The Dark

by John McGahern

  As June drew closer the school prayers, morning and evening, were offered for the exams—that the school might do well. The class was exhorted to offer their private prayers for the same intention.

  Please God may I not fail.

  Please God may I get over sixty per cent.

  Please God may I get a high place.

  Please God may all those likely to beat me get killed in road accidents, and may they die roaring.

  It made no sense, even if you did say your prayers any more. If God was there nothing mattered but the Presence.

  The poor, the tramps of the road, were supposed to have better chance in the final round-up than the secure. What was you alone went to Him, not roses and vegetable garden and semi-detached house and young wife and children and the Ford or Volkswagen for Sunday outings from the Dublin suburbs you took to him if you got the Junior Executive Exam for the Civil Service, but whatever was you alone.

  What was there to do but keep silent, but when Mahoney offered the hurried rosary they said each night for your success you couldn’t stand it, at least Mahoney should be above that slobber, you thought.

  “What did you say that for?” you almost shouted the moment they’d finished, unable to choke back the anger.

  “What?”

  “Praying for my success.”

  “Don’t you want the Grace of God or are you a pagan or something?”

  “No. It’s not that. What does it matter to God whether I get the exam or not, or to my life under him? If it’s his Will, and I’m lucky enough and good enough, I’ll get the exam. And if I don’t it doesn’t matter. It’ll not matter the day I’m dying.”

  “What sort of rubbish and blasphemy am I listening to?”

  “None. You want to use prayer like money, wheedle the exam out of God. Can’t you leave it alone. God is more important than a getter of exams for people. What does it matter whether I get the exam or not?”

  “There was enough fire and light used on it then, if it wasn’t important. You should take your scarecrow face and bag of bones before a mirror if you want to get a fright sometime, apparently it matters that much. And now you’re gone too crazy madhouse to ask God. Is it out of your mind you’re gone?”

  “No. I’m sane as you are, or more. Ask for Grace if you want, but don’t ask him to pass the exam ——”

  “Heathen rubbish!”

  “No. No exam deserves the Grace of God, nobody does. Let them ask Grace, a bolloksed poor devil, but no, no, no.”

  Mahoney waited till the rush of passion subsided, and then addressed more the general house than made direct answer.

  “Do you hear what I had to wait till near the end of my days to hear in my own house? Heathen rubbish. And in future keep your dirty language for your street-corner friends in town, do you hear me?”

  “I do, but I don’t want any praying for exams.”

  “We wouldn’t as much as dirty prayers with your name again but such filth and rubbish. Hell is where you’re heading for and fast. I never knew too much books to do good yet. Puffed pride. You think you can do or say anything you’ve a mind for. I’ve seen a few examples of it in me time, but never such prize heretic baloney as this night. I’ll hear no more in this house. Do you hear me now?”

  “Alright. You’ll hear no more.”

  “Such rubbish,” he went on complaining. “And in front of the children too. Puffed up and crazy, it’d choke you to live the same as other people, wouldn’t it? You don’t even need God now? You wouldn’t ever have to do such a mean thing as clean your arse, would you, these days? Maybe it’s up in the sky you spend your time these days, having conversations with God, and not down here with the likes of us. And I reared you and let you to school for that. As if there could be luck in a house with the likes of you in it.”

  He went muttering and complaining that way to bed. And then, when he was gone, the wave of remorse that came. You’d troubled him, and for what? Did it matter what was prayed for? If it gave him satisfaction to pray for success why not let him, it would make no difference except he’d not be upset as now. Stupid vanity had caused it all. The house had gone to bed. You were alone in the kitchen. You wanted to say to him you were sorry but you weren’t able.

  His boots, wet from the grass, stood drying by the raked fire. They started to take on horrible fascination.

