Unravelling Oliver (10 page)

My earliest memories are confused. A dark room in a Gothic house. I was alone for most of the day, but sometimes an old lady gave me food and was kind. Her name, I think, was Fleur, or perhaps that is just a name I gave her. I remember being told that I must keep myself tidy because my father was coming up to see me, but I accidentally spilled some red juice on my shirt and I wasn’t allowed to see him as a result. Fleur was French, and I think I may have spoken French before I spoke English. She taught me to read a little in both languages. She hugged me sometimes, and called me her
pauvre petit cœur
. I recall my father came to my room one time and Fleur was nervous. He stared at me and then roughly pulled at me, examining my hair, my teeth. What was he looking for? I cried then, and he shouted at the woman and left the room, slamming the door behind him.

Fleur told me that my father was getting married to a lady called Judith. I saw her once from the top of the stairs. She was beautiful and very fair. I remember wishing that I could be blond like her. She did not see me and I never spoke to her. I was not allowed to attend the wedding.

My next memory is of Fleur packing a suitcase for me, and she was pretending to be happy but her eyes were wet. She told me that I was going on a great adventure and that I would have lots of playmates. I was excited, but at the
gates of the boarding school I realized that she was not coming with me, and I grabbed her legs and begged her not to leave me there, but a gentle priest lifted me in his arms and distracted me with a toy truck, and when I turned to show it to Fleur, she was gone.

I was one of the youngest boys in the school, but I settled in well. I was not used to much attention and was mesmerized by the constant bustle of activity. I was not so homesick as the other boys, because, as I now know, one is not sick for home, but for the people in it. I pined a little for Fleur, but not too much. I was not the most popular boy and I was not at the top of the class, but I tried my hardest. I heard from other boys about living with mothers and fathers and siblings, and I came to understand that fathers were often stern and that the only way to appease them was to get good report cards.

But regardless of how hard I studied and how good my report card was, I failed to win my father’s approval.

I was not permitted to go home during the holidays and rattled around with the priests for the summer months. Every other year, my father would visit and the priests and I would scrub up in preparation. They were as in awe of him as I was, because it was a diocesan school and my father was in control of the finances. The school depended upon his decisions for funding. I would sit on one side of the headmaster’s desk, and my father would stand behind me, refusing to sit or take tea. I would be as still as I could, but could not stop my hands from buttoning and unbuttoning my shirt cuffs. Father Daniel would tell him that I was doing well, even when I wasn’t. My father would ask to inspect my report cards and enquire about my general
health and then he would leave, without touching me or looking in my direction. Father Daniel was embarrassed for me and would try to make a joke of my father’s distance.

‘Isn’t he a busy fella, your dad? Eh?’

It was Father Daniel who told me that I had a younger brother, Philip, born a year after my father and Judith wed. He is blond like his mother. He joined the primary school as a day pupil when I was in the senior boarding school. I watched him grow up in a way, because I could see my father’s house from a window on the top corridor and I had an almost permanent loan of Stanley’s binoculars, with which I spied on my father’s new family. I watched my brother come and go from my father’s house; watched Judith pottering in the garden; watched them all out in the driveway, admiring my father’s new car together. I envied Judith and Philip.

School sports days were a particular kind of torture. In the first few years, when I thought my father might actually turn up, I tried my hardest in the weeks leading up to the event, rising early and doing extra training. If my father would not acknowledge my academic achievement, I thought perhaps he might be impressed by my athletic prowess. In the early days I won medals and trophies every year, but my father never appeared.

The other boys’ families would descend upon the school, the mothers dolled up and reeking of perfume so strong that it would make your eyes water, accompanied by the fathers in their highly polished cars. There would be sulking or boisterous siblings, and small babies swaddled
in pastel shades and shrieking and tantrums. Significantly, there would be a great deal of hugging and affectionate ruffling of hair and manly handshakes. And after the sporting events, there would be a grand picnic on the lawns, where the families would sit together in huddled groups. Father Daniel did his best to distract me from my isolation on these days, employing me in tasks of ‘great importance’. Even when I did not win a medal, he would single me out for special mention.

