The Dead School (30 page)

Man did she laugh as he sucked the match between his teeth and spun the chamber. ‘I’m sorry, honey,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing you can do or
say.’ He was wearing his Jack Nicholson shades. He flicked the match away. ‘I’ve gotta take the motherfucker out.’ He knocked on the door and out came Bell. ‘What can
I do for you?’ he said. Malachy sighed and shook his head. Then he took off his shades and repeated, ‘What can I do for you – well how about that!’ He was still laughing
when he stuck the gun in Baldy’s back, gave him a kick on the arse and told him to get the fuck inside. ‘You can’t do this to me! You can’t do this to me!’ was all you
could hear.

He gave him another kick up the hole and then got down to business. ‘Shout: I am a bollocks!’ he said to him and gave him a poke with the gun. For a minute it looked like he
wasn’t going to. ‘No, I won’t!’ he shouted. A few jabs more with the shooter put an end to that bullshit however and before long he was hopping about the place like
nobody’s business, shouting ‘I am a bollocks! I am a bollocks!’ for all he was worth.

After that he made them tea.

‘This tea is too weak,’ Malachy said. ‘Make more.’

‘Yes, sir,’ says Bell and off he goes.

By the time they were finished, there wasn’t a peep out of him.

‘I hope you’ve learned your lesson, asshole!’ snorted Malachy as he stuck the shooter in his belt. ‘Otherwise – you’re history! You got that?’

‘Yes, sir,’ says Bell and hung his baldy head.

‘Let’s go, girl,’ he said and laughed as he squeezed her hand and they headed off up Grafton Street to Stephen’s Green.

Another favourite after a belt of the afternoon medication when you were feeling nice and woozy and smiling at nothing out the window was Marion and yourself driving around in
a beat-up truck with a head in a vegetable crate in the back, except that this time it wasn’t Alfredo Garcia’s, it was poor old Bell’s. Boy was he getting a hard time these days!
Malachy shifted gears and shouted, ‘Hey, Meester Bell – how you like eet back there? You theenk ees nice being in a box, no?’

‘Let me out! Let me out!’ shouted Bell. ‘You can’t do this to me!’

‘Maybe you should have thought a leetle beet about that before you fuck around with me in your school, no?’

Man, what a laugh that was! Cruising in the dust and the head just going crazy in the heat. Especially when they stopped at a roadside diner and all it could see through the bars of the crate
was Marion and Malachy sipping an ice-cold beer as they called ‘So how you feeling now, Mr Bell? You feeling OK in there?’ and gave each other a kiss to drive him twice as mad. It was
crazy. It was a crazy dream.

Raphael and Malachy had both retired from society in or around the same time, and now, as the minutes turned into days and the days turned into months and the first year came
and went, it was hard to say which of the pair of them was the worst. I suppose to Malachy’s credit, if he did shuffle about the place with a big fat mopey head on him, at least he
didn’t keep his room like a rathole, which was all you could call No. 53 Madeira Gardens these days. Yes, it was a right old dump now and no mistake. Damp streaks on the walls, cobwebs on Our
Lady’s eyes, rotten fruit and stale bread in the kitchen, not to mention the hundreds of empty bottles that were lying about the place. A sorry-looking tip now and no mistake. Not that its
owner was any better. A right-looking candidate now to be running any school, private or public or dead or alive or any other kind.

You don’t use a stick or a pointer in the Dead School. Instead you use big old-fashioned iron tongs. That soon puts manners on the boys. Raphael stood at the blackboard
and roared. He slammed the heavy tongs-pointer down on the desk again and again. ‘No! No! No! There are
not
five sevens in forty two!’ He wiped the gleaming beads of sweat off
his forehead with the flat of his hand and shook his head in exasperation. There was a bubbly froth on his mouth as he looked up and yelled, ‘What are you doing Connolly for the last time do
you hear me – put that pencil down! You needn’t think you’ll come in here with any of your lip for by God I’ll put the smirk on the other side of your face and don’t
think I won’t! You won’t do it here, indeed by God you won’t! You’ll not get away with anything you want here my friend – if that’s what you want go on down to
Evans. She’ll let you do whatever you like! Divorce – of course you can, young Connolly! Drugs – would you like some? Of course! I happen to have some right here in my handbag. Is
that what you want, Connolly? Is that the way you want to behave? Well you won’t! Not here. Not in my school, my friend!’

