The Fields (14 page)

Mam, we all know, wants a tumble drier, and has wanted one for over a year, ever since she saw Maura Connell’s in action. Maura’s husband Tim took a break from being a pilot for ten minutes and went into Clery’s in town and bought it for her on
the sly. Had it delivered and everything. It was a big deal when the Clery’s van turned up. Everyone acted like it was the Pope himself, just dropping by to say Hi to Maura and bring her a gift from God. So now every day that Mam’s out in the garden, hanging up and pulling down the damp manky clothes off the orange ropy line that Dad has rigged up for her, she enviously spies Maura’s back door, where a thick black pipe is belching out wet smoky refuse from her tumble drier – hinting at the soft, feather-dry clothes inside, just waiting to be effortlessly picked and plumped into a perfect fold, and happily plonked on to the family beds.

Straight away, sadly, Mam spots that it’s not a tumble drier, because Dad can practically carry the box above his head with one hand. He plonks it down in front of her, says Happy Christmas, and tries not to laugh. She half laughs, in sympathy with him, and to hide her disappointment, and begins opening the box. After one layer of wrapping paper she knows the score. As we all do. This is Dad’s favourite trick. To get a tiny present and wrap it a million times until it’s the size of a house. He does this every year, either at Christmas or at one of our birthdays. He thinks it’s hilarious, like there is nothing funnier on planet Earth than watching someone peel back wrapping paper and look vaguely disappointed.

Thing is, once Mam gets over the annoyance of not having a new tumble drier, she kind of gets in on the joke. After every layer of paper she goes, Oh, Matt, you’re an awful man! And this makes him go even gigglier than ever, right red in the face, like he’s watching the best
Benny Hill
ever. After a while, of course, it gets totally stupid, and Mam is right down to a package the size of a tennis ball, with mounds of old ripped-up newspapers around her (Dad stops using wrapping paper about three layers down and switches to old copies of the
Irish Independent
). The present is eventually revealed to be either earrings or a chain
necklace – not cheap, but not too expensive – and Mam goes overboard, saying it’s totally glamorous and straight out of
Dynasty
. She turns to us all, and we coo and gawp in unison, but we’re all just happy that she got to the end of the papers, and happy too that Dad has managed to break out of his sleepy funk long enough to get a present and turn it into a signature comedy showcase.

Mam then asks the girls to help her gather up the mess into plastic bags, and turns to me specifically and tells me to hurry up. It’s Christmas Day, after all, she says. And you don’t want to be late for Fr O’Culigeen!

No, I think quietly, I don’t. So I gather up my
Star Wars
action figures, and carry them in my arms into my bedroom, and let them scatter down on the still-unmade mattress. I take some of them out of their packets. Boba Fett and Luke in Hoth costume. I kneel down before them, like I did for so many years of before, and set them up for a big adventure. Usually, I play games that have nothing to do with the
Star Wars
films, and instead make my action figures run ahead of a giant tidal wave (my blanket) and leap, at the last minute, off a cliff (my bed head) and into a raging blue torrent (my carpet). But today, on this Christmas Day, I just look at them. It’s like my head, the one that made up all the stories, has become a megamix that’s stuck in pause mode.

Mam comes rushing into my room, makes me put on my smartest Christmas clothes, which is a brown suit jacket with matching trousers, and then drops me down to the church, right to O’Culigeen’s door, a whole forty-five minutes before Mass is due to start.

O’Culigeen nearly wets his pants when he sees me. He tells me that I look divine, and that I’m the best Christmas present that any priest could ever ask for.

The run-up to my fourteenth is just as bad. January is a nightmare. School is back on. And I’m a mess. Can’t concentrate on anything. Not even Mr King’s showy turn at the top of the room as King Lear, or my once favourite coefficient of static friction versus coefficient of dynamic friction experiment in Spits McGee’s Physics – which is basically pushing a block of wood along a slippy surface and seeing how much effort it takes to keep it from stopping. All the teachers think I’ve gone into messer mode and am trying to defy them, so they start putting me down to the back of the class, and out the door. This buys me some credibility with the GAA boys, who think that I may be a Bronski bender, but I’m a tough sonofabitch Bronski bender all the same. They like it especially when Fats Madigan has to kick me out of Geography because I can’t answer the same question three times in a row.

