Skippy Dies: A Novel

Next morning he goes in early to get to the photocopier; he’s in the staffroom, collating pictures of pre-war rugby teams, when the Automator comes in. Crossing swiftly to the armchair where Tom sits reading the sports section of the Irish Times, ‘Quick word?’ he says.

Tom looks up blankly. ‘Sure, Greg, do you want to go…?’ He motions at the door.

‘Actually, perhaps you won’t mind me sharing this with the others,’ the Automator replies, taking from his jacket an envelope emblazoned with the Paraclete crest. It is from the Congregation’s headquarters in Rome; the letter inside, which the Automator reads aloud, announces that Tom has been selected to teach in Mary Immaculate School, Mauritius. Tom lets out a whoop; the Automator, laughing, claps him on the back.

It takes a moment for Howard to understand that what he is witnessing is an act, put on for the benefit of the onlookers. He is struck by how convincing they are – Tom flushed and starry-eyed, the Automator with a paternal arm over his shoulder, nothing veiled or calculating detectable in their expressions. It’s as if, for them, their lie has already replaced the truth; and now, while he watches, that lie crystallizes outwards, inscribes itself in reality with the help of his unwitting peers, as they crowd around to pump Tom’s hand.

‘So you’re leaving us…’

‘Yeah, it was a hard decision, but…’

‘I’d say it nearly killed you. Mauritius, no less!’

‘You won’t have to put up with this shite over there.’ ‘Ricky’ Ross, the economics teacher, gestures humorously at the lugubrious Irish weather outside.

‘No, though it has its own problems, of course…’

‘And what about us? How will Seabrook go on without you?’

‘What about the Ferry? They’ll have to close down!’

‘We didn’t even know you were thinking of leaving.’ Misses Birchall and McSorley are quite overcome. ‘You never told us, you bold boy.’

‘Yeah, well, it was all a bit out of the blue. Greg told me this position had come up, and I decided to go for it. Seabrook’s where my heart is, obviously, but, you know…’

‘Tom felt like they needed him more over there,’ the Automator contributes judiciously. ‘They haven’t got it easy, those poor kids.’

‘Will you be teaching or coaching?’ Pat Farrell asks.

‘A bit of teaching, English and whatever else they’ll let me near. But mostly I’ll be training the rugby team. They’ve a decent enough programme out there – is it Father McGowran set it up, Greg?’

‘That’s right, Tom. Father Mike’s been doing some really Trojan work, getting that school into shape. But he can’t do it all on his own. And God knows he can’t kick a rugby ball to save his life!’

They laugh. Then delicately, Ó Dálaigh, ‘So, back on the rugby pitch, eh?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘Been a while, all the same.’

‘It’s time,’ Tom says, and gives them that disarming, lopsided smile. ‘Got to face up to the past eventually, don’t you?’

‘You do. You do.’ This sentiment pleases his congratulators. Howard feels like his head is about to explode: he makes for the door, but gets entangled in the crowd and finds himself redirected towards Tom. Up close, the coach seems taller than before, virile, vital, as if his ruptured spine had miraculously healed itself; his blameless eyes fall serenely on Howard, who by comparison feels like a ghost, can almost hear his bones rattle as he shakes Tom’s hand. ‘Congratulations,’ he says mechanically.

‘Thanks, Howard. Thanks.’ In that heartfelt, manly grasp, Howard is suddenly overcome by nausea. He springs away to the toilet and throws up weak tea.

Walking down to the Annexe later on, he is buttonholed by Farley. ‘Heard the news?’ Farley asks, matching step with him.

‘About Tom, you mean?’

‘He’s got the right idea,’ Farley says. ‘I’ve been thinking about doing something like that lately.’

Howard feels like a piece of driftwood afloat on some tempestuous sea of irony. ‘Go to Mauritius?’

‘Go somewhere they might actually need me. Somewhere I could make a difference. I don’t think I’d have to travel that far.’

