The Dead School (10 page)

The head honcho was in no mood for games. Someone had violated the honour of his daughter and would have to pay. The reward was to be a million dollars, no less. You bring me
the head of Alfredo Garcia and the million dollars is yours, he said to Benny, alias Warren Oates. Benny was cool. He was even cooler than Joe Buck. Malachy decided he would be him now. He wore a
beat-up linen suit and shades and no matter what way you looked at it he was just about the coolest thing going. Benny played ‘Guantanamera’ in a Mexican bar with chickens running
across the top of the piano. Benny didn’t care. All he cared about was bringing Alfredo’s head home and collecting the million bucks. But what a job he had doing that. He tracked him
halfway across Mexico and when he did eventually get him and the head, every hood in the place was trying to get it back off him. It got so bad Benny kind of went off his head. Started talking to
the head and all this kind of stuff. Not so good. Talking to a head in a muslin bag ain’t so healthy, just like it ain’t healthy to share a station wagon with maybe half a million
flies. Like Benny was crazy. Him and Alfredo.

They went to the Mayfair Grill in O’Connell Street. ‘So maybe you like to eat some of zees food, Señorita?’ Malachy said as he flipped the menu open. Marion was getting
in on it all now. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. Maybe I don’t want to eat any of your steenking food you pig!’

‘I theenk maybe you keep it a leetle quiet because ze woman – she come.’

‘Do you want the burger in the bun or outside the bun?’ asked the middle-aged waitress.

Benny Dudgeon lowered his shades and said, ‘I theenk maybe inside. What you say?’

Marion shrugged again. ‘I theenk maybe inside.’

‘Right you be,’ said the waitress and stuck the notebook in her pocket.

Malachy twined his fingers around Marion’s. Then he kissed her on the lips. ‘One million dollars – that ees what I pay for you Señ orita,’ he said.
‘You’re a headcase,’ she said and shook her head. ‘Do you know what I say to you, Meester Dudgeon – you are crazy in zee brains. You see – in here? Crazy!
Pah!’

Outside the buses groaned like they were on their way to the wrecking yard. Beneath Daniel O’Connell’s statue a skinhead kicked the air mercilessly with his Doc Martens as a bunch of
Skin Girls urged him on clapping and singing. Outside the Ambassador the hippies queued up for
Pink Floyd at Pompeii
. A tramp looked in the window and played a few bars of a song for them on
a busted harmonica then went off laughing and giggling to himself. Malachy kissed the back of Marion’s hand, hardly realizing he was doing it. It was 1974 in Dublin and was it good to be
alive.

The Stadium was packed to the door. All you could hear was: ‘Horslips! Horslips! Horslips!’ If they didn’t show soon the place would be torn apart. Marion was
going mental. She was up on the seat cheering, ‘Horslips!’ She pulled him by the jumper, ‘Come on!’ she cried, ‘Get up here!’ Up he got. The screams were
unbelievable. Then out of nowhere appears Eamon Carr the drummer with a giant shamrock on the backside of his satin suit. He starts pummelling the drums like a madman. Before you know it the band
are into ‘Johnny’s Wedding’ and the place has gone absolutely apeshit. Charlie O’Connor’s mandolin is like something possessed. It’s like it has a tiny music
demon inside of it and is away off on little silver legs never to be caught by anyone ever again. ‘It’s good to be back in Dublin!’ cried the bass player. A thousand scarves and
woolly hats went into the air. ‘This one’s called “The High Reel”,’ he said and Marion fell off the arm of the seat right on top of Malachy. ‘Come on,’ she
said. ‘Let’s dance!’ and dragged him out into the middle of the floor, shaking her strawberry blonde hair like a wild thing.

Whenever they were apart, they wrote every day. ‘Dear Marion,’ he wrote. ‘I love you so much. I am gone fuckways in the head I am so in love with you. I
can’t wait to get back to college to see you again.’ Half the time he didn’t sleep at all thinking about her. She sent him a picture of herself and he kept it in his pocket.
Sometimes when he’d be drinking with Kevin Connolly he’d take it out and say he was going for a piss just to have a look at those eyes.

