The Dead School (29 page)

And Malachy knew it was. The Dummy was the happiest man in town and always had been for as far back as anyone could remember. Whenever his name came up, someone was always sure to say, ‘I
met the Dummy this morning coming across the square and do you know what, I don’t think there’s a happier man alive in this town.’ To which the response was likely to be,
‘Or any town.’ And how true it was, as Malachy knew so well. No matter what hour of the day or night you happened to meet him, he would have a grin on his face the like of which you
wouldn’t see on someone unless perhaps they had won the sweepstakes maybe. The wonderful thing about it all was the fact that the Dummy’s not speaking didn’t seem to bother him in
the slightest. Everyone found this very impressive because they felt that if, God forbid, they themselves were suddenly struck dumb through some dreadful accident or something, that far from going
about the place with a great big happy smile it would be much more likely they would be found sitting inside in the hotel bar drinking a bottle of whiskey a day if not more, looking at everybody
with dead eyes and a sad face that said, ‘Do you see me? I can’t speak. I used to be able to but not any more. Why should things be like that? It’s not fair. Everyone else is able
to speak and I’m not. I have been struck dumb. Dumb for the rest of my days! What do you think about that? I will tell you what you think. You don’t care. You don’t care just so
long as it’s not you. Of course you are going to deny it. Well, deny it all you like, my friend but it’s true! You’re glad aren’t you? You’re glad that you can talk
and I can’t. And never will again until they shovel me into the ground! To hell with you! Damn you! Damn you for not caring!’

They knew perfectly well that was probably what they would do. Which was why they were so impressed by the Dummy and never let an opportunity go by without praising him. There he would be,
smiling and laughing away with all the kiddies who loved to play with the broken pump, a giant umbrella of water skitting all over the place. Sometimes it got all over the Dummy and dripped down
his face and on to his clothes. Any other adult would have said, ‘You stupid children! Look what you’ve gone and done – my good clothes are ruined!’ The children might even
have got a clip on the ear for themselves into the bargain. But not on this occasion. Not from good old Dummy. In fact what he did was laugh his head off. If you could call it laughing. Laughing
without any sound perhaps. Whatever you called it, he was having the time of his life with the kiddies dancing rings around him and the water dribbling down his cheeks and making a big puddle at
his feet. As people went by they said, ‘There you are, Dummy. Good man yourself!’ and he touched his forelock and away off with him then into another bout of no-sound laughing. Another
thing about the Dummy was that he never seemed to sleep. By all accounts he didn’t need to. Whenever he did he did so in an old hayloft in a farmyard. But most times he didn’t bother.
He was too busy going off around the streets laughing and joking and being the happiest man in town. Rarely a day went past but Malachy would meet him up the street and say to him, ‘There you
are, Dummy! That’s not a bad day now,’ and would receive in return an enormous melon-slice grin. What cheered Malachy up was that at least there was someone happy about the place. It
certainly beat Nobby Caslin and his baby counts and body counts and all the rest of it. As far as Malachy was concerned it knocked all that into a cocked hat. Which was exactly what he was feeling
the day he met the Dummy after he left the church. Not that it had been bad in the church, for indeed it had not. In fact it had been quite wonderful in there. The organist played away and Father
Pat and the sacristan were dickeying up the altar with the most beautiful flowers Malachy had ever seen. There was a beautiful smell. It took Malachy off to a distant land of shining suns and
mysterious perfumes. Then Father Pat came down and started chatting to him. He wanted to tell him about the goal he had scored in the last minute of a needle match in 1949. No, he didn’t, he
just wanted to chat to him about his mother and his poor poor dead father. When that particular part of the conversation was over, Father Pat went on to talk about the christening, which of course
was due to take place that afternoon, hence the riot of blooms. ‘Yes,’ said Father Pat, ‘another little baba comes into the world! And a lovely little fellow he is too. Do you
know the Cunninghams at all, young Dudgeon?’ He nodded and said yes he did. The priest squeezed his shoulder and said, ‘Mammy Cunningham is the proud woman this day!’ The organ
swelled as Malachy thought of the little crying baby and all the women in headscarves going through boxes of Kleenex. After which they would all go off down to the hotel and have the party of a
lifetime and say we are the best family in the world and we all get on together don’t we, we love each other yes we do. Which, Malachy thought, was probably true but then he really
wouldn’t be the one to ask as all he knew about that was what he had picked up in a certain boatshed one sunny day. But as he sat there with the sun streaming in through the stained-glass
windows and the organist soaring away off like there was no tomorrow with ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’, he had to admit that there wasn’t very much wrong with the world. At
least for that moment or so it was beginning to look like a pretty good place indeed.

