A Month of Sundays

by John Owens

  Just as he got to the door, he heard a voice in his ear. “Ah, John, I was looking for you.” It was Mister Li, the elderly Science master. “You have booked the overhead projector for tomorrow morning. Will you be using it?” Shaking his head wildly, O’Driscoll passed through the door into a short corridor. He made a conscious effort to take long, slow breaths to calm the volcanic mass that was bubbling in his stomach, but all his past experience told him he was fighting a losing battle as the sour, heaving soup began to rise through his esophagus. He had literally seconds to spare when he saw the large canvas hold all resting against the wall. It was filled with exercise books and papers and it was recognizably the property of Sister Bernadette.

  O’Driscoll looked wildly around, his hand in front of his mouth as his body convulsed, but apart from Sister Bernadette’s hold all, the corridor was bare, so he took one step, bent over and directed a stream of vomit neatly into the bag. Without breaking step, he reached for the door that led into the courtyard and propelled himself in one movement in the direction of the shrubbery. His momentum carried him into the cover of the bushes where he evacuated the remainder of his stomach, unseen.

  Inevitably, he bumped into Duffy ten minutes later as he was attempting to creep away from the scene of his crime. Duffy as always contrived to maintain an air of grace and ease no matter how much alcohol he had consumed. He greeted his friend with practiced bonhomie and before he knew it, O’Driscoll was having the first of a series of “steadiers” suggested by Duffy as the perfect antidote to the earlier accident. The remainder of the night became an incoherent procession through a succession of bars and clubs until he finally staggered back to his small flat in Southall at three o’clock in the morning.

  Tuesday

  It was not birdsong or the rays of the sun that woke John O’Driscoll the next morning but a chorus of hawking and spitting as the cash and carry that lay below his flat on Southall Broadway opened for business. As he lay in that delicious vacuum that precedes the return of memory, his mind began to untangle the events of the previous evening and drifting at random and in no particular order into his consciousness came a kaleidoscope of images; Karen Black’s delectable bottom... Father Kennedy’s undelectable nostril hair... the mole on Mrs. O’Higgins’s chin... Sister Bernadette’s bag. With a start, O’Driscoll sat bolt upright as the image of Sister Bernadette’s hold all filled to the brim with his vomit appeared in his mind’s eye and as the details of the preceding evening slowly returned to him and incrementally increased his sense of unease, his hand made an unconscious southward journey and began to scratch his scrotum in search of solace.

  He was hopeful that he had been unobserved as he evacuated the contents of his stomach, but in the state he had been in, it was hard to be sure. Casting his net wider for evidence of further crimes, he didn’t think his insobriety had been so obvious as to make him stand out in the crowd and he was fairly sure he hadn’t made inappropriate comments to any of the matrons of the parish. He had kept so far out of Father Kennedy’s way that it was unlikely that he had blotted his copy book further there, and most important of all he was certain that his interactions with Karen Black had been so fleeting that he could not have said or done anything to blacken his reputation.

  As he scratched around in his scrotal area, his face contorted itself into a succession of strange shapes and a whoosh of air rushed silently from his mouth. He was aware that a range of disturbing mannerisms had begun to manifest themselves when he was in a state of anxiety and although he believed he had the grimaces under control, he could not say the same for the sudden exhalations of breath that escaped from him, sometimes in a silent whoosh but more often in an audible form that can best be rendered into print as “OOST!”

  The whole situation was causing O’Driscoll some disquiet for he was not a stupid man and was aware that ejaculating the word “OOST!” at random moments was not a practice calculated to impress the school leadership or improve his prospects of gaining that vital contract extension. And it was unlikely to reduce Karen Black to the sort of quivering pliancy that she occupied in his wilder imaginings. But O’Driscoll was uncomfortably aware that since the last interview he had had with the school leadership on the subject of his future, the noises had begun to appear with greater frequency and, more worryingly, they seemed to be increasingly audible to those around him.

