Heaps of Trouble (16 page)

Even Boy-o-Boy was impressed when he dropped by one evening on his long way home. In spite of being in his customary drunken state he couldn't have missed it, for the father had parked the car on the pavement right outside our hall door.

‘Boy, oh boy, Ron,' he began, even before he poured his first drink, ‘did you know that some bowser has parked a bus right outside your front door? There should be a law about that kind of thing, cluttering up the entrances to hard-working people's homes. Boy, oh boy, it's not right that some eejit should own something as…'

At that point the father interjected before he went overboard, ‘It's ok, it's mine, I've just bought it.'

Boy-o-Boy just stood there, shocked, like Lot's wife when she had been turned into a pillar of salt, transfixed, with his mouth opening and closing without saying anything. Until eventually his brain caught up with the moving mouth and, sitting down and shaking his head from side to side, he mumbled, ‘Boy, oh boy, Ron, but the ‘compo' came through right quick.'

*

The father had been given a leave of absence from his job and I was not going back to school for the rest of that year. As the parents needed to get away from daily reminders of Catherine, it was decided that we would travel down to the mother's part of the country where we could recuperate, while keeping an eye on the pending court case.

All I can remember of those few months is two hotels that we stayed in: one in Fermoy and the other in Youghal. The parents spent most of their evenings in the residents' lounge, telling everybody and anybody who would listen of the tragedy that had befallen us. It always ended with me having to present myself to complete strangers and show them the bright pink scars that adorned my chest, while the mother broke down in tears and the father went off to order another round of drinks.

I felt like a performing monkey that had to remain on hand until beckoned over to expose itself – as if the sight of my disfigurement would add credence to the story. I hated those evenings and I began to detest the wallowing self-pity that the effects of alcoholic overindulgence had on the parents. Particularly the mother, who always began with the same words, ‘You know, I had tragedy', her eyes brimming over with tears as if we were the only people in the world to have suffered any calamity.

One evening the mother met a new lady in the bar and, before long, out came the usual words, ‘I've had tragedy, you know.' The woman sat quietly and attentively throughout the rendition, tears and all, and only interjected once to say, ‘I am so sorry, your poor thing, you must have gone through hell.' When the mother had concluded her story, the woman began to tell us her own tale.

She was from England and, earlier that year, every member of her family had been wiped out in a car crash. Her husband, two sons and one daughter – all gone, smashed to pieces in one fell swoop. Now I thought that this was a pretty horrific story and a lot worse than ours, but not the mother. No, this woman's husband could be replaced and, as her children had been years older than Catherine, their deaths didn't have the same impact as that of a four-year-old.

No, no, that woman didn't know tragedy as well as the mother did.

Eventually I would be allowed to retreat back to my darkened room to await the arrival of my old tormentor, which I had now grown to accept as a permanent part of my life. Back would come the awful smell, filling the room with its rotten stink, and I would have to get up and open a window in a feeble attempt to rid the place of the smell of burning flesh and hair. It was always better when we stayed in Youghal, as we were close to the sea and during the night I could climb out of the window in my room and walk to the beach, gulping in the sea smells of salt water and seaweed, which acted as an antidote to the stench filling my nostrils.

The ‘compo' claim wasn't going according to plan, since the gas company were putting up a good defence and still claimed that their bottle had not been the primary cause of the explosion. Their lawyers were making out that the father's Primus stove, with its deadly container of methylated spirits, had been nothing but a portable bomb that had exploded first and set off the gas cylinder. Not their fault at all, and nothing to do with them. Stranger still, the crucial piece of evidence (namely the gas bottle) seemed to have disappeared. Oops, what a shame, since it had ‘only' been taken away for ‘safe keeping'.

Over the next few months I became the main exhibit in the case, because our solicitors were forced to base all their evidence concerning the damage caused on my own carcass. They used maps and drawings of the area in which the caravan had stood and measured the distances between where Catherine had been lying, I had been sitting and the father's position when he had struck the match. In this way they hoped to present a case that would prove, without any doubt, that the Primus stove could not have possibly blown itself up, particularly since methylated spirits is a very low combustible fuel, incapable of going ‘bang'. Gas had been leaking out of the cylinder for at least twenty-four hours before the accident, thus causing Catherine's death, although she had not been in the direct line of the fireball. The damage caused to the rest of the cul-de-sac (all of the surrounding trees and bushes had gone up in a cloud of smoke) was again due to the leaking gas that had settled there during the preceding day and night. The weather reports for that period proved that there hadn't been a breath of wind to disperse the gas that had collected near the caravan.

