Sexy Times in God's School

As O-Level exam time approached the pressure was on to perform well as pupils, and the pressure was on for the Saint Malachy’s authorities to make sure that all the boys who left the blue gates for the last time did well as men, too. They had to address sex, and they did so in the last term of fifth year, before they lost that last chance to teach purity of mind and body to hormonal Catholic schoolboys. Besides them calling it, “a beautiful union of man and woman” in the old Church of The Holy Plaster Shower, sex was never mentioned in the teachings that Fathers McGarry, O’Hagan, and Patton made from on high. But in Saint Malachy’s there was no escaping what needed to be taught. 

My class, Senior 2B, lined up outside the classroom in C Block, waiting for Mr. Ward to arrive for the Religious Education class. A gentle man, he passed out sweets and threw compliments like his brother, also a teacher, spat out venom and launched desks. He was late, and we stood waiting, hoping for a free period, the precious forty-minute periods that were becoming all the more welcome what with the exams darkening our futures.

“Anyone see Ward today?” shouted someone from the back of the line.

“I did, this morning. Haven’t seen him since.”

“Anyone else see him?” The crowd hushed as a priest walked up to the front of the line.

“Is this Senior 2B?” he asked as he put down his briefcase, grasped the door handle, tried turning it, then fumbled for a key that matched the lock. His fingers and his eyes knew only some of those keys – on any ordinary day he should not have been here.

“Yes, Father.”

“Ah, good,” he said, turning the right key in the right lock, “Okay, follow me.” He led us into the classroom and seamlessly into an Our Father and a Hail Mary. In English.

Clasping his hands in the Learned Man’s fashion behind his back – they must surely teach all priests this stance during their years of instruction in the seminaries, I thought – he stared at a point on the back wall, but no particular point. His hips thrust forward and his clasped hands stretched behind him as he rolled heel to toe, toe to heel, heel to toe. 

“Gentlemen, many of you will be leaving us this year and it is as important that you know how to act in a Christian manner outside of these gates as you have been taught how to be a Christian within these gates. Gloria ab Intus boys, remember? Glory from within.” He pointed to the breast pockets of some boys closest to him before pausing momentarily, rolling from heel to toe, toe to heel, belying a certain discomfort.

“You’ll soon all be men, soon, you boys, leaving here, and that means you’ll be doing things like getting jobs, joining the world of work, marrying and maybe even having children one day, if God spares you.” This was one of our Mum’s favourite expressions, “If God spares you.” I began – around this time – to ponder on the petulant and cavalier nature of this god of ours.

“And there are things to learn about being a man in the outside world that can be taught like anything else in this life. Like mathematics, or English, or Gaelic football.” He paused again, rolled from heel to toe, toe to heel, cleared his throat, absently considered the ageing and browning maps of the world adorning the walls, crisp as old Uncle Arthur’s heavy plastic table-cloths.

By then we knew what was coming. This was to be our first sex education class, and there were sniggers, wry laughs, and whispers, and all around the room there were boys nudging each other in the lets-see-what-we-can-teach-this-guy-’cos-he’s-a-fucking-priest style. The priest stared hard at those sniggering, but uttered not a word of admonishment. The serene priestly gaze – the second thing taught in a seminary, I thought – always was enough to quieten and redden the face of any Catholic, regardless of age or life experience or cockiness.

“Okay then, boys. There’s a lot of vulgarity about sex these days, gentlemen, and you will see it on TV all the time, and that vulgarity demeans three of the most beautiful gifts from God himself. Oh yes, you boys, the gift of sex, the gift of love, and the gift of children. You boys have been here for five years now, and you’ll have all heard the ways sex is described out there on that quad, or up at the field, or up by those handball alleys and, God forbid, in the lavatories, haven’t you?

Thirty heads nodded and a few murmured, “Yes, Father.”

“Yes, well, I’m sure you have, as there’re boys in this school with minds in the sewers, I can tell you, with more muck up there than they have grey matter, boys, let me tell you all now, boys lost to proper Catholic thought and teaching and practice and living.” He stabbed the air at the four losses we suffered, ending wide-eyed in a crouch beside his desk, his finger pointing extreme right. Then he swivelled, following his finger extreme left. 

