was keen to make sure we boys understood this was basically a goddess created for peasants. One problem, explained Fr. Ferchware, was this: If Mary was conceived and born without sin, for that is what Immaculate Conception means, is it not, Treacy? (It is, Father), then she had no need of the salvific intervention of her son, Jesus Christ, did she? Don’t try to answer, child, just tell me, the grammatical term for that question.
“A trick question, Father.
“A rhetorical question, you godless reprobate. I shall continue. So if there was already one perfect person in the world, Jesus Christ could not have been the Universal Savior. We might conclude, therefore, that His universality is imperfect and that He is therefore imperfect and He cannot be God. And what does this demonstrate?
“The evident limitations of logic and the frailty of human reasoning in the face of the divine, Father.
“Good man, Treacy.
“The thing about the Jesuits is they started off their history as a sort of special operations force, often poised to stage a military coup within the Church, but ended up teaching geography to schoolchildren. I think that-and chastity-drove most of them mad.
“I was expelled at 16. The immediate or ostensible cause was my poisoning of O’Leary, a gap-toothed red- faced thug who thought he could make my life a misery because I was not so good at rugby. I patiently waited for him one afternoon behind the science wing, opened that very year and contributed to by my stepfather or whatever he was. When O’Leary eventually came by, he was on his own. Looking back with the forgiveness of years, I suppose he was not the worst type of bully. He didn’t have a gang; he didn’t spend his time looking for me. It was casual, off-handed bullying, made possible by his size. I hit him over the head with a rock as he walked around the corner. He stood there and rubbed his head like a cartoon character doing a double-take, so I hit him again, on the temple, and down he went. I sat on his chest and opened up three paper twists of powder I had taken from the chemistry lab. The first contained tartaric acid, basically sherbet without sugar, and I held his nose and poured it into his gaping mouth. It fizzed, and he choked and I told him it was arsenic. The next packet contained bicarbonate of soda, which I told him was plutonium. While not generally available to Irish schoolchildren, plutonium was such a scary new word back then that I thought its dramatic reach would bridge the credibility gap. The last package contained copper sulphate, which I had taken for the beauty of its color, and this, unfortunately, was toxic, though not deadly.
“I hadn’t figured O’Leary for a snitch but the plutonium and arsenic had him worried. Even then, his babbling report might not have been taken too seriously were it not for the black bruise on his temple, his blue tongue, and terrified eyes. Everyone stood ceremoniously on the pebbled driveway as the ambulance drove away with O’Leary inside accompanied by the headmaster.
“As I was packing my bags, Fr. McCarthy came in holding his black ‘biffer,’ a leather strap weighted with lead. He administered twelve strokes to each hand, aiming also to hit the wrist. He left saying, ‘We’ve all known the truth about you for some time, Treacy.’
“A biffer works on the hands rather like a coronary stroke, managing to impart pain and numbness at once. With my throbbing and fumbling hands, I was unable to complete my packing, still less close my suitcase and bring it downstairs to the front door, and I think it was this more than anything that caused me to become so upset. At any rate, it was Fr. Ferchware who came up and found me, finished packing my suitcase for me and accompanied me to the front door. Before we went out, he told me, ‘There’ll be a lot of people looking at you, Henry. You don’t want to go out with a face like that.’ He took a startlingly white, sharply folded, and perfectly clean handkerchief from his pocket, and handed it to me. ‘Dry your eyes, blow your nose.’ The handkerchief smelled of lavender and sunshine, the smells of France, Italy, and my future. I filled it with gray snot and salt, the color and taste of Ireland and my past.
“ ‘Who is coming for me?’ I asked. ‘Is it my mother?’
“ ‘No, son, they’ve sent a taxi.’
“When I was younger, each month was a compact unit containing so many events and changes that they had to be compressed just to fit. But now an entire year can drift by empty of significance. I thought when I started this I might be able to unpack some of those compressed events and examine them in detail, but I find I have forgotten most of them. Life then was brimming, but I still have to pass over years as if they had hardly happened at all.
“After my expulsion from Clongowes, they sent me to the Presentation Brothers in Bray, but I got kicked out of that, too, this time for setting fire to an outhouse. No one saw me, but I was stupid enough to turn up to my next lesson reeking of paraffin and smoke, and was sent to the headmaster’s office, from whose window the smoldering heap across the field was still visible. A red fire engine stood in the middle of the field, one fireman dribbling his hose on the black patch of ground, a second fireman watching. The headmaster waved his arm at the window, and declared,
See you yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild,
The seat of desolation, void of light,
Save what the glimmering of these livid flames
Casts pale and dreadful?
“Then he burst out laughing, and took some time to get himself under control. As he dabbed his watering eyes with the back of his hand, I figured it was probably going to be all right after all if he found it so funny, but then he said, ‘I’ve phoned your house, and nobody is in, so I’m afraid it is up to you to tell them you have been expelled. We are also considering prosecution, and shall certainly be seeking damages. That is all.’
“I ended up in Ballybrack Technical College, and, in between the metalwork, remedial English, and getting beaten up, finally learned something useful: basic carpentry. But after less than a year, I had left that school, too. This time I was not expelled, I merely wandered off and no one seemed to notice.
“One morning, I was sitting on the number 45 bus on my way to Bray when a group of kids, three boys and a girl, in front of me started slashing the rubbery blue seats with penknives. One of them turned around to see if I wanted to make something of it, then nudged his companion. Here comes trouble, I thought. Then the girl turned around and said, ‘Henry!’ And I looked at her for a while, then finally said, disappointed but also kind of awed, ‘Monica!’
“She was going through her anti-authority phase. Cut adrift and allowed to do her own thing. I was the perfect companion.
“In the summer of 1966, a woman called Mrs. Heath, who was connected in some vague way with someone who knew my stepfather, allowed me to use an empty mews in her garden. The deal was that I would do odd jobs, like washing the forty-two windows of her house (each of which had four panes and, of course, two sides, so it was no small task), weed the garden, clean some of the slime from around the pond, cut the grass, run errands. In exchange, I got to live in an empty stone mews without electricity. But it had running water, a bathroom, a permanently damp bed, some black oak furniture, and was effectively my first apartment. It was an unheard-of freedom that rendered me attractive to Monica.
“For a West Brit, Mrs. Heath was a good woman. She encouraged me to paint, and paid for the supplies. When I did something, she would ‘air’ it in the house, since the mews was too damp. I thought she was ancient, but she was probably only in her thirties. After a few months she trusted me enough not to follow me around the house as I cleaned the windows or carried mahogany chairs and tables from one room to another, for she was always rearranging her life, ready to start afresh.
“One morning, Monica and I found ourselves alone in the drawing room. Mrs. Heath was away for a few hours and had asked me to dust the room. As I was lifting silverware and china trinkets from the mantelpiece, Monica said, ‘We should steal something.’
“I turned around to see if she was serious.
“ ‘Something really valuable. To make it worthwhile. Something that we could sell and then use the money to go somewhere.’
“Her suggestion was to go to London, a city where everything was happening. I was attracted by the idea, too, but did not want to steal from Mrs. Heath. But I knew Monica would be disappointed if I made bourgeois moral objections to her idea, so I pointed out the practical difficulties of getting a flat, putting down a deposit, finding a job. Since she still lived with her parents and I was the one with the independent life, she deferred to me on these points. But the result was to set Monica thinking along more ambitious lines.
