POPS returned home from Brother Rice one afternoon a couple of weeks before my first day of school and announced that Director McHugh had told him that His Grace had decreed that Percy Joyce, Little Percy, was to be exempt from any and all forms of physical discipline or corporal punishment at school. My mother was so happy and relieved I wondered what exactly I had been exempted from, but she merely said it was something I needn’t worry myself about, now that His Grace had intervened. “He knows how it would look,” I overheard her say later to Medina. She didn’t finish the sentence, but I now know what she meant. It wouldn’t look good if the little Joyce boy were strapped, what with His Grace having preached a sermon from the Mount on my behalf, what with my overly large hands that would make such easy and conspicuous targets for a strap. It wouldn’t look good if, after having been strapped, the little Joyce boy put those hands beneath his armpits in a vain attempt to put out the fire in them. It wouldn’t look good if, thus disposed, the little Joyce boy, eyes streaming tears, walked forlornly down Bonaventure, his big feet flapping like a pair of codfish.
The night before my first day of school, my mother and Medina drank a lot of beer. Pops kept storming out of his room to complain about the noise they were making, saying that even if they didn’t care about him, they ought to remember that they were keeping me awake on the night before such an important day in my life. His complaints did not deter them—not that it would have mattered to me if they had for even if the house had been silent I couldn’t have slept, what with being so wrought up with anticipation and anxiety. I joined them in the kitchen, drank Crush and watched them drinking beer and, when they abandoned their card playing, watched TV with them as they loudly made fun of a Barnum & Bailey circus programme. My mother asked Medina: Who, at some point in their life, has not longed to throttle a ventriloquist or beat some sense into someone who was forever plucking quarters from the ears of strangers? Who hasn’t prayed that some flaming sword swallower would extract from his throat a shish kebab of his vital organs? Who hasn’t pictured an acrobat emerge from a somersault with a noose of rigging ropes around his neck? Who hasn’t wished that the tuxedo-wearing, unicycle-riding balancer of twenty spinning plates would slip and go down in a clattering tangle of sticks and spokes and broken china?
My mother kissed Medina on the cheek, then kissed me on the cheek. They stopped watching TV and played “What If?” In this case, what if the Church hired cheerleaders to tell its story and promote its cause? Tight-fitting-short-sleeved-blouse-and-short-skirt-wearing cheerleaders. My mother had been a cheerleader at Holy Heart. She stood up and began doing jumping jacks. When my mother nodded at us, Medina and I clapped our hands in time to what she was chanting.
There go the Pagans, there they go.
There go the Pagans, there they go.
How do you spell victory?
How do you spell victory?
Split that V
Dot that i
Shake that c-t-o-r-y
VICTORY
YEEAHHH PAPISTS!
Come on, Papists, pump it up
Let them Muslims know what’s up
We have a team, we have a yell
A team that fights like bloody Hell
How do you spell DESTROY?
D-E-S-T-R-O-Y
Cleave those breastplates
Throw those spears
Kill those darned char-i-o-teers
YEEAHHHH PAPISTS
Come on, prove that you have dicks,
Go out and kill some heretics
YEEAAHHH CHRISTIANS, YEEAAHHH CHRISTIANS
They may be the infidels
But we have better cheers and yells.
What is better for the soul
Than Muslim heads upon a pole?
Put his head upon a stick—
Mohammed is a lunatic!
YEEAAHHH CHRISTIANS
Big noses only make big sneezes
We’ll get you back for killing Jesus
We’ll stomp your faces, break your bones
Annihilate your chromosomes!
The Krauts may be the craziest
But Communists are atheists!
We’ve got Hitler, yes we do
We’ve got Mussolini too
Now don’t complain, don’t make a fuss
They’ll do our dirty work for us
YEAHHHH FASCISTS
Kill the commie, kill the Jew
We’re worth more than ten of you
On your feet, let’s hear you stamp!
Can you spell concentration camp?