As he was leaving, Father Pat gave him a wave and a big wink and out he stepped into a town steeped in sun. Everything was cruising along fine. The breadman had arrived at the corner shop and as
he strode across the street with a tray of hot pan loaves he said to a woman with a shopping basket that’s one of the best days yet and she said yes it is we could be doing with a few more
like that. The petrol pumps were humming away outside the garage and in the sky the clouds sat still. Everyone was going about their business but they weren’t in any hurry going about it and
he thought that was just fine because he wasn’t in any hurry to go about his either. It was just then that he met the Dummy, coming past the cinema. His mouth was shaped like an O which of
course meant that he was whistling, no-whistle whistling of course but nevertheless merrily whistling along. When he saw Malachy his face lit up with a big grin and he made the shape of his name
with his lips. They stood there together for a while and it was good. It was good standing there beside the Dummy with his eyes twinkling and the sun shining all over the quiet happy busy town. A
man went by and saluted. ‘That’s a powerful day, Dummy,’ he said, then added, ‘And young Dudgeon! Couldn’t forget you, young Dudgeon! Ha! Ha! Ha!’ They hung
about some more, chatting and talking about this and that, at least Malachy did, with the Dummy nodding and lighting up and practically foaming at the mouth with excitement every time Malachy
mentioned the slightest little incident about the town. Then Malachy thought he had better be off about his business and he said to the Dummy, ‘And so where are you off to now, Dummy? Off on
your travels I expect!’ The Dummy grinned again, even more this time, if such were possible, then stuck a stiff index finger into the air like a mime artist you might see on the television.
What he put on then was more or less what you would call a little play. Malachy of course had seen him at these little plays before so it didn’t take him too long to work out what he was
trying to tell him. It was clear that he was off out to spend the day at the lake. Malachy said that that would be good. He said that there would be great fun out there. He asked the Dummy was he
going for a swim. He said, ‘Is that why you’re going out to the lake?’ But the Dummy said no and shook his head. He was most emphatic in fact. He wanted Malachy to know that that
was not the reason he was going out there. That wasn’t the reason at all. To tell the truth, Malachy got a bit confused then, but the Dummy didn’t mind that. He was well used to people
getting mixed up and frustrated when he was trying to tell them something. He was never at a loss in such situations. His contingency arrangements were always taken care of, namely an old scrap of
paper torn from a child’s copybook on which, with a stump of a pencil, he now scribbled the words, ‘To get some peace’.

Whether he liked to admit it or not, on this occasion Malachy could not make head nor tail of what he was on about, which was why he thought the safest course of action was to laugh away with
him and to see the pair of them standing there in the street, with the Dummy chewing the stumpy pencil and laughing away at the same time, you would have been hard pressed not to sign the pair of
them up for the circus. In fact by the time they had finished laughing Malachy thought to himself that he had never laughed so much before in his life. Actually he was almost sick from laughing.
His cheeks were flushed and he had a pain in his head. As he was crossing the square, he thought to himself, ‘I think I could be doing without all that giddy carry-on for a while, I can tell
you.’