If I had thought that displaying my scars for the multitude of drunks in hotels had been bad enough, I soon found out that it had been a mere prelude to the main act that followed. For the preparation of the court case I had to be examined by the specialists chosen by our solicitors. Skin, eyes, nose, ears, feet, chest and any other specialist that they could think of – I visited them all. It got to the stage where I could remove my clothes faster than a prostitute on a windy night in Phoenix Park. They prodded, poked, photographed, examined, tapped, stared and peered at every part of me, from the top of my head to my big toes. They made plans to remove skin from my thighs and transplant it onto my face and chest. They rigged me to a machine that nearly popped the eyeballs out of my head and, at the end of all of this, charged a fortune for every visit.

They all concluded that I had been in a gas explosion, since I could not have sustained my injuries in any other way. Well, I could have saved them a lot of time, as I was there when the cylinder went ‘whoosh'. The only good news in this rigmarole was that I was still too young for them to carry out any of the repair work they were suggesting. ‘Bring him back to us for the skin grafts when he has stopped growing and, by the way, here is our bill.' Which was always in guineas, never pounds. Pounds (the father patiently explained to me) are what you use to buy food and clothes, but guineas are what you pay to specialists or use to buy horses. I thought that the ordeal might be drawing to an end when we slammed the front door after the last specialist. But then the solicitors acting for the gas company (who up until then had been very quiet) finally announced their presence.

Now it was their turn to contradict the piles of medical reports regarding my condition. They wanted me to visit their own appointed specialists, just in case ours had made some mistakes in their findings. When visiting the specialists retained the parents, I had always been ushered into rooms with my mother in tow, and she invariably did the talking, as if somehow I had been struck dumb. We were usually met by a dark-suited smiling face, who would go ‘hmmm', and ‘I see', as I unveiled my framework. He would spend hours chatting to the mother while I stood in the middle of his well-appointed room, wondering whether to put on my clothes again. Or waited to be beckoned over to stand by his seated form, or waited to be told to lie on a brown leather, elevated examination table.

All in all, very civil altogether. If they weren't scaring the life out of me with their talk of operations (present and future), they bored me to death with their small talk.

‘Hum, hum, can you please raise your right arm for me, there's a good boy.'

‘Hum, hum, very good, very good', as if I had just performed a tremendous feat of gymnastics.

‘Hum, hum, now Madam, if you look here you can see where the tissue over the right side of the chest has been very badly damaged, owing to the molecular structure of the…'

And so it would go on, as if they were discussing a lump of meat that would fail to take a prize at next year's Royal Dublin Show food exhibition.

Not so with the gas solicitors' bunch. Although they had similar addresses and looked much the same, they treated me as if I was nothing short of a liar and as if, somehow or other, I must have inflicted the damage to my person on my own, while nobody was looking.

The opposition lawyers also went one better in the specialist line-up: they arranged for me to see a psychiatrist, which was the strangest interview that I had during the whole saga. He was a heavy, jolly-looking fellow, wearing a huge pair of glasses, so that when you looked into his eyes through his specs, he resembled an owl observing his prey. He even made me lie on his couch, just as you would see on TV.

‘Well, young man, how are you feeling?' This in his rich, hypnotic voice that I was sure could lull me to sleep if I succumbed to it.

‘Fine, fine.' I had learnt when I was in hospital that this was the best response to make; any other answer tended to have the nurse galloping over, quicker than you could blink, with the injection trolley bouncing and rattling in her wake.

‘Good, good…any pain anywhere?' He raised his bushy eyebrows, which were magnified behind his glasses and looked like two rows of shaggy hedges.

‘Eeer, no, I don't think so.' I thought this was another catch question.

‘Good, gooooood…now would you like to tell me what happened?'

‘Which bit?'

‘Take me back to the accident, and what you remember in your own words. Now take your time.'

So I began, yet again, from the beginning. Where Catherine was lying, where the mother and father had been, what the weather was like, how I saw this yellow fireball coming towards me, how it lifted me into the ditch behind, and how I ran down to the stream to quench the flames, and…here he snapped to full awareness and interrupted me.

‘So you weren't there when the explosion happened?' He retrieved a note pad and pen from his inside pocket and began to take notes

‘Of course I was, how do you think I got burned?' I stopped myself just in the nick of time from adding ‘you eejit'.

