We laugh because Courtown’s sandy beach and Courtown Bay are four miles from Gorey and we cannot hear the seagulls or the boats. This is a lie, a story, told for fun and I like it; I like him.
I watch as Mr Roche moves between our desks, and I can smell him. Perhaps he stood in manure in his walk across the field; it’s the same smell as the farmers who have breakfast at Kylemore’s in town. It doesn’t suit his fancy clothes and posh voice to have this smell on his shoes and I wonder when he’ll notice and clean them.
‘Now, I’m going to have a short quiet chat with every one of you,’ he says and he crouches down at each desk in turn, asking questions in a whisper.
I wait anxiously for my turn, thinking that he’ll soon discover me and know that I’m different. I’ll tell him about my gift.
At Brendan’s desk, Mr Roche crouches down and this time he does not whisper. We can all hear him say, ‘Are you easily influenced, Brendan?’
Brendan shrugs, then Mr Roche puts his mouth against Brendan’s ear.
‘OK, I will,’ Brendan says and then he drops his head and keeps it down, as though looking for an important message written on his desk.
Mr Roche reaches Kate’s desk, but he doesn’t kneel down to whisper in her ear. Instead, he sits on the empty desk behind hers, taps her on the shoulder and says, ‘And who might you be?’
Kate turns to look at him. ‘I’m Kate Breslin,’ she says. ‘I’m an only child from Dublin and my family has taken over a deceased estate.’
‘Well, Kate, I believe you’re the clever one. That must make you feel quite special?’
And then I know it: Mr Donnelly took Mr Roche away to talk about each of us. Now I am sure Mr Roche will realise who I am.
‘Not really,’ says Kate, her voice trembling.
‘Clever or not,’ Mr Roche says, ‘I hope your coffin is airtight.’
He laughs and the whole class laughs with him, because what he has said makes no sense. Even Brendan turns round to show me his laughing teeth.
Mr Roche walks to the front, sits on the edge of the teacher’s desk and smiles directly at me. Although he didn’t come to my desk, I’m sure he knows. I’m sure he will help me.
As soon as I get home, I make a toasted ham sandwich and then I lie on my bed and spend two hours writing another letter to the Guinness Book of Records. I’m confident I’ll get a reply this time.
Dear Guinness Book of Records,
My name is John Egan and I have written to you once before.
I am the boy with the gift of lie detection. I have now read all of the books on the subject available on the East Coast of Ireland and I have tested my talent a few more times since my first letter.
I am even surer that my gift is rare and unusual to say the least.
Please write back to me this time and I will arrange a demonstration for you either in Dublin or in London or wherever it suits you best. I will prove that I can detect lies with 100 % accuracy.
John Egan
Age 11
Gorey, Ireland
My mother comes into my room at teatime without knocking. ‘Why don’t you knock?’ I say. ‘Don’t I have any privacy?’
She laughs and sits on my bed. ‘Aren’t you a cheeky one? Maybe I did knock and your ears are too full of earwigs to hear.’
She rubs my leg as she speaks.
‘I hate talking about housework, but it’s high time you did some of your chores. Could you please do them without being reminded? You haven’t done the hoovering for a week and you haven’t dusted the mantelpiece either.’
‘Sorry.’
‘All right. You can eat, then. We’re having chops for tea and I’ve made some rhubarb and custard for dessert,’ she says.
And suddenly, even though I haven’t seen my father in two days, I am happy.
18
It’s Friday and I walk to school quickly and get there early so that I can watch Mr Roche prepare his classes at the teacher’s table. I watch him all morning. I like him very much and I especially like his voice.
But then, during second lesson, I realise that I have been holding on too long and I must go to the toilet. I can’t have another accident. I stand and put my hand up and ask to be excused.
Mr Roche comes straight over to me, takes my hand, and leads me into the corridor. I’m embarrassed to be led like this in front of my class, but he looks at me as we walk, and he smiles at me, as though leaving the classroom like this is normal, as though I am his friend.
In the corridor, he asks me to sit under the coat rack and I sit with my head under somebody’s duffel coat, holding on to my urine.
‘Keep it in,’ he says. ‘Just a minute longer.’
I manage to hold on. Then he takes me to the bathroom.
He waits for me and I wait for him to leave. But he stays by the door, looking all the while as I stand with my hand on my zipper.
‘I won’t bite,’ he says. ‘Go ahead.’
I turn away from him and open my fly. I urinate. So little comes out I worry that I’ll soon need to go again.
When I have finished I turn to look at him.
‘Good lad,’ he says.
I walk over to him and he pats me on the back.
‘You’re a good lad,’ he says. ‘You have a very nice way about you.’
I smile and he smiles back, and I feel all right, even when we return to class, and everybody is talking and laughing. But they’re not laughing at me. Kate is standing up next to the teacher’s desk, impersonating Mr Roche by speaking in a posh voice.
Mr Roche tells her to return to her desk and, as she walks away from him, he slaps her across the back of the head. ‘You cannot sell your phlegm and then ask for it back again,’ he says.
Nobody understands, but everybody laughs, because Kate is stunned and, for the first time since she came to our school she is silent. For the rest of the day Kate doesn’t move unless Mr Roche tells her to and even Brendan does not talk to her.
After school, when everybody has left the classroom, I go to Mr Roche’s desk. He looks up at me and smiles. He has straight, white teeth and deep laugh-lines around his mouth.
‘Mr Roche?’ I say. ‘I was wondering if you could help find me some books about lie detection from America?’
I am hoping that he’ll ask me why I’m interested in the subject, but instead he grabs my hand.
‘You’ve reminded me of something that’s been bothering me.’
‘What?’ I ask.
He stands up and walks to the window. ‘It makes my blood boil that this school has no library. Every school should have a library.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I say. ‘Yes, Mr Roche.’
‘No storybooks,’ he says, ‘means no reading stories.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I say.
‘No reading stories means no imagination. We all start life with an imagination, of course, but without stories to feed it the imagination, like a starved dog, dies.’
He stares out at the playing field. ‘And when a person doesn’t read and when a person has no imagination they are sure to end up with no inventiveness of mind and spend a life with nothing but hackneyed, worn-out things to say. A life of slogans, jargon and clichés.’
I nod.
‘A weak man repeats what he hears and makes himself dumb.’
‘I agree, sir.’
He walks away and then walks straight back to me to say, ‘And science and invention stem from the imagination.’
I’ve been searching for something to say, and now I’ve found it. ‘Einstein thought that, too,’ I say. I read this in the book my father left on the coffee table last week.