So those were the great times. Then Brother Burley took Roddy White's trousers down and sang with his leather, Caruso, and I gave up school. But why did times not become even better once I was rid of fearful Brother Burley and the tyranny of his classroom, and even greater lengths of day were available for roaming? A day would come, I was aware of that, when I would have to go back to school, something was going on in Dada's mind, I sensed it. But considerations of the future had never ruined the present for me before and certainly should not have distracted me from a present of blissful school-less days. Was it because my aunt Fay decided to take over my education, and because I had to help Dada with jobs? Were these the reasons why my days disimproved? How had my sense of citizenry of the free world gone and deserted me?
Education with Fay meant history, geography and more geography. That wasn't too bad. It was wizard, in fact. Fay didn't like the normal subjects; neither did I. We studied from a wonderful book of coloured maps called an atlas. We studied Munster. "We'll start at our own front door," Fay said. So Munster was my own front door.
But I didn't see my school friends any more. Somehow, not seeing them in school made it difficult to go out and meet them outside of school. Would I want to meet school friends who only remembered me as the fellow whose trousers should have come down in front of everybody? So that for evermore, when my name would he mentioned, a bottom, and not a face, would float before their eyes. And not seeing my school friends began to have an effect on me, to make me different. At least, according to the staff in the hotel, I was becoming different. "Don't be pestering me, get out of the kitchen. Why can't you be normal like other boys, odd one." Bid Cullen, the cook, shushed me away from the big table where she carved the beef roasts.
I was becoming an odd one. Bid Cullen was very definite in her opinions. If a diner didn't like the potatoes he was served up, Bid Cullen could always explain it to the kitchen staff: "The poor dim creature, sure he can't tell mashed potato from mashed parsnip." Because of her ability to hand down judgement on the character of her diners, she had come to be held as a general authority on everything. So I was an odd one. I began to notice it myself. I was seeking company among the hotel staff. Una, with her black hair, shiny as a blackbird. Why was I always getting on chairs, then jumping on her back? She didn't like it.
"Get off."
"I'm only playing. Giddy up, Una."
"I'll tell your aunt."
But why did she like it when Grizzler from down the yard came up and winked at me as he stuck his hand up under her skirt and pulled at something inside that made a snap sound? The sound like a banjo going twang. That's what he said. "I hear your banjo twang, Una." Dropping the hand, he called it. Not lifting the hand, as it seemed more reasonable to call it. He loved dropping the hand, making dives at her, as she shrieked and ran between tables, knocking chairs. I could have told Dada on him. But then how could I when I began to do the same thing myself? The first time, I pulled my hand away as soon as I felt Una's skin. But once I had grown used to it, I let the hand rest there for as long as I was allowed, a dream of banjo twanging passing through me, even though I was making not a sound. Dada thought Grizzler was wonderful for a long time. He had sandy-grey hair. It curled tightly against his head. He had a wide forehead that went into creases of concentration whenever Dada was explaining jobs he wanted him to do: "Right boss, right boss, as good as done boss." As Dada said, "He can put his hand to anything." How could I tell Dada about Grizzler's adventures in the kitchen. He had put him in charge of all the other men in the yard.
The next thing, Grizzler was gone.
"He can grizzle his own wife now," all the maids laughed.
"Where is he?" I asked.
"Oh, your father gave him the sack."
The sack. What was the sack? The sack filled me with dread. Was it bottomless; was it dark; was it soggy, like the sack in the water barrel the five kittens were put in? Would I get the sack if I was found out? But what could I do? I was good when Dada was about, but I couldn't stop putting my hand up Una.
Rocky Dunne was another one that came into the kitchen. The maids didn't like Rocky at all. They just left out the buckets of slop for him to feed the pigs and then hunted him. Rocky took me down the yard. There was a shed he liked to take me into. He shut the door so that only a crack of light came through. I could barely make out the things in the shed, the handle of an old plough, a horse manger on the wall with strings hanging from it. In return for a penny, Rocky would ask me to sing for him. "Three Lovely Lassies from Bannion", one of Auntie Delia's songs. I never sang except for money. In return for another penny, he would ask me to lean against him while he rubbed himself up and down against my tummy. The first time I was a bit curious at what was going on. But when I lost interest in proceedings, which was very quickly because it was boring, he grew even more interested. Then I hated it; I hated how he dribbled down on my hair, saying between dribbles, in an anxious voice, that it wouldn't take long. There was a smell of old potato skins off his clothes. The handle of the plough bore into my back, and I tried to make out the manger and the other things in the dark shed. "I'll give you a penny, I'll give you another penny," he pleaded, but when I struggled to break free of his clothes against my face he always let me go. At times other than during the "Three Lovely Lassies" sessions in the shed I was happy to pal around with Rocky. And for a while he was my only daytime companion.