I never gave up hope that my father might one day remember me. In my fantasy, he suddenly realized that he was wrong about me and that I was not a bad boy. He would come to the school and take me home to live with him and tell me that I was a wonderful son.

And then in my penultimate year at St Finian’s, I was overjoyed finally to see my father arrive in a black Mercedes with Judith by his side. They could have walked, but I think the car was a status symbol that needed to be displayed. They parked up in the lower car park and I ran down the lane towards the car, my heart pounding, barely hoping that my fantasy might become reality. My joy turned to bitter dismay when I saw Philip climb out of the car behind them and I remembered that my father was there for him, for Philip. My pace slowed and I stopped in the middle of the lane and did not know whether to turn back or not, but it was too late. My father looked up and saw me. He nodded quickly at me and raised his hand, and I thought for a moment that he was summoning me, but in the same instant he looked over at Judith, who just looked startled, and what could have been a wave of acknowledgement revealed itself to be a gesture of
dismissal and I knew I was not welcome in their company. For the rest of the day, I feigned illness and retired to the infirmary until the festivities were over.

The following year, I did not enter any event, pleading exam pressure. I stayed in the study hall for the entire day, trying to block out the sound of the tannoy, the cheering and the laughter. Stanley came in later with a cake his mother had baked especially for me. A giddiness overtook me and I indulged in a food fight with him, tearing the cake apart and flinging fistfuls of jam and sponge at him, at the walls, at the light fittings and the portraits of former masters. We laughed until our sides were sore, but our glee was different. Mine was bordering on hysteria.

Stanley was a friend, a real friend back then. I knew that I was different from the other children by the time I was in the senior school. They talked of holidays and cousins and fights with their sisters and Christmas presents and politics at the family dinner table. I had nothing to offer in these conversations. I was also marked out by my obvious lack of money. My uniforms came from the school’s lost-and-found office, and I had no money for the tuck shop. There was an unspoken agreement that Father Daniel would provide whatever I needed. I do not know if this was instigated by my father or if it was a simple act of kindness on Father Daniel’s part. I suspect the latter. But a teenage boy often has more wants than needs, and I could not ask Father Daniel for stink bombs or plastic catapults or gobstoppers or dirty magazines.

Stanley Connolly shared all these things with me and, indeed, Stanley gave me my first glimpse of home life
when I went to stay with his family on their farm in Kilkenny. I was surrounded by women for the first time. Stanley’s mother was a widow and he had three sisters. They terrified me. I had hit puberty and was barely in control of my hormones. I was tall and strong for my age and well able to do the farm work, but in the evenings when the family would gather for dinner, the noise and chattering of the girls unnerved me. I felt somewhat as if I had been mistakenly locked into a cage of exotic animals in the zoo.

They were incredibly kind and generous to me, and I know now that the girls were openly flirting with me. I should have been delighted with the attention, but I felt that the devotion was unwarranted, that any minute they would discover that I was a fraud, that they would realize a boy who did not deserve a mother could not belong in a family, blessed among women. I imagined that, like some unfamiliar species, they might all turn on me. Kill me. Eat me. I do not like cats for the same reason.

Stanley’s mother constantly fussed over me. She wanted to know what my favourite food was, and my uncultured palate betrayed me because I really only knew meals by the days of the week. Mondays: bacon and cabbage; Tuesdays: sausages and mashed potato; and so on. Eating real butter, home-baked bread and fresh meat and vegetables on unscheduled days made me uncomfortable. In school, we had fish on Fridays and that was my preference. ‘What kind of fish?’ she asked, and I could not tell her, but said that it was white, triangular-shaped and usually about four inches long. Mrs Connolly laughed, but I could see that she was sad for me, and from then on she set about
awakening my taste buds, which, while sweet and generous, only made me uneasier. I knew my manners and ate everything that was served, but my stomach was so unused to such richness that sometimes, at night, cramps would keep me awake until the small hours. On one of those nights, I resolved that I would learn about food when I was properly grown up and that I would not be embarrassed again.

