Heaps of Trouble (17 page)

More staring into space, as the mother had given an edict that on
no
account
was the telly to be turned on, since it would be seen as the height of bad manners. A pity she hadn't consulted with her two sisters.

‘Wheeen are we goooing to visssit Catherinnne's gravvvve, Robeeert?'

‘What, what?'

‘Tomorrow after lunch.' The father didn't bother to translate for the mother.

‘What, what?'

To keep the peace, I now began to interpret and relayed messages until, inevitably, the mother turned to her sisters and requested that they sing that famous Australian song,
Waltzing Matilda
.

‘Oh no, not again,' I thought, as I watched the father excuse himself and make a beeline across the street, oblivious to oncoming traffic. As if on queue, the two sisters sang all one hundred verses of that damn song. If I never, for the rest of my days, hear another rendition of that song it will be too soon.

The whole of the mother's ‘tribe', as the father referred to them, descended on our house for the farewell party. With one last rendition of
Waltzing Matilda
, with which the whole family joined in (by now they had all learned it off by heart), they were waved off from Dublin airport with much wailing and tears.

‘Ah Jesus, we will never see them again.'

‘Bejesus, it might have been better if they had never come.'

‘It's like they were dead, found, and now dead again.'

‘The poor crators, flying halfway around the world to their certain deaths.'

‘Jesus, Matty, you shouldn't have left them go.'

‘What do you mean, you rotten bastard, you're the eldest, you should have stopped them.'

And so it went on back at our house until the early hours of the morning. To date the two nuns have been back over six times and I do believe that another visit is imminent.

*

I could never be described as a light sleeper; instead, my pattern of rest has been described as ‘not sleeping, but taking a short course in death'. The rows at home began again, but this time with a difference. They were now starting up in the early hours of the morning. I would be brought rudely awake to the sound of my door crashing open, the light switched on, and I would then be hauled unceremoniously out of bed. After nursing geriatrics at St James Hospital the mother had become quite adept at getting seemingly helpless people out of bed. She pulled back the covers, grabbed my feet, pivoted them over the edge of the bed, and, in one fluid movement, pushed down on my legs while hauling me up by the arms. The result was always the same: suddenly I was wide-awake, standing upright in the middle of my room, totally disorientated, while she screamed at me, ‘Listen to what your father is saying to me.'

This mystified me, as the father would be nowhere in sight; but, dragging me by the hands, she would haul me out into the hall where she would continue shouting at their closed bedroom door.

‘Come out here and tell your son on what you just said, you bastard.'

I would then be led into their room where the father would be standing over in the corner, in his striped pyjamas, seething with barely controlled temper. His face contorted and his whole body trembling as if under tremendous physical restraint like a coiled spring ready to snap back.

At the time I could not understand the problem, but as I got older I came to realise why the mother dragged me out of bed in the early hours of the morning. It was her only protection against the father's sexual advances, as he wanted them to try and have another daughter to replace Catherine. However at that time I was totally ignorant of the situation and my only thought was, why am I standing here, freezing in the middle of a room, listening to yet another row? Now I had another horror to contend with as I lay in bed, the room in darkness, listening to the traffic and the voices of pedestrians passing outside. The smell of burned flesh and hair I had begun to accept as a part of my life, along with the physical reminder of the scars that I bore. A reminder that the bed I slept in had also been Catherine's. Only now, to add to this, I dreaded the fact that I might close my eyes to try and get some sort of rest – and then, bang, suddenly finding myself standing in my room, right smack in the middle of a row.

Eventually I learned to tell by the sound of their steps on the stairs and the level of communication between them if the night would bring restful slumber or aggression. They were using me as a device to inflict pain on each other, and I was beginning to hate them. I plotted to escape from this environment and rebelled in every thought and deed against their wishes and instructions. To me, they had both lost their right to command me in any way.

