A Son Called Gabriel

by Damian McNicholl

  “Leave Gabriel alone.”

  “I was out working when I was his age.”

  “Where has it got you?”

  Sometimes I wished Mammy wasn’t so quick. Daddy’s facial muscles twitched rapidly. I thought he was going to hit her. He’d never hit her, but sometimes I thought it must definitely come when she said things like that.

  Daddy stood rock still. Nuala’s fingers pinched into my flesh.

  “Well, I’m sick of the whole damned lot of you. I wish I could do what other men in my situation do and clear off for good.” He yanked the door open. “Eileen, you can go to hell. You can go to hell and take him with you.”

  He slammed the door as he left. Its ringing echo engulfed the kitchen. I remained frozen as his footsteps receded. Seconds later, the car engine revved and was followed by a ferocious screech of gears.

  “I’m not going to be like him when I grow up,” I said, stooping to help pick up shards of the broken plate. “All he does is rant and go out to pubs.”

  “Don’t say a word against your father.”

  “He’s always picking on me. Always wanting me to do dirty work I don’t want to do. And you heard what he said about me just now.”

  He would get no more love from me. To me, he was Daddy no longer. The word “Father” was a better way to address him. Used in England but not so much in Ireland, at least not in Knockburn, it was ideally remote. I was removed from him and this was the perfect word. I resolved to think of him only as “Father” in my mind from now on. Of course, I realized I’d still have to call him Daddy to his face. I’d have to use it when he spoke to me directly, otherwise my mother would notice and pass remarks after a time. Nor could I address him as “Father” in front of Caroline and James, because they’d die laughing at its ridiculous formality. I couldn’t avoid calling him Daddy to his face, but he was only Father in my mind from now on.

  Mammy looked at the jagged piece of plate in her hand. “He’s got a point, Gabriel. You should offer to help him. Your father works like a dog. You could pick up stones and do a bit of shoveling some Saturdays.” She looked at me. “He’s never refused you anything when you’ve asked and we could afford it.”

  To be perfectly honest, avoiding going out to help Father had become one of my priorities. I was definitely work-shy when it came to doing manual labor. The priests at Saint Malachy’s said all work had dignity and pleased God, and that it wasn’t only Protestants who possessed a work ethic. But I couldn’t buy that load of junk about all work being dignified. I couldn’t see what was so damned dignified about breaking your back. I couldn’t see what was supposed to be so dignified about digging drains and ditches with a shovel and pick. Nobody would do it if they didn’t have to. Manual work was hard and demeaning, and I felt people should just be honest, admit it, and stop saying ridiculously good things about it.

  “It’s true, Gabriel. You should offer to help. Your daddy’s a decent man. He doesn’t drink. He attends Mass. While it’s true he can’t make himself a cup of tea, I hope you turn out to be as good a man.”

  Her ability to reverse herself and stand up for Father was truly astonishing. Just when I thought she hated him, just when she was threatening to walk out and take us with her, she’d turn on a penny and praise him. Jesus, this was such a source of bafflement.

  I’d noticed that Caroline could change that way, too. One moment a thing was black, the next it was white, and you didn’t know where the hell you stood.

  Seventeen

  Tiny scarlet nets were etched into the whites of my sister’s eyes as she stood before my mother in a disheveled state. She’d just got in from school and the two uppermost buttons of her blue-and-white-checked blouse were missing and a long ladder ran from the knee of her right stocking to disappear beneath the bottom of her tunic. Her hair was also uncharacteristically tangled. She was now a teenager and in her third year at Saint Veronica’s Convent in Carntower.

  “I’m telling you, I didn’t provoke them,” Caroline said. “None of the girls ever speak to those horrible boys when we’re waiting for the taxi home.”

  “You definitely didn’t smile and give him a wrong idea?” said my mother.

  “They called us ‘Fenian whores.’ They’re always calling us names. But they’ve never touched me until this afternoon. Those Ballynure school pupils hate us because we’re Catholics. That’s exactly what it’s about. Even the girls swear at us, and they egg the boys on, too. That’s why the brute lunged and tried to grab me.”