  They were your father’s boots, close to the raked fire. They’d been put there to dry for morning. Their toes touched where the ashes spilled out from the fire on the concrete, boots wet from the grass. Your father’s feet had been laced in their black leather, leather over walking flesh. They’d walk in his hopes, be carried over the ground, till they grew worn, past mending, and were discarded for the new pair from Curley’s, on and on, over the habitual fields, lightly to the football matches in Reegan’s field on Sundays, till the feet themselves wore, boots taken off his dying feet. Corns of the flesh against the leather. All the absurd anxiety and delight and heedlessness the boots carried. They stood so utterly quiet by the fire, the feet that they’d cover resting between sheets to wear them through another day. The boots were so calm there. They would not move. You touched them in fascination, they did not stir, only the rough touch of wet boot leather against the finger-tips. One lace was broken, replaced by white twine.

  How could you possibly hurt or disturb anyone? Hadn’t the feet that wore the boots, all that life moving in boot leather, enough to contend with, from morning to night to death, without you heaping on more burden, from sheer egotism. Did it matter to the boots, moving or still, whether your success was prayed for or not? Why couldn’t you allow people to do the small things that pleased them? In this same mood you did what you had never done and went and knocked on his door.

  “Who’s that? What do you want?”

  “I’m sorry over the prayers.”

  “It’s a bit late in the day to be sorry now, easy to be sorry when the harm’s done, such heathen rubbish, easy to know why you’re sorry. It’s more than sorry you ought to be——”

  Anger rose as the voice continued to complain out of the darkness of the bedroom. The same boots could kick and trample. You couldn’t stand it, you’d only meant well, that was all.

  “Forget it for God’s sake. I just said I was sorry,” you said and closed the door sharply to go troubled and angry through the kitchen to your own bedroom.

  21

  CLOSER AND CLOSER THE EXAM CAME ON A COUNT OF DAYS, early June days of pure summer that year, memory of boats on the river down the town at the bridge and girls in white at tennis over by the Courthouse on Wednesday half-days through dead evenings. All but the exam classes had been let away on summer holidays. The pressure of the ordinary schooldays was completely relaxed, effort to ease the strain of waiting for the exam. Timetable and rule went overboard, chairs were brought out on the lawn. In the shade of the huge cypress tree a half-circle was made about Benedict, the lawn bright outside the shade, white flags of the clock golf, white lawn blocks like toy dogs on either side of the concrete path that cut the lawn in two, the pink snow of petals on the grass under the one lilac tree.

  “There’s no need to sweat any more. The work is over. More harm than good is always done this time of year by work. Just relax. An exam is the same as a football match. You never train heavily on its eve. What we’ll do now is go over any points that still puzzle you. Well, I’m waiting for questions,” Benedict smiled, the jet-black hair sleeked, he’d to shave twice a day because of the darkness of his beard. The wide leather belt was buckled tight about the narrow waist, part of the cape drawn across his throat and thrown over his shoulder. It was said that he could read in six languages and that he had foreign blood because of his blackness.

  Questions moved about the Council of Trent, a point of grammar in one of the Horace Odes, Plantation of Ulster, degenerating into sheer time-wasting and ease in the end.

  “Do you think if Horace came he’d understand the Latin the way we read it?”


  “No. He’d probably be horrified. But you needn’t fear, McDermott, the only ghosts you should have back these days are the nights you spent in the Gaiety all winter.”

  “Why is the dead language of Latin used in the Mass?”

  “Because it’s the official language of the Church, binding together the differences of so many languages, the universal unchanging language.”

  It was a game, not touching the exam.

  A drill battered at concrete the other end of the town. Cars passed the gate on the Dublin Road, the stone Celtic cross above it, ad maiorem dei gloriam. The shadow of the great cypress, stretching farther than the hedge of flowering currant and the high wall, stayed still on the lawn. The questions lazed on.

  “Were the Romans much like us?”

  “Why were so many of the poets heretics and mad?”

  “How many classes have you prepared for the Leaving since you became a Brother?”

  “Do you think has Roscommon much of a chance in the All Ireland this year?”

  “Do you think our class is among the better or worse?”

