The Whipping Club (41 page)

             
“How’s my father?” he asked.

             
“He’s there himself doing good work for you. You may yet be released from here; there’s been talk of that now. They want to end your father’s rants.” He looked around, then pulled an
Irish Times
newspaper clipping hidden in his pocket. “Father Brennan’s been here to talk with me about you,” he whispered.

             
Adrian glanced at a picture of his da wi
th his fist raised in the air.
A bold caption stated, “This father won’t eat unless justice is served.” Adrian tried to picture his da in prison. “Might he forgive me, do you think, for messing up his life?”

             
“Your da loves you. Put away the talk of revenge, Adrian,” he said, stuffing the article back into his pocket. “‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.’ Forgive me, too, for not protecting you from them,” he said softly. Brother Mack would never forget the whiteness of Adrian’s exposed neck, as the lads charged toward him with a thick rope, and he had felt the boy’s desperate eyes follow the back of his black cassock as he walked away, resigned, seeking refuge in the chapel.

             
“You’ve been like a father to me,” Adrian whispered back.

             
“You’ll be soon gone.”

             
Adrian closed his eyes.

             
Brother Mack laid his head on top of Adrian’s chest. Adrian put his arms around him and, with timidity at first, began to pat his back. Brother Mack stroked Adrian’s bald head, kissed his brow.

             
For a few moments, they lay there quietly. Then Brother Mack whispered Father Brennan’s plan. “Half an hour earlier than your normal rising. It’s perfectly arranged, you need not worry,” he whispered. “I’ll make sure you’re up and you’ll go to the bakery as usual. Turn on the lights and wait for your mother by the back door.”

             
Adrian stared into the Christian Brother’s face. 

             
Brother Mack unclasped a gold cross from around his neck and placed it around Adrian’s.

             
“My father’s, now yours.”

             
Adrian didn’t know how to respond. He said he couldn’t believe that such a gift would be given to him and protested shyly.

             
“I want you to have it,” Brother Mack said, urgency in his tone.

             
Adrian touched the cross.

             
“That’s right, go ahead and hold it. Don’t be afraid, you’ll know what to do.”

It was two o’clock in the morning when Johanna, who had been up all night, emerged from her room.

             
They sat, mother and daughter, in the back seat of Officer Dolan’s new police car, the City of Ballsbridge embossed in gold lettering on the door. Marian put her arm around Jo’s shoulder, looked unswervingly into her face, and told her that she was sorry, that things would get better. “I promise,” she whispered, laying her head on Jo’s shoulder and then they held each other for the forty-minute ride to Surtane.

             
They pulled up behind the school. Officer Dolan dropped Marian in the alley, turned off his car lights, and he and Jo waited silently in the dark for her return.

             
Inside, Brother Mack hurriedly made his way to the security guard station, an unusual look of desperation on his face. “I heard something outside. Quick, go check for v
andals at the front entrance,”
he ordered the man on duty. Marian hunched low, heard their voices, and like a ghost, stepped quietly to the back gate. As soon as the guard left, Brother Mack let her in and she waited behind the bakery building until she heard footsteps and a light flashed on. It was Adrian, frail, one eye half open, blotches of purple and red covering his round face.

             
Without speaking, she grabbed his hand and hurried with him to the back entrance.

             
Behind the back buildings, she tripped on a piece of bark and fell into mossy grass. Adrian lifted her under her arms, and she scrambled to her feet, ignoring the throbbing pain in her lower back.

             
They made it out the gate and to the waiting car. She opened its doors for Adrian, motioned him inside, and handed him a change of clothes from a bag.

             
“What have they done to you?” Marian said in a voice below a whisper. She reached out and lightly touched his cheeks. His pitted skin reminded her of a crushed grape. Her remorse over the botched attempts to get him home reared up again.

             
He stared hard at her before he spoke. “Hogtied me to the pole, Ma. Ran screaming for the shaving cream, nicked my head, beat me senseless with a wooden golf club,” he said, looking into her mournful eyes. “There was cheering and singing. They were singing ‘A Nation Once Again’ before I passed out.”

             
She touched his tender face, and she wondered about those boys who watched the beating from the sidelines, those who left him there naked, the rain bucketing. The blessed drops had soothed his parched mouth, and when the harsh light coming from the high walls of Dormo Three was switched off, he said he dared to loosen the rope around his wrists. He slid down the pole, lay there in the drowning grass, and watched the darkness descend. He wondered if there were any amongst them who were aware that their silence at his torture would surely kill them.

             
Marian angled her way into t
he middle of the seat and held
Johanna and Adrian close to her, despair and clarity entwined as she felt their arms around her.

             
“Things will be better now.” She whispered her words softly into Adrian’s ear, and then told him the details of the escape plan.

             
But Brother Ryder had noticed Brother Mack’s light and then heard the rustle of footsteps. From his window, he glimpsed a woman and a boy limping behind the buildings and he himself fled to the back gates. He ran to the infirmary, and there was Adrian’s bed, empty. Brother Mack was mulling about.

             
“You better not be in on this, Mack.”

             
“No more than you are, Driver,” Mack countered. “You might need your golf club where you’ll be going. You’ll have no more use for it here.”