He’s asking me about glacial erosion. Really simple stuff, paternoster lakes and the like. And I see his big spitty lips moving, but something’s stopping me from hearing the question. He’s going, blah blah, mountain or low-lying? And all I’m doing is staring at his spitty lips. He marches down to me the first time, stands right beside me and says, Well? And the only thing I can
do is look at him and go, I dunno. He then gives it another shot, right into my face this time. Blah blah mountain or low-lying, and which region in France? Again, it just isn’t getting through. The spitty lips are too powerful, and right next to my face they’re almost impossible to ignore. He pucks me this time, right in the shoulder. Grabs my jumper and begins to shake me from side to side. His face is bright red now, and he bellows, full blast, Blah blah fecking blah, paternoster fecking lakes, blah mountainous fecking region, blah low-lying? But he might as well be saying, Look at my big spitty lips, shooting flecky foam right in your face. You like, no?

I shrug, and say, once more, I dunno, and he reefs me by the collar and marches me out of class, throwing me against the coat racks, telling me not to test his patience ever again, and to think about my life while I’m out there. It gets worse, however, because outside patrolling the corridor is Jack Downs, our civics teacher and newly appointed year head. Jack is a failed hurley player with a scar on his left temple that he got from being in a tractor crash down the bog when he was a toddler. He was a big cheese in the hurley world, but ever since he got fired from the Kerry squad and became a teacher, his favourite activity has been beating schoolboys to a pulp. Any excuse, any time, any place possible, he loves it. And not just little pucks on the shoulder here and there. No, he does the works. Big dramatic smackdowns from the top of the class to the bottom, with a slow-motion lecture intermingled with the blows. Usually about what sort of animals this country is rearing these days. Except he’ll say, What, bang, sort, bang, of animals, bang bang, is this country, bang, rearing, bang, these days. The bangs are when he’s punching in the flat of the back, or smacking on the side of the head.

He does me on the Fats Madigan day, brings me back into the class and asks Fats why I’m out there. When he finds out that I’ve been silently insolent to a geography teacher he goes mental, and
does the speechy hitting thing right the way up and down the class, only this time the hitty question is directed at me. You won’t, bang, answer, bang, me now, bang, will ye, bang?

Normally, the fella getting the hitty speech beating would be in floods by now, but the way things have gone for me recently I just kind of dance along with Downs, all around the classroom till it’s over. Not really feeling the punches or the slaps, not really hearing the words. Only the tiniest part of me, the smallest flickering light inside, wondering, like Downs himself, what sort of animals is the country rearing these days, when all they can do is beat, punch, and rape their own children.

It’s not all bad though. The GAA lads think I’m like the Rocky Balboa of benders after this, and they re-imagine the beating with Downs as Apollo Creed and me as Rocky, getting thwacked and bashed but refusing to go down. Just staring blankly with that kind of brain-damaged Stallone look. They still call me a bender every time I wear my Jimmy jacket to school, but that’s about it. They don’t even call me and Gary husband and wife any more. Plus I get sent on a religious retreat because of my bad behaviour. Which is better than it sounds.

The retreats happen twice a year up in the monastery on the hill at the back of the school. The monastery is where the brothers live when they’re not teaching, and where they do a lot of gardening, praying, being silent and feeding grass to the two knackered ponies that live in the gardens (they were saved from tinkers in Tallaght, and have huge burn marks down near their hooves, where they were set fire to). The monastery sounds much grander than it is, and in fact calling it a monastery makes it seem all fifteenth-century and stony and mossy and candley, and a bit horror film. Whereas, in fact, it’s dead modern, flat and cream-coloured, not more than fifty years old, and probably got planted there on top of the hill when the brothers who teach in the school got bored with travelling every day from a castle in God knows
where just to smack some kids for a couple of hours before getting back on the bus.

The brothers, naturally, are the ones who choose the kids for the retreat, and they never pick more than twenty each time, out of an entire school of four hundred fellas. Everyone, of course, wants to get on their list, because you miss a whole two days of classes if they choose you, but no one knows exactly how. They go for a pretty random cross-section, choosing a few of the brainiest fellas as well as a few of the toughest and cheekiest. The brainy ones are there because, and so the theory goes, if they fully turn to the Lord and become super-holy after their two days with the brothers it’ll be a great result for the God squad. The toughies are there, I guess, because they’re on the brink of going to hell, and only sudden intervention on behalf of their souls will save them.

Best of all, no one who goes on the retreats ever really spills the beans on what goes on up there. They come back two days later looking all sheepish and wonky-eyed, sometimes hanging out together in a group of twenty, smiling quietly to each other, whispering little jokes and sometimes, really, even hugging each other out of the blue. Like they’re sharing something completely over the top.

So, of course, when I get picked for this one (that was always going to happen – I practically have a big red ‘Soul in Danger’ sign flashing over my head every time I walk past the staffroom), and bearing in mind my run-in with Downs and my twice-weekly O’Culigeen sessions, I can barely imagine the sort of bonkers hell-pain that awaits both me and the other luckless nineteen as we slip through the doors of the monastery. I’m thinking, best-case scenario, just full-on total rape for two days – with a load of foreign monks jetting in from around the world to place bets on us in some mad twisted poke-to-the-death spunk-a-thon. Worst case is, like, being forced to skewer each other with red-hot
anal intruders while the brothers make us eat steaming plates of tortured Tallaght pony poo.

Imagine my relief, then, when the first priestly figure we see inside, supping on a cuppa and clutching a fistful of Rich Tea, is Fr Jason himself. Immediately, my shoulders drop, and I’m like, ace, we’re in for a goodie now.

And I’m not wrong either. Fr Jason is in total control for the two days. Cool as ice throughout. He starts the ball rolling by giving us all tea and bickies (which is probably why they choose twenty – they only just have enough cups), and then getting us to sit round him on the floor in a big circle in a darkened room that has thick carpets, chairs up against the wall and three or four candles lighting. He tells us about being an alcoholic, about how he ruined his life, about how he was once a family man long ago in his old non-priesty life, and how he once gave his wife a right belt in the mouth, and how he stole money from his own kids to pay for booze and even drugs.

And then, he says, one day, at his lowest ebb, with sick all down his filthy rags, right smack in the centre of Dublin, he stumbles past a church. The door is half open, and for some reason, unknown to himself, instead of toddling on past, or pissing in the corner, up against a bin, which he was fond of doing, he made a sharp left and went inside. The church is empty and the story ends with him lying prostrate in front of the altar, flat out on the floor, arms extended so that he’s in the shape of the cross. And he cries, really bawls his head off, and screams big angry tears at God, saying things like, I’m here, you fucker! I’m finally here! Fr Jason actually uses the word ‘fucker’, which blows us all away, considering he’s a priest, and he’s talking about being in a church, and talking to God himself, and he’s talking to schoolboys who normally never hear anything worse than ‘corner boys’ from teachery types in the curse department. But anyway, he says, I’m here, you fucker! I’m finally here! And
I’m a worthless piece of shit, so fucking kill me! Come on! Fucking kill me!

And he’s waiting and he’s waiting, and he’s begging to be killed. He hates himself so much, and he hates what he’s done to his brilliant wife, and his amazing kids, that he just wants to die. Come on, you sick bastard, he’s saying to the altar, up on his knees now, with tears and everything. Kill me.

And then, maddest of all, he sees a figure coming towards him from the behind the altar. And the figure isn’t a priest, or a man, or an angel. It’s everyone and no one. A presence, and a light. And the figure doesn’t say much to Fr Jason. But he says enough. Just three words that change his life for ever, and turn him from a dirty drunken puke-addled alkie to a man of God. And the words? ‘You are loved.’

