finally, with five minutes to go before the end of class, all activity ceased and the boys waited patiently over their bogus unfinished experiments.

Devlin woke with a start when the bell rang and was foolishly reassured to see the boys all bent studiously over their experiments.

“Okay, that’s enough, we’ll write up the results on Thursday. Mr. Scully, you can clean the blackboard.”

“Fuck!” breathed Scully under his breath. “Take it,” he hissed to Finbar, and poured the mercury into his helpless hands. “Don’t drop it or you’re dead,” Scully added, and went to clean the blackboard.

Finbar sat uneasily with the heavy shiny liquid in his palms. He had heard mercury was poisonous but reckoned it was still safer to hold on to it than drop it.

“I need three volunteers to help me tidy up,” announced Mr. Devlin. It was a cursory, almost ironic nod toward encouraging participation that he knew would elicit no response. “Right then: Bradshaw, Clark, Hennessy, you’re all volunteered. The rest of you can go.”

“I’ll cover you,” said Ferrara to Finbar, and picked up Finbar’s bag.

With no time or inclination to argue, Finbar followed slightly behind the other boy and left the lab. Behind him he heard Scully’s low voice: “Slow down when you get to the door.”

At the door leading out of the lab and into the yard, Finbar slowed down. In front of him he saw the boys pause when they passed the first window. As he got closer he saw McDonagh lean toward a massive bowl sitting on the windowsill. He dropped what looked to Finbar like a piece of phosphorous into the bowl. McDonagh quickened his pace and moved on into the yard. Without slowing down much, Egan emptied the contents of his test tube into the bowl. “A colorless, odorless, tasteless liquid,” he intoned mirthlessly.

Jesus! If that’s acid …
thought Finbar, and would have stopped in his tracks had it not been for Scully right behind him who pushed him gently along.

“Into the custard,” said Scully.

Not knowing what else to do, Finbar deftly turned his hand over and watched the silvery globules of mercury sink into the bowl of cooling custard.

With a strange sense of exhilaration he walked on into the yard and was surprised when he stopped and found Scully was still beside him.

“Stupid bastards always have custard on Mondays,” said Scully without further preamble, “and they always leave it sitting out on the windowsill to cool. Don’t know how they’re not all dead with the shite that goes into it.”

“What did Egan put in?”

“Don’t know. Looked like acid. Wouldn’t be surprised what Egan would do these days. Gone in the head he is now. Coming for a smoke?”

Finbar gave a passably casual
why not?
shrug to disguise the soaring he felt, and he and Scully walked out of the small yard toward the smoking hideaway behind the hall.

Oh God! Oh God! Let me die now!
thought Finbar as he retched once more into the toilet bowl. Nothing came up except vile acidic spittle. His determination to persist with the task at hand—that of making himself sick again so he’d eventually get used to smoking cigarettes—would have been admirable had it been applied to something that wouldn’t leave him in an emphysema ward later in life. As women forget the pains of childbirth to ensure the continuance of mankind, so did schoolboys forget the misery of being sick from cigarettes to ensure the continuance of retailers of loose cigarettes such as the IRA shop.

Finbar blew some more burning snot out of his nose, spat again, and leaned back against the wall of the cubicle. He felt better now. He glanced up at the cistern above him in relief, greatly comforted by the cold-sounding gurgle of water inside it. It was the next best thing to a fresh breeze. As he looked at the wall above the cistern, it let out a creak and surrendered a chunk of plaster, which fell into the toilet bowl with a crack and a plop. Finbar stared at it, feeling, in his post-vomiting relief, a sense of heightened lucidity and appreciation of the smaller things. He looked on as little crumbs broke from the main piece settling in the bottom of the toilet bowl. Slowly the big chunk started to absorb the water and changed its color from institutional green to a slightly warmer olive shade, before finally sinking. Finbar watched in wonder as the reverse fresco of decay enacted itself in the toilet among his bile and spit.

“Hey, Bogman, the bell is gone. Better move or you’ll get a hiding,” called Scully from outside the cubicle.

“You all right now?” he asked when Finbar emerged.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“It’s no big deal.” Scully turned to walk away.

“How do you do it?” called Finbar after him.

“Do what?”

“Smoke and drink and all that. Don’t you get sick?”

“Oh yeah, the first few times. After that you get used to it. Most of the time. So? You okay now?”

“Yeah, I think so, but come here to me,” said Finbar.

“What?”

“I think there’s something weird about this place.”

“So? What do you want, a rubber medal?”

“No, I mean something creepy. Like when I was sent over to the monastery that day to get the spare leather. I saw Boland on the stairs. It was like he was listening to the walls and whispering to them. He was touching the walls like you’d pet a dog or something.”

Scully looked hard at Finbar. “You know they’re all gone in the head, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but this was different. I can’t explain. If you saw it you’d know what I mean. He was talking to the walls, humming to them. He was nearly crying.”

“So? Everyone knows he’s completely mental. They’re all mental. Welcome to Werburgh Street!”

Finbar couldn’t help but smile. This felt like something. It was a thawing feeling inside, a feeling that at least Scully was starting to see him.

“What the fuck are you laughing at?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on before we get snared for being late.”

24

F
inbar stood in the small shed with Scully, Lynch, and McDonagh. They all shivered against the April wind. “Did you see Mulligan in the yard this morning trying to stop the pigeons shitting on the railings?” asked Scully.

