Lamb

He had met Owen for the first time about three years ago. He had just finished a lesson when word came through from Brother Benedict that he was wanted in his office. He hung his apron in the cupboard, brushed the sawdust from his soutane with the palm of his hand and walked to the Superior’s office. Reception was the only part of the place which had carpet. The hypocrisy of it annoyed Michael every time he walked on it. Outside Brother Benedict’s door there was a small traffic light divided into three sections: Enter – Engaged – Wait. Michael knocked and after a long moment heard Brother Benedict call ‘Come in’ in his posh voice. Benedict was behind his desk, looking over his half-glasses; to the right was a woman slanted sideways in an armchair; to the left, standing by a wooden upright chair, was a small boy. A Guard, his hands behind his back, was leaning against the bookcase.

‘Brother Sebastian,’ said Benedict, ‘this is Mrs Kane and this . . . ’ he waved his hand slightly in the boy’s direction, ‘is her son, Owen. In the special circumstances of the boy’s age the powers-that-be have thought it best that Mrs Kane be here at his inception, as it were. You may sit, Brother Sebastian.’

Michael took the hard chair beside the boy. The woman was too heavily made up. She gave the impression of having put make-up on her face without washing it first. Her mouth was small and red and pinched, pulled tight as if by purse strings. She looked old enough to be Owen’s grandmother. Her hair was dull and combed for the day.

‘Mrs Kane has been filling us in on some background information on Owen.’ The woman nodded, drumming her nicotined fingers. ‘And I have been assuring her that the boys who arrive here thimbleriggers and termagants are the least of our worries. But we do not send them out that way. Do we, Brother?’

‘Kill and cure is my method, Mrs Kane. You can rest assured that if anything can be done to put this young man on the right path then it is we who will do it. There may be pain in the process, Mrs Kane, but I’m sure that we have your backing – and for that matter, the State’s.’

Mrs Kane nodded vigorously, snapped open her handbag and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. She tentatively offered the packet in the direction of Brother Benedict. He refused with the palms of his hands and his face slightly averted.

Mrs Kane lit a cigarette with a small bronze lighter, pulling hard on it with her tight mouth and taking it between her knuckled fingers. She crossed her legs and Michael noticed that her thighs were scuffed with psoriasis, blotches of crusty skin, obvious through her tights.

‘You’ve no idea what a trial that boy has been to me,’ she said. ‘He was my last hope – after the way the others have gone. I’ve done everything for him and this is the thanks I get. I let him get away with far too much. If I’d been like some mothers I know t’would have been a different story. He has me nearly driven mad. I can’t take it any more . . . ’

‘I hope you’re proud of yourself,’ went on Brother Benedict. ‘Your mother has sacrificed herself for you totally. She has struggled to rear you and you repay her by starting your life as a criminal. Do not worry, Mrs Kane, we will return you a different boy. The guttersnipe you bring us will not be the boy you get back. Brother Sebastian, will you show Master Kane to his quarters?’

Throughout the boy had been standing with his hands behind his back, looking down at his toes. He seemed glad to be walking out of the door. In the corridor his shoulders drooped with relief and his hands slipped into his pockets. Michael warned him about the hands in the pockets.

The worst and most damaging attack that Owen had had was in the gym one January day. Everyone had gathered to watch the Home play a posh grammar school at basketball. Brother Benedict and all the staff sat in a nook on the sidelines, protected behind a table. The boys were lined along the tops of the wall-bars. Everyone had been warned beforehand that there was to be no barracking of the visiting school. Brother Benedict made it seem almost an act of charity for them to come and play at the Home. The boys, in their turn, should treat them, if not with politeness because they had not got that in them, then at least with respect. The school had turned out in a smart strip – green vests with the school emblem on the chest, green satin shorts and green socks. The Home had unironed regulation white. The sniggers, raised eyebrows and limp-wrist gestures of the boys on the wall-bars were soon stopped when the grammar school began to play. They quickly went 25–3 in the lead. The umpire’s whistle shrilled; then it happened in the silence of the first time-out.

Owen, who had been one of the boys perched on the wall-bars, let out a screech and toppled down behind them. There was a gap of about a foot between the bars and the brick wall. Owen slithered down, but because of the wall-bars, remained upright during his attack. He gyrated and threshed, his knees and legs unable to bend. His head pummelled on the bars. His eyes rolled and he made strange noises. Brother Sebastian ran from behind the table, clambered up the wall-bars, the skirts of his soutane flying, but could not reach down to the boy.

‘The pipes. He’s getting burnt by the pipes,’ someone yelled. Owen continued to jump and twitch like a puppet behind the bars. His hair was too short for Brother Sebastian to get a grip on it and he himself was too bulky to squeeze his shoulders down to reach his clothing. The grammar school boys stood staring. One of them nervously began pounding the ball off the maple floor in a static dribble. And still Owen’s attack continued. There was blood on his face and collar now and he was making a noise in his throat like the draining of a sink. Brother Sebastian jumped down and reached his hand through the wall-bars. He bunched up the front of his jacket into a fist, then raised the struggling boy a little. He put his other hand through a higher wall-bar and raised him a little more, still gripping his clothes. Slowly he inched him up behind the bars. Other boys – the older ones – saw what he was doing and came to help, slipping their hands between the bars and easing the stricken Owen to the surface.

Brother Benedict stood at the table, his fingers splayed and his face white. Later he said to Michael, ‘Although I’m an educated man, it is easy to see how, in the past, it was construed as demonic possession.’

