Brian Culley was almost six. His late start was due to a bout of polio which had left him with a curvature of the spine. He could walk now, but badly; he had to wear iron frames the length of his legs. Caterpillars, he called them, when we gathered round during our lunch break in the small yard behind the school, mixing up the actual word, callipers, with the crawling yellow insects that we liked to collect because they made girls cry if used in certain unexpected ways. He showed us how the bars were held in place, and told us what his mother had told him, that if he didn’t wear them he’d be a hunchback by the time he made his Holy Communion. We all thought that would look great in the photographs, but we didn’t say it because we didn’t really know Brian yet. Even with his stoop, he was the tallest in the class by a good six inches, and because of his bout of illness had been fed to excess, so he was easily the heaviest of us too. And just because he couldn’t walk right didn’t mean that he couldn’t fight.
A fortnight in and the days were already being lost in a stupor. Miss Moynihan, our teacher, was a slight, shrill woman, pushing fifty and going nowhere. She dyed her hair a shade of brown that looked far too rich to be real, and she wore it in a bouffant style that didn’t suit her sharp, angular features at all. It was Brian who christened her with the fitting nickname of Bull’s Eye, and we all snickered at that and whispered it among ourselves. Her eyes were the immediate point of focus on her face, great dark hyper-thyroid bulges that fixed on you while her constantly quivering mouth churned out chill ribbons of criticism. ‘I’m so disappointed in you, Billy,’ she’d say, and we were supposed to hang our heads at that and act contrite, act disappointed in ourselves. Brian though, would just stare back, and sometimes, just for fun, he’d turn his own eyes ever so slightly. Miss Moynihan wouldn’t know what to do with him then, so she’d make him go and sit in the corner. The rest of us she made stand, but Brian’s mother insisted that because of the leg braces, standing wasn’t recommended for long periods. It could cause him irreparable damage, apparently.
‘Take your seat and move to the corner, Brian,’ Miss Moynihan would squeal, and Brian would sigh and make a drama of rising and dragging his chair across the floor, purposely crashing into desk after desk just to make us laugh. The corner was no hardship to him; actually, it was a break from lessons.
I quickly discovered that there was a stifling tedium to school. Apart from the fifteen minutes or so of fun that we’d have at playtime, the day was spent just sitting, copying down the first few letters of the alphabet from the blackboard into our workbooks. Or learning our tables. One and one is two; two and one is three; on and on. Two weeks to a four-year-old on the cusp of five feels like an eternity. Everyone felt the same, but we had Brian.
Because he was older than us he was better at almost everything. He could already write his name, and he could count to sixty in English and twenty in Irish. Because of this, school must have been even more boring to him, and he used every opportunity to cause a disruption. Miss Moynihan was uncertain how best to deal with him. We were far easier to punish; she could slap us or make us stand outside the door. But she quickly learned that it wasn’t wise to slap Brian. The one time she tried it, just a mild crack across the hands with her own, his face crumpled so completely and the sobs were so wrenching that he actually caused her to flee the classroom. We had been sure that he was just pretending, the sight of him wailing, his eyes clenched shut and the slits almost lost in the heavy folds of his face, his mouth stretched wide and his tongue lolling free on bleating waves. But after the teacher had left the room he kept on, a full ten minutes until finally she returned and pressed some sweets into his hand and told him to take them into the corner and to please be quiet. Even then, he quieted only gradually, and while we worked at our sums we could hear him sucking noisily on a Peggy’s Leg and still occasionally shuddering with tears. Miss Moynihan never hit him again, though she kept on hitting us even when we tried to react as he had done.
The day I remember best stretches back to that time. Brian had the desk next to me. All day long he’d draw covert stick pictures of the teacher or of other people in the village, like Fr Lucey, the parish priest, or Joan Kelly’s grandmother who had a great strawberry birthmark smeared across her face. I’d never know who he was drawing; my job was to guess.
