I peered out cautiously from behind the cross and saw, less than twenty feet away, the shadow of a man limping by on the path. He seemed to be dragging his left leg. A few more steps, and he emerged from the shadow of a huge copper beech into moonlight, and I saw his face for the first time. It was ghostly white, pale like my mother’s the day she told us our father was dead. His eyes were lost in the darkness beneath prominent brows, almost as if the sockets were empty. His trousers were torn and he wore a ragged jacket and grey shirt open at the neck. A small sack of belongings hung from his left hand. A vagrant seeking a place to sleep among the dead? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know.
I waited until he had shuffled off again to be swallowed up by the night, and I moved out from behind the tomb to see for the first time the name cut in the stone of it. And every hair on my body stood on end.
Mary Elizabeth McBride.
My mother’s name. I knew, of course, that it wasn’t her lying there beneath the ground. This Mary Elizabeth had been in residence for nearly two hundred years. But I couldn’t shake off the sense that somehow it was my mother who had guided me to that place of concealment. She had charged me with looking after my brother, but had taken it upon herself to watch over me.
I turned and fled, back the way I had come, heart trying to crack open my ribs, until I saw the black-painted metal gate standing ajar. I was through it like a ghost, and sprinting across the asphalt to the door at the back of The Dean. The only time in my life, I think, that I was glad to be inside it.
Back in my bed I lay shivering for a long time before sleep took me. I’m not sure when it was that I was wakened by Peter. He was leaning over me, caught in the moonlight that angled in across the dorm in elongated rectangles. I could see the concern in his eyes, and he was touching my face.
‘John,’ he was whispering. ‘Johnny. Why are you crying?’
It was Alex Curry’s fault that the adventure on the roof ended in disaster. He was a brute of a boy, older than the rest of us, and had been there the longest. He was about as tall as Mr Anderson, and probably stronger. He’d always been a rebel, the others said, and had his arse belted more often than anyone else at The Dean. But in three years he had developed to the point where his physical strength matched his rebellious nature. And that must have been pretty intimidating to Mr Anderson. Lately he had refused to cut his thick, black hair and grown it into an Elvis quiff and duck’s arse. I think that’s probably the first time that Peter and I became aware of Elvis Presley. We had barely been conscious of the world outside of our own. The belting of Alex had tailed off, and it was rumoured that he was to be sent to a hostel. He was too old for The Dean now, and far too much for Mr Anderson to handle.
Catherine had come to us the day before, with a wink and a smile and a conspiratorial tone. She and several of the other girls had received food parcels that week, and there was to be a midnight feast on the roof the following night.
‘How do we get on to the roof?’ I said.
She looked at me, eyes full of pity at my innocence, and shook her head. ‘There are stairs leading up to the roof from both wings,’ she said. ‘Go and take a look at your side. There’s a door at the end of the landing, and behind it a narrow staircase. The door’s never locked. The roof’s flat, and perfectly safe if you stay away from the edge. It’s the only time the boys and girls ever get to meet up without the bloody staff watching us.’ She grinned lasciviously. ‘It can get interesting.’
I felt an immediate stirring somewhere deep in my loins. Like a worm turning over. I had long ago learned to masturbate, but I had never so much as kissed a girl. And there was no mistaking the look in Catherine’s eyes.
I could hardly contain my excitement all the next day. School passed infuriatingly slowly, and at the end of the afternoon I couldn’t remember a single thing that we’d been taught. No one ate much at dinner that night, conserving their appetites for the midnight feast. Of course, not everyone was going. Some of the kids were too young, and others too scared. But wild horses couldn’t have kept me away. And Peter was fearless.
There were around ten of us who slipped out of the dorm on to the landing shortly before midnight that night. Alex Curry led the way. I don’t know how he had managed it, but from somewhere he had acquired a couple of dozen bottles of pale ale which he shared out among us to carry on to the roof.
I’ll never forget the feeling of emerging from that dark, narrow stairwell on to the wide open space of the roof, moonlight spilling freely across its tarred surface. It felt like escape. Even my later solitary outings never felt quite like that. I wanted to turn my face to the sky and shout out loud. But, of course, I didn’t.
We all met up in the middle, behind the big clock and to one side of the huge skylight that lit the upper floor. The girls brought the food, the boys had the beer, and we sat around in a loose circle eating cheese and cake and biscuits, and dipping our fingers into jars of jam. At first we spoke in the faintest of whispers, but as the bottles of beer got passed around, we grew bold and careless. It was the first time I had ever drunk alcohol, and I loved the kick I got from that soft, bitter liquid foaming on my tongue and slipping over so easily to steal away inhibition.
I’m not sure how, but somehow I found myself sitting next to Catherine. We were side by side, shoulders and upper arms touching, legs drawn up. I could feel her warmth through her jumper, and I could have breathed in the smell of her for ever. I have no idea what that scent was. But it always hung around her. Faintly aromatic. I suppose it must have been a perfume of some kind, or the soap she used. Perhaps something sent by her aunt. It was always arousing.
I was already heady from the beer, and finding courage I never knew I had. I slipped my arm around her shoulder, and she leaned in against me.
‘What happened to your folks?’ I said. It was a question we hardly ever asked. We were never encouraged to dwell on the past. She took a long time to answer.
‘My mum died.’
‘And your dad?’
‘It didn’t take him long to find someone else. Someone who would give him children, like a good Catholic. My mum had complications when I was born and couldn’t have any more kids.’
I was confused. ‘I don’t understand. Why aren’t you still at home?’
‘
I heard the pain in her voice, and felt it too. It was one thing to lose your parents to death, it was another to be turned away, unwanted. Especially by your own father. I sneaked a glance at her, and was shocked to see silvered tears run down her cheeks in the moonlight. Wee, tough Catherine. The arousal I’d felt earlier dissipated, and all I really wanted to do was hold her, and comfort her, so that she would know she was wanted by someone.
Which was when I became aware of a commotion on the far side of the skylight. Someone had taken Peter’s bottle of beer off him, unopened, and several of the boys were throwing it from one to the other, tantalising him, making him run around in dizzying circles trying to catch it. It seemed that Alex Curry was the ringleader, bating and taunting, encouraging the others. Everyone knew Peter wasn’t quite the full shilling, and without me to stand up for him he was an easy target.
Of course, I was no physical match for Alex Curry, but I had the mental strength to stand up to anyone when it came to Peter. I had promised my mother, and I wasn’t about to renege on that.
I stood up immediately. ‘Oi!’ I almost shouted, and immediately everyone went quiet. The bottle-throwing stopped, and one or two voices shushed me in the still night air. ‘Fucking leave off,’ I said, sounding much braver than I felt.
‘You and whose army’s going to make me?’
‘I don’t need an army to kick your arse, Curry.’
I know whose arse would have got kicked that night if fate hadn’t intervened. Before Curry could respond, Peter lunged at him to grab his beer, and the bottle spun away through the air, knocked from the bigger boy’s grasp.
The silence of the night was shattered as the bottle broke through the glass of the skylight then fell through a moment of stillness to an explosion of glass and foam as it landed in the hall below. More glass showered down after it. It sounded as if a bomb had gone off.
‘Holy Mary, mother of God’ I heard Catherine whisper, and then everyone was up and running, shadows darting east and west across the roof in a panic, food and beer abandoned in haste and fear.
Bodies crammed together in the darkness of the stairwell, shoving and jostling in a rush to get down to the landing. Like rats we poured through the door of the dorm and fanned out towards our beds.
By the time the doors flew open and the lights came on, everyone was curled up beneath the sheets
