Heaps of Trouble (6 page)

Not-My-Round-Jim was completely useless at selling anything, setting the father a real challenge in keeping him out of the way, while at the same time making him feel that he was performing an important task. So he placed him in ‘overall charge' of the wrapping section. Which translated into his doing nothing, but still thinking that he was doing something important. And since he was in the same room as Boy-o-Boy, the two of them could drink themselves silly.

As for Boy-o-Boy, he took up residence by the drink table and was ready to hand out a glass of whiskey to anybody who felt the need of revival. Because he also came with his own stock of booze secreted about his person, there was never a chance of running out.

Finally there was the mother, located by the cash register with her two lady shop assistants who were in charge of the children's clothing section. Throughout the evening she bundled up rolls of banknotes and handed them to the father who stuffed them into the pockets of a pair of very baggy pants that he wore specially for the occasion. So that, by the end of the evening, with front and back pockets bulging, it looked like he was wearing a pair of Spanish Conquistador pantaloons.

By five in the afternoon the full force of the shoppers had descended on the store; by six the two front doors had to be taken off their springs and tied back, to allow the multitude of people trying to get in and out to pass. The bright lights of the shop illuminated every corner and the constant ringing of the till announced yet another sale, mingling with the curses and cries of the people trying to get attention. All you could see of Joe was his hands raised high above his head as he forced his way through the press of people to hand over some object for wrapping to the ladies in the kitchen (who were now working at a feverish speed in an attempt to keep up).

I raced between the legs of the people behind the counter delivering goods for wrapping, and then gathered up the wrapped parcels for delivery back to the customer. Boy-o-Boy was diligently handing out drinks to everybody behind the counter and, each time he passed the father, he muttered, ‘Boy, oh boy, Ron, but it's busy this year.' Klepto Joe flapped his arms wildly, trying to get Boy-o-Boy's attention, exclaiming that he was ‘gasping with the thirst and can't that drunken eejit see me?'

And so it continued throughout the whole evening, with very short spells of calm that allowed everyone to draw breath for a minute before the onslaught started all over again. Finally it reached a climax around eleven that night, when the fathers, on their way home from the pubs, congregated outside the shop. Peering through the windows, while at the same time counting the money they had left over from the wages after the night's drinking, they assessed what they could afford to buy for their children (who still believed that Santa
just
might make it to their house that year).

By midnight, with the bells of St Michael's church announcing the arrival of Christmas Day, the flurry had died down to the odd few drunks making their way home. All of the ‘helpers' were congregating in the kitchen and toasting each other for another well-run operation. I was just starting to clean up the multitude of cardboard boxes that littered the floor behind the counter when a lone drunk came staggering into the shop, dressed in a dirty old coat and swaying slightly. He came over to the mother (who was tidying up the drapery section) and reached into his pocket, dragging out a handful of coins, which he carefully placed on the counter. Then he asked the mother, very politely, ‘What toys can I buy for that amount?'

Thinking that the mother would sling him out with a flea in his ear, I was amazed to hear her asking him how many children had he and what were their ages? When she had extracted the information from him, she picked up an empty box from the floor and, walking down the shelves, began to fill it with an assortment of toys, before handing it over. She then guided him to the door very gently but determinedly, and pointed him in the direction of his house with the words, ‘Now, make sure that you place these in the children's room before you pass out.'

As an afterthought she called him back and, rushing behind the counter, grabbed a set of gloves and ran back out to him, stuffing them into the box as a ‘gift for the wife'. Whereupon he appeared to sober up noticeably and, turning to my mother, announced in almost an apologetic voice, ‘I'm sorry, Mam, but she died two year ago'.

The mother and I watched him shuffle off up the street with the cardboard box clutched tightly to his chest and, as she locked up the shop doors, I noticed tears running down her face. She turned to me, wiping her cheeks, and then she picked me up in her arms and carried me into the kitchen where the ‘hooley' was about to begin – and would carry on into the early hours of the morning.