  You sat on that lawn through those questions, part of your life passed that way, in the ease of the day and this shuttlecock of undemanding question and answer. Though the ease was broken by constant flashes: the exam was near, the day of reckoning. A horrible tightening of fear gathered in the guts. Benedict said you’d walk away with the Scholarship, but there was always luck he said too.

  Would you fail? Fail Benedict’s opinion, not have any luck, get the wrong questions, not having what it took in the last round-up. You could hear your father’s voice when that result came.

  “See where the study got you after it all, the amount of fire and light down the drain, and for nothing. Yourself and the rest of the house damned near driven cracked. Didn’t I tell you? I told you only those with the pull would get anything, didn’t I tell you that?”

  You tried to shut your eyes. Your eyes strayed about. Grass, concrete, shade, strands of wire running between concrete posts and beyond the sanded yard you used cross with the bicycle, all the times rough-and-tumble soccer was kicked there with a sponge ball. Fallen lilacs were on the lawn. A hit tune started to beat through the sickness: “We’ll gather lilacs in the springtime.”

  They’d all gather lilacs in a horrible summertime, parched into dust. Dry lilac petals choking your father’s mouth, your own mouth, rotting life of the lawn about the lilac tree, under the bridges of Paris with me, darling you’ll hold me tight.

  The sun, the heat was the worst. The futility of the chairs on the lawn. Your father might be right enough yet, you were half crazy. If you’d kept on to be a priest you’d be calm as the others; just an easy progression into a seminary of continuing days is all you’d have to fear.

  “Security. Security. Security. Everyone’s looking for security,” the Reverend Bull Reegan shouted annually from the pulpit at every annual retreat.

  Lives were lived through in this rathole of security, warding off blows, dealing blows, one desperate cling to stay alive in the rat hole; terror of change; neither much risk or generosity or praise, even madness as banal and harmless as anything else there. You must get the same bus at the same time on the same road each morning, hang your hat on the same hook, have three pennies for the same newspaper which the newsboy would hand you without you asking. That was the height of the exam. That of the recognition in the city when you’d walk out of the office with the umbrella.

  Dream of a girl’s mouth on the lawn in the cypress shade and Benedict’s dry ironic voice yards away with the drill digging the concrete, no taking to the air a quiet breath without moan, but the last shiver of the nerves in soft threshing thighs and lips on a dancing floor.

  No. Some ordinary futility instead, fail the exam, a second-class ticket on the nightboat for Holyhead, and did it matter, but it was too close to the exam to turn back, just go blindly into it for the next fortnight for God’s sake.

  “Pray for success. Ask God’s blessing. Have the peace of the state of Grace in your soul. Put yourself as an instrument in God’s hand. You’ll not fare any worse by it,” Benedict was saying, obviously ready to end the class, and it was no use to you.

  “I have studied the course, worked as hard as I could drive myself. After that it’s a game with luck. I’ll just go in and do it as best I can. If anyone’s better it has nothing to do with me. There’s not places for everyone, only two, no matter how good the rest are. It’s only a shocking game. And who are the judges and what are their standards anyhow?” you tried to phrase as you left the lawn with your books and chair.

  “You can go to England if all fails. You’ll work in Dagen-ham and they’ll call you Pat.”

  “Will you make up a game for the alley,” O’Reilly called, it was the best. A doubles, energy let loose in this striving, the concrete wall before you, imprisoned by the high netting wire. The small elephant was a brown blur of spin and speed. There was the joy of skill and pure movement, the flash of instinctive thinking, and it was of no consequence much who won or lost. Outside the netting wire was the mould of the monastery garden, full of cabbages and young potato stalks.