Then he too got the sack from Dada. At least then I knew that the sack wasn't something you got for dropping the hand. But was it for rubbing me in the shed? So I had to go around for days, keeping out of Dada's sight, until I found out what it was you did get the sack for. Rocky got the sack for choking one of the pigs. A match-stick that Rocky should have seen in the slops and taken out had stuck in its throat. That must have been the day I saw the pig flat out beneath the gate of the pig pen, its head blue with the cold. Then I saw Rocky burying it under a cloud of flies in the dungheap. "Don't tell your father," he said, and I thought he was talking about the other thing. As if I could have told anybody about something as boring as that. When he was gone the maids said they'd miss him, bad and all as he was, because he was harmless. And they left out some milk for him each day, to take home to his mother. Though he had been my only company down the yard for a while, I grew used to his absence.
Miss Carroll had lived in the hotel for as long as I could remember. She'd always had the same room; a sunny room at the back and just above the kitchen. It was a cheerful room - certainly not lonely, being within hearing of the hub of everything that went on in the hotel - a cheerful room but very small and smelling slightly of the kitchen. It suited the size of Miss Carroll's pocket, I once heard Fay say. When my sister Pam and me were little we used to arrange all Miss Carroll's combs and brushes on her dressing table. She tied her hair in a grey bun at the back during the daytime but when she was in her room she let it down so that we could brush it out for her. It was thin and wispy but we liked to brush it. She had a huge bed, which took up most of the room, into which we used to climb. Miss Carroll at one side, a bolster down the middle, and my sister and me on the other side. Now I took again to visiting Miss Carroll. She didn't mind. She lay on one side of the bolster, I lay on the other and I told her about my geography lessons. She told me about her family from the County Offaly. I loved to lie there in her bed, the sun coming in the window and falling on my face and all down along the bed until it hit the mirror on her dressing table.
I had a game: Miss Carroll could hardly say a sentence without putting the words "of course" into it: "Of course, my father didn't approve of my becoming a hairdresser. Of course, he and my mother never stopped arguing about it. Of course, my mother believed in getting the girls out of the house: "Educate the girls, the boys will look after themselves." Of course, you had to go to Dublin to learn hairdressing in those days. And Dublin for young girls in those days was not of course . . ." I would count the number of courses and tell Fay. For a while Fay was amused. Then one day she told me she was worried about the amount of time I spent with Miss Carroll because it was too much intrusion on Miss Carroll's privacy and she would have to speak to Dada about it. Fay knew that all she had to do to get me to do something was mention Dada's name.
"Promise me you will not see Miss Carroll in her bedroom any more."
"I promise, Aunt Faith."
"But promise you will continue to be nice to her."
"Of course I promise." As if I would let down Miss Carroll like that just because I was no longer going to bed with her!
My next bed-mate was Auntie Leg. She was Dada's aunt. Visits to her were not so satisfactory because she made me do what she wanted, not what I wanted, which was to lie on top of her big draughty double bed with its brass rails and imagine myself sailing across the seas on a tall ship.
I had to arrange all of Auntie Leg's shoes for her. She kept them under the bed, hundreds of them. I didn't mind the shoe arranging; in fact it was quite enjoyable finding the matching pairs. I didn't mind the smell either, which was of disinfectant - Aunt Leg was once a nurse and everything had to be disinfected. What I minded was the thought of the bed coming down on top of me. Auntie Leg was a very big woman and when you had to get out of her bed and go beneath it to do her shoes, or to find her hair-brooch which she was always losing, you heard the bedsprings rumbling above you like thunder in the skies. You wanted to ask her not to move about so much because she was going to bring the whole world down on top of you, but you couldn't draw Aunt Leg's size to her attention. I told Fay once that Aunt Leg was huge and she told me never to breathe a word to Aunt Leg about it. So here's me under the bed, the rumble above me, but at least happy in the one thought that Aunt Leg would not die on me up there. Not like old Miss Corbett, who died in her bed on the top landing and Dada had to cart her off. Aunt Leg was a diehard and that was why she would not die. Dada said it: "A diehard, green to the bitter end," he said one day with an unhappy face. Here's me under the bed; above me, Aunt Leg's continuous chatter about politics, the great man de Valera, the mistaken ideas of the other side of our family . . . Other chatter she went on with: how it was going from bad to worse in the hotel. How since Mama died it was being poorly run. How she pitied Dada having to cope on his own . . . Uninteresting chatter.