Howard has been avoiding Farley lately, but from a distance he’s seen a change come over his friend, a morbid, directionless anger. ‘They need you here, Farley. Everyone needs a good teacher, rich or poor.’

‘These kids don’t,’ Farley says. ‘Why would they? They’re set up for life, and they know it.’

‘It’s not their fault their parents have money.’

‘Of course it’s not their fault. Nothing is anybody’s fault,’ Farley replies, deadpan. ‘It’s not just the boys, Howard. It’s this whole place, the hypocrisy of it.’

As if on cue, Father Green sails by – affecting not to see them, keeping his gaze fixed on some imaginary point over their heads, like a missionary posted to the last days of Sodom, determined to ignore the temporal murk.

‘Walking around as if nothing ever happened,’ Farley says darkly. ‘It’s sick.’

‘We don’t know that he had anything to do with it.’

‘We can join the dots, can’t we?’

Someone keeps writing pedo in Tippex on the priest’s office door. Every morning Noddy scrapes it off, and then by lunchtime it’s back again.

‘The sooner this school gets the fucking priests out of the picture, the better,’ Farley says. ‘Greg may be a cretin and a fascist, but at least he doesn’t pretend to be anything else. He doesn’t act like he’s got some superior moral insight. Just good old-fashioned greed.’

‘Father Green’s done a lot of good things,’ Howard says weakly. ‘If you’re talking about making a difference. He’s probably the only one in the whole school who actually has.’

‘A power trip, that’s all that is. Junkies and down-and-outs are the only people he can still feel superior to. Though it’s better he’s hanging around them than the kids.’ He emits a curt, bitter laugh, then stops and shakes his head. ‘It’s not right, Howard. It’s just not right.’

In his classroom Howard leans heavily on the lectern as the students slouch in. Ruprecht is next to last, making his bloated way like an ailing dowager. He waits for them to settle as much as they’re going to, then gathers himself together. ‘I have something special to show you today,’ he says. There is a general snigger. He takes the uniform from the bag.

‘This belonged to an Irish soldier who actually fought in the First World War,’ he says. ‘His name was William Molloy and he attended this very school – in fact he was Juster’s, he was Daniel Juster’s great-grandfather.’ The name feels wrong, alien in his mouth, and it produces no effect on the boys; they look on disinterestedly, as they might at an uninspired street-performer while waiting for their bus.

‘He would have volunteered in 1914, as Lord Kitchener…’

A tittering can be heard at the back of the room; something amusing is evidently occurring outside the window. Howard breaks off, turns to see Carl Cullen stumbling across the car park towards the school.

‘He’s forgotten he’s suspended,’ someone remarks gleefully. ‘It’s the second time this week.’

‘He’s off his head,’ someone else observes.

Even from this distance, Carl’s eyes are visibly scrambled, and in his stagger Howard, for one freezing instant, foresees something awful… but he isn’t wearing a jacket, nor has he a bag, so it’s difficult to see where he might conceal a firearm; anyway, Howard tells himself, that kind of thing only happens in America, not here, at least not yet… Now a teacher emerges from the school to intercept him. ‘Slattery,’ someone says.

‘Maybe he wants to score some E’s.’

Howard watches the old man grip the boy by the shoulders, lean into his slack face, speak to him softly and briefly, then spin him 180 degrees and send him on his way.

‘Good thing the Automator didn’t see him,’ Vince Bailey says. ‘He’d get another week’s suspension.’

‘Oh yeah, I’m sure Carl really cares about being suspended,’ Conor O’Malley mocks.

‘Oh right, I forgot you’re his best friend, that knows everything about him.’

‘Fuck yourself, shithead.’

‘All right, all right.’ Howard raps on the lectern. ‘We’ve got work to do here. Now let’s see what this uniform can tell us.’