‘That’s oul’ Bull’s Eye, boy. Sittin’ on the ponny.’ Nobody used the ponny any more; a lot was changing in the country, and backyard toilets were just about a thing of the past, but there was something about the word, especially when put in conjunction with teachers, something so undignified, that it was an essential feature of any of Brian’s matchstick masterworks.
I’d study the picture again armed with this new information, and if the teacher happened to be writing on the blackboard I’d risk a snicker behind a shielding hand.
Brian was the only child in the class with a schoolbag, a small brown patent leather satchel that rarely held more than a jam sandwich, a pencil, and his workbook. The rest of us carried our workbook under our arms. Our pencils we tucked up on our ears, the way some of our fathers did with their cigarettes if they were down to their last one. We admired Brian’s schoolbag, and we knew that he was proud of it.
This particular morning, when he raised the bag from the floor and flashed a quick grin in my direction, I simply thought that he was about to unveil his latest masterpiece, a scribble of Miss Moynihan hanging by the neck from a tree, or something equally tasteful. But the bag this morning carried a more notable weight.
It was mid September, but summer still had a strong hold. A blaze of yellow sunlight streamed through the windows and lit the classroom more brightly than ever before. It was warm too, even Miss Moynihan was wearing only a long dark skirt and a high-necked apple-green blouse instead of her usual layers of cardigans and woollen sweaters.
‘Hey, Bill,’ Brian hissed, loud enough, I was sure, for everyone in the room to hear. ‘Guess what I have in the bag.’
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘A picture?’
His smile was wide and there was a wicked set to his clenched teeth. ‘Not even close, boy.’
I watched his small fat hands fumble with the leather strap and brass buckle. The knuckles were little puncture holes in the flesh. Soon, everyone was watching, everyone except the teacher. He shared the wicked grin around, then pushed a hand inside the bag, held it there for a moment so as to heighten the suspense, and withdrew a huge dead rat.
Somebody screamed, and then everybody did. It was like an offer of freedom, and we screamed for all we were worth. All of us, even Brian. Brian tossed the dead rat into the air and it bounced off a desk closer to the front before its weight brought it to the floor. Miss Moynihan turned from the blackboard and looked terrified without quite knowing why. Then she saw the rat and scrambled up onto a chair. Her weight set the chair to tottering and after a moment when I was sure it would find its balance it went over, spilling her badly. The rat had landed as though crouched and readying itself to attack. Miss Moynihan lay on the floor some three or four feet from it, and she screamed, her bulging eyes huge in her pale face.
Brian sprung from his place, grabbed the rat by the tail and began to swing it over his head. Somewhere behind him, the door was thrown open as the other teachers hurried to see what all the commotion was about. When they saw Brian spinning the rat they stopped short. We watched as he swung and swung, the rat a blur of grey fur above his head. Then, suddenly, the tail broke off and the body of the rat smashed into the wall with a sickening crunch. It slipped a bloody trail to the floor and lay in a mangled heap at the skirting board.
None of the teachers knew that Brian had brought the rat to school; they all assumed that he had simply picked it up and killed it. He was the last of us to work that out, but he did in the space of a few seconds. ‘It was a rat,’ he said needlessly, the words squeezing out between great wet heaves of breath. ‘I just saw it there and I killed it.’
Mr Hennes
sy, the teacher of the class next door, moved across the room, stooped to study the dead rat, then rose and helped Miss Moynihan to her feet. She was crying, gagging on her own tears. ‘Now take it easy, Loretta,’ he said, in a voice that didn’t know how to get below strict. ‘It’s all right. Young Brian there saved the day ...’
For a while, Brian and I were friends. More than that, even; we were inseparable. He was so mischievous, and I couldn’t help but look up to him. But as the years passed and we moved up through the ranks of school, different paths led us in different directions. Drifting apart didn’t happen overnight, but was a gradual thing. New friends came and old ones went. By Confirmation age, we were little more than nodding acquaintances, running in different circles, our lives full of different priorities.