  Only the day before, a lady on the 207 bus had received a shock when the otherwise innocuous-looking young man sitting beside her had enunciated suddenly and with great clarity the word “OOST!” Aware of the unease that he was causing among his fellow passengers, O’Driscoll’s anxiety levels had begun to rise and he was about to give voice to another “OOST!” when, realizing the vicious circle he was in danger of entering into, he desisted abruptly. A moment later, he coughed loudly and extravagantly, hoping to cloud at least one of the “OOSTs” in uncertainty, but the damage was done and the lady next to him spent the rest of the journey sitting as close to the corner of her seat as she could without actually falling off it.

  He dragged himself wearily back into the here and now and a scant hour later found himself hemmed in a corner of the staff room, listening to morning briefing with a hand over his mouth, desperately trying to divert his beery breath downwards and away from his colleagues.

  “A big thank you to everyone who helped with the dance last night,” said Mr. Barnet, the Head. “Just a note to be careful if you are taking the children across to the church hall. Sister Bernadette thinks there might be a vomiting bug going around among the old people...” at this point he heard a violent exhalation of air from somewhere to his right “...so if any pupils start developing symptoms, get them straight home. Now, moving on to the Year Six mass next Sunday - Miss Gillespie, could you continue to work with the choir; Mr. Li, would you mind doing the programme; John, can you arrange to get the hymn books re-covered, they’re looking tattered? Oh, and Karen could you do the flowers again?” O’Driscoll considered this directive as he made his way to his classroom to teach Geography to 5R. He was surprised that, after the fiasco with the poster, he had been considered for a task that involved printing but, on reflection, it wasn’t too bad a job, and would involve him in the minimum of fuss on the day of the Year Six mass, one of the major events of the Spring term.

  Later in the staffroom, sipping tea that had come from the communal pot and that was so strong and dark it left rows of little tidemarks on the china of the cup, he listened idly to the gossip that was going on around him. Mrs. Goodwin, the woman who had gleefully informed O’Driscoll of his faux pas with the poster, was holding court and the topic being debated, a recent court case where a homosexual couple had been refused accommodation by the owner of a bed and breakfast, was one that she considered herself well-qualified to discuss on the basis of she and her husband having run such an establishment a generation ago.

  “Now don’t get me wrong, we’re very tolerant, me and my Reg,” she was saying. “Very tolerant, and at the end of the day, there’s a lot worse going on in the world, isn’t there? We always knew the ones of that persuasion who came to stay at The Willows, although of course they were a lot less flagrant about it than they are these days. I like that, I mean I can have a perfectly nice conversation with someone without having to think about what he’s got and where he’s going to stick it as soon as I’ve left the room. Take that nice quantity surveyor from Greenwich, he was at it hammer and tongs with whichever young man he’d brought with him, but you’d never have known it to talk to him.”

  There was a palpable air of unease in the room. “Who’s doing assembly this week?” asked someone, trying to change the subject, but Mrs. Goodwin was not to be deterred. “Yes, we would have been happy to have that sort at The Willows all the time. Very quiet and well-behaved they were as a rule, no drunkenness to speak of and, according to Reg, surprisingly clean. He said it was like a Turkish bath in some of their rooms the way th
ey were always showering and titivating themselves.” She paused to take a drink and her face took on a thoughtful expression. “Reg said they washed themselves to absolutely abnormal levels, it was as if ... you know ... they were trying to scrub off more than the dirt. He said there was probably some psychiatric reason behind it all, there usually is, isn’t there? No, the only thing Reg said you’d have had to look out for was their bedlinen, you’d have had to keep that separate and wash it under a hotter cycle, because of the different stains.”

  The silence which greeted these words was finally broken by a timorous voice saying, “Different stains?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Goodwin “Reg says it stands to reason there’d be different stains with the kind of things ...”

  “Who’s for a game of darts!” came a cry from the Science teacher and there was a sudden movement of bodies away from the soft chairs.