I did not realize the extent of my institutionalization, but I was self-conscious about being the object of their pity, or admiration, or whatever it was, and when my father ordered me to leave, I was almost relieved to do so. Stanley was a witness to my poverty and my isolation, and I think he knew more about my circumstances than I told him. This embarrassed me, so I did not make much of an effort to keep in touch with him when I left that school, not until I got married and had my first success with a book and had the proof that I was not a failure, but by then years had passed and we had little in common beyond the memory of shared catapults.

Many years ago, I went into town for a meeting with a publicist and I was early. It was a beautiful, warm summer’s day, and I decided to take a walk through St Stephen’s Green. As I passed the children’s playground, I saw Stanley pushing a little boy on a swing. The likeness was extraordinary, though the little boy was not cursed with the facial discolouration of his father. Stanley was older now and there were flecks of grey in his hair, which he still wore in a long fringe in a futile attempt to cover the mark.

Stanley could not take his eyes off his son, as if he could not believe his luck. He and the boy were in their own
world, oblivious to this strange man watching. The boy threw his head back and laughed a hearty cackle as he swung ever higher, and I wanted to be him more than anybody else in the world. Just for a moment, to exult in a father’s love and attention. Then the boy stopped the swing, scuffing his little sandals into the gravel to apply the brakes. He jumped off and ran to a red-haired lady sitting on a bench nearby. Her lipsticked mouth grinned at the boy and she scooped him up into her arms and he buried his face into the soft slope of her neck. I felt only envy.

I heard a loud cough right behind me, and when I turned to see a park-keeper in a soiled uniform glaring at me, I realized how it must appear – an adult solo male mesmerized by the children’s playground. We both thought of each other as a sick bastard and, incensed, I left immediately, stopping for a swift Jameson in Peter’s Pub to steady my cuff-buttoning hands before my meeting.

Perhaps I should have had children with Alice, but I knew that any child would only remind me of a small French boy so full of charm and mischief, and long dead. I might even have been a father figure to Alice’s brother Eugene, but something told me that if my father had so strongly disapproved of me, a strong and handsome and successful young man, then Eugene, an overweight mental defective, would have appalled him.

St Catherine’s House

PATIENT NO: 114

ANNUAL REPORT: 17/12/1987

NAME: Eugene O’Reilly

DATE OF ADMISSION: 22/07/1987

DOB: 17/05/59

HEIGHT: 5 foot 8 inches

WEIGHT: 16 stone 9 lbs

HAIR: Brown

EYES: Blue

MENTAL CAPACITY: Eugene is of limited intellect with an estimated mental age of seven or eight years. He can’t read or write, although he likes to have books in his possession, and needs help dressing himself (buttons, laces). He can feed himself, although he must be watched at mealtimes as he will not stop eating until food is removed from him. Most of the time he can perform his toilet tasks without assistance. He has little interest in television but loves music, although his physical reaction to music can be upsetting to other residents. Eugene is unaware of his own strength and size.

HISTORY: Eugene O’Reilly was admitted in July of this year by his brother-in-law Oliver Ryan (the author Vincent Dax). Eugene was in good general health, although Nurse Marion reported some bruising to the upper arms and body. These marks were explained by Mr Ryan, who said that Eugene had often to be restrained after episodes of aggression. Mr Ryan very much regretted the incidents that led to these bruises but suggested that he had little choice in the matter, as Eugene was not capable of controlling his temper. Mr Ryan reported that Eugene had become violent and difficult since the death of Eugene’s mother in 1986 and that he could no longer be cared for in the family home, particularly in the light of a recent arson attempt that Mr Ryan insists was malicious. It was notable that there seemed to be some difference of opinion on this issue between Mr Ryan and his wife, the patient’s sister Alice Ryan. Mr Ryan maintains that his wife is unrealistic about Eugene’s abilities and propensity to violent outbursts.