However my father had one more task for me to perform, so he took me upstairs to their bedroom and sat me down on their bed. He told me how proud he was to have a son who had reached the age of being able to assist in the business, then emptied from his pockets bundles and bundles of notes. They were creased and folded in every conceivable manner and I was given instructions to sort them into their respective denominations. Once done, I was to count the lot, hide it under the rug, and finally to creep down and whisper to him the final figure before I went to bed. Tiredness forgotten, I set to my task with renewed vigour and, after carefully unfolding, straightening and stacking all of the notes into their respective piles, I began the task of counting and storing them. I checked each pile twice and carefully noted down the total for each bundle before totting them up.

Totally amazed, I stuffed it all under the rug and, satisfied that it was safely concealed, simply tore downstairs with such excitement that I roared from the doorway:‘Dad, Dad, we took in thousands and thousands of pounds!' And stood there grinning and hopping from foot to foot with excitement.

The room was stunned into silence, broken by the sound of a glass smashing as Boy-o-Boy dropped his drink and stuttered, ‘Boy, oh boy, Ron, but that's great.'

‘The pipes have busted, the pipes have busted!' The cry first started in the schoolyard like the soft murmur of approaching rain and slowly the news was taken up in the classrooms nearest the yard. Eventually the crescendo of noise reached our room with such force that it infected us all; even I began to chant with the others, ‘the pipes have busted, the pipes have busted!', although I had no idea what it meant or what would be the consequence.

It had been our first day back at Golden Bridge School after the Christmas holidays and I had gone to bed the night before with a sense of dread at having to go back to ‘that awful place with them nuns'. I was in such a state of panic that not even the grandmother (with offers of bribery in the form of sweets, money and promised trips to the local cinema) could stem my howls of anguish. Up until the previous evening, before the awful realisation had sunk in that my Christmas holiday was over, I had been engrossed in the roadworks that were taking place on our street. They had begun at Kilmainham and over the previous months they had been slowly marching up the road in checkerboard slabs of concrete.

The Dublin Corporation was continuing its effort to rid Dublin of all its old tramlines and cobblestone streets. Since Emmett Road was the main exit route out of the city for all the country people returning to Cork and the southern regions, our road was enjoying the full might of the entire available workforce in an attempt to complete the works quickly.

All through that first week in January I had watched the workers from my bedroom window, which offered a panoramic view of the operation. They first cordoned off one side of the street, then the other, while they tore up the old, redundant tramlines and, using pneumatic hammers, dislodged the tightly locked and deeply imbedded cobblestones, before installing large mats of steel mesh and filling the void with concrete. Throughout the day the street was filled with an unholy row from the constant jackhammering that reverberated from building to building. Whenever one crew stopped, another was already tapping out its ear-shattering response as if they were in constant communication and were trying to out do each other.

I saw the removal of the tramlines as the end of an era, since the tracks I viewed from my bedroom window had always guaranteed amusement on a wet day. Inevitably some poor fellow cycling down the hill from Ward's pub would end up with the wheels of his bike slipping into the tramlines. Depending on his cycling ability, he would display antics worthy of a circus act in attempting to keep his balance, while avoiding being swept round the corner into Spa Road. Sometimes, of course, people just promptly fell off as soon as the wheels hit the lines. But thankfully the odd one had the skill needed to travel the whole road, with bike and body gyrating wildly from side to side, in an attempt to counteract each movement. Displaying great skill, they were able to hop the bike out of the lines before they were forced to navigate the sharp bend into the CIE compound.

Every evening the perimeter of each newly completed concrete section was secured with forty four-gallon barrels, topped with long planks from which hessian blankets were hung. This was an attempt to keep out the stray animals that appeared to show as much interest as I did, if not more, in the freshly laid concrete. In the evening the truck arrived to collect the workforce, having first unloaded the night-watchman, complete with his galvanised, domed hut, oil-lamps, and coal brazier. With calls of ‘Jimmy, don't catch your death of cold' from the departing workers, the watchman immediately set about building his coal and slack fire in the brazier. Once lit, he would sit close by the fire, hunched over with his head cupped in the palms of his hands, staring into the flames as if in search of the answer to some question he had spent his entire life investigating. His concentration spasmodically interrupted by passers-by, who would engage him, briefly, in conversation, as an excuse to warm themselves by his fire. After heating their hands over the coals, they emphasised the cold of the night with the stamping of their feet on the ground and eventually, exhausting all conversation, reluctantly they moved off, allowing the watchman to revert back into his hidden world.

