The Dead School
Authors: Patrick McCabe
For Margot, Katie and Ellen
Tripping Over Himself With Brains
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Horslips Are Playing in the Stadium
You Don’t Really Like ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’, Do You?
Boys and girls and I hope you are all well. The story I have for you this morning is all about two teachers and the things they got up to in the days gone by. It begins in the
year of Our Lord 1956 in a maternity hospital in Ireland when a wee fat chubby lad by the name of Malachy fell out of Cissie who was married to Packie Dudgeon the biggest bollocks in the town. At
first he was a happy-go-lucky little fellow who liked nothing better than to ride around on the scooter his father had made for him, shouting ‘Hello there!’ and ‘Not a bad day
now!’ to all his neighbours, but it wasn’t long before he quit that carry-on. As Alec and the lads who worked the trawlers said one day, ‘Would you look at Dudgeon, the auld
stupid walk of him. It wouldn’t take long to fix that. A good root up the hole and we’d soon see how much he’d walk.’ Of course there were times when Malachy felt like
shouting back something like ‘Ah shut your mouths’ or ‘What business is it of yours anyway?’, maybe. But like everybody else he knew that wouldn’t be a good idea. It
wouldn’t be a good idea at all. So anytime they said something to him he just nodded his head. If they had said ‘Jesus Christ was a murdering bastard, wasn’t he?’, he would
have replied ‘That’s right’. He didn’t want to. Of course he didn’t. But that was the way it was.
Unless, that is, your name happened to be Raphael Bell, or should I say
Mister
Raphael Bell, God’s gift to Irish education, who not only would have known exactly what to do with
foul-mouthed young curs who would come out with the like of that but would have been on them in a flash and thought nothing of beating them senseless, giving it to them each and every one of them
until they went down on their knees and begged for mercy. Oh yes, he’d have sorted them out all right, the dirty little ill-bred pups, for that’s all they were, and when he was finished
with them, it would be a long time before they’d ever call Our Lord names again, or anybody else for that matter! And when his work was done, he’d compose himself once more, and then,
with a twirl of his umbrella, stride off into the evening sunset – The Master! – the one and only Raphael Bell, pedagogue par excellence, sum-teacher, spelling corrector, guardian of
peace and of morals, his hairless dome shining as off he went, proud as punch, another good day’s work behind him, and what a happy day it would have been if only Malachy Dudgeon could have
been like him. If only he hadn’t been old Skittery Doodle HalfWit Bollocks afraid of his own shadow, running around the town thinking about love being in the grave and all that stupid old
rubbish that used to come into his head – how different my little tale might have been then, boys and girls! How different it all might have been then!
But no, he had to be just stupid old Malachy Bubblehead, didn’t he, flashing his big bright eyes and driving his poor old ma daft with all his questions.
‘Questions, questions, questions – that’s all I ever hear out of you, Malachy Dudgeon,’ Cissie would say. ‘Do you know what it is – you have me astray in the
head! Astray in the head you have me, you little rascal, and that’s a fact!’ Whenever she said that she always threw her eyes up to heaven as if she didn’t know what she was going
to do about it at all at all, but Malachy knew well she didn’t mean it. She was only codding. Or ‘acting the jinnet’ as his da called it. ‘Man, dear, but your mother’s
an awful woman for acting the jinnet,’ he’d say. ‘I never seen the like of her in all my born days, our Malachy.’ Malachy liked the way he ran his fingers through his curly
red hair and smiled when he said it, sort of like he was proud that she was his wife and nobody else’s. One night after he came home from the Marine Hotel with a few bottles of Guinness, he
said to Malachy, ‘I’ll never forget the day I walked up the aisle with your mother. She was the most beautiful girl in this town, our Malachy.’ Sometimes he would go on repeating
it to himself under his breath – ‘the most beautiful girl in the town’. Every night before he went to sleep, young Malachy would smile to himself as he thought of those days long
before he was born, with his ma and da coming striding up the aisle as proud as punch and everybody throwing flowers and confetti and saying happily, ‘Don’t they look terrific?’
and ‘God – isn’t she a picture?’, instead of ‘I wonder is Jemmy Brady going to give her a rub of the relic tonight?’
Which was all Malachy seemed to hear these days. Particularly from Alec and Company. If there was one man in the town they liked talking about, it was Jemmy the cowman. ‘Jemmy
Brady,’ they’d say. ‘Bloody Jemmy Brady! What a cunt!’
Hardly a day went past but Malachy would hear someone shouting, ‘Hey! Dudgeon! Where the hell do you think you’re going? Get over here till we talk to you!’ They would never
start on about Jemmy straight away of course. They liked to leave that part till last because, as Alec said, it was ‘More crack’. Which was why they went on about the masters above in
the school and how he was getting along and all the rest of it. ‘So – tell us then,’ they said, ‘how are you getting on up there?’ ‘Fine, thank you,’
Malachy would say, and whenever they heard that, they thought it was just about the best thing since sliced bread. ‘Fine, thank you!’ they repeated. ‘Fuckingwell fine, thank
you!’ Then they went into fits of laughter. ‘Sweet mother of Christ,’ said Alec with the tears nearly rolling down his face. Then came the bit about Jemmy and the boatshed.
‘Do you know what I’m going to tell you?’ said one of them as he lit a cigarette. ‘I was coming past the step this morning and I went over to take a look in and what did I
see, only the bould Jemmy standing there. Standing there I swear to Christ, naked as the day he was born and him with the baldy lad in his fist. I mean – would you credit that? Would you
credit that now boys? Would you, Alec?’
Alec scratched his head and said that he would not. Then he said, ‘Oh, now, you have to hand it to him all the same. You have to hand it to the cowman. He’s some operator now, the
same boy. When it comes to the women he knows what’s what. Jemmy’s the boy knows what the girls want, eh boys? Indeed and he does surely! He has what they want and he’s ready to
give it to them!’
Jemmy was well known about the place. He drove cattle all over Ireland. Cork, Tipperary, Dublin – you name it, Jemmy drove cattle there. ‘Good man, Jemmy!’ you’d hear the
people shouting. ‘There you are now, Jemmy! How’s she cutting?’ As Alec and the lads said – he was like a stray ass. Everybody knew him.
To tell you the truth, for the first while Malachy hadn’t a bull’s notion what they were on about. Sure he was far too young to be bothered about the like of that. All he knew about
in those days was strolling about the town with his mother and going down the harbour and staring off out at the yacht sails bobbing away as she squeezed his hand and said things like ‘Do you
know what it is, our Malachy, there’s times I think this is one of the best wee towns in the world’ and ‘There’s nothing I like better than coming down here to have a look
at the boats, yourself and myself.’ That was all he knew about in them days. He didn’t know anything about things going wrong and love dying and going away and never coming back again
and all that stuff. I mean – how would he? Even if you had told him, it would have seemed ridiculous. But it wasn’t ridiculous of course, as he was soon to find out. It wasn’t
ridiculous at all. It was expecting love to stay that was ridiculous.
After all, you couldn’t expect to have happy hand-squeezes and warm toast feelings and fun and games and laughs all your life. These had to come to an end sometime. Of course they had. And
once Malachy began to realize that, he soon started to see what he ought to I suppose, realistically speaking, have seen long ago – that his father knew all about it. Anything there was to
know – he knew all right. You could tell by the way he stared into space when he thought you weren’t looking. And by the little bit of a tear you could see just there in the corner of
his eye. It wasn’t that much of a tear. Which was just as well – I mean – you didn’t want him to start bawling about it in public! But it did the trick all right. You could
see enough to know. Just enough to let you know what was going on.