Aunt Leg began to find too many jobs for my liking. I had to help her roll out her wool yarn and while she sat in the bed I stood on the floor until my arms nearly fell off from holding out the wool. I had to maintain a constant supply of toilet-papers by her bed for the receipt of parcels of catarrh silently expelled from beneath her tongue. But the day I had to empty her potty, I thought that was enough. On my under-bed crawlings I'd had always to avoid the potty, denying any notice even of its existence: "Mind out for the potty, Lally," the warning used to reach me through the bedsprings. "I can't see it, Aunt Leg," though its whiteness glimmered like pearl through the tangle of shoes. And now here it was, having to be hauled into the daylight, having to be held up and carried to the sink. There was no denying the existence of the potty after that. And so I gave up Auntie Leg. A diehard, with a heavy potty.
I began to visit Mr Scanlan. I visited in the early morning. Goodness me, all the people I was getting to know so intimately. And all because I had given up school. Was there any limit to the number of people a fellow might get to know if school didn't come in the way? The first time I visited Mr Scanlan was because I had taken on a new job. Denis, the waiter, polished the shoes of all the guests and then left them outside the doors. I liked Denis, who was getting very old, and I decided to do the shoe polishing for him. I polished all the shoes brown; even the black ones I polished brown. Dada's shoes were brown. If brown was good enough for Dada, it was good enough for everybody else. But then Denis told me I would have to give up the polishing. So I took to returning the shoes for him. Early every morning I rose, to return the shoes, and not just to leave them outside the doors but to take them into the rooms.
Mr Scanlan was the guest most pleased to see me returning the shoes. A sight for sore eyes, he said, and they did look sore, or at least very wrinkled. Like the wrinkled skin around the eyes of the old bullocks that skeetered the streets on fair days. His room was not so pleasant as Miss Carroll's; it was far up the corridor, which at that time of morning was very quiet. There was always a smell from his washhand basin. Stale soap, if such a thing is possible. And gobbling noises came from it every now and then as if it was about to spew up something ferocious. He did not do things to me as Rocky had done except for rubbing my face against the rough hairs of his. "See how the fairies pull out my beardies at night," he used to say and rasp me, laughing. He was a lonely soul and it was not until I developed the rash on my chin, for which I had to steal Fay's Nivea Creme to salve myself with, that I gave up going to him.
None of the other guests were permanent. I did not feel I knew them enough to visit, so that, bit by bit, I was finding myself more and more in the nursery room. My geography began to come on with great leaps.
Then I began to experiment with matches. It was Dada's cigarettes that started it. After Mama died I had to sleep with Dada to keep him company. I would be asleep when, after closing the bar and then cleaning all the glasses, he came to bed. The smell of the cigarette would waken me. He always smoked a cigarette before switching off the light. He must have thought that I turned into a sort of ball once I went to bed, because as soon as he lay down he bundled me up, kicking his legs all around me and I could feel all the moistness of him until I fell asleep, or he broke away from me, muttering loudly to himself. One night, after Fay had said good- night and while the singing of the drunks went on in the bar beneath me, I lit up one of his cigarettes. I liked it. I liked the sudden rush of deadness into my head and then having to lie flat out from weakness while the bed seemed to float about the big room. But it was the lighting of the match that was best. And the little crackling and buzzing on the cigarette as it sucked in the flame. So I took to lighting matches in the nursery. And that was how, one evening after I'd had my bath, I lit the fire that had been set and my dressing gown caught flame and I burned myself. Fay congratulated me on my quick thinking, because I had pulled the dressing gown off and thrown it in the fire. But she asked me did I think Dada would be happy losing Mama and then me? She asked me to think about it.
I knew myself that it was Mama had saved me the night of the fire. An angel in the choir, she was more than that, she was a guardian angel - but then I began getting in other kinds of trouble that not only could she not save me from but I would have been ashamed for her even to have seen. I had stolen Fay's Nivea Creme to deal with the Scanlan rash. But the day I stole it, I saw money lying on her dressing table. Just a little money, enough to buy a fizz-bag or something. When I came back a few days later because of a sudden thirst that only a fizz-bag could quench - probably because of that fire and the drying effect it was after having on me that would not go away - there was all this extra money lying around, I didn't know how much. I didn't have time to pick and choose among the coins, so I took them all. When I went to Georgey's shop I was amazed at how much I had and so was Georgey, his long neck growing even longer as it stuck out of his collar and he looked down over the counter at me.
