Lamb (2 page)

‘Well, it's just that you never say anything witty when you're with me – and I always like to think the best of people.'

He lit another cigarette from a red piece of turf he picked up with a long pair of tongs.

‘Had your father a big farm?'

‘No. There's not much money – if that's what you mean.'

‘Approximately.'

‘Once all the debts are paid there will be very little.'

Brother Benedict took his empty glass and refilled it.

‘Nevertheless. Every little helps. The Brothers are sorely in need of it this weather.'

‘The Brothers?'

‘Yes. Your vow of poverty. You remember?'

‘I'm sorry, I just wasn't thinking.'

‘Yes, I'm sure you're upset after these last few days.'

The whiskey was beginning to make Brother Sebastian's head light. He hadn't eaten since he left home at midday. He didn't know whether it was the whiskey or the sight of the man sitting opposite him or the emotional strain of his father's death that made him do it but, before he could stop himself, he said,

‘I'm thinking of leaving.'

When he said it he was amazed. He hadn't even voiced the thought aloud to himself. It had been there for a long time in the back of his mind but it had all seemed so difficult, the problems were so insuperable, that he never gave it any real consideration. Now that his father could no longer be hurt it seemed different, but that he should be saying it now to Brother Benedict of all people, left him slightly breathless. The statement hung in the air between them. Brother Benedict, with a gesture of the hand and a tilting of the head, turned it round and viewed it from different angles.

He got off the library steps, put away his feather duster and took off his Guinness apron. A Brother again, he sat down in his own chair and joined his hands. He said quietly,

‘Freedom is an affliction, Brother. Now, who or what is tempting you to leave?'

Brother Sebastian moved awkwardly in his chair. Benedict sat waiting with a bird-like tilt of the head, sharp, beakish, owl-like. He tended to look with one eye, one side of his face, before he pecked.

‘You couldn't have taken your vow of poverty too seriously?'

‘No, it's not that,' said Sebastian.

‘Then what is it?'

Because Brother Benedict had taken what he said so calmly and because the whiskey had taken the edge off his usual wariness, he said,

‘It's everything – everything about this place. What it stands for.'

‘For instance?' His voice had gone thin, a chicken eyeing a seed.

Brother Sebastian groped for an example.

‘Well, a place that can treat a twelve-year-old boy as a criminal for mitching school and running away from home. That can't be right?'

‘Ah, we have favourites, do we? Young Owen Kane, isn't it? We shouldn't allow ourselves to become too attached to any one boy in particular. You know what that can lead to.'

‘It was
you
who talked of dirty minds.'

‘I shall ignore that remark, Brother. There is a distinct difference between realism and innuendo. And while we are on the subject, it has reached my ears that you
are
spending too much time with that boy.'

‘But he needs a lot of time. Nobody has ever spent time on him before.'

‘I admire your text-book idealism, Brother Sebastian, but I have rarely seen it work. You are being influenced by the tenderness of his years. Do you believe in the Church, Brother?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then you must believe that if a boy is old enough to receive communion he is old enough to break the law, to cause suffering in others.'

‘But if they do not fully realize what they are doing . . . '

‘Diminished responsibility, Brother, can only be claimed for babies, idiots and nuns.' He rose from his chair as if the meeting was at an end. The full skirt of his soutane blocked out the blaze of the fire.

‘What we run here, Brother, is a finishing school for the sons of the Idle Poor.'

‘It finishes them all right.'

Brother Benedict stopped in mid-flight, his eyebrows raised in mock pleasure.

‘Ah. A witticism. You are not totally lost yet, Brother. I'll thank you not to interrupt me again. What we run here is a school for the sons of the Idle Poor. We teach them to conform, how to make their beds, how to hold a knife and fork, and the three Rs. We shoehorn them back into society at an age when, if they commit another offence, they go to the grown-up prison. If they do not conform we thrash them. We teach them a little of God and a lot of fear. It is a combination that seems to work. At least we think so. There is no room here for your soft-centred, self-centred idealism.'

‘I think . . . '

‘Your problem, Brother Sebastian, is that you can't think. In all your time here I do not think I have heard you make a rational statement.'

‘Brother Benedict, I . . . '

‘You are overwrought, Brother. Like it or not, I am your spiritual father. You will join me on my walk every day next week.'

Benedict took his walk each day at the same time, summer and winter, selecting a different Brother to accompany him on a weekly rota. To get to know them informally, he said. At moments of crisis, Brothers like Sebastian were required to jump the queue. He rose unsteadily to his feet. Benedict said,

‘And remember, if you do leave in hurried circumstances we can make it difficult for you to get a job. The Church in Ireland, Brother, has as many fingers as there are pies. Remember that.'

Brother Benedict held the door open for him to go out.

Once outside he walked the lino-covered, Lysol-smelling corridor with his fists knotted. He stopped, then turned on his heel and walked back to the door. He knocked and Benedict opened it.

‘Yes?'

‘There are still some things to be cleared up at home and there is no one else to do it. Can I have permission to go back at the week-end?'

‘If you must you must,' said Benedict and closed the door in his face.

‘Some day, Brother Sebastian, I'm going to kill you,' said Owen. The boy sat on the sand opposite Brother Sebastian, staring with narrowed eyes into his face.

‘All I said,' laughed Brother Sebastian, ‘was that this is all you are good for. Minding the clothes. Provided there is no money in the pockets.' The boy sat handfulling sand and letting it trickle through his fingers.

‘You don't trust me,' he said.

‘You don't trust me either.'

The screams and whoops from the rest of the group floated to them from the water's edge. It was early in the morning and they were having the one bathe they were permitted each day.

