The Arrival of Fergal Flynn Page 2

  One such morning, when the twins had gone to school, Ciaran was asleep in her bed and Fergal was wheezing on the sofa, Angela was ironing a beautiful pink nightdress for a girl about the same age as Fergal. She'd had a particularly nasty fight with her husband that morning. He wanted to go to Donegal on a weekend hurling trip and insisted he couldn't bring her or any of the kids, but she knew for a fact that some of the other wives were going. She knew she couldn't go anyway - they couldn't afford it and no one would be able to mind her brood - she'd just wanted to be asked. On top of all that, it was her twenty-eighth birthday, and he'd forgotten. She felt like an old woman.

  Two Valiums later, though, things were looking up. As she smoothed the little cotton nightdress, she remembered the time when it would have fitted her own body, when she had been just somebody's daughter and nobody's wife or mother. She held it up against her own adult body, whose shape the babies had changed forever, and tried to do a little spin, but there wasn't enough room. She said to Fergal's sleepy head, 'We thought you were going to be a girl, you know. I even had a few wee bits put aside - but, sure, then I had to give them away to Mrs Carson, who ended up having five girls and no boys. Jesus, I don't know which is worse - imagine having to pay for all them weddings.'

  Fergal was six years old and, although he hated not being able to breathe properly, he loved curling up on the settee in his underwear beneath a wee blanket, away from school and his brothers and his da. He had been drifting in and out of sleep. The doctor had given him a large measure from a bottle of cough mixture which was so strong that alcoholics got it on prescription if they couldn't afford vodka that week, and lay around in the fields, comotosed from drinking too much of it. Angela looked over at the back of his head, and again at the dress. Then she remembered the picture of her with her father after her First Holy Communion.

  It was as if someone else was controlling her movements. She picked up the freshly ironed nightdress and knelt down beside her sleeping son. She looked at his wavy hair and imagined it was longer. Then she sat him up and, with one movement, pulled the dress over his drowsy head. Fergal was more awake now, but even at such an early age something told him not to say anything. The fresh, crisp cotton felt soft and clean against his skin, and it fitted him perfectly. Angela stood him up and smoothed out the creases, then took the hairbrush from the mantelpiece. She began brushing his thick hair like a doll's, humming 'Happy Birthday' to herself, a huge smile radiating from her face.

  Then, gradually, she began to cry, and the brush strokes got harder and harder until Fergal cried out and pulled away. Suddenly embarrassed, Angela dried her eyes on her sleeve and she asked him to walk up and down the room to see if she'd ironed the nightdress right. Just at that moment, Ciaran woke up and began roaring for her upstairs. She pulled the nightdress off Fergal so roughly that it ripped under the arm. She hissed frantically that she would lose her job because of him if he couldn't stay still and that he wasn't to tell anyone what had happened.

  Fergal, climbing back under the relative safety of his blanket, was confused and frightened. He had thought he was helping her, but now she was saying he could get her the sack. As he drifted back into cough-mixture sleep, his panic was slowly replaced by the comforting realisation that he and his ma had a secret. It was the first time he'd ever felt important.

  Right up until he was ten, Fergal would be kept off school at a moment's notice to 'see if I've ironed this wee dress properly'. One such day, a friend of Angela's had dropped off a Confirmation dress that needed to be taken up at the hem as her youngest daughter wasn't quite as tall as the rest had been. When Angela unwrapped the treasure from its brown-paper embrace, her eyes lit up.

  She took an extra pill with the end of her tea and stood Fergal on the little coffee table in his underwear. She asked him to raise his hands to heaven, pulled the snow-white satin down over his pale body in one careful movement and shook out the bottom of the dress. When she stood up to get a better look, she gasped and put her hand over her mouth.

  Fergal was instantly worried. 'What, Mammy? What's wrong? I didn't tear it - I didn't...'

