Half-Sick of Shadows (9 page)

Mother’s genuine happiness made me genuinely happy too.

But our happiness was destined to be short-lived.

6

Going to School

An unexpected haircut symbolized abrupt severing from the happiness that went before. Happiness could not return. Time went forward, not back – at least, time as I understood it then did. The time for beginning my formal education drew close like a storm.

Days before I went to school for the first time, Mother said I should be excited. I was terrified. Sophia went off her food. Mother knew what ailed her: missing me before I’d gone.

Then …

‘It’s very kind of you. I’m sorry for putting you to all this trouble,’ said Mother, smiling, and grovelling so low she almost scraped her forehead on the kitchen floor. She had her coat on, her boots, a bag over her arm, and wore a headscarf. Farmer Barry beamed red from ear to ear. Mother spat on her fingers and combed them over my fine hair to stick it down.

Although very young, I knew the undesirability of so much gratitude shown to anyone for anything. I couldn’t define the undesirability, but I came to think of excessive gratitude as a way of belittling oneself – and in adult life there are folk enough willing, able and ready to belittle you. Schoolteachers are good at it. I wished she would stop behaving like a lackey. I knew what a lackey was because
Mother
often told Father she wasn’t his. Father usually responded with an ‘aye’ that disagreed.

Farmer Barry lifted a suitcase in each of his powerful hands. He had fingers as fat as pork sausages, and green teeth that glistened like polished Wellington boots. They were visible when he smiled – and he smiled constantly. He had a round, red, rustic face. A woollen hat sat on top of it like a cherry tomato’s hat on a beef tomato’s head.

‘Not at all, not at all,’ he replied, and carried the suitcases out to his lorry. Mother thanked him, and thanked him again as he went.

I’d overheard Father telling Mother that Farmer Barry drank like a fish. That’s how he got broken veins in his nose. I drank too, and I had no broken veins in my nose. Maybe I would have them by the time I reached Farmer Barry’s age if I started drinking like a fish. Father had some broken veins in his nose. I wondered how, since they had no hands, and fins instead of arms, fish drank. Might Farmer Barry hunker down and drink from a dish like a cat? But fish, unlike cats, have no legs with which to hunker. And if fish are such heavy drinkers, how come the sea isn’t empty?

I watched Farmer Barry’s boots as they crossed the floor, toes pointing east and west respectively. His boots were the size of small sheds. He must have had terrifying feet. Meanwhile, Edgar puckered his lips and made porridge spew out. Gregory turned away, revolted, and buttoned his coat. Sophia sneezed, and wiped her nose on her hand-knitted cardigan, the one with more holes than wool.

Having to start school meant I had to suffer the agony of separation from my other half. I cried myself to sleep last night – good practice for nights to come. Sophia cried herself to sleep too. Mother had to come to our rooms with a message from Father: ‘Tell them pair to stop their gurning.’

Sophia and I would reunite each Christmas and during the summer breaks, but many lonely months were insurmountable obstacles between each of those. I thought they’d let me go home at Halloween, Easter and weekends. But not so.

Being special, Edgar didn’t go to school. I wished I were special too. Only Gregory went to school, so I asked him about it. Aware of my bed-wetting anxiety about punishment for starting school a year late, Gregory delighted in exacerbating my fear. School’s like a dungeon, he said.

‘What’s a dungeon?’

‘Have you ever seen a smelly, damp cave under a castle on a cliff-edge with iron bars and rats and a torture chamber?’

‘No.’

‘A dungeon’s like that. There’s no daylight. You need a torch to see.’

Dungeons were a bit like our cellar, then. I had never seen inside our cellar, but I knew it existed – under the kitchen table – and you needed a torch to see. Mother told Father it had rats, and he said he knew. Mother told him to put poison down, and he might have. So far as I knew, our cellar didn’t have a torture chamber, although it might get one when they came to fit the indoor toilet.

Dungeons, my brother enthused, were where torturers chain you to the wall, starve you half to death, and whip you until you’re covered in cuts and blood and all your bones stick out.

‘What happens when all your bones stick out?’

He got stuck on that one. ‘They just … stick out. It’s horrible.’

‘What do they whip you with?’ I asked.

‘A whip, idiot! Have you never seen a whip?’

I’d seen Mother whipping cream. But she did that with a wooden spoon until she muttered swear words and complained of arm-ache.