On that last night of freedom, having accepted the realisation that there was no escape from the impending doom of a new school term on the morrow, I recall being led to my bed by the grandmother. Casting a last glance at the watchman, whose face had now taken on an orange glow from over-exposure to the heat of the fire, I recall thinking that I wished I were he.

I turned and twisted in my bed, unable to sleep because the fear had settled deep in the centre of my stomach, and I listened to the quiet snores of my grandmother. The silence of the street outside was broken only by the sound of a car or bus negotiating the roadwork barriers. Or the shouts of the night-watchman directed at some dog attempting to leave his paw marks in the wet concrete, as proof of his existence on this planet: ‘Geerron outa there you shaggy mongrel, geeerron, geerron before I take my stick to you.'

‘The pipes have busted, the pipes have busted!' The whole school was now in uproar, with the nuns running around trying to restore order. I stood in the middle of the room with the older kids from the other classes rushing by me to the door, screaming ‘no more school, no more school', before they disappeared off down the street. I still did not fully understand the problem, but was beginning to realise that, whatever had happened, it meant that we were being sent home for the duration. For me it was like a stay of execution and, with a feeling of exhilaration, I turned and collided head-on with sister Ann. The fear of committing a sin of this magnitude caused me to nearly die with fright; but, as she was so preoccupied with the problem of the burst pipes, she sent me on my way with an almost half-hearted clip over the ear. With the front door wide open and beckoning like the pathway to heaven, I joined my fellow classmates, skipping and jumping down the street towards temporary freedom. My mother was surprised to see me back home so early and we had to wait until the father got back that evening for him to explain the ‘busted pipes' story that I had repeated to her throughout the day. In his words, ‘the nuns were too bloody mean to leave the heating on low throughout the holidays. So when they started it up again, all of the pipes, being frozen, just flew off the walls. If those bloody twisters spent less time praying and more time running a school, well, the lad would be back in school tomorrow.'

‘Ron, not in front of the child,' admonished the mother.

That night I even said my prayers before going to bed, after taking a last look out of the window at the night-watchman who seemed to have aged more since the previous night. I jumped into bed, glad that my wish of becoming him had not come true after all, and within seconds I was fast asleep.

The next morning I woke early, as if some inner sense had triggered a premonition of some great change overnight. Opening my eyes, the first thing I noticed was that the room was bathed in an eerie, pale light, and all sounds from outside were muffled as if wrapped in cotton wool. I flung myself out of bed and rushed over to the window to peer out in awe at a world turned white.

Dressing as quickly as I could, I rushed downstairs and out on the street, where I began to scoop up handfuls of snow and make piles of snowballs. These I attempted to lob onto the roofs on the opposite side of the road. When I'd seen this in my comic books the snowballs had gained dramatically in size from the snow on the roofs until, gigantic in proportion, they had hurtled back down to the street.

All I succeeded in accomplishing was to incur the wrath of Mrs Malloy, whom I woke with the sound of my snowballs crashing against her bedroom window. With numbed fingers and hands, I continued throughout the day to construct snowman after snowman, until the backyard was packed with strange snow-beings in various shapes and sizes, from blobs to odd, egg-shaped mounds. But with the assistance of the father we finally produced something resembling a snowman as depicted in the
Beano
. After we had finished the masterpiece, the mother completed the sculpture with a few buttons off an old duffel coat, a scarf donated by the grandmother and one of her father's old broken pipes that he had left on his last visit.

*

A week later I was back in Golden Bridge School with the heating pipes repaired and the nuns lecturing us on the cost they had incurred in ensuring our comfort. Our first Holy Communion was now only a few short months away and they were intent on redoubling their efforts to teach the catechism. Eventually the big day arrived. I was up at the crack of dawn preparing for the event, beginning with a bath presided over by the grandmother. She insisted on scrubbing the back of my neck until it turned red and it felt as if she had removed the first layer of my skin. She then targeted my ears and, after cleaning them to her satisfaction, left me to complete the bathing on condition that I was to give ‘down there' a good scrubbing.

Once dried, I was taken downstairs to the kitchen and stood on top of the kitchen table, wearing nothing more than a pair of white underpants. With this, both the mother and grandmother set about me, as if preparing a pedigree animal for a dog show. First the mother tried to get the black shorts on me by issuing instructions to lift first one leg and then the other. Unfortunately this coincided with a different instruction from the grandmother to raise my arms so that she could attach the shirt to my carcass. Before long I was balancing on top of the table like Boy-o-Boy attempting to navigate our hallway on one of his bad nights.

