Mothers and Sons

by Colm Toibin

  He went back and lay on the sofa. He stared at the ceiling and thought about nothing. He slept well at night and was never tired at this time of the day, but he felt tired now. He lay on his side, putting a cushion under his head, and, knowing that it would be a few hours before his sister-in-law returned, he slowly faded into sleep.

  When he woke he was nervous and uneasy; it was the loss of concentration and control which disturbed him and made him sit up and look at his watch. He had only been asleep for half an hour, but he realized that he had dreamed again about Lanfad, and he wondered if he would ever stop dreaming about it. It was twenty-four years since he had left it.

  He had dreamed that he was back there again, being brought in for the first time, between two Guards, arriving, being shown along corridors. But it was not himself as a thirteen-year-old boy, it was him now, after all the years of doing what he liked, being married, waking in the morning to the sound of children, watching television in the evenings, robbing, making plans and deals. And what unsettled him in the dream was the feeling that he was happy to be locked up, to have order in his life, to keep rules, to be watched all the time, not to have to think too much. As he was led through those corridors in the dream, he had felt resigned to it, almost pleased.

  He had felt like this for much of the time when he served his only adult sentence in Mountjoy Jail. He had missed his wife and their first child, and missed going where he liked, but he had not minded being locked up every night, he enjoyed having all that time to himself. Nothing unpredictable occurred and that made him content; the other prisoners knew not to come too close to him. He hated the food, but he paid no attention to it, and he hated the screws, but they knew to be careful of him as well. He made sure when his wife came on visits once a week that he gave nothing away, no emotion, no sense of how lonely and isolated he sometimes was. Instead they spoke about what would happen when he would get out, as she slowly put her finger into his mouth, a finger she had just wriggled around inside herself, so that he could take in the smell of her, and hold it, letting her talk about the neighbours and her family while she made it fresh again for him. He touched her hand so that the smell might stay with him for the rest of the day.

  His first days in Lanfad were the ones which lingered most in his mind. Perhaps because it was in the midlands and he had never been outside the city before. He was stunned by the place, by how cold and unfriendly it was and how he would have to stay there for three or four years. He had allowed himself to feel nothing. He never cried and when he felt sad he made himself think about nothing for a while; he pretended that he was nowhere. That was how he dealt with his years at Lanfad.

  In the time he was there he was beaten only once and that was when the entire dormitory was taken out one by one and beaten on the hands with a strap. Usually, however, he was left alone; he kept the rules when he knew there was a danger of being caught. He realized that it was easy to slip out on a summer’s night as long as you waited until everything was quiet and you chose the right companion and you did not go too far. He learned how to raid the kitchen and made sure not to do it too often in case they set a trap for him. As he thought about it now, lying back on the sofa, he realized that he had liked being on his own, standing apart from the others, never the one caught jumping from bed to bed, or locked in a fight, when the brother in charge entered the room.

  On one of his first nights there, there was a fight in the dormitory. He heard it starting, and then something like: ‘Say that again and I’ll burst you.’ This was followed by cries of encouragement. So there had to be a fight; there was too much energy in the dormitory for something not to happen. Although it was dark, you could make out shapes and movements. And he could hear the gasping and the pushing back of beds and then the shouting from all around. He did not stir. Soon, it would become his style not to move, but at this early stage he had not developed a style. He was too uncertain to do anything. Thus when the light was turned on and one of the older brothers, Brother Walsh, arrived, he did not have to scramble back into his bed like the rest of them, but still he felt afraid as the brother loped menacingly about the dormitory. There was now an absolute silence. Brother Walsh spoke to no one but walked around the beds looking at each boy as though he would pounce on him. When the brother looked at him, he did not know what to do. He met his gaze and then looked away and then back again.

  Eventually, the brother spoke.

  ‘Who started it? Stand out who started it.’

  No one replied. No one stood out.

  ‘I’ll pick two boys at random and they’ll tell me who started it, they’ll tell me all right, and it’ll be worse for you now, whoever started it, if you don’t stand out.’

  The accent was strange. He could not think what to do except pretend fiercely that this was not happening at all. If he were picked on, he would not know what to say. He did not know anyone’s name, and had not seen whoever it was who had started the fight enough to identify him now. Also, he did not know what the rules were, if it were agreed among the boys never to tell on anyone else, no matter what. He was puzzled as to how all the rest of them had learned each other’s names. It seemed impossible. As he thought about this, he looked up and saw that two boys were now standing beside their beds, their eyes cast down. One of them had the top of his pyjamas torn.

  ‘Right,’ Brother Walsh said. ‘The two of you will come with me.’

  The brother went back to the door and turned the lights out, leaving pure silence behind. No one even whispered. He lay there and listened. The first sounds were faint, but soon he heard a shout and a cry and then the unmistakable sound of a strap, and then nothing and then a howl of pain. He wondered where it was happening, he thought it must be in the corridor outside the dormitory, or the stairwell. Then the beating became regular with constant crying out and yelping. And soon the sound of voices shouting ‘No!’ over and over.

