Heaps of Trouble (12 page)

After quietly pointing out to me that if I had continued without being apprehended, I would most certainly have missed out on my confirmation, he gently asked me why I had mitched from school. I was completely dumbfounded by his question and realised that if I blurted out that it was because of him, I would have nothing to back up my statement. I took the only course of action left to me; I shrugged my shoulders, said nothing and continued to stare at the ground. When he and the mother had exhausted every conceivable reason they could think of, the father piped up with, ‘Is it Mr Gleeson, Son?'

Hesitating for a second, with my mind screaming, ‘Yes, it's because of that bad-tempered fucker', I looked directly at Gleeson and shook my head. I could have sworn I glimpsed relief in his eyes. This seemed to alter the tempo of the meeting, because Gleeson jumped up and, rubbing his hands together, said, ‘Well, all kids go through stages like this in their lives and since he hasn't missed that much schooling, we can certainly make sure he will be ready to make his confirmation. I'll give him extra homework, which he can do in the evenings to catch up on whatever he has missed.' And with that we were being shown the door. Feeling a lot better as I left than I had when I arrived, I suddenly remembered on our way back to the car that I wasn't out of the mess just yet. I still had the small matter of the ‘non-existent' bike to contend with.

But I was, for the second time in as many hours, surprised by the mother's reaction and concluded that the father must have already tackled the subject with her. To my astonishment all she said was that I should reclaim the bike from wherever I had stored it so that she could look at it, and then she asked, ‘Do you think me a complete fool altogether?' She had spotted the grease marks from the bicycle chain on my trousers and had known for months that I was riding a bike.

I can't say that anything changed in the classroom, nor did my fear lessen. The only thing I learned from the ‘mitching episode' was to live with the fear – and that running away wasn't going to solve the problem. However it was one thing preaching this, and an entirely different matter practising it. Still, I got up every day and, conquering my foreboding, I went to school.

*

Eventually, the big day of our confirmation dawned. Over breakfast we were flabbergasted to hear on the morning news that the IRA had blown up Nelson's Pillar in O'Connell Street during the night. It apparently scared the living daylights out of one of the few witnesses to the event, a taxi driver, whose interview was replayed over and over on every broadcast.

‘Jaysus, I don't know how I wasn't killed. I had just driven by when the blast blew the fag outta me mouth, the noise of the explosion deafened me, and with the falling column following me up the street…shure, I thought I was gonna be crushed. And not a window on O'Connell Street broken. Can you believe that, wha'?'

When we arrived at school around ten o'clock, our pending confirmation forgotten with the excitement of events in the early hours of the morning, Gleeson formed us into our well-rehearsed positions. He checked us all like a sergeant-major getting his squad ready for inspection, verifying that we were correctly dressed and had our badges pinned to our lapels – badges that announced to the world that we were going to make our ‘confo'.

With the news being passed from pupil to pupil that at two o'clock the Irish army were going to blow up the stump of what was left of old Nelson, we headed down Leeson Street to rendezvous with the girls from the Loreto Convent. They took up the rear, flanked by a company of nuns, and Gleeson took the lead with his head up in the air, swinging his umbrella to some rhythm that was pumping out in his own mind. En route to the cathedral our long column stopped traffic at every crossing.

When arrived and entered the pews, Charley and I ended up on the outside adjacent to the aisle. With the organ blasting out some hymn or other and flanked by a whole colony of priests, the bishop was led down the aisle to begin the ceremony. To our horror it was to include a High Mass, which meant that the bishop had better get a move on, as none of us wanted to miss the action at two o'clock on O'Connell Street. About halfway through the ceremony the bishop slowly made his way up the church, stopping at every pew and asking the first two occupants biblical questions. I nearly fainted with fright when he halted in front of us. He asked Charley some really daft question, like who made the world, then asked me mine. He glared at me because I had forgotten to join my two hands together in prayer, and in panic I rattled off an entirely incorrect answer to his question. This made his head jump back in total disbelief. For a second I thought his hat was going to fly off, but before he could say anything, with my face on fire from embarrassment, I babbled out the answer he wanted to hear and, patting me on the head, he moved on up the church.