YEAAAAHHHH PAPISTS
You know the Papists are the best
We’re much better than the rest.
Let’s hear that cheer, you know it well
All Protestants will go to Hell
YEAAAAHHHH PAPISTS
Pops came out this time to protest what my mother was saying in front of me. “He doesn’t understand a word of it, Pops,” my mother said. “We’re just having some fun, that’s all. Throwing a coming-out party for Perse. Tomorrow’s his first day of school, and the last one of life as he knows it.”
“He’s only six! Barely six! You’re biting the hand that protects your son.”
“It’s not as if we’re doing it in front of Uncle Paddy.”
“Soon Percy will be talking about His Grace like that. In front of someone who’ll tattle to McHugh.”
“Old Gloomy Gus McHugh.” She put her hand on my head. “Don’t call the Archbishop Uncle Paddy, not even in this house, okay?”
I nodded.
“We’re just letting off some steam, Pops. Feel free to leave us to it. If you must complain, phone the police and tell them your landlady is making too much noise.”
Pops went back to his room.
My mother sat on the sofa with her thigh against Medina’s, one arm around her shoulder. She kissed her again. I stood on the sofa and kissed my mother on the cheek. Medina got up and put on a record by Patsy Cline. She and my mother danced to “I Fall to Pieces.” Medina kissed her briefly on the lips and slipped one hand between the buttons of her blouse. My mother shook her head, pulled away and rejoined me on the couch. “She was just trying to tickle me,” she said. Medina came over and sat me on her lap and tickled me.
Then my mother began to cry. “Oh fuck, Medina. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. I can’t let them have him, can I? I can’t just send him off like a lamb to the slaughter.”
Medina smiled at me but she looked upset. “You’ll be fine, won’t you, Perse?”
She kissed my mother on the cheek and pulled her head onto her shoulder, stroking her nylon-covered leg. My mother shook free of her again.
“They’re not even allowed to think about sex. You might as well let loose a pack of dogs upon a flock of sheep. The last thing they’re suited for is teaching. Christian Brothers. Jesus. More like a riot squad. They even look like their specialty is crowd control. And nuns. Nuns attacking with picks and shovels a vein of coal a mile underground would be ideally employed.”
Medina told her she was doing a wonderful job of preparing me for my first day of school. “I’m sure he’s not at all nervous about what to expect,” she said.
My mother cried that she didn’t want me going “out there” by myself. Medina held me with one hand and rubbed my mother’s back in soothing circles with the other, murmuring something I couldn’t make out. She kissed my mother on the lips again. I kissed my mother on the lips, but she laughed and pulled away. “Why don’t you go to bed, Perse?” Medina said, stroking a thick strand of my mother’s hair. “Go on, now, go to bed. Big day tomorrow.”
So, the next morning, I went to St. Bon’s, short for St. Bonaventure, the junior school at the top of Bonaventure Avenue, across from the Fort Townsend Fire Station whose trucks, flashing lights and screaming sirens I remember as the seemingly ceaseless accompaniment to the voices of my teachers. The smooth grey stone of St. Bon’s looked as if, fifty years after the school’s construction, it was still awaiting some sort of cosmetic surfacing—paint, imitation brick, stucco, clapboard, something that would make the place look finished. The school was as unadorned, as monastery-like inside as out—long rows of lockers the same grey colour as the cement floor, which itself was the same colour as the outer walls.
My mother wanted to walk me up the hill to St. Bon’s on my first day of school, only, she said, because she was worried about the traffic. She crouched down in front of me and tugged at the shoulders and cuffs of my navy blue St. Bon’s blazer. I insisted on going by myself. “I’m six. I’ll be the oldest in grade one,” I said.
“Don’t be too sure,” Pops said. “A lot of my students failed grade one.”
“He’ll have the last laugh,” Medina said. “You know what they say about men with big feet.”
“What do they say?” I said.