  Everyone in the dormitory remained still; no one made a sound. It did not stop. Finally, when the two boys opened the door and tried to make their way to their beds in the darkness, the silence became even more intense. As they lay in bed crying and sobbing, the other boys did not make a sound. He wished he knew the names of the boys who had been punished and he wondered if he would know them in the morning, if they would look different because of what had happened.

  In the months which followed it seemed to him unbelievable that the boys around him could lose any sense of caution and forget what had happened that night. Fights would regularly break out in the dark dormitory and boys would shout and get out of bed and leave themselves wide open to being caught when the lights came on and Brother Walsh or some other brother, or sometimes two brothers together, stood there watching as everyone scampered back to bed. And each time the main culprits would be made to own up and then taken outside and punished.

  Slowly, the brothers noticed him; they realized that he was not like the others and gradually they began to trust him. But he never trusted them, or allowed any of them to become too friendly with him. He learned instead how to look busy and seem respectful. In his time there he never had a friend, never let anyone come close to him. At the beginning, when he had trouble with Markey Woods, a bloke older than him and bigger, he had to put thought into how to deal with him.

  It was always easy to get a companion, someone who would work for you if you offered them protection and attention. He found a wiry fellow called Webster, but he did not tell Webster what he had in mind. He told him to let Markey know that there were cigarettes hidden in the bog, a good distance from the school but within its grounds. He let Markey threaten Webster that if he did not lead him to the hidden cache, he would beat him up. Thus he found himself walking with Markey and Webster towards the outer and remote limits of the Lanfad estate. He had primed Webster to run at Markey at an agreed signal, simply knock him to the ground. He had been experimenting with knots and ropes, having stolen a length of rope from the workshop, so he knew how to tie Markey’s legs quick
ly and then extend the rope to his hands and tie them too. This would be the difficult part, but with his legs tied, Markey could struggle all he liked, he would not have a chance.

  All this took more time than he had imagined as Markey struck blow after blow at Webster, causing him to become afraid, almost useless. Eventually he pinned Markey down and got the knot around one wrist, jerking it so that it almost broke his arm and then turning him face down so he could tie his wrists together. He had worked out that there was no point in trying to beat Markey up. It would mean nothing to him. Which was why he had brought a blindfold, and a small pair of pliers he had also found in the workshop. Once the blindfold was on, he turned Markey on his back and told Webster to start kicking him in the ribs, and as Webster was doing this with relish Markey had his mouth wide open roaring threats at him.

  He studied Markey’s mouth for a second as he continued to roar, and then he moved in quickly with the pliers gripping hard on one of Markey’s upper back teeth on the left-hand side. Even though Markey instantly clamped his mouth shut in shock, the pliers held fast.

  He began to loosen and pull at the tooth, worried now about the noise, the hysterical set of screams coming from Markey. He knew that the pliers had precisely a single tooth in their grip, but he could not understand the length of time it was taking to loosen and extract the tooth. In his own single visit to a dentist, when he had realized how simple and effective this would be, the tooth had come out very quickly.

  Suddenly, instead of putting pressure on the pliers and trying to loosen the tooth, he yanked the tooth back and forward and then he pulled the pliers hard. Markey let out a howl. It was finished. The tooth was out. Webster, when he came to examine it, seemed almost as pale as Markey.

  He took off Markey’s blindfold and showed him the tooth. He knew that it was important now not to let Markey go in a hurry, to keep him tied up, to let him bleed a bit as he talked to him quietly, letting him know that if anyone in the school ever touched him or Webster again, he would take out another tooth until Markey would only have gums left. But, he explained to Markey, if one of the brothers ever got word of what had happened, he would not take out teeth, he would go for Markey’s mickey. Did he understand? He moved the pliers down between Markey’s legs and tightened them around his penis. He spoke gently as Markey sobbed. Did he understand, he asked him. Markey nodded. I can’t hear you, he said. Yes, Markey said, yes, I understand. He released the pliers and untied Markey, forcing him to walk back to the school with them as though they were friends.

  From then on, the other boys in Lanfad were very afraid of him. Soon he felt unthreatened. He could, if he wanted, stop fights, or take the side of someone who was being bullied, or let a boy depend on him for a while. But it was always clear that this meant nothing to him, that he would always be ready to walk away, to drop someone, including Webster, whom he had to threaten in order to stop him from being his friend.

  The brothers allowed him to work out on the bog and he loved that, the silence, the slow work, the long stretch of flatness to the horizon. And walking home tired at the end of the day. Then in his last year they allowed him to work in the furnace, and it was when he was working there – it must have been in the winter of his last year – that he realized something he had not known before.

  There were no walls around Lanfad, but it was understood that anyone moving beyond a certain point would be punished. In the spring of each year, as the evenings became longer, boys would try to escape, making for the main road, but they would always be caught and brought back. All the cottages in the area seemed to have figures posted at the windows ready to report escaping boys to the brothers. Once, in his first year, two such boys were punished with the whole school watching, but that did not appear to deter others who wished to escape as well. If anything, it egged them on. He found it hard to understand how people would escape without a plan, a definite way of getting unnoticed to Dublin, and maybe then to England.

