The Dead School (8 page)

By now Lally was on his knees, his legs having buckled beneath him. Raphael punched him mercilessly until his nose was nothing more than a bloody pulp and then dragged him by the scruff of the
neck over to the junior he had treated so badly. ‘Apologize!’ he demanded. ‘Apologize to the boy!’

‘I’m sorry!’ blubbered the bloodied Lally. Raphael hit him again. ‘I’ll never do it again!’ he instructed.

‘I’ll never do it again,’ choked Lally.

‘Let that be a lesson to you!’ snapped Raphael as he pushed him out of the way like the piece of dirt he was and then, buttoning his shirt, took his jacket from an admiring junior
and walked off alone in the direction of the main building.

It was exactly thirty-nine years later, the day after Neil Armstrong took a small step for himself and a giant one for mankind, that a thought struck Malachy Dudgeon as he was
walking past the grocery shop thinking about Cissie. It would have been wonderful if he had grown to like her again. If somehow it had become even remotely like the way it used to be between them,
walking along the shore and staring out at the yachts bobbing on the horizon and so on, but it hadn’t, for the old boatshed days were still with him and to tell the truth, if he had arrived
home to hear that she had had a stroke, it wouldn’t have bothered him very much. Of course, he was aware that it was wrong to think the like of that about someone who was supposed to be close
to you – but so what? She should have thought of that before she threw herself on the nets in front of the cowman, shouldn’t she? She ought to have given that some thought before she
started to make her little visits up to Dr Wilding. Sadly, however, she hadn’t and now it was too late. ‘Way too late, my friend,’ as Malachy now said to himself in his recently
remodelled American accent.

As for Cissie herself, she was more or less at her wit’s end as to know what to do about the way things had gone between them. Once he looked up to see her standing in the doorway of the
bedroom with her voice shaking, pleading, ‘Please, Malachy – I don’t know why it happened. Forgive me, for God’s sake – please!’ He looked at her for a long time
but he didn’t say anything. There wasn’t a muscle moving in his face. And his eyes – well they were just about the coldest she had ever seen. It was sad of course. But then, as he
had discovered some years before, there were lots of things that were sad, weren’t there?

In the end it did get so bad that Malachy began to feel a bit sorry for her. I mean she was so pathetic. Sitting there going through her tenth or eleventh box of Kleenex, practically throwing
herself at his feet. One day she broke down at the kitchen table and began to weep uncontrollably. She told him she had met Jemmy Brady up the town and sworn at him and told him that it was him had
caused all the trouble and she never wanted to see him again. ‘It will be all right from now on won’t it, Malachy,’ she wept. ‘Everything will be the way it used to be in
this house now that all that’s over.’ For a split second he felt so warm towards her that it was indeed like old times but it was only that – a split second and when it had passed
it might just as well never have happened at all.

Which suited Malachy just fine. For if on a Sunday morning in the hotel long ago, he had been afraid to whisper the words ‘I love you’ to his father, in case they would wither and
die on his lips, he knew one thing for sure and that was that he wouldn’t be having that problem ever again, for from now on it was bye bye love as far as he was concerned, be it with his
remorse-eaten mother or anyone else. He had more sense than to let himself go down that road again didn’t he oh yes but of course he did.

Not that it was all bad back in those days – indeed in many ways Malachy was happier now than he had ever been. For a start, Alec and his crew were no longer a problem,
having long since lost interest in him and now directing their attentions towards some other poor stuttering unfortunate whose mother with a bit of luck was making mysterious Sunday morning visits
to boat-houses. Jemmy Brady was still to be seen about the place but sad to say he was a shadow of his former self and if someone had told you that once upon a time he had been considered something
of a whizz kid in the prick department, all you would have been able to do was laugh your head off. Nowadays just about all Jemmy was able for was falling about the place with an old brown coat on
him and a bottle of whiskey in a paper bag, muttering and raving to himself: Not that Malachy gave two fucks what he did, for he was too busy enjoying himself. He spent long days in the café
listening to Donny Osmond and looking at women. Women who were never going to mean anything to him because of course he had too much sense for that. Sunny days on the fairgreen with the blue sky
over you and your whole life stretching out like a highway. ‘So – what’s the story?’ his buddy Kevin Connolly from The Terrace would say. ‘Where are we headed
tonight?’ and Malachy’d reply: ‘Let’s go hear Horslips in Carrick!’ Horslips were jigs and reels on speed as you boogied all night long and went half-crazy shaking
your head and Kevin Connolly yelled over at you ‘Shakin’ All Over!’ and man were you shaking all over or what! Then it was out into the warm air and an open field with the dawn
coming up as the Carrick women called, ‘You will come back and see us, won’t you?’ and you both cried, ‘Sure girls – see you next time OK?’ as you roared off
into the morning.