On which count he needn’t have worried because only the day after it dawned on him what the Dummy had been talking about. The whole town was on about it, of course. Everyone had seen him
just before he did it. Nobby Caslin was running up and down the street like a blue-arsed fly. Of course, as always, there were a few liars who claimed to have seen it coming. In the hotel bar, they
said they had always known there was something odd about him. ‘It was only a matter of time,’ they said. But of course everyone knew this was what you might charitably describe as
‘shite-talk’ and in the end they made the right decision and at long last shut their mouths. They said no more about it after that. The laugh of it was that they had found his clothes
neatly folded behind a bush on the shore of the lake, and it looked more like his intention had been to pay a visit to the laundry. They were out on the lake for two or three days but in the end
they found him. From that day on the lake became known as ‘The Dummy’s Water’ and everyone agreed that that was good, because every time you passed it now you wouldn’t be
able to think of anything but the poor old Dummy and his great big happy face. You would stand there listening to the grasshoppers clacking and the birdies singing to their little baby fledglings
and as you stared across the flat expanse of the still blue lake, you would think of him deep down there in the silent blackness, tumbling like an astronaut with his eyes staring and his long limbs
floating, with two words struggling to clamber from his mouth but never of course succeeding: ‘
help me, help me, help me.
’

Which were no longer the words he was using to Malachy as he stood before him now after all these years, any more than it was the Dummy he had once known. For now the smile on
his face was bitter and twisted and as he repeated the sentence, Malachy wept and begged him not to but it was no use, again the soft words came, ‘Your father did it after me because he
thought it would bring him peace. He thought the waters would close over him and there would be no more pain.’ Malachy was close to weeping as he went on. He was going to go on for ever.
‘But there is!’ snarled what had once been the Dummy. ‘There is and there always will be! As he knows now! At the bottom of that lake he knows it now! Go and join him if you
don’t believe me! Because it’s true! For all eternity he will rot there in pain – as I did! And now you! You too! Do you hear me? Do you hear me, Dudgeon! Throw yourself into the
water if you don’t believe me! Then you’ll know! Then you’ll know once and for all! Go on, Dudgeon – do it! Swim into the darkness where you belong! Swim until you die! Do
you hear me? Do you hear me! Die, fucker, die!’

The sweat was streaming off Malachy as the orderlies held him down. For days after he remembered nothing. They told him he had been screaming. A woman’s name by all accounts. Marie or
Mary. Marianne maybe.

For the first month he couldn’t stop shivering. He was terrified to sleep. He was afraid the Dummy would come again. ‘You’re afraid of a Dummy,’ laughed Stephen Webb.
‘Kyle – he’s afraid of a silly Dummy!’

‘Tee hee hee,’ laughed Kyle.

Thus, in overheated rooms and infinite corridors, the days went by.

The whole of Dublin city must have decided to go out to Bray Head that day. As they lay together on the grass, close by the hush of the sea, he brushed her closed eyelids with
the petals of a daisy. She smiled, then rolled over on her stomach and tried to push him away as she cried, ‘Don’t! Don’t do that!’ He kissed her on the ear.
‘We’ve got to go back, Malachy,’ she said. ‘I have to finish my essay for Ed. Psych.’ He put his arm around her waist and she turned her face to his, then put her arms
around his neck and he kissed her on the lips.

She had been up half the night. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Malachy,’ she said. ‘One minute I’m all shivery and the next I’m
sweating all over. I must be coming down with something.’ Her face was flushed and her brow shone with sweat. ‘Get back into bed and I’ll go down to the chemist’s,’ he
said. He didn’t go into work that day. He rang in and said he was sick. He knew Bell didn’t believe him but for that one time in his life he didn’t care. On the way back from the
chemists he bought a bag of coal and lugged it all the way up Rathmines Road. The snow was coming down thick and fast and by the time he got home, the hands were about to fall off him. ‘Is
that you – is that you, Malachy?’ said Marion in this shaky voice. ‘Don’t worry – it’s me all right,’ he said. ‘Dudgeon the coalman.’
‘Oh, Malachy,’ she said, half in this world and half out of it. He built up a huge fire and in no time the room was flickering with warm shadows. Then he made a pot of hot broth and fed
it to her from a spoon. She touched the back of his hand and said, ‘I love you, Malachy. You’re so good to me.’ He smiled and said, ‘Come on now, ma’am – eat up.
We’ve got to get this fever out of you.’ After that she slept and he sat there reading and watching her as she turned over in her dreams. Outside, the snowswept city was a thousand
miles away and in that room of warm shadows they were the only two people in the world and it really did seem back in those first few weeks they spent living together as if that was how it was
going to be for evermore.