  “Yes, Reg says you can tell a lot about people from their bedding,” went on Mrs. Goodwin, sipping her drink reflectively as she surveyed her much-diminished audience. “He reckons if there was a T.V. programme - you know like that Through the Keyhole - only you had to guess who the famous person was from their soiled bedlinen, he’d make a fortune.” She paused to take another sip from her coffee and gently nibbled the corner of a custard cream. “You know what my Reg says?” she continued, fixing a birdlike eye on the teenage work experience girl who was sitting, transfixed, opposite her. ‘A fitted sheet tells no lies!’ that’s what he says.”

  Later, passing the Cozy Kleen Launderette, O’Driscoll recalled Reg’s syllogism and wondered whether the leadership of the church had thought of incorporating it into Catholic dogma. Perhaps some conclave of portly Italian theologians might even now be applying it retrospectively to the Shroud of Turin. His train of thought was, fortunately, terminated by his arrival at The North Star, where he had arranged to meet Duffy and Micky Quinn for a pint and by the time he joined them, the other two were already seated, Duffy’s neat, well-groomed appearance a contrast to the lumpy dishevelment of Quinn.

  To say that Michael Aloysius Quinn left a lasting impression on those meeting him for the first time would be to make something of an understatement. It was as if an ancient Gaelic warrior had been forced out of his animal skins and into a suit of modern clothes and then been hurled unceremoniously and with no respect for his dignity or his enormous girth into the 1990s. A belligerent freckled face sat atop the incongruously-suited body and above rested a dense carpet of matted red hair which had over the years resisted all attempts at cultivation and from which, or so his friends claimed, movements of a suspicious nature sometimes emanated. Below, Quinn’s great paunch fought a running battle with his waistband while the habit he had of hitching his trousers up when deep in thought meant that wedges of stray shirt were forever struggling to escape the confines of his belt.

  The three had known each other since childhood, having attended one of those London Catholic schools where red hair and freckles were the norm rather than the exception and where morning registration plodded through the alphabet in a desultory fashion until with the arrival of the letter “O” it suddenly swept into a gallop of O’Boyles, O’Carrolls, O’Connors, and O’Donnells. Each class contained a makeweight quantity of English children and there would be the odd Pole, and an exotic smattering of De Souza’s and Fernandez’s whose precise lineage was unclear, but the bulk of the population was comprised of children of Irish descent.

  Although these hybrid creatures adopted the glottal tones of London and used the present perfect tense when speaking of their fights and their trips to watch Arsenal and Chelsea, they knew they were different, a breed apart, and many of them began to identify with the country of their ancestors, especially as they grew older and more aware of the troubled history between the two nations. That they were not Anglo-Saxon they knew, but on visits to the mother country, the reaction to their accents, ranging from “Plastic Paddy” at the friendlier end of the spectrum, to “English Wanker” at the other, left them in no doubt that they were not truly Irish either.

  Over the first pint, Duffy and O’Driscoll filled Micky in on the events of the previous evening. “Jesus,” said Quinn when he heard about the surprise package that had ended up in Sister Bernadette’s bag. “I wonder if she noticed when she picked it up or did she end up carrying it all the way back to the convent?”

  “Surely she’d have noticed,” said Duffy. “I mean, it would’ve been lapping over the sides.”

  “On the other hand it might’ve dried,” mused Micky, “which would’ve made things a bit more complicated when the poor woman got home and got the books out to mark them. They’d have looked like they were written in Braille.”

  “Anyway, enough of all that,” said Duffy, dismissing Sister Bernadette and her troubles from his mind. “What was that big dance the old biddies were doing last night?”

  “It sounds like one of those celidh things,” answered Quinn, who had spent his childhood among the clubs of Kilburn and Cricklewood. “I heard my old dear talking about it, there’s like this great big square with hundreds of old grannies moving around like ants. I can’t remember what it’s called, The Siege of something.” As he spoke, his brow furrowed in thought and his hand worked away at some disarrangement inside his trousers, causing his left knee to gyrate alarmingly. A moment later, his face cleared and he banged the table, causing beer to slop from the glasses. “Venice! That’s it. The Siege of Venice.”

  “Where?” asked Duffy.

  “Venice.”

  “Venice? It’s not The Siege of Venice you eejit, it’s Ennis.”

  “Ennis?”