I sat there thinking I could feel the eyes of the whole church on my back because I had stuffed up the answer, and so the rest of the ceremony passed in a haze. The only recollection I have is that when I left the church after the event I wondered why I didn't feel any different from when I had entered. We had been taught that, during the ritual, the tongues of knowledge from the Holy Spirit were supposed to descend from heaven and enter our heads, filling us with enlightenment.

Feeling a little bit cheated, I set off towards O'Connell Street, which had been blocked off with barricades on the southern end of O'Connell Bridge. Pushing myself through the mass of people who had gathered to watch the army do its job, I ended up at the very front with an uninterrupted view of what was left of Nelson's Pillar. A little after two, with an army loudhailer starting a countdown, a sudden hush descended over the crowds: ‘three, two, one…', and an immense cloud of white smoke enveloped the structure, followed seconds later by a sound like rolling thunder that washed over us and passed up the street. As the smoke cleared, revealing a pile of rubble scattered all over the road, people all around me exclaimed in excited voices:

‘Jaysus look, they've busted all the windows in Clery's shop.'

‘Bleeden' hell, you're right, and look, they smashed the GPO's as bleeden' well!'

‘Jaysus, they should have gotten the IRA boyo's back to finish the job, they blew the whole bleeden' thing up without cracking a pane!'

‘Jaysus, you're bluddy right there.'

Leaving them to their chatter, I pushed my way out, walked into Dame Street and caught the bus home. There I was met by Catherine, who was waiting at the hall door for my return. Rushing to greet me, she threw her arms around my waist, announcing that we were to have our photograph taken together and that she would be four next week. Catherine's birthday was celebrated with a ceremony that the father had started with me at the same age: he stood her against the door dividing the kitchen from the shop, ensuring that her back was straight. He then marked her head height with the point of his pen and, moving her away, drew a line on the door with a ruler at the mark and wrote, ‘Catherine, aged 4.' Catherine admired her height and pointed out that she was as tall as I was at the same age.

This led to a discussion as to how tall she would grow eventually, with the mother pointing out that her father was a tall man. The father said that, as all his family had always held on to their hair, the odds were that she would never go bald. This caused the mother to subconsciously finger Catherine's head as if to assure herself that she had a healthy head of the stuff.

A couple of weeks later I pedalled home for the holidays and flung my school bag under the dark recesses of the shop's counter, praying to the heavens that I wouldn't have to look at that bag again for at least another twelve weeks. To celebrate the occasion, I took Catherine up the street before the mother could stop us, and bought her an ice cream in the seated section of the Italian chipper on Tirconnell Road. Watching her enjoying every mouthful, I reflected on the mother saying that she was not going to ruin Catherine as the father had ruined me at the same age.

I realised that my sister had the ability to enjoy every small treat that came her way with a pleasure that affected anyone lucky enough to be in her presence. I wondered what sort of brother I was going to be to Catherine; would she ever get married and would she have any children? Particularly since having kids seemed to involve the kind of shenanigans we had witnessed the night of the rocket on the bus.

The father had gone back on the booze, and the mother announced this to me not as if it were a condemnation, but as if it had been an agreement between the two of them. They had decided that he wasn't really an alcoholic after all, she confided. That he could, in fact, have a drink. And, since he was only drinking beer, well, there was no issue. And furthermore, the doctors didn't know what they had been talking about anyway. I reminded her of the AA meetings that we had attended together and how we had begged and begged him to quit. About the tears, and worry of him drinking us out of house and home, and all of the whiskey bottles that we had found hidden all over the house, and how the doctor had warned us that the father could never again touch the stuff. She kept repeating that he had been off it for a good while and, if he wanted, he could go off it again, but since he didn't have a problem, it wouldn't be necessary. That night the two of them went across the road to the upstairs lounge of the club, where they could keep an eye on the place and I could look after Catherine.

I found it incredible to think of the powers of persuasion that the man could use whenever there was a suggestion that he might be an alcoholic; if he had put his mind to it, he could have convinced the Pope that Christ didn't turn the water into wine at that wedding. And if there was ever a mention of what the doctors at St Pat's had said, he always responded that he had had to agree with them, otherwise they would not have let him out. Or some other story along those lines, depending on his frame of mind when the issue came up.

