Authors: Paul Murray
‘It’s a confidentiality clause. No doubt you’ll be familiar with these from your days in the City. In signing, you consent
by law not to disclose sensitive information pertaining to school affairs, including what we have discussed here today.’
Howard gapes back at him stupidly. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Merely a precaution, Howard, making sure we’ve got all our angles covered. No need to rush into it right away. Take it home
with you, think it over. If you want to turn it down, do the honorable thing, I can’t stop you. I’m sure you’ll find a position
elsewhere easily enough. Gather there are vacancies in St Anthony’s at the moment. Teacher got stabbed there just last week.’
‘I can’t believe you’re doing this to me, Greg,’ Howard says softly.
‘Like I say, Howard, it’s up to you. Here at Seabrook we take care of each other. Play by the rules, listen to your captain,
and we’ll always find a place on the team for you. But if you can’t stick by your school when it has a bad bounce of the ball,
why should it stick by you?’
With numb fingers, Howard leafs again through the pages of dense, recondite text till he arrives at the last, where he sees
his own name, with a line above it for his signature, and the date already added. He can feel the surreptitious and lowered
gazes on him, pressing against him like bodies in a crowded elevator.
In the closeness Father Green’s voice rings out like a bell, in a merry sing-song: ‘And will
God
be apprised of what has taken place?’
An irritated mutter passes around the table. The priest rephrases his question. ‘I am merely asking, as a matter of protocol,
whether on the Last Day, when God demands of us our sins, our confidentiality agreement requires that we keep silent then
too?’
‘With all due respect, Father –’ the Automator visibly annoyed ‘– now is not the time.’
‘You are quite right, of course,’ Father Green agrees. ‘I daresay we shall have plenty of opportunity to consider it, when
we are condemned to eternal hellfire.’
The quick-eyed, foxy priest turns to him exasperated. ‘Why must you always be so
medieval
?’
‘Because this is
sin
!’ The priest’s bony hand pounds on the table so that the teacups in their saucers and the plastic biros jump, and a raging
eye roves over the table to fix each of them in turn. ‘It is
sin
,’ he repeats, ‘a most egregious sin against an innocent child! We may hide it from ourselves with our nice talk of the good
of the many. But we cannot hide it from the Lord God!’
For the rest of the day, while school continues at some invisible remove, Howard wanders alone in a clammy, evil fog. Farley
asks if he wants to go for a drink after work, and Howard can barely look him in the eye. With every moment he feels the secret
worming deeper into him, making itself at home, like some monstrous parasite.
When these matters arose in the past
: the words spoken so casually, a parent explaining the change of seasons to a child. Is this what he’s been living in all
along? Old stories rise up from the depths of his mind – the straying hands of this priest, the sadistic tendencies of another,
doors that were kept locked, eyes that lingered for too long in the changing room. Stories, though; stories were all he’d
ever taken them for, idle gossip made up to pass the time, like everything in Seabrook. Because otherwise how could those
men still be walking around? Wearing Pentecostal doves in their lapels? Surely at that level of hypocrisy God or whoever would
be compelled to swing into action! Now it’s as if a panel has been slid back and he’s glimpsed the secret machinery of the
world, the grown-up world, in which matters arise – hotel doors are pushed open, pills are dropped into glasses of Coke, bodies
are laid bare, while outside life goes on oblivious – and are dispatched again, by small cadres of men in rooms, the priests
in their conclave, the Automator and his legal team, it doesn’t really make any difference. A little white lie for the common
good. That’s how we keep it on the road.
His last period is free; today he doesn’t feel like staying around, so he gathers his things and makes his way out. At home
he unsheathes the contract from its envelope and lays it on the table, from where it seems to glow at him, polar-white.
Halley’s phone rings out three times before she answers it. When she does it’s a shock to hear her voice – outside his own
head, independent of his memory. He realizes he’s imagined her suspended in some atemporal state; only now does it hit him
that in the moment before his call, and all the moments before that for the last weeks, she’s been doing other things, living
through days that he knows nothing about, just as before he met her there were thousands more days as real to her as the hand
before her face that he will never have an inkling of, in which he never figured even as an idea.