“They say,” my mother said, “that they have an unfair advantage in kangaroo look-alike contests.” I shook my head. “Never mind Medina,” she said. “She should mind what they say about aunts with big mouths.”
“What do they say?” I said.
“Jesus, Percy,” my mother said. She stifled a sob, her hand over her mouth. “Okay, then. Out you go, I guess. Out the door into the big bad world.” She crouched down, took me in her arms and hugged me so hard I felt something snap in my back. Medina reached out a hand toward her but let it drop when my mother stood up quickly, folding her arms.
“Now you’ll be here all by yourself,” I said. “Will you be lonely, Mom?”
“Yes,” she said, dabbing her nose with the back of her hand. “So don’t be a stranger, okay, Perse? Some Joyce men have a habit of never coming back.”
“I’ll come back,” I said. “Do I look anything like Jim Joyce?”
“No,” she said. “Now don’t tell anyone in school that you have False Someone Syndrome. They might treat it as a joke.”
“Okay.”
Walking up the hill to St. Bon’s that first day no one laid a finger on me. But when I got into my new classroom it began. I was called Joyce Face. I was asked why, being six years old, I had yet to wash my face. Nigger Lips. “Jesus, Joyce,” one boy said, “you must have come out through your mother’s arse.”
After school, the indoor part of which lasted less than an hour the first day, I reported it all to my mother, who started to cry. “Little bastards!” I know now that she was worried that one of these taunts would stick, become my permanent nickname, the kind of name that stuck to local “characters,” that forever kept them from being taken seriously and earned for them a kind of fondly ironic mockery, which in order to survive I would give in to, even encourage, and wind up playing the fool’s role that I had been assigned. She told me fiercely that I should ignore people who called me names and do my best to make friends and not become a loner. But I already sensed that not even one of the other misfits of the school would want to further devalue his currency by chumming up with me. That night, I imagined a world beyond the Mount in which, by a string of extraordinary accomplishments, I would earn respect, and the onus would be on others to put me at ease.
The second day, I was surrounded in the schoolyard by boys, and by girls who wandered up the street from Belvedere, children my age, most of whom had seen me for the first time the day before and, so far, were merely curious.
“What happened to your hands and face?” a girl named Nancy asked.
I said my father and I were in a car that crashed into the Block. He was killed and I was scarred for life. There were still bits of windshield beneath the skin around my eyes. She could feel them if she liked. She shook her head.
Most of the boys and girls looked scared, a few scornful but envious.
Over the next few days, I kept changing my story, making up all sorts of lies. It was the beginning of “give me myth or give me death.”
I suffered a syndrome when I was born.
My face turned scarlet when I had scarlet fever.
My sister went aboard of me with a box of Brillo pads.
I said I was part “Red Indian” as the “supposedly extinct” Beothuk Indians were. I was the only living person with Beothuk blood and there was a great deal of pressure on me from scientists and museums to reproduce so as to keep the Beothuk from dying out altogether. None of the children had heard of the Beothuk.
My father was in charge of wild elephants in a circus on the Mainland.
My mother might take me to Lourdes.
My father was killed in the war. My mother was so sad she almost died and that was why I had a stain.
John the Baptist had his head cut off. I might get mine cut off someday. It might end up like his did, on a plate for doctors to look at.
The stain started after I was born and one day might cover me from head to toe. I would smother if it covered all of me. I just had to wait and see. I used to be afraid but my mother told me it was in God’s hands.
I was stained all over, but it would all be gone when I was eight. A doctor was going to fix the stain. I could pick any kind of face I wanted. I would look like everyone else.
I can still see the scared, bemused expressions on the faces of my fellow grade one students, expressions that said, So this is what going to school is like, this is the sort of thing you see when you venture out into the world without your mother for the first time, a boy whose face is purple and whose lower lip is three times fatter than the upper one, which itself is twice as fat as normal, whose hands and feet are the size of a grown man’s, and who holds forth about these things to anyone who asks about them, or anyone who’ll listen. They must have been wondering what else they would encounter as the first days of their expulsion from their lifelong homes went by. What was out here that the grown-up strangers in whose care they had been left would not shelter or protect them from?
