The Dead School (28 page)

He stared at the chalk on the floor. ‘Why did you fall, chalk? Why did you have to?’ he wanted to cry to it. But he couldn’t. He was too tired. The pain in his
head was starting up again and there was someone talking at the back of the class that was why he could write no more why would they not stop talking didn’t they know their baby died? He knew
they did he knew and that was why he shouted. That was why! ‘Stop it!’ he cried, ‘Will you for the last time stop it! Our little boy died! Do you hear me! Do you hear me, Rogers,
do you hear me talking to you do you want me to go down to you by God if I go down to you you’ll be the sorry boy I can tell you what are you doing Mulhern do you hear me Mulhern you brat
you! Listen to me – put that pencil down!’ He waited to see what Mulhern would do but then all of a sudden it didn’t matter any more he just went down on his hunkers, trying not
to let any more tears come into his eyes in front of the boys.

Raphael was doing the nine counties of Ulster when he heard the noise. ‘Now come on, lads,’ he said. ‘Put your thinking caps on. Which one of you can stand up
there and name the nine counties of Ulster for me. What about yourself, young McQuillan? You look like you might be able for them. Come on now – I’ll give you a hand. Donegal, Derry,
Antrim, Down . . . up you get now like a good lad!’ But young McQuillan never got a chance, did he, because the noise came then. If you could call it a noise – more a grunt, like a pig
would make. Raphael went cold all over. ‘Don’t move, boys!’ he cried. ‘Don’t move now till I get back!’

He came running down the stairs and by the time he got to the back door he was out of breath. He couldn’t turn the key, why couldn’t he turn the key? ‘Turn key –
turn!’ he cried. He pulled the door open and shouted at them, ‘You needn’t think you’ll do that in here! You’ll get away with it everywhere else! But not in my place
– do you hear me? Not in my place!’

His voice was shaking when he said it. He expected them to turn on him and abuse him, that was what you would expect, that was what they all did nowadays. But they didn’t in fact and when
he looked again they were gone. There was no writhing white flesh, no gleaming sweat. The lights of a car rose up along the coast road, then dipped again and were gone. Then a dog barked in a
distant garden. But apart from that – nothing. Raphael clasped his head in his hands because he really did think it was going to crack in two. Then he went inside and sat in the dark,
shivering.

Meanwhile back in Bubble-Land, after half a dozen ounces of Lebanese Red and a few thousand or so cans of McEwan’s Export, Malachy was now beginning to give some thought
to the notion of securing regular employment. The Prince handed him a number and said, ‘Give them a call. You’ll walk right in there, man. No problem at all. All you gotta do is say you
know me. Say you know the Prince – got that?’ Malachy had it all right and off he went with the hair flying behind him. The building site was in south London and would you believe it,
all he had to do was sit there in this gammy uniform, keeping an eye out for any bastard who might be inclined to do a bit of robbing. It was a breeze. An absolute breeze, man. Or would have been
until Head Asshole came round and started asking questions. ‘Were you smoking drugs on duty here last night?’ he says. ‘I had a report that you were smoking cannabis. I
don’t want any bullshit now – OK? Just tell me – is it true or is it not?’

Malachy didn’t know where to look. He had just had a joint five minutes before and he was afraid he’d burst out laughing in the asshole’s face right there on the spot!

‘Well – were you?’ he says, and was he pissed off or what.

‘Yes – I was as a matter of fact,’ says Malachy – and man did fuckhead like that!

‘Oh, babe – if only you’d been there! If only you’d been there, Marion!’ he said to himself as he came cruising down the road with a big fat jay in his hand.
‘It was unbelievable – fucking unbelievable, man!’

As indeed it was, of course – but it put an end to Malachy Dudgeon’s burgeoning career in the high glittering world of nighttime security, I’m afraid!

