The Fields (12 page)

He then says that he remembered ‘accidentally’ overhearing Mozzo tell me about The Sorrows’ canal at Donohue’s hoolie, so he thought he’d take a spin down there to see if everything was all right.

Lucky for you I came when I did, eh? he says, pointing to my filthy gear.

Yeah, lucky me.

O’Culigeen steps out of the car and looks around him and then over to the greybrick church building which is next to his tiny brown house. He gives the building a floppy salute, from his forehead, and says, Goodnight Lord, sleep tight!

He ducks his head back down inside the car and says to me, Come on, let’s see what you can do!

I’m still in a daze when I find myself in O’Culigeen’s study.

The sitting room next door is lovely and warm, with a real fire and soft fluffy rugs, but he says that we can’t go in there coz I’ll dirty it with my scruffy clothes.

And it’s funny, coz this is when his voice starts to change. Telling me I’ll dirty everything, as if I’m dripping with mud.

No, we don’t want your dirt everywhere, do we, he says, suddenly sounding like Spits McGee or one of the St Cormac’s boyos.

Don’t want you rubbing your filth everywhere.

He guides me into the study, pushing me in like he’s in a rush to get the last sliced pan in Quinnsworth’s. His study smells of old socks and has light blue walls. There’s a picture of the Pope on the wall behind his desk and one of those paintings of mountains, big green fields and sheep on the opposite wall. There’s a lovely red leather chair in the corner, but O’Culigeen makes me stay standing, facing his desk, which has only got writing paper and a jar of biros on it.

Come on, he says, pacing around me like a lion tamer, let’s hear it.

Hear what? I say.

Your voice, he snaps back.

I’m still shaking from my mugging and I don’t like the way this is going either, so I’m not sure if I can even manage a note. But before I can tell him that my legs are weak and that I need a glass of water, he fuckin belts me in the centre of the back and shouts, ‘The Fields’, give us the fucking ‘Fields’!

This is completely out of order, hitting me and saying ‘fucking’. And normally I would’ve been out that door in full bionic mode, but I’m so shocked by the belt that my stupid fuckin brain actually thinks about giving ‘The Fields of Athenry’ a go!

Well, he says, grabbing both my shoulders and shaking me from side to side, like I’m a rag doll. Do your best, ye filthy little pup.

He has decided, right then and there, that I am a filthy little pup, and he can’t stop saying it.

Sing, ye pup, sing! Ye filthy little pup!

He’s still pacing around me, giving me the odd puck in the arm, but now he takes off his jacket and throws it on the chair, as if he really means business and is going to belt me to blazes.

I don’t want to find out so give the first line my best shot.

‘By a lonely prison wall, I heard a young girl calling …’

This works a treat.

Oh, yes, he says, like the cat who got the cream. Would ye listen to the voice on that little pup!

It’s as if he’s talking to someone else in the room, maybe the Pope.

Voice of an angel, that’s what ye have, he’s saying, breathing his stale cheese breath on me. But you’re a pup, and you’ll always be a pup.

Next, it gets really fecking weird.

O’Culigeen takes out his mickey. Serious. He’s behind me, but I can hear his trousers zipping apart while I’m singing about stealing Trevelyn’s corn.

He starts stroking my head, calling me angel and pup one after the other, but I can feel his mickey bobbing about behind me, prodding me in the side, rubbing off me leg.

It’s right at this point that I notice myself, me, who I am, shift over a couple of feet to the left of where I’m actually standing, without moving my body. From this new position I can see everything happen clearly. O’Culigeen’s trousers are completely off, and he’s just in his black shirt and he’s rubbing my body madly and humping up and down on my leg like he’s a fuckin Jack Russell.

I get to the last verse of the song and stop singing. It’s been such a mad night, and now this. I start to have a little cry.

O’Culigeen is not happy.

Sing! he says, belting me across the back of the head. Sing, ye
dirty little pup! And as he’s ordering me, he starts reefing off my grey denims.