In many ways it was the Summer of Dreams and when the exams were all over and the call came to teacher-training college you just could not believe it. ‘Can you believe it?’ you said
to Kevin Connolly who flicked the cigarette and said, ‘You gotta be kidding. You a teacher? Man, it’s crazy. Now why would you want to do a thing like that?’ Malachy didn’t
know. And man, did he care. It was just another of those exams he’d done and if they were dumb enough to ask him to join the club, well then who was he to argue. As long as it got him out of
the town once and for all, that was fine by him. He sailed through the interview the following week but man did he feed them some bullshit about being devoted to a career of teaching children.
‘Whee-hoo!’ laughed Kevin Connolly as they fell out of the pub that night, ‘I gotta hand it to you – you sure can bullshit your way into things – Master
Dudgeon!’

The summer drifted by. In the café Donny Osmond smiled at you from the wall, a row of gleaming teeth. ‘Now why would you want to do a thing like that?’ asked Donny. And did
you know? Of course you didn’t. At seventeen you didn’t know and didn’t care. Why should you? You just wanted to climb the highest peak in town and cry out across the rooftops,
‘It’s over, man! I’m gone!’ and so you would be, a puff of smoke into the future and the past all bundled up and buried, kicked into the grave where it belonged. Kevin
Connolly and you got drunk, man you got so drunk and when you embraced he said, ‘It’s all yours now, man! You’ve got it all!’ and the tears, man, they ran down your
face.

The last days, maybe they were the saddest when Cissie tried her damnedest to raise it from the ground, what had once been between them. She sat there looking at him, knowing there was nothing
she could do now for she had done everything. She stared at him with her eyes so raw and red and said, ‘Do you remember the way it used to be, just you and me, the pair of us shopping up the
town. Do you ever think of them days now, Malachy?’

He said nothing.

The day he left Kevin stood in the town square by the purring bus and handed him a copy of
Midnight Cowboy
as he said goodbye. Malachy leaned out of the window and said, ‘Looks like
it’s goodbye, kid!’

Kevin shot him with a gun-finger and said, ‘Yep! You make sure and write me all about those Dublin chicks now – you hear?’

‘You better believe it,’ grinned Malachy.

The bus pulled out and Malachy strained to hear as Kevin called after it, ‘Master Dudgeon – can you believe it!’ and then that was that, goodbye town for ever I’m gone
and that’s the way it’s gonna be as trees and shops and other towns by the score sped past and Midnight Cowboy Joe Buck Malachy Dudgeon sailed on down the freeway of his mind into the
heart of the midday sun with the sound of Harry Nilsson singing ‘Everybody’s Talking’ ringing in his ears.

Way back before Harry Nilsson was a gleam in his father’s eye, on the 5th of October 1930 at the age of seventeen, Raphael Bell climbed out of the hired car that had
taken him from the station and, waving goodbye to the driver, turned and took his first look at the grounds of the training college which was to be his home for the next two years. As he walked up
the avenue listening to the birds singing in the sycamore trees, he felt he would faint with excitement. He could not believe that it was actually happening and he was at last embarking upon the
career that he knew now without doubt to be his true vocation. He registered at the main desk and was shown to St Brigid’s Dormitory, not unlike the one in which he had spent five years in St
Martin’s. When he found himself alone, he slipped to his knees and said a silent prayer to Our Lady. He felt like weeping he was so happy.

Outside the birds twittered in the twilight as bicycles sped homeward all along Drumcondra Road.