“Now, they use the words they hear on the street, boys, don’t they? Hmm? Don’t they?” He waited for an answer that would never come from thirty boys guilty of exactly he same thing. 

“It’s not smart, you know, and it impresses no one, does it? So... Here’s what we’ll do.” He cracked open the tin in which he kept his chalks. “Go on then, tell me these words, this slang you’ve all heard out there. Go on, don’t be embarrassed. Say whatever you want.” He took the priestly stance, his chin up; heel to toe, toe to heel.

Silence fell. As I looked about me I could see that there were boys whose lips had pursed because in their full mouths they were hiding laughs, or they were hiding one of the quad or lavatorial vulgarities behind their tongues and their teeth. The priest put his open hand to his ear and leaned forward in the I-can’t-hear-you stance. A second, maybe two, passed.

“Come on now, boys,” the priest encouraged gently, “Don’t tell me that the cat’s got your tongue now. Say whatever you want. Pretend, even, pretend that I’m not a priest, that I’m one of your friends. What about that?” More silence.

“Boys! Come on!”

“Cunt! Sorry, cunt, Father!” shouted Keith McMahon from the back of the room, shattering the stillness with a word powerful enough to mark forever this incredible moment, a word so powerful that it let laughs break free from behind clenched teeth. Keith was the type to relish being the first to say the word cunt to a priest, and there was something about him that hinted at the possibility that he had been waiting on this moment all his life. This one moment most probably would be the only time a priest would invite him to do so. In that moment Keith may have become the only person in the whole of Irish Catholic Ireland ever to say that word – the swear word – to a man of the cloth. It was a moment he could be proud of, a first in our lives, a moment for us all to remember. Keith’s name was etched deeply into memories at that moment as the man who dared say cunt to a priest.

“Okay boys, okay. That’s enough.” The priest calmed the class with his hands, allowing us a glimpse up his wide sleeves, to the darkness of his armpits. “Good. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. McMahon. Always a popular one that, and usually one of the first words offered.” As he spoke he wrote the word on the blackboard.

“Next?”

“Fanny, Father,” shouted Brendy Lynch, also from the back of the room. Brendy offered a wide and very cheeky smile, his wiry, tallish, and short-and-tight-haired presence the very personification of a controlled mischief.

“Father, boobs is one,” added someone excitedly.

“Cock, Father,” said Keith.

“Father, tits, Father,” said Brendy.

The vulgarities came thicker and faster from the boys as they became comfortable with being as honest as they had ever been told they could be without being punished for it.

“Clit, Father,” shouted Brendy, refusing to let Keith eclipse his own lavatorial vulgarities. Brendy was good: in our first year he was the owner and user of a word I never knew existed, and he let the young, blonde temp teacher, Miss McGuckian, know that, strictly speaking, shit was, in fact, excreta, you know. She agreed, congratulating him on his expansive scatological vocabulary. It certainly was impressive. We all knew urine, and felt proud of that knowledge, but only Brendy Lynch had technical knowledge of number twos.

“Well, now, it’s actually called a clitoris, a clit-O-ris, -O-ris, young man, and we’ll be using the proper term so that the whole class knows what we’re talking about, okay? Okay then, any more?” The three syllables of clitoris he said slowly as he wrote the word on the board, and he pronounced the middle syllable twice into the air, the shape of his lips ensuring that we knew even how to spell the word. 

“Do you know what a clit-O-ris is, by the way?” Silence. A gland in the brain, I thought, or a machine of some sort, something devilish, dark and hidden from all mankind. I knew nothing of the whereabouts of mine, and that concerned me. Not only did I not know the word but I was unable also to reach my hand to feel if my clit-O-ris was okay, and clean, able to be taken into public without embarrassment. In fact, I didn't even know if I could touch it. It was a mystery then, something I knew was maybe part of me, but something unknown, like my middle ear, with all its hammers and anvils.

“Well? You can’t use the word without knowing what it means now, boys, can you?” Silence.

“The clit-O-ris, boys, is part of the female body, and you might be well advised to remember what words mean before you consider using them. You would be well advised of that, wouldn’t you?” He paused, looked at his watch, sighed. I paused, thought about this clit-O-ris thing, sighed.