  Angela couldn't really hear him. The Valium had begun its numbing journey in her bloodstream and she was convinced that her longed-for daughter stood in front of her, getting ready for her Confirmation. She went around behind Fergal, smoothing any crease that dared ruin the calm surface of the pearl satin fantasy, and saw that the zip was still undone. Fergal tried to stand still as she coaxed the fragile zip upwards and the table wobbled in protest, but he couldn't help fidgeting.

  'Hold still, love, for fuck's sake... You want to look nice for your big day, don't you?'

  'What? What big day?' Had she really called him 'love'?

  Angela didn't answer him. She was busy trying to get the zip to go past Fergal's shoulders, which had broadened just enough to make it impossible. She held her breath in concentrated silence for what seemed like an eternity before finally exhaling loudly and cursing in defeat. 'Fucking, fucking... no! Fuck!'

  She sat down on the arm of the settee, suddenly exhausted. The angry sentence escaped out of her mouth before she knew it, 'Why couldn't you have been a girl? You were meant to be a bloody girl!'

  Fergal froze. He wanted to rip the dress off in a fit of anger but, when he saw his mother's face, he could only step carefully down onto the living-room floor and stand there, not knowing what to do. The words 'You were meant to be a girl' echoed in circles above his head. He caught sight of himself in the mirror above the fireplace, squeezed into the miniature wedding dress, and felt a hundred times stupider.

  'Mammy, I'm taking it off now, OK? Can I? Please? I'm roasting, and I don't want to wear it any more. I'm not... I'm not a girl.'

  Angela looked at the dress that would never fit her son, and crowds of tears gathered at the corners of her eyes.

  'I'm sorry, Mammy - I'm sorry...' Fergal didn't know what to say, he hated to see her cry.

  Suddenly she stopped. 'I'll finish the job on my own,' she said.

  Angela thought their secret was intact until Ciaran announced casually at dinner one day, 'Mammy puts dresses on our Fergal, Daddy.'

  All hell broke loose. Angela screamed her denial and locked herself in the bathroom, but it was too late. Paddy broke up half the kitchen. It was weeks before they were on speaking terms again.

  ~

  Fergal tried his best to get on with his brothers, but he was useless at sport - Ciaran could kick a ball straighter than him before he could even walk properly - and his brothers and father were scathing about it. One day a few girls from the top of the street asked him to join them in a skipping game. After a few days he started to get the hang of it, but John, always the slyer of the twins, told their da. The moment Fergal came in, he was thrown against the wall in the living room. His da held him by the hair and warned him that he'd fucking kill him if he ever saw him playing with girls again.

  'It's all your fucking fault, Angela. Why the fuck would any boy want to skip? What is he, a fucking kangaroo?'

  Fergal couldn't understand. He thought the girls were brilliant. They were kind to him, and funny, and really good spellers too and he loved that. He knew he was different, but he also knew better than to answer his da back.

  He passed his eleven-plus exam, which meant he could go to the grammar school up the road, but the fees were too much. So that was the end of that. When September came he dreaded the short walk to his new school. The first thing he saw in the unfamiliar playground was a whirlpool of boys swarming in a circle of charcoal-grey nylon, shouting and swearing. He got sucked into the churning current of uniforms and suddenly found himself looking under someone's bent arm at two older boys fighting on the ground. The taller boy held the other down by the hair and was kicking him repeatedly, sickening dull blows to the face from his new Oxford brogues with steel tips. Then someone shouted that a teacher was coming. The boys untangled themselves from the murdered moment and Fergal, frozen to the spot, was left staring
down at a pool of thick raspberry blood on the grey concrete, like a moat surrounding three broken white teeth. The teacher took the dazed, toothless boy off to the hospital to have his jaw wired, just as the bell rang for the first assembly on the first day of Fergal's six-year sentence at St Bridget's Secondary School for Boys.