  That last winter two boys who were a year or two older than he was had had enough. They were in trouble almost every day and seemed afraid of nothing. He remembered them because he had spoken to them once about escaping, what he would do and where he would go. He became interested in the conversation because they said they knew where to get bicycles, and he believed that this was the only way to escape, to start cycling at midnight or one in the morning and go straight to the boat. He added, without thinking, that before he left he would like to stuff one or two of the brothers into the full blazing furnace. It would be easy enough to do, he said, if you had two other guys with you and you gagged the brother and moved fast. The blaze was strong enough, he said, that there would not be a trace of them. They would go up in smoke. If you were lucky, you could stuff four or five of them where the fuel normally went. No one would know a thing about it. You could start with one of the doddery old fellows. He said this in the same distant, deliberate way he said everything. He noticed the two boys looking at him uneasily as it struck him that he had said too much. As he stood up abruptly and walked away, it struck him that he should not have done this either. He was sorry that he had spoken to them at all.

  In the end the two boys escaped without bicycles and without a plan and they were brought back. He heard about it as he was bringing a bucket of turf up to the brothers’ refectory. Brother Lawrence stopped him and told him. He nodded and went on. At supper he saw that the two boys were still not there. He supposed that they were being kept somewhere. After supper, as usual, he went down to the furnace.

  It was a while later, close to lights-out time, when he was crossing the path to get more turf, that he heard a sound. He knew instantly what it was, it was the sound of someone being hit and crying. He could not make out at first where it was coming from, but then he understood that it was happening in the games room. He saw the lights were on, but the windows were too high for him. He walked back stealthily to the furnace to fetch a stool; he put it down under the window. When he looked in he saw that the boys who had tried to escape were face down on an old table with their trousers around their ankles and they were being beaten across the buttocks by Brother Fogarty with a strap. Brother Walsh was standing beside the table holding down with his two hands the one who was being beaten.

  Suddenly, as he watched this scene, he noticed something else. There was an old light-box at the back of the games room. It was used to store junk. Now there were two brothers standing in it, and the door was open so they had a clear view of the two boys being punished. He could see them from the window – Brother Lawrence and Brother Murphy – realizing that the two brothers administering the punishment must have been aware of their presence too but perhaps could not see what they were doing.

  They were both masturbating. They had their eyes fixed on the scene in front of them – the boy being punished, crying out each time he was hit with the strap. He could not remember how long he watched them for. Before this, he had hated it when boys around him were punished. He had hated his own powerlessness amid the silence and the fear. But he had almost come to believe that these punishments were necessary, part of a natural system of discipline in which the brothers were in charge. Now he knew that there was something else involved, something which he could not understand, which he could not bring himself to think about. The image had stayed in his head as though he had taken a photograph of it: the two brothers in the light-box did not look like men in charge, they looked more like old dogs panting.

  HE LAY BACK on the sofa knowing that he was going over all this again as a way of not thinking about the paintings. He stood up and stretched and scratched himself and then walked out onto the balcony again. Something beyond him, he felt, was beckoning; he wanted to leave his mind blank, but he was afraid. He knew that if he had done the robbery alone he would dump the paintings, burn them, leave them on the side of the road. When he was finally let out of Lanfad, he brought with him the feeling that behind everything lay something else, a hidden motive perhaps, or somethin
g unimaginable and dark, that the person on display was merely a disguise for another person, that something said was merely a code for something else. There were always layers and beyond them even more secret layers which you could chance upon or which would become more apparent the closer you looked.

  Somewhere in the city, or in some other city, there was someone who knew how to offload these paintings, get the money and divide it up. If he thought about it enough, if he sat back on the sofa and concentrated, would he know too? Every time he considered it, however, he came to a dead end. There had to be a way. He asked himself if he could go to the others who took part in the robbery – and they were so proud of themselves that night, everything had gone perfectly – and explain the problem. But he had never explained anything to anyone before. Word would get around that he was weakening. And also, if he could not work this out, then they certainly could not. They were only good at doing what they were told.

  He studied the waste ground in front of the flats. There was still nobody. He wondered if the cops had decided that they did not need to watch him, that he would make mistakes now without any encouragement from them. Yet that was not how their minds worked, he thought. When he saw a cop, or a barrister, or a judge, he saw the brothers in Lanfad, somebody loving their authority, using it, displaying their power in a way which only barely disguised hidden and shameful elements. He walked back into the flat and over to the sink in the kitchen, turned on the cold tap and splashed his face with water.

  Maybe, he thought, it was all simpler than he imagined. These Dutchmen would come, he would take them to see the paintings, they would agree to pay him, he would drive them to where they had left the money. And then? Why not just take the money from them and forget about the paintings? But the Dutchmen must have thought of that too. Perhaps they would threaten him and make clear that, if he broke any agreement, they would have him shot. Nonetheless, he was not afraid of them.