Malachy was a proud man. And why wouldn’t he be? He had just been appointed head of the still room! It was a very important position in a very important gentlemen’s
club in central London. They had given him an apron and everything. His job was to make French toast, ordinary toast and Melba toast. But he didn’t make any toast. He just stood there eating
it or else letting it burn. The head waiter wasn’t pleased. He said if things didn’t improve, Malachy would be fired. Malachy pleaded. Please give me one last chance, he said. OK then,
said the head waiter, just one. You stop your daydreaming and letting toast burn, I’ll give you a last chance. How’s that? That’s fine, said Malachy and let more toast burn. He
didn’t mean to do it of course. He just kept daydreaming, that’s all, thanks to all these drugs he was taking. The head waiter said OK one last chance – you do the sandwiches.
That was the best job of the lot. You had to go and get the ham or the tongue out of the kitchen and put it in the sandwiches. What you didn’t do was get the munchies and eat it all on the
way back to the still room. Because if you did, then a gouty colonel with a handlebar moustache would come storming in with two bits of bread, shouting ‘Who’s the comedian!’ and
get you fired.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ the waiter bawled at Malachy. Colonel Blimp looked like every blood vessel in his face was about to burst. Malachy looked at him. ‘Huh?’ he
said, hoping that there weren’t too many ham or tongue crumbs around his mouth.

All in all, Malachy had twenty-seven jobs but in the end he decided that he would have to give them all up. This was because Chico had offered him a better position as
assistant sales manager with his company Lebanese Red Incorporated. Like he said, ‘Ten bob a week and all the draw you can smoke.’ Not that they were an international organization or
anything. ‘We serve mostly local retail outlets,’ said Chico as he chopped up the dope into little nuggets and put them in cellophane bags. ‘How about free gifts? Beach balls
maybe?’ asked the Prince from the armchair. ‘No,’ said Chico. ‘No gimmicks.’ Then it was off to the hostelries of north London with any amount of five pound and ten
pound deals for the needy. They were happy days in London town with the sun burning down and pigeons flapping in Trafalgar Square and Malachy Bubblehead the dopiest doped-out hippy in town, off
down the street in his army surplus coat and the hair halfway down his back.

And so on it went – a hard day’s work and then home to the squat to blow what was left and listen to the latest albums. ‘I wonder what Marion and Paddy are listening to right
now,’ said Malachy out of the blue as he took the joint off Chico.

‘Paddy and Marion who?’ said Chico and they both burst out laughing, flying high somewhere over Shepherd’s Bush Green.

We like picnics don’t we children oh yes we do we like them the best of all because you get boiled eggs and cakes and sweets and buns and lots of yummy orange and you can
sit out in the field with the bees buzzing and the birds singing and the farmer doesn’t say get off my land because at picnics everybody is happy at least they are supposed to be and who
knows, maybe if Malachy hadn’t gone and freaked out, they would have been. Still, you can’t blame him – how was he to know it was going to happen. As far as he was concerned,
dropping three – not one, not two, but
three
tabs of acid was the best idea ever. And for a while it was. All the way down to Wales, all you could hear out of him was ‘We like
yummy orange!’ and then, big snorts of laughter. Chico got something into his head about being ‘in charge of the picnic’ and fell off his seat with the tears running down his
face. The Prince said he didn’t care who was in charge. ‘As long as I get my cut of the boiled egg suss, that’s OK by me,’ he said. In all seriousness, it was the very last
thing you would have expected to turn out bad. If anyone had mentioned boatsheds or Mrs McAdoo or Bell or Pat Hourican or your father throwing himself in the water or any of that stuff, you would
have laughed at them. You would have said, ‘I’m sorry, man, but it’s just not that kind of a day. You’ve got your facts wrong!’ Which wouldn’t be true either
because it’s always that kind of day, whether you know it or not. As Malachy discovered when he went away off climbing hills on his own. He could hear Chico shouting after him but he just
laughed. He had had it with the picnic, he said. He was off into the mountains where the warm wind stroked your face with long silky fingers. He could see them all down below. They looked like
little blobs of paint. ‘Hello there, blobs of paint. Can you hear me? Having a good picnic, blobs?’ he cried. He waited a while for them to answer but then he forgot all about them. His
whole body was a crackle of tingles. All the tingles in the world were having a meeting in him. The Annual General Meeting of the Tingle Association. He was Mr Tingle. Hello, I’d like to
introduce you to Malachy Tingle. How do you do? I’m fine, thank you. Tingling a little bit but fine apart from that. Ha ha. And you? Who are you anyway? Stomp stomp stomp up the mountainside
in your seven league boots full of tingle feet. You could go on stomping for ever in these boots if for some reason out of nowhere the word ‘Marion’ hadn’t come into your head.
Well maybe that wouldn’t have been so bad but followed by the words ‘I
don’t
love you’ in Marion’s voice – well that was bad. Very bad indeed, I’m
afraid. Because that’s the trouble with acid, although Malachy didn’t know it. All it takes is one thing to go wrong and then – well, everything else decides to follow suit
I’m afraid. Mr Sun, who a minute before was saying ‘Hello! I’m Mr Sun! I’m your friend on this happy picnic day!’ is opening up a big sunny mouth full of razor teeth.
Then, just when you’re getting used to that, a great big tear comes rolling out of Mr Sun’s eye for no reason. It gets to the stage where you don’t know where you are at all.
There is probably some way you can say to yourself, ‘Oh this is a lot of nonsense! Suns with tears coming out of their eyes and teeth that look like razors – oh for heaven’s sake
it’s a lot of old rubbish, that’s what it is!’ In fact, just when everything was starting to go wrong, Malachy tried that particular strategy. But if it worked for other people,
it didn’t work for him. The sun just laughed at him. So did the grass. It sounds ridiculous I know – grass laughing. But the grass did. It laughed right into his face. Not only that in
fact – it talked to him. It said, ‘You poor stupid bollocks! You’ve really fucked it now!’ He hadn’t however. Not yet. The big fuck-up was yet to come. The big fuck-up
came when he thought of Pat.