‘Howard?’
‘Yes.’ He hasn’t planned out what he was going to say. ‘It’s been a while,’ he manages finally. ‘How are you? How have you
been?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Are you still staying with Cat? Is it okay?’
‘It’s fine.’
‘And work, how’s that going, it’s all…?’
‘Work’s fine. What do you want, Howard?’
‘I just wanted to see how you were.’
‘Well, I’m fine,’ she says. The ensuing silence has the conclusive air of a raised guillotine.
‘Me too,’ Howard says miserably. ‘Although I don’t know if you heard, we’ve had some trouble at the school, this boy, he was
in my History class…’
‘I heard.’ The ice in her voice melts, if only fractionally. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Thanks.’ He has an impulse to tell her everything, about Coach, the Board meeting, the confidentiality clause. But at the
last second he recoils, not sure it’ll do him any favours at this point to show her the contaminated world he’s living in.
Instead he blurts out, ‘I made a mistake. That’s what I called to say. I’ve been a fool. I’ve done such terrible things. I
hurt you. I’m sorry, Halley, I’m so sorry.’
A single word, ‘Okay,’ like a barren atoll in the oceanic silence.
‘Well, I mean, what do you think?’
‘What do I think?’
‘Can you forgive me?’ Spoken out loud the question sounds laughably misjudged, as if he’d started quoting
Casablanca
at her. Halley doesn’t laugh, though. ‘What about your other woman?’ she says in an indifferent, uninflected voice. ‘Have
you checked this with her?’
‘Oh,’ he waves his hand dismissively, as if the past were a smoky image that could be dispelled at a stroke. ‘That’s over.
It wasn’t anything. It wasn’t real.’
She doesn’t reply. Pacing distractedly back and forth over the room, he says, ‘I want to try again, Halley. I’ve been thinking
– we could get out of here. Start over somewhere else. Back to the States even, we could get married, and move back to the
States. To New York. Or wherever you wanted to go.’
In fact this is a plan he has thought of only now – but as he speaks it sounds so perfect! A new, committed life, somewhere
far away from Seabrook! In one fell swoop all their problems would be solved!
But when she answers, although a measure of affection has returned to it, her voice sounds sorrowful and weary. ‘When your
hand’s in the fire, right?’
‘What?’
She sighs. ‘You’re always looking for ways out of things, Howard. Escape routes out of your own life. That’s why you liked
me, because I wasn’t from here, and I seemed to offer something new. When I stopped being new, you slept with that woman,
whoever she was. Now because you don’t have me I look like a way out again. You have something to aim for, you have a quest
to get me back. But don’t you see, if you did get me back the quest would be over and you’d be bored again.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ he says.
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because it’ll be different, because I
feel
different.’
‘It can’t just be feelings. How can I trust my life to a feeling?’
‘What else is there?’
‘There has to be something,’ she says. He can’t think of anything to say to this, and while he is searching about, she speaks
again. ‘The point is that life isn’t a quest, Howard. And it’s not the kind of fire you can take your hand out of. You need
to accept that, and start dealing with it.’
The hostility has dropped from her voice now and her tone is the plaintive mixture of urgency and pity of someone trying to
save a self-destructive friend. Howard waits for a moment after she has finished talking and then says softly, ‘And what about
us?’
The hum of the empty phone line is like a knife twisting between his ribs.
‘I don’t know, Howard,’ she says at last, in a small sad voice. ‘I need time. I need a little bit of time to work out where
I’m going. I’ll call you in a little while, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Okay. Take care, Howard. Bye.’ The line clicks dead.
The day after the Board Meeting, Father Green fails to arrive for his morning classes. The official word is that he’s been
taken ill, but this is confuted almost instantly by a sighting of the priest lugging boxes down Our Lady’s Hall, hale and
hearty, or as hale and hearty as he ever is. He doesn’t turn up for his afternoon classes either, and then the news emerges
– from no particular source, it’s just
there
, floating in the ether – that he has retired from teaching to concentrate on his charity work.