  “It’s disgraceful,” said Mammy.

  “His hand was partway inside my blouse, Mammy. I had to get away. That’s why my buttons came off.” Caroline started crying. “Honest to God, Mammy. It wasn’t my fault.”

  “I believe you, pet.” Mammy patted Caroline’s head and laid her hand on her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry about the blouse,” Caroline said, amid sniffs. “I’ll sew on the buttons and mend my stocking tonight.”

  “We’ll get it sorted,” my mother said. “They’re a bunch of scum. Something needs to be done. You must tell Sister Margaret-Mary about this tomorrow. She’ll contact the police.”

  “What can the headmistress do?” my sister said. “The police won’t listen to a nun. Sure the police hate the Catholics, too.”

  Every evening, Caroline had to catch a connecting bus near the steps of the Ballynure clock tower. Her uniform, a royal blue tunic and blazer with a crest comprised of a cross on its breast pocket, was the giveaway she was Catholic.

  Arguments between Protestant school and Saint Malachy’s pupils were forever breaking out, too. Sometimes, it was the Protestants who started it; sometimes, it was Saint Malachy’s boys. The whole thing was dumb.

  It offended me because I was now a fourth-year and had befriended a Protestant schoolboy. Nigel lived in the Protestant fringe surrounding Knockburn and traveled the last part of the morning journey, a ten-minute ride into Ballynure, with us to catch the same bus as Caroline to Carntower. A ram of a chap with a thick neck, round face, and ginger hair (the latter unusual for a Protestant, I thought), Nigel was also in his fourth year and played rugby at Carntower Academy, a brilliant Protestant school. One morning, he chanced to sit beside me on the bus. We nodded and smiled, got talking, and I learned in the course of our first sit-together that Protestant schoolboys could be very mannerly.

  I hoped he’d sit beside me the next day, and he did. I began reserving the seat for him, albeit very discreetly. I never said a word to him about what I was doing, but Nigel knew I was keeping the seat. I knew by the way he grinned as he walked down the aisle. The more we talked, the more we got to like each other. Even our mothers, who’d seen one another in Hamilton’s supermarket but never spoken, began chatting when they met on account of our friendship.

  Nigel fast became a source of fantasy to me. In bed, after I’d said my prayers, I’d imagine us entering into a lasting friendship where I’d visit his house, he’d visit mine, and we’d talk about every subject under the sun. I imagined us talking about the real differences between Catholics and Protestants. Not obvious stuff like religion, but rather about what made us dislike one another and what could be done to improve relations. Of course, he and I never discussed such a prickly subject on the short bus ride, but nevertheless, sitting beside him every morning talking about school stuff was one of the highlights of my day.

  Another fascinating thing about Nigel was his uniform. The blazer was stunning: red and white stripes on a purplish-blue background. He also wore a matching cap and scarf that were compulsory wear. Everything was so classy and made my uniform look drab in comparison. The Saint Malachy’s boys took offense to the Carntower Academy uniform, grumbling its colors were the same as those of the Union Jack, which only Protestants recognized in Ireland. It didn’t matter to them that the school and its uniform colors were hundreds of years old.

  Over time, some boys noticed I reserved a seat for Nigel and the pathetic nonsense commenced. Nigel and his unifor
m provided new fodder for Pearse, Mickey, and, of late, Mickey’s younger brother, Willie, who was a third-year and fast becoming a bully in his own right. They didn’t bother me during the morning commute because they were too busy copying homework from one another. It was always during the evening ride home when Mickey would send Willie down to bat me on the head for sitting beside a Protestant. I couldn’t do a thing about it, because I knew Mickey was behind it.