The tongs came sweeping down again in a huge arc and nearly broke the table in half.

When he wasn’t beating algebra and the history of Ireland into his charges, Raphael would wander about the house in a half-daze. He’d sit there in the kitchen
chuckling to himself, thinking what a fool he had been all those years ago to believe that he was important. He knew now how important he was. Just about as important as one of the spots on the
heel of mildewed bread he was eating for his lunch, as John McCormack sang his heart out on the old gramophone the way he had done that day when
Glorificamus
was beamed into the sky and one
million people sank to their knees, uttering those words which Raphael had whispered to the young woman he had loved so much,

and she had turned to him and held him close, his own dear Nessa. Now dead. In the grave. Yes. Her face eaten away. Not Nessa any more.

The record played all day long. That was why it was in bits. There were so many scrapes and scratches on it you couldn’t hear half the words. Not that Raphael cared. From her wooden
plinth, Our Lady looked down upon him with pitying eyes. ‘What are you looking at?’ he said and started chuckling again. They thought they were going to break him completely. They
thought they were going to wreck this school too, didn’t they? But they weren’t, you see – that was where they were wrong. He laughed. ‘Oho no!’ he said. ‘Your
wrecking days are over, my friends! Well and truly over – make no mistake about that! Do you hear me?’ he barked and then, when he was satisfied, threw the rest of the bread away and
went back to class.

To tell you the God’s honest truth, Malachy would have been just as happy to stay in the hospital for the next ten years, for by now he was well into the swing of things
and there was nothing he liked better than smoking his roll-ups and listening to his records, then off for a walk around the grounds and back in to watch telly or just sit by the window and dream
away. But the doc was having none of it and said that eighteen months was more than enough for anyone to be stuck in a place like this so once again it was the boot for Mr Dudgeon and down the
avenue of Friern Barnet Mental Hospital he went, off on his travels once more. They got him a flat in Stoke Newington and a job in a pub in Camden town. The job was good for a while but then one
day he let a heap of crates fall and they told him to get the fuck out he had nearly killed the barman. But he didn’t mind. ‘Fuck you too, man!’ he said back to them. What did he
care? This was London town for Christ’s sake! Jobs were ten a penny. You could leave one and walk into another the same day for Christ’s sake.

But he didn’t stay in the next one very long either. He was supposed to pack hamburgers into boxes, and for a while it was OK. Then one day he just didn’t bother going to work. In
the end he got fed up altogether going looking for jobs. He knew he could exist on the dole and the allowance they gave him for the flat so fuck it he said to himself and just spent the day smoking
and listening to his records. He listened to them all day long. Horslips and Mott the Hoople. Mott the Hoople sang the songs of summer’s end, when you drifted through the college grounds with
your sweater knotted and your folder under your arm and you didn’t give a fuck about anything in the wide world.

Outside London heaved as Malachy tried to steady the roll-up in his hand.

The day he met Chico coming out of Piccadilly Circus tube, he couldn’t believe it. It was only when he heard him speak that he believed it was him at all. ‘Hey,
Malachy – how are you doing for fuck’s sake!’ Chico said. They went to a pub and Chico told him they’d all long since left the squat. The Prince, believe it or not, was back
studying at university. Chico himself was working for Lloyd’s as an insurance underwriter. ‘The suit, man!’ said Malachy. ‘I can’t believe it. You look like me in my
fucking teaching days!’

‘I guess,’ laughed Chico as he downed a lager. Then he patted his briefcase and said, ‘Well, I gotta go. It was great to see you, Malachy. You mind yourself now – you
hear?’

The sun was streaming in the plate-glass window as Chico vanished into the crowd. Punk music blared from the jukebox and all about Malachy orange-haired youths in tartan struck poses and snarled
at nothing. Malachy felt the warm, comforting arms of four pints around him and smiled as he looked at himself in the mirror. His long, lank greasy hair was way past his shoulders. Sure it was
crazy to be wearing a green army surplus greatcoat on a blazing hot summer’s day. But who cared? Who cared what was crazy to wear on a hot summer’s day, blazing or otherwise, as he
ordered another pint and said to the punk beside him, ‘The Clash, that’s not music, man. Horslips – now there’s a band, there’s a fucking band, man!’