The chorus of ‘The Fields of Athenry’ goes, ‘Low lie the fields of Athenry, where once we watched the small free birds fly’. But all I can manage is a very long and really shaky version of, ‘Low lie’. That’s all I can sing, and I do it over and over again. Low lie, low lie, low lie.

O’Culigeen doesn’t seem to be bothered by this coz he’s too busy calling me a filthy pup and feeling me all over something vicious. He starts slobbing all over my shoulders and grunting and poking his mickey about in my arse.

In myself, with superhuman strength, me, who I am, I, take a massive four or five feet jump away from the table, but again, without actually bringing my body with me. It’s mad, like I’m sitting up by the picture of green mountains and sheep while I watch him rut away at me. At one point I think, That’s it, he’s fecking riding me! Fr Luke O’Culigeen, man of the cloth, quizmaster, and bloody good gentleman is riding my arse! How mad is this?!

I’m hoping that this is as bad as it gets, but O’Culigeen is in a savage mood tonight. He can’t stop calling me little filthy pup, even when he’s banging away, and every time he says it he slaps me, or punches me.

Filthy little pup, he says, all the trouble you cause. Pup. Your mother. Pup. Your poor father. Pup. And me, pup, look what you’ve done to me, pup, look what you’ve made me do!

Somehow, in the midst of all this, he decides that squeezing me round the neck will teach me not to be a little pup any more. It’s a tight squeeze, a hundred times worse than Mozzo, who it turns out was clearly messing compared to this.

So, O’Culigeen is riding me against his desk, squeezing me by the neck and calling me filthy little pup. He’s squeezing and banging away to his heart’s content when all of a sudden, bam!

It’s that simple. I come flying off the wall and zooming back into my body like I’m attached to myself with a superstrong elastic band. For a brief moment I feel everything that’s happening to me, and I’m on fire. It feels like O’Culigeen’s driving a Yorkie Juggernaut right into me, and like my skull is packed to bursting with barbed-wire stuffing. I have a couple of seconds of this and then nothing. I’m out of the game. I fall forward on to the table, bounce my head off O’Culigeen’s biro jar and flop back on to the floor.

Naturally, O’Culigeen, the big gobshite, goes mental. He thinks I’m dead. He’s slapping me on the face and shaking me and crying and kissing me on the cheek and hugging me and bawling saying Jesus this, and Jesus that, and Lord have mercy and God knows what. He holds me there in his sweaty arms on that stinking smelly socks floor for an age and says that he’s sorry and he loves me and he never meant to hurt me. I want to say Bollocks to that and give him a right slap for his troubles, but I’m having trouble speaking, and just putting all my energies into getting a few decent breaths down my mangled throat.

I lose track of time. Passing in and out. I get snatches of O’Culigeen pacing about above me, and talking gibberish to himself.

Jesus Lord, mea culpa, what to do, desperate hours, this is me, my hour, help me Lord, what do I do, mea culpa, what to do?

He then drags me in zigzags around the study. It’s as if he’s looking for a little cubbyhole to hide me in. Eventually he lets go of me, falls to his knees and starts praying really hard. His lids are squeezed closed and his hands clasped in a vicious double fist up against his mouth. He doesn’t say a word out loud, but I can tell he’s trying really hard coz there’s tears flowing out of the cracks of his tight-shut eyes.

A full hour later I’m up on my feet again. Well, sitting actually, in the red leather armchair in the corner of the study. O’Culigeen’s made me a pot of super-sugary tea and is pouring it down my throat, along with a whole plate of custard creams. He’s covered the gash on my forehead with a huge waterproof plaster and, by home time, he’s already washed my entire outfit and dried it by the fire next door.

He says nothing during all this, and just points me into rooms, through doors, and eventually back into his car. He drops me home, a little before midnight. As I get ready to leave him and crack open the car door, a light pings on above both our heads and he says sorry, and promises me that it’ll never happen again. He then leans in and kisses me on the cheek, and says that if I mention this to anyone I know, alive or dead, he’ll bring down upon me the wrath of the Lord God Himself.