ASSESSMENT: In adults with the type of moderate to severe learning difficulties Eugene presents, violence and aggression are unusual, but clearly Mr Ryan was correct in his assessment of Eugene, as he has displayed extreme aggression in his objection to being left in our care, and unfortunately two of our porters were required to take Eugene to the lockdown unit after Mr Ryan left. Eugene has had
great difficulty settling into St Catherine’s and has caused major disruption among other residents. In particular, he attempts to pick up other residents while they are seated, running the length of corridors, holding them high above his head within their chairs. While this may be a source of amusement to some residents, to others it is terrifying and we cannot allow the health and safety of any of our patients to be jeopardized. Eugene has been reprimanded for this activity on several occasions and has reacted belligerently when physically restrained. Although we are reluctant to medicate Eugene to subdue his boisterous nature, it has become our only option.

Eugene is highly verbal at times, and at other times almost totally silent. Mr Ryan warned us that Eugene could not be depended upon for veracity, and indeed we have found that Eugene seems often to inhabit a world of fantasy in which he imagines that he is a prince of a magical kingdom. Through trial and error, we have learned that it is best to leave Eugene to his own devices.

In his first two months here, Eugene’s sister visited him almost every day, but her visible upset at leaving Eugene communicated itself to him and I took the decision to write to Mr Ryan to ask him to confine his wife’s visits to just once a week. Mrs Ryan cannot be dissuaded from bringing with her home-baked cakes and confectionery, which I think
best to confiscate for the good of Eugene’s health.

Noreen McNally

Executive Director of St Catherine’s Residential Care Facility

My mammy loved me and Alice loved me and Barney loved me and God loved me I said my prayers every night every night I still say my prayers and I ask God to bless Mammy in heaven and Alice and my friend Barney but sometimes I forget sometimes I forget. I remember I remember Barney is my friend he used to take me for a drive in his car his ears stick out like a clown hahaha he makes me laugh and tickles me and tells me stories and brings me flying he is Grimace and I am Prince Sparkle and he helps me battle with the evil Queen who does wee-wees in her knickers hahaha.

Oliver? No nonononono. Oliver is the baddy man he stealed Alice from me and Mammy and Barney where is Mammy I want Mammy Oliver hurted me he pinched my arm and squeezed and squeezed I had a big purple bruise Alice is coming she brings me cakes and reads stories she says Oliver made Prince Sparkle she says Oliver writed it down but I know he didn’t he didn’t he didn’t Oliver is the bad Queen dressed up as a man.

Where is Barney? I miss Barney where is my Mammy I remember now she’s dead in a box in the mud she doesn’t like it to be dirty I don’t want to be dead why are all the dead people in the mud my daddy is in the mud too but I seed him in photos and Alice telled me he was a great man.