Inside the cinema, Malachy was half-asleep. Beside him an old man snored with his head tilted back on the seat. Coming from the screen, in the distance he heard the sound of a
ship’s horn and through bleary eyes that had not closed the night before he watched the grey fog drift over the lapping water. There was something out there, just floating along with all the
time in the world. At first it seemed to be a dolphin or a seal, bobbing with an easy leisured rhythm. Then the stranger standing along the wharf just staring out to sea saw that it was the body of
a young girl slowly drifting toward him. She was so pale. Hardly more than a child. Her white body nudged the cold stone as the stranger perplexedly stroked her bloodless cheek. The pale tremor of
the ship’s horn sounded again and in the silence broken only by the occasional creak of the rigging and the swaying hawsers, the stranger whispered abstractedly to the torch-bearing
patrolman, ‘Who do you think she was?’

For a long time nothing passed between them and then, frantic, the stranger gripped his lapels and pleaded with him, ‘Please – who do you think she was?’

The patrolman gently eased him away and as he knelt by the inert, eye-glazed body, he tipped back his cap. ‘Christ knows, mate,’ he sighed. ‘We pull at least one of these out
of the river every week.’

The oily water licked her fingers. The stranger could not hold back the tear that moistened his eye. The patrolman said something to him but he did not hear it. He was searching for some
impossible word or words that would somehow make her live, smile again. But he could not find them. When he raised his head to look again, the patrolman was gone. The echo of his footsteps
lingered. The girl’s lips were frozen blue. He would have given all he had to know what her words might have been, if they told of the vast grey oceans of the world where even now so many
like her drifted unnamed, each coming slowly into port like empty vessels after wasted voyages, fetched up without a sound in the vast, unknowing silence.

Our Lady looked down at Raphael and said she was sad because he hadn’t bothered to bury Setanta. He just laughed at her, however. He said if she was so sad about all
these things, why hadn’t she done something about them, like she was supposed to. It wasn’t much good coming along when all the damage was done. Anyway, when he had first noticed that
Setanta wasn’t moving and was probably dead, it had occurred to him to bury the animal. But then he went and forgot all about it and by the time he did remember, it was already too late, for
what had once been a grand old cat growing old gracefully was nothing so much as a pile of mucky goo and moving maggots lying beneath the kitchen window. Of course it was sad but there was nothing
he could do about it now, was there, no matter how much she whinged and looked at him.

Raphael opened another bottle of Jameson and switched on the radio. Leo Maguire’s merry voice floated out of the wireless into the warm summer air, ‘This is
The Walton
Programme
, your weekly reminder of the grace and beauty that lie in our heritage of Irish song – the songs our fathers loved!’ Of course Leo Maguire came floating out – who
else would you expect? Except that he didn’t. He did in his hat, because he was dead. Like everything else. But Terry wasn’t dead. He most certainly was not! ‘Hi!’ he said.
‘This is Terry Krash with the sixty-second quiz! Have you all got your pencils and paper ready?’ He wanted to know what country Delhi was the capital of. Raphael snorted as he slugged
his whiskey. ‘Are you all ready, boys?’ he scoffed. ‘Have you all got your pencils and paper ready? I mean – it’s such a hard question!’ ‘Norway,’
replied the caller and Raphael spluttered the whiskey all over himself. Next, says Terry, can you tell me what Hitler’s first name was. ‘Heil,’ the caller answered. Yes indeed, a
lot of bright people on the
Terry Krash Show
today. But then, Terry was a very clever man himself, wasn’t he? Of course he was! He was one of the first to interview Evans! He was
clever enough to see that she was going places. Running for election now, as a matter of fact! It wasn’t enough for her to wreck schools you see – oh, no. That was just to start her
off. When she had achieved that, she would move on to bigger and better things. Which indeed she did. Now you couldn’t open a paper but there she was – give your vote to Marie Evans! A
big rosette and a happy smiling face. She said Ireland was moving forward with her. Of course it was! She was Mrs Evans, wasn’t she!