‘But you said that you ran from the clearing?'

‘Yes, but that was after I was hit by the fireball. I had to put out the flames, so I ran to a river near the road.'

‘So you didn't see your sister getting burned?'

‘No.'

‘Why didn't your parents help you, when you told them you were on fire?'

‘It all happened too quickly, the clearing was full of smoke and fire, I just panicked and ran.'

‘Did you see your father with the Primus stove?'

‘Yes, I already told you, I saw him take it from the boot of the car and set it up behind the gas cylinder.' This fool was beginning to get me flustered; I had already told him all this.

‘And you saw him strike a match?'

‘Yes, I…saw…him…light…the…match.' I said this slowly, just in case he was hard of hearing as well.

‘So how are you so sure that it was the gas cylinder that blew up, if all you saw was a yellow flame and then smoke?'

‘I just know, that's all, sure it had to be that!'

Here he changed tack completely. ‘Tell me how you feel about your scars?'

Well, I had to admit this question stumped me, as, up until that very moment, I hadn't really thought of them one way or the other. All I knew was that they were there and probably would be for the rest of my life. My mother had continually told me that, as I was a man, they really didn't matter; the only thing that any woman would look at would be my job prospects. I was to concentrate on getting a good education, going to university, and coming out with some qualification or other.

‘Well, the doctors at the hospital told me that I can never go out in the sun again.'

‘Does that bother you in any way?'

What sort of a question was that, at eleven years of age? I answered ‘no'.

‘Is there anything else that you would like to tell me about regarding the accident?'

‘Well,…it's the smell.'

‘What?', he roared, making me jump as well, ‘what smell?' He must have thought I was referring to something in his chambers, as he began to look about the room as if I had spotted a dead rat on the floor.

‘It's the smell of burning flesh and hair that I get every night, sometimes it gets so bad that I can't sleep.'

‘Oh that,' he said, with relief evident in his voice, ‘well, don't worry about it, as some reaction is bound to be expected.'

‘But how do I get rid of it?'

‘Well don't worry, it will go soon, probably as soon as you start school again.'

And that was that, interview over. When we set out on the drive home and the parents asked me how it went, I replied that Dad was right, all psychiatrists were crackers and this fellow was no exception.

I went back to CUS in September 1967 to start a new school year. As I had missed out completely on the previous year's schooling, I thought I would be returning to Gleeson's class for another sentence. But the powers that be decided it would be better if I started year one of the secondary school and, if necessary, I could spend two years in that class before moving on

I joined the Alpha lot (the ‘thickos' of the school), along with about twenty-three others destined to spend the next six years together. This little group turned out, especially in our last two years, to be one of the most difficult classes that the Marist fathers had ever had to contend with. What did they expect? They treated us like fools, so as far as we were concerned we might as well act like fools, proving the old saying, ‘If you dish out peanuts, well, expect a bunch of monkeys.'

We even had a different curriculum from the A ‘geniuses'. For us there was to be no German, no physics, no biology and no chemistry (which was a pity, as Naty was still having difficulty in getting the sodium chlorate and sugar mixture to work). The biology they could keep, as I was not into cutting up frogs and dissecting rabbits. Anyhow, we were not being educated to go on to university. No higher English or maths for us either. Over the next six years we were simply to be taught the basics required for passing our Leaving Certificate. If lucky, we could aspire to becoming bank tellers, or, if we had the flair, draughtsmen or artists.

When I returned after my year-long absence, I was waddling around a couple of stone overweight and had been banned by the doctors from participating in any sport for at least two years until the new scar tissue had completely formed. Our solicitors also encouraged this scenario because it would add meat to the pending court case. I was sure they were also going to suggest that I had been one of the school's up-and-coming rugby stars.

The accident had done nothing to improve my spelling. If anything it had become worse, and once more I found myself up in front of the blackboard, chalk in hand, scribing down what the teacher dictated. The level of humiliation was not quite as bad as I had experienced over in the other building. But the priest still found it necessary to remark to the class that normally when they handed students over from across the yard, the boys had been taught (at the very least) to read and write. ‘So, where oh where, dear Lord, did they go wrong with you?'

The home front had settled down to quiet acceptance in anticipation of our court case. But still I turned twelve facing another Christmas that none of us wanted to endure. For some reason or another it had been decided that we would spend Christmas day in a convent, having dinner with a bunch of nuns. I know that this was the mother's idea, for the father (given a choice) would have spent the time in a pub, far away from any nuns that reminded him of little girls being abused. However, in spite of the father's strong objections, to the nunnery we did go that Christmas morning. Once there, we sat in a cavernous hall, at the longest table I had ever seen, with the Reverend Mother about a mile away at the top being attended to by novices.