"Your birthday?" he said.
"Yeh," I said. "A fizz-bag, please."
"And is that all?"
"How many can I buy?"
"Let me see, eight shillings and seven pence. Thrupence each. That's thirty-four fizz-bags and a penny-bar."
I said penny-bars were bad for my teeth. Even though I ate them all the time, they got dropped from the menu once something better was on offer.
"Thirty-three fizz-bags and two sherbets then."
I said, "OK, thanks."
"I like a lad with manners," he said.
Georgey was a gentleman himself. That was why he liked boys with manners. There were not that many of them. Fellows came in from the country to Georgey's shop and bought ice creams so large they could hardly open their mouths wide enough to bite them and then the ice creams slipped through the wafers onto the high step outside his shop and they cursed, "Feck ya anyway, Georgey, with your slippery feckin' ice cream." Georgey didn't like that. Often I had to stop and admire Georgey's way of walking on the footpath: his walking stick, how dapperly he brandished it. How he could make it twirl! He passed by the hotel each evening on his way home to his house in Lacey Parade after locking up the shop for the night. Quick step, the hat on, the scarf around the neck, a twirl of the walking stick into the air, a flick of it, as if he was trying to dislodge a lump of dog's doings off its tip. King of the Templemore toffs.
On my way home to the hotel, my fizz-bags stuffed into my pockets, I gave over my mind to hard sums . . . I worked out that were I to consume eleven bags a day, then the fizz-bags would last me three days. Exactly. Wasn't it great to know your eleven and twelve times tables? I had got as far as big sums in school with Burley. I hardly knew myself now, I was so good at them. Even sums with answers bigger than a hundred. Sure I would never need to go back to school again. On my first and second day I ate a fizz-bag every waking hour and that was great, but on day three I opted for all my fizz-bags together because one at a time was becoming boring. The contents of eleven fizz-bags and two sherbets emptied into a glass and water poured over them. It was a tricky business. I accomplished it at the kitchen sink while nobody was looking. But the water had a problem getting into the glass; after the first few drops no more would go in because the fizz-bags exploded out of the glass as though they were a bomb and I got such a fright I didn't know where to go with the glass and ran through the kitchen, the glass spitting out all my fizz-bags and sherbets over the dinners sitting on the hot range ready to go into the dining room. Fizz-bags and sherbets don't go together, I'm afraid, I said to myself. But then Bid Cullen, whose attentions I was trying to avoid by smothering the glass against my jumper, shouted out that I was a rat belonging to a witch and got a sweeping brush after me and I dropped the bubbling glass and ran out in the yard.
Unfortunately, on a diet of eleven fizz-bags a day one develops a severe, to use Fay's word for her explanation for her ten cups of coffee a day, addiction. The next time I approached Fay's dressing table the idea was to return the hairclips that had been mixed in with the money and that I had in my haste taken along with it the first day. This time the money on the dressing table lay there all bare, no clips or hairs or strands of doubt in the way. Even before I mounted the high step to Georgey's, my mathematical abilities being now well advanced after the first day's exercise, I knew how many fizz-bags were within my reach.
"Let's see how much we have." I could see Georgey's neck enlarging again at the sight of the money.
"Nine shillings and no pennies," I said.
"Another birthday?"
"Yeh."
"You'll be older than myself soon."
"Yeh. I have two birthdays. One that I had with my mother and I still have it. One that I have with Fay since she found that the date on the birth certificate was three days after the date my mother said." Which was true, by the way, confusing but true, except that my two birthdays were yet months away. "Thirty-six fizz-bags, please, no sherbets."
"Your mother God rest her." Georgey's head sadly toppled from side to side on his long neck.
The next time I went into Georgey he didn't even ask me about my birthday, just handed over the thirty-six fizz-bags. That evening Fay told me that she and I were having a chat.
I don't think I will ever forgive Fay for her deception.
"How much bait would you say is required to rat out a thief?" Here was that word rat again. And a cold smile to go with it that was exceedingly threatening. It reminded me of cold meat on a bare dinner plate. "Nine shillings, would you say, would that be enough to catch the little rat that has been visiting your aunt's quarters? Nine shillings might be a big hole in one's federal reserves, don't you think? And the poor exchange rate on the American dollar."
