There is a strange synchronicity in all this, a macabre pattern, a common impulse: denial, punishment, death. The pattern becomes compelling.

 

Something else was afoot. I heard them planning. The sense of threat was tangible. I said nothing. I could’ve gone and reported something. What would I report? How would I talk about it? I was expecting it to be at night. But it was in the middle of the afternoon, hot, blinding light. The seniors didn’t have games that Saturday. I remember it so vividly now, the noise, running feet on the bottom corridors. A roar of boys! I had detention in the study hall. The prefect in charge left to go and see what was happening. We were all out on the corridor hanging over the parapets, looking down into the playground. A ringside view. Ted and J. M. were being pursued by what seemed like twenty seniors. It was wild. They had taken off from the playground and had disappeared down the path which led to the bush, past the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes, and which eventually led into the hills behind the college. We could not see anything. It became very silent. The prefect returned and the detention continued. I kept my head down. I could not imagine what was going on.

‘Ave, ave, ave Maria …’ Even now, our hymns plait themselves in incongruously.

There was a high wind, which howled and rattled the windows. Parrots screamed. Then the silence and the scratch of pens on paper continued. Lines: I must not talk in chapel, five hundred times.

Once when I looked up, the boy in front of me turned around and signalled with his hand and fingers, flicking them so they made a clicking noise, indicating that Ted and J. M. were getting what was coming to them, what they deserved.

Licks, he said, clicking fingers like whips.

I put my head down and wrote. I must not talk in chapel. Blue Quink ink on white paper with pale blue lines, words in blood: now his poetry is mine.

When we came out of detention I saw the seniors, one or two at a time, come straggling back into the playground.

J. M. called it ‘The Raid’. He had a way with titles. Like ‘The Night of the Rain.’

There is an account in the journal. Aelred going over the ground three years later?

But I heard the seniors talking. One or two were real braggers. So bragging that it was some time before they noticed me.

The brother, they pointed.

They had it coming to them. If that’s what they want. If that’s what they like, the bullers. If that’s where they want to take it. Let them.

Did you hear them? Like they were asking for it.

PLEASE was louder than STOP. Did you hear them?

The bragger was going over the top. I saw others slink away - already ashamed now that they were back in the playground. I saw some others not even join the gang with the bragger, who were congregating into the lavatories to smoke. I slipped into a cubicle.

I heard some say, Shut up, leave it.

A fight nearly broke out. But then a core of braggers egged each other on with description. I sat in the cubicle and listened. I dared not breathe. I hardly read what was on the walls: ‘K.O. SUCKS S.T. WHO WANTS A PRICK AS BIG AS A DONKEY?’ Someone had written under it, ‘YOU DO. FOCK YOURSELF.’ An O for U. The cleaners hadn’t got here with their brushes as yet.

The bragger coughed, and the smell of smoke mixed with the smell of urinals.

Did you have them both?

One and then the other.

I saw O’Connor come out and there was blood all over his prick.

Do you know what he did? He went round. And when Macdougall went in, he shoved it down one of their mouths.

I heard him say, Suck it clean, you cunt.

They all laughed. I retched. I could not help it. I started being sick.

Who’s in there? They were kicking the door.

I sat bent over. They clambered up and looked over. When I looked up, four faces.

All said, It’s the brother.

One jumped over and opened up the door. They dragged me out. One was about to put my head in the urinals, when another boy walked in.

Leave him alone, he’s not a buller, just because he’s his brother.

It was him who shouted buller. I saw him in the refectory. You know your brother is a buller, don’t you?

Maybe his brother has bulled him, another laughed and sneered.

Get out.

They all kicked me as I passed out of the door.

Get out or we’ll all bull your fucking arsehole. Then they laughed again. Yes, come take this. One held his cock bunched in his pants and shoved it out at me. I was passed along the line, blows to the head.

Yes, your arse must be sore. They kicked me again.

I did not see J. M. or Ted. The headmaster called me into his office that evening and said that my brother had been taken home and would not be coming back until the new term. There were still two weeks to go before the holidays. I could not imagine how they could come back. It was kept from me, kept between my parents and J. M.

During the next holidays I remember he did not play, as he used to, with me, even though I was younger. He wouldn’t come down to the savannah to play cricket. He stayed a lot in his room, reading. Was that when he went religious? I remember he used to get up early early in the morning to go to Mass in San Andres. He would take the five o’clock bus. He had a whole set of prayer books. I remember Mum saying things like: Toinette take Master J. M. lunch in his room today.