You’re a disgrace! A disgusting disgrace!

Dad says this over and over again, and thumps the door in between each insult. He says that he’s not leaving, and that I have two choices. Come out now, and get a belt of the cane for my troubles. Or stay inside and wait for nothing less than an everlasting downpour of hell almighty.

Naturally, I don’t move. I am dressed in an open-necked monkey suit, badly creased and mildly stained from the Debs dance the night before, and I am inside our stand-alone toilet with the bluebird wallpaper. Most people on The Rise have bathrooms with a toilet attached on the inside, so that you can do all your washing and cleaning and bodily stuff at the same time and in the same place. But we have a separate toilet, in an upstairs room, a little bird-blue cell, all of its own. Dad says that he was given the choice, but asked the builder to keep it separate, because growing up in hard-knock centre-city Dublin you always had ‘the jacks’ outside the building, and he couldn’t imagine anything worse than brushing your teeth and fixing your hair while the stink of fresh plop rides up through your nostrils. Mam agrees, and has loads of stories about lashing to the outhouse in small-town Ballaghaderreen during dangerous thunderstorms
and midnight snow freezes. She says that indoor toilets give her the collywobbles. You might as well do it right there on the carpet.

Our stand-alone toilet cell is narrow, with room enough only for the toilet itself, a few spare rolls of Jacks paper, and a tiny boxy window up at the top, to let the smells out. Dad says that the tiny window is the one design flaw in the whole house, because although it’s good at letting the smell of plop out, it can also let crafty criminals in. When Mam jokes that she hasn’t seen any midget burglars running round Dublin these days, Dad comes up with a whole big story about how the real Dublin criminals, like the tough ones he knew growing up, use small children to climb in through tiny windows and let their bosses in through the front door. He’s seen it himself, as a kid, loads of times, and he’s so convinced that there are indeed burglar children on every corner of our own suburban estate that he eventually decides to weld a thick metal bar on to the middle of the small boxy window, to allow the smell of plop to escape while the only thing from the Dublin underworld with a chance of getting in is a tiny trained criminal monkey.

The stand-alone toilet room is so narrow that you bash your arms, knuckles and elbows off the walls when you try any manoeuvre other than a straight honest to goodness man pee i.e. walk in, pee, flush, reverse, out. Anything that involves turning, or wiping of any sort, is instant clatter territory. My room, which used to be me and Fiona’s room, sits right next to the stand-alone toilet room, and you get a right earful of everything that’s going on. The clatter is just a small part of the sound picture that’s painted every day for the unfortunate listener. It’s really manky, and most of the time you ram your fingers hard in your ears the minute you hear the click of the door. But you’re not always quick enough, or paying enough attention to the comings and goings outside your room, and soon, and against your better
instincts, you get to recognise everyone in your whole family just by the noises, the bangs, and the unholy symphony of plops and splatters that constitutes their most private moments of business just three feet away from you at the edge of your bed, separated only by a rubbish plywood wall.

Dad’s the biggest clatterer, and he seems to hit the walls with every part of his body as he gets up and down, and cartwheels around for a wiping session. And the splatters too. With him it’s like someone’s firing a super-charged sub-machine gun straight into the bowl. Dreadful stuff. With Sarah, there’s constant moaning and pushing, like she’s having a baby every time, even if it’s only a pee. A big production. Claire and Susan are hard to tell apart, although Susan usually pulls the paper holder to pieces before she’s even sat down. Siobhan can’t stand the fact that I can hear everything, so she tries to do all her business outside the house, in public loos, in restaurants, anywhere. Mam’s super silent. And Fiona’s not thick, so she tells me to blare up the boombox every time she heads inside. And if it’s not loud enough she’ll bang on the wall until the sound of Jimmy Somerville screeching ‘Smalltown Boy’ has managed to drown out her heaves and hos.

