The Dead School (27 page)

‘An awful character,’ says the barman.

‘Oh, now – who are you telling!’ says Raphael.

Then home to find Nessa sobbing in bed, not that he cared what she did, after what she’d done on him. Her and Stokes and company, for God knows who else she had had in the house, plotting
behind his back. ‘To hell with them!’ he roared as he fell across the bedside cupboard. ‘I fixed Lally in the handball alley and I’ll fix them! My father died for Ireland!
Stand up when I’m talking to you! Where’s your rosary beads, boy! Open your books at page sixteen!’

Then he’d fall on the floor or into an armchair and sleep there for the night.

He did that every day after school now and was going to go on doing it until he left for good. Why shouldn’t he? He didn’t care. He didn’t care if he looked like a baldy old
scarecrow in front of his boys. Why should he? They weren’t his boys.

Not any more.

They could say what they liked to him. They could say absolutely anything. Raphael didn’t care. He had trumped them all – Evans, McCaffrey and the whole whispering
tribe of them. The flower-seller in Grafton Street wasn’t so smart now, was she? It wasn’t quite the same thing saying, ‘There’s Mr Bell. He made a fool of Father
Stokes,’ as, ‘There’s Mr Bell. He made a boy drown.’

Which was why he turned to her with a triumphant smirk on his face. Not so much as a murmur out of her. And why? Because he had had the last laugh, that’s why. Nobody had been expecting
Raphael to go to the bad so they hadn’t the foggiest notion what to do about it when it happened. There were meetings and suggestions and all sorts of things but they came to nothing. For a
while Father Stokes called to the house to see Nessa but it got so nerve-wrecking wondering would Raphael be in or out that the visits became less and less frequent and after a while began to peter
out altogether.

Of course Raphael was distressed at the way she was behaving. What did she expect of him? Had she not considered the effect her actions might have had? He simply ignored her and went up to his
room. He felt sad of course that their once-spotless home was becoming little more than a midden now that she had evidently decided to suspend her domestic duties, for some reason best known to
herself. Some form of protest, perhaps. As if it mattered now. The sheets in their bed were flea-ridden. Stinking dishes piled up in the sink. He didn’t care. Why should he? He ate his dinner
in the Harcourt Hotel. It might, indeed most likely would, have gone on like that indefinitely had it not been for the barman. On hearing the whole sad story from start to finish, he had scratched
his neck and said, ‘Ah God, Master – you wouldn’t do that on her? You wouldn’t treat the poor woman like that!’ It was the gentle way that he said it, and because he
was such a good old stick that it occurred to Raphael for the first time that perhaps he had been, after all, a trifle harsh. ‘Would you not think of going a wee bit easier on her –
would you not, Master?’ As he stared at the barman’s kind face, all of a sudden a little thought came to him and he found himself smiling. ‘Yes!’ he said to the barman.
‘I will! After all – she’s not the worst of them!’

‘Now you’re talking!’ said the barman as he poured him another Jameson.

No doubt the flower-seller was more puzzled than ever when he bought the big bunch of flowers. But then, that just went to prove it, didn’t it – they would have to get up early in
the morning before they would begin to understand Raphael Bell! He smiled at her as he took his change. She didn’t know what to say as he beamed at her. He was feeling tremendous now, he had
to admit. It was just a pity the barman hadn’t made his suggestion sooner. But no matter. Better late than never.

And so, having paid the taximan, off he strode up the avenue and into the house calling his wife’s name, not exactly saying darling but feeling for some strange inexplicable reason like
doing so, not that it made an awful lot of difference what he felt because she didn’t hear a word.

Of course, like any human being, when he saw her sitting there with her mouth open, the furthest thing from Raphael’s mind was that she was dead. Indeed it wasn’t until he touched
her on the forehead which turned out to be as cold as ice that he realized what in fact he’d done was make one of the biggest mistakes of his life, one of those mistakes which would
unfortunately, no matter what he did, be with him until the day he died.

The Dead School was first opened on the 21st of July 1976, the day they blew up the British Ambassador. Raphael walked into Pat McNulty’s hardware shop in Clontarf and
said, ‘Could I have two dozen black bin liners please?’ As Pat was taking down the bin liners from the top shelf he said, ‘Wasn’t that terrible about the British Ambassador,
Mr Bell? Or what the hell is wrong with these people? What do they hope to achieve?’ He shook his head then went ‘Tsk, tsk’ as he put the bin liners into a big brown paper bag.
‘What do I care about the British Ambassador?’ Raphael said. Then what did he do, without another word, paid for the bin liners and walked off out into the street. Pat McNulty looked
after him and felt his cheeks redden. ‘I wonder what the hell’s eating him?’ he said to himself.