When I was dressed to their satisfaction there followed a tour of the various shops. I felt like a right idiot. First I was over to Mrs Malloy, who said that my socks didn't go with the shoes. That made the mother spin me out of the place before my feet could change direction and haul me back across the street to Mrs Finnegan.
She
was too busy getting her daughter Ann ready for her first Holy Communion to make a fuss of me. But with that, the mother was caught with having to remark on how well Ann looked, defeating the whole purpose of showing me off in the first place. She had to settle for a bunch of women shopping in Finnegan's, who commented on how well the ‘little angel' looked: ‘…and Jaysus, would you just look at the cut of him, shure, once the bishop sets eyes on him, they'll pop out of his fat head, ha, ha, ha. And Mrs Finnegan – that fish you sold me last Friday made my husband shit all night and I didn't get a wink of sleep with him coming and going.'

At the appointed hour I was led up the street towards St Michael's church and, as I looked around me, it was as if something other-worldly was taking place. It appeared that a host of angels were descending on the church from every direction, with all the little girls attired in their white, beautiful dresses, complete with white veils of every length and description. Most of the boys were similarly dressed to me: black shorts, white shirt and tie, dark jacket or blazer. Owing to our darker dress we helped to highlight the girls' outfits. But there were the odd few exceptions. Some of the girls (although they still resembled little angels) wore off-coloured and oversized white dresses, black or brown shoes and socks of different sizes and colours. Their whole outfit screamed of something ‘not quite right', and as soon as the nuns spotted them, they were discretely directed to the side aisles.

The nuns were guarding the church entrance with an intensity that would have made the commander of an army barracks proud. As every family appeared, the child was whisked away, sorted by dress and parenthood, and ushered from nun to nun along the main aisle of the church as in a relay race. The Reverend Mother conducted the operation with hand signals (viewed from the rear, she looked like a penguin, clapping her flippers for food), with the girls being directed to the left and the boys to the right. One particular boy from my class, who was easily identified by his mop of red hair that never appeared to have seen a brush, turned up alone. He was wearing his normal school dress of was odd socks, busted shoes, torn shorts, and stained jumper, complete with a variety of holes of different sizes.

As the mother and I entered the church grounds, we were just in time to witness the arrival of the red-haired fellow, who had entered from the opposite gate. As soon as the three nuns at the entrance set eyes on him, they jumped in union, as if they had been shot. With cries of ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Sister Assumpta, would you just look at the state of him,' two of them rushed to head him off, while the other one flew inside to find the Reverend Mother. She must have given a good account of the boy's appearance, for the Reverend Mother came out of the main door, doing at least 20 miles an hour, with another group of nuns being sucked along in her wake. She skidded to a halt in front of the boy, who was looking up at the nuns with a face that proclaimed, ‘What have I done wrong, I have only come to make my first Holy Communion?'

A confab began amongst the nuns, resembling a flock of wild geese fighting over one of their young, with the Reverend Mother glaring at Sister Charlotte as if it was all her fault. She was now standing behind the boy with her two hands resting on his shoulders in a protective fashion. Suddenly, a large black car containing the bishop glided to a halt at the church entrance. Since the Reverend Mother had her back to the gate, her only warning was when the nuns facing her threw themselves to their knees whilst blessing themselves, with a speed that would have matched the movements of the tic-tac men at the race track. Turning quickly, the colour of her face now matching the white surround of her habit, she hissed instructions to the others to ‘whip him inside before the bishop set eyes on him', while she shot off to catch up to the lines of priests forming beside of the bishop's car.

With a jolt that nearly ripped my arm from my shoulder, I was also dragged inside and sent on my way down the aisle with a hefty shove in the back by one of the nuns. Red Head had also been bundled down the far aisle nearest the wall by two nuns who sandwiched him between them on a pew. I watch, fascinated, as he sat, stood and knelt at the nuns' prompting. All the while, he turned and looked around with such excitement on his face, as if this was the most important moment of his life. Even though he had no parent watching, he displayed a sense of pride that challenged anybody to say that he had no business there, dressed as he was.