Every day himself and Kevin went to the café. Donny Osmond was there, flashing his teeth and singing away about how them older folks just didn’t understand him and his poor old
Puppy Love. But they didn’t know you see. Not as far as Donny was concerned. They could say what they liked. ‘Damn right,’ said Malachy as he took a drag of his cigarette and
nearly shit himself when he realized he had just agreed with Donny Osmond.

After a couple of dozen cups of coffee, Kevin Connolly said, ‘You’re fucked – do you know that? You’re out of your mind over this woman. It’s going to come to a bad
end.’ He was joking. Of course he was. He was laughing when he said it. But little did he know just how right he was. Malachy sure had come full circle. Those hotel Sunday mornings when he
was afraid to utter a word about love in case it would wither and die on his lips seemed like a thousand years ago now. It was as if they had happened to a stranger.

Relations between him and Cissie didn’t improve any, however. He was civil to her but that was about it. Sometimes she’d plead with him and turn on the tears but he didn’t want
to know. Not that it mattered because most of the time anyway he was either in the café or at the movies, dreaming of the day when he’d be heading back to college. When he’d come
home she’d still be sitting there in the chimney corner, going through old memoriam cards and trying to pretend that it had all been so beautiful way back in the old days when Packie and her
were so much in love. She looked sad and broken sitting in the chimney corner where she spent all her days and it was hard not to feel sorry for her. But then he came to his senses and thought to
himself well too bad ain’t it – that’s what you get when you make your bed. You have to lie in it, don’t you? Which is absolutely true of course as he was going to find out
himself, and a lot sooner than he thought, standing there in the kitchen coming on like a preacher and passing judgements on a helpess, choked-up wretch who, with her stick fingers and wizened skin
and rapidly disappearing teeth, was beginning to look more like a scarecrow than someone you would be inclined to call your mother.

The first sign that old lover boy might be in for a little bit of a surprise came when the inspector on his second teaching practice said to him, ‘I see where you
received a B plus for your earlier teaching practice. To be quite frank I can’t understand it. Perhaps it was because you had second class. Sixth class as you can see are a different kettle
of fish altogether. There were times, Mr Dudgeon, when I felt you were seriously out of your depth.’ Malachy was dumbstruck. He stared at him in disbelief as he clicked his briefcase shut.
What was he talking about – out of his depth? Sure there had been a little bit of a problem getting one or two of the boys to sit at rest during the geography lesson but that was no big deal
was it for Christ’s sake. I mean – come on! As he was leaving the inspector paused and said, ‘I would suggest you pay careful attention to discipline and related areas. Much of
your teaching is good but classroom discipline is of paramount importance. Unless that is taken care of everything else suffers. A good rule of thumb is – firm but fair.’

When he was gone, Malachy felt like laughing. What did he care – he would get a job anyway. There were hundreds of jobs. Thousands. He didn’t care what the inspector said. Fuck him!
He had it all worked out and nothing was going to stop him! Of course he would get a job. They were crying out for teachers all over the country. Everyone knew that. Soon as you left college, all
you had to do was walk right into one. Which was exactly what he was going to do. And just as soon as he did, Marion and him would get married. It was all worked out. It was all worked out and
nothing on earth could stop it. Nothing.

He said it to her that night after they had made love.

‘I want to get married,’ he said.

‘Me too,’ she replied. ‘But let’s live together for a while first? See how it goes.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Let’s get married. Who wants to live together?’

‘Right in, Malachy Dudgeon. Right in at the deep end every time.’

‘I want you all to myself,’ he said and kissed her neck and face.

She was wearing a T-shirt with a big red number 99 on it. Even the sound of her brushing her teeth in the bathroom was enough to drive him mad.

Marion was first to get a job – teaching infants in a convent on the south side of the city. The night she received confirmation of her appointment, they went out and got plastered. They
kissed outside the gates of the college just like that first time after the dance in Parnell Square. Malachy was ecstatic. ‘I just can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Moving in
with the woman I love more than anyone in the world. Wake me up – tell me I’m dreaming!’

‘You’re dreaming!’ a faint voice echoed at the back of his mind. ‘You’re dreaming.’ But he didn’t hear it. With his tongue halfway down Marion’s
throat, he never heard a word.

