Lamb (11 page)

Towards the end of the week Michael began to notice the speed with which his money was dwindling. On Friday night, after Owen was asleep, his unease about the situation forced him to count it. He was shocked to find how little he had left.

He could not sleep. Long after he had snapped the cash book shut and dropped it on the floor beside the bed, he lay with his eyes open. He heard voices on the street below and got out of bed. He opened the curtains and looked down but could see no one. The yellow sodium lights made haloes in the rain droplets on the window. Occasionally a car engine changed its note as it came to the hill on which the hotel was built. Somewhere not far away he heard a factory churning through the night. Michael had never liked the city – any city – but he knew the mentality of country people well enough to know they would be conspicuous in a village. The city hid them and he was grateful and annoyed at the same time.

He had been raised in the country, on a small Ulster farm outside Ballycastle. The place had been poor, although they had never gone really hungry.

A grey cement house, surrounded by a clutter of outbuildings set with its back to a hill. In the middle of the buildings and at the back door of the house was the yard, always in his memory glistening with muck. The front door, which had a small concrete path on to the road, was rarely, if ever, used. The only times he could remember seeing it open were at his parents' funerals. When his mother died, and as she lay stiff and white on the bed, his father with rusted garden shears wept as he cut the front door free of the overgrown rambling rose so that her coffin could be taken out that way and not through the mucky yard. The front door had been closed originally to preserve the beautiful rug in the front hallway. Then with habit the passageway had fallen out of use and Michael, at his father's funeral a fortnight ago, had seen the rug in the dark behind the closed door, still covered with its sheet of clear plastic.

There was a rule that wellingtons had to be left at the back door, and his father padded about the house in grey socks. Always the heel of his sock worked its way to the arch of his foot after a day in the wellingtons. His mother knitted the socks when she was well enough.

When he was five she had been crushed against a concrete gatepost by an unruly heifer. The doctor said that she would be paralysed from the waist down for the rest of her life.

‘It's the spine,' his father had said, and had a bed set up for her downstairs. She lived on like this for six years, knitting when she was able, crying when she was not. Each night before the family rosary, his father would freshen her up, washing her face and hands with a damp face-cloth. Although she could do this herself, she always let her husband do it. It became a sort of ritual, when he would caress her face with the cloth, looking at it as if for the slightest speck of dust. Then she would put her head down and let her hair fall forward while he washed and massaged her neck. She always said that part was nice.

‘Michael, give me my beads out from under the pillow,' and they would kneel at her bedside by the slight ridge of her legs beneath the coverlet and recite the rosary.

His father did everything for her. Michael felt that he sacrificed his life for her. He refused to have a nurse in and, with the time taken up looking after her, the farm began to go down.

He was a man who had respect for every living thing. Although he was plagued by rabbits, when the myxomatosis came he would take the trouble to kill them with a blow of his hand as they sat trembling, saying that he did not want to waste a cartridge on them. He pulled chickens' necks so fast and expertly that they never felt a thing. He showed Michael the best black pools, with their slow wheels of foam, to find trout and taught him how to distinguish the various birds of prey. The sparrow-hawk, the kestrel, the harrier, and when they were on Tor Head, the eagle. If he saw a hawk he would stop and freeze and watch until it was out of sight. He would put his hand on Michael's shoulder and whisper, ‘Watch now, son, and you might learn something.' They would stand and watch the bird hovering in the air, as his father said, ‘like a trout facing upstream', and watch it stoop out of sight, or if they were lucky see the kill. The fact that he lost several lambs a year to them did not diminish his admiration for them. ‘The rulers of the air,' he would mutter, almost in disbelief. And yet he hated the gulls. In early May he took the boy on climbing trips around the cliffs and rocky coves to smash the eggs of black-backs. Dropped, they broke on the rocks far below with a moist click.

‘They're a curse,' said his father. ‘They do more damage than enough. They'll peck the eyes out a lamb before the ewe can get her born – aye, and the tongue too. They'll leave it in such a state that there's nothing left to do but kill it.'