  After the bus dropped us off in Ballynure every evening, a taxi took us up to Knockburn. Six of us had to arrange ourselves in the backseat of the vehicle. It was so packed inside, I could hardly breathe, let alone move. Eventually, somebody got it into his head to torment me during this ride as well. Within five minutes of starting the journey, I’d experience small, sharp stabs in my thigh that made my eyes water. No matter how many fractions of an inch I tried to shift my leg away, I soon felt the stabs again as something sharp pierced my flesh. It was impossible to ascertain who was doing it. I complained one evening and more than one boy laughed. That’s when I realized the attack had been planned.

  The stabbing was all the more painful because I didn’t know what to do about it. I couldn’t appeal to my parents or teachers: Father would just turn a deaf ear, as he always did; Mammy always agreed with him whenever he told her not to interfere because I had to fight my own battles; and appeals to the teachers who mattered at Saint Malachy’s would be most unwelcome.

  Saint Malachy’s was an Irish Catholic boys’ school down to its consecrated foundations. Boys were expected to be tough and assertive and to show no feminine qualities, as they would be inexcusable signs of weakness. Yet, naturally, we had to respect such feminine qualities in women, as such qualities in women weren’t weaknesses. They had to be respected because women were our mothers and would eventually become our wives.

  Saint Malachy’s boys dared not worry about facial spots, dared not show affection for one another, dared not giggle too shrilly. Most of our senior male teachers had come through this system and now behaved as gentlemen in front of women. Yet, some of them took pleasure in punishing boys in ways that bordered on perverse. So, I couldn’t approach the teachers who held real power with my problem, because I was fourteen now and unyielding manliness was demanded. Not all the Saint Malachy’s teachers behaved this way, of course. There were decent teachers, too—but they were low in the pecking order.

  I had to find my own solution. I couldn’t tune it out like I did with the verbal abuse. Trouble was, just when I’d narrowed it down to a particular suspect and observed his movements carefully, I’d find out I was wrong.

  “You know damned well who’s jabbing me in the leg, don’t you?” I said to Fergal, after the taxi dropped us off at the crossroads one afternoon.

  The ride had been particularly painful and the gloomy weather compounded my frustration. It was damp and the silent hedgerows, interspersed with middling-sized, ragged hawthorns, seemed otherworldly because of the mist.

  “I do not, indeed,” he said.

  I cast my satchel down on the road. “How can you lie to me when you know someone is sticking something sharp into my leg?”

  Though Fergal and I talked every day, we were actually estranged. Our boyhood friendship was as tattered as a tinker’s clothing. We knew it, denied it, and chose instead to fill the walks home with phony conversation. Fergal was a ruddy complexioned, very average pupil, one of those jovial schoolboys one sees peering from an old class photograph whose face is familiar but whose name is always forgotten. Competitiveness and parental jealousies had distanced us to chasm proportions over the years. We lied to each other habitually about the silliest things: whether or not we were studying for a class test, or whether we were doing research or not for some project. Both of us knew we lied, and yet we went through the motions and asked the questions, anyway.

  More than once, Fergal had called me a “poof” on the bus when it was noisy and he probably figured I wouldn’t hear his voice. But I heard him. I’d know his voice anywhere. His voice had been around me since awareness began and you never forget a voice that’s been around that long. He’d always apologize when he guessed by my frostiness I’d heard him. I always forgave him, on account of we did go back to awareness. But trust was an entirely different matter. Circumstances had rendered trust between us irrevocably dead. We were in a schoolboy’s dilemma. We couldn’t terminate the friendship. We couldn’t do what adults do when a friendship’s over and simply stop speaking, because we had to walk home together and go through the charade daily.

  “How would you like someone to do that to you every day, Fergal?” I said. “It’s sore as hell. My leg’s full of tiny red holes.”

  Fergal looked at me for an instant before shifting his gaze up the road, even though he could see nothing. The clinging fog lent a ghostly appearance to his body, made him appear so different, like someone from another time.

  “It’s Kevin McDermott,” Fergal admitted. “He says you’re a big stew and you deserve it for talking to that black Protestant from Carntower Academy. He sticks you with a compass.”

