The Fatal Touch (18 page)

“One day, Miss Woods, our art teacher, set us the task of drawing our favorite objects, as many of them as we saw fit. We had three lessons in which to complete our drawings. If deemed worthy, they would be pinned to the walls for sports day when parents would be allowed to come into the school to watch the children do long jumps that can’t have been all that long, and run egg-and-spoon races.

“Miss Woods allowed us only dark colors to begin with, though we were free to use crayons or pencils. She told us we could do the coloring-in during the next two lessons. I observed Monica carefully, noting the objects she chose to draw; I watched the yellow pencil in her beautiful fingers as she glided her hand over the page leaving careful gray outlines. Most of the other children were still using their fists as they sought to keep their waxy red and blue crayons under control.

“During the second lesson, when it seemed Monica had finished outlining her objects and was preparing for the coloring-in phase, I neatly divided my page into four columns and five rows: 20 boxes in all. In the first box, I drew an exact replica of Monica’s entire page, in miniature, without missing out a single object. In the second box, I did the same, only this time I colored in the objects in the way I thought she was likely to choose. In the third box I chose a different color scheme and so on until I had exhausted almost every permutation. When Monica did finish, her picture and colors corresponded exactly to my miniature in box 17. It is still my lucky number.

“Monica’s favorite objects were: a comb (I had kept it brown or black until version 12, when I thought it might be silver), a golden-brown teddy bear with a green bow, a pair of black dancing shoes, a red-haired Raggedy Ann doll, a giraffe, and a blue windmill with white sails.

“Miss Woods loved my work. Mrs. Walsh, the headmistress, did not, dismissing it in front of the whole class as being rather too ‘. . .’. I did not understand the big word she used that day, and I can’t remember it now.

“But it was clear the bitch did not like it.

“As for Monica, when she realized what I had done, she took her picture down from the wall, ruined it by adding a large and poorly-drawn cat and a purple cabbage tree in the foreground, whereupon she hung it up again.

“I learned three things from that. First, I could draw in another person’s style like it was my own; second, women could be unpredictable and vindictive; third, never imitate a living artist. If I had forgotten the first lesson and remembered the other two, I would have made my own life easier.

“My mother never came to school events and so she never saw the picture. Apart from not having any interest in how I was doing, I think she felt uncomfortable with the ethos of the school. It was Protestant. Church of Ireland, to be precise. My mother was born a Catholic, but no longer practicing. She had not lapsed; rather she had been cast out and thrown over when she became pregnant with me by a man whose name she never revealed to anyone, not even me. After failing to reconcile with her own family and most of her neighbors, she adopted a Bohemian guise, and affected not to care. After a while, assisted by some serious afternoon drinking and several rejection letters from publishers not at all interested in her imagist poetry, she really did not care.

“At the age of eleven, I acquired a reluctant stepfather called Manfred Manning. I call him my stepfather but at the time of his appearance he was married to another woman whom he could not divorce, this being Ireland and then being then. He finally chose to leave his first wife when she was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. She lasted almost three years, which may be some sort of record, perhaps hanging on to spite them, perhaps hoping he would come home at least for the final part. When she died, Mother and Manfred were holidaying in Edinburgh, a city I have yet to find a reason for visiting.

“After a Protestant primary education, my mother sent me, aged 12, as a boarder to Clongowes Wood College. It seems strange the Jesuits should take in the child of such an immoral woman shacked up with a bigamous Prod, but the reason is simple enough. Manning made a large contribution toward the building of a new wing and my mother lied about everything. She told them she was married, and though admitting her husband was a Protestant, insisted she was bringing me up Catholic. She might even have produced some false paperwork to prove it.

“The summer before I went, she gave me a crash-course in Catholicism, bringing me to mass, and shuffling me up the aisle to communion. Tongue out, eyes downcast, no chewing, it is supposed to be the flesh of Christ. Yes, Henry, it is a revolting concept, but it helps you not to chew. She explained confession to me, too, and warned me to hold back on some issues, notably religious doubt and my paternity. It was expected, she said.