In dungeons, Gregory enlightened me, bald, hunchbacked torturers wearing hoods pull off your fingernails with pliers, pour boiling oil on your eyeballs, and stick spikes up your bum.

‘Why do they wear hoods?’

‘Because they’re so ugly you’d die if you saw their faces.’

‘How do you know they’re bald?’

‘Because they are, stupid!’

Puzzled, I pointed out: ‘But they’ve got their hoods up.’

‘Shut up!’

He punched my shoulder and it hurt.

I suspected some lies, but it must have been mostly truth, otherwise Gregory would have had nothing to base his lies upon.

According to my eldest brother, the senior boys’ half – of the school which would later become my home for the greater part of each year – was bad enough, but the junior boys’ half – where I had to board, except for summers and Christmases, until I reached twelve – was ten times worse.

‘Every morning the masters strip you naked and hose you down with freezing water, and for breakfast they feed you gruel – if you’re lucky.’

‘What’s gruel?’

‘Stuff with the texture of wallpaper paste that tastes the same.’

‘Porridge,’ I said.

He thumped my arm and that hurt too.

‘Gruel! Gruel!’ he insisted. ‘And the beds have spiders.’

‘Same as the Manse, then.’

‘The masters beat you with bamboo canes.’

‘Pandas eat those.’

‘Shut up! These are different. You’re so sore they make Father’s strap feel like a feather. And if you get your homework wrong they make you clean out the toilets with your bare hands.’

‘Is the toilet outdoors, like ours?’

‘Yes. And it stinks. You can die from the smell.’

‘What’s homework?’

Homework, Gregory revealed, was what they made you do in your dormitory, instead of in the classroom, because there were too few hours in the day. I was none the wiser, but homework sounded a lot less painful than having spikes up my bum. Actually, I liked the sound of homework.

Lording over both boys and masters, lording over the whole school like the shadow of a giant storm cloud, hovered the fearful figure of
the
headmaster. Wanted by the police for crimes against schoolboys too horrible to talk about, they called him Murderous Mulholland.

‘Why does he want to murder us?’

According to Gregory, he wanted to murder us because he had a demon inside him. If you disobey one of the rules and a master sends you to the headmaster’s office, you’re in for it.

‘In for what?’ I asked.

Stumped, Gregory punched me in the head, but I ducked and he nearly missed.

Murderous Mulholland stood eight feet tall and growled at everybody when his mouth took a break from chewing their bones.

‘Bones aren’t chewy, they’re crunchy.’

‘Right, then,’ said Farmer Barry, clapping his big hands and rubbing them together. ‘Everybody ready for the off?’

Sophia and I held hands. Mother took my other hand and dragged me to the back door. Sophia dragged along too – until Mother disconnected us. We reconnected. Mother disconnected us again, and this time raised a warning finger.

There had been no emotional goodbyes and wishes for good luck from Father, or even a prayer that God would bless us and keep our train from crashing. There had been no unemotional ones either. I had decided to give him the benefit of the doubt; maybe he had prayed for us in private. As usual, he had gone to work on Farmer Barry’s farm before we got up, I thought. He might well have met Farmer Barry as he left his farm travelling in the opposite direction. Father would have raised a salute and an aye-aye, and Farmer Barry would have raised his hat.

Sophia, hands behind her back now, and innocent-eyed, rocked her shoulders from side to side as Mother gave instructions. ‘Don’t go outside, and don’t touch anything until I come home. Same for Edgar. Don’t let him out unless he needs the toilet.’

Father frightened the wits out of me by passing through the
kitchen
and out the back clutching newspaper pages torn into squares. He was in a heck of a hurry.

‘Take Edgar to the living room and give him his colouring book when he’s finished his breakfast. Don’t remove the fireguard, and don’t even think about handling anything in here. Stay in the living room. Have you got that?’

Sophia said she had it.

‘Bye-bye, Edgar,’ I said. ‘See you at Christmas.’ He waved his spoon and dotted the floor with porridge. ‘Bye-bye, Sophia.’

Sophia and I hugged for so long Mother had to separate us like a referee in a boxing match.

Gregory had followed Farmer Barry out to the lorry to avoid having to say goodbye or hug anyone.