The best thing, however, about the stand-alone toilet is the lock. It’s by far the best lock in the house. It’s a proper lock. Not a little brass effort for decoration, like the bathroom lock, which is a shiny thin horseshoe thing you could push open with a decent shoulder shove and is only there to let you know that there’s someone on the other side of it that’s probably naked in the bath. No, the toilet lock is a big silver-grey Chubb thing that lives half-inside the door itself and could only be broken down with the aid of some serious sledgehammers. It’s designed to give the person inside the loo the ultimate in privacy, which, considering the rubbish plywood walls and the subsequent plop family hits, is a bit dim. No matter, though, it’s still the perfect lock to
stop a rampaging father, despite ‘his condition’, from smashing in on top of you and skinning you alive for being a disgusting disgrace.

Things have not been good between me and Dad for ages now. Mam calls it a right across-the-board clash, which is nevertheless aggravated by Dad’s condition. For a start, for instance, there’s school. Here, I have become, through no deliberate plan of my own, totally rubbish at everything that happens inside of St Cormac’s Secondary School for Boys. A complete failure. Sent down the back by Spits McGee most days. Kept in for detention by Mr King on Saturday mornings. And extra homework on Thursdays after Brother Seamus’s civics class. I stare into space a lot. I forget homework. I have entire sessions where the world stops in my head and everything around me goes blurry and I’m like the fella who wakes up in his bedroom at night and has no clue on earth as to where he actually is. I hear voices too. I see things. Clips, images. Moments and snatches of things gone by, and puzzling pictures that make no sense. Voices and noises, sizzling and burning inside me, like Helen Macker’s eyes. Teachers don’t like this. And it’s worse for Dad. Because Dad’s children, his girls at least, have always done well in tests and exams, and debating and camogie, and netball and hockey. So when it’s my turn to finally start winning stuff and getting gold stars and proving myself in secondary school as Dad’s finest offspring by totally dominating the rest of the boyos, it comes as something of a shock to him to find out that I can only achieve a performance level that’s just a tiny rung below total fecking shite.

Me becoming an altar boy meant nothing to him either. He had big rows with Mam about it late into the night. Telling her that my immortal soul didn’t matter two fecks if I was going to spend the rest of my life on the streets because I failed my Leaving Cert. Once I swore that I could hear him crying his head
off in the loo. He asked Mam what in feck’s name had happened to me, and how I had gone from a normal happy-go-lucky steady-Eddie who liked homework and doing physics experiments to a moody silent fella who could barely lift a pencil and hadn’t even bothered to put protective brown paper wrapping on this year’s textbooks even though we were already well into winter.

The altar-boy thing, of course, was O’Culigeen’s doing. It took him about two minutes to renege on his promise to the Lord God Almighty to be an honest non-raping man-of-the-cloth.

Instead, he arrives up to our house, barely three days after the attack, and pours some thick priesty talk into Mam’s ear about maintaining the purity of my soul and the quietly divine influence of the Holy Mass. The upshot of it all is that, after one cup of Tetleys and three dipped ginger snaps, it is decided that instead of joining the church choir I can do one better – I am finally ready to become an altar boy. This is a bad thing. Mam calls me down from the bedroom and tells me to run out to O’Culigeen in his car and to thank him. He rolls down the window and winks at me through his sunglasses. Just before he whizzes off,
Knight Rider
style, he tells me that he’s sorted out my little problem. Declan Morrissey, he says, when I blank him, and then adds, You won’t be hearing from that young pup again!

I do Thursday evening Mass, and Vigil Mass on Saturdays. Twice a week, every week without fail. And before each Mass, when we’re supposed to be preparing and praying, and getting all solemn like, O’Culigeen can’t help but find himself in his giddy element. Oh, my boy this, my child that, come here to me, me little child, and so on. And then he checks the clock, makes sure that the others are busy on pew plaque duty, fighting over the Mr Sheen, and hustles me into sacristy, mostly with a lock on the door, and gets busy raping.