“Okay, anybody else?” The priest began to sound exasperated, we could all tell: he spoke as only exasperated people alone do, stretching their coming-up-to-my-final-words, like he stretched his “anybody.” He knew there were more words coming his way.

“Is fuck one, Father? Like saying 'fuck me' or 'let’s fuck' or 'do you fancy a fuck big girl?' or…”

“Thank you! Thank you! That’s quite enough young man! You’re only embarrassing yourself, not me, so just you calm yourself down there. But thank you, and well done that man!” He pointed to the wag in the game show host’s exaggerated congratulatory style, all pizzazz and bent-kneed, and I waited for him to announce a prize for that one word, the game’s Magic Word.

“Yes! Thank you! I thought that was never going to show its face today. That’s usually one of the first ones out too, you might be surprised to know, or not...” His voice faded to a sly, comic understatement, and he looked to the class, expecting us to laugh. No-one graced his expectation.

“It took you boys a little time, but you got there eventually.” More finger pointing and failed lightening of the mood. “Anyway, well done that man! Anyone else? Any more? Mr. McMahon? Have you any more for us?”

Keith stayed silent. 

That

She tried to speak, to defend herself, she tried to cower, but another slap would take the words from her mouth. She tried desperately to get away, but he held her arm so tight he bruised often the skin on either side of her elbow. She fought to get her free arm to her thigh, to defend the skin, and she tried to free her other arm from the grip he held. Her body doubled over, her head went near his crotch. She would twist again if that failed, pushing her head against his chest, her body turned into him, doing everything she could do to protect her skin from the blows, trying with all her strength to get her legs as far away from his hands as possible. 

“Who do you think are talking to anyone like that? Huh? You have to learn what respect is, and if this is the only way you’ll ever learn then hell slap it into ya! I’ll not be talked to like you talk to yer mammy, d’ya hear me?”

He never went for her head. He always went for the legs, for the sting and that satisfying popping sound that skin makes on skin when you hit it just right.

She twisted and turned and flayed and tried to beg him to stop, often ripping her clothes as she tried desperately to pull away. The next scream truncated the one previous as it blasted from her mouth, peppering the air with spit and sweat and snot and silence then noise. He found a way around her every time. He would pull her arm down sharply, turning her with the force created. Often he would get his body beside hers, his torso over her back, his left arm around her waist, from above, her body held in position by his left knee. That way she was defenceless – open at the back for a girl with a school skirt on – like he had her over his knee in a standing position. That way both her hands were free, but the grip he had was unbreakable and that was how he liked it, that was the position he wanted. All Martina could do then was tear at his trousers or reach out to Mum if she could see her in the room. Or she would just take it once more.

We did nothing. We could do nothing but stare. He was unstoppable when he was like that. Drunk or sober and spoiling for a fight, Martina or Pepper were going to get it, sure as the sun would rise the next morning over the roofs in Blackthorn Park. 

Every beating lasted a good five minutes, and they never eased. Martina struggled until the end, even if she did accept what was happening, and I knew in my heart that her struggling meant that she never became used to the pain, no matter how often or how hard Dad laid into her. She always fought. When Dad eventually let go she would run screaming and crying from the room, but he always got a slap or two in as she was running through the living room doorway, or at the bottom of the stairs. 

At Night, No Shadows, No Sounds

As the last of the night minutes crept slowly into the first of the day minutes the fear would leave us a little, and we would go to our rooms and play our new singles on the record player, keeping the volume wheel at a tinny 2 or less. With the lights off, the music so low we could barely make out the metallic voice emanating from the single speaker, our father slumbering downstairs, Mum getting ready for bed and the girls already retreated from fear and now dreaming, Brendan and I lay on our beds and watched the street. Four streetlamps illuminated the stretch of the street we could see from the window, but nothing lit up the garages; skewed toe-pointers had sent footballs smashing into the streetlights just once too often for the borough council to replace them. The substation was pitch-black, the longest, darkest parts of the alleys the same. The garages were quiet, the sub-station might quietly hum if the wind was right, the alley-ways were quiet, and the only sounds that late on would be couples walking home from bars, or cars driving past on Woodburn Avenue, or vulturous children picking dry the bones of some old dead car somewhere behind us in Blackthorn Park. We listened and watched until the early day minutes became the early day hours, the tinny voices of Africa Bambataa or Adam Ant our only comfort. We slept when dawn broke. 