Sometimes, though, we will cross paths in one or another of the village pubs. The age gap that was so alluring then means nothing at all now; middle age loses all such subtleties. And when we do meet, we put our respective lives on hold for half an hour or so and share our memories over a pint, laughing at things that weren’t all that funny at the time but which have lost their pain thanks to the passing of years. We’ll chat and laugh, calling to mind stories and faces long since past, and on the best nights a glimmer of our childhood friendship will spark to life again.
War Song
Thirty-five years, and even now, some things feel as close as yesterday. For instance, all it takes to relive the day that I probably should have died is for me to close my eyes and let it in again. Clenching them shut, because the darkness beyond is the link, bringing me back to the place where bad things lurk.
That day, that ugly early morning, eyes clenched against the war, and all the world is darkness. There is pain, but mostly there is the fear. An all-pervasive thing, and smothering. The mud slick against my face, the spears of rain pummelling. Noise made up of differing levels: the faraway rumble of thunder or falling mortars; the whine and fizz of bullets and sometimes their dull thud as they find their target; the jerk of a shocked breath torn free. And then, after a wet flapping draw of air, the screams. My own screams too, thin and distant sounding but mine because they taste like mine. Voices of others, like Pete Sanchez calling for a medic, Jimmy Testeverde crying Jesus in blood bubbles over and over, his mouth torn to shreds. Above, Dave Gelman telling me to just take it easy, to lie back for the sake of all that’s good and holy, it’s over, going home time.
And the bullet, big as the world and hot as hell somewhere in my stomach. Gelman’s Texan drawl: Got yourself a ticket wound, Scruggs. A Purple Heart and a magic ticket home. Thank the Lord for this sweet gook bullet, kid. Out of here, and don’t you be coming back now. Got that?
The mud has the taste of foreign places. The way the roasted air of Egypt tastes of spice, the grey mud of Vietnam clots every inch of exposed flesh and is drawn deep by the tongue’s nervous, darting stroke and swallowed, coating the mouth and throat like rotting olive oil, tasting of sourness and steel, the nutrients of the soil or all the poisons that have been dropped with the intention only to kill, to do anything that has to be done to win, at any cost. It is a taste that exists in smell and even in touch, a thing to batter senses, heightened and desperate enough to smother even the contesting stench of my own burning flesh.
I try to sit up, just suddenly to see that I still can, but Davie Gelman is there, and pushing me back down again and again, that big hand hard against my shoulder, that black face shining like an eclipse against the day. ‘JUST CHILL, SCRUGGS!’ Roaring to be heard as a dust-off drowns out the world, all the words and the lash and lash of the rain percussive in the mangroves and the buzz and distant crack of enemy fire arriving and volleyed back, the speed of sound perverting everything, bullets past before singing out their take-off. I try to sit up because I am afraid. It feels as though I have just one leg.
Then I am down again, back down in the mud, made so this time not by an endless push but by Gelman’s big right hand shaping a fist and then driven hard into my face. Now along with the mud I can taste the warm and sickly seep of my own blood sluicing through my teeth, filling the pocket of my sinus. But still what I mostly taste is the mud.
‘HAD TO DO IT, SCRUGGS!’ Gelman is saying, beneath the shuffle of the rotors. Shuffling like the MG’s, the guys back in Rear Echelon like to say, grasping for the coolness to cloak their feeling of inadequacy. Wonder when Booker T’s gonna get here? And to the helicopter pilots: What did you guys have for lunch, huh? Green Onions? And that bastard Gelman thinks HAD TO DO IT, SCRUGGS is going to be good enough! When I get up I’ll kick that bastard’s black ass a new hole, don’t give a shit how big he thinks he is.
Spearing me in the good leg then, and looking down I can see the syrette in my thigh like a child’s dart, jogging with the twitch of muscle gone spastic, but I can’t see the morphine or even feel it. I have seen guys getting pinned with those little syrette things before and often wondered what it would be like to get the morphine myself, and now finally my turn comes and that bastard Gelman sticks me with a dud. Just wait till I can get up to that low-down son of a bitch. Medic, my ass! When I get a hold of him he’ll wish to God his mammy never met his daddy. Bastard!