That was the day after they buried Nessa. Raphael was standing outside the cemetery repeating to himself, ‘Nessa’s gone. She’s gone, you see,’ when Father Stokes came
over to him and laid a leather-gloved hand on his shoulder. ‘Let me take you home, Raphael. And maybe we can stop for a bite to eat on the way. What do you say to that?’

Raphael looked blankly at him. Then, before the clergyman could say anything, he pushed past him and started walking off down the road in the direction of Dublin City.

Some people reckoned it was the hottest day for fifty years. T-shirts and shorts and sunshades were everywhere. Lawn mowers whirring away to beat the band. Cars whizzed along the coast road with
the kids all yelping, ‘We’re going to the seaside! We’re going to the seaside!’ Which indeed they all were, with the result that Madeira Gardens was practically empty. A
warm suburban ghost town. Except of course for Raphael who was busy as a beaver in his shirt sleeves, tacking up his bin liners. He had all the back windows done and now he was starting on the
front ones. He dumped all the curtains in the bin. When he had that done, he gathered up all Nessa’s clothes, her lovely womanly perfumey clothes, and packed them all into a trunk and dragged
it upstairs. Then he locked it in a storeroom. So that was the end of that. Now what was there to do? I have a hundred and one things to do here in the Dead School, he laughed. Then he sat down and
said, ‘Ah to hell with it, I’ll have a rest!’ He opened a bottle of whiskey and took a swig out of it. Once he had heard a fellow in the pub saying, ‘He was as black as the
riding boots of the Earl of Hell!’ Raphael thought that was a good one. It certainly was a good way of describing what had once been the parlour of 53 Madeira Gardens! But anyway, that was
enough of that! He couldn’t sit there all day drinking whiskey – there was work to be done! He opened his briefcase and took out his books.
A New English Primer. Catechism for Boys
and Girls. Hall and Knights Algebra. JC Beckett’s History Of Ireland. My Friend Our Lady
. A pamphlet called ‘May I Keep Company?’ Lots and lots of books. Homework books. Sums
copies. Jotters. Books by the hundred. And pens. And bottles of ink. What a lot of things Raphael had in his briefcase! He flicked on the table lamp and started to read what JC Beckett had to say
about Mr Parnell and his carry-on with Mrs O’Shea the dirty trollop. ‘Now where are we,’ he said, ‘Parnell is off to visit her at her home for the weekend.’ ‘Is
he now,’ said Raphael, ‘well you needn’t think I’m going to waste my time reading rubbish the like of that, no I think I’ll skip back here to the eleventh century and
see how Brian Boru is getting on at the Battle of Clontarf’ but he couldn’t see how Brian was getting on because the words started floating in front of his eyes, swimming off here there
and everywhere so that he couldn’t read anything. Not a stitch! Off they went into the air like big spidery insects. He tried to stop them but they wouldn’t listen to him. ‘Stop
it!’ he cried. ‘Get into your lines at once!’ Fortunately this time they listened to him and kicked their heels as they got back into line. ‘At last!’ said Raphael.
‘You’re showing a bit of manners!’ He didn’t mind so much now after the way it had all worked out. But unfortunately just as he was about to start reading again the words
went and swooshed away off the page and round the room like wordy tornadoes curling all about him and trying to tease and make a cod of him. He tried to get a hold of them, shake some sense into
them, but it was like trying to wrestle smoke and anyway there was no point because the more he tried the more they tickled him and laughed at him and called him names, singing, ‘Belly
can’t catch the words! Belly can’t catch the words!’

It was at times like that Raphael didn’t want to be in the Dead School. He didn’t want to be anywhere near it. He wished it would collapse and fall to bits. He wished it would burn
down. He felt like crying out to the statue of Our Lady looking over at him from the mantelpiece, ‘Why can’t you help me like you used to do, Our Lady? Why can’t you help me like
you used to do when I was small and me and Mammy and Daddy used to be so happy? Why do you just stand there and look at me with no feeling in your eyes?’

But he didn’t do that. He didn’t because he was too tired and that was why he just let the book fall out of his hands and onto the floor and felt his lips and his eyes go dry as he
saw them again, standing waving to him in a field of golden corn, his mammy and his daddy who were so proud of him and had been ever since the day he was born sixty-three years before.

Sometimes now he thought of days and would they ever come back to him. He stood before his boys and, hiding the quiver in his voice as best he could, asked them will I boys
please tell me will you. Days that once could never end all of them now dead. Why boys? Why are they? He tried to steady his hand as he wrote on his makeshift blackboard: Today we are doing: DAYS.
He wiped away the thin watery mucus under his nose with the sleeve of his jacket. He had done that so often now the whole sleeve was almost silver. Anyway, he licked the chalk and wrote: