The Fields (23 page)

Pitching the tent is dead tricky. It’s not raining exactly, more misty wind than anything else. But all five of us boys are useless at it, even Hennessy with his scouts’ experience. Plus O’Culigeen has decided that our first lesson in outdoor survivalism will be how to pitch a tent in the mist without any printed instructions on paper or spoken advice from the mouth of the one adult who knows how to do it. I can tell he’s still fuming at me for bringing a real priest with me, because he keeps looking at me and gritting his teeth. He can’t hide it from the other boys who are now officially terrified, and snatch nervous glances from him to Fr Jason to each other, and try not to contemplate the kind of godforsaken sex circus that’s going to kick off once the sun goes down.

Fr Jason, though, is playing it dead cool, and has pitched his tent a good fifteen feet away from ours. His is a tiny nylon one-man jobby, like a navy-blue triangular coffin, or a Toblerone made out of rain jackets, just big enough for him to lie on his back, as he does once he’s finished, and read a small paperback and look over at us, winking, and saying, This is the life, eh?

O’Culigeen, of course, just paces distractedly in wide circles around the spot he’s chosen for the tent – a small flattened
clearing on the lower slope of Three Rock, fifty yards of huffing bags and camping gear inland from the winding gravel road that runs all the way up to the radio mast at the top. He chose his spot carefully, and kept saying out loud as he was driving, Hmmm, now let me see, let me see, as he pretended to scour the road ahead for the right place to park. But anyone could tell that he’d been here a million times before, and so when he said, Would you look at that! as he pulled into a deserted and tree-shaded lay-by, it was almost a joke.

You can’t see the van from the road. And the camping spot, equally hidden in a weedy overgrown field, looks like it is strictly an O’Culigeen find, and not visited by actual normal human beings with real-life camping on their minds. It kind of makes me feel a bit sick and sad at the same time, when he stops us there, and we look around at the big empty green space, and the patchwork of empty green fields beyond that tilt slowly downwards into the distance, getting greyer and darker until they merge into Dublin city itself. And, even if only for a moment, we listen to nothing up here but the sound of the wind in the leaves and the long grass, and I think of what these things – these fields, these sounds, this emptiness – are supposed to mean to normal people who go camping for fun, rather than raping.

And it makes me think of Saidhbh’s favourite story about her mam and dad’s honeymoon in Galway, and how they really wanted to go abroad but couldn’t afford it, so they settled on Connemara instead. It made them a bit moody for the first few days of the honeymoon, and it felt like a bad beginning, to start off their married life on a penny-pinching drive rather than living the dream in faraway lands. But then, on day four of the honeymoon, while they were out strolling aimlessly across one of the region’s many famous dirty great patches of rocky brown and barren scrubland, the sun suddenly came out and turned everything all warm and gorgeous and it made Saidhbh’s parents
hug each other tightly. When Saidhbh’s mam, Sinead, looked into Taighdhg’s eyes she could see that he was crying, and when she asked what was wrong he said nothing, but asked her to look around her at the beautiful landscape of rocks and muck that was Ireland at its best. At which point in the story Taighdhg says, Why? Why would a person from Ireland ever ever ever want to go and visit any other country in the world when they have this kind of beauty on their doorstep?

And after that, and for the rest of their married life up to now, Saidhbh’s parents never left the country and always holidayed in Ireland, the most beautiful country in the whole wide world.

Saidhbh finally cracks on the Thursday night, after her Irish oral, just as I’m packing for the camping trip. I’m up in the bedroom and I’ve covered the duvet with three pairs of clean everything, which seems a lot, but it’s mostly for smells, and in case it rains. I’ve a heavy four-mongo-battery torch for doing midnight slashes. I’ve got a toothbrush and a bar of Lifebuoy soap for the usual. Plus I’ve a woolly bobble hat for the early morning hours when it gets bonkers cold, and a Nevil Shute book with boobs on the cover to impress the lads in case we’re supposed to read before lights out.

Mam pops her head around the door to tell me Saidhbh’s just been on and it sounds serious and she doesn’t want to speak to me but wants to meet down by The Sorrows hockey pitch. Right now. Lovers’ tiff? Mam asks, and then doesn’t even wait for an answer but says, You two! I mean, really!

When I skid up to her on my bike she’s a mess. Hair lathered to her face with tears, and half hiding everything else deep inside Taighdhg’s big brown duffle coat, which she’s gotten buttoned up to the neck, even though it’s as balmy a night for early June as you’ll ever get.

She says, OK, OK, about a hundred times, and tells me I’ve won, I’ve won, and am I happy now, and that she wants to do it,
the abortion, but she wants to do it now, as soon as possible, no messing about. She wants it out of her body, right now! She says that she’s had it with everyone, including me, and including the baby inside her. She says that the last straw was O’Culigeen, who, this very evening, shooed her away from his door like a common alley cat when she called in for some life or death advice. She said he was totally distracted and crazy looking, and barely recognised her face at first, and when she mentioned the fate of her unborn baby he just told her to do what she thought was right for everyone and to leave him alone because he was a busy man. Saidhbh, who’d never seen O’Culigeen’s true colours, and had generally regarded him as a semi-saint, decided that he was just fecking about, and tried to take a step over the threshold, but O’Culigeen shut the door on her foot. When she yelped he told her he was sorry, but that she really needed to feck off with herself right now, and stop looking for answers from everyone else but herself. The last thing he told her was not to worry about me, and what I’d done to her. Because I was a cute whore, but he was going to put some manners on me this weekend. And then he slammed the door for good.

Saidhbh takes ages to sniffle up all her tears, and get back to breathing normally. When she does, she tells me that she’ll go with me to London on Monday, and she’ll have the abortion. She’ll stay with me and Fiona and Aunty Grace on Monday night and all of Tuesday. At this point she says, real cold like, that she doesn’t know what exactly is going on between me and Fr O’Culigeen, and she doesn’t want to know either. But what she wants to make violently clear is the fact that when we get back to Dublin on Wednesday afternoon she never wants to see me again. Ever. Ever. Ever.

The first night in the tent is pretty hairy. There’s all five of us lads squashed elbow to elbow, on one side of the tent, with our heads
all jammed up against the side, noses against the damp saggy yellow canvas that’ll be dripping wet by the quiet cold of morning. The other side is left entirely free for O’Culigeen. There’s buckets of space over there, and in fact you could’ve fit a fella each, easy, on either side of him, but none of us are completely thick. Although Hennessy, the new boy, does make a move in that direction, squeaking away that he doesn’t mind snuggling up to a priest. He gets a savage puck in the arm for his troubles, courtesy of Ronan Duignan, who’s a bit of a toughie and yanks him back over to our side of the tent and squashes him in between the rest of the altar boys, without a single word of explanation.

Our voices are wrecked anyway, coz of all the singing. Here, after we’ve barely got the tent going, Fr Jason, with just a set of spoons, gets us doing ‘All God’s Creatures Have a Place in the Choir’ over and over again, until we can do seconds, harmonies, the works, totally mixing it up, singing low for a laugh as the words say, ‘Some sing higher’ and then singing high, for another laugh, when the words say, ‘Some sing lower.’ O’Culigeen is a bit annoyed at first, coz he can see that Fr Jason is hijacking the night, and turning it into a major sing-song, but it isn’t like he has any choice. With his booze bag hidden in the corner of the tent, and all his devious plans on hold, he eventually peels off the driving gloves and starts slapping his right hand on his thigh a couple of times, just to show that he’s enjoying the tunes.

And then there’s the cooking part, which is easy, and we all get a big kick out of using sticks and twigs from the ground around us to fish our very own burnt-on-the-outside-and-raw-on-the-inside flame-cooked potato out of the fire itself. O’Culigeen then splatters huge spoonfuls of baked beans on to our plastic plates, and all over the poor blackened spuds, while Fr Jason makes some jokes about cowboys farting in the old days. We laugh at this, all the boys do, but O’Culigeen keeps quiet. He barely says
a word throughout the whole meal, other than to correct Hennessy for using his fingers as bean scoopers. He calls him a little pup a few times for doing it, and adds that he’s being a disgrace to his dead mother and his poor widowed father, which seems way over the top for getting a blob of tomato sauce on your hands, and Hennessy is getting a bit wobbly-lipped about it when Fr Jason bursts in again in sing-song mode. This time he tells us to stack up our plates near the fire, and to get ready for the best of Neil Diamond.

We do ‘Sweet Caroline’ for nearly an hour, until the summer sky gets purplyblackyblue and some of us are singing, Bam, bam, bum, with our eyes closed. As suddenly as he started, Fr Jason stops, chucks down his spoons and tells us that it’s time to clean our teeth and put ourselves to bed, and leave the night hours to the grown-ups.

We brush our teeth in a tiny basin by the side of the tent, all at the same time, pigs-in-the-trough style, just so we can get a good dunk of clean water on our brushes before it becomes filled with stretchy white spit and froth. O’Culigeen stands above us for this and, like a right ponce, explains to Fr Jason that he’s supervising our ablutions, and then says something that sounds like he read it off a Christmas cracker, about how God likes clean boys just as much as he likes holy ones. Then he leads us round to the back of the tent, near the nettle bushes, and tells us that it’s time for our pee-pees. We look at each other, and no one wants to be the first, and O’Culigeen says, Well?! as if it’s the most natural thing on earth, to be staring at five boys with their mickeys out at the same time. I’m thinking of holding mine in for a midnight effort with the torch when Hennessy starts it off with a tiny jet of his finest. We all join in after him, but we end up half-slashing over each other in our shuffly full-bodied and swervy-shouldered attempts to do it straight into the bushes without letting O’Culigeen get a good goo for himself.

After this, we go shooting into our sleeping bags, like five nervous bullets, and we roughly whip off our jeans and pull up our pyjamas while remaining safely deep in the darkness of the bag. We, nonetheless, keep peeping our heads out above the top, with the thick bronzey zips rubbing against our chins, like a little pack of jittery African animals, hiding in the long grasses of the Serengeti, but always keeping twitchy eyes out for the local lion.

Within seconds, our worst fears are confirmed. We hear the two priests saying, ‘Night then, Father’ to each other, like two total gobshites who don’t even realise that they sound completely thick when they call each other Father. O’Culigeen then sticks his ugly mug into the tent and tells us, with a fake yawn, that he’s too tired for grown-up talk tonight and is going to join us here in the boys’ tent instead. He squeezes himself in, bodily, and grins like a mad man as he climbs over us, petting all our bags individually, and telling us that we did ourselves proud tonight, with our lovely sweet voices, and that we’re the Palestrina Boys’ Choir in the making. He lets his hand rest on my bag, and under the same purply blackness of coming night, gives me a secret squeeze, a real vicious one, that tells me I’m still in the most super-dooper trouble of anyone on the planet.

He sits over on his side of the tent, cross-legged, and starts sniffing and taking deep deep breaths and muttering under his breath the usual rubbish about us all being dead filthy and trying to ruin him. It’s like he’s building himself up for the big one. Getting into character. Quiet as a mouse, he untwists the cap of a small spirits bottle from his booze bag and takes a monster slug. He then grabs his black priesty jumper and pulls it over his head, followed by his black shirt, and his white vest, before reaching down roughly for his own belt like a man possessed.

Knock! Knock! Are you still awake, Father?

It’s Fr Jason, the living saint, hovering inches away from the main zip outside.

O’Culigeen flinches, freezes, and tries to play the dummy. Ronan Duignan, seizing the moment, does a pretend yawn and a roll over that sends a leg flying right into O’Culigeen’s bare stomach. It winds him and makes him say Ooof and Shite out loud. Fr Jason asks him if he’s all right in there, Father, which forces him to say, Grand, Father, which is funny, when you think of it.

Turns out, after lots of toing and froing from either side of the main zippy door, that Fr Jason can’t sleep and feels like having a fireside chat to Fr O’Culigeen about life and the universe and all the deep things he has on his mind. O’Culigeen tries to think of a million excuses not to go out there, but Fr Jason is so brilliant at describing his own situation – a bit sad, a bit lonely, a bit confused – that there’s just no way O’Culigeen can stay in here without seeming a complete and utter bollocks.

Fr Jason also says that he’s a fierce thirst on him, but not a drop of drink in his rucksack, and is wondering if any of the clinking clanking noises he heard earlier from O’Culigeen’s bags might be the cure. O’Culigeen does a million little silent curses to himself, and reefs his black jumper back on, reaches over to the booze bag, pulls out a fresh naggin of Powers, and scrambles out of the tent, pucking Ronan Duignan and me as he passes.