Skippy Dies (71 page)

Jeekers raises his hand. ‘Are we going on a class trip, sir?’

‘Sure,’ Howard says. ‘Exactly.’

‘But don’t we need permission from our parents?’

‘We’ll clear it with them afterwards. If anyone doesn’t want to come, that’s fine. You can proceed to the Study Hall for the
remainder of the class.’

‘So long, loser.’ Simon Mooney twists Jeekers’s ear on his way to the door. The thin boy wavers; then, clambering out from
behind his desk, he grabs his bag and hurries after the others.

It takes mere seconds for the boys to reappear from the locker room with their coats. Bringing a finger to his lips – ‘Let’s
be sure not to disturb the other classes’ – Howard leads them up Our Lady’s Hall, past the oratory and the Study Hall, towards
the daylight framed in the double-doors – and then they are outside, clipping down the winding avenue between the rugby pitches
and chestnut trees.

He walks them down to the station and they take a train into the city. He still hasn’t decided where they’re going, but as
they pass Lansdowne Road, the site of internationals and schools rugby finals, ‘Seabrook’s second home’, he finds himself
telling the boys how within weeks of the outbreak of war, Juster’s great-grandfather and hundreds of other professional men
were going to the stadium every night after work for military training, among
them many who would join ‘D’ Company. Disembarking, he leads them up Pearse Street, around College Green, along Dame Street,
the same route, he tells them, the ‘Pals’ had taken on their triumphant leave-taking of the city.

Cutting through Temple Bar toward the river, they pass the cinema outside which Howard met Halley for the first time: this
nugget of history he does not pass on to the boys. He remembers walking with her down to the riverside, but it’s only as they
are crossing Ha’penny Bridge – the elderly construction seeming to sway beneath their impatient feet, the quays of the city
stretching away on either side – that he remembers the museum was where she had been headed that day too, was where he had
promised to take her, but never did, instead falling in love with her, leading her away into the backstreets of his life.
Now he’s finally on his way there, but with twenty-six hormonal teenage boys instead of her. Nice job, Howard.

The boys climb the hill through the gates of the museum grounds. Gerry Coveney and Kevin Wong shout, ‘Echo!’ at the walls
of the vast courtyard. Here and there, groups of tourists make their way over the cobblestones: huge Americans like sides
of beef, prim Japanese ladies in black, all with cameras dangling at the ready from their necks. By the entrance, a horde
of children from primary school are clustered around a besieged-looking man in a red sweater. ‘Now a museum,’ he is telling
them, ‘is a place with lots of objects from the past. By studying these objects, we find out about things that happened long
ago…’

The children nod seriously. They can’t be much older than six or seven; everything to them is long ago. From a safe distance
their teacher looks on with a mixture of fondness and gratitude for a moment’s peace.

Howard brings the boys inside and approaches the man at the reception desk. ‘I wanted to take my class for a look around…’

‘We can probably arrange a tour, if you like,’ the receptionist says. ‘Is there a particular area you’re interested in?’

‘We’re studying the First World War,’ Howard says.

The receptionist’s face clouds. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘we don’t really have anything about the war at the moment.’

Behind Howard, the man in the red sweater, with a hounded look, leads the children into the bowels of the museum. ‘Objects!
Objects!’ they cry deliriously as they go.

‘Anything at all?’ Howard says, when the noise has passed. ‘Uniforms from the Irish regiments? Rifles, bayonets, medals, maps?’

‘I’m sorry,’ the man repeats sheepishly. ‘It’s not something there’s much demand for at the moment. Though we’re hoping to
feature it in a forthcoming exhibition?’

‘Forthcoming when?’

The receptionist calculates. ‘Three years?’ Seeing Howard’s face fall, he says, ‘You might take them to the Memorial Gardens
in Islandbridge. It’s really just a park. But I’m afraid that’s about all there is.’

Howard thanks him and steps back outside, the class billowing behind him like a murmurous cloak; on the cobblestones they
congregate around him expectantly. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘It’s my fault, I should have called ahead. I’m sorry.’