  “Yes, Ennis. It’s in County Clare!”

  “Are you sure? I’d swear it was Venice.”

  “You ignorant great tub of lard” said Duffy. “What on earth would the old biddies who do that dance have to do with Venice?” He went into a shrill falsetto. “Morning, Mrs. Maguire, I’m just off down into Venice to buy a bag of potatoes, there’s a grand little Spar in the Piazza San Marco. Jesus Christ,” he went on, reverting to his normal voice, “I’m surrounded by idiots.”

  Micky hitched up his trousers defensively. “I was sure it was Venice.”

  “It’s Ennis,” said Duffy, who was now warming to his theme. “I spent a fortnight there every summer when I was a kid. What a place!”

  Quinn shrugged. “Anyway, Ennis, Venice, what’s the difference?”

  “I’ll tell you what the difference is,” said Duffy, whose holiday experience clearly still rankled. “Most of Venice is underwater and most of Ennis bloody well should be!”

  His friends exchanged glances and Quinn replied, “Thank you, Judith Chalmers. I’m surprised the Irish Tourist Board hasn’t snapped you up. You’re a walking advertisement for the old country. Anyway, apart from the Siege of... wherever it was, did anything else happen last night?”

  “Well, I’m afraid our friend here missed another opportunity,” said Duffy. “Instead of laying siege to Karen Black, he spent the whole night swooning in the arms of Mrs. O’Higgins.”

  “Jesus Christ, O’Driscoll, are you a man or a mouse?” asked Quinn. “It’s obvious you fancy the arse off her so when are you going to get your act together and ask her out?”

  In truth, O’Driscoll’s infatuation was so debilitating that in Karen’s presence, he became speechless. He was aware that to most people she was no more than conventionally pretty, but to him the sum of her parts was overwhelming. She was small and graceful and dark and dimpled, her eyes were huge, her lips cherubic, her voice low and pleasant. She appeared to be without conceit of any kind, she listened with interest to whoever was talking, even Mrs. Goodwin, and when she smiled she revealed a set of perfect teeth. O’Driscoll loved her to distraction but was aware that the strength of his feelings was an impediment to developing things further. If he literally couldn’t speak when sh
e was in the same room, engaging in the kind of witty, sexy banter likely to make her notice him wasn’t really an option, and it was only in his daydreams that he was able to function with the charm and style that was so lacking in his real-life interactions.

  “If you don’t get a shift on, John, she’s going to fall for me,” said Duffy. “A girl can only fight so hard.”

  O’Driscoll ruefully conceded the truth in this for Duffy accomplished his conquests with the kind of grace and charm that he could only dream about. He had few illusions, therefore, that in the normal course of events, Karen would sooner or later fall prey to Duffy’s charms and although the prospect was terrifying, he could see no way of avoiding it unless some kind of miracle occurred. His only hope lay in meeting Karen in a social situation where his alcohol intake had reached the stage of easy uninhibited wit, but not the point where it had begun the descent into incoherence, but as piss artists the world over know well, this is a finely calibrated line and one that can be all too easily crossed.

  “She’d have more sense than to go anywhere near a big ugly fuck like you, Duffy,” he said. “She’s a woman of taste and sophistication.”

  “She certainly is,” said Duffy.” I heard someone say the other day that she’s really into literature. You could tell her about that nativity play you produced last year, John, you know the one where the shepherds ended up fighting the sheep and the three wise men didn’t have the brains to find their way onto the stage? That might impress her.”

  Later, half-asleep and three-quarters drunk as the bus trundled homewards along the Uxbridge Road, O’Driscoll recalled the remark and the interior of the 207 gradually morphed into a 1950s version of the Orient Express, belching a cloud of smoke into the night sky as it moved slowly eastwards into the mysterious Balkans. Ian O’Driscoll, the famous writer of spy novels, sat deep in thought in one of the train’s sleeper compartments and as he considered the new scene in his latest book, he knew that it was essential he got it just right because beautiful, delectable femme fatale Karen Black would be reading it and if she liked it, the seduction that he had had in mind for some time might move a step closer.