The Dead School (35 page)

There was a lovely little school band standing by the graveside, near a white-haired priest on crutches who had to have his prayer-book held for him because he could no longer hold it himself.
The nuns had assembled the band specially for the day. They were all dressed up in their neat little uniforms and had been practising all morning. They were going to play Mr Bell’s favourite
song – ‘Macushla’. Which the nun had told them earlier was the Gaelic word for ‘My Darling’ or ‘My Beloved’. So now they knew. Which in all honesty was
about as much as they wanted to know, for as far as they could see, the words of it were just a jumble of old rubbish that made no sense at all, something to do with an old fellow who had nothing
better to do than ask his wife to get up out of that and not be lying in the grave! Whatever that was supposed to mean!

Not that they exactly made it any more comprehensible with their rendition which began shortly after the mourners arrived. Just about the most magnanimous thing you can say about their
performance is that it wasn’t exactly going to win them the Band of the Year Prize. Between that and the wind whipping away half the words as they were playing, you would have been hard
pressed to know what the hell was going on. All you could see were people holding their hats as the prayerbook pages flapped and Mario Lanza Jr put the crows out of business as he sang:

What they were raving about, nobody had the foggiest notion. In fact, if you didn’t know better, between the little fellow banging the bass drum and the cymbals crashing
and the flutes and tin whistles playing different melodies at the same time, you might well have thought that they were some sort of comedy or circus band that had drifted into the graveyard by
accident. Be that as it may the scene was still too much for some people as they looked at the bright hopeful happy faces of the children and then stared at the yawning open hole into which Mr Bell
was about to go very shortly. Especially when one of the little innocents gave a shy little wave and said,
‘Slán Leat A Mhaistir’
– ‘goodbye,
Master.’

It was hard to know how many people were there. If our old friend Nobby Caslin the funeral expert had happened along, it would have done his heart good. ‘This is more like it, boys,’
he’d say. ‘This is more like the real thing. How many now would you say is here? Five thousand? Ten? I’d go for the ten now. By Christ you won’t get better than
this!’

And you wouldn’t have either – if it had happened like that which of course it didn’t for there were no more multitudes and school bands there than Raphael Bell was going to
jump up and call out to the gravediggers, ‘Hold on there lads! It’s a mistake! I’m not dead at all!’

In fact, if poor old Nobby had indeed turned up, a more likely class of a speech from him would have been, ‘I seen the time when a schoolmaster the like of him would have pulled in over
the six hundred mark and well above it. I mind Master Jack who used to teach in the wee school out by the mountain, died of a heart attack one sunny day and him driving the car up the street. I
remember it as well as if it was yesterday. Into a pole and the pair of them killed outright, himself and Reavy the contractor. As God is my judge, the day that man was crated, you wouldn’t
have got moving in the streets, that many turned out to pay their respects. It’s a sad state of affairs when this is all that can be dragged out for a Master, a scatter of old biddies, a
dying-looking hippy in a tramp’s coat and an auld whinging bollocks of a priest, would you look at him, slobbering away there like a halfwit or what in the hell is wrong with him? Don’t
you think now you’d expect a bit more from a clergyman, taking into account the number he’d have put into the ground in his time, if you get my meaning.’

The holy water sparkled in the air as the priest cleared his throat, beginning to read:

He then closed the prayerbook and raised his head as he said, ‘Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord’ and then, responding for the throng that could not answer with
one voice because it was not there, said softly to himself, ‘May they rest in peace. Amen.’

Malachy, with a big fat shiner on him and looking like he’d been dragged through a ditch backways, turned and walked toward the gate, and it has to be said that his spontaneous impression
of Mrs McAdoo’s walk after Thomas’s funeral was not bad at all.

As the pine box was lowered on canvas straps, the white-haired priest was inconsolable and had to be led away. The officiating priest closed his prayerbook and averted his eyes as Father Desmond
Stokes was helped into a car outside the cemetery gates.

A light rain swept towards the city.