  22

  THE DAYS IMMEDIATELY BEFORE THE EXAM TOOK ON THE quality of a dream: time passing, the will paralysed, watching the certain flow towards the brink in helpless fear and fascination, it could not be true and yet it was drawing relentlessly close. Possibility of working was gone, the listless turning of pages I knew already by heart alone in the room. Evenings across Oakport towards the river with books; but, instead of studying, all it was possible to do was gaze at the great rusting gates of Oakport that used open to coaches once, the weathered white of the rotting wood of Nutley’s boathouse, the reeds along the shore trembling with fish and the endless water. On the way home through the wood my feet tramping on the bluebells. The exam was only days away, but it was as unreal as my own death; was all life like this; and it was impossible to be easy. Crossing the stone walls of the Plains with the sheepdog in the hope of the distraction of a grazing rabbit was one escape.

  The day before the exam was an intensification of the same, a Sunday, hot and without a breeze. With Joan I went on the river, in the old tarred boat, the tar melting and smelling in the heat, and I’d to pour water over the squealing rowing-pins. She let out the spoons and I rowed at slow trawling speed, but there was too much brightness, the light glaring off the water, not even in the shade of Oakport Wood along the edges of the drowning leaves did a single fish strike. Joan sat with the lines in her hands at the end of the boat. I rowed with the same mechanical slowness, lifting the oars high now and then to listen to the ripple of the boat through the glass-calm water.

  “Are you worried about tomorrow?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. The whole business seems cuckoo or something. It’s not real. Why did you ask?”

  “No why. You didn’t speak a word since we left. I was just wondering.”

  “I suppose I must be worried.”

  In a dream the boat went by the known landmarks. The Gut at the mouth between a red navigation pan and a black, the Golden Bush good for perch, Toughran’s Island, Knockvicar Island and the creamery through the trees, the three arches of Knockvicar Bridge with the scum from the creamery sewer along the sally bushes, names bedded for ever in my life, as eternal.

  Knockvicar Locks was as far as the boat could get up the river, because of the great wooden gates. To an ash sapling rooted in the stones we tied the boat and started to worm fish for perch, an even mane of water falling across the wall and churning white out on the stones from the sluice, the smell of rotting river-weed thick in the air.

  The place was almost crowded: a few boats, people sitting on the lock gates or out on the wall fishing with their trousers rolled to their knees, the mane of water dragging at their ankles before it poured down the green wall; girls on the grass along the bank. There was sense of laziness and ease and Sunday over it all, but the fishing was withou
t pleasure, list¬ lessly pulling in the small perch, their bright red fins and the gills working on the floor of the boat till they died in the heat, baiting the hook again, and sitting to watch the cork. The exam was tomorrow, the first day would be finishing this time tomorrow, it wasn’t possible to believe, and there was only a dull ache. This whole corner of river was a painting of a Sunday, even children. These hadn’t to wrestle with any exams. They were as fixed here on hot Sundays as the river. There was no darkness or fear or struggle. Their cigarette-packets drifted past. Only a fool wanted to be different.

  “I’m sorry, Joan. I can’t stand it. We’ll go home.”

  Rowing home was distraction, the sense of movement. I had at least the notion of going some place. Though before the boat was half-way I was worrying if the oars would blister my hands for the morning, it’d be almost safer to ask Joan to row.

  “Tomorrow the exam starts,” Mahoney echoed it at tea.

  “Yes, tomorrow,” I nodded. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” started to beat to the mind out of Macbeth.

  “What subject is on?”

  “It’s Irish first.”

  “Don’t worry, not to worry is the important thing. It’s not an execution you’re going for, remember. Cool, calm and collected, the three seas of wisdom and success.”

  The house grew impossible to endure, outside the glare was gone, a liquid yellow from the west pouring on the gates under the yew. I went by the orchard, the apples green and hard, the big rhubarb leaves crowding out of the wooden frame, the red stalk streaked with green when I lifted the leaves. The fierce urge to touch grew, the pale moss on the apple branches with my finger-tips, brittle and hard; the cool of a rhubarb leaf against my face. The wooden stile at the bottom was white with weather, the bucket handle nailed into the yew to steady you over was cold. Nettles and huge dock grew choking against the thorn hedge except where the fowl scraped.