Malachy had arrived there too of course. But what he was looking at in the year of Our Lord 1973 was not exactly what had met Raphael’s eyes way back in those good old
days. He would have had a heart attack if he had seen what was going on; the place was swarming with women and all you could hear was rock music blaring out of the canteen. If the bursar who had
been in charge in Raphael’s time had seen them at the like of that, he wouldn’t have been long putting an end to it. He’d have run the lot of them out of the college, the whole
bloody lot, for if they weren’t prepared to dress and act like people who were in charge of children, and to attend to their Euclid and Ovid, then they weren’t worth having. That was
what he would have said. But there wasn’t anyone saying that now. As a matter of fact, there didn’t seem to be anybody saying anything about anything. By the looks of things, the place
had gone like everywhere else in Ireland these days. You could do what you bloodywell liked. Which indeed appeared to be the attitude of one Malachy Dudgeon who right now was doing exactly that,
sitting in the lecture hall chewing a pencil and staring off out the window watching the world as it made its way on by. The lecturer paced up and down with his clipboard and fixed his glasses on
his nose once more as he tilted his head to one side and said, frowning, ‘Rousseau says that children are not vessels to be filled.’ Malachy didn’t care what Rousseau said.
Outside two girls with folders and their hair tied back with flowery scarves sat on the steps. Their sweaters were knotted about their waists and they were laughing. The mature student sitting next
to Malachy took a dim view. ‘Drug addicts,’ she said, ‘for that’s all they are.’

Then they went back to their scribbling and Malachy took a look out at the adddicts. They were leaning against the flower beds, clutching their folders to their chests, still laughing away. The
taller addict’s skirt swished about her heels as addict number two nodded in agreement. The way she nodded said, ‘I’m cool. I’m just about as cool as you can get. Not
because I’m on drugs. I’m just cool – you know?’ Of course she was. She was a second year. Part of the cool bunch who draped themselves around the record player and looked
around the canteen at everybody else as if to say, ‘We’re second years – OK? We’ve done just about everything there is to do. All you got to do is make sure and remember
that. You just remember that and you’ll be fine. Meanwhile let me get on with smoking my drugs if you don’t mind.’ All day long they kept that record player going, just sitting
there and listening and looking cool. It wasn’t that easy looking cool you know. It wasn’t just any old bollocks who could do it. You didn’t jump up and shout ‘This is a
fantastic song!’ or ‘This is the best song this year!’ Oh, no – you couldn’t be seen doing that. What you did was hide in behind a big pile of hair and emerge every so
often to remark ‘Nice drumming that’ or ‘Like the guitar break there’. Then you vanished back into your haystack for another hour or so. Another thing you could do was peer
over your shades now and again and take a look around you like everyone in the place apart from your mates was some kind of human garbage. Then you chuckled to yourself as if to say, ‘What a
sad, pathetic bunch of miserable little people!’ before you flopped back into your chair, picking up an album sleeve and starting to investigate the back of it for interesting facts about the
bass player or perhaps some cryptic clues to something mysterious hidden inside the lyric sheet.

Meanwhile back at the notepads, the mature students were scribbling away like madwomen as the lecturer gave out some guff about Paulo Freire and a few other heads who reckoned they had the
lowdown on schoolkids. Malachy considered the blank vastness of his page and wondered should he stop chewing his pencil and get started. It seemed too late to bother now however so he decided to
draw some instead. He drew some addicts talking to mature students. ‘I hope there’s no drugs in these sweets,’ they said, ‘because if there is – we’re telling!
Aren’t we, Annette?’ Annette nodded and said, ‘Yes! Yes, we are!’ as her word balloon spread away out all over the page.

‘Oh, no,’ the addicts said, ‘there’s nothing in them – they’re just ordinary sweets.’

‘Thank heavens,’ Annette said, as the top of her head came flying right off and her friend went racing off down the road shouting, ‘Help! Help! They gave us drugs!’

Yes, there was no doubt about it, said Malachy to himself as he put the final touches to his work of art and the Philosophy of Education lecturer thanked everyone for coming, drug addicts or no
drug addicts, this college sure was one swell place to be on this brilliant, leaf-kicking, sun-streaming autumn day.

I mean just what was going on or who in the hell did Malachy think he was now, Jack Nicholson coming in the college gates sporting a pair of shades he’d just bought in
the Dandelion market in Grafton Street? Clicking his fingers and puffing on his rollup, well now, man, wasn’t he just the cheese. ‘Where’s that Joe Buck?’ he laughed aloud.
‘I said where’s that Joe Buck!’ Hell, I am one crazy motherfucker he said to himself and felt like jumping ten feet in the air as he made his way into lecture hall fifteen for
today’s lecture ‘Conker Men in the Classroom’.