For The Cause

The morning air filled with the remainder of last night’s laundry drying over the fireguard; the smell of the breakfasts; coal freshly retrieved from the shed; cigarette smoke; the waxy, sweet and heady smell of paraffin, and the songs of death and axes on the radio. Una got to the bathroom first, after Dad, and only because Anne-Marie’s search for a bra and socks took her on a journey around the four corners of the house. Often she might end up squeezing herself into a half-dry bra plucked reluctantly from the side of the fireguard or the pile of laundry in the dining room. And there were screams more days than enough when heated metal clasps burned her cold skin. When searching for her missing clothes she let the family know of her frustration in short, blunted outbursts.

“Can’t find friggin’ bras. Was one here last night, friggin’ gone this morning. Bra! Skirt! Blouse! All gone, disappeared overnight. Friggin’ gone now wherever they are!” Her movements mirrored her outbursts, being as they were erratic and rarely useful to their purpose. She rarely did search fully: she did nothing more than frantically move clothing, so finding a garment was always a happy accident, but an accident nonetheless. And her finds were rarely greeted as triumphs. “Right at the bottom of the pile, last frigging place I’d look, of course. Who the hell put it there?” She would continue, “Blouse! Need a blouse. From now on Mum leave my bloody bras on the fireguard where I can find them in the mornings. Lost bloody blouses. Friggin’ bras too. Can’t find frigging anything around here! Where’s my bloody blouse? Where?”

“Well, why don’t you do your own washing from now on then, my girl, then you’ll not lose anything, will you?” snapped Dad.

“Everything else is here except my stuff. Bras! Blouses! Gone! Bloody hell!”

“Well, I didn’t move them. Ask yer Mammy where she put them. Go on. She’ll tell you she put them right here with everything else, won’t she? Aye. She will.”

“Then why’re they not friggin’ here then? Huh?”

“Well no one else had them, did they? Huh? D’ya think we have elves and goblins that steal just your clothes? Well?”

When the elves and goblins stole Anne-Marie’s clothes they forever took them to the same place, the place where she found all her lost garments: the mythical land of The Last Place You’d Ever Look.

I stayed in bed until I heard her scream; when the hot clasp of a half-dried bra burned her skin with the two-eyelet brand, that’s how I knew the worst was over, the bras and blouses had been found, and that everyone was good and ready. When you hear your sister scream you know it’s six o’clock in the morning and time to get up, wash your face in the cold water, and get ready for toast and sausages and waxy heat and death and unemployment, followed by a hearty run the full length of The Hollies and the top half of the Woodburn Road pushing a heavy silver car guided one-handed by a bad-tempered heavy man hopping alongside, cursing into the morning air everything and everyone under the sun.

Dad was first to the car for only he could get it started, and he struggled with it those mornings, cursing silently under his breath, at first. We had to push the car down the street, silently, careful not to wake the neighbours, and by the time Dad got the car started we were halfway to the bus stop. Every morning he cursed and swore, but he held back the worst words because he knew Una was there, and she could tell the educated Aunt Kathleen what words Uncle Arthur used of a morning. Those who wore skirts were excused the trials of pushing the car on the side with the exhaust. As irregularly as regularly the car backfired, spewing filth, hot liquid, and black smoke into the crisp, pristine morning air. Pushing the car on the exhaust side was my duty. By the time we boarded the bus to school, both Anne-Marie and I had been scalded by something red hot. By Friday my blazer and trousers reeked of exhaust fumes, my hands turned soot-black and smoky-smelling if I rubbed them on my trousers, and my fingers stained pages in my books as I sat before the shrine to the Virgin Mother in Saint Malachy’s College quad, envisioning my glorious priesthood or my incredible plate-making career, seeing myself enjoying the salubrious lifestyle that work brought a man. 