“She told me in some detail about the first communion party I never had, and the gifts of money I never received from relatives I had never met. After a while, I began to remember all these events that had not happened, and I realized how easy it was to paint a fictional past.

“The most surprising thing I learned during my conversion to temporary Catholicism was that God was a soft blue woman. Cabinteely Catholic Church, to which my headscarfed and unrecognizably pious-looking mother took me to learn the ropes, had a tondo image of Jesus set into the pier to the right of the altar. A red sanctuary lamp hung over the altar and a second tondo image, this one of a gentle-looking person in blue, was set into the left pier. Now, as the Protestants had given me enough instruction about God’s three-in-one-person trick but remained tight-lipped about Mary, Mother of God, my interpretation was: Jesus on the right, the Holy Ghost in the middle, and God was the blue-shrouded woman on the left.

“I was soon disabused of the notion, but images are stronger than words. God was then and is sometimes even now an azure Bellini-esque woman . . .”

Blume turned over the page and looked in dismay at a web of crossings-out and insertion marks.

“I can’t make this out, but I think I’m going to skip ahead. This is no good to us. You’ve hardly taken any notes, I see. Are you following?”

Caterina looked down at what she had written.

Blume flicked forward a few pages. “This section seems to come to an end here.”

“You may as well read it through.”

“The Jesuits may have designed the myth of the Immaculate Conception, but the Irish chapter of the order was keen to make sure we boys understood this was basically a goddess created for peasants. One problem, explained Fr. Ferchware, was this: If Mary was conceived and born without sin, for that is what Immaculate Conception means, is it not, Treacy? (It is, Father), then she had no need of the salvific intervention of her son, Jesus Christ, did she? Don’t try to answer, child, just tell me, the grammatical term for that question.

“A trick question, Father.

“A rhetorical question, you godless reprobate. I shall continue. So if there was already one perfect person in the world, Jesus Christ could not have been the
Universal
Savior. We might conclude, therefore, that His universality is imperfect and that He is therefore imperfect and He cannot be God. And what does this demonstrate?

“The evident limitations of logic and the frailty of human reasoning in the face of the divine, Father.

“Good man, Treacy.

“The thing about the Jesuits is they started off their history as a sort of special operations force, often poised to stage a military coup within the Church, but ended up teaching geography to schoolchildren. I think that—and chastity—drove most of them mad.

“I was expelled at 16. The immediate or ostensible cause was my poisoning of O’Leary, a gap-toothed red-faced thug who thought he could make my life a misery because I was not so good at rugby. I patiently waited for him one afternoon behind the science wing, opened that very year and contributed to by my stepfather or whatever he was. When O’Leary eventually came by, he was on his own. Looking back with the forgiveness of years, I suppose he was not the worst type of bully. He didn’t have a gang; he didn’t spend his time looking for me. It was casual, off-handed bullying, made possible by his size. I hit him over the head with a rock as he walked around the corner. He stood there and rubbed his head like a cartoon character doing a double-take, so I hit him again, on the temple, and down he went. I sat on his chest and opened up three paper twists of powder I had taken from the chemistry lab. The first contained tartaric acid, basically sherbet without sugar, and I held his nose and poured it into his gaping mouth. It fizzed, and he choked and I told him it was arsenic. The next packet contained bicarbonate of soda, which I told him was plutonium. While not generally available to Irish schoolchildren, plutonium was such a scary new word back then that I thought its dramatic reach would bridge the credibility gap. The last package contained copper sulphate, which I had taken for the beauty of its color, and this, unfortunately,
was
toxic, though not deadly.

“I hadn’t figured O’Leary for a snitch but the plutonium and arsenic had him worried. Even then, his babbling report might not have been taken too seriously were it not for the black bruise on his temple, his blue tongue, and terrified eyes. Everyone stood ceremoniously on the pebbled driveway as the ambulance drove away with O’Leary inside accompanied by the headmaster.