So there you are, that’s the end of my story and what a sad end it turned out to be, what with brambles and briars growing all over poor Raphael, and nobody ever
bothering their backsides to come near him, never mind remark on their Sunday stroll past Madeira Gardens, ‘Do you remember old Mr Bell who used to live there?’ or ‘That house
belonged to the headmaster of St Anthony’s once upon a time.’ Even the young couple who lived in it now hadn’t the foggiest notion that it had once been the Dead School, which of
course was perfectly understandable, for with its lovely garden full of geraniums and begonias and its beautiful whitewashed walls, you just wouldn’t have believed it possible. But then, of
course, there’s lots of things you wouldn’t believe, such as the way things have been going in the town lately, for example. Maybe it’s just as well poor old Raphael kicked the
bucket when he did, for I doubt if his heart would have been able to stand up to all the carry-on. It’s got so bad now that if you didn’t know better, you’d think half the country
was on drugs. It all started in earnest when they sold the hotel where the bold Packie once upon a time loved to have his couple of wee bottles and the new owner decided that what was needed was a
bit of exotic dancing to cheer the locals up. Then came the wet T-shirt competitions, mud wrestling four nights a week, and foxy boxing on Sunday mornings. The priest tried giving out about it at
Mass, saying that things had gone too far and he wanted it back the way it was when he was a young boy, when Sunday mornings were a time of togetherness, a special time, a holy time, when you would
walk up the street with your mammy and daddy, then get the papers on the way home from Mass before you had your Sunday dinner and settled in to listen to Michael O’Hehir as the ball went high
into the clouds and the cheers of the crowd brought joy to your heart. The priest got so excited when he was making the speech that he closed his eyes and went all red in the face as he pounded the
pulpit, pleading with them to remember. ‘Do you remember!’ he cried, half-choked. ‘Do you remember those days, my dear people!’

Of course they remembered them, I mean it wasn’t all
that
long ago. Not that it mattered when it was, for as far as they were concerned, he could stick those days up his arse for
they had been listening to him blathering about them long enough and if he didn’t shut up, soon he might be counting himself lucky to find anyone in his stupid fucking church at all.
Meanwhile, down went the fish factory with one whack of the wrecker’s ball and up went the Copacabana, the disco to end all discos with its three neon waitresses ferrying cocktails across the
roof and high-kicking over the town. Next door is Hollywood Nites video shop and through the open windows Robert Ginty, The Exterminator, takes on all-comers as yet another asshole comes running
right into his custombuilt flamethrower and goes, ‘Come on, motherfucker! Come on and die, you slimeball fuck! Fry, fuckhead – if that’s what you wanna do!’

If Malachy had been twenty years younger, he might have got stuck into all this but he wasn’t of course, not any more, as a few of the young lads down the harbour reminded him in the
time-honoured tradition one day when he was out with Cissie. ‘Hey, Baldy!’ they shouted, ‘Why don’t you go away and grow some hair, you wee fat cunt!’

Anyway, whatever about twenty years ago, getting stuck in now was pretty much out of the question, for by the time Cissie’s looked after, most of the day is gone anyway. But at least
it’s not like in the beginning, when she was going to stage some sort of miraculous recovery, sitting there playing tapes and blathering shite into her ear and getting nothing only the goo
goo treatment back. No, that’s all history now. These days he just plays it by ear and waits to see what sort of humour she’s in. If she’s in a bad one, you’ve had it.
She’ll just take a swing with her one good hand and send bowl and spoon and the whole lot flying. That can be a right fuckup. Usually, however, one day is pretty much the same as the next.
She wakes in the morning and looks at him with empty eyes as he eases her gently out of bed. He’ll wash her first, then dress her and carry her downstairs. She likes to sit by the fire where
he feeds her and after that she’ll sleep. Then maybe he’ll read, or listen to Terry Krash. Or watch a few videos maybe. But most of the time he doesn’t bother. He prefers just to
sit there, waiting for them to come again, as he knows they will: a night in a Parnell Square dancehall when he searched the floor and saw that she was there, then held her close as her strawberry
blonde hair brushed his cheek and he whispered, ‘You don’t really like “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep”, do you?’, that day in the park when a white unbroken blanket of
snow stretched as far as the eye could see and she stood by a frozen river, staring at something far away, then slowly turned and looked into his eyes, her lips about to part to form three
words.

Patrick McCabe was born in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland in 1955. He is the author of the children’s story
The Adventures of Shay Mouse
, and the novels
Music
on Clinton Street
,
Carn
,
The Butcher Boy
(winner of the
Irish Times
/Aer Lingus Literature Prize and shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize),
The Dead School
,
Breakfast on Pluto
(shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize),
Mondo Desperado
,
Emerald Germs of Ireland
,
Call Me The Breeze
,
Winterwood
,
The Holy City
and
The Stray Sod Country
. He lives in Sligo with his wife and two daughters.

Also by Patrick McCabe in Picador

Carn

The Butcher Boy

Breakfast on Pluto

Mondo Desperado

Emerald Germs of Ireland

First published 1996 by Picador

This edition published 2002 by Picador

This electronic edition published 2012 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Associated companies throughout the world
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ISBN 978-1-447-23084-7 EPUB

Copyright © 1996 Patrick McCabe

The right of Patrick McCabe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital,
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liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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