I have to report that me old mate Picasso went to see Anne and left her in need of a few stitches.
I waited for an hour or so after he’d gone then took a drive up to the main house and went inside. Anne was in Conor’s bedroom, relaxing against the pillows. Not the sort of thing you should look at on a full stomach. You’d throw up. I’d seen corpses before but, fuck me, never the way Picasso left them.
Her hair was draping down around the edges of what his gallery suggested was a carved flower. Her legs were spread wide. Oddly enough they were still attached to her. Maybe he forgot his saw. She was a bad colour too, pale as the sheets – pale and red as the sheets. Her arms were detached though, spread out from her crotch to make her look like she’d four legs. She wouldn’t be showing any more mares, that was for sure.
I wasn’t interested in trying to figure out why he’d cut her the way he had. I had what I wanted and that was that.
I’d had enough of fucking around with the Donavans. It was over. Besides, this wasn’t even my home. It held fuck all for me. It hadn’t even been built when Sean and I were born. The cottage was. That’s where I’d watched Picasso coming and going from. We’d been born there. Skeffington had more or less confirmed it.
Nice little cottage. Modernised now, but it still held its charm. I began in the kitchen, checking, as I’d checked before for something to do with my past. I didn’t expect to find anything this time either. And I wasn’t disappointed.
But then something hit me. It was the eyes that did it. Y’know how the eyes in some pictures follow you around the room? Well, that’s what the Sacred Heart was doing. I thought of something a nun had said to me when I was a kid. She was one of the good ones.
‘Robert,’ she said. ‘Folk’ll take down every picture in the house except a Sacred Heart.’ Which didn’t make any sense to me at first, until she went on. ‘They admire family photos and take them down, pass them around at gatherings and so on.’ She’d been referring to the twenties and thirties when photos were a big thing; when people paid a lot of attention, wanted to know what had become of such and such who’d fucked off to America and years later had sent home a picture of what he looked like now, which his folks then showed to people who’d known him when he was young. But a Sacred Heart’s a Sacred Heart, so nobody had any reason to take one down for a closer look.
I took down Edna’s and there taped to the back was a letter, dated the night I was born, from the old girl herself, Teresa Donavan. My darling fucking mother.
Dear Conor, Edna and Amy,
My darling children, I never wanted to go away and leave you, but I had to go. Some day you’ll understand the reason why. I didn’t want you coming back to an empty house wondering what had become of me, so I’m leaving this note to say that everything will be clear when I see you again.
Your ever-loving mother
It was too vague. But it more or less fitted in: she’d got herself into trouble and was going off to dump me and Sean in the orphanage because bringing up a couple of illegitimate kids’d bring shame on the family. As I say, the nature of illegitimacy in Ireland ruled out ever discovering the truth behind it. That’s why people like me exist. Still, that’s the way it goes. No good complaining. You have to make the best of the opportunities life has given you. The Donavans got rid of me and Sean; I got rid of them. ‘An eye for an eye’, as the guy in the picture hiding the note’d once said. I’m very religious when it comes to certain things the Church teaches us.
Speaking about the Church, I forgot to tell you exactly where I knew Picasso from. Me and him had shared a well once. It was actually a dried-up well. They used to lower you down in a bucket then close the top off. Punishment stuff. I got mine for creeping out of bed one night to see how Sean was doing. Corn got his for asking too many questions – one.
A government minister visited the place one day and Corn went up to him.
‘Might I have a word?’ he asked. ‘Are you in a position to prevent them from treating us like this?’ I’ll never forget it. Only Corn could’ve put it like that. We all started giggling.
The minister didn’t though. He looked at his chauffeur and said, ‘Get me to fuck out of this place.’ His exact words for all to hear and from a minister too. Tut tut.
The Brothers weren’t mad about it either. Corn had been there only a few weeks, y’see. He hadn’t been educated to their ways yet.
