The Brothers' Lot (24 page)

Brother Kennedy turned and saw McDonagh standing at the end of the workbench.

“What?” asked Brother Kennedy, bewildered.

“An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leabharlann?” repeated McDonagh more urgently.

Kennedy continued to stare at him.

McDonagh started to make little jigging movements and tried again: “An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an liathróid?” he tried hopefully. (May I go to the ball?)

In time, with Brother Kennedy’s gradual understanding that the word McDonagh was grasping for was in fact
leithreas
(toilet), McDonagh’s I’m-about-to-piss-myself dance became more vigorous.

“Have you learnt nothing at all ever?
Leithreas
is the word. Get out to the line!”

“But Brother, I’m bursting!”

“Out to the line before I—”

Kennedy was interrupted by a long rasping fart from the other side of the lab. He turned to pinpoint the source and McDonagh took his opportunity to get out to the line while the getting was good. Egan, despite his already precarious position, could not help himself and started to rock with suppressed laughter.

“Who did that? Who was that animal?” yelled Brother Kennedy. There was a short silence ended by a higher-pitched aftershock of a fart. Egan could not help it; the tears were streaming down his face.

“Do you think that is funny, you insolent little pup?” shouted Brother Kennedy as he turned and grabbed Egan’s hand.

He was just about to deliver the second blow to Egan when he was interrupted by Rutledge: “An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leathlá?” (May I go to the half day?)

Brother Kennedy stared at him in disbelief: “
Leathlá? Leathlá?
What are you talking about?

“The jakes, Brother. I have to go to the jakes.”

“Jakes? Jakes?
I’ll
jakes
you! Out to the line, you ignorant pup!” He moved across the room and delivered four stinging blows on each hand to everyone on the line. The sweat poured down his glowing face. He had just finished when Brother Boland’s handbell rang out from the yard. It was noon and time for the Angelus.

Brother Kennedy pocketed his leather, turned to face the ever-suffering Christ on his cross perched above the blackboard, and blessed himself. Reluctantly the boys stood up. A lot of indifferent and inaccurate blessing ensued, and they were off.

“The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary,” wheezed Brother Kennedy.

“And she conceived of the Holy Ghost,” murmured the boys, dragging each syllable out for all its leaden weight.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee / Blessed art thou amongst women / And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus,” struggled Brother Kennedy, bowing his head deeply.

“Holy Mary, mother of God / Pray for us sinners, now / And at the hour of our death, Amen,” chanted the boys.

“Behold the handmaid of the Lord,” intoned Brother Kennedy.

“Be it done unto me according to thy will / Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee / Blessed art thou amongst women …”

“And blessed—” Brother Kennedy stopped abruptly and seemed to go rigid. “Is the fruit,” he croaked, and clutched his chest. A weird choking, collapsing sound came from the back of his throat and he buckled against the door. The boys could see his face going from red to purple as he gasped for breath. Kennedy flailed and gurgled, then stumbled and grabbed onto the top of Lynch’s desk.

“Is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus,” came Egan’s voice from the back of the class.

Slowly, reluctantly, Egan’s intention made itself clear. At first it was only Scully, Lynch, and a couple of others, but gradually more voices joined in: “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our DEATH, Amen.”

“And the word was made flesh,” blurted Egan, trying to keep his voice as steady as possible, suddenly coming to the full realization of what he had just set in motion. Brother Kennedy slumped to the floor.

“And dwelt amongst us,” answered the rest, Lynch’s voice now towering above the others.

Finbar’s guts sang. The back of his neck ran with sweat. His mind flooded with fire and the sound of heavy metal doors. This was so wrong. His breathing tightened. He closed his eyes and willed it all to stop. He knew it would not. This was real; the most real and terrifying thing he had ever been caught up in.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” continued Egan, speeding up a little. Brother Kennedy had gone very pale and his lips were turning blue. His hand slipped from Lynch’s desk and fell limply to the floor. Egan hesitated.

“BLESSED ART THOU AMONGST WOMEN!” prompted Lynch.

“And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus,” concluded Egan.

In the silence before the response there was a worse one, the no-sound-at-all from Brother Kennedy.

The moment froze and hung in the air like the screeching, rending second before a thunderclap. Kennedy retched and choked and his right hand flailed in the air.