He was a perfect father, yet Michael was sure that never once had he thought of his role as a father. It came so naturally to him to communicate his enthusiasms, his warmth. When he was with his father he felt safe. Nothing could touch him. His grip of iron as he helped his son across rocks. Wearing full-length waders he could still lift Michael bodily across white water.

‘Stiff elbows,' he would say and Michael would hold his elbows stiff and tight by his sides and feel himself hoisted into the air by his father's cupped hands. This was the way they had got into football matches. In the rush at the turnstiles Michael's father would swing him up with the warning, ‘Mind your head,' then pay for himself and push through after his son.

‘Two for the price of one,' he would chuckle on the terrace.

He had once taken Michael to an All-Ireland Semi-final at Croke Park. For Michael, the yellow jerseys of Antrim, the crowds, the excitement – everything was ruined by the return journey on the train.

Everyone except his father seemed to be drunk. Michael was put in a window seat and his father half shielded him from the crowds passing up and down. They couldn't get a seat in a compartment but had to make do with the open carriage. At the station, before they even left, there had been a fight and the Guards had led a man away with snot and blood coming from his nose. The men on the train wore yellow and white paper hats and rosettes. They staggered and fell as they tried to walk the train. People were singing and shouting and women were screaming. Once Michael had to go to the toilet and his father walked close behind him, a large hand on each shoulder. The place, when they got there, was covered in sick. The aisles of the train were black and wet with spilled bottles. They rattled about as the train swayed. His father, all the time, seemed terribly angry and kept looking at his watch. When they got back from the toilet he said,

‘Try and get some sleep, son.'

He covered him with his coat but Michael could not sleep. His eyes darted with nervousness, watching the procession of staggering men. Then two men started to fight just opposite them.

‘Then you're no fuckin' Irishman,' screamed one of them. He had a bottle in his hand and smashed it against the metal edge of the seat, leaving a dagger of brown glass in his hand. Michael's father leapt to his feet and walked over to them. Michael flung off the coat but still sat huddled on the seat. The one with the bottle turned on his father and made an upper cut at him with the broken bottle. His father stopped the blow and twisted the man's wrist behind his back.

‘A fine example of Irish manhood you are,' he said. He made the man drop the bottle. He talked closely into his ear. Finally he let go of him and the man turned and put his arms around him.

‘No offence, nofence meant. Nofence, nofence, pal.' The man was crying. Michael's father guided him out of the carriage and looked at his watch once again. He was white around the mouth.

‘Try to get some sleep, son.'

But Michael couldn't. Even now as he twisted on the bed sleep would not come to him.

One day he remembered well when his father had taken him in to Ballycastle to fish from the pier. His father crouched, a small blackened tin box at his feet, sorting through the hooks with a careful finger. He had just lost another hook in the thick leathery seaweed to the left. It had been a bad morning's fishing – one small mackerel and three lost hooks. His father selected a hook and squeezed the fat worm on to it. He cast it far out to the right but before or just as it hit the water, a gull swooped and snapped up the bait. His father stood in amazement, the rod still in his hand and the gut whining off the reel.

‘Lord God,' he said. He snapped on the brake and braced himself for the tension. The gull was pulled round in a wide arc above their heads.

‘I can't leave it in that state,' said his father and began to reel the bird in. It made the most awful squawking, like the shearing of metal. It jinked and twisted and changed direction so that his father had to keep turning on the pier to keep from getting his line tangled. A crowd had gathered to watch. Some people were laughing. He brought the bird down in a flurry of grey and white. Michael was amazed at the size of it and its large yellow beak open like a pair of scissors with the fishing line disappearing into it. His father struck it hard on the back of the head with a piece of wood and it cowped forward, its wings outspread, like a broken W. He struck it again and again until it was dead. Then he snipped the line and dropped the bird over the side of the pier. He looked up at Michael, and smiled.

