Heaps of Trouble (11 page)

‘Bull's eye, bull's eye.' Our euphoria at having brought a Dublin bus to a halt quickly turned to dismay when the potentially dire consequences of the incident finally sank in: what if the rocket had ploughed into one of the women? We decided there and then to scrap any further assaults on buses. Since neither of us wanted to have anything more to do with the remaining rockets, we went down the laneway and slung them into the river, before heading off for our usual Saturday night treat, a bag of chips.

Knowing the father, he must have had a sneaky suspicion as to the identity of the gurriers throwing rockets around like confetti, for he insisted to the mother that I spend the Easter holidays in Tramore with the grandmother. The weather was appalling that fortnight, and this was probably the only reason I discovered the scam she was up to. To make matters worse, not only did my father know about it, but it was taking place with his explicit instruction.

It was pension collection day and the rain and wind pounded against the side of the caravan with such force that you wouldn't leave a dog out. So the grandmother sent me to the post office instead, to collect her money. She wrapped the pension books in a plastic bag along with a note for the postmaster, and gave me strict instructions not to open my mouth if asked any questions. On my way home curiosity took over and I decided to have a peek inside the bag. Instead of the two pension books I was expecting to see (I knew that she was also claiming a war entitlement from the British government), there were four. Apparently when old Claus had passed away the father had neglected to inform the Irish government of this fact; the death certificate had been issued from his own dispensary. Bemused by the grandmother's antics for the past number of years, I decided that my best course of action was to keep my mouth firmly clamped shut.

When I returned to school for the summer term I made a concerted effort to learn to spell properly. This I endeavoured to do by memorising the spelling of as many words as possible and completely ignoring the way in which we had been taught to break words down, syllable by syllable. So that by the end of the term I could remember the correct spelling of a lot of big words, but still completely messed up the smaller ones, often reversing some, or all, of the letters. But my renewed efforts appeared to satisfy my English teacher and, as I was quite proficient in most of the other subjects (except Irish), I came first in the class that year, beating off my archrival Charley.

Apparently I had pipped first (in spite of my bad spelling) with the English essay I had written for the exam. My impressed teacher told the whole class that my essay was the product of ‘a brilliant imagination showing a mind prepared to explore the improbable'. Then he made me read the story out to them all: it was the sad tale of an old woman living on her own in a caravan, battling against the elements, while ripping off two governments by claiming subsidies for a long-dead husband.

*

One of my greatest wishes at that time was to be the proud owner of a push-bike. Any old push-bike, as long as it had two wheels, handlebars and a saddle. Earlier that year I had suggested to the mother that I might get a bike to ride to school. The idea was met with such a stern ‘over my dead body' that even the father had reservations about ever bringing the subject up again. When he had mentioned it once before, the mother had asked him, ‘Are you cracked or what? Him riding to school on a bike through the streets of Dublin? In God's name, are you trying to drive me mad?'

That summer passed quickly, with Naty and I experimenting in his basement at weekends with a new-fangled substance called sodium chlorate, which he had acquired from a chemist in town. Mixed with sugar, it burned fiercely like a fuse. We were also messing about with gunpowder: well, not exactly gunpowder, but its three main ingredients, for we were still trying to get the percentages right in the mix. All of our experiments to date had yielded nothing but a thick, black smoke cloud that had filled his house and driven his mother to bed.

I was now in fourth class with Mr Gleeson as our new teacher. As far as I was concerned, this moody, bad-tempered young tyrant brought a new reign of terror. He really did nothing out of the ordinary to instil such fear in me, but he certainly succeeded in petrifying me daily. With hindsight I can understand what triggered these feelings – my state of mind never really improved over the years, but luckily my reaction to a given situation did change. Back then I was a kid living in a constant state of dread, and that dread stemmed from the home front, where I constantly expected an eruption of bad temper, either between my parents or directed at me. So, when everything was running smoothly, I worried about when it would revert to a situation of anger and accusation; and when the situation
did
revert to anger, I worried about what had been the cause.

And so every morning I sat in Mr Gleeson's class worrying (just like the rest of my classmates, no doubt) about the mood he would be in when he arrived. As I heard his footsteps advancing up the stairs, getting nearer and nearer, acid began to churn my stomach, travelling up into my gullet, souring my mouth and causing my breath to come in short gasps. If he arrived in a good mood, well, I just sat there all day petrified, wondering when he was going to throw a tantrum. Or if he arrived in a bad mood, dismay descended over the entire class – and doubled the acid being produced inside my own body. With my manifestation uncomfortably increasing in frequency over the first few months of the new term, I came up with a very simple solution. I wouldn't go to school. I would get off the bus in Harcourt Street and, instead of just walking past Stephen's Green, I went inside through the corner gate, hid my bag in a well-matured bush, and spent the morning walking along Grafton Street, visiting various shops.

I became a master at ‘mitching' from school and quickly learnt the art of not getting caught. Any kid roaming the streets of Dublin with a school bag during school hours ran the risk of being approached by a garda and asked why he or she wasn't in school. But if you didn't have a bag on your person, well, the odds were in your favour that he would assume you were there with your parents' consent. Spotting priests and teachers from the school before they saw me was a more difficult task, and very quickly I learned to keep away from the main shopping streets near the Green, Dame Street or O'Connell Street. This tended to drive me into districts like North Wall and Ringsend, where some of the other kids I met ‘on the mitch' definitely would not have passed my mother's questions with regard to their parents' origins or occupations.

I scraped by in this fashion for a time without getting caught and celebrated my tenth birthday with a gang of dockers down by the East Wall. The only handicap was the amount of time I had to spend in confession every Saturday, confessing the long list of lies I had told everybody that week; especially my mother, who would ask why didn't I have any homework for the night.