He holds it up, as if it had some Grail-like power to penetrate the fog of the day. But in the morning light, in the intermittent, corrosive adolescent gaze, the uniform no longer appears to tell them very much. It no longer feels charged with history, nor with anything else, save for the smell of mothballs; and when Howard tries to recall that epiphany of last night, the catharsis he was going to bring about in them – he sees only that little scene in the staffroom: the joy on Tom’s face as he is handed his escape route; the affection and pride, real, genuine affection and pride on the Automator’s; the staff gathering round to pass on their congratulations, Howard himself shaking the coach’s hand.

Somebody twangs a rubber band with his teeth, somebody yawns.

Why should they care about the doings of ‘D’ Company? Why should they believe a single thing he tells them, or anything they’re told within the walls of this school? They know how it goes, they know how it works in places like this – even if they don’t know they know.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he says.

The boys look back at him desultorily, and suddenly Howard feels like he’s suffocating, like there is nothing breathable left in the room. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Everybody go and get your coats. We’re getting out of here.’

Nothing happens. Howard claps his hands. ‘Come on, I mean it. Let’s get moving.’ He doesn’t know what he means; he only knows that he can’t stay in this room a moment longer. Now the general apathy gives way to a nascent stirring of interest, as the boys realize that, whatever has happened to him, he is serious about this. Bags are lifted, books hastily put away before he can change his mind.

Jeekers raises his hand. ‘Are we going on a class trip, sir?’

‘Sure,’ Howard says. ‘Exactly.’

‘But don’t we need permission from our parents?’

‘We’ll clear it with them afterwards. If anyone doesn’t want to come, that’s fine. You can proceed to the Study Hall for the remainder of the class.’

‘So long, loser.’ Simon Mooney twists Jeekers’s ear on his way to the door. The thin boy wavers; then, clambering out from behind his desk, he grabs his bag and hurries after the others.

It takes mere seconds for the boys to reappear from the locker room with their coats. Bringing a finger to his lips – ‘Let’s be sure not to disturb the other classes’ – Howard leads them up Our Lady’s Hall, past the oratory and the Study Hall, towards the daylight framed in the double-doors – and then they are outside, clipping down the winding avenue between the rugby pitches and chestnut trees.

He walks them down to the station and they take a train into the city. He still hasn’t decided where they’re going, but as they pass Lansdowne Road, the site of internationals and schools rugby finals, ‘Seabrook’s second home’, he finds himself telling the boys how within weeks of the outbreak of war, Juster’s great-grandfather and hundreds of other professional men were going to the stadium every night after work for military training, among them many who would join ‘D’ Company. Disembarking, he leads them up Pearse Street, around College Green, along Dame Street, the same route, he tells them, the ‘Pals’ had taken on their triumphant leave-taking of the city.

Cutting through Temple Bar toward the river, they pass the cinema outside which Howard met Halley for the first time: this nugget of history he does not pass on to the boys. He remembers walking with her down to the riverside, but it’s only as they are crossing Ha’penny Bridge – the elderly construction seeming to sway beneath their impatient feet, the quays of the city stretching away on either side – that he remembers the museum was where she had been headed that day too, was where he had promised to take her, but never did, instead falling in love with her, leading her away into the backstreets of his life. Now he’s finally on his way there, but with twenty-six hormonal teenage boys instead of her. Nice job, Howard.

The boys climb the hill through the gates of the museum grounds. Gerry Coveney and Kevin Wong shout, ‘Echo!’ at the walls of the vast courtyard. Here and there, groups of tourists make their way over the cobblestones: huge Americans like sides of beef, prim Japanese ladies in black, all with cameras dangling at the ready from their necks. By the entrance, a horde of children from primary school are clustered around a besieged-looking man in a red sweater. ‘Now a museum,’ he is telling them, ‘is a place with lots of objects from the past. By studying these objects, we find out about things that happened long ago…’

The children nod seriously. They can’t be much older than six or seven; everything to them is long ago. From a safe distance their teacher looks on with a mixture of fondness and gratitude for a moment’s peace.