I had just turned thirteen when, arriving home from school one evening, I found the father standing in the middle of the kitchen. He told me that my mother had been admitted into a nursing home in Dun Laoghaire and that he was closing the shop for good. Apparently the date of the court case had been fixed for the coming week, but that morning they had received a letter from our solicitors stating that it had been delayed until further notice.

I didn't know whether to feel elation or disappointment. Elation, because with the mother gone there would at least be tranquil nights. Or disappointment that the court case had been delayed until God only knew when – and what would we do for Christmas, which was only a few weeks away? I settled on elation, concluding that at least peace would reign under our roof for a while. We had our Christmas dinner in St James hospital, in the staff canteen, along with all of the other people on duty that day.

The father was now able to drink at his own discretion and spent most of his evenings across in the Workingman's Club, so I learned to cook for myself.

Visits to the mother were regimented affairs, in which I stuck my head into the private room, said ‘hello', then departed as quickly as I could. That left the pair of them talking to each other about any new correspondence from our lawyers as if they were complete strangers who had just met for the first time and were discussing some mutual business deal.

I can't say that my schooling suffered, as the fear of being hauled up for the ‘usual six' kept me in line with my scholastic studies, but since I was alone for many an evening I often rushed quickly through my homework. On the weekends I met up with Naty, who was still experimenting with things that could go ‘bang' in the middle of the night. He had cracked the sodium chlorate and sugar mix, and so we spent many a Saturday evening preparing our explosive devices.

We used empty tablet tins with screw on lids that I acquired from the dispensary when nobody was looking. They proved to be excellent containers for our experiments and so, once again, Emmett Road reverberated to the sound of explosions that kept the local gardaí baffled for months. We would drill a hole just slightly larger than the width of a drinking straw in the top of the tin, pack the tin with about a pound of our lethal mixture, and then screw the lid back on. Filling an ordinary straw with the same combination, we'd poke it through the hole so that it acted as a fuse. Then we picked a quiet location somewhere along the street where we would be undisturbed and, after lighting the fuse (which took a good minute to burn down), we'd retreat to a safe distance and wait for the big bang.

We were trying to think of new and interesting testing grounds when we remembered the Workman's Club and the carnage that we had caused with the bangers in the toilets. What could we do with this new power that we now possessed? The new toilets at the club had a flat roof that was easy to climb onto. The sewerage pipes for the toilets were made of 4-inch ductile iron pipe, all surface-mounted, and they ran up, down, sideways, and every which way on the back walls of the building, resembling a plumber's nightmare. However there was one vent pipe, which stuck high in the air above the flat roof and, by standing on a bunch of empty beer crates, we could just about reach it.

Now we had a plan. One good charge thrown down the vent pipe, especially the iron pipes at the Club, would reverberate around the whole building without causing any damage, and we thought nobody would ever figure out what had happened, because it would detonate in the sewerage pipes.

We picked the following Saturday night when the place was packed to the rafters. The whole operation took us less than five minutes: we climbed up onto the roof and dropped our fizzling tin into the vent pipe, where it clattered its way down until it lodged in one of the main sewerage pipes that ran off at a right angle. Throwing the crates back off the roof into the Club's storage yard, we climbed back down again and, since we had doubled the length of the fuse, we had plenty of time to return to the safety of Naty's backyard before the device exploded.

It took longer than we had figured, but just when we had given up hope, thinking that the fuse must have gone out, off it went with a roar like an express train hammering through a narrow tunnel. Purely out of ignorance, we had not made any allowance for the fact that the vent pipe was full of methane gas. NASA would have been proud of the shot of flame that rocketed out from the top of the pipe and went a good 50 feet into the night sky, sounding like a thunderclap. Momentarily turning night into day and lighting up the whole area, as if the Workman's Club was trying to join in the race for space supremacy against the Russians and the United States. Delighted with our night's work, as we had caused a bit of noise and plenty of flame, we went off for our usual bag of chips.

