Aloysius Tempo Read online

  I put the packet and bottle away and start walking again.

  *

  Darkness is a few hours old and Danny is exercising from the neck down, just his head above the water, a man visible from his gold chain upwards.

  He is shivering now, his teeth chattering, his face flicking little involuntary jerks as his muscles work hard to battle the deep, still, chill. The only mist now is no longer from the surface of the water, but from out of his mouth.

  I’ve asked him if he has pissed yet but he won’t answer. I genuinely wanted to tell him it might provide a moment’s warmth, but he didn’t speak up. He didn’t like that I was pissing in his pool as I asked it, didn’t chose to move into the warmer water I made.

  I’ve asked him how hungry he is, and eaten a ham sandwich and Mars bar while I waited for an answer.

  And I’ve asked him if it’s true he beat a ninety-four-year-old woman to death, if it’s true he likes the word to get around that he hires paedophiles and rapists as bailiffs?

  He says now, ‘You … can’t bruise me. You can’t … injure me.’

  I don’t know what the fuck he’s on about.

  I say, ‘Wha?’

  I’m sitting on a poolside seat, just watching and watching, and he says that to me.

  I stand up, walk to the edge, ask again, ‘Wha?’

  He goes, ‘It won’t look … like an … accident if … you bruise me.’

  And he starts moving to the ladder, his limbs juddering like some terrible disease has seized him. He’s starting to think about climbing it, about what happens if he does get my boot in his face.

  Speaking softly now, watching my own breath as the words come out, I say, ‘Something really pretty about bruises, isn’t there, Danny? Something elegant about the colour schemes, the way they change, the way they cover up the hurt in such a graceful way.’

  He’s wading, still trying to get to that ladder, all in slow motion, avoiding looking at me, and there’s a splutter, some kind of cough, some kind of cry that speaks of more than just clearing his throat.

  I say, ‘Bruises are like a badge of healing, aren’t they Danny? Like something that says to the world, “I was hurt but now I’m getting better.”’

  He reaches the ladder and I’m already there.

  I say, ‘Truth is Danny, you’d be doing me a favour. A bruise on the head would explain the drowning, wouldn’t it? It’d look like you bashed your cranium, lost yourself for a moment, slipped underwater.’

  He pulls back, waving his hands beneath the surface, trying to say something.

  I say, ‘In fact, come closer. Let me bash that head of yours. It’ll hurry this shit up.’

  He’s twisting his head from side to side now, teeth clattering but nothing coming out.

  ‘They say it’s nice after a while, Danny,’ I tell him. ‘They say that after a while you begin to breathe the water in and out of your lungs like air, that it gets euphoric, that you feel high, that it’s not the worst way to go.’

  And instead of the shaking, his head is nodding, nodding, nodding.

  I want to ask Imelda Feather if she would have the stomach to see this happen, if she would go the distance if she had to do this herself. And in part I think she would, in part I think she wouldn’t.

  But I can’t ask anyone anything. My job is to do, not to question. I’m good at this stuff because I know the weight of that distinction, because I have the stomach for the separation of reason and role, because I have the guts, the on-off switches to do the shit that others want done but cannot do. That’s the post, the accident game I have carved out for myself.

  And here I am, upgraded, saluted, salaried.

  I know why men come back from wars and never have a clear thought again. I know that minds are tainted by the kind of things I have seen, that neatly compartmentalising the explosive and unwieldy is not possible, that all that stuff has tamper switches, that being able to just shift it offside is a myth sold by shrinks and life coaches.

  You have to do it yourself, to think your own thoughts day in and day out and find a way to think other things as you think them, to think some thoughts louder than you think others. You learn to live with what made you, with what was done to you and what you have done.

  It’s the not being it, the not thinking it that drives people insane.

  It’s the trying to stop the unstoppable that drains the life force out of heads and hearts.

  *

  We’re touching 2 AM and exhausted Danny’s eyes are closed as he slides, deliberately, carefully, under the water. It makes him look, for the first time, as if he has taken some control of this situation, and I almost feel proud for him.

  I thought he might look at me, watch me watching him, try in some final way to make me remember this end of a life and feel in some way bad about it, his only way to try to impress himself onto my emotions. But, in fact, his eyes are all done with looking at the world.

  Maybe my face is not the last thing he wants to see. Maybe it’s too much to give, too much to allow me to know that he took my image to the darkest, deepest place a man can go.

  Maybe he has a beautiful lover in his mind, an image of a place where he laughed, or of a loving mother, a proud father, a moment in his life he can see and is making him feel safe.

  And, as he goes down, as the bubbles appear, as he starts sucking in the water he paid for, I sing it. I sing a final, gentle, sweet tribute to a man heading off to his fate.

  I go:

  Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling,

  From glen to glen, and down the mountainside,

  The summer’s gone and all the leaves are falling,

  Tis you, tis you, must go and I must bide.

  Chapter Two

  Kerk Counselling Service

  Amsterdam, The Netherlands

  8 March 2016

  IT’S EIGHT months before my night with Danny.

  I’ve got age on my mind.

  Age is the most amount of information in the least amount of space.