Howard brings the boys inside and approaches the man at the reception desk. ‘I wanted to take my class for a look around…’

‘We can probably arrange a tour, if you like,’ the receptionist says. ‘Is there a particular area you’re interested in?’

‘We’re studying the First World War,’ Howard says.

The receptionist’s face clouds. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘we don’t really have anything about the war at the moment.’

Behind Howard, the man in the red sweater, with a hounded look, leads the children into the bowels of the museum. ‘Objects! Objects!’ they cry deliriously as they go.

‘Anything at all?’ Howard says, when the noise has passed. ‘Uniforms from the Irish regiments? Rifles, bayonets, medals, maps?’

‘I’m sorry,’ the man repeats sheepishly. ‘It’s not something there’s much demand for at the moment. Though we’re hoping to feature it in a forthcoming exhibition?’

‘Forthcoming when?’

The receptionist calculates. ‘Three years?’ Seeing Howard’s face fall, he says, ‘You might take them to the Memorial Gardens in Islandbridge. It’s really just a park. But I’m afraid that’s about all there is.’

Howard thanks him and steps back outside, the class billowing behind him like a murmurous cloak; on the cobblestones they congregate around him expectantly. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘It’s my fault, I should have called ahead. I’m sorry.’

He knows they are only disappointed because they fear this means the end of their outing. Still, as they hang there in the weak, cloud-filtered light, shuffling a little, waiting for him to tell them what to do, they appear different to their everyday school selves – younger, less cynical, lighter even, as if Seabrook were a weight that they carried, and set free of it they might just float off into the air…

Traffic pants on the quays in a shimmer of monoxides. The park does not sound terribly inspiring; Howard is debating whether to cut his losses when his phone rings. It’s Farley. ‘Where the hell are you, Howard?’

‘In town,’ Howard says. ‘On a class trip.’

‘A class trip? What, without telling anybody?’

‘It was sort of a spur-of-the-moment thing,’ Howard replies, keeping his voice carefully neutral.

‘Greg is going ballistic, Howard, we just about talked him out of calling the guards. For God’s sake, have you gone mad? I mean, what are you doing?’

‘I don’t know,’ Howard says, after a moment’s consideration.

Farley releases a strangulated sigh. ‘Look, if you want to have even a chance of keeping your job, you’d better get back here right away. Greg is climbing the walls, I’ve never seen him this angry.’

‘Oh,’ Howard says.

‘In fact maybe you should talk to him now – hold on, I’m going to put you on to him and you can –’

Howard hangs up the phone and switches it off. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Let’s go and find these Memorial Gardens.’

The boys brighten visibly, and set off ahead of him up the street.

He has read about the gardens but never visited them. Islandbridge is an out-of-the-way and not especially inviting part of the city. Bleached posters for last year’s music acts account for most of the colour to be seen; down-at-heel pubs front mazy streets where at the turn of the last century thousands of local prostitutes attended to the needs of British soldiers stationed in the barracks that now houses the museum. It may no longer be the biggest red-light zone in Europe, but it couldn’t be accused of gentrification; as they turn towards the river, the grime becomes thicker, the flats more dilapidated. The boys are fascinated. ‘Sir, is this the ghetto?’ ‘Quiet.’ ‘Do people buy drugs here?’ ‘Shh.’ ‘Are those people on drugs?’ ‘Do you want to go back to school? Is that what you want?’ ‘Sorry.’ Their faith in him is at once touching and alarming – their trust that they are safe simply because he’s with them, as if an adult presence warded off all possible threat, emanated an unbreachable forcefield.

The gate to the Memorial Gardens is at the end of a laneway, between a scrap merchant’s and a mental institution. They file through one by one; Howard does not know whether to be cheered or not when they find the park deserted.

‘How come nobody’s here?’ Mario asks.