In the year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and thirty-one when Raphael was eighteen years old and in his first year at St Patrick’s Training College Drumcondra, he found
himself one evening sitting under a laburnum tree with javelins of light sailing towards him through the autumn leaves. As he looked up from the
Hall and Knights
algebra opened on his knee,
he saw standing in front of him the blocky figure of a youth in a grey suit with a great big smile.

The youth leaned against the tree and ran his fingers through his blackberry curls, shaking his head at the boundless wonders of the world. ‘Boys,’ he said to Raphael, ‘but
that was a powerful game you played against St Bartholomew’s. As true as I’m standing here you could have put them from here back to Bartholomew’s all on your own.’ Three
priests floated by as Raphael smiled to himself and closed the book. In the trees the birds sang, a tram clanged along Drumcondra Road. ‘Once I knew where I was with the full-back, it was
plain sailing after that,’ said Raphael.

His name was Paschal O’Dowd and he was from Athlone. He had been on his way to Maynooth College to become a priest when he changed his mind at the last minute and headed for Drumcondra.
‘Raphael,’ he said as they walked the playing field together, ‘I think the Church of Rome can soldier on for another while yet without the likes of me.’

A good man on the football field too, the same Paschal, well able to rise into the air as gracefully as any man, plucking the ball from nowhere and sending it high and over the bar for yet
another point for St Patrick’s.

A devout man. Many times Raphael would quietly enter the college chapel, perhaps after tea or before study period, and find him there, deep in contemplation at the foot of the cross or beneath
the pale feet of the Blessed Virgin Mary to whom he too had a special devotion. For it was she, he said, who had helped him along the road to the decision he had made to serve as best he could the
children of Ireland. The first free generation of a country for centuries in chains. Free at last to take its place among the nations of the earth.

‘We are a proud and noble people,’ he remarked to Raphael on one occasion, ‘for too long kept upon our knees.’

But that all belonged to the pages of history now, there consigned because of the courage of men like Raphael’s father, brutally done to death by a cowardly commandant in a bloody field.
There were nights when his face, a mask of terror, would return to Raphael and he would call on her, the Mother of God and she would yet again come to his assistance as the calm once more descended
and sleep drifted down upon him as a gossamer veil from her very own brow.

‘We have been given so much, Raphael,’ Paschal said. ‘Much is expected of us.’

A sea of fresh and hopeful faces, of children whose names as yet they did not know, swept into the future before them. In the nights they saw themselves with chalk in hand, pacing polished
classrooms, league-stepping into infinity.

Both, happy men. In the afternoons they chased the football wildly with the enthusiasm of young colts, then afterwards a silent prayer in the incense-perfumed stillness of the chapel.

The musical evenings were held in the college assembly rooms, occasions rarely missed by either of the two men. When Paschal would excel himself with his rendition of ‘Macushla’,
with its sad tale of a husband’s yearning for his dear departed love who was now cold in the grave. He sang it with such feeling that it would wring tears from a stone. ‘Now who,’
Raphael was heard to remark on every single occasion it was sung, ‘could follow that?’ as he himself would shyly take the stage to begin his, as he described it himself, ‘humble
rendition’ of his father’s favourite song, the story of a young girl who died far away among strangers – ‘She Lived Beside the Anner’.

Part of their work in the Legion of Mary which they had joined on the same day was to visit the sick. One of their charges was a distant relation of Paschal’s, Mrs Ellen
Molloy who had never recovered since her husband’s death. Raphael stood by the bedside and took the sick woman’s hand, looking into her eyes as Paschal intoned a decade of the rosary.
You could see she had once been a lovely girl, with happy smiling eyes and everything to live for. But that was all in the past. Now she could barely breathe and all the flesh had fallen off her.
The hand Raphael was holding was like the skeleton of a bird. She looked at Paschal and tried to say something. But she hadn’t the strength and just fell back onto the pillow. Her groans were
pitiful. In the end she just gave up and turned her face away. Paschal was not an overly sentimental man and had seen many harrowing things in his day, but on the way home that evening Raphael
could see that he was upset. And when he turned to him and wiped a tear from his eye, saying, ‘Sometimes this world – it’s a sad old place, Raphael – do you know
that?’, Raphael understood.