He knows they are only disappointed because they fear this means the end of their outing. Still, as they hang there in the
weak, cloud-filtered light, shuffling a little, waiting for him to tell them what to do, they appear different to their everyday
school selves – younger, less cynical, lighter even, as if Seabrook were a weight that they carried, and set free of it they
might just float off into the air…

Traffic pants on the quays in a shimmer of monoxides. The park does not sound terribly inspiring; Howard is debating whether
to cut his losses when his phone rings. It’s Farley. ‘Where the hell are you, Howard?’

‘In town,’ Howard says. ‘On a class trip.’

‘A class
trip
? What, without telling anybody?’

‘It was sort of a spur-of-the-moment thing,’ Howard replies, keeping his voice carefully neutral.

‘Greg is going ballistic, Howard, we just about talked him out
of calling the guards. For God’s sake, have you gone mad? I mean, what are you doing?’

‘I don’t know,’ Howard says, after a moment’s consideration.

Farley releases a strangulated sigh. ‘Look, if you want to have even a chance of keeping your job, you’d better get back here
right away. Greg is climbing the walls, I’ve never seen him this angry.’

‘Oh,’ Howard says.

‘In fact maybe you should talk to him now – hold on, I’m going to put you on to him and you can –’

Howard hangs up the phone and switches it off. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Let’s go and find these Memorial Gardens.’

The boys brighten visibly, and set off ahead of him up the street.

He has read about the gardens but never visited them. Islandbridge is an out-of-the-way and not especially inviting part
of the city. Bleached posters for last year’s music acts account for most of the colour to be seen; down-at-heel pubs front
mazy streets where at the turn of the last century thousands of local prostitutes attended to the needs of British soldiers
stationed in the barracks that now houses the museum. It may no longer be the biggest red-light zone in Europe, but it couldn’t
be accused of gentrification; as they turn towards the river, the grime becomes thicker, the flats more dilapidated. The boys
are fascinated. ‘Sir, is this the ghetto?’ ‘Quiet.’ ‘Do people buy drugs here?’ ‘Shh.’ ‘Are those people on drugs?’ ‘Do you
want to go back to school? Is that what you want?’ ‘Sorry.’ Their faith in him is at once touching and alarming – their trust
that they are safe simply because he’s with them, as if an adult presence warded off all possible threat, emanated an unbreachable
forcefield.

The gate to the Memorial Gardens is at the end of a laneway, between a scrap merchant’s and a mental institution. They file
through one by one; Howard does not know whether to be cheered or not when they find the park deserted.

‘How come nobody’s here?’ Mario asks.

‘Maybe they heard you were coming, Mario.’

‘Yeah, Mario, they heard the biggest bummer in Dublin was on his way and they all ran inside?’

‘You’re the bummer, asshole.’

‘Quiet, all of you,’ Howard snaps.

From here, aside from its eerie emptiness, the Memorial Gardens looks like any other park. The grassy lawn stretches off into
the distance, rising on its left to a hill; the wind ruffles the water of the river to the right, and whispers through the
leafless trees lining the avenue. The only edifice in sight is a small stone gazebo. They walk down and crowd into it. Inside
a stanza from a Rupert Brooke poem is inscribed in the floor:

‘Look –’ Henry Lafayette points up the hill. A tall stone cross can now be seen, looming over the crest. They climb towards
it, talking less now; fanning out over the grass, they appear to Howard younger again, as if they are going backwards in time.

At the top of the hill they find themselves in a long garden, encircled by trees and ivy-clad colonnades. Water trickles into
the basins of two identical fountains, winter roses grow in the borders. The surrounding city can no longer be seen: they
might be in the garden of a country manor, were it not for the towering cross, and, about a hundred feet in front of it, a
white stone sarcophagus.

‘
Their name liveth on forevermore
,’ Dewey Fortune reads from its side.

‘Whose name?’

‘The Irish soldiers’, you spa.’

‘They got that wrong,’ Muiris says.

Lucas Rexroth shivers. ‘This place is spooky.’