As I told each lie, the grade ones who had heard any of the previous versions of my story drifted away and the older ones mocked me for lying. But it was the few seconds or minutes or days of awestruck, dumbstruck credulity that egged me on. Eventually, there were not even any among the grade ones left for me to try to hoodwink or win over. I was seen by all to be some sort of myth-weaving, odd-looking crank who was better left ignored.
My mother found out about my lies from Pops, who found out about them from Brother McHugh, whose source could have been just about anyone.
“Why did you make up all those stories?” she said. “I told you not to mention FSS.”
“I didn’t.”
“They asked him what happened to his face,” Pops said. “He had to say something.”
“He didn’t have to say everything. He didn’t have to contradict himself with every word. Now they all think he tells lies. About everything.” I wanted so badly to describe to her how impressed some of the children had seemed, how in awe of someone so oddly afflicted, someone doomed, someone blessed, someone who had survived a car crash in which his father died, who had been so near to, so intimate with, mystery, who had been to the Mainland, whose future depended on a Lourdes miracle, who had suffered a syndrome and whose father was in charge of elephants.
“You are like Jim Joyce,” she shouted. “If you must tell lies, can’t you be consistent so it isn’t so obvious you’re lying?”
“Pen,” Medina said, which sent my mother into tears. She took me in her arms.
“I’m sorry, Perse,” she said. “I really wish you’d let me walk you up that hill.”
But I shook my head.
I got more or less perfect grades by doing little more than pay attention in class. I didn’t bring home school work or even books if I could help it. I assumed it was somehow because of my FSS that I was smarter than the others, but Pops said, as he had when we went to Brother Rice, that I took after my mother. “How do you do it, Perse?” Medina said. “I look at a page and nothing happens. You look at one and you remember everything.” I shrugged, though what she said was true. I sponged up words and numbers without effort. I could probably have completed the year’s work in a week—but that was just more evidence, it seemed to me, of my freakishness. I sensed it would do me no good to show off what one boy called my “brains” in class, but I was so bored trying to keep pace with the others that I couldn’t help finishing my every assignment in seconds. The Brothers started sending me to the “library,” telling me I should “read something” until they came back to get me. The library consisted of little more than rotatable trees of paperbacks, a grove of them that Mrs. Crowley, the only woman in the school, watched over as she made up questions for the school TV quiz show that she coached. It was called Reach for the Top. Her team of boys, all twelve-year-olds, would come to the library sometimes and Mrs. Crowley would fire questions at them that I almost always knew the answers to. “What is a waiting line of people called? The word can also be used as a verb.” “Queue,” I said, but they all ignored me and Mrs. Crowley went on to another question. I often sat alone in the library, at one of the long tables, for hours, still bored because the library books at St. Bon’s were less interesting than the ones my mother read to me. I stared out of the window at the trees that obscured my view of St. Pat’s, at drifting snow or gusting rain, and often fell asleep, my head on my arms.
The teasing and name-calling continued. My mother asked Pops to speak to Brother McHugh about my treatment at school, which, she said, seemed to fly in the face of at least the spirit of Uncle Paddy’s Sermon on the Mount. Soon, the boys of all the schools on the Mount had it made known to them that to say an unkind word to Percy Joyce, on or off school property, would earn them the legendary wrath of Brother Rice Principal McHugh. It was said the Archbishop had intervened again and had personally charged Brother McHugh with looking out for the little Joyce boy. Pops said that every boy at Rice and at the other schools on the Mount was justifiably terrified of Brother McHugh. No one wanted to be caught staring at me or even looking at me lest I think they were staring at me. I wondered if it would have been better just to get beat up from time to time.
“Thank God for Uncle Paddy,” my mother said. “I mean His Grace.”
