Beyond exhaustion, I rested against the wall of the carriage and pressed my face to the window. I quickly reached that helpless stage where I blinked open my eyes, puzzled for a moment that I wasn’t at home in my own bed, awakening to another day of grind and guilt. I’d fallen asleep.
My briefcase. My right hand jerked sideways with my eyes. The touch of the soft leather and the qualification in my vision of the battered Tuscan black briefcase did little to temper the steely-cold fingertips scampering down my back. As nonchalantly I as imagined I didn’t appear to be, I undid the two hidden side buckles and checked inside the flap pocket. There they were, the photos of two beautiful boys, a year between them – seven and eight. I held one in my hand and ran my thumb around its white-bordered frame. I then returned it to the zipped pocket and closed the case.
Removing my glasses, I worked my middle fingers into the corners of my eyes, replaced my glasses, yawned and took a surreptitious scan around the carriage. The usual homeward bound commuters: indifferent-looking women in their twenties or thirties, a scattering of serious-faced young men in suits, a few surfing and scrolling on their Smartphones, some of them reading newspapers, one or two pretending to; a fat middle-aged woman talking loudly to a disinterested young mother, and a mixed group of mid-teens, their vacuous declarations and sneering laughter a constant reminder that the rest of us were incidental and that the world was made only for them. That’s when I saw him.
Three-quarters of the way down the carriage, a couple of seats behind the standing teenagers, a pointy-featured face was locked on to the teenage group like a twitching-tailed cat watching a host of chattering sparrows. His oversized nose led his gawping stare.
His interest caused me uneasiness. Was that how I looked to others when they copped me staring too long at some of the younger boys in the playground?
The glimpses I caught of this man until he got up to get off the train after three more stops disturbed me further. Like a forgotten face in a disremembered dream, there came at me ugly associations I couldn’t locate. These elusive associations made me queasy. The rhythm of the train and the sudden stops, together with the lack of food left me light-headed. But when he got up and worked his way past the teenagers and stood holding the vertical bar at the exit door, I recognised that nose. Concorde. That’s what we called him in my schooldays. Smaller now he seemed to me, he still shifted that birdlike head about in jerky spasms.
Phantom fingers clutched me by the throat. Breathless, my panicked attempt to suck in oxygen coincided with bitter bile pumping from my stomach into my throat. Broken images and words that had, for over thirty-five years, never left me alone, fell upon me like a tiger ambush. Father Brian, the Concorde, singling me out in theclassroom during prayers. His long and shiny finger curved and beckoning me from my desk and out the door. The sickly-green walled corridor. Being dragged by the scruff to that alcove between the cloakroom and the toilets. The Concorde’s slimy touch, his hands working over my body like a potter at his wheel. Wheezy grunts, the clenched-teeth and strangled snarls. The cologne and garlic stink.
“Laughing through the Lord’s Prayer, Slevin, eh?”
“No sir. Please sir …”
“I’ll teach you to laugh, boy. Get to your knees.”
Long hands twisting me about, overgrown fingernails scratching my bared stomach …
“ ‘Our Father, who art in heaven / hallowed by thy Name’ – Say it.”
“I’m sorry sir. Please sir.”
“Father.”
“I’m sorry, Father.”
“ ‘…thy kingdom come, thy will be done’ – repeat it, Slevin,”
“ ‘Our Father, who art in heaven …’ ”
Clutching my briefcase, I pushed myself from the seat and made it to the exit just before the doors whooshed closed. Five stops before mine, I stood on the platform and pretended to make a call on my mobile. This allowed the Concorde time to move ahead of me without my arousing his suspicions.
Less light-headed now, I tailed him up into the coastal town, passed the city hall and as far as the shopping centre. Not sure what I intended to do, I waited in the open area inside the entrance while he went into the supermarket. Once more I feigned making a call on my phone.
When the Concorde finally came through the checkout with his plastic bags, I gave him a few seconds before slipping after him. Didn’t want to lose the bastard now. I expected him to head to one of the many apartment complexes in the area, but, jerking his head about in front of the multiplex cinema next to the shopping centre, he pulled out a white handkerchief, put it to that enormous nose and honked into it.
That ugly honking sound exactly as it reawakened in my head. A sickening sound that belonged in the buried past.
Into the cinema complex he went. I slipped after him.
Dizzy again, I really needed to eat, but I’d upset my whole routine so much, he wasn’t going to escape me now. Standing beneath the screen with the movie listings and times, he said something to himself. I sidled up next to him and pretended interest in the digital screen. I hadn’t been to a cinema for years.