The next morning the father, who had been enjoying himself in the Club when we dropped our charge down the pipe, warned me not to attempt anything as stupid as that again – if, as he suspected, we were responsible for the explosion. We weren't plumbers, so how were we to know that every single waste pipe inside the building was also connected to the 4-inch sewerage pipes? But we had been quite correct in our assessment that the place was packed. Apparently at the time of detonation it sounded to most of the clientele as if a 21A bus had hit the side of the building, head on. Others thought that the gas mains had gone up and ran into the toilets for protection – which, in hindsight, was a bad move on their part.

The thick-walled ductile iron pipes had contained the force of the explosion, but the energy created still had to go somewhere – and it did. It shot out of every waste pipe inside the building: toilet bowls, wash-hand basins and bar sinks. Forcing out, at great speed, any water or items lodged between the point of detonation and the escape route. Luckily nobody had been sitting on any of the toilet bowls at the time, as the force blew waste water, soggy toilet paper and lumps of shit all over the bathrooms, causing the toilet seats to jump up and down as if possessed by an evil spirit. The same happened with the wash-hand basins, although not quite to the same extent. But the worst confusion occurred in the main bar itself.

All of the large sinks were already filled with hot water, in preparation for the washing and rinsing of the hundreds of pint glasses used throughout the evening. The percussion blasted sink plugs and water up to the ceiling before showering down again onto anybody within range. Since nobody knew what was happening, bedlam reigned. But at least their plumbing pipes got a good clean out and, in due course, the blame for the totally mystifying events was placed firmly at the door of the Dublin Corporation.

*

I suppose everybody experiences certain turning points in their lifetime and, God only knows, I have been through a whole string of them. One of the most fortunate was triggered by my mother's brother Matty. On one of his visits to our house in Dublin he suggested to my mother that I should be sent down to his family farm for the summer holidays. This was to be my first introduction to a household that embraced me immediately as one of its own and gave me an insight into how wonderful family life could really be. My relationship with Matty's family lasted for a number of years. They gave me new definition for the idea of family unity, which assisted me greatly in surviving the middle years of my teens without turning into a full-scale Dublin gurrier.

‘Boulta', as the house and farm was called, comprised some 480 acres of prime agricultural land in the heart of east Cork, about 30 miles from the city. The house was a three-storey structure and dated back to the eighteenth century, with the later addition of two long, single-storey buildings that were used as the kitchen and informal dining-room. The first and second floors held two large bedrooms apiece, with my uncle and aunt on the first floor and the ‘lads' (being Gerard, Noel and I) installed on the top floor. From its front windows our room offered a majestic view out over the front lawn and the ancient, oak-lined driveway that wound its way down to the main road. Looking left, I could see over the wall that marked the lawn boundary onto the slate roofs of the farmyard, with its long, low cowhouses, milking parlour, hay barn and stables for the multitude of horses that appeared to roam everywhere at will. Over to my right, I was able to look down on the orchard where apple trees, tall in their own right, seemed dwarfed by the giant oaks that guarded the house.

In the distance I could see some of the farm's fields running down to the main road, which wound back up and out of sight behind the house. Dotted along the roadside were small cottages that I was told belonged to their tenants, with the menfolk employed on the farm and some of the women working in the house. It all gave me the impression that I had landed on some present-day gentleman's country estate. But for the two lads and I, there was to be no idleness, since Matty had us up the next morning at eight to begin the day's farm work.

There was hay to be cut, turned, baled, stacked and, as the final task, brought in and stored for winter feed in the hay barns. They had a large dairy herd of Friesians that required milking twice a day during the summer months. This mundane task was performed by one of their tenants who, on the very first day that I introduced myself to him, scuttled away fearfully as soon as I came within talking distance. Later on, during the course of the day, he dragged Noel and Gerard aside and warned them to keep an eye on me, as I looked like ‘one of them Dublin gurriers' he had read about in the papers. He added that they had best keep a watchful eye on me, because I might draw a knife on them, or murder the whole family while they slept.