This was when I learnt to creep around him quietly. It was like I knew what had happened and knew what it was but didn’t fully bring it into my mind to see it for what it really was and cope with it. I never wanted to admit any of the things I had done and said. I suppose it was the time we were living in. Now I might’ve had a counsellor. J. M. would’ve had therapy. All that was on offer was Father Gerard’s spiritual direction and confession. Inside his heart there must’ve have been so much shame, so much guilt. And then what happened to Ted! No wonder he left and went away. And it was hardest when they had to go back into the new term to prepare for their exams.

But before the holiday, a special assembly was called on the last evening. Two boys were expelled as ringleaders, another two suspended. They let the others stay. There was a long queue outside the dean’s office late that night.

Some were strapped, some caned. All in pyjamas, dropped, naked bottoms. Ironic.

There was a new head boy. The following week there were new captains for the teams. Ted was dropped, J. M. forgotten. Forgotten?

I overheard the gym master one afternoon speaking to one of those I noticed in the lavatory, who had not been suspended at the beginning of the new term:

They had it coming to them - fairies, he said.

Now I think of angels. Wings. A fancy.

What is it Joe said that really struck me?

It’s like the church has taken possession of the body. It’s like a demolition site.

Then he asked: Why does spirituality have to entail the subjugation of sexual passion?

There’s another thesis he developed, which I find startling. It was on one of those nights when he and Miriam stayed up really late finishing the rum and getting me to play the cuatro. They want to come to Les Deux Isles. They took me down to a West Indian restaurant before for some good food. It was Jamaican.

Joe is so animated. The state wants to control the body, wants to say what you can and can’t do with your body. Then, ironically, it now says that we can kiss and touch. Well, it’s not explicit, exactly what it is we can do with our own consent, provided we are twenty-one. That has to change. We have to have the same rights for gay people as we do for heterosexuals. It will come. Sixteen! he says. Look at your story, the story of your brother and Ted. It will come because it’s enlightened and just. He talks of the Stonewall riots.

I try to imagine myself having this discussion in Les Deux Isles with the family, or just with so many friends. Of course back home there’s no protection under the law, no rights whatsoever.

Religion run amock, Joe says.

I agree, actually. Though Joe says that many countries give lip service to some UN charter. I didn’t know that.

He says, It’s barbaric. There are things afoot in this country, even now.

Miriam says, In some countries, particularly with fundamentalist regimes, it’s like concentration camps all over again, and so often in the name of God. All this done in the name of God.

Maybe J. M. died for something in the end. To make his brother think straight. Straight? Words take on a new meaning. And I always have his words, grist for my mill. I see the forming of his complex desires and where they got hidden.

I found a substitute for my love after Ted’s death among those men who reminded me of angels and would be angels in the beauty of their chanting. Their dance was so different from that of the lithe athletes.

I lingered over those pictures in those foreign books on monasticism in the library, desiring and fashioning myself on the bodies of the monks I saw there: the sharp outline of the tonsured head, the hooded head bowed in holy prayer, the folds of the cowl, the tight belt, the scapular over the cassock, the leather sandals buckled on their naked feet.

I yearned for the life I saw there. I sought to be one of those men, hard at work in rough smocks. I stared at those still lifes of hands in prayer, at a potter’s wheel, bent on a hoe in the field. I put out my fingers to stroke those perfect profiles, those shoulders at a desk, those hands illuminating sacred manuscripts.

I devoured these books like a kind of pornography, my spirituality, an erotic mysticism.

I idealised them in the lace of their surplices, the linen of their albs and the damask and silk of their vestments, the chasuble and the cope. I drew near to their sacred dance, this liturgy, an acolyte.

As I genuflected, as I turned and descended the steps from the high altar, as I bowed, as I poured water from the crystal cruets on to the soft consecrated fingers of the priest, and swung the thurible of hot coals smoking with the perfume of incense; as I carried the Abbot’s crosier and mitre, I fashioned my face into that of an angel.

And from where they stood, the others, who had jeered and dared Ted to dive into the pool, could not touch me on my pinnacle. From there, I could pretend I was safe.

See my poetry in the words my brother found from a distance; a long gaze.