There was a prayer said between every course, which must have been a special show put on for us, since Catherine's name was mentioned fairly frequently. At three o'clock we waved good-bye to a group of nuns who had gathered at the main door to bid us farewell and returned to a cold house, where the parents installed themselves in front of the TV and promptly fell asleep. So ended Christmas Day in a household still mourning the death of a child that never could, or would, be replaced.

As the New Year slowly marched forward, I felt the house became rather like a dark cave. Once incarcerated in its gloomy interior a depression settled over all who dwelt within, only to disappear immediately you re-entered the daylight beckoning outside the hall door. The parents oscillated from silent depression, occasionally broken by the brief monotone sentences required to sustain any basic form of communication, to a fleeting, pre-accident rapport, exhibited when they returned from the pub nearly every evening. This good humour lasted only a short while, invariably ending with a shouting match as the alcohol levels pushed the start button that set off the ‘accident-blame' syndrome.

If I had misjudged their arrival time and was caught in the kitchen when they came back from the pub instead of being entrenched in my room, I would be subjected to a drunken period of the ‘loving parents' game, in which they were delighted that I, at least, had been left to them. But we would quickly move on to the ‘blame' game: I had been given the bike and, as a result of damaging my knee, I had been responsible for the whole disaster. When we reached this stage any attempt to go to bed was absolutely out of the question, because the accusations would follow me upstairs. I learned very quickly that I could only hope to see my bed by standing my ground and taking the abuse for a time. But inevitably there would be some word spat out that opened up my own mental wounds and I would begin to fight back.

Finally, one or both of them would tire and retreated to their own room, leaving a silent, highly charged atmosphere in their wake that brought restless sleep. The next day the household would return to a quiet, stunned, temporary truce, as if the previous night's antagonism had somehow washed away the sorrow that they felt, like the intermission of a stage show that you knew would recommence very shortly.

I began to time my arrival home from school as late as I possibly could. Often I went with David to his house first, where we did our homework together and I was given slices of fresh bread spread thickly with bananas (my favourite) by his mother. Within a short period their home became my place of refuge, we became like brothers, and I was accepted into their household on that footing. I very rarely talked to David or his family about the pending court case. As far as I was concerned, it lay far in the future. Oh, the evenings dreaming with the parents about the new life that we were going to carve out for ourselves when we got the money were all very well. But, as the months went by, all their talk of court cases and compensation began to seem like the telling of a good fairy tale. With David and his family I lived in the here and now. Court cases and ‘compo' were part of the mythical world that the parents had elected to live in.

The father was promoted (or at least that is what he called it) and moved from the dispensary in Inchicore to the head offices of the Eastern Health Board at St James Gate, by the main entrance to the hospital. He was even given his own office, complete with secretary. He and his drinking buddies now spent their days commuting from office to pub, betting shop, back across the street to the office, and finally back to the pub again. His boss Klepto Joe was also a compulsive gambler and drinker and, as alcohol was the father's primary concern, their daily three-way triple cross wager on the horses was submitted as a sort of miracle speculation. Their principle was that if it did come up, they would treat it as bonus drinking money. They settled into a routine that suited them all: there would certainly always be someone across the street, within easy reach of the betting shop, to collect the day's winnings.

Coming home in the evenings, I would often find the mother in bed, which suited the father and I very well, since peace would reign downstairs provided we brought her evening meal up to her. This I was more than happy to do, because it kept the two of them apart and allowed the father to carry on drinking in the kitchen uninterrupted. However, sometimes, owing to too much alcohol, he would make a complete hash of the meal. If the results of a botched job were presented to her, she would be out of the bed and downstairs as fast as a rabid kangaroo, shouting and screaming at us – which rather defeated the purpose of cooking her a meal in the first place.

I believe that it was my mother's elder brother Matty who attempted to try and get us all back into some semblance of a family unit. Matty had a very large farm in county Cork and, along with his wife, Mary, was busy raising a family of eight: four boys and four girls. His eldest daughter, Pat, he sent to visit us in Dublin and she brought a friend with her, called Marigold. Their brief stay was like a visitation from two angels. They were both eighteen, lively, beautiful, and so full of energy and fun that the whole household was galvanised into feeling it wanted to join the land of the living again. They both had younger brothers at home and immediately adopted me. At the age of twelve I was ready to fall in love with the pair of them as if they were my older sisters. The parents also fell under their spell and laughter once again reverberated around the hollow walls of the house. Pending court cases and ‘compo' were temporarily forgotten: the mother remembered she had a house to run and the father even sobered up, tickled by the idea of having two young ladies in tow.