“What’s that, Brother? You’ll have to speak up, you miserable bastard,” said Egan, and stood up. This was not just badness. Egan had gone somewhere beyond reach. He wanted only vengeance. “Are ye all right there, Brother? Can we get ye anything? A kick in the head maybe?” Egan’s voice carried through the unbreathing silence around him like a scream.

Brother Kennedy struggled to speak and turned purple. The spittle rolled from his lips and down his chin.

“Are ye dead yet, ye bastard?” asked Egan. He was oblivious to the others who now watched in open-mouthed horror.

Brother Kennedy choked and gasped in a twitching heap on the floor. He stopped moving and then shuddered once more and was still.

A new layer of silence fell over the class. It was momentous, irreversible, and frightening. Boys moved forward to look at the inert heap of the Brother on the floor. He was done.

“Fucking bastard,” said Egan quietly.

Steeled by this response, the others sat back down in their places. Egan moved to the door, then turned and faced the rest of the class, his eyes two stony points of purpose that glinted with unholy energy in his weirdly calm face. His was the dreadful energy of someone with nothing left to lose. He started rubbing Kennedy’s lines off the blackboard and addressed the rest of them.

“Mr. Devlin didn’t come in. We were waiting for him when Brother Kennedy came in,” he began, his voice catching with invented upset and shock. “He was asking us questions about photosynthesis and suddenly he started coughing. We didn’t know what was happening. Then he started choking.” Egan’s voice was taut with emotion. He moved to the workbench and casually filled a beaker with water. “Brother Kennedy asked me to give him some water but before I gave it to him he just kind of collapsed.” The boy calmly poured a little water on the floor in demonstration and dropped the beaker beside Kennedy’s inert shape. His voice was now strained with suppressed hysteria and tears expertly welled up in his eyes.

Instantly some switch in Egan seemed to click and he looked fiercely at the rest of the class. “That’s how it happened. Right? Right, Scully? Right, Lynch? Cos we’re all in it now,” he said in a low voice.

“Right then. Turn on the waterworks and go for help,” he added brightly, then ran out the door and down the corridor. “Help! Help! Quick! Help!” His footsteps and the tears in his voice echoed through the monastery and covered the shriek of twisting wood as the stairs in the bell tower writhed and torqued.

28

T
he bowels of the earth,” intoned Mr. Pollock, hefting the hunk of rock in his palm. He walked distractedly to the window and looked out into the haze. “On a clear day you can see Moscow from here.” This was his token gesture to what was supposed to be Geography class. “What did I say, Mr. Leake?”

There was silence. Mr. Pollock spun around on his crepe-heel with a squeak and glowered at where Leake was all too obviously not sitting.

“And where might our friend Mr. Leake be today? Some snooker hall? Police custody?”

“His ma died last night,” said McDonagh from the back of the class.

“Ah, I see,” murmured Mr. Pollock as if this was all part of some childish plot to make him look stupid. “Well then, Mr. McDonagh, perhaps you would like to tell us what I said?”

“And where might our friend Mr. Leake be today? Some snooker hall? Police custody?” repeated McDonagh.

“No, Mr. McDonagh, sor, before that.”

McDonagh looked blankly at the teacher. He had not been paying the slightest attention.

“Hmmmm,” mused Mr. Pollock, giving the signal for a free-for-all.

“Sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir,” hissed the boys in counterfeit eagerness to answer as they waved their hands around in the air.

“Well, Lynch. It is not often we see your hand above your head except when you are throwing stones at passing buses. Pray enlighten us, sor.”

Lynch stood up, hands by his sides like some well-behaved Dickens urchin, and barked: “The bowels of the earth. On a clear day you can see Moscow from here, sor!” What Mr. Pollock could not see was the sheet of paper Lynch had stuck to his own arse that said
Fuck Pollock
in bright red letters.

“Very good, sor. You may sit down.”

“Thank you, sor!” replied Lynch, and sat down.

Brother Cox came to the door and tapped gently on the glass panel. The teacher nodded back conspiratorially.

Mr. Pollock then beckoned silence. “We will be going to the oratory now to pay our respects to Brother Kennedy, so I want no blackguardism. We will make our way up the stairs in silence and then you will wait for me at the oratory door.”