On the plus side, he eventually stops doing the choking thing,
which is a relief all round. And, instead of crying and praying after it, he loads me up with chockies and chewing gum, and sometimes, when he runs out of them, even money. It’s gas. He’s like, here’s your fifty pence, which is like a tenner to me, and thanks for that. As if I’ve just bob-a-jobbed the windscreen on his jammer, or weeded the flower beds near the side entrance. And he stops blaming me too, stops acting like I’m filling him full of voodoo magic against his will. Instead, after it, while he’s pulling himself back together and I’m lying there in a heap, dead to the world, without a tear in my eye or a feeling in my heart, he’s all buddy buddy. Acting like we were two big benders together, me and him against the world, with a big secret between us about how we love getting dirty with our pants off. I hate that bit the most. At least the other bit is just him being Luke O’Culigeen the Rapist Priest. And I can understand that, and blank it out, and blank myself out, and go, and be gone. Whereas this bit, where he pretends that we’re the bender version of
The Two Ronnies
, makes me want to cry till my stomach blows up inside me and spews guts out of my ears.

At home I spend more and more time alone in my bedroom making giant megamix tapes on C90s, of wall to wall Jimmy Somerville, because I’m done with Soft Cell and because Fiona’s into Bronski Beat and she has much better taste than me and is usually right about these things. It’s my bedroom now, without Fiona, strictly on Dad’s orders. He made her share with Susan and Claire because he was offering me, on Mam’s instruction, the carrot rather than the stick. Being in my own room, on my own, was supposed to make me a super student who studies maths and biology and becomes friendly again, instead of a quiet fella who stares into space and looks moody and only comes alive when he’s dancing to his boombox, spinning round in circles on the spot, into dizzy oblivion, singing ‘Run away, turn away, run away, turn away, run away!’ at the top of his voice.

I dress like Jimmy too, with tight jeans and an even tighter haircut. And I write the words Bronski Beat in wavy writing, like on the ‘Smalltown Boy’ twelve-inch cover, in Tippex on the back of my denim jacket. The jacket is ancient, and far too short for me, but this is actually perfect because it sits just above my belly button when I wear it with the sleeves up, like Jimmy on
Top of the Pops
.

Mam bought the jacket for me years ago, when I was a little fella, and still into the
Six Million Dollar Man
. I thought it made me look like Steve Austin in the giant life-size poster that used to sit on the entire back bedroom wall, and made Aunty Jane jump when she nipped in to check the path of her lipstick in the mirror during our annual New Year’s Day bash. Aunty Jane is Dad’s sister, and a Dublin spinster who never had any man action and always wore a big red splodge of lipstick that bled all over the corners of her mouth and made her look like the Joker, from telly’s
Batman
, but in a silky blue A-wear blouse. So when she told everyone the story about jumping at the sight of a handsome bionic man in the mirror most people felt that the joke was extra funny and extra sad at the same time. Like she was stupid for jumping at the sight of a man from a poster, but that part of her was really hoping that Steve Austin was actually alive and standing dead still in the running pose, just waiting for her to come into my room so he could start moving again and take her away from this boring old man-less life that had landed so unfairly on top of her.

Mam, of course, doesn’t mind the new haircut, because in her mad golden-oldies rule book, a short haircut means you’re neat, respectable, dead honest and good marriage material. And in altar-boy vestments she says that I look positively saintly. The shorter the better, as far as she’s concerned. She tells Dad that I’m just going through a blip at school, and that he’s to cast his mind back and remember how bad Siobhan was when Sarah
started winning everything, and Siobhan had to get used to being second place, but only after an entire term of mitching and shoplifting.

Dad isn’t convinced. He’s bothered by the lot. A right-across-the-board clash. The haircut, the jacket, the music, the spinning, the school, the detention and the staring. What bothers him the most, though, and the reason that he has finally, right now, on the morning after my very first Debs Dance, and after months of simmering smouldering rage, worked up the energy, in spite of his condition, to chase me right up the stairs and into the loo, is none other than Saidhbh Donohue herself.