  It took a while for him to recognise some of the other pupils from St Bridget's Primary School because they looked so clean in their new, freshly ironed uniforms. Within seconds everyone seemed to have chosen their own wee gang of friends. Fergal knew a few of the fellas to say hello to, but that was all. When he did eventually coast the conversations bubbling away in the playground, he hadn't a clue what or who most of them were about - it was almost always football, and they were merciless if you didn't know all of the up-to-the-minute details. Paddy Jr and John were in the year above him at St Bridget's, winning every sporting award that could be won. Fergal knew he would have been beaten up a lot more if he hadn't been related to them, so he was as grateful as he could be for that.

  Fergal was bright and he listened, so at least he got on all right with most of the teachers. His favourite lesson was the music class - if it could be called that. The hard fellas all sat at the back of the class, flicking phlegm and doing homework for any teachers they were really afraid of, while he and the other geeks sat at the front because those were the only seats free. They listened as their teacher, Baldy Turner, alternated between telling them about his musical childhood - the joy of piano lessons with his granny, the way he'd practised for up to four hours a day until even his fingers felt like crying - and describing his 'wild years' at college in a desperate attempt to keep their attention and earn cool points.

  As soon as puberty started knocking, Fergal had to find a way to stop doing PE. Any time he went near the changing room - or, worse yet, the showers - the increasingly unpredictable muscle between his legs began to thicken and lengthen without his permission at the slightest sight of someone else's pubes or penis or the manly beginnings of a hairy stomach or chest. He tried his best not to look too interested as his classmates nonchalantly stripped off and went after each other in the nude, flicking rolled-up towels. Fergal envied how confident and sure of their own bodies they were. He thought he would burst as they crowded the lukewarm showers and scrubbed themselves, stopping only to throw soapsuds at each other, and then dried themselves all over, talking away about this or that girl who they were on a promise with.

  He wondered what it would be like to have a girlfriend and go on dates. He knew girls were great company and tried to imagine what it would be like if one of them was standing in the shower. Maybe he would fancy her if she was in the nude? But, somewhere in a little locked room in his heart, he knew the answer was written on a rolled-up piece of paper in a tiny drawer, waiting to be opened someday - and he knew it was No. The thought filled him with dread. He didn't want to fancy his classmates. It wasn't normal. He wanted to be normal and fancy girls, didn't he?

  Fergal couldn't even stand up in the shower room until the last lad was out the door, lest his erection give him away. He wished he could stop it happening, but it was beyond his control, like his asthma. He was convinced that all his classmates knew what was going on, and he was terrified that the twins would somehow find out. So, every week, he convinced his mother to give him a note asking for him to be excused from Physical Education because of his asthma. He ended up writing the notes for her, anyway - she'd never really been able to write that well.

  The PE teacher was a big burly man from the country called Mr McGann and he loathed anyone who he thought wasn't trying. When he'd first learned that Fergal was the son of the famous Patrick Flynn, and indeed the brother of Paddy Jr and John, he had got very excited about having another fledging champion under his wing but, much to his disappointment and disgust, he had soon learned that Fergal was anything but. When Fergal repeatedly showed up without his PE kit, Mr McGann made him carry all the revolting unwashed kits around the playing fields in the lashing rain or write stupid essays about being a football shoe.

  In his final year, Fergal successfully argued that, because there was no exam to be done in PE, he ought to use that period to study for his O-levels. If any of his class hadn't completely hated him before, they certainly did now. While they marched off to the playing fields, he'd sit by himself in any available empty classroom either doing that night's homework or reading the growing number of notes he found in his bag, informing him of which teacher's dick he was sucking or which one was fucking him up the arse that week - or, just to contradict popular opinion, how many times a day he was breastfeeding from the ugliest mother they could think of.