“As I was packing my bags, Fr. McCarthy came in holding his black ‘biffer,’ a leather strap weighted with lead. He administered twelve strokes to each hand, aiming also to hit the wrist. He left saying, ‘We’ve all known the truth about you for some time, Treacy.’

“A biffer works on the hands rather like a coronary stroke, managing to impart pain and numbness at once. With my throbbing and fumbling hands, I was unable to complete my packing, still less close my suitcase and bring it downstairs to the front door, and I think it was this more than anything that caused me to become so upset. At any rate, it was Fr. Ferchware who came up and found me, finished packing my suitcase for me and accompanied me to the front door. Before we went out, he told me, ‘There’ll be a lot of people looking at you, Henry. You don’t want to go out with a face like that.’ He took a startlingly white, sharply folded, and perfectly clean handkerchief from his pocket, and handed it to me. ‘Dry your eyes, blow your nose.’ The handkerchief smelled of lavender and sunshine, the smells of France, Italy, and my future. I filled it with gray snot and salt, the color and taste of Ireland and my past.

“ ‘Who is coming for me?’ I asked. ‘Is it my mother?’

“ ‘No, son, they’ve sent a taxi.’

“When I was younger, each month was a compact unit containing so many events and changes that they had to be compressed just to fit. But now an entire year can drift by empty of significance. I thought when I started this I might be able to unpack some of those compressed events and examine them in detail, but I find I have forgotten most of them. Life then was brimming, but I still have to pass over years as if they had hardly happened at all.

“After my expulsion from Clongowes, they sent me to the Presentation Brothers in Bray, but I got kicked out of that, too, this time for setting fire to an outhouse. No one saw me, but I was stupid enough to turn up to my next lesson reeking of paraffin and smoke, and was sent to the headmaster’s office, from whose window the smoldering heap across the field was still visible. A red fire engine stood in the middle of the field, one fireman dribbling his hose on the black patch of ground, a second fireman watching. The headmaster waved his arm at the window, and declared,

See you yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild,

The seat of desolation, void of light,

Save what the glimmering of these livid flames

Casts pale and dreadful?

“Then he burst out laughing, and took some time to get himself under control. As he dabbed his watering eyes with the back of his hand, I figured it was probably going to be all right after all if he found it so funny, but then he said, ‘I’ve phoned your house, and nobody is in, so I’m afraid it is up to you to tell them you have been expelled. We are also considering prosecution, and shall certainly be seeking damages. That is all.’

“I ended up in Ballybrack Technical College, and, in between the metalwork, remedial English, and getting beaten up, finally learned something useful: basic carpentry. But after less than a year, I had left that school, too. This time I was not expelled, I merely wandered off and no one seemed to notice.

“One morning, I was sitting on the number 45 bus on my way to Bray when a group of kids, three boys and a girl, in front of me started slashing the rubbery blue seats with penknives. One of them turned around to see if I wanted to make something of it, then nudged his companion. Here comes trouble, I thought. Then the girl turned around and said, ‘Henry!’ And I looked at her for a while, then finally said, disappointed but also kind of awed, ‘Monica!’

“She was going through her anti-authority phase. Cut adrift and allowed to do her own thing. I was the perfect companion.

“In the summer of 1966, a woman called Mrs. Heath, who was connected in some vague way with someone who knew my stepfather, allowed me to use an empty mews in her garden. The deal was that I would do odd jobs, like washing the forty-two windows of her house (each of which had four panes and, of course, two sides, so it was no small task), weed the garden, clean some of the slime from around the pond, cut the grass, run errands. In exchange, I got to live in an empty stone mews without electricity. But it had running water, a bathroom, a permanently damp bed, some black oak furniture, and was effectively my first apartment. It was an unheard-of freedom that rendered me attractive to Monica.