Michael lay in the darkness, watching the streak of yellow light from the crack in the curtains swing from one side of the ceiling to the other. The London traffic seemed to go on until all hours. The sound of Owen’s breathing came quick and regular from the other bed.

Michael opened his eyes and knew that he had no chance of going to sleep. He had been keeping his eyes tightly shut and his jaw clenched. He tried to relax but could only do so when he was conscious of it. Each time his mind returned to the past his jaw tightened up and he found his fists were knotted. A drink might help him sleep. He dismissed the thought, not wanting to leave the boy on his own so soon. What if he should wake up? Or even worse. He looked at the green specks of his watch and was amazed to see that it was only a quarter to eleven. He got up and dressed quietly in the dark and went downstairs. Little harm could come to the boy sleeping.

The same girl was still sitting at reception, looking more bored than ever. She was painting her nails with blue nail varnish which had flecks of silver in it. She directed him to the bar, calling him Mr Abraham after a quick glance at the open register in front of her.

Michael, after the quiet of trying to sleep and the silence of the foyer, walked into a room rowdy with noise. The bar was crowded, the talk almost drowning the background of piped music. He ordered himself a pint.

‘Bitter?’ said the barmaid and he nodded. What a strange thing to call a drink. Bitter. Aloes. Sorrow. For something that was supposed to make you feel happy. Vinegar on a sponge offered as an act of kindness. One of the Brothers had told him of being in Rome and drinking a wine called ‘Tears of Christ’.

He sat down in a free corner with his pint. He didn’t want to talk to anyone and hoped that nobody, drunk or otherwise, would disturb him. He always found it difficult to lie. He was no good at it – although he thought he had done not too badly in the past two days. Normally he found himself speaking the truth even though he didn’t want to. Once on holiday with another Brother, both of them in civvies, they met two nice-looking girls who laughed a lot. They were getting along fine until his asked him what he did and without a moment’s hesitation he said he was in the Brothers. He didn’t want to say it but it had just come out. After that the other Brother spent the rest of his holiday hitch-hiking on his own.

Michael knew that he must get himself into the frame of mind where lying came naturally to him. His and Owen’s future depended on it. If it was left to Owen, there would be no difficulty. They would have to work out a story which both of them knew and stick to it no matter what situation they ran into. In the Home Owen’s lying had been professional, but Michael felt he had got inside that. He felt that the boy told him the truth now, although about some things he was not absolutely sure. Things he could not verify about his mother, about his past.

Owen had told him that his mother had tried to kill him. Michael found difficulty in believing this story. Was the boy just looking for sympathy or was it horribly true? Some of the details seemed genuine – but that was the mark of a professional liar, to get the details right.

Owen said that his mother had been drinking all night – vodka with orange juice. She had had a man with her and she had made Owen go to bed early. Sometimes when this happened he sneaked out of the window on to the flat roof and climbed down the pipe, then through the back yard into the street. The back-yard door had been torn off its hinges many years ago and never replaced. This night he stayed in bed and listened to the voices and silences between the man and his mother, until he fell asleep.

It must have been the slamming of the door as the man left that wakened him. He lay awake waiting for his mother to come to bed. He heard her open the bedroom door and he closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep. He heard her stagger against the plywood wall. She was mumbling to herself. He felt her ease the pillow out from under his head and he thought she was going to take it for herself. Then suddenly he felt it close over his face. He began to struggle and shout but she pinioned him tight where he lay. He remembered wondering if it was another kind of fit that he hadn’t had before and he was imagining it all, with the breathlessness the only real thing about it. He screamed and gasped and managed to turn his head sideways where there was air. He felt her hand try to force his face back into the pillow and he bit it, as hard as he could. She screamed and for a minute let go of him. He wriggled away and ran for the light of the other room. He heard her call after him drunkenly,

Those were the words she had used, he said. He then went on to tell what happened when a neighbour found him in the bottom hallway behind the bins wearing only his vest. Owen had spun him a few lies and had been taken in to his downstairs flat for the night. The man had provided him with striped pyjama bottoms with white draw cords, big as a tent, and had helped him roll the legs up until they reached Owen’s ankles. The next morning the boy went back up to his own flat. His mother had cried most of the day and had given him the money for enough chewing gum to last the week.

When Michael asked him about the story later, on different occasions, it remained substantially the same. There were some differences. Once he said that his mother had brought a cushion from the other room. Another time he said it was the man upstairs who had found him. Michael did not like to trip him up by grilling him on these points, for, on a matter so serious, it would have displayed a terrible lack of faith.

His bitter had inched its way down the glass without him being aware. He bought himself another. The crowd had become very noisy, laughing and shouting to make themselves heard above the din. There was no one drunk like in Ireland, but looking around it was hardly an English pub. The people in the bar seemed to be mostly tourists and foreigners. He had heard American accents and the girls in the opposite corner looked Spanish, like the posters of dancers. He felt secure in this atmosphere. If they mixed with the tourist crowd they would be very difficult to trace. Just another holidaymaker and his son.

On his way upstairs he noticed that the receptionist had finally gone. In the bedroom he put the light switch down slowly, minimizing the snap as it went on. He went over and looked at Owen as he undressed. He was still breathing normally. His elbow was high on the pillow over his head and his face was turned into its crook. The bedclothes had been pushed down about his waist and his new vest had rumpled up. His rib-cage, each bone outlined, rose and fell. His eyelashes were long and dark. Suddenly the boy smiled, not a grin, but a deep warm satisfied smile. Then he snuffled and began to snore lightly.