I often rang her, pleading, and one lunch hour she consented to see me when I said I was desperate. We walked aimlessly through streets of the lunch hour, and I’d to hold back tears as I thanked her for kindness, though when she’d given me all her evenings and body I’d hardly noticed. The same night after pub-close I went — driven by the urge that brings people back to the rooms where they once lived and no longer live — and stood out of the street lamps under the trees where so often we had stood, in the hope that some meaning of my life or love would come, but the night only hardened about the growing absurdity of a man standing under an umbrella beneath the drip from the green leaves of the trees.
Through my love it was the experience of my own future death I was passing through, for the life of the desperate equals the anxiety of death, and before time had replaced all its bandages I found relief in movement, in getting on buses and riding to the terminus; and one day at Killester I heard the conductor say to the driver as they sat downstairs through their ten-minute rest, ‘Jasus, this country is going to the dogs entirely. There’s a gent up there who looks normal enough who must umpteen times this last year have come out here to nowhere and back,’ and as I listened I felt like a patient after a long illness when the doctor says, ‘You can start getting up tomorrow,’ and I gripped the black umbrella with an almost fierce determination to be as I was before, unknowingly happy under the trees, and the umbrella, in the wet evenings that are the normal weather of this city.
The Recruiting Officer
Two cars outside the low concrete wall of Arigna School, small and blue-slated between the coal mountains; rust of iron on the rocks of the trout stream that ran past the playground; the chant of children coming through the open windows into the rain-cleaned air: it was this lured me back into the schoolroom of this day — to watch my manager, Canon Reilly, thrash the boy Walshe; to wait for the Recruiting Officer to come — but a deeper reason than the quiet picture of the school between mountains in bringing me back, can only be finally placed on something deep in my own nature, a total paralysis of the will, and a feeling that any one thing in this life is almost as worthwhile doing as any other.
I had got out of the Christian Brothers, I no longer wore the black clothes and white half-collar, and was no longer surrounded by the rules of the order in its monastery; but then, after the first freedom, I was afraid; it was that I was alone.
I had come to visit one of my married sisters, when I saw the quiet school. I said I too would live out my life in the obscurity of these small places; if I was lucky I’d find a young girl. To grow old with her among a people seemed ambition enough, there might even be children and fields and garden.
I got a school immediately, without trouble. The newly trained teachers wanted places in the university towns, not in these backwaters.
Now I am growing old in the school where I began. I have not married. I lodge in a pub in Carrick-on-Shannon. I travel in and out the seven miles on a bike to escape the pupils and their parents once the school is shut, to escape from always having to play an expected role. It is rumoured that I drink too much.
With mostly indifference I stand at the window and watch Canon Reilly shake a confession out of the boy Walshe, much as a dog shakes life out of a rat; and having nothing to do but watch I think of the sea. We went to the sea in summer, a black straggle in front of Novicemaster O’Grady, in threes, less risk of buggery in threes than pairs, the boards of the bridge across to the Bull hollow under the tread of our black sandals, and below us the tide washing against the timber posts. Far out on the Wall we stripped, guarding our eyes on the rocks facing south across the bay to the Pidgeon House, and when O’Grady blew the whistle we made signs of the cross on ourselves with the salt water and jumped in. He blew it again when it was time for us to get out. We towelled and dressed on the rocks, guarding our eyes, glad no sand could get between our toes, and in threes trooped home ahead of O’Grady and past the wired-down idiotic palm trees along the front.
The bell for night prayers went at nine-thirty, the two rows of pews stretching to the altar, a row along each wall and the bare lino-covered space between empty of all furniture, and we knelt in the long rows in order of our rank, the higher the rank the closer to the altar. On Friday nights we knelt in the empty space between the pews and said: My very dear Brothers, I accuse myself of all the faults I have committed since my last accusation, I broke the rule of silence twice, three times I failed to guard my eyes. After a certain rank and age the guarding of the eyes wasn’t mentioned, you were supposed to be past all that by then, but I never reached that stage. I got myself booted out before I became impervious to a low view of passing girls, especially on windy days.
The sea and the bell, nothing seems ever ended, it is such nonsenses I’d like written on my gravestone in the hope they’d sow confusion.
‘You admit it now after you saw you couldn’t brazen your way out of it,’ Reilly shouts at the boy, holding him by the arm in the empty space between the table and the long benches where the classes sit in rows.
‘Now. Out with what you spent the money on.’
‘Lemonade,’ the low answer comes, the white-faced boy starting to blubber.
‘Lemonade, yes, lemonade, that’s how you let the cat out of the bag. The Walshes don’t have shillings to squander in the shops on lemonade every day of the week.’
Still gripping the boy by the arm he turns to the rows of faces in the benches.
‘What sins did Walshe commit — mind I say sins, not one sin — but I don’t know how to call it — this foul act?’
I watch the hands shoot up with more attention than I’d given to the dreary inquisition of the boy. I was under examination now.
‘The sin of stealing, Canon.’
‘Good, but mind I said sins. It is most important in an examination of conscience before confession to know all the sins of your soul. One foul act can entail several sins.’
‘Lies, Canon.’
‘Good, but I’m looking for the most grievous sin of all.’
He turned from the blank faces to look at me: why do they not know?
‘Where was the poorbox when it was broken open?’ I ask, having to force the question out. Even after the years of inspectors I’ve never got used to teaching in another’s presence, the humiliation and the sense of emptiness in turning oneself into a performing robot in a semblance of teaching.
‘In the church, sir.’
‘An offence against a holy person, place or thing — what is that sin called?’
‘Sacrilege.’ The hands at once go up.
‘Good, but if you know something properly you shouldn’t need all that spoonfeeding.’ The implied criticism of me he addresses to the children.
‘Stealing, lies, and blackest of all — sacrilege.’ He turns again to the boy in his grip.
‘If I hand you over to the guards do you know where that will lead, Walshe? To the reformatory. Would you like to go to the reformatory, Walshe?’
‘No, Canon.’
‘You have two choices. You can either take your medicine from me here in front of the class or you can come to the barracks. Which’ll you take?’
‘You, Canon.’ He tries to appease with an appearance of total abjection and misery.
‘It’s going to be no picnic. You’ll have to be taught once and for all in your life that the church of God is sacred.’ He raises his voice close to declamation, momentarily releases his grip on the arm, takes a length of electric wire from his pocket. The boy whimpers quietly as the priest folds it in two before taking a firm grip on the arm again.