The boys stood outside the closed double doors of the oratory in a disorderly huddle. Mr. Pollock squeaked up the stairs so slowly that there was barely a trace of movement in his gown. When he got to the landing he held his arms up over his head to part the boys in front of him. They shuffled back and let him through. He opened the door a crack and peered inside.

“We shall be entering shortly,” he announced to the boys as if they were waiting expectantly for every tiny development in this outing. While they waited Mr. Pollock weaved his way through, ordering the tucking in of a shirt here, the tightening of a tie there, the straightening of unruly hair here, the removal of a smirk from the face there.

“As if the dead shite is going to be looking,” muttered Scully under his breath.

The door opened and Brother Cox’s red leather face peered round it. Mr. Pollock pushed the boys nearest the door back to allow for the egress of those inside the oratory. Brother Cox stood back from the door and watched his charges file out.

“Is it a good show?” whispered McDonagh to one of the boys leaving.

“Deadly. Laugh a minute,” whispered the other boy and rolled his eyes skyward.

Mr. Pollock stood by the door and ushered the boys in with a flourish of his right arm. They filed in and stood there in an uncertain maul.

“You will be seated in the pews,” called Mr. Pollock from the doorway.

The seating options were severely limited by the ragged scaffolding that Dermot McDermott had erected to repair the ceiling. Out of deference to Brother Kennedy’s lying in state, repairs to the oratory had been suspended and all of McDermott’s tools gathered safely away under lock and key in the basement. Of the pews that were left in place, the backmost ones filled first. Only the physically weak or the devout ended up in front.

Before the altar stood Brother Kennedy’s open coffin on a shiny liturgical-looking trolley. From a seated position you could just make out Kennedy’s red nose peeking above the edges of the coffin. It did not look as red as usual, more like a wax apple in a window than the nose of a bad-tempered reformed boozer.

Mr. Pollock stood beside the coffin and blessed himself ostentatiously. At the signal the boys knelt down in the pews, surprised by the unusual softness of the kneelers.

“We will say a decade of the rosary for the repose of the soul of dear departed Brother Kennedy,” announced Mr. Pollock.

He rattled on, followed by the ragged response of the boys. As if lulled by the sounds of Erse devotion to the Blessed Virgin, Finbar found himself staring at the end of the coffin and putting his eyes out of focus. When he was younger he had been able to drift deep into himself by fixing his stare like this. The room would grow larger and more distant while the detail of the fixed point would sharpen to an almost microscopic intensity. It sometimes used to feel like he was floating and sailing downward into an ever-expanding self and receding from the growing world. As he stared at Brother Kennedy’s coffin now, the only effect it had was that his eyes watered and he had to blink. There was no drifting away from the reality of this moment. His stomach tightened and he began to twitch his right leg rapidly. He found himself praying; at first half-heartedly mouthing the words and then gradually seizing on the broad vowels and the hard consonants in the hope of riding away on their sound to somewhere that was not here and sometime that was years from now when all of this was some faded memory.

Scully’s mind drifted through the blur of words around him and down the front of Sharon McGoldrick’s blue bank clerk’s uniform. There it dwelt on the alluring bulges of her soft, heavy-looking breasts. For two weeks now he had been dawdling on his way home to run into her. She wore lipstick and high heels when she went out on Saturday nights, clattering down their grim little street and away into the mysterious world that her three years of seniority over Scully and a job entitled her to. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Scully still harbored the fantasy that, with a little persistence, he could get her to go down to the canal with him.

Lynch was busy picturing himself in front of Stone’s lumberyard. The gate was wide open and there was no one in sight. The box of matches in his pocket sang with promise and joy. His mouth watered at the imagined smell of burning resin. He could almost taste the sweet wood smoke already.

Brian Egan sat tight-lipped and pushed hard with his stomach muscles. This was something he had become good at. The panic and the shouting would well up inside him and he would push it back down with his diaphragm. Smalley Mullen counted the three warm pennies in his palm over and over, and McDonagh wondered if God was listening and, if so, did he speak Irish. Through all the activity, the closest thing to prayer was Finbar’s fervent wish that none of it was really happening. Finally the decade of the rosary was over.