You always knew when someone important was coming to see them. Usually it was an orphanage inspector who came. He’d run a check on how we were being treated, and that’d be him for another year. He’d just drive off in his black Austin with running boards on the sides and let on he’d suffered some sort of perception blackout, that he hadn’t seen what he’d seen.
Anyway, Corn worked on the farm feeding the pigs. If the Brothers liked you, they’d give you a cushy job. And they liked Corn. Which meant he got plenty to eat. The meals there were bread and dripping for breakfast, a kind of porridge at midday, cabbage and the water from the cabbage and spuds for dinner, and an egg every Easter. But if you worked with the pigs, you got what they got. You made yourself Head Pig. The best job of course was going around the canteen unstitching mice from the gunge they used to tape onto skirting boards. You could usually grab a handful of something.
Now because this diet hardly led to what you’d call healthy teeth and bones, it meant that we were all skinny little bastards, stunted and full of boils. Our necks used to be covered in them.
So when a big shot was calling, they’d get you up, cover you with a white dust to hide the boils – some of those big shots must’ve let themselves believe they’d walked into a bakery – and give you new sheets, pillowcases, new plates and cups, good silverware and decent clothes. It would all disappear and we’d be back into our sack clothes once he was out the door. But Corn had disappeared before this minister’d showed up.
He’d been feeding the pigs in his normal gear and when he came back and the minister saw the difference between him and us, he knew that Corn’s gear was the norm, and the Brothers knew he knew it. But Corn took this as a good opportunity to ask his question. It’s hard to believe that someone with enough brains to outwit the law was once so naïve.
He got slaughtered for it. The door to the whip room opened and they put his head up against a Brother’s crotch and laid into him naked in front of the rest of us. I think the Brothers felt he’d let them down. Corn lost his pig job after that. We had to carry him to the infirmary and lay him out. I knew he was in for what they called the ‘head staggers’ after that.
They had a night watchman, y’see, who used to go around the dorms with this birch, some old branch he’d broken off a tree. He’d lay into whoever took his fancy. Or whoever had embarrassed his bosses. The beds were laid with their foots at the windows and their heads at the centre aisle. Everybody had to sleep in the same direction: you had to lie on your left side with your back to the door. The watchman used to come in from behind you, and you weren’t allowed to look round, so you never knew he was going to pick on you until you felt the birch. A lot of kids were afraid to go back to sleep again. You were always jumping at the slightest noise, steeling yourself. Corn got that night in, night out, for fuck knows how long. That and the constant digs in the head was how they’d give you the staggers. He was one of the lucky ones – he never went deaf over it. Oh, and the bat and ball. A Brother’d put him against a wall and fire hurling balls at his head. All this stuff went on for months, years sometimes, till they had you going around banging your head against the wall. Some banged their heads that much they lost eyes, smashed bones, all that. It was their way of driving you insane. Then they’d send you off to the nuthouse.
It’s amazing how many people are surprised to learn that Brothers only joined up for a job for life. Bit like joining the army. No sense of vocation or fuck all like that. Funnily enough, I never saw Corn banging his head against the wall. That surprised me. Anyway, they’d stick you in the well as well. That’s where I got to know him better. His voice, in particular, I should say. It was too dark to see his face.
I think I remember him telling me his parents were in a bad car crash, and Corn ended up in with me for a couple of years while they were getting better. Corn wasn’t a long-termer. A lot of kids spent time in those homes because their parents had fallen on hard times for a while and had no one else to turn to for help. Some of them even came from families who could’ve looked after them but wouldn’t – they’d gone to America or whatever – and left them in what they’d thought were good hands, even paid for them to be looked after. Corn’s parents probably thought he was having a great time. Once they were better of course they came and got him.
Funny how things work out.
Though funny isn’t a word that came to mind when I rehung that Sacred Heart. I wasn’t alone in that cottage.
‘Well, this is a surprise.’
‘What?’
I didn’t even see it coming. It was Corn. Complete with spray. He let me have it.