This provokes a chorus of ghostly
woohooos
; but Lucas is right.
The chilly air that shrinks their voices, the wet grass and lonesomeness, the strange disconnection from the world around,
the inexplicable sense of having
interrupted something
… they give the garden the character of an afterworld – the kind of place you can imagine waking up in, stretched out on the
grass, immediately after some horrific collision. The damp air swirls around them; gradually, the boys’ chatter peters out,
and they shuffle about uncomfortably until each of them is facing Howard. For a moment he waits, reluctant to dispel the curious
chanting silence. Then: ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘The Dublin Pals.’ And he begins to tell them what Slattery told him about ‘D’ Company
– how they had joined up together from the school rugby clubs, how, while Robert Graves shivered and fought off rats in a
ditch in France, they were dispatched to the furnace of the Dardanelles. ‘They were landed on beaches along the Gallipoli
peninsula – hundreds of them, packed into a tiny space, waiting to be told what to do. Days went by, dysentery, enteritis,
fever broke out, shrapnel was going off overhead the whole time, wounded and dead men were being carried through on stretchers,
huge swarms of flies buzzed from corpses into the mouths of the living so it was almost impossible to sleep or eat.

‘Finally the order came through for an attack on Kiretch Tepe Sirt, a long ridge overlooking the bay. The men set out in unbearable
heat that only got worse as the day went on. They hadn’t been given enough water and the Turks had poisoned the wells. They
hadn’t been given enough ammo either and they soon ran out of that too. Near the top of the ridge they found themselves pinned
down by Turkish guns. They sent for reinforcements but none came. It got so hot the gorse caught fire, and they had to listen
to their own wounded being burned alive.

‘They spent the night trapped on the mountain, being picked off one by one. When they ran out of bullets, they threw stones.
One Pal, Private Wilkin, started catching Turkish grenades and throwing them back – he did this five times before the sixth
grenade exploded in his hand. At last, after hours of watching their friends being slaughtered, the
men – Seabrook men, Clongowes men, St Michael’s men and others, who a week before had never been out of the country, most
of them, let alone experienced enemy fire – mounted a bayonet charge on the Turkish guns. During this charge, Juster’s great-grandfather,
William Molloy, got shot in the hand and had to crawl back to his own lines. He was one of the lucky ones. Half the Pals were
lost that night.

‘After that episode the Allies changed their plans. The division packed up and the remnants of the Pals were split up and
transferred to Salonika. As their ship sailed away, as they left their friends behind them on the cliffs and hillsides, the
men vowed that their sacrifice, what had happened there, would not be forgotten. But as we’ve seen, it was forgotten. Or rather,
it was deliberately erased. It seems pretty hard luck, after enduring so many terrible hardships and pointless deaths. But
that’s what happened. The years went by and the Pals became casualties again, this time of history.’

He stows his notebook in his bag and looks up at the boys looking back at him, dotted around the viridian sward in clumps
of three and four, like rain-jacketed statues.

‘It’s hard for us, living in peacetime, to imagine the mindset of the people who lived through the war. So many men had been
killed, one in every six who served, and there was barely anyone who wasn’t touched by loss in some way. Fathers, mothers,
brothers, sisters, wives. Friends. This was a world overwhelmed by grief, and the ways that that grief manifested could be
quite extreme. In France, for example, there was a plague of graverobbing. Poor families spent every penny they had on locating
their sons’ bodies and bringing them home from the Front. In Britain there was a huge outbreak of spiritualism. Fathers and
mothers held seances to speak with their dead sons. Very respectable, normally quite rational people got involved. There was
even the case of the celebrated scientist, a pioneer in electromagnetic waves, who believed he could use them to build a bridge
between our world and the next, “tune in” to the world of the dead.’

He halts momentarily, thrown by Ruprecht Van Doren, who is
goggling at him as if he’s choking on something. ‘Above all, though,’ he fumbles for his thread, ‘people coped with their
grief by
remembering
. They wore poppies in honour of their loved ones. They erected statues and built cenotaphs. And all over Europe, in villages,
towns and cities, they opened memorial gardens like this one. This particular garden was different to all the others, though.
Can anyone tell me why?’ He gazes evenly from face to pallid face. ‘This garden was never actually opened. It wasn’t begun
until the thirties, and it wasn’t completed until the very end of the century. For the decades in between it was let run wild.
People grazed their horses here, dealers used it to sell drugs. It was the memorial garden that no one remembered. And it
represented most Irish people’s attitude to the war, which was to bury it.