“Yeah, that was gas,” said Finbar

“Come here, did you hear what happened to Maher after they took him away?” asked Lynch suddenly.

“Attracta Maher told Imelda the law came to the house with a priest and a court order and told Mrs. Maher he was sent to Drumgloom for attacking that priest at the O’Rahilly mass,” said Scully. “Imelda is me sister,” he explained to Finbar.

“She’s a beaut!” beamed McDonagh.

“Shut up! She wouldn’t touch you with a barge pole,” said Scully.

“Maher never touched that priest!” said Finbar.

“That’s what you say. You’re not Father Fury and Brother Loughlin, are you? It’s what those fuckers say that counts,” muttered Scully.

“Drumgloom. Fuck!” said Lynch quietly. “They’ll eat him alive.”

“What’s Drumgloom?” asked Finbar.

“Industrial school in Navan. The worst. Like a reformatory only worse,” McDonagh informed him. “Some young fellah from Drimnagh hung himself there the year before last. Anto Rourke, who was in first year with us, got five years there for mitching off school. The Brothers there are real bastards. Much worse than these fuckers here. Most of them get transferred there out of schools like this for being too vicious. If Kennedy wasn’t still so sick, he’d probably be there by now.”

“Jaysus!” Finbar did not know Drumgloom but the words
industrial school
chilled him to the marrow. Boys in Cork had been sent away to the Oblates of the Impervious Heart of Herod for years just for throwing muckballs at the railway bridge.

“Yeah,” concurred McDonagh in a momentary slide into seriousness.

A cold silence descended on the boys and through it came the distant sound of the bell announcing the end of small break.

“Deadly! Latin next. Free class,” declared McDonagh gleefully.

“Gift!” added Lynch, his mind already racing with new ideas of what to do with the hinge he had removed from the lid of his desk.

“Yayyyy!” cheered McDonagh when Brother Mulligan shuffled in and closed the door. So far the coverage for Brother Kennedy while he recuperated from his heart attack had been numerous talks on the evils of drink from Father Flynn; Brother Loughlin repeatedly setting them bits of long division to do while he smoked and farted out in the corridor and periodically came in to leather someone at random; and endless classes of Larry Skelly telling them they should all become bread-van drivers and letting them do their homework while he read the horse-racing page of the
Morning Herald
. This promised to be another easy doss.

A free class with Brother Mulligan was always a bit of a giggle. First, he made everyone copy down the old Gaelic alphabet from the blackboard. The delicate curves of the Gaelic scribe were never designed to be reproduced using two-penny nib pens that dug and bit the coarse paper like rakes on wet grass. That invariably led to the amusing spectacle of Brother Mulligan correcting the copies and trying to hurt people with his leathering.

When the calligraphic tutoring had run its course, Brother Mulligan would perform his favorite party trick. He would pick up a piece of chalk in his shaky hand, hold it over the blackboard for a few seconds while he tensed and braced himself, and then, with a superhuman effort, he would channel all his shakes and quivers into one sudden flourish and leave behind on the blackboard a perfect circle. This ability genuinely impressed the boys, though there were rumors abroad that being able to draw a perfect freehand circle like that was a sign of complete madness.

Once the entertainment was over, Brother Mulligan would launch into what he saw as the vital lesson for survival in an ever-changing and puzzling world, one that could never be repeated too often: “What are the three things we must always be on the watch for if we are to keep clear of Protestants? How do we spot them?”

The boys had been through this dozens of times but none of them could be bothered to volunteer an answer. It was more enjoyable to watch Brother Mulligan wind himself up into a sweat of frustration.

“Ah, ye are useless. Ye remember nothing! If they came in the night and swapped yer parents for Protestant doppelgängers ye’d never even notice. Ye need to be on yer guard against them. They’ll sneak up on you and before you know it, you’ll be keeping all your old twine neatly bundled up and taking unnecessary pride in shining your shoes.

“What do we look for? What are the three key signs?”

The boys remained silent and did a passable show of appearing interested in the answer, though the main preoccupation was that there was only one more class after this until lunchtime.

“The yellah skin, the eyes too close together, and the quarter-past-nine feet. What are they?”

“The yellah skin, the eyes too close together, and the quarter-past-nine feet,” droned the boys in mimicking chorus. Finbar joined in leadenly, recognizing here some firmly held precepts of his mother’s.

“Good! Now what do we do when we see a Protestant?”

Again the boys remained impassive and silent.

“I’d have an easier time training chickens to ride bicycles! What we do when we see a Protestant coming is we cross the street and turn the back part of our scapulars to them. Are you all wearing your scapulars?”

“Yes, Brother,” they lied. No one but the most overmothered wore them. They scratched and got caught in your navel and the string would burn your neck if you had to walk fast or run. Finbar had thrown his into the back of his wardrobe after the first week of school. Anyway, no one believed that a medallion of the Blessed Virgin Mary hanging down your back and a leather pouch with a picture of Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly hanging down your front could really afford much protection against the type of things they most needed protection from, such as the gangs in Markiewicz Mansions and the Brothers themselves. People with sallow skin, close-set eyes, and splayed feet in clean shoes who kept old twine and did not venerate the Blessed Virgin were not really that much of a threat when it came down to it.