‘I don’t,’ Howard remembers hurriedly.
‘Are you worried she’ll tell him she doesn’t want to sleep with him too?’ Farley says slyly.
‘No, it’s just…’
‘Maybe she’s planning not to sleep with the whole faculty!’
‘Just let it go, would you?’ Howard snaps.
‘Not-to-be-taken Aurelie,’ Farley chuckles, returning to the weather report.
‘Hey, Von Blowjob, let me see your homework.’
‘No way, there isn’t time.’
‘I just want to see it, that’s all. Come on, Cujo won’t be here for – hey, Skippy, let me see your homework… hey! Skippy?’
‘Earth to Skippy!’
‘Hmm? What?’
‘Whoa, are you feeling okay? You look sort of green.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Like you’re actually green, like frog-coloured?’
‘I’m just a bit –’
‘Hey, everyone, look at Skippy!’
‘Shut up, Geoff.’
‘He’s turning amphibious!’
‘Hey, maybe if you turn into a frog you’ll be able to speak French better. Hey, everyone, Skippy thinks if he turns – ow!’
Max Brady, waiting to get his homework back from Dennis, scans the doorway. ‘Where is the old bastard?’
‘Maybe he’s feeding his snakes.’
‘Maybe he had a meeting with Satan.’
‘Or he’s off delivering lard to the poor.’
‘ “What is this, lard?” “You’ll eat it and like it!” ’
Turning in his desk, Vincent Bailey says sotto voce that he heard Cujo’s in one of his bad moods today. Yeah, Mitchell Gogan says, he heard that in Cujo’s fifth-year class this morning the priest caught someone playing a game on his phone under his desk and he put the boy’s head inside the desk and whacked the lid closed on top of him so hard he had to get stitches.
‘That’s bollocks, Gogan.’
‘Yeah, the fifth-year desks don’t even have lids.’
‘I’m just saying that’s what I heard.’
‘I heard that once he hit a guy so hard he nearly died.’
‘Well, he’s not allowed hit people any more,’ Simon Mooney interjects. ‘My dad’s a lawyer and he says that the law is, teachers aren’t allowed –’
‘Shh! Shut up! Here he comes!’
Instantly all conversation vanishes, and the class dutifully rise to their feet. The priest enters and crosses to the lectern. In the prevailing silence his black eyes scour the room, and although the boys do not move, interiorly they huddle together, as if caught in the midst of some icy wind.
‘Asseyez-vous.’
Father Green: previous generations took some clandestine solace in the fact that this translates neatly as Père Vert. Mention him to your dad and he’ll definitely remember him, and most probably chuckle at the terror he inspired – that is the way dads’ memories seem to work, like nothing they felt when they were this age was really real! Nowadays, whether it’s another instance of dumbing-down, or that the priest’s mood swings have grown more extreme with the years, the linguistic esprit has been jettisoned in favour of the more direct Cujo; because that’s what his French class is like, being trapped in a small room with a rabid animal. Rail-thin, a head taller than the tallest of the boys, on his best days the priest looks like the end of the world; his presence itself is like smouldering kindling, or knuckles cracking over and over.
On paper, though, Father Green is close to sainthood. As well as his various campaigns for Africa – the Seabrook Spinners Sponsored Cycle, the Seabrook Telethon featuring Miss Ireland runner-up Sophie Bienvenue, the Lucky Shamrock pins the boys go out and sell on St Patrick’s Day – he makes regular trips to deprived areas of Dublin, delivering clothes and food. Sooner or later, most of the boys will end up ‘volunteering’ on one of these runs – travelling in the priest’s lumbering estate to wastelands of glass and dog-shit, carrying black bags and boxes into tiny houses with boarded-up windows while youths their own age collect in scabby gangs to jeer at them every time they come out to the car, and the priest glowers terrifyingly at pupil and hoodlum alike, in his black raiment looking like a single downward stroke of a pen, a peremptory, unforgiving slash through the error-strewn copybook that is the world. You’ve got to wonder just how glad the Poor are to see him, rapping on the door with his false smile and his troop of trembling helpers. They should count their blessings they’re not cooped up in French class with him four days a week, waiting for him to explode.
It’s no secret that Father Green hates teaching, and he especially hates teaching French. Lessons are frequently suspended for tirades – usually directed at Gaspard Delacroix, the unfortunate exchange student – on the subject of France’s decadence. He seems to believe the language itself to be morally corrosive, and most of the class is spent doing grammar, where its grossness can be partly contained; even then, those languorous elisions, those turbid glottals, enrage him. But what doesn’t enrage him? Air particles enrage him. And the boys, with their expensive haircuts and bright futures, enrage him even more. The best they can do is stay quiet and try not to set him off.
Today, however – pace the stories of V. Bailey and M. Gogan – the priest seems in uncharacteristically jovial spirits, full of bonhomie and playfulness. He collects the copybooks and breezes through yesterday’s homework, commenting, accurately, on how dull it is, and apologizing for putting such clever young men to such uninspiring work, which, although he’s probably being sarcastic, they giggle at obediently; he pokes gentle fun at Sylvain, the anti-hero of the French textbook, who in today’s exercise is discussing with his dweeby French friends all the lame places they have been that day using the past tense of the verb aller, before he sets them to work on an introductory letter to a fictitious pen pal while he checks through their copybooks.
Gradually, the oppressive mood in the classroom lifts. In the distance, there is birdsong, and a shaky ascending scale from Father Laughton’s music class. Behind Skippy, Mario very quietly begins to tell Kevin ‘What’s’ Wong how he had sex with his French pen pal’s hot sister last summer. As he elaborates, he starts unconsciously kicking the back of Skippy’s chair. Thin pages flap through the priest’s bony fingers. Skippy, who is still decidedly green about the gills, turns round and stares meaningfully at Mario, but Mario doesn’t notice, being involved in an impressively detailed account of the sexual predilections of the French pen pal’s sister, whom he is now claiming is a famous actress.
Kick, kick, kick, goes his foot against the chair. Skippy pulls at his hair, flushing.
‘What’s she been in?’ Kevin ‘What’s’ Wong asks.
‘French things,’ Mario says. ‘She’s very famous, in France.’
‘Stop kicking my seat!’ Skippy hisses.
Keeping his head craned close to the copybook he’s marking, Father Green lilts to himself, ‘I’m so piiiiimmmmp it’s ri-dick-i-less.’
Instantly everyone stops what they’re doing. Did he just say what they think he said? Father Green, as if becoming aware of this shift of attention, looks up.
‘Stand up, please, Mr Juster,’ he says pleasantly.
Skippy rises uncertainly to his feet.
‘What were you talking about there, Mr Juster?’
‘I wasn’t talking,’ Skippy stammers.
‘I distinctly heard talking. Who was talking?’
‘Uhh…’
‘I see, no one was talking, is that correct?’
Skippy doesn’t reply.
‘Lying,’ Father Green counts on his fingers. ‘Talking during class. Obscenity – do you know the meaning of obscenity, Mr Juster?’
Skippy – who’s rapidly paling, becoming a ghost-frog – hoists a shoulder indeterminately.