At night, after dinner, we sat and waited on Dad coming home. If he was any later than his usual time we would start to worry because – we had ourselves convinced – someone had mugged him or killed him, or he was in the pub getting drunk, or there had been a terrible accident on the way home, and the parents of the child he had killed were on their ways to hound us out of our home, our house. “Kill the Drunken Fenian Child Murderer!” they would chant. “Kill the Drunken Fenian Child Murderer!” If he was a half hour late I would go to my room to peek out the window and beyond the Foley’s house and the green, and whisper to myself, “Come home, Dad. Please come home.” We loved him, we did. We wanted no harm to come to our Dad. Standing at that window I would be the first to see him coming round the corner, on to Woodburn Avenue, then into The Hollies. If he came that way he had been to The Brown Cow, and somewhere along the route home he had parked the Hillman Hunter and jumped behind the wheel of the Shredded Wheat truck. 

It took only a few months of working the carparks for my Dad to need a drink after work on weekday work nights. I wished I had the guts to say something to him for making the family worry every night he was late, and all because he wanted his Guinness or his whiskey. But he did what he did, and if his hand went up, palm forward, then you needed to shut your mouth, or else. That was the end of the argument. The end of the argument was absolute, and always in his favour, so there was no sense in trying.

Still, if he drove round that corner it meant that he had avoided or survived being mugged by the Proud Fenians in the Markets, and seeing him meant he was alive and not lying in the morgue or on a gurney in the Royal Victoria Hospital with blood pouring from his head, his pockets and his bosses’ pockets both empty. At night, after we had gone to bed, he closed the living room door – pushing it until the paint creaked against paint, just to be sure – and he would spill his guts to Mum about the people who had tried to mug him that day, or those who had cornered him in his tiny kiosk in the Markets. Every morning the newsreaders spoke of events overnight in the Markets area of Belfast, a place where serious sectarian trouble occurred nightly. Besides the countless murders there were the car bombs, or burned-out cars found abandoned in the area, decaying into playgrounds for vulturous children. Scenes of Crime Officers removed other charred cars – and their expired contents – to examine them minutely. The terrorists burned their getaway cars to destroy evidence, and many of those blackened shells littered the Markets. Being a Catholic area of the city, I thought it peculiar that Catholic thugs were mugging my Catholic Dad, but that was how it was when the people fighting for your freedoms and dying for your rights needed your money for their beer money and gun money, when Noraid – the Irish-American foundation supporting the Republican cause from a base 3000 miles distant, whose members had the audacity to walk home drunk and careless while their charitable donations morphed into shrapnel in British and Irish hearts – when that charity found itself frustrated in its fundraising efforts, then any Catholic victim was as good as any Protestant victim. Money had to come from somewhere. It rarely mattered who you were: if you had money on you and the IRA felt it was better in their hands to further the cause of the poor, poor Catholics, then just you be prepared to hand it over, for the cause. Either that or you’ll get a gun in your face, or your kneecaps blown off, a choice all too often not afforded the victim, and all for the cause. They might call an ambulance before shooting you but only if you could prove your status as a Fenian, a brother. “Say the Hail Mary, fella, and we’ll make sure you’re looked after, what about that? Huh? Get you seen to soon enough, eh? Heh-Heh-Heh!” As you laid down face-first on the eternally wet alleys running off any Belfast carpark, the man behind you – fighting for your rights – would cock his gun and ready himself to spend a bullet or two in the effort to free Mother Ireland, by emptying your pockets and reimbursing you by filling your knees with Noraid-funded lead.

Alphonse & Mirabelle; RIP

Catholic Carrickfergus, like the town itself, held no surprises. Every week the families of the parish took to the same pews they had taken to from time immemorial, when their parents and grandparents sat a layer of paint or two closer to the cold naked stone. It was impossible to lose friends in the healthy but dwindling crowd. Old Paddy McGuire sat at the back casually and noisily clearing his throat and then spitting the contents of his mouth behind the radiator below the eighth Station of The Cross, Jesus Meets the Women of Jerusalem. With his walking cane, old clothes, jar-bottom glasses and white hairs in odd places on his face he was maybe too old and maybe too stubborn or maybe too set in his ways for the tortured women of the parish - who did the work for the Lord in His house, without thanks or payment or smiles for dirty-faced children - to admonish.   

We sat near the middle, in the pews to the right, but only if Mum got the four of her children fed, watered, washed, dressed and down the road in time: the mile walk down Woodburn Avenue on to Woodburn Road and Ellis Street took us twenty minutes on a good day. If we were late we took to the back seats - always on the right - far from God and the splendour of the Tabernacle of The Holy Plaster Shower, and a long walk to the communion rail, which we came to know as The Finish Line. Once there it was all nearly over. If we were really late we had to stand in the polished porch, disgraced and even further from Him, His treacherous tabernacle and the communion rail. 