‘Maybe they heard you were coming, Mario.’

‘Yeah, Mario, they heard the biggest bummer in Dublin was on his way and they all ran inside?’

‘You’re the bummer, asshole.’

‘Quiet, all of you,’ Howard snaps.

From here, aside from its eerie emptiness, the Memorial Gardens looks like any other park. The grassy lawn stretches off into the distance, rising on its left to a hill; the wind ruffles the water of the river to the right, and whispers through the leafless trees lining the avenue. The only edifice in sight is a small stone gazebo. They walk down and crowd into it. Inside a stanza from a Rupert Brooke poem is inscribed in the floor:

We have found safety with all things undying,The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth,The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying,And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth…

‘Look –’ Henry Lafayette points up the hill. A tall stone cross can now be seen, looming over the crest. They climb towards it, talking less now; fanning out over the grass, they appear to Howard younger again, as if they are going backwards in time.

At the top of the hill they find themselves in a long garden, encircled by trees and ivy-clad colonnades. Water trickles into the basins of two identical fountains, winter roses grow in the borders. The surrounding city can no longer be seen: they might be in the garden of a country manor, were it not for the towering cross, and, about a hundred feet in front of it, a white stone sarcophagus.

‘Their name liveth on forevermore,’ Dewey Fortune reads from its side.

‘Whose name?’

‘The Irish soldiers’, you spa.’

‘They got that wrong,’ Muiris says.

Lucas Rexroth shivers. ‘This place is spooky.’

This provokes a chorus of ghostly woohooos; but Lucas is right. The chilly air that shrinks their voices, the wet grass and lonesomeness, the strange disconnection from the world around, the inexplicable sense of having interrupted something… they give the garden the character of an afterworld – the kind of place you can imagine waking up in, stretched out on the grass, immediately after some horrific collision. The damp air swirls around them; gradually, the boys’ chatter peters out, and they shuffle about uncomfortably until each of them is facing Howard. For a moment he waits, reluctant to dispel the curious chanting silence. Then: ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘The Dublin Pals.’ And he begins to tell them what Slattery told him about ‘D’ Company – how they had joined up together from the school rugby clubs, how, while Robert Graves shivered and fought off rats in a ditch in France, they were dispatched to the furnace of the Dardanelles. ‘They were landed on beaches along the Gallipoli peninsula – hundreds of them, packed into a tiny space, waiting to be told what to do. Days went by, dysentery, enteritis, fever broke out, shrapnel was going off overhead the whole time, wounded and dead men were being carried through on stretchers, huge swarms of flies buzzed from corpses into the mouths of the living so it was almost impossible to sleep or eat.

‘Finally the order came through for an attack on Kiretch Tepe Sirt, a long ridge overlooking the bay. The men set out in unbearable heat that only got worse as the day went on. They hadn’t been given enough water and the Turks had poisoned the wells. They hadn’t been given enough ammo either and they soon ran out of that too. Near the top of the ridge they found themselves pinned down by Turkish guns. They sent for reinforcements but none came. It got so hot the gorse caught fire, and they had to listen to their own wounded being burned alive.

‘They spent the night trapped on the mountain, being picked off one by one. When they ran out of bullets, they threw stones. One Pal, Private Wilkin, started catching Turkish grenades and throwing them back – he did this five times before the sixth grenade exploded in his hand. At last, after hours of watching their friends being slaughtered, the men – Seabrook men, Clongowes men, St Michael’s men and others, who a week before had never been out of the country, most of them, let alone experienced enemy fire – mounted a bayonet charge on the Turkish guns. During this charge, Juster’s great-grandfather, William Molloy, got shot in the hand and had to crawl back to his own lines. He was one of the lucky ones. Half the Pals were lost that night.