As it was their first visit to Dublin, he and the mother introduced them to the local watering holes, as all good tour guides should. Nearly every evening the girls would collect me from school, endure the wolf whistles from the departing sixth-formers (with whom they were more than capable of dealing), and bring me to an early evening matinee.

The first picture they wanted to see (showing in a cinema just off Leeson Street) was
Romeo and Juliet
. I balked like a stubborn mule and refused to enter when I saw ‘by William Shakespeare' plastered all over the posters at the entrance. The only way they could convince me that I would enjoy the film was by giving demonstration sword fights up and down the street, to give me a preview of the action. At the same time quoting lines from the play to each other, much to the amusement of everyone else queuing to enter. The onlookers in the queue must have had a hilarious wait, what with the sullen, fat boy standing as still as a rock in the middle of the theatre's entrance, while two lively ladies fought an imaginary sword fight around his bulk.

Their antics worked and, before I knew it, I was sitting between the two of them in front of the screen. Unfortunately after the first five minutes I spent the rest of the film cowering down behind the person in front of me, red in the face with embarrassment. Unable to look left or right in case one of them would see my glowing face, which must have resembled a flaming match. Mostly, I was embarrassed for the two girls, as I couldn't believe the attire that the male actors were wearing had passed the Irish Censorship Board. They had multi-coloured, striped tights and they looked as if they had been poured into them; the effect was to magnify their private parts to the point at which they looked completely out of proportion with the rest of their bodies. As far as I was concerned, having elevated the two ladies to a position of near sainthood, these two ladies should know nothing of the evil ways of men. And so I practically swooned when one of the actors uttered something along the lines of ‘my cock is throbbing like a rooster'.

For this reason, aside from wondering whether Juliet's breasts would win the battle with her dress and eventually fall out and appreciating the theme music (which, to this day, floods me with nostalgia whenever I hear it being played), I remember practically nothing else of the film.

All too soon their visit came to an end. For a short time afterwards the energies with which they had infected the house lingered on. And before the environment could lapse back into its original state, a new drama began to unfold.

*

‘The nuns are coming home, the nuns are arriving.' The mother burst into the kitchen after reading a letter that had just come in the afternoon post from one of her sisters down the country.

The father promptly went across the street to the Workman's Club, while I hung around waiting for an explanation. Apparently, many years before I was born and while the mother was still in her teens, her two eldest sisters had been shipped of to a nunnery by their father, finishing up as teachers in a convent somewhere in the Australian outback. The last time the family had seen them was when they waved goodbye from a railway platform years before.

Now they were coming home for the first time. During their three-month stay (when the father heard the time span it promptly drove him back across the street to the pub) they were to stay a week with every brother and sister, including a week with us in Dublin. As it was thought that this would be their one and only visit, nothing was going to be spared to make them feel as comfortable as possible.

My mother had never lost her Cork accent during her years in England and Dublin, and had a loud voice that could carry across a twenty-acre field – not only loudly enough for her to be clearly understood within the field, but with enough decibels left to carry a further twenty acres. She also had an annoying habit of saying ‘what, what' in quick succession when you began a conversation, so a person would have to stop and restart the sentence.

When the nuns arrived we sat in the kitchen every evening after tea and waited for somebody to strike up a conversation. After day three of the visit the most obvious topics had been exhausted (there is only so much you can discuss with two nuns). However the evenings continued to follow the same format. The mother would sit in one of our better, straight-backed chairs, as proud as punch that her two sisters were staying with us. The two nuns were installed in our only soft chairs alongside each other. The father sat on the edge of his chair, looking for any opportunity to bolt across the street – and then there was me, all dressed in my best school uniform, complete with school cap.

‘Louvelely meeeal, Robert,' one of the nuns would finally comment in her soft Australian accent, as if she had been elected to become the spokesperson for the two of them.

‘What, what?' the mother would roar, causing the nun sitting closest to her to jump with fright.

‘She said it was a lovely meal.'

‘What, what?'

‘She said it was a lovely meal.' This time shouted to her by the father, which caused the
other
nun to jump in her chair.