Now, as Fr Jason’s telling this story, his eyes in the candlelight are filling with tears. I don’t look around at any of the other fellas, but mine are filling up too. Because, right then and there, I want to be Fr Jason back down on the floor, covered in rags in that church, and I want to know that I am loved. And loved in that way, by a magical force from above that knows everything about me, and all about my life, and yet remains all loving and all knowing and only wants to scoop me up with enormous floaty cotton-wool arms and cuddle me close and kiss me on the place where my forehead ends and my hair begins and breathe heavenly breaths down slowly upon me, and tell me that I am safe.

It’s a knockout beginning to a knockout two days. Fr Jason has set the standard and doesn’t let up for an instant. Day one kicks off with a couple of prayers, a lap of the rosary, and then, for three hours straight, we do a brilliant game of chit-chat called, ‘The Best Day of My Life and the Worst Day of My Life’. In this one Fr Jason goes around the circle, fella by fella, and asks us to tell the group about the one time we felt the worst in the
world, and then to take a quick break and a deep breath, and tell us about the best time. Pretty simple. But brilliant all the same.

Now, the little fellas, from first and second class, are brutal at this. But in a funny way. A tiddler called Shaymo, who’s deadly at football and sure to be a school star, says that the worst day in his life was when he missed a penalty for his local under nines side, the Dunbarton Kestrals, in the league final, and the best day of his life was when he was told the family were taking a summer holiday trip to Liverpool, to see Anfield. He added that they never actually went on the holiday, because his mam one day suddenly insisted that they put all the holiday money in the Trocaire box instead, for the starving Cambodians. Which, Shaymo adds, just after his turn has passed along the line, makes it probably as bad as the day he missed the peno.

Some of the little ones do get it, though. An angelic-looking midget in specs called Pilibeen, who wears an Irish dancing medal on the outside of his jacket, and sounds like he should be going to Coláiste Mhuire ni Bheatha, says that the worst day of his life was when his granny died. This immediately makes everyone go all hushed, and makes Pilibeen’s cheeks go puce red. He says that he was at his dinner table, making mash-potato mountains and sausage trains through the middle, when the phone went and it was his uncle Billy. He knew it was his uncle Billy because his mam answered the phone and went, ‘Oh, Billy noooooooo!!!!’ Like they do in the movies when someone’s about to shoot the one you love in slow motion. Pilibeen says that he loved his grandma loads, and that it was a terrible terrible day, but as he’s speaking the little midge doesn’t look all that gutted. So Fr Jason, who’s on the ball, and like a friendly priest version of a TV copper, asks Pilibeen a few super-clever questions about how he felt exactly on that day, the answers to which eventually steer Pilibeen into admitting that what made the day so sad was seeing his own mother in a mess, and not the fact that his old granny – who
he saw only once a month and was pretty boring because she was deaf and a bit smelly – was dead.

Fr Jason was amazing like that. He said that he was just looking for the truth in every situation. Because the truth is God. And only God can set you free. None of us have a clue what this means, but it sounds fecking brilliant.

Next he’s on to the oldies, and this is where it really starts cooking. For it quickly transpires that we’re all, basically, a bit mad. Daryl McDonagh, a real quiet fella from all three of my main classes, says, for instance, that the worst day of his life was when his father left the family home. Nothing surprising there. Everyone nods along in silence. But then he starts to go all red-faced and watery-eyed, and he says the best day of his life was that day too, and that his father was a complete bastard. He’s allowed to say bastard because we’re in, says Fr Jason, a safe space, and because calling your dad a bastard isn’t half as bad as calling God a fucker. Turns out that Daryl’s dad was a real bastard, and probably a bit of a fucker too. And not in the old-fashioned way. Not in the sense that he ever smacked Daryl around the place, Jack Downs-y style. No, he was weirder than that. Real head-messing stuff. Daryl explains that if he left any veg or skins on the plate, his da could suddenly go mad, tell everyone to leave the kitchen and load up Daryl’s plate big time with all the scraps he could find. Then, and this is the weird bit, he’d make Daryl fetch a full-length mirror that was held in the garage for just such occasions, and he’d make him eat all the shitty scraps – bits of gristle from his brothers’ plates, the tops and tails from uncooked veg, even the odd boiled egg shell – and he’d have to do so while staring at his increasingly on-the-verge-of-puking face in front of the mirror.