‘Shut the door behind us, Sophia, and stay warm or you’ll catch your death. Sit by the fire and keep your head dry. Don’t go out unless you need the toilet. Give Edgar his colouring book …’

‘I know! I know!’

Mother followed Gregory, pushing me in front of her as I looked back at Sophia with a sort of ‘save me’ expression on my face.

Sophia, sneezing again, followed Mother and me outside, but Mother sent her back in with an angry bark.

Farmer Barry drove us to Bruagh to catch the train.

The village consisted of two crumbling buildings on either side of the potholed road that ran between them. No other roads turned off or on to this one, just the occasional cattle track, or disused trail leading to a pile of stones that used to be a habitable hovel. Some trails faded away in a field as though having lost interest in a destination. A rusty cow-gate here and there interrupted the wild shrubbery and twisted trees. There were bogs everywhere. There was one on Hollow Heath and we were forbidden to go anywhere near it. It swallowed Father’s bicycle once when he took a short cut. The bog would be full of bodies, with no room for mine, if all the tales about it were
correct
. I didn’t know where I heard these tales – maybe from Granny Hazel.

There were farms round about, at the top of winding, bumpy lanes, with dogs that ate you if you came too close. The farms produced enough potatoes, carrots and eggs to sell at a busier roadside, or take to weekly markets in Garagh and other towns far away.

One of the crumbling roadside buildings doubled as a post office cum shop, where handy items such as Wellingtons, dish cloths, damp matches and prehistoric tins of baked beans were available for the desperate. You could get the freshest eggs in the world there, though, and the freshest milk.

I sat on Mother’s knee, missing Sophia already, but excited by the prospect of a train ride. Gregory squatted on the floor behind us, between the seats. The lorry had no back window. When I twisted around to see Sophia I saw Gregory, and I had no wish to see him.

I said, ‘I thought Father had gone to work.’

Mother explained. ‘Sure, isn’t he in awful pain this past week. The rebels want out, but the back door’s rusted shut.’

Farmer Barry chuckled. ‘If he’d eat more cabbage …’

‘That medicine’s doing the job. He never moves that fast.’ Mother tittered – she hardly ever tittered.

What they were talking about, a clue I had not. None!

No one spoke for a while. The wipers wiped rain off the window.

‘It’s a terrible day,’ Mother thought aloud, to make sound in the lorry, because Farmer Barry never did anything aloud except smile.

Mother kept reminding Farmer Barry of his terrible kindness, and Farmer Barry kept saying not at all, not at all. God had never created a kinder man, as far as I could tell – except Jesus, obviously. Despite having been stewed in scripture for five years, I still hadn’t grasped that Jesus and God were the same person.

The lorry bumped along and made me feel ill. The wipers wiped and would have put me to sleep but for awake nightmares about
dungeons
, hunchbacks, spikes, my bum and Murderous Mulholland.

We left behind misery – Father wrestling constipation in the toilet, Sophia barking like a hound, and Edgar eating porridge off his trousers – and travelled through misery into more misery.

Nobody said Gregory and I were to travel alone. Nobody said the iron school gates would shut with me inside, in a dormitory, looking out through barred windows with tears in my eyes.

Whimpering like a dog who knows he is going to be put to sleep, but is clueless as to why, I hung on to Mother’s coat as the train steamed and rattled to a halt at Bruagh Halt. ‘Look after him,’ she told Gregory, but it sounded more like a question. She squeezed and squeezed the tears out of me, then tore me from her and pushed me on to the train, both of us contributing to a reservoir on the platform floor. ‘I’ll see you at Christmas,’ she said. ‘It isn’t far away.’

Christmas was months and months and months away!

The station man helped Gregory hoist our suitcases on board. The station man shoved me in too when I tried to escape. The station man slammed the door shut and blew his whistle, Mother out there weeping and me locked in, bawling. The train jolted to life, and I fell on the seat, but quickly jumped back up. Mother waved to me – to Gregory too – with a handkerchief for her tears. She waved and wept from Farmer Barry’s armpit as one of his big arms swallowed her in a hug. I flattened my nose on the window. The train took me away as I tried to press my head sideways through the glass.

I cried myself to sleep on the train. Gregory shook me awake when we arrived at Whitehead House. He did not tease me about my weakness, and I was grateful for that. Once upon a time, he cried himself to sleep too
.