‘Just because I'm not allowed to swim . . . ' said Owen.

‘It's for your own good. God knows what would happen to you if you went in the water with your condition.'

The boy began pouring sand from one hand to the other. He had nothing more to say. Brother Sebastian found talking to him difficult.

He had known Owen since he had first come to the Home about two years ago and, although the boy never told him much at a time, he had managed to build up a picture of what his life had been like before. At the beginning he found it difficult to separate the truth from the lies.

Owen was from Dublin, from a large housing estate on the east side.

‘It's like Ballymun – only it's rough,' was what he said about it. He had been put away because he had continually mitched school and had run away from home frequently – the Gardai had been informed on four occasions at least. God knows how many times they had not been. Since coming to the Home he had twice absconded.

Brother Sebastian hadn't taken to him right away, because he was not that sort of child, with his small furrowed face, but over his time at the Home he had grown to like him. He had attractive qualities of openness and resilience. What was more was that the boy seemed to seek Brother Sebastian out if he wanted anything, which he thought showed the beginnings of a trust. To achieve anything with these boys a trust was necessary.

He was the last of a family of five boys. The two eldest were in Mountjoy Jail (one of whom Owen had never seen at all), one was in the Merchant Navy and the sixteen-year-old had just joined the Free State Army. His father, if indeed it was his father, had been a lorry driver, away for weeks on end in England. When he came home he would get drunk and whip Owen with whatever came to hand, a length of electrical flex, his belt, a bamboo cane, an old leather his own father used to sharpen his razor on. One night he came home with a piece of rubber hose pipe which he whistled through the air as a warning.

When he was at home he would inspect Owen's bed each morning, slipping his ice-cold hand beneath the boy. If Owen had wet the bed during the night he would take him and plunge him into a cold bath, sometimes even forcing his head underneath the water.

‘This'll toughen you up, ya pissin' cissy,' he would shout as he did it.

Then one day he went away. He went on a driving job to England and never came back. Brother Sebastian asked the boy if he was glad when this happened and he had replied that it made no difference. He was afraid that he would come back any day. The door would just open and he would be there.

The only person Owen spoke of with anything approaching affection was his grandmother, his mother's mother. He would go sometimes and stay with her and she would get drunk and give him money and hug him and call him ‘lamb'. He would light the fire for her and do her messages. He always tried to short-change her but she was not to be fooled. Owen demonstrated how she would hold the coins up to the level of her chin and move her lips, then say,

‘You're 10p short, Owney.'

For some reason she always called him Owney. She wore men's socks in bed and every night that Owen slept with her she set the alarm clock for seven thirty, even though she never got up before midday.

His mother he rarely spoke of.

And yet he preferred all that to living in the Home. It was miles from nowhere on a promontory jutting its forehead into the Atlantic wind. If a boy absconded he had to walk about ten miles of peat bog, if he wanted to avoid being picked up on the road, before he reached another route.

It was a big house ‘from the days of the British Occupation', as Brother Benedict said with a curl of his lip. Over the years bits had been added on here and there. Within the house itself stone flags would give way to brown lino, showing the seam of the extensions. The walls were painted throughout a pale hospital green above shoulder level, and below, a dark hospital green. The only remnant of better days was the ornamental plaster ceilings. The stables had been made into a chapel. Brother Benedict had said that it gave him some satisfaction to see a pagan British stable become converted to the Catholic Church. There were various prefabs scattered around the house for classrooms. Surrounding the whole complex was a high wire fence which screamed and whistled in the constant wind from the sea. It seemed to rain continually.

The place was scrubbed and clean and dead – ‘like a corpse', as one of the boys put it. The air was full of disinfectant and polish and each boy had a cleaning duty to do every day.

Brothers, always on the alert, walked the corridors. In the grounds they moved like crows, their black soutanes flapping.

When he did talk, Owen's incessant theme was his hatred for the Home. He loathed the food and the Brothers (he would tell Brother Sebastian this and somehow in the telling Sebastian was excluded), especially Brother Benedict whom he feared almost as much as his father. He loathed the fact that he had a rubber sheet on his bed in the dormitory and that all the boys made fun of him because of it. ‘Kane the Stain' they called him. He loathed the prayers and processions, the classes, the scrubbing, the wind and sea – everything about the place. Because he was younger than the others, he made few friends. He was a loner walking the perimeter wire.

He was glad now to be sitting out from the crowd with Brother Sebastian ‘minding the clothes', even though there wasn't a person for ten miles to steal them.

‘They said prayers for you in Chapel when you were away,' he said.

Brother Sebastian looked up.

‘For me?'

‘Well, for your . . . Dad.'

It was the first mention Owen had made of the death. Brother Sebastian flattened out an area of sand with his hand.

‘Was he O.K. of a Dad?'

‘Yes, he was good. We were good friends.'

‘Friends? You weren't glad then?'

‘No.'

Brother Sebastian squared off the ends of his plateau. He looked all around. The rest of the boys were still horsing about in the water. They wouldn't come until he called them.

‘Did you ever think of running away again, Owen?'

For a moment the boy's eyes lit up and the furrows disappeared from his forehead. Then they came back again.

‘Naw. It never works. I always get caught. I'm too wee to work or anything.'

‘What would you say to me taking you away from this place?'

The boy considered this, not really understanding.

‘You mean you and me?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are you on the level?'

‘Yes. But I've got to arrange it first. Give me till the weekend. What do you say?'

‘Yeah. Smashin'.'

‘If you say anything to anybody, it's off. Anybody. I wouldn't want to take you against your will, but if you stay here you will have no life. Nothing. Swear that you will say nothing to anyone.'