This is greeted with incredulity. The priest’s loathing of the French language, and indeed of his students, has never been
too closely disguised; still, most expected that he would keep teaching until he died, if only in order to spite them, and
perhaps himself too (of those, more than a few privately believed he would never actually die). But now, just like that, he’s
gone, and right in the middle of term-time; although of course he’s still there, carrying in deliveries for his hampers, carrying
out hampers to his car, making runs to St Patrick’s Villas and the bleak housing estates to the north and west of the city.
All very strange and sudden; and then someone remembers that on the day Skippy died he’d been in Father Green’s office packing
hampers, and they put two and two together.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, duh, what do you think? After a million years’ teaching he’s just quit overnight, with no one to replace him? There’s
no way they’d let him do that unless some serious shit was going down.’
‘Yeah, and remember it was like that actual
day
, and there was no one there except Skippy and Cujo…’
‘Holy shit…’
‘But wait, come on, if he did do it, they’d hardly just let him get away with it, would they?’
A moment’s thought elicits the realization that this is
exactly
the kind of thing They would do. The more the boys think about it, the more they see Father Green making his rounds, with
his eternal air of impassive rectitude, of existing on some higher spiritual plane in which they feature as free-roaming coagulations
of dirt, the more the rumour crystallizes into certainty.
‘This is bollocks,’ Geoff Sproke, fists clenched, avows for the umpteenth time. ‘This is total fucking bollocks.’
It is total bollocks; but who’s going to do anything about it? Geoff, who cried at the end of
Free Willy 2
? Niall, always cast as the heroine in school plays? Bob Shambles, with his collection of naturally occurring hexagons? Victor
Hero, probably the least aptly named boy in history?
No, not them, and not Ruprecht either. Ruprecht’s mouth is usually full of doughnut these days, and even in those rare moments
when he is not eating, he has little to say. He does not scribble equations on scraps of paper; he does not check the computer
for signals from outer space; the upstretched Ruprecht arm, a landmark for so many teachers, disappears from the classroom
horizon, and when Lurch gets stuck solving a problem, he merely watches, chewing his gum impassively as the maths teacher
gets more agitated and the jumble of wrong numbers sprawls gradually over the entire board. It’s the same when someone calls
him a shithead or kicks his arse or punches him in the back of the head; he will stumble but not fall down, and, righting
himself, continue on his way without so much as turning round.
The rest of the gang might well have found these developments worrying, and possibly even done something about it: the thing
is, though, there does not seem to be a gang any more. Without anything actually being said, they have relocated themselves
to opposite sides of the classroom; after lunch, bolted as quickly as its noxiousness will allow, Mario now plays football
in the yard, while Dennis and Niall have taken up smoking cigarettes
with Larry Bambkin and Eamon Sweenery by the lake in Seabrook Park, and Geoff has succumbed at last to the lure of Lucas Rexroth’s
role-playing group, and spends his lunch hour exploring the dread Mines of Mythia in the guise of Mejisto the Elf. When their
paths do cross, in the corridor or the Study Hall or the Rec Room, they feel embarrassed without quite knowing why; the not-knowing
makes them feel more embarrassed still, and resentful of the other for making them feel this way, and so before long they
go from avoiding to actively persecuting each other – flicking ears, mocking peccadilloes, spilling to third parties secrets
entrusted in happier times, e.g. Dennis in the Ref the other evening, ‘Hey, everyone, know what Geoff’s afraid of? Jelly!’,
brandishing a gelatinous bowl at him as Geoff squeaks and cringes. ‘What’s the matter, Geoff? Too
wobbly
for you?’, till Geoff, pushed past the brink, blurts out, ‘Dennis’s stepmum isn’t his stepmum, she’s his real mum, he just
pretends she isn’t because he hates her!’ Stunned silence from Dennis, giggles and jeers from Mitchell Gogan and the others
at his table, though ultimately they don’t care either way.
It’s as if Skippy had been one of those insignificant-looking pins that it turns out holds the whole machine together; or
maybe it’s that each of them is secretly blaming the others for saying or doing something that brought this whole thing down
on them, or not saying or not doing something that might have stopped it. Whatever the reason, the less they see of each other,
the better, and Ruprecht, who was always more Skippy’s friend than theirs anyway, is allowed to continue on his downward spiral
without interruption.