  Tell me someone’s nationality and I’ll take a shot at what sports they like or what god they know about. Throw in their sex or race and I start refining the picture.

  But the whole thing unlocks with age. Age is the mileage, the clock, the time, the fact, the base of what a person is.

  Ask any doctor or cop, ask a journalist, ask anyone that needs to get or give hard information about people, about who they really are. They need an age. It says how long they’ve got, what they don’t care about, if they’re a threat.

  A name is a retread of some random word someone else owned. A country is just a sound, just a lump of come-and-go habits. Age is the ID in your bones, the inside-out truth.

  Fuck around with age, what happens? You end up paying someone to stick needles in your face and wearing stuff you can’t wait to get out of. Then everyone starts lying about you looking younger and younger, when you look worse and worse.

  Fuck around with age and sooner or later you become ridiculous, sooner or later you fall asleep or break a bone.

  I’m good at age. I can guess yours fast, and I’ll be close. I won’t be scanning your clothes or refreshed follicles or half-arsed beard or ray-gunned teeth or shapeshifted eyes or asking how you feel, who your heroes are, what music you like. That’s all void.

  I’ll be watching how you move, your limbs, fingers, feet, seeing how they all fit together. I’ll be watching the way you are around people, around the bodies of the old and young, at the way you look at them and the way you don’t.

  Humans have been sussing out age since before we were humans. We’ve been needing to know the age of everything we see, eat, drink or jump off since we were apes. Age tells us what we need to know, and never more than when it’s the age of another person.

  You think you can trick the smartest creatures on the planet with ten minutes in a clinic? The only one getting fooled in that situation is the one paying the bill, the one in the chair.

&n
bsp; So here’s my point. If I say there’s two males talking alone in a room, that means nothing. If I say it was two Irish guys talking in a room, it has no value. Two white guys by themselves and talking to each other, so what? There’s no useful information there.

  What if I tell you one of them was a priest? You’re thinking, Oh right, now we’re getting somewhere – maybe it’s a confession?

  What if I tell you one of them was fifty-two and the other was eleven? Now you’ve got a story. Now you know there’s a different dynamic, now your mind is opening up to other possibilities, things based on the age of the people in the situation.

  And, truth is, now you’re thinking, Is that eleven-year-old okay in there?

  You’re thinking, I shouldn’t jump to any conclusions here, but …

  That’s how Ireland has changed. That’s where our minds go, because the whole country got punched in its sleep, the whole place woke up.

  Back then, when I was eleven, I had no idea about age, about numbers, about how they tell a story. That fifty-two-year-old, he knew. He knew all about the numbers. The number was all he needed to know about someone to know if he liked them or not. Sex, creed, background, attitude – all irrelevant. If he had your age, he had the only fact that mattered.

  I used to think that guy, Father Barry, must have been eighty or a hundred – as old as the hills. But I think of his gait and his skin now and I’m saying fifty-two, sticking with fifty-two. I can see him, very clearly, the way I saw him the last time I saw him. I see the crinkles, shades and sags, the lifts and drops of him going around the place and my brain goes, Over fifty, not yet fifty-three – that guy’s fifty-two.

  If I ever see a headstone with the words, ‘Here lies a priest, died hard aged fifty-two,’ on it, I’ll know who it is. If I see one and it says, ‘This one died hard aged fifty-five,’ I’ll not be so sure it’s him. I’m that confident at this age-calculating stuff. I don’t guess it, I say it.

  I stood in his study one day and he told me age describes everything. He said that age says when you can start to design a dream and when not to bother. He said that age can be hope, promise and power and all sorts of other stuff, and I hadn’t a baldy what he was on about.

  He said to me, ‘Age holds court over ugliness and beauty.’

  He went, ‘And, Aloysius, you should know that youth is beauty, they are equal.’

  And I said, ‘Okay.’

  That was his thing, having me come into his study and stand in front of him. I’d stand for ages, legs getting numb, as he wrote in his book or looked out his window and hummed some holy tune or talked away to himself in Latin.

  So, look, you wanted an example, a memory of an event in that shithole institution? I don’t talk about that place – I’ve never talked about that place – but I’m going to say this much, and it’s all I’ll say about it. In all that lies ahead, there’s no more talk from me about that place, okay?

  Well, I had to stand in that study a lot, standing there looking at bookshelves, bibles and ornaments and golden Jesus figures and thank-you cards. It was like a fucking shop.

  One day he said, ‘How many breasts have you seen?’ Honestly. That’s the sort of shite he said to the boys there. Random stuff about parts of the body, often about breasts.

  So on that day I had to think a bit because, being eleven, I hadn’t seen many breasts. Then I told him I’d seen seven.

  He sat back, put his big black shoes up on the chair at the side of his desk and said, ‘Breasts come in twos, you stupid prick.’

  I reckon he thought I wasn’t being serious, that I was trying to make a joke, maybe trying to insult him. So I said ‘Sorry’ and then ‘Six’, and that seemed to make him feel better.

  I’d seen the breasts of a woman on TV. I’d seen a nun’s breasts. I’d seen the breasts of a drunk woman thrown off a train for stripping.