However I have to admit that over the following summer he showed none of his previous symptoms of heavy drinking. A typical one was that he would answer in French when any of us asked him a simple question, such as ‘What time is it?', or when someone told him ‘dinner's ready'; and the more he was under the influence, the more mixed up his French became, until the time when I asked him if he wanted to watch telly and even I understood that his response translated as ‘It is ten minutes past eight.'

So perhaps he had been right after all: all the doctors had been fools in their diagnosis and he could give it up any time he wanted. Perhaps I was just too sceptical. But I couldn't help thinking about the answer that the psychiatrist at St Pat's had given me when I had asked the question, what is the difference between an alcoholic and a boozer? With Boy-o-Boy springing to my mind, since he often gave it up for several weeks at a time. His answer to was, ‘An alcoholic drinks to live, while a drinker lives to drink.'

I was still unsure into which category the father fitted.

To the present day the method of parking a car around St Stephen's Green has never changed: nose towards the kerb, with the arse parts sticking out. It works quite well, especially if all of the cars are roughly the same length. Coming out of Leeson Street one day, I pedalled like mad along the car-park side of the Green. I was hemmed in close to the car boots by traffic whipping past me on the outside and, glancing over at a car that was passing close to my leg, I failed to look ahead and notice that one parked car was sticking out further than the rest. I crashed right into its tail-lights, which stopped my bike dead in its tracks. I, however, continued, with my legs still driving imaginary pedals, until I came to a sudden halt as I met the asphalt on the far side, my right kneecap absorbing most of the impact.

Climbing to my feet, with the kneecap already blowing up like a balloon and turning an odd shade of purple, I picked up the bike (whose handlebars were rotated at a slight angle from the impact) and surveyed the damage to the car. Well, for one thing, the car's owner was certainly going to be annoyed when he returned, for all that remained of his right-hand rear-light section was lying on the ground in a shower of red, yellow, and white pieces of smashed glass that winked back at me. And whereas the owner might previously have boasted about the fine lines of his car's bodywork, that was now interrupted by a very deep dent, compliments to the handlebars.

Expecting to be apprehended at any moment by someone looking for the culprit, I grabbed my school bag (now lying in the middle of the road where passing cars were dodging it), collected the bike, and attempted to beat a hasty retreat from the immediate area. But, as I mounted the machine again, I nearly fell off for the second time. It was clear that my right leg was not responding to the instructions being transmitted from the brain.

I straightened the handlebars by jamming the front wheel into the railings of St Michael's church and tugging on them until they were re-aligned, and then pedalled off home where I managed to hide my injury from the mother for the whole evening. But when I woke up the following morning my right knee had seized up to such an extent that I could not stand up unless I hopped on one foot. Catherine raced off to call the mother who, using her nursing skills, decided that while it was not busted, the damage was sufficient to keep me from school for at least a week. After they had taken me to the dispensary for Dr Dillon to confirm the mother's diagnosis and strap up my knee, the parents decided that we should make the most of my incapacity and the Indian summer we were experiencing, so all of us headed down to visit the grandmother in Tramore for the remainder of the week.

The weather was fantastic for the whole week, with not a breath of wind blowing, allowing us to sunbathe in the sanctuary of our little cul-de-sac without worry of being interrupted by any passers-by. My knee had healed perfectly and we spent our days either swimming in the sea, or lounging around outside the caravan. We were parked at the end of the cul-de-sac, on the left-hand side, leaving a 4-foot gap in front of the door that faced the ditch. There was also a space of roughly 20 to 30 feet between the front of the caravan and the berm that blocked us off from the main road, with about the same distance from the right-hand side of the caravan to the opposite ditch. At the end of the hitch on the caravan rested a yellow Calor gas bottle connected to the van with a long rubber hose.

