Derek strummed and sang gruffly, “Is this heaven or is this hell? I look around and I can’t tell.”
“Didn’t anybody else notice the Pearly Gates and the choir of angels as they entered, or was it just me?” Helena smirked.
“You didn’t enter through Pearly Gates.” Bernard shook his head wildly, his neck wobbling from side to side. He looked at me and his neck continued to shake. “She didn’t enter through Pearly Gates.”
Derek strummed, “I didn’t pass the Pearly Gate nor felt the burning flames of hate.”
“Oh, stop it,” Joan huffed.
“Stop it,” he sang.
“I can’t bear any more.”
“I can’t bear any more, someone please show me the door…”
“I’ll show you the door,” Helena warned, but with less conviction.
He continued strumming and they all fell silent, contemplating his last few lyrics.
“Little June, Pauline O’Connor’s daughter, was only ten when she died, Helena,” Bernard continued. “Surely a little angel like her would be in heaven and she’s not here, so there goes your theory.” He held his head high and Joan nodded in agreement. “We’re not dead.”
“Sorry, it’s over-eighteens only,” Helena said in a bored tone. “Saint Peter’s down at the gate with his arms folded and an earpiece in his ear, taking instructions from God.”
“You can’t say that, Helena,” Joan snapped.
“I can’t get in, I can’t get out, Saint Peter, what’s it all about?” Derek sang in a gravelly voice. Suddenly he stopped strumming and finally spoke. “It’s definitely not heaven. Elvis isn’t here.”
“Oh, well then.” Helena rolled her eyes.
“We’ve got our own Elvis here, haven’t we?” Bernard said, chuckling, changing the subject. “ Sandy, did you know that Derek used to be in a band?”
“How would she know that, Bernard?” Helena said, exasperated.
Bernard ignored her again. “Derek Cummings,” he announced, “the hottest property in St. Kevin’s back in the sixties.”
They all laughed.
My body turned cold.
“What was it you were called, Derek? I’ve forgotten now,” Joan said with a laugh.
“The Wonder Boys, Joan, the Wonder Boys,” Derek said fondly, reminiscing.
“Remember the dances on a Friday night?” Bernard asked excitedly. “Derek would be up there on the stage, playing rock and roll, and Father Martin would be almost having a heart attack at him shaking his pelvis.” They all laughed again.
“Now, what was the name of the dance hall?” Joan thought aloud.
“Oh, gosh…” Bernard closed his eyes and tried to remember.
Derek stopped strumming and thought hard.
Helena kept staring at me, watching my reactions. “Are you cold, Sandy?” Her voice sounded far away.
Finbar’s Hall. The name jumped into my head. They had all loved going to Finbar’s Hall every Friday night.
“Finbar’s Hall,” Marcus finally remembered.
“Ah, that was it.” They all looked relieved and Derek’s strumming continued.
Goose pimples formed on my skin. I shivered.
I looked around at the faces of the group, studied their eyes, their familiar features, and I allowed all I had learned as a little girl to come flooding back to me. I could see it now as clearly as I had then, when I came across the story in the computer archives while researching a project for school. I had immediately taken interest, had followed up on the story and was more than familiar with it. I saw the young teenage faces smiling up from the newspaper’s front page and I saw those same faces around me now.
Derek Cummings, Joan Hatchard, Bernard Lynch, Marcus Flynn, and Helena Dickens. Five students from St. Kevin’s Boarding School. They disappeared during a school camping trip in the sixties and were never found. But here they were now, older, wiser, and their innocence lost.
I had found them.
10
When I was fourteen, my parents talked me into seeing a counselor after school on Mondays. They didn’t have to do much convincing. As soon as they told me I’d be able to ask all the questions I wanted and that this person was qualified enough to answer, I practically drove myself to school.
I knew they felt that they had failed me. I could tell that by their expressions when they sat me down at the kitchen table, with the milk and cookies in the center and the washing machine going in the background as the usual distraction. Mum held a rolled tissue tightly in her hands as though she had used it earlier to dab away tears. That was the thing with my parents: they would never let me see their weaknesses, yet they would forget to get rid of the proof of them. I didn’t see Mum’s tears but I saw the tissue. I didn’t hear Dad’s anger at having failed to help me but I saw it in his eyes.
“Is everything OK?” I looked from one strong face to the other. The only time two people can look so confident and as though they can face anything is when something bad happens. “Did something happen?”
Dad smiled. “No, honey, don’t worry, nothing bad happened.”
Mum’s eyebrow lifted when he said that and I knew she didn’t agree. I knew Dad didn’t agree with his words either but he was saying them nonetheless. There was nothing wrong with sending me to a counselor, nothing wrong at all, but I knew that they had wanted to help me themselves. They had wanted their answers to my questions to be enough. I overheard their endless discussions about the correct method of dealing with my behavior. They had helped me in every way they could and now I could feel their disappointment in themselves and I hated myself for making them feel that way.
“You know the way you have so many questions, honey?” Dad explained.
I nodded.
“Well, your mum and I”-he looked to her for support and her eyes softened immediately as she glanced at him-“well, your mum and I have found someone that you’ll be able to talk to about all of those questions.”
“This person will be able to answer my questions?” I felt my eyes widen and my heart quicken as though all of life’s mysteries were about to be answered.
“I hope so, honey,” Mum answered. “I hope that by talking to him, you won’t have any more questions that will bother you. He’ll know far more about all the things you worry about than we do.”
Then it was time for my lightning round. Fingers on the buzzers.
“Who is he?”
“Mr. Burton.” Dad.
“What’s his first name?”
“Gregory.” Mum.
“Where does he work?”
“At the school.” Mum.
“When will I see him?”
“Mondays after school. For an hour.” Mum. She was better at this than Dad. She was used to these discussions while Dad was out working.
“He’s a psychiatrist, isn’t he?” They never lied to me.
“Yes, honey.” Dad.
I think that’s the moment I began to hate seeing myself in their eyes, and unfortunately it was when I began to dislike being in their company.
Mr. Burton’s office was in a room the size of a closet, just about big enough for two armchairs. I chose to sit in the dirty olive-green-velvet-covered chair with dark wooden handles, as opposed to the stained brown-velvet-covered chair. They both looked like they dated from the forties and hadn’t been washed or removed from the small room since. There was a little window so high up on the back wall that all I could see was the sky. The first day I met Mr. Burton it was a clear blue. Every now and then a cloud passed, filling the entire window with white before moving on.
On the walls were posters of school kids looking happy and declaring to the empty room how they had said no to drugs, spoke out against bullying, coped with exam stress, had beaten eating disorders, dealt with grief, were clever enough to not have to face teenage pregnancy because they didn’t have sex, but on the off chance that they did, there was another poster of the same girl and boy saying how they used condoms. Saints, the lot of them. The room was so positive I thought I was going to be ejected from my chair like a rocket. Mr. Burton the magnificent had helped them all.