             
Down to the bakery Brother Ryder went, and the baker Bernard

Donnelly told him that he hadn’t seen Adrian but that the light was on when he arrived.

             
Enraged, Brother Ryder ordered all guards, both in the front of the school and the back, to scan the gro
unds for evidence of an
escape. The police were phoned and a cab called. Ryder would go to Donnybrook, he raged, to retrieve the bastard himself.

             
Traveling at high speeds through the silent night, Ryder arrived at the Ellis residence. There he found a nun, dressed in her full habit and wimple. Ryder bowed respectfully to the Sister before launching into his tirade and asked to speak at once with Mrs. Ellis.

             
“Sister” Barbara explained politely that Marian and her daughter had gone to see the
Fairy Queen
.

             
Ryder’s face momentarily confused and contorted at the comic book reference that was designed to infuriate him. Barely four o’clock in the morning, could it be any more obvious that this lying, stone-faced woman was there just to taunt him? Filled with poisonous venom, Ryder left for the police station, hoping like hell that the security guards or police had news of the missing boy’s capture.

At the appointed morning hour of three o’clock, a security guard and personal friend of Officer George Conrad’s retrieved Father Brennan from a hiding place inside the prison refectory and led him to Ben’s cell. There they would wait for the bail bondsman, who lived in a cottage just outside the prison gates. Privately, without any publicity, Ben would sign the bail bond.

             
This time, there could be no leaks. There could be no press following them to the docks.

             
One slip up, one lazy link. A faulty alarm clock. Simple human error, and their plan would go awry. Where was the bondsman? No one wanted to show their apprehension, but as the minutes passed, and the hour of four approached, Father Brennan broke out in sweat.

             
“Fuck it all,” Officer Conrad said, all formalities aside. “We have no more time. Get us out of here.
I’m releasing you on your own
recognizance.”

             
The guard escorted them through a maze of underground tunnels to the ground level parking lot of the prison. There, Mr. O’Rourke waited in a friend’s taxicab to take them to Dun Laoghaire Harbor.

             
“We’ve missed our mark,” Ben said. “We took too long. We should have–”

             
“No worries, we’re on our way,” Father Brennan interrupted him. But he, too, had his doubts about whether they would make it.

             
“Speed it up, would you,” Ben said, and O’Rourke nodded.

He threw his cigarette out the window and sped through the foggy streets.

As they sat quietly waiting for Ben in the dark, Marian lightly moved her fingers up and down Adrian’s arm and Jo’s shoulder in soothing, circular motions.

             
There was only blackness now. Out the hazy window of the cab, Marian became acutely aware of the buzz of silence in the air. She no longer worried if Adrian was to be set free. Her eyes were trying to shut and she began to drift into a semi-sleep, her son’s arm stretched around her.

             
She awoke from the murkiness to the
chjj, chjj
sounds of barn swallows and searched through the dark for the source of their song. Listening to their music, Marian nestled her face into Adrian’s neck, aware of the synchronicity of the birds’ voices and her own breath. She looked beyond the plate glass window through the gauzy gray and made out the sensual outlines of hedgerow bushes, watched the ghostly light ascend from the dark
ness. As the minutes crept on,
a nameless calm descended upon them.

             
Marian escorted her two children from the car. She held tightly onto their hands, whispering to find courage, assuring them that the pain would pass away. Marian looked at her watch, looked up and down the empty streets along the harbor. Ben and Father Brennan had still not arrived.

             
“We have to get you on board,” she said,
and they began to walk
toward the docks. There was no time or energy left for sentiment. Adrian had been filled in on the plan, and she promised him that custody would be granted or, well before a year was out, she herself would come and get him.

             
Marian handed Adrian a bag of sandwiches and a container of raspberry lemonade. She stuffed into
his shirt pocket a photograph
of them at Dollymount Beach. Johanna’s arms were around his neck. She pushed a wad of bills forward. “Find a safe place for this,”

she said. “We’ll send more.”

             
Ben and Father Brennan’s cab finally arrived at the docks. They shot out of the car and rushed toward the three shadowy figures in the distance. Ben sprinted ahead but knew not to call out to them.

             
Adrian stopped and turned. He watched his father rush toward them, his great-uncle gasping behind.

             
Finally Ben stood awkwardly next to his son. They eyed each other tentatively. Marian couldn’t help but notice how gaunt and exhausted her husband looked. Adrian put the cross dangling around his neck under his shirt.

             
“I’m sorry, Da,” Adrian said, but his da hugged him.

             
“Shush.” Ben kissed him softly on the temple. “I’ve always wanted you, Adrian. Always wanted you, you must remember that. Go on. The boat won’t wait.” His voice was hoarse.

             
Father Brennan handed Marian the union card for Adrian and a union pin that would give him legitimacy if there was trouble on the ship. The priest made the sign of the cross and left.

             
Crews of rough boys from the Ringsend gang were already working on the docks, emptying coal boats, two and three thousand ton-ers, up to their eyes in coal. Their young features were buried beneath the grime. On the stern of a large steel vessel, Koliknova Coal was engraved in onyx block letters.