Pops said it was common knowledge that, at a word from Brother McHugh, boys from any of the schools could be called to his office. He said there were boys who stayed home for months after a session with McHugh, waiting for the broken bones in their hands to heal. So it was under the aegis of His Grace/Pops/Brother McHugh that I would flourish. Hopefully.
“Pops is exaggerating,” my mother assured me, but Pops shook his head. “I’m not exaggerating in the least.” He said that the Director’s strap was actually a “strop,” a piece of leather on which barbers sharpened their straight-blade razors.
Brother McHugh, by his own edict, was the only Brother allowed to mete out corporal punishment to boys from any of the schools on the Mount. The other Brothers sent misbehaving boys to him. It was said that he kept a record of all the boys who were sent to his office and meticulously kept track of the number of straps or other kinds of blows that they received, the repeat offenders, those who had been suspended and expelled, those who had cried, those who had vowed not to and had kept their vow, those who had vowed not to but had broken down. And so McHugh was what my mother called “the one-man retribution show,” the lone “corrections officer” who shouldered the entire load, primarily, he said, because he wished to spare his fellow Brothers the unpleasantness of punishing young boys, was willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of those who worked beneath him.
But I alone, of all the boys, past and present on the Mount, had a free pass.
I learned at school that, as a child, McHugh had gone by the name of Gus and still did to those who knew him personally, and that Gloomy Gus was his nickname among the students. McHugh was said to have hated the short form of his name all his life. As with Saint Augustine’s mother, McHugh’s mother’s name was Monica. Saint Monica. My son the saint. He takes after me. “I actually like the name Gus,” my mother said. “But he doesn’t seem like a Gus, does he? What’s Gus short for? Angus? Surely not. I don’t think that man’s parents would name him after a breed of cattle. Augustine, more likely. Saint Augustine. One of the super saints. So McHugh’s name is Augustine. A very august name. Augustine McHugh. I can just see little Augustine on his tricycle. A hard name to live up to. A name for a boy for whom his parents had high hopes.”
My mother asked Pops what he knew about McHugh’s background. Pops said he was from Grand Falls, had three sisters, all of them Presentation nuns who taught school in various places on the Mainland. His working-class parents were still living in Grand Falls.
“The only boy,” my mother said. “The hope of the family.” She wondered how his parents felt about having no grandchildren. The end of their bloodline. To his parents, my mother speculated, McHugh not getting married was a gamble that they may have hoped would have a bigger payoff. Their son the priest. Instead, it was their son the Brother. The Brother, but still. “I might be way wide of the mark,” my mother said. “Maybe the only person disappointed in Gus is Gus. Or maybe he’s come further than he ever dreamed.”
Students overheard using the name Gus by a nun, Brother, teacher, staff member or student tattletale were soon, if they were boys, sent to Gus for punishment, or if they were girls, to Sister Celestine of Holy Heart. Sister C, the use of whose nickname was permitted because she was fond of it, also had a monopoly on discipline, being the sole punisher of all students who misbehaved in the girls’ schools of the Mount.
Of course, the extreme ban on the use of “Gus” made the boys all the more inclined to use it, to gleefully, often blasphemously, defy the ban. “You’ll be called before Gus” if you do this or that, boys would warn each other. Gus will get you for that. Gus will smite you down for that. Gus knows all your secret thoughts, words and deeds. Almighty Gus; Holy Mary, Mother of Gus; Gus the Father, Gus the Son and Gus the Holy Gust.
My mother said she was not sure she wanted to be beholden to such a man. But she soon stopped voicing her worries when the teasing and taunting all but disappeared.
“He’ll be fine,” Medina said. “He’ll probably be the first boy on the Mount to get to grade seven without a black eye. Even if a bit of name-calling was the worst he had to put up with, he’d be luckier than most.”