Regardless of where we stood or sat we knew where to see the Hall family on our left, or the Deignan sisters - all as tall and quiet and dignified as the stained-glass windows themselves - sitting a row or two in front of us, their youngest daughter’s swarthy skin and tight black hair an indication of their dedication to the cause of the poor: not every family could afford to adopt a Black Baby from a famished country, but they had. The Deignan parents looked perpetually proud and strong, but those are, perhaps, the only qualities a child can discern from faces that remained unsmiling and tight-jawed and provincially Catholic. They used the tight faces to maintain a certain serenity for themselves and an unspoken rein over the girls, even if I thought oftentimes that it looked just too good to be anywhere near to perfect, on either score. The Foley’s were there every day we were, and Mr. Foley would sing and sing and sing to all the hymns, until, one day, his hair turned pure white from the effort of his praise, and he was elevated, thereupon, to lead singer with the band. I only ever heard and saw him and him alone from then on. In saying that, one particular woman was a touch too operatic of an occasion, poorly so, and I was sure even the deaf noticed her.  

With mass ended we could go in peace to love and serve the Lord. Our parents would stop in the porch to buy the Catholic magazines and booklets to which they subscribed, papers that every good Irish Catholic family should have. Mrs. Armstrong smiled and laughed heartily in the repository as she doled out The Little Messenger or the Ireland’s Own or The Universe, or when she would sell your Mum a plastic water font from Lourdes or Knock, or a leather-bound bible for a special occasion. Sometimes she would sell you a First Holy Communion prayer book, decorated - seldom with variation - with a puffed-velvet pair of hands joined in prayer, with - again without much variation - a ruche of lace around the cuff if the prayer book was a gift for a girl. Two weeks later, Mrs. Armstrong would be raffling the same bibles for 10p a ticket, or five for 40p. Dad always bought raffle tickets, as did our Mum, because even the poor felt compelled to give to the church in every way they could. The red personal identification number emblazoned on the collection envelopes was enough of an inducement to make the contents always somewhere near respectable, and that meant that the envelope should never jingle with the sound of lower-denomination coins, whether they be British, Irish or just-been-to-Spain-on-holiday coins. We had to give what we had, whether we had or not, like the woman in the bible who washed the feet of Jesus with ointment because that was all she had. We had no jars of ointment at home worth more than the speedier recovery of a skinned knee, so we gave nothing but the food from our mouths.

In time, our house began to look like the church, adorned as it was with pictures and fonts and Holy Family shrines and memorabilia that Mum and Dad had bought or had won in the weekly raffles. I thought often of selling some of it back to Mrs. Armstrong because if Jesus ever returned and visited the good Irish Catholic people of Carrickfergus he would go straight to our house, mistaking it for the church and us as cousins because we had so many family snapshots of Him and His sacred friends and family, all glowing and serene and looking skywards, like any one of the Deignan sisters, with the exception of the black one because she was too young and too unruly to obey the stern faces of her parents. We had pictures of our holy mother, Mary; the earthly father of our lord Jesus, Saint Joseph, the carpenter; the lick of flame that we knew as The Holy Spirit; dedications to all the saints - and all the dead martyrs and holies that would be saints soon enough, sure enough - above us and around us. We lived in the holiest place in Carrickfergus outside of the church grounds. We lived in the Vatican, the Vatican of The Hollies.

But if Jesus did visit we could have chatted to Him over tea in the nice cups that Mum kept for special occasions, and we could eat some nice biscuits bought special that day. But Jesus, I was sure, would politely have eaten our yellow-pack Digestives, Rich Tea or Ginger Nuts, perhaps a Custard Cream, and he would not, I was sure, embarrass us by telling us that He came from a place awash with ice cream, the finest biscuits and cakes, and every other kind of goodness known to God alone. Jesus, I was sure, knew poverty, knew that a yellow-pack Digestive was as good as a Wagon Wheel on any given day.

“Some rabbit, Lord? Or maybe a nice piece of trout?”

“Don’t mind if I do there, Annie. Thanks. Ah, I see you got yourselves nice haircuts there too, lads.”