"Is it poor at the moment?" I asked. Fay was always giving me bulletins about the exchange rate on her dollars that she was still getting from the diocese of San Francisco, where she had worked with the priests.
"If there is one thing I would wish, it is that you have an idea of the value of money."
"Yes, Aunt Faith."
She gave me an option. Either she told Dada or I was a big boy and received a tanning on the bottom.
I felt my face burn hot.
"Telling Dada is the worst," I mumbled.
In the end she didn't give me the tanning on the bottom. But how could Fay have put me in such a predicament? I will never forgive her for that either. After all, only a few days previously I had complimented her on a shapely dress she had been wearing: "I like that black dress on you, Auntie Fay."
"Why do you like it?" She had been delighted, looking at herself in the mirror.
"I don't know." And I didn't know how to say it either. "Makes you sort of . . . something, I don't know."
The truth was that I liked what it did to her, fattening her or something, making her somehow like Una. Not of course to the extent where somebody like Grizzler might want to drop the hand on her. That would be out of the question with Fay. Out of the question. But the black dress made her look pretty.
"You're growing up," she said smiling, still looking at herself in the mirror, with her hands giving her titties a boosting. How could Fay have put a growing boy in such a predicament?
I didn't get the tanning on the bottom that time. But I got it shortly afterwards. I will not forget it, not to my dying day.
The tanning came another day, as a result of rudeness to Aunt Leg.
"Why didn't you keep an eye on Aunt Leg's ironing when she asked you?" said Fay.
"It was too nice outside."
"What did you say to her when she came back from the toilet?"
"That it wasn't my fault what happened."
"What else?"
"That she didn't have to iron vests and things, only skirts and blouses."
"And?"
"She said vests and things had to be aired, that's why they had to be ironed."
"What else did you say?"
"Nothing."
"You did. You used shocking yard-boy language, which while it may not shock me, has greatly distressed your grand-aunt."
IT (had been all Aunt Leg's own fault. I had told her I was not going to help her. Everybody thought that because I was not going to school I should be their slave. Especially Aunt Leg, wheezing beside her ironing board up on the landing every Tuesday with her sagging cheeks flapping around her neck like turkey wattles. And I having to rummage through her laundry for her and stack in piles, first her knickers, then her vests, then her hankies. And then stack them all again after the ironing.
"What's that smell?" says Aunt Leg when she comes back from the toilet and I had already told her I wasn't minding her stuff. She should have known what the smell was. She should have seen the big brown burn of the iron.
"The arse's burning out of your poor knickers, Aunt Leg," says I.
It had been the first time I'd ever used that word. Having heard it in the yard, I'd only wanted to hear what it sounded like coming out of me, especially having found a use for it in an appropriate setting. And I'd only left the iron on her stack of knickers to see how far down the burn mark would get to. Aunt Leg was always making mistakes with burn marks, I had just wanted to see how long it took to make a mistake myself.
I think what I said next caused the real damage.
She said she thought she had only imagined I had used certain language and that maybe the word she'd heard was arson and she asked me what was she going to wear for mass now that all her knickers were ruined. Aunt always walked to daily mass at twelve o'clock. Her constitutional, she called it.
"Sure the priest is hardly going to notice your arson, let alone if it's a burnt arson," says I. And I left her there, chuckling to myself about Aunt Leg walking to church, imagining herself the talk of the town, imagining everybody taking a look at her big brown burnt arson through her coat and skirt.
I actually don't know what overcame me, that I should have shot off like that, first one barrel, then the second barrel, of dirty language. But I paid for it.
"She is your grand-aunt," said Fay. "That makes her my aunt. Who I greatly respect and it is for that reason you are being punished."
I heard Georgey out in the shop once talking to Fanning the butcher about the reason why the world was coming to what it was, and that was the lack of punishment that had a good effect on people. In Georgey's opinion what had a good effect on people was to take their trousers down and give them the cane. A great effect.
No Georgey. Never. It has a very bad effect, not a good effect, on people. Nobody should have their trousers taken down like that, because when the trousers comes down there is no protecting the little pure thing within. It's the window to the heart, is the arson. Which only wants to shrink away then and die of shame. Comfort, the heart needs then, not chastising. Chastising was what Fay did.
(c) Leo Cullen 2001