  The instant the half-past-three bell rang, most of the pupils bolted out of the school like junkies in search of a fix, heading home to their football-poster-encrusted bedrooms to further obsess about the details of the coming matches. Getting home wasn't so easy for Fergal. If one of the hard men had had a particularly tough time from one of the teachers, it was only a matter of time before someone lower down the food chain would end up winded by a boot in the back or hit by a handful of razor-sharp graveyard stones up the side of the head. Sometimes Fergal was lucky enough to escape with just a bog-standard punching until they got bored and tipped his schoolbag into somebody's garden, preferably one patrolled by a crazed Doberman.

  Then he had to be at the ready when he walked in the front door of his house. If both parents were out, he was fair game to the twins. If both parents were in, it could be a different kind of danger. Whenever he got the chance, Fergal barricaded himself -under the excuse of studying for exams - into the upstairs front bedroom that Paddy Flynn had partitioned into two box rooms. The twins shared one and Fergal now shared the other with Ciaran - a deep sleeper from birth, who was relaxed to the point of profound laziness. Most mornings, Angela still carried him downstairs and let him lie outstretched in front of the fire for a while, before dressing him in his school uniform as he stood yawning and drooping like a scarecrow. If she'd offered to carry him to school too he would have let her. He and Fergal didn't fight, but Ciaran mainly followed other people's example. He knew he was their father's favourite and had inherited his appetite for sport, so there was no chance of him and Fergal ever being close.

  Meanwhile, at the top of the street, the twins retained their imaginary world titles in every competitive sport ever invented -handball, cribby and, inevitably, football. Regardless of the political climate, the players every local boy impersonated as they scored their classic goals were usually from Manchester or Liverpool, and the top of the street, where the factory wall made a kind of cul-de-sac, was always referred to as 'Old Trafford'. Fergal knew he would be asking for trouble if he tried to find out what Old Trafford actually was. He thought it might be a horse.

  Fergal's mother came to the rescue at all the wrong moments. She even went up to the school, accompanied by her impossibly bosomy sister Concepta for support, to complain about the repeated ripping of Fergal's good school blazer that was still only half paid for - not to mention the regular insertion of chewing gum into his 'lovely hair' that she'd had to perform surgery on with blunt scissors that left him looking like he'd caught his head in a lawnmower. Of course, this only increased the attacks. The twins turned on their heels if they saw Fergal coming along the corridor, usually accompanied by an angry crowd of insults ranging from 'no dick' and 'gee-head' through to 'fruity boy', 'blouse' and 'you fucking girl', as if a girl was the worst thing you could be and deserving of every conceivable punishment. On the rare occasions when the twins did actually speak to him directly, it was only to deliver a warning, through clenched teeth, that he hadn't seen them smoking on the way home.

  Fergal fantasised about telling his ma lies about the twins, just to see how they would like it. But he knew it would turn out to be more trouble for him in the end, so he settled for just thinking about it. He also imagined gluing together the lips of the people who shouted insults at him - maybe while they were asle
ep or something... It made him smile, for a while anyway.

  He wondered what his life would be like if he didn't have asthma. Would he be more like his sporty brothers? Would they all be great friends and do everything together? Would he finally understand what they were talking about when they shouted at the matches on TV? Maybe his da would even like him and talk to him... But, at the same time, the thought of spending more time with his father and brothers made him shudder. Deep down, he didn't want to be anything like any of them.

  3

  The hunger strikes in the Maze Prison were the scariest thing Fergal had ever witnessed. They were constantly on the news. Aerial footage of H-shaped cell blocks and then the insides of the shit-smeared cells being steam-cleaned by men in space suits while the naked, skeletal prisoners wrapped in blankets stared motionless, hopeless and vacant into the camera. Fergal thought they looked like archaeological finds, perfectly preserved famine victims from centuries before.

  Paddy Flynn covered everything he ate in HP Brown Sauce. He would sit in front of the TV, staring at the images of the dirty protest and mopping up the last of the discoloured grease on his dinner plate with a bit of fried bread. Nobody seemed to notice that the HP stood for 'Houses of Parliament', or that there was a picture of the British government buildings on the front of the bottle.