‘It's a bad day when the biggest thing you catch is a seagull.'

Michael wondered why it was the tragic things that remained with him most vividly. The cat that had been killed by a lorry at lunchtime in front of his house. That day they had tapioca for lunch.

This was the summer that the Brothers had come recruiting to the school. Michael was due to leave at the end of the year and, full of piety and enthusiasm, put his name on their list. At first his father had not fully approved, hoping that Michael would stay to take over the farm. But he accepted with good grace, saying the decision was up to the boy himself.

Michael wanted to be to Owen what his father had been to him. He looked round now at the boy as he slept. His mouth was open and his hair tousled. He wondered if this is how he would feel about a child of his own. If his child would have the love and trust to fall asleep in the presence of someone else. He bent over and kissed him on the forehead and knew that the boy would not have permitted it if he had been awake.

As he stood over the bed, his mouth still puckered from the kiss and the boy muttering and turning, Michael was conscious of the time he wasted. He was aware of the times when he was unaware. Tracts of the day when he did not heed what the boy was saying or doing. It was lost time, never to be regained. The same set of circumstances could never be repeated. If asked, he would undoubtedly say that he loved the boy, but there were many times when it didn't seem like it. Michael knew that their time together could end at any minute and to waste any of it was a regret to him. Not to probe, to respond, to teach actively was to throw away an opportunity. Michael lay down on his own bed, his hands cupped behind his head. It had been like this with the Brothers. He knew now that his time there had been wasted. His life had been governed by a series of prohibitions and, while God existed for him, this was acceptable. But once he ceased to believe in the God of the Brothers, all he was left with was a handful of negatives. His vow of poverty did not worry him much because it was a condition he had been used to most of his life on the farm, but those of chastity and obedience did.

The Novice Master had constantly played the humility card, speaking as he always did, with his face averted from his audience.

‘Pride, Brothers, is one of the worst sins of all. I see Lucifer on useless wings plummeting into the sea of Hell for all eternity because of it. It is only by subjugating your will to the will of others – and God – that you will find your true self. If you want to find strength, give in to others without a murmur. When you have whittled away everything that makes you who you are, then that is your true self.'

Michael found nothing at the end of the process of self-whittling. He had no true self. He told this to the Novice Master, who looked out the window. It was some time before he answered Michael.

‘You have not yet gone far enough. There is a hard core in you that resists you giving up your will. You must continue to try. It may take a long time but you must never give up.'

Eventually Michael fell asleep with his jaw taut and his fists clenched.

They were walled in by people and Michael had to lift Owen so that he could get a glimpse of the pitch.

‘Stiff elbows,' he said and the boy held his arms bent and stiff against his sides. Michael hoisted him above the heads.

‘Can you see?'

‘Yes,' shouted the boy. Michael felt him quiver with excitement.

‘Time?'

‘Two fifty-six.'

‘This is useless here. Let's get down the front,' said Michael.

They threaded and elbowed and pushed their way through the crowd until they came to a crush barrier not far from the front. Owen followed in the passage that Michael created, holding tightly on to the back of his anorak. Michael, acting a bit simple, indicated the boy and got himself a place at the crush barrier. He lifted Owen on to the bar so that he could see, and held him there with his arms round him.

He was stunned by the new season green of the pitch, its flatness and the precision with which it was marked in white lines. At home he had played on fields tilted to the side of a mountain or with a hillock in the middle hiding the goal at the far end, the whole area measled with pats of cow dung. He had forgotten that at this level of the game everything could be so perfect.

The teams came out and Owen cheered himself hoarse when he saw the red and white strip of Arsenal. He recognized the players from their photographs and pointed them out, screaming and laughing at the top of his voice to Michael. In pale blue, the colour of a blackbird's egg, Manchester City were kicking into the goal nearest them. They were knocking about what looked like five brand new footballs. Owen looked over his shoulder and shouted,