“Yes, Lord.”

“Just killed one of my rabbits then, eh?”

“Yes, Lord. Sorry.”

“His name was Alphonse, did you know? And that fish last week?”

“Yes?”

“Mirabelle.”

“Sorry, Lord.”

“Oh, for fuck sake, boys! I’m kidding! Jesus… Do you think I have time to name every fucking rabbit? Holy sh… You two need to lighten up, you know that?”

“Yes, Lord.”

Spectacles, Testicles, Wallet, and Watch

By that summer of 1982 I had been through one year of Saint Malachy’s and I knew the pressure that teachers placed on your shoulders. We had to learn by heart every word in every textbook, and we had to learn it well. There was little room for contemplating getting just the basics, just scraping by. The academic record was the cornerstone on which the glory from within stood mighty, just as the old master informed us that past August. We had to analyse and parse Latin text word perfectly, and verb declensions we had to know by heart or the imposing figure of Mr. Crummey would stand above you and chill your heart hard as backroom butcher’s meat. That deathly, silent stare. Half my class, Junior 1B, attended Mr. Crummey’s all too frequently ordered detentions, so strict was he.

Before one particular Irish class even started, as irritatingly late on Friday afternoons as any class could be, we were made to say the Hail Mary perfectly in our land’s mother tongue or the teacher would walk to the nearest desk and throw it across the room with one hand. He was still a young man; he could do it easily, one hand underneath the desk, sending it crashing into a far wall, and him all in a fit. Teachers in neighbouring classrooms failed to come investigate the noise, and I found that strange for they castigated us pupils for talking an inch above a whisper should we find ourselves alone in a classroom awaiting a teacher. Those times, breathing was deemed a damned distraction from the good work.

One Friday Francis Hughes struggled to bless himself in the mother tongue, and as he concentrated on the foreign words in his head he lost control of his hands. The master twitched with rage, more so than he did on any given Friday. He pointed to Francis Hughes and his teeth sparked.

“Boy, I’m leaving here for one minute, one fucking minute. By the fucking time I get back here you’d better be able to bless yerself like any good fucking Catholic your age.” He slammed his hands on the desk, locked his elbows, and he bawled. “How the fuck old are you?” he exclaimed, spit misting the air. “And you can’t fucking bless yourself?” Francis stood bolt upright, his shoulders back, his fingers playing with each other, wetly I was sure. He dared not move his gaze until the teacher slammed his open hands on the desk once again before storming out, screaming. “Fucking learn it boy, and learn it fast! This is fucking ridiculous…” He slammed the door behind him, puffing air under maps along the nearest wall. They came to rest again as all eyes rested on Francis.

For the next minute the class desperately whispered instructions to Francis, Shugsy as he was known.

“It’s your forehead, stomach, left shoulder, right shoulder! Got that?” Francis tried, failed, then tried again, then failed again.

“Shugsy! For fuck’s sake! Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch! Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch! You better get it fucking right or we’re all here till late on, you fucking wanker!” 

“Yeah, get it right Shugsy, or we’re all fucked. I’m not staying here just because some wanker can’t fucking bless his self, ya fuckwit.”

The teacher returned just too quickly for the instructions to be of any use, and he made us stand for an entire class, until Francis could bless himself while reciting a blessing in some foreign tongue.

“Are you fucking stupid, boy? Are you? Are you fucking stupid?” The master stormed around the room, the tails of his grey suit-jacket flailing behind him, a wreck of desks and the concomitant cacophony spreading. Still, no teacher came to investigate.

“I don’t care if it is a fucking Friday because we’ll stay here until you know how to bless yourself boy, you stupid fucking idiot!” He bawled an inch from Francis’s nose, wagging a stiffened finger in his scarlet face. “I’m going fucking nowhere boy, and if I’m not, you’re not, and neither are any of these fuckers. Got that?” He quieted. “Now, again. Bless your fucking self again, you fucking idiot.”

There never was room for the basics in Saint Malachy’s College, not when it came to blessing yourself, not when speaking Irish or French or declining past imperfect verbs in too many dead languages thought still too important to be ignored by Irish Catholic educators.