The morning of the 20 September 1966 promised that the day would be as hot as the last days had been; there had not been a breath of air throughout the night and, as the day advanced, it became hotter still. An eerie silence descended on the place, as if the birds themselves were too drowsy to announce their presence. The grandmother was sitting indoors, and the father had removed one of the foam seats that doubled as a bed and placed it on the ground for Catherine to lie on, directly between the gas bottle and the berm. As soon as I spotted Catherine getting what I considered to be a prime lounging area, I felt jealous and asked the mother if the two of us could go and play. She was sitting by the right-hand side of the caravan in a deck chair and refused my request. I was the one, she commented, who had crashed off the bike (which she had never wanted me to have in the first place) and bashed my knee (still supposed to be injured), so I could just sit down and behave myself. Grabbing an empty milk crate, I retrieved an old comic from the back of the car and stomped over to the far side of the clearing, directly opposite Catherine. I watched the father retrieve his Primus stove from the boot of the old Popular and set about boiling a kettle to make a pot of tea. This stove was his pride and joy and was about a foot square, with a fold-up lid that acted as a windbreak when opened and a little holding tank for the pint of methylated spirits on which it ran. It had only a single burner ring and there was barely enough room on that for an average-sized kettle. Once it was lit, it produced a small blue flame that would eventually bring the kettle to the boil, as long as you were very patient and not gasping for a cup.

I watched him, over the top of my comic, as he went through the ritual of preparing the little stove for its task, which involved priming the thing by pumping up and down on a little piston that was fitted to the side. He glanced at Catherine, who appeared to be asleep on her makeshift sunbathing bed, then stood up, retrieved a box of matches from his pocket, bent down, and struck a match.

A ball of bright yellow flame whooshed directly towards me right across the clearing, with a sound like an approaching express train, and physically plucked me off the crate I was sitting on, blasting me against the ditch. Temporarily blinded and deafened by the blast, I picked myself off the ground, trying to see through eyes that could barely make out a grey, out-of-focus landscape. The clearing was still, as if time had stopped and I was the only person capable of movement.

The first of my senses to recover were those of smell and taste, and my mouth seemed to be filled with the flavour of burned smoke. Then a sickly sweet smell of burning flesh and hair filled my nostrils, as if somebody somewhere was overcooking the fat of a pig they had left on the fire for too long.

Looking down, I saw the skin on my chest was spitting and bubbling with the flames shifting up and down my torso; sensing a tickling sensation around my ankles, I also noticed that I was standing in a sea of yellow flames that were dancing across the ground. Finally I realised that I was on fire and remembered the small stream that wound its way through the woods a couple of hundred yards down the road. My body was screaming at my brain to put the fire out as I dashed through the gap in the berm – and ran, and ran, and ran, not even realising that I was running with bare feet on the gravel that made up the hard shoulder of the road.

Reaching the small stream, I ran into the water, unable to register its icy chill, only that it was wet. Then I threw myself down, ignoring the sharp stones on the river bed, and rolled over and over until I put out the flames, causing steam to rise from my skin. My body now seemed to be without feeling and, still not comprehending exactly what had happened, I decided to return to the caravan in the hope that someone there could explain the last five minutes.

I ran back up the road and arrived just in time to see the father helping the mother into the back seat; she was cradling a bundle shrouded in a blanket. He spotted me just as he was getting into the driver's seat and shouted that if I wanted to go with them, I should hurry up and get into the car straight away. I couldn't hear him properly because my ears were still ringing with a high-pitched buzzing noise and I was barely able to see his wild-looking face with my still half-blinded eyes. But I made out that he was frantically gesturing at me and pointing to the passenger door, so I ran towards it.

I climbed into the back seat and, for the first time, realised that it was Catherine who was wrapped in the blanket that the mother was cradling. She was very quiet and, looking directly at me with her large, grey eyes, she smiled at me as if she had seen something amusing. Looking down at myself, I noticed for the first time that what I could see of my body was, for some reason, completely black, as if I had spent the day working in a coal mine. And the pair of shorts I had been wearing were so badly tattered that I was amazed the mother hadn't given out to me about ruining them – and why were we driving with all of the windows open?

The mother was talking over father's shoulder from the back seat and, as some degree of my hearing began to return, I could hear her say that she was not too happy about Catherine and could he drive faster. The father was bare-chested I noticed: with that, I passed out, dreaming that we were all just going for a drive. I came to with a shuddering of the wheels, as if we had bumped across some sort of high kerb. For a few seconds I thought that the dream was reality, and that whatever had happened to me was the dream, until I was once again over-powered by the stinking smell of burning hair and flesh. I wondered why my lips hurt, why was I so cold, and why did my face feel so stiff?