I forget lots of things all the time but I remember being in my house with Mammy and Alice and Barney visiting and telling me stories. Barney telled me he was going to marry Alice and I could live with them but it’s a secret and I’m not telling anyone I wish he would hurry up because Oliver the baddy man already married Alice and it’s Barney’s turn now. Alice went away when Oliver married her and they lived in a flat I visited two times but I was only allowed in Alice’s corner and Oliver has a locked-up green box for his writing and me and Alice are not allowed to see in the box. I want to know what’s in the box but Alice says it’s Oliver’s private business. One time I was looking at the box and Oliver shouted at me just for looking I think there’s a monster in the box. I wasn’t allowed to visit Alice after that and I was sad but Barney came and read me stories and we went in his car I’m not allowed in the front seat because I can’t stop beeping the horn Barney thinks it’s funny but the baddy men in the other cars are very cross very cross and I have to sit in the back. Mammy got sick and was in the hospital. Mammy is dead. After Mammy went in the mud Alice came home to live and that was nice I miss Mammy where is Mammy oh yes dead in the mud. Oliver came to live in our house too he is mean and calls me bad names and it’s my house and Alice’s house not Oliver’s house. I hate Oliver he punched me when Alice wasn’t looking and then he telled a lie he calls me a big fat pig I am big and fat but a man he is a pig stealing Alice and Mammy’s house he said I had to have my dinner in the kitchen and it’s his house now and he’s the boss of me but I like the kitchen and I like Mammy’s and Alice’s and my house but not when Oliver is the boss. Oliver took my
flying chair and goned it somewhere I don’t know Barney doesn’t come and do flying any more now he can’t no chair. Oliver fell over in the garden one time and I laughed and laughed it was funny. He went to the hospital and when Alice came home, Oliver telled her that I hurted him his tail is as long as a telephone wire but he locked me in my room and I shouted all night until Alice let me out she was crying and it wasn’t funny any more and I was sorry for laughing when Oliver hurted himself. Then another time I was sitting at Alice’s dressing table brushing my hair with her silver hairbrush that was Mammy’s she’s in the mud and Oliver came in and smashed the mirror and turned the dressing table upside down. I was frightened and Alice came running and the big fat liar says I done it but I didn’t for cross my heart and hope to die and then it’s my birthday and I have a cake with birthday candles and I blow them out and wish that Oliver isn’t here but Oliver is nice to me on my birthday and lets me play with his lighter that is shaped like an aeroplane in the shed in the garden but there is an accident and I am very bad boy because I started a fire and help! help! like in
Jane Eyre
one of Alice’s favourite books. Oliver says he is scared of me and doesn’t want to be in the house with me hurrah this makes me happy and dancing because Oliver is going away but he isn’t going away I am going away and I hate him.

Oliver said I had to come and live here in St Catherine’s I don’t know what St Catherine’s is I think it’s where a saint lives and I said yes if Alice comes too. He lied and said Alice was coming too Alice telled a big fat lie and then she is crying crying and it’s me making her sad and Oliver says
it’s me making her sad I have to go to St Catherine’s on my own. No Mammy.

I was frightened here in the start where is Saint Catherine not here no saints here just some mad people I know I’m a bit mad Barney told me I’m a bit mad in a good way but the people who live here are really mad in a mad way much more mad than me and some of them shouting but not in words just in noises I don’t like shouting and some of them like dead people strapped in wheelchairs and fed like babies with bibs and televisions on everywhere loud louder.

And the boss is a lady Miss Noreen who is all smiley and laughing when she rings Oliver to tell him I’ve been a bad boy I can hear her through the wall in the nurses’ station but here no smiles laughs chats but Lord Snooty face and ignoring everyone only shouting at the nurses where is Mammy I remember now in the mud where is Alice she used to come on Tuesdays with cakes and we play games only now she doesn’t come any more either. In the start I was really scared and want to go home to my own room and my own bed with my record player that Barney gave me but Alice says I live with twelve friends some of them don’t like me and some of them love me Nurse Marion is my favourite I don’t like Miss Noreen makes me sit with my hands under my legs Christy is very old he dribbles like I used to Mammy said that was bad manners and I told Christy but he was shouting and Miss Noreen said go to your room it’s not my room it’s all of our room there’s Christy, Billy, Malachy, Conal and I forget the others we share a big room and no talking when lights are out and no stories at bedtime and no jam sandwiches in bed I remember
Barney jam sandwiches and stories with the Selfish Giant and the one about Alice going down the hole with the rabbit but I’m in a story with Grimace and I am the Prince so that’s my favourite one Christy went in the mud yesterday no more dribbling thank God.

He was dead in his bed and I told him look after Mammy in the mud Nurse Marion is my favourite one she’s here in the daytime and gives me sweets our secret Alice didn’t come yesterday, or last week, or lots of weeks. I seed Miss Noreen and Nurse Marion fighting. Miss Noreen made Nurse Marion cry Nurse Marion asked me about Barney and where he lives I telled Nurse Marion that Barney is my friend and she ringed him up and now he is visiting me every day he telled me that Alice is in Happyland drawing pictures and flying around in a chair. She is not in the mud. He sweared me that and Barney always telled the truth. Barney says we can visit Alice when I am growed up, but I think I am a growed-up. Barney says I must be growed up more.