I finally returned to school in January, with the feeling that I was turning over a new leaf, and made a concerted effort to curtail my fear of the teacher. This was especially important as I was to make my confirmation that year, and the emphasis was on pounding a thicker version of the catechism into us. It didn't go too badly, because I had developed a retentive memory and could recite the lot from cover to cover without any problem. However, sometime during February, my old fears returned with a vengeance; and this time I quit going to school altogether – or at least that was my first intention.

I spent the first week freezing to death in the Phoenix Park; it was so cold I couldn't feel my hands. On my first day in the park I stayed in a public toilet that had large radiators supplied by 2-inch pipes running around the interior walls. I sat on the floor alongside one of the pipes, with my hands turning blue, and every few minutes I placed them on the pipes in the hope they would eventually heat up – which of course they never did. On one of my trips outside I was jumping up and down, trying to get the circulation back into my body, when I was spotted by a gardener. As soon as he saw me he blew his whistle and roared, ‘Come back here, you little horror, you should be in bleeding school.' I bolted with him giving chase, still blowing his whistle to attract other groundsmen, but I quickly lost him in a large grove of trees.

That weekend, on the Saturday, the father brought me up to the dispensary. Unlocking the door into the building, he astonished me by saying, ‘Well Em, remember that day that we all went up the Dublin mountains and we came across the strange clearing in the middle of the forest, what did I tell you?'

‘You told Catherine and me that it was a place where all of the fairies of Ireland meet.' Feeling proud that I had remembered.

‘And what else did I tell you?'

Not having a clue as to where this was heading I continued, ‘You told us a story of going somewhere similar with your father when you were a kid.'

‘That's right,' he said. ‘When I made my wish, I wished for a fob watch and within six months I received one as a present from an uncle that I didn't even know existed – and I bet that day you wished for a bike?'

Looking at my drooping jaw and smiling, he opened the door into his office and, lo and behold, there stood a massive old black bike. Apparently, exactly one year earlier, he had found that particular bike in the yard of the dispensary, and when he had reported it to the police they had come to collect it. The father thought that would be the last he would ever see of it. But when nobody had reclaimed it from the Garda station after the required holding period of a year and a day, they had returned the bike to him, on the Friday, announcing that it was now his property. Overjoyed at the beautiful monster he was handing over to me, I broke down crying and told him about not having gone to school for the past week. When he asked me why, I could not find the right words to convey the reason, except just to say, ‘I hate school.'

He sat me down and explained that we all have to do things we dislike and described how he hated going to work in the mornings and wished he didn't have to. So, telling me to ‘act like a man', he said that he would give me a letter for the teacher explaining that I had been sick for the week. Returning to the matter of the bike, he said I could have it as long as I went to school, but we would have to hide it from the mother – and I wasn't to go and kill myself with it. Then he gave me a spare key for the dispensary, telling me to store the bike in the main waiting area; as the place was not open until ten in the mornings he thought no one would be the wiser. The following Monday I couldn't wait to get up and head off to school. With a nod of thanks to the father, I rushed out the door with his letter of excuse in my bag and took the beast out for our maiden voyage.

Cycling along the South Circular Road, I was completely oblivious to the cold that froze my hands to the handlebars, my eyes streaming in the icy wind, and my jacket flapping in the breeze. I felt a freedom and joy that I had seldom experienced before, which quickly turned to exhilaration. I soon learned how to duck and weave my way in, out and between the cars and buses of the traffic at the top of Harcourt Street, now beginning to slow down with the onset of the morning traffic jams.

For the next few weeks school became a temporary interruption to the feelings of anticipation that were with me constantly. During the night I looked forward to the morrow when I took to the roads again with the monstrosity. At school I awaited the bell announcing my freedom to once again learn new techniques for battling through the traffic. But the state of euphoria didn't last forever and slowly my consternation at having to face Gleeson every day returned and overrode the joy of cycling to his class. Until one day I realised that I could have the best of both worlds; I could simply ride the bike every day and just leave out the middle bit at school. Now I ventured further afield with the bike and explored places that I had previously only heard about. Especially the posh areas where most of my classmates came from; now I was able to judge firsthand if those areas merited the amount of boasting that went with their addresses.

I kept this up for about two weeks with no clear view of how it was all going to end, only knowing that at least I felt a lot happier out and about on the bike. I didn't have to contend with the sickly acid feeling that I suffered constantly at school. But I also realised that, with every day I didn't go to school, I was getting deeper and deeper into a hole that I would not be able to climb out of. And then the inevitable happened.

One afternoon when I was pedalling down Rathmines Road I spotted Gleeson, who must have been taking an afternoon off himself. Certain that he hadn't seen me, I ducked down a side road, out of sight, but of course the sharp-eyed bugger had observed my exit. Gleeson put two and two together, what with me not at school and then seeing me on the bike, and he wrote to the mother that same afternoon. When she received his correspondence she went straight over to the father's office and rang Gleeson on the school phone. Somewhere in the letter he had also mentioned the word ‘bike'.

When I arrived home that evening, the parents, without saying anything else, told me to get into the car and we headed off towards town. With mounting fear, I realised our destination was CUS and slumped in the back seat. I recognised that this time there was to be no escape. I felt like a condemned man mounting the gallows as I was led into the now empty school, up the stairs, and into my classroom, where they had agreed to meet. Sitting with his arse hanging over one of the desks was Gleeson, smiling and nodding at the parents as if he was the best-humoured person in all the world. Standing with my back against the blackboard I felt relieved that finally it was all over, yet at the same time concerned at the possible repercussions. With the three of them now sitting on desktops, Gleeson proceeded to display a softness of character that I had never seen before.