me. She placed a bowl of porridge on the table, which I ate greedily, barely caring if it scalded my throat.
‘Comb his hair,’ my father instructed her. ‘He can’t go looking like he slept in a haystack.’
But the tufts would not sit down, no matter how hard Phyllis yanked at them. Finally she pushed my head under the tap, then combed the drenched hair back into shape. Her fingers trembled, her eyes avoiding mine. She snapped at Cormac to hurry up, pushing us both out the door. We were late, trotting in silence at her heels. Lisa Hanlon stared at me as she passed with her mother. Phyllis took my hand, squeezing my fingers so tightly that they hurt. Every passer-by seemed to be gazing at me and whispering.
‘You mind your brother this time.’ Her hiss was sharp as she joined our hands together, pushing us through the gate. We walked awkwardly towards the lines of boys starting to be marched in.
I glanced at Cormac whose eyes were round with tears. ‘If you slept in my bed I’ll kill you, you little gick,’ I whispered. He released his hand from mine once Phyllis was out of sight.
It was hard to stay awake. My eyes hurt when I rubbed them. I avoided Cormac at small break, while a boy jeered at me in the long concrete shelter: ‘What was your mother screaming about yesterday?’
‘She’s not my mother.’
Cormac moved alone through the hordes of boys, being pushed by some who stumbled into his path. But he seemed content and almost oblivious to them, absorbed in some imaginary world. I watched him walk, his red hair, his skin so white. He was the only boy I knew who washed his hands at the leaky tap after pissing in the shed which served as a school toilet. At that moment I wanted him as my prisoner too, himself and Lisa Hanlon with tied hands forced to do my bidding on some secret island on a lake in the Boyne. I don’t know what I really wanted or felt, just that the thought provided a thrill of power, allowing me to escape in my mind from my growing sense of worthlessness.
When lunchtime came I knew Cormac was about to get hurt. Bombs were exploding in the North of Ireland, with internment and riots and barbed wire across roads. I didn’t understand the news footage that my father was watching so intently at night. But Pete Clancy’s gang had started to jeer at Cormac, chanting ‘Look out, here comes a Brit’ and talking as though the British army was a private militia for which he was personally responsible.
Yet I had never heard him mention his father or living in Scotland. It was like he had no previous existence before gatecrashing my life in Navan. He spoke with a softer version of his mother’s inner-city Dublin accent, but this made no difference to Pete Clancy, who detested Dubliners anyway. Cormac was the nearest available scapegoat and therefore had to suffer the consequences.
I watched from the shed as a circle of older boys closed in on him, while younger lads ran to warn me that he was in trouble. The prospect of violence spread like an electric current through the yard. I wanted Cormac hurt, yet something about his lost manner made me snap. The huddle of boys seemed impenetrable as they scrambled for a look. They let me through as if sensing I meant business. But even if I could have helped him I had left it too late. Cormac’s shirt was torn, his nose a mass of blood. Pete Clancy stopped, knowing he had gone too far. Behind him Slick McGuirk and P. J. Egan stood like shadows, suddenly scared. Slick was trembling, unable to take his eyes off Cormac, maybe because when they had nobody else to torment the two companions always tormented him. Pete Clancy let go of Cormac’s hair and all three stepped back, leaving him kneeling there.
The circle was dispersing, voices suddenly quiet. I knew Mr Kenny was standing behind me, the tongue of a brass bell held in his left fist and his right hand clenching a leather strap with coins stitched into it. He looked directly at Pete Clancy. ‘What’s been going on here?’
‘Two brothers, a Mháistir, they were fighting.’
Clancy’s eyes warned me about what could happen afterwards if I contradicted him. McGuirk and Egan took his lead, staring intimidatingly at me.
‘Did you try to stop them, Clancy?’
‘I tried, a Mháistir.’
The Low Babies and High Babies were sharing a single classroom that year, while the leaky prefab, which previously housed two classrooms, was being demolished to make room for a new extension. Every boy knew that the school would never have leapfrogged the queue for grant aid if Barney Clancy hadn’t pulled serious strings within the Department of Education. My father might be respected but my word held no currency against a TD’s son. I looked at Pete Clancy’s closed fist which still held a thread of Cormac’s hair.
‘Is this true, Brogan?’ Mr Kenny asked me.
‘No, sir. He’s not my brother.’
Someone sniggered, then went silent at the thud of Mr Kenny’s leather against my thigh. The stitched coins left a series of impressions along my reddened flesh.
‘Don’t come the comedian with me, Brogan!’
It was hard to believe that two hundred boys could be this quiet, their breath held as they anticipated violence being done to somebody else. Pete Clancy eyed me coldly.
‘Did you strike this boy?’ Mr Kenny asked me again.
Cormac looked up from where he knelt, trying to wipe blood from his nose. ‘No, he didn’t.’
‘I did so!’ I contradicted him, not knowing if I was trying to save Cormac or myself or us both. Clancy’s henchmen haunted every lane in Navan, whereas with Kenny it would simply be one beating. ‘He’s a little Brit,’ I said, parroting Clancy’s phrases. ‘They’re only scum over there in Scumland.’
‘Brendan didn’t touch me, sir,’ Cormac protested. ‘Please leave him alone.’
‘Stand up,’ Kenny told him. Cormac rose. I knew he was crazy, only making things worse. But Clancy and the others stepped back, suddenly anxious. Cormac’s honesty was illogical. There was no place for it in that schoolyard and they were suddenly scared of him as if confronted by somebody deformed or spastic.
‘You needn’t be afraid of what he’ll do to you at home. I’ll make sure your mother knows about this,’ Mr Kenny said, beckoning us to follow him.
A large wooden crucifix dominated the corridor outside the head brother’s office, framed by a proclamation of the Republic and a photo of a visiting bishop at confirmation time. I stood outside the office while Slick McGuirk and P. J. Egan pressed their faces against the window on their way home, muttering, ‘You’re dead, fecking dead!’
Their threats weren’t directed at Cormac sitting on a chair near the statue of Saint Martin de Pours, but at me. They ignored the child who had defied them, but, in acquiescing, I had become their new bait.
Phyllis didn’t even glance at me when she emerged from the head brother’s office. Her silence lasted all the way home as she gripped Cormac’s hand and I fell back, one step, two step, three steps behind them. Conscious of watching eyes and sniggers. Aware of hunger and of how my palms stung so badly that I could hardly unclench my knuckles after my caning by the head brother. Cormac didn’t speak either. Perhaps he realized that the truth was of no use or maybe he was exacting revenge for every sly pinch I’d ever given him.
The grass needed a final autumn cut in the back garden. I remember that leaves had blown in from the lane to cover the small lawn with a riot of colour. They looked like the sails of boats on a crowded river.