So close to him was I, I could hear his loud breathing through that nose. Sickening. I caught him jerking his head my way. Like he was about to speak. I shoved off to where there were some leaflets and flicked one open. Not ready yet to confront him, I felt a pulse hammering at my temples.
Hoping that he would go to the sweet shop, which would give me too the opportunity to pick up a snack, I moved after him when he went directly to get his ticket. But I was too late. He’d already told the assistant the name of the movie and was shifting about while he waited for his ticket to print out. Next in line, another assistant chucked his head at me and asked me could he help me.
I drew in breath, not knowing what I would say, when the Concorde turned back and asked which screen he was going to.
“Screen 12,” the young man who had served him said.
I made a self-conscious humph-sound I hoped indicated what a funny coincidence. “Screen 12,” I said to the round-faced youth looking at me with belligerent eyes.
“Stella Days?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s it.”
The cinema theatre was tiny with seats for no more than forty at a glance. Apart from the Concorde, there were other people seated when I entered. He sat in the second last row at the back. Perfect. I positioned myself in the row behind him and two seats to his left.
Removing the photos from my briefcase and pocketing them, I left the case in my seat and slipped out to get a drink and a Danish pastry. The movie didn’t start for another five or so minutes.
Only a scattering of cinemagoers, ten or eleven, occupied the seats by the time I got back. With my sticky bun and cola, I settled down to watch the movie. Might as well. But as soon as the credits got rolling, I saw it was some paddywhackery about an American priest returning to Ireland in the 1950’s to set up a cinema in Tipperary. By the end of the movie, however, I surprised myself by realising I’d actually forgotten about the Concorde occasionally, so engrossed had I become in what was happening onscreen.
Time for some real-life action now, I nodded to myself. I leaned forward and spoke the first words to this man who had, three decades back, ruined my prospects of living a normal life as a normal human being. “Good movie?” I said, surprised, shocked even at the deep adult timbre to my voice.
The Concorde whipped his head in my direction so fast I might have spat into his face. “Indeed,” he said. “Yes, indeed.” He pushed himself from his seat and to his feet and made to leave.
The lights came on, and with them a young girl with a black plastic bag entered to clean up. The mostly elderly cinema audience fumbled with their bags and coats and struggled obediently to get up.
“Are these yours?” I called after the Concorde. I held in my outstretched arm the two Tesco bags he’d forgotten.
He turned around. “Oh yes,” he said. “I’d forget my head if it wasn’t, you know -” He stood there expecting me to bring them to him. I remained where I was. Quickly he bustled back towards me, his old man’s claws stretched before him. I leaned over, pushed a seat forward and plopped the bags into it. His craggy vulture face jumped at me and then at the bags.
“Fr. O’Shea,” I said. His surname had only now come to me.
He froze.
“Fr. Brian O’Shea?” I said.
Out of his stoop he rose, one hand clutching his shopping, the other held at me offering his hand to shake. “Yes,” he said, his voice hesitating, awaiting my reminder as to where we’d met.
I accepted his handshake, as limp and disturbingly soft as I guessed it would be. “You don’t remember me,” I said. I kept his hand in mine, increasing the pressure until his open-mouthed face drained to white and he made a kind of squeak.
“Please,” he said. “My hand. You’re hurting –”
“Excuse me,” I said. And I mumbled something through a staggered laugh about eating too much meat and not knowing my own strength.
“Please,” I said, indicating that we head for the exit and he walk ahead of me.
In the foyer the Concorde tried to dismiss me and slink off into the past from whence he emerged, some foul and diseased-ridden piece of subhuman filth that had lain dormant, incubating in its own rotting juices, awaiting the moment to emerge and strike again with renewed force the weak and vulnerable when defences were once more down.
“You’ve no idea who I am?” I said as we stepped out into the evening light.
He ignored me now and tried to push off.
“Andrew Slevin,” I said to his back. “1974.”
He paused, made as though he would turn around, but shuffled away at a surprisingly nimble pace. I went with him, walking next to him when the pedestrian-packed pavements allowed it.
“Son of a bitch,” I said to him through the side of my mouth. “Eleven years of age, you fucking bastard, you.”
“The police,” he said. “I’ll call the police.”
“Yeah,” I said, no longer giving a damn about the people in the street hearing me. I whipped out my mobile and held it to him. “Go ahead and call them.” I pushed the phone in front of his face. He tried to brush my arm aside. I kept my arm aloft, the phone next to his ear.
“Leave him alone,” a passer’s-by voice said, an old woman’s.
“It’s okay. We know each other,” I said to the air.
“Right,” I said to him. “This is it. Two choices. You walk down the road with me now to the Garda Station, or you can come with me and face the consequences of what you did to me.”