  That Kevin thought I was a nerd surprised me. He was a very civil fellow. It was also ironic he called me a stew. McDermott, with his long teeth and Cheshire Cat smile, looked as devious as God ever intended sneaks to appear. He was in the same year as me and consistently first in his class. All the boys complained it was easier to pull wisdom teeth with chopsticks than to ever get him to share his homework.

  “How do you think Kevin manages to always come first in his class?” I said.

  “Because he’s a stew as well,” Fergal said. “It’s actually more to do with the Protestant thing.”

  I let the fact Fergal said “stew as well” slide. “Nigel’s not a black Protestant. He should get to know him before he makes judgments.”

  “I don’t think you should be reserving seats for Prods, if you want my opinion. They’re all the same. Nice to your face and stab you in the back when it suits them.”

  “Like Kevin’s doing, you mean?”

  He sighed. “You know what I’m saying, Gabriel.”

  “You fancy Cathy Simpson who waits near our bus line in the evenings?”

  “That’s different. She’s a girl . . . and I only like her because I’d like to ride her, so it’s okay.”

  Fergal was unfazed by the glaring hypocrisy. It had to do with the fact he was completely oversexed. Sex was what he and many other boys in our class talked about most of the time now. They talked tits, hard-ons, riding girls, homework complaints, latest soccer results, more tits and hard-ons. It was all big talk. If a girl approached Fergal, he’d bolt.

  Though only one year younger than him, I wasn’t obsessed with girls or their body parts. I liked looking at a girl overall, not just at her tits and arse. And the way they talked about hard-ons was ridiculous, about how this girl or that one made them get really stiff. I woke up stiff as well, sometimes, but I didn’t go on about it as if it was the only thing in life that mattered.

  Cathy Simpson was one of the really pretty girls and wouldn’t give Fergal a second glance. She didn’t look Irish Protestant in the slightest, either. Her silky blonde hair fell to the small of her back. She tossed it beautifully as she got out of the school bus, just like a horse does its mane in full gallop.

  “I don’t think you should say that sort of thing about Cathy, either,” I said. “If you like a girl, what does her religion matter?”

  “I would never go steady with her. You only ride the Prod girls.”

  Kevin liked to play chess at lunchtime. The next day, I went to the physics laboratory where the players met, took him aside before he began a game, and asked point-blank why he was stabbing me with a compass.

  At first, he denied it vigorously. “How could you even think I’d do such a thing?” he kept protesting, as he tried to look me in the eye.

  I told him I knew it was him because someone had informed on him. He looked away, pretending to watch an upper-sixth fellow
wiggling his index finger against the tip of his nose as he pondered a move. Finally, he turned back to me and mumbled an apology.

  “I won’t do it again,” he said, and flashed me his cheesy smile. “I promise.”

  Two days later, the stabbing recommenced. Three gentle, probing stabs the first day and then back to the old intensity and frequency the next. The following evening, I made sure to be in Kevin’s vicinity as we bundled into the taxi. At the first stab, I took my compass out of my pocket. On the second prick, I negotiated my hand toward his leg, sank the entire point into him and withdrew it quickly. His cry shriveled to a gasp when the other boys complained about his shifting about in the packed car.

  I didn’t feel any pity. Not a sliver. Yes, it was a savage act, but I had to protect my body. I had to make him stop. If I didn’t protect myself, who else would?

  It worked. Kevin stopped the attacks. And even more astonishingly, he began respecting me. It was a slow-built respect, beginning with chats about homework that moved on to include other stuff. It felt pretty good.

  Father’s big break came around this time. He’d applied six months previously to be entered on a government “Select List” for subcontract work. A new business contact who was a Protestant like Father’s bank manager had recommended Father’s company to the government department and a letter arrived unexpectedly advising him that the company was required to assist in a multimillion-pound road building project. The job involved the construction of a bypass around a large Ulster town and Father was to be one of ten subcontractors working for the main firm, a large company with its head office in London.