But that’s what I was afraid of, being perceived as being luckier than most, an undeservedly special boy, a pet who, because of the Archbishop, Gus and Pops, was spared even what trials the most popular of boys endured—and who rubbed all that in their faces with his effortless perfection in academics. They mocked me as if I fancied I was Uncle Paddy, as if I was His Grace. “Your Face,” boys said to me, and fell to one knee as if to kiss my ring.
I was excused from religion class. I was deemed to be physically “too frail” for gym class but about that I didn’t care—I knew I’d be the weak link in any sport because of my oversized hands and feet and didn’t want there to be yet one more thing for which I alone could be excused. And I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to shower with the other boys, wouldn’t have to let them see what was hidden by my clothes. I had an “evaluation” session with the guidance counsellor, a well-meaning but painfully embarrassed young woman who divided her time between all the schools on the Mount. Reading from a laminated list, she asked me about various things having to do with what she referred to as my “specialness.”
“Is there anything you want to ask about your specialness? Have you ever been teased about your specialness? What words do other students use when referring to your specialness? Do you sometimes wish that your specialness would go away? Do you feel that your teachers understand your specialness? Have you ever felt embarrassed by your specialness? I stared at the desk and said I didn’t mind my specialness. My evaluation session ended when she got to the bottom of the list. I never set eyes on her again.
I told my mother about my appointment when I got home. She began to refer to me as “Your Specialness.” “What would Your Specialness like for dinner? Is the macaroni to the liking of Your Specialness?”
During my mother and Medina’s card game that night, every other word was “specialness.” “So tell me, Penelope,” Medina said, “how do you feel about your specialness?”
“How do you feel about yours?” my mother said.
“Do you feel that I understand your specialness?” Medina said.
“Have you ever thought about playing with your specialness?” my mother said.
“I believe I have thoroughly explored my specialness.”
“There aren’t many sports that require you to cover every inch of yourself. It’s a pity the school doesn’t have a fencing team,” my mother said wistfully.
And I imagined it: the world’s first never-defeated fencer, his identity unknown because he was never seen without a mask.
There was a network of underground tunnels that connected most of the schools on the Mount. They were necessary partly because the Brothers who taught at St. Bon’s and St. Pat’s lived in the Brothers’ Quarters attached to Brother Rice, a tower of modest height. There was no room for Brothers’ Quarters on the grounds of the other six schools, and the walk from Brother Rice to them could be a daunting one if done outdoors given that, as Pops said, most of the school year was winter, a cold, windy, snowy winter that made it all but impossible on many days for a Brother encumbered with textbooks, exercise books and exams to make his way up the slippery slope of the Curve of Bonaventure.
The tunnels were essential for the older nuns and Brothers, and for McHugh, who, as the Director of all the Brothers and the supervisor of all the schools, had to make his way several times a day from Brother Rice to the top of the Mount. The Main Tunnel connected Brother Rice to Holy Heart, St. Pat’s and St. Bon’s, while narrower tunnels branched off to Belvedere, Mercy and Presentation. I had no idea what the tunnels were like, but the way the other boys darkly referred to “the tunnels” made me think of scenes from old movies I had seen on TV, tunnels lit by flickering torches, rat-teeming passages that would have unnerved even such a beast as Lon Chaney always seemed to play. Most of the boys who had been inside the tunnels had only been there to be led from St. Bon’s and St. Pat’s to Brother Rice to be punished by McHugh—led by older, junior high students who were known among the boys as the MPs, the Military Police, hall monitors who wore white arm bands. “Honour bands,” as the teachers called them. It was rumoured that some MPs were undercover, their identities known to no one but McHugh. Rats, finks, squealers could be anywhere, so you had to be careful what you said and did even when there were no white arm bands to be seen.