The rotors slow in a way that I have never heard before, and for a moment I am actually afraid for them, afraid that they have been taken down by enemy fire and are about to blow, but then voices of the men begin to catch the strangeness too, words elongate with the same demented frustration as running underwater and the day’s colours seem to dim, and I think, this is it, this is the morphine, and I might have been wrong about Gelman after all, because Gelman’s a hell of a good guy really and that’s the God’s honest truth.
There is the idea too, just some faraway logic, that maybe this is the other it, the dying it. Maybe this is what it’s like when you’re dying, your eyes playing tricks and the stinking taste of mud in your throat.
I hold with that idea though only until I feel that bastard Gelman’s hand inside my stomach, his big thin fingers searching for the bullet probably, because that’s all that can be in there since even my corned beef hash lunch had decided to pull out for the safety of the foxhole floor, and I try to tell myself that I’m not that close to the end, not yet anyway, can’t be. I’m not ready yet to die. All of this is just a mistake.
This must be as bad as it ever gets. I can feel the spreading coldness and I know that I have been ripped apart. Without having to look, without having to relive the moment of impact in my mind. I know it, and I know it is bad. So standing on the brink, what else is there that is left to fear? Nothing surely, because the worst has already happened.
Well, there is death, but pain is the opposite of death, right? And surely all of this hurts too much. But maybe we’ve all got it wrong; it might be that death is a thing of endless suffering, an eternity of tasting mud and the ceaseless rain beating you into the ground and taking your watered-down blood in rivulets down into the earth to make sure that even when you leave this place you can never really leave as long as a part of you remains.
Just thank sweet Jesus that Gelman’s fingers are thin.
I hope you washed your hands, Davie, I want to say, just as a joke, but my mouth and throat are busy screaming and there is no room for words. I am not really screaming because of the pain – though it seems to be driving free from every pore – but because shot men scream, and men with other men’s fingers in their stomachs do nothing else but scream and scream until they die.
After that is mostly in and out, nothing real, nothing imagined, the drugs perhaps or maybe me just veering close to the death I no longer suddenly fear quite so much. I can feel it coming sometimes like the tide, the wash of the ocean approaching and rolling back, approaching and rolling back, but approaching an indecipherable step closer every time and rolling back just a little less. And then it is so close that it floods over my face, smothering. Death tastes just like mud. When it ebbs again I gasp for air, choking because the air is water too, wa
ter and mud.
I am moving and what else is there to do but look up as men take me by the arms and legs. Ebbons at my right arm, glancing down at me from time to time and smiling and saying something that I don’t hear but something that I just know must be funny because Ebbons is the funniest guy you’ll ever meet and because if it makes that fucking madman smile then it must be funny. Quincy has my left arm, though he doesn’t look down at me at all because, can you believe this, even after five months In Country, the son of a bitch is squeamish. Can’t stand the sight of blood. If Quincy’s not looking down at me, then it’s a safe bet that I’m bleeding pretty bad. And, you know, in a way maybe that’s not such a terrible thing, because knowing I am bleeding makes me realise, on some level anyway, that this game can still go either way, and that if I really want to get through this then I’ll have to pull damn hard.
Except, I can’t pull any more. Suddenly, I am so tired. All the months of marching, all the nights too wired to sleep, are dragging now at my bones. Sleep is calling me, and nothing else seems to matter very much.
Faces lose their identity and become shadows, pale in the light and heavier when the light wanes, and the numb, featureless sky is a falling whiteness, wanting ground only. The men carry me along, and I can feel my body drooping between them like the hang of a hammock, can feel myself swaying softly as they wade and stumble through the milky water and over the muddy ridges of the paddy field.
Against the pleading call of sleep, the pain seems less, and I know that this must be the morphine, and above the silhouettes of my comrades the sky is nothing but that falling whiteness, full of the spears of rain. And then through the slosh and suck of fallen steps there is the whiplash echo of the rotors, the perfect 2/4 time tucka-TUCKA tucka-TUCKA rhythm of the blades, and when their edges stray into the whiteness, they are like a band-saw, a shadowy arc made hypnotic with illusive speed.
In Exile Page 15