He shouldn’t have done that. He shouldn’t have thought of Pat at all. Thinking about Pat was a bad thing to do, because then he thought about Collins and Webb. And not just Collins
and Webb but bad, awful Collins and Webb. With voices that said, ‘You let Pat fall in the water. You did. We saw you.’ Then he did an even worse thing. He tried to reason with them.
That was a really fucking stupid thing to do. I mean, you don’t reason with the likes of Collins and Webb. They’ll only laugh at you and worse, they’ll start singing, ‘Pat
fell in the water, Pat fell in the water’ and you won’t like that will you? No, that will drive you mad.

But bad and all as it was, it was nothing compared to the wasp. What the hell did it have to come along for? Going bzzz. Go away wasp, Malachy said. But it hadn’t the slightest intention
of going away. At least, not before it had done what it came to do in the first place which was sting Malachy. Now that’s something which is not very nice on an acid trip – a big ugly
wasp sting going into you like a hot wire. And Malachy knew that. Go away wasp, he pleaded, but it wouldn’t. It gave a great big waspy grin. A grin that said ‘Me sting you! Me sting
you!’

‘No! Please!’ was what Malachy said back.

‘No yes! Me sting you!’

In went its big wiry sting as far as it could go. Then what did he do but start running. He was running all over the place. Up, down and around the mountain. Next thing he ran straight into
someone. Oops! It was Mrs McAdoo. ‘Look – my face is all worms.’ That was all she said and so it was. Then who pulled up in an accordion-pleated Morris but the bold Father Pat
with blood streaks all over his face. ‘There youse are,’ he said as he chucked the brake and pulled up beside him. ‘Hop in!’ But Malachy didn’t hear him because he was
transfixed by the face of his father in the back window. He looked so sad. ‘I loved your mother,’ was all he said. ‘Don’t ever think I didn’t. She just didn’t
love me, that’s all.’ It might have been all right if Marion hadn’t decided to get in on the action. Well it wouldn’t have been all right but it mightn’t have been as
bad as it was. She was standing by the frozen river with her back to him, with the snow all about her as she clutched her folder to her chest and stared at something far away. He had been watching
her for a long time before she turned to him and smoothed her hair back behind her ears as her lips slowly parted. She was going to say it. He begged her not to say it. Marion please oh please
don’t say those words. ‘I love you,’ she said and that really was the end. It was like his head caving in, a bomb bursting ever so silently and after that he didn’t care any
more, which was why he was in such a state when Chico and the Prince found him, gibbering away to himself, raving all kinds of rubbish nobody could understand.

They managed to get him to the cops who took him to the nearest general hospital. Three days later he arrived at Friern Barnet mental institution. Not that it made much difference, for as far as
Malachy was concerned, he might as well have been on the moon.

Through the haze came the Dummy smiling. His voice was soft and soothing. ‘Don’t worry, Malachy,’ he said, ‘I’ll look after you. Put your trust in
me and I’ll tell you all about it.’

‘It’s been so long since I’ve seen you, Dummy,’ Malachy said. ‘Tell me what has happened. Why am I in this place where everything is a fog around me? Please tell me
what has happened to me.’ ‘Of course I will,’ said the Dummy. ‘You know I will. The Dummy is always there when you need him – isn’t that right,
Malachy?’