McHugh’s hair was said to have been white since he was in his early twenties. He combed it to the right in a wave that ended in a crescent that hid half his forehead. He was in his mid-forties now, of average height, neither muscular nor fat, but large, soft-looking, with a small double chin that quivered when he spoke. It was easy to spot him from a distance, especially outdoors when it was windy, for his hair went up in a flickering mass of what might have been white flame. He had a smooth, pink complexion; he looked as if he never shaved because he never had to. His neck and hands and wrists were of the same hairless, pink complexion, almost faded versions of my own. These features, combined with his bright blue eyes and his habit of almost always smiling, gave him the jocular, plump look of an easygoing, all-understanding bishop who, you might imagine, was given to merrily making the sign of the cross over everyone and everything. But he had a deep-timbred, flawless, far-projecting voice that alone of all his features seemed to match his reputation. He could, at conversational volume, silence a school hallway at lunchtime, his voice clear and unmistakably his. McHugh visited St. Bon’s and St. Pat’s at lunchtime via the tunnels when the halls were full of boys, among whom he strolled, hands in the pockets of his slacks, shouting out the last names of skylarking boys in a tone that made it clear they would get no second warning. It was said that he not only knew the first and last names of every boy on the Mount but also knew their academic standing and their attendance and detention records. He had an infallible eye for family resemblance and was forever telling boys they would never measure up to their older brothers who had graduated high school under him.
McHugh would stop and look down at me as he had done in the chem lab and the boys would look expectantly at him. McHugh, chewing his gum, would smile as if he was savouring some devastating witticism which, but for the Archbishop’s edict, he would say aloud and send the boys into derisive fits of unprecedented hilarity. But the smile would abruptly vanish, be replaced by a look of ironic amusement, as if it had occurred to him that, protected or not by the Archbishop, I was not worth toying with.
The boys at St. Bon’s tried to goad me into misbehaving—into skipping class when I felt like it, talking back to the Brothers, smoking on the school grounds, starting fights in the hallways. “Tell Brother Hogan to go fuck himself, Percy. Come on. Detention is the worst you’ll get, if you even get that. Come on. Do it. He can’t send you to McHugh. McHugh can’t lay a finger on you. No one can.”
They seemed fascinated by the question of just how much I could get away with, just how far my amnesty might extend. I was intrigued by the question as well. Could I do anything and get away with it? Could I steal candy, bubble gum, cigarettes from Collins’s store and give them to boys as bribes in return for friendship? Had Uncle Paddy conferred upon me absolute clemency for offences committed anywhere on earth?
“You got it made, Percy,” the St. Bon’s boys said, shaking their heads at my refusal to take advantage of having it made. “Come on, Percy, you won’t get into trouble. If Uncle Paddy told everyone to leave me alone, I’d kick you in the balls.”
But my mother warned me that the “hands off Percy Joyce” edict could be revoked at any time if someone like McHugh convinced the Archbishop that I was abusing it, and then where would I be? Surrounded by Brothers and boys I had made enemies of when they were forbidden to lay a finger on me. She said that Uncle Paddy, being so old, might pass away and be replaced by someone less interested in my health. Uncle Paddy might be made a cardinal and appointed to the Vatican, where he was unlikely to spend much of his time pondering the fate of Percy Joyce. “Don’t push your luck,” my mother said. “I can just imagine the field day McHugh would have with you if Uncle Paddy ever changed his mind.” She told me to behave as if the Archbishop had never heard of me.
“The boys of St. Bon’s seem to think, Medina, that sin won’t register on Percy’s soul. When the time comes, he’ll simply bypass death and Purgatory and ascend directly into Heaven like Christ and the Blessed Virgin. Remember,” she said to me, “you can’t complain to Uncle Paddy if I smack your arse.” Medina smiled and winked at me and Pops said he was sure I would never warrant a smacked arse.
“They’re right,” my mother said. “I wouldn’t smack you. I would never hit you.”
I knew it was true. She would never hit me. Neither at school nor at home would I be punished, at least not in that way. I vowed that I would never take advantage of her love and concern for me. I believed it at the time. But I might as well have made that vow with my fingers crossed behind my back.