  The single breast was when the sister of one of the boys came to take him away. Me and this girl, nineteen years old, sat on the waiting-room bench and chatted before he was brought to her. I saw the hatred in her movement as she talked about that place. She was wearing a black Motörhead T-shirt and as she left with her brother’s wee hand in hers, she pulled it up, flashed a tit, beamed it right at me.

  I always thought it was a lovely thing to do. It was like two fingers to that place, like some secret magic button, some sign to me saying, ‘Hey Aloysius, one day you will find a whole wide world out there.’

  But the priest would have went bonkers. This was a man who said women were to blame for all the sin in the world, who said nuns were wise only because they knew of their natural shame, who said females carried ‘the devil’s doorbell’ in their knickers, that we were lucky to learn at an early age that women are ‘rich with danger’.

  So I switched my answer from seven to six. And the old goat dropped his head back, went silent and, I don’t know, maybe let the image of six breasts gather some space in his sludged mind.

  You have to wonder what it was for him, you know? Breasts ease, don’t they? They ease and cushion and feed. They engage the senses, don’t they? They make joy, they’re incapable of causing pain. Was that what it was for him? Did he never know a breast in his life? I don’t know.

  Anyway, you wanted an example.

  So he got up, walked to me, took my right hand, my little finger, folded it at its knuckles. He pressed the nail, pushing the finger back into itself, hard as he could. And it was sudden, colossal pain. Pure, sharp pain, something tearing up through the flesh in my arm. A sting that doesn’t stop, a break that stays breaking.

  I know now that’s one of the pressure points, one little drop-a-man trick they teach police, teach bouncers. Everyone goes weak, anyone is all yours, when you bend and press their wee finger like that.

  He goes, ‘You dirty little bastard.’

  He goes, ‘You nasty wee bastard.’

  And I shut my eyes so tight my face hurt. I opened them and saw this blur, saw him cupping and swinging his free hand. He clapped me over the ear so hard he knocked me clean over.

  He always hit ears that way, Father Barry. He always caught air the in his palm, slammed it into your head that way, leaving you deaf and sore for an hour, leaving you with a headache like a brick had hit you. He always knew the best ways to hurt someone with nothing but his own body.

  You get to thinking how, one day, you will turn the tables on a man like that. You get to thinking about reversing the roles, avenging it all. When you’re eleven and he’s making you stand naked in front of him all day and knocking you into bookshelves and trophies, you think, One day I’m going to bash the brains right out of his head and all over the floor.

  But it’s so hard to find a day when you can even look him in the eye. You struggle to find half the feeling you need to not run when he calls you. You’re the opposite of him. You’re the giant when he’s not around, you’re nothing when he’s there.

  You get to thinking that the only thing you can fight a man like that with is time, because you know one day you will be gone, out of there, away from him. And he knew I used to think about that.

  He said to me one time, ‘Months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, Aloysius. All of those little numbers are in my hands, all of those little facts – do you understand?’

  It’s tough when you have nothing to fight with, when you’re too small or weak or scared. Fighting back is as natural as rain, as natural as stones and trees.

  But when you can’t, the only thing you can do is take it to your dreams, to the only place where you can change things. You can lie down at night and float away to a place where you have what he has, where you can use fear and time against him, where you can reverse and avenge. And night after night I was killing that man.

  You know, it’s a funny thing, one of the funny things about what Irish children were put through by so many holy men and women. The funny thing is you never hear people asking, ‘Why weren’t some of these guys killed?’

  You n
ever hear that.

  No one says, ‘How did all of those fuckers avoid getting strung up, beaten to death or shot in the head?

  ‘How come no abusive priest was nailed to a tree by the balls? How come no freaky nun was tied to a friggin’ bonfire?’

  People want to not look back, they work hard to reach a place where they beat off the volume of these people in their heads. Some people see it as a problem that was designed to be unsolvable at the time, designed to fit their weakness, their age, and they grow away from it.

  But I’m generalising here, every case is different.

  My case?

  If you ask me how Father Barry survived?

  He didn’t.

  That example I gave you?

  That was the last time he hit me.

  Chapter Three

  9 March 2016

  Birthday of St Aloysius

  BEEP.

  Awake.

  Stars above. Hundreds of them, coming into focus, getting clear in the darkness. Neatly drawn locked-together luminous-penned triangles, over and over on the ceiling of the flat.

  How and why? Who and why? How long did it take to do that? How sore would your arm get doing that?

  I don’t know.

  A yawn.

  Beep.

  Another yawn, a short, angry one. I rub my eyes and say, ‘Ninth of March.’

  Beep.

  I need to think about this flat, about how I am not getting used to it. A one-bed box, three floors in the air. I can’t fully live in it, can’t sleep long or deep in it.

  Beep.

  It always feels moments away from being cold, as if there’s an open door or window I have never found.

  The place came with total blackout blinds, with those secret Stars of David on the ceiling. It comes equipped with some story that is not mine to know.

  It sucks the frigging life out of me, this flat. There’s no welcome here, no sense that anyone has ever had a wholesome day in this place. It’s not a space to think, and I’d like a space to think.