We were passing the town’s main church. He stopped. “I’ve made my peace,” he said. He indicated the church. “I’ve made my peace with him. With our Lord.”
I exploded into such a tirade of anger against him, his church and his god, he agreed to walk on, but asked me to please keep my voice down. I screwed up my face and kind of nodded. We headed for the seafront and the windy pier.
With darkness now drawing in, bringing with it a savage coldness, the last of the evening strollers were braving the pier. He squinted into the hazy distance of the long granite arm stretching out to sea, stopped, and suggested we walk along the seafront instead.
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Let’s go,”
To unnerve him, I said little on the walk towards the pier’s end. He prattled on much as he had outside the church, saying how he had long ago atoned for his succumbing to what he described as his weaknesses in the face of temptation as a young man.
“I used to bring my kids out here to fish,” I said. “Two lads.” I scanned the harbour, listening to the creaking and jangling yachts.
“It’s terribly cold,” he said. He wrung his hands together and blew into them.
I placed my briefcase on a blue bench.
“What are you doing?” he said. “Why have you brought me here?”
“They loved it down here. Me too.”
“I need to get going. There are people expecting me. They’ll be wondering –”
“My kids are dead.”
“Look,” he said.
“No, you look. Look at me.”
He looked.
“I don’t mean dead-dead. But they’re dead to me. My wife left me. Got a barring order. I can’t even see me own boys. Never. Not ever.”
“What’s that got to do with me?” he said. Now he was getting cocky.
Why should I explain anything to this bastard? I decided. I got down on my knees and turned my head upwards to the flashing light on the lighthouse. The cold of the ground penetrated my bones.
“Our Father, who art in heaven / hallowed be thy Name,” I began to recite. “Down on your knees,” I said.
“You can’t,” he said. “This is blasphemy.”
“On your knees,” I bellowed. “Now.”
He lowered himself to his knees, suddenly blubbering, his elbows supporting his weight on the blue bench.
“You,” I said. “You’re the preacher. Start praying.”
“Our Father, who art in heaven / hallowed be thy Name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” he managed to get out between snivelling. “Do you know how old I am?” He turned to me.
“Keep praying.”
“I’m seventy-one.”
“Congratulations,” I said. Although regarding him now, he reminded me of my own father, the way he used to get all weepy after my mother died. Something beat inside my head and told me this wasn’t right. I fought away the feeling.
“I’m not well,” he said.
“Good.”
“I’m on medication. Seventy-one years of age and I have heart problems.”
I got up, pulling him to his feet with me, my hands clutching his collar. “Yeah, and I was eleven when you first dragged me from my childhood and used me like a fucking toilet, you piece of fucking shit.” Hating myself even more than I already did, I smacked him in the face with the back of my hand, holding onto him with the other. He squealed like an old woman. I then tossed him sideways. He went to the ground easily.
Lying in the granite surface, he curled into a foetus position and began to pray again – this time unbidden. I bent into him, took hold of what was left of his oily hair and lifted his head up.
“That’s it. Say your prayers.”
His feeble hands grabbed my wrist as I dragged him over to the edge of the pier. Was I really going to do this?
“No. Please, you can’t.”
I let go of him, leaving him where he lay, and went over to my briefcase. Whether he was unable to get up from the lip of the pier or had resigned himself to death by drowning I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. From my briefcase I took out the photos of my two boys. I kissed their images. I don’t know why. It just felt like the thing to do.
Back to the Concorde I went. “Your phone.”
“What?”
“Your phone, your mobile phone. Do you have a mobile?”
He whimpered in the affirmative.
“Give it here.”
He indicated his coat-pocket.
As roughly as I could, I dipped my hand into his pocket and pulled his phone free. I then drew back my arm and flung it far out into the dark and thrashing waters. One shove from my foot and I could have tipped him over the edge and into the drowning sea. The urge to do so was enormous. But I fought it and won. He had already turned me into one thing – he wasn’t going to mould me into a murderer.
I left him as he was, praying and clearly petrified that he was going to die.
Walking back up the pier alone, I thought about what could have been: A stable marriage to a good woman who trusted me, a woman who bore us two beautiful boys. A marriage undermined through my deceit, the giving in to an induced urge I strived but failed to deny.
That I was born even vaguely like him, that loathsome piece of human detritus at the end of the pier, I can never be sure. Perhaps he recognised in me as a boy something of himself, the same flaws and weaknesses, and so preyed upon me. Perhaps, by contaminating me with his delusions, he moulded me into a distortion of who I truly am.
Nine years she and I had been married. For nine years I couldn’t accept this thing inside me that looked at young men, boys really, with a look that should have been reserved for my wife. Finally, the temptation had been too great, the longing too real.