The father pulled into a petrol station on the outskirts of Waterford to ask directions to Ardkeen Hospital, roaring his question through the passenger window at some people who were standing at the petrol pumps. They responded with hand signals and, without acknowledging their assistance, he bounced and bumped his way back onto the road. Within minutes we roared through the gates of the hospital and pulled up in front of the casualty department. There, before the car had even come to a stop, a nurse, doctor and two orderlies ran out to us. The father shrugged off their offers of assistance and reached into the back seat, gently lifting Catherine out and holding her to his chest, then running in through the doors with the hospital staff chasing after him, followed closely by the mother.

Climbing out, I thought that I should also head in after them, since I was beginning to be aware of a pain, the like of which I had never experienced before. Just inside the double doors of the entrance a wide corridor ran off into the distance, and to the right of this was a room with a large glass window, through which I could see that Catherine had been laid on a surgical table. They had removed the blanket from around her and, to my amazement, I noticed that she was completely naked.

As I walked into the room, I was torn between wondering what I was doing there and if I should flee before I was spotted, and bewilderment as to where Catherine's clothes had gone. But even in the short distance from the car to the room feelings had begun to return to my body, sending messages to the brain that somehow I had been injured – and then the pain hit me.

It attacked everywhere at once; I felt as if my whole body was cooking slowly over an open coal fire. Still nobody had noticed me and so I climbed up onto the long row of cupboards that ran under the window. Putting my left hand to my head, I realised that I had no hair and, touching my scalp, bawled out with the pain. That made everyone at the table jump and turn in my direction.

First she begged someone to give me something for the pain – and then the mother told me to shut up and be quiet, couldn't I see that my sister was seriously injured? I tried to curtail my sobbing and shook with cold and fear, since I had not yet come to terms with what had transpired. What did it matter what had happened to Catherine? Could they not see how much
I
was hurting? The room became darker and the voices faded away in the distance as, lying down on the counter top, I drifted off into merciful darkness.

I found myself in a deep well that was completely black and, miles above my head, was a very bright light surrounded by a dark rim as if the sun was shining high above in the sky. It bathed the area above me with light that only penetrated a little way down into the void where I was. All of a sudden a head appeared over the rim and smiled down at me. Realising that it was Catherine, I wondered what she was doing up there and, more importantly, why was I in this hole with no hope of getting out?

The well was very cold and there was a smell of rotting eggs. I was still freezing cold when I became aware that I was in a bed – that much I could tell from the feeling of starched linen against my back – but I had no idea if it was day or night, since my eyes were covered with heavy bandages. The smell was over-powering. It was not now of rotting eggs, but of burnt hair, and it seemed to be coming from my own forehead, which felt tight and wrinkled. There was movement in the room and I heard my father's voice. I felt hands carefully turn me over on my side, then the sharp jab of a needle being stuck into my backside.

I was back in my well again, looking up at the bright light that never changed in intensity. But now it was hurting my eyes and I was engulfed by an overwhelming fear because I was convinced I was going to die. I knew that I didn't want to die because I was frightened of dying. But I was slipping further down into my hole in the ground, and I kept on losing the bright light within the rim high above, which caused me to panic. I had the feeling that, if I lost this, I was doomed to spend the rest of my existence in this black void. But the light remained. I couldn't get rid of it and it began to give me a constant headache. No matter how tightly I tried shutting my eyes, the light still burned through as if burning a hole in the back of my head. And the smell was always in the background, sometimes exploding to the fore and overpowering me with its stench.

The bed was rolling; I could feel movement and my first thought was that least I was being transferred away from the bright light and the awful stench of burning hair. But the light and the smell followed me along a corridor that seemed to go on forever. Doors banged against the side of the bed when we passed through, as if the bed itself had been used as a battering-ram. Voices instructed my bed-pushers to gently lift me up and place me on an ice-cold slab in a room that felt beautifully cool. A woman's voice told me to be very still because they were going to X-ray me – and not to worry, as I was going to be alright.