Brimstone and Spittle

By the summer of 1983, Mum decided that her sons could still get back from the Catholic church some of Dad’s hard-earned money, and she asked Father McGarry if there was anything he would like done in the grounds around the beautiful new church that he had brought to the parish, all new and lovely and inspiring as it was. She had two fit young men, ready and willing and able, she said, offering up our precious free time, our Saturdays and Sundays, all for the glory of god. Father McGarry, the Parish Priest, the PP, lived in the grand Parochial House beside the new church. There was his gleaming new car in the driveway for all to see, a monument to the good life being a holy man could afford those broken down and pieced back together in the seminaries up and down Irish Catholic Ireland. He was tall, broad, smoked a moderately priced cigarette, and he slicked his grey hair back like an aged but perpetually handsome Brylcreem model. His was a look that belied a youthful gorgeousness, a precociousness, some ethereal knowledge. Looking calm and wise, said Dad, was the result of anyone being calm and wise with the money the PP was making, “And doesn’t he go off to Florida to play golf bloody well ten times a year, and sure that would make anyone calm and wise, now wouldn’t it?”

 

Taking our money and taking himself off to Florida left us with a gamble every Sunday. Would we get Father O’Hagan or would we get Father Patton treading the boards in his place those Sunday mornings? From Whitehead, ladies and gentlemen, came Father O’Hagan, to us youth a grumpy old priest with a ruddy and unforgiving full face, the merciless priest who threw Martina out of the confessional, at the ripe age of nine years, for not being syllable perfect with her Act of Contrition. Would we get another of his sermons that continued until members of the congregation glanced furtively upon their watches, shanks of roast beef in the oven at home getting a little drier with every admonishment? Father O’Hagan’s ferocity imbued us with the sense that we would never be saved, that we would burn in Hell fire for all eternity unless we changed our ways, and even then the odds were against us, we incorrigible bloody sinners. Despite His murderous and merciless record, what God was too timid to say and do in the Bible he gave Father O’Hagan the breath in his body to take forward. In his fleeting gentle demeanours he could make the parable of the lost sheep sound more fiery, more violent, more destructive than ten Sodoms and ten Gomorrahs, atop ten of the greatest earth-rending floods. We walked away those Sundays weaving our ways past pillars of salt in the foyer, the heat of Hell’s fires burning the soles of our feet as we crossed the foyer entrances.

And, ladies and gentlemen, from Greenisland came Father Patton, or Father Gerry as he let himself be called by those who liked others to think that they actually did know him. Father Patton once was the curate at the nearby university, and he was young and exciting and bushy-haired, a man who took great pleasure in a pipe full of sweet-smelling tobacco and some good craic. He looked like good craic, this busy-haired fellow. He was what the Elders referred to as “the new breed,” and he would walk in the congregation like a pop star, asking questions of the bleary-eyed Sunday morning faithful, questions they answered nervously into the microphone he carried with him, the respondents preceding their every answer with a “Well, yes Father, I think that what this means - what Our Lord means - is...," accompanied by a brief clearing of a dry throat at least a half-hour silent. The pious and the self-righteous fortune of cleaning ladies with their dusters and Mr. Sheen failed to take to him and his new-fangled microphone-flaunting ways, and they made sure to go to the good, the proper, the respectful eviscerations conducted by Father O’Hagan, his masses with sermons that would light the church in red and yellow and searing white as the mirage of Hell appeared to and embraced warmly the huddled mass parched by the eating of the dry fruit from the now stripped-bare Tree of Sin from which Eve had tempted Adam before turning to God and with a cackle asking, “Tell me, O Lord, where is this place called Carrickfergus?” The Catholic parish of Carrickfergus had eaten from the tree and relished it, charged Father O’Hagan. We had come back for seconds, he said. Then dessert. We took home a doggy bag of cold dead sin, hot lust, bubbling greed, he said. 

In the Old Church of The Holy Plaster Shower his fire would make the Crayola air bubble and spit and scald. But the fortune of cleaning ladies feared more that the beautifully gentle Father Gerry would stick a microphone in their half-hairy faces and they would see the priestly spittle and feel compelled to Mr. Sheen the microphone to a good and proper Catholic gleam right there and then. Cleaning priestly spittle must surely have been like getting the very key to Heaven itself. And they lived for that. They continued to live for that. Damn them. Damn priestly spittle.