‘After that episode the Allies changed their plans. The division packed up and the remnants of the Pals were split up and transferred to Salonika. As their ship sailed away, as they left their friends behind them on the cliffs and hillsides, the men vowed that their sacrifice, what had happened there, would not be forgotten. But as we’ve seen, it was forgotten. Or rather, it was deliberately erased. It seems pretty hard luck, after enduring so many terrible hardships and pointless deaths. But that’s what happened. The years went by and the Pals became casualties again, this time of history.’

He stows his notebook in his bag and looks up at the boys looking back at him, dotted around the viridian sward in clumps of three and four, like rain-jacketed statues.

‘It’s hard for us, living in peacetime, to imagine the mindset of the people who lived through the war. So many men had been killed, one in every six who served, and there was barely anyone who wasn’t touched by loss in some way. Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, wives. Friends. This was a world overwhelmed by grief, and the ways that that grief manifested could be quite extreme. In France, for example, there was a plague of graverobbing. Poor families spent every penny they had on locating their sons’ bodies and bringing them home from the Front. In Britain there was a huge outbreak of spiritualism. Fathers and mothers held seances to speak with their dead sons. Very respectable, normally quite rational people got involved. There was even the case of the celebrated scientist, a pioneer in electromagnetic waves, who believed he could use them to build a bridge between our world and the next, “tune in” to the world of the dead.’

He halts momentarily, thrown by Ruprecht Van Doren, who is goggling at him as if he’s choking on something. ‘Above all, though,’ he fumbles for his thread, ‘people coped with their grief by remembering. They wore poppies in honour of their loved ones. They erected statues and built cenotaphs. And all over Europe, in villages, towns and cities, they opened memorial gardens like this one. This particular garden was different to all the others, though. Can anyone tell me why?’ He gazes evenly from face to pallid face. ‘This garden was never actually opened. It wasn’t begun until the thirties, and it wasn’t completed until the very end of the century. For the decades in between it was let run wild. People grazed their horses here, dealers used it to sell drugs. It was the memorial garden that no one remembered. And it represented most Irish people’s attitude to the war, which was to bury it.

‘The fact is that, after the Easter Rising and the War of Independence, the Irishmen who’d fought in the Great War didn’t fit the new way the country imagined itself. If the British were our sworn enemies, why had two hundred thousand Irishmen gone off to fight alongside them? If our history was the struggle to escape from British oppression, what were we doing helping Britain out, fighting and dying on her behalf? The existence of these soldiers seemed to argue against this new thing called Ireland. And so, first of all, they were turned into traitors. Then, in a quite systematic way, they were forgotten.’

The boys listen palely, the lucent grass-green of the empty park shimmering around them.

‘It’s a good example of how history works,’ Howard says. ‘We tend to think of it as something solid and unchanging, appearing out of nowhere etched in stone like the Ten Commandments. But history, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn’t make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn’t fit. And often that is quite a lot.

‘The men of “D” Company, like the other men who fought, found this out the hard way. They were told all kinds of stories to get them to join up, stories about duty and morality and defending freedom. Most of all, they were told what a great adventure it would be. When they arrived they discovered that none of these stories was true. Instead they had been lied to and plunged into the most brutal and barbarous mess in the world’s history to that point. And the history that was told of that mess was as dishonest as the stories that helped create it.

‘When they left Dublin in 1914, with crowds cheering them on, the Pals must have thought that the very least they could hope for was to be remembered. Then again, after so much betrayal, maybe the ones that were left alive afterwards weren’t all that surprised it went the other way. And maybe they were wise enough not to let it get to them. They had joined up as friends, and when they got out to the Front, when the grand words evaporated, that bond between them remained. That they stayed friends, that they looked out for each other, most agreed, was what kept them from cracking up altogether. And in the end was the only thing, was the one true thing, that was genuinely worth fighting for.’

He smiles summatively at the boys; they gaze mutely back at him, in their grey uniforms for all the world like an incorporeal platoon, materialized out of the winter clouds to scour the bare park for someone who has not forgotten them.