‘Ready…’ Guido at his shoulder.
– resembled, it hit him in a flash, his own future –
‘And… go!’
Howard did not move.
‘What’s the problem?’ Guido asked.
‘Nothing, I just need a second to…’ He bent his knees, a caricature of a diver.
‘You want a little push?’ Guido advanced. Involuntarily Howard sidestepped away from him, raising a hand in defence. ‘What?’ Guido appealed. ‘Are you going to jump or not?’
‘Okay, okay…’ Howard went back to the brink, shut his eyes, clenched his teeth.
The wind in the trees, on the rocks, like a siren’s song.
‘What’s going on?’ The girl’s voice sounded like it was coming from the other side of the world.
‘Fallon won’t jump,’ Steve Reece said. ‘Come on, Fallon, for fuck’s sake, I’m freezing my bollocks off.’
‘Yeah, Fallon, come on.’
‘He doesn’t have to jump if he doesn’t want to,’ he heard Farley say.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Steve Reece repeated heavily – and then a hand dragged him back from the precipice.
‘I’ll go. Jesus Christ.’ Tom was unstrapping the harness; Howard let him, gulping in air like he’d just been hauled out of the sea, then, freed, stumbled away on jelly legs to collapse on a tussock of grass a safe distance away, still too disoriented to be ashamed.
‘Jesus Christ, Fallon,’ Paul Morgan said. ‘You fucking pussy.’
‘Howard the Coward,’ Tom said, shrugging on the harness.
‘Howard the Coward!’ Steve Reece laughed delightedly.
In the distance he heard the girls’ laughter like the chirr of woodland animals, and he blazed with disgrace, feeling like he’d been at long last unmasked, outed, shown for what he really was.
‘Is anybody going to jump tonight?’ Guido was playing up the incident as a personal affront. ‘Maybe I should just take you home now?’
‘Chill the fuck out, LaManche.’ Tom had buckled the harness belt and now stepped forward to survey the void. ‘Everything’s ready?’ Guido assented. ‘Right,’ Tom said crisply, and hurled himself over the edge.
The others leaned out to witness his descent, his brawny body in a matter of seconds dwindling to a little toy as it dropped through space, straight down, not twisting or turning, and hit the ground with a flat thud.
For a moment no one reacted: they simply remained craned over the chasm, looking down at the tiny prostrate dot of colour motionless at the bottom. Then Guido mouthed, ‘Oh, shit.’ And from their position over by the edge of the trees, one of the girls began to scream.
Eleven years later, two hours after his last class, Howard is still haunting the school. First he attends a meeting about the upcoming Father Desmond Furlong Memorial Concert, to which he contributes mostly by way of nods or ambiguous throat-clearing noises; then he installs himself in the staffroom where, taking advantage of the silence, he corrects a class’s worth of essays on the Land Acts, appending meticulous individual critiques and advice for future projects. He has moved on to potential questions for the fourth-year Christmas exam when the cleaner starts hoovering pointedly under his feet; accepting defeat, he slinks for the door.
It’s Friday, and Farley has been sending regular texts from the Ferry, which Howard has ignored; Tom is bound to be there, and tonight of all nights he would prefer to avoid him. When he reaches his car, however, he realizes that even the prospect of being beaten to a pulp is more appealing than another night in his lonely house. Perhaps he can hide out in a corner without being seen? It’s worth a shot: pocketing his keys, he turns in the direction of the pub.
The time is after six, and most of his colleagues are, in their own parlance, ‘well-oiled’. To Howard’s dismay, Farley is talking to Tom, conspicuously flushed and laughing too loud. He salutes them curtly and heads for the snug, where a little crowd has gathered around Finian Ó Dálaigh, the restored geography teacher, who’s in the middle of a diatribe about the bastards in the Department of Education: ‘Those bastards do nothing but sit around in their fine government buildings playing battleships, I’d like to see them supervise four hundred maniacs running around a gravel yard…’
‘H-bomb.’ Farley materializes at his elbow. ‘Why didn’t you come over?’
‘You were talking to…’ Howard nods clandestinely over his glass at Tom, waiting at the bar with his back to them.
‘So?’ Farley says. ‘He’s not going to bite you, is he?’
Howard stares at him. ‘How do you know? Don’t you realize what day it is?’
‘Friday?’
‘It’s the anniversary, you clown, the anniversary of the accident. Eleven years.’
‘Oh, for –’ Farley swats his hand at the idea. ‘Howard, I swear, no one in the world is aware of that except you. Forget about it, for God’s sake. You’ve got enough to worry about.’ He drains his glass and sets it down on a nearby ledge. ‘Aha, perfect timing,’ as Tom appears beside them and hands him a drink.
‘Sorry, Howard,’ he says, ‘are you all right for a pint?’
‘I’m still on this one,’ Howard mutters.
‘It’s nearly gone – excuse me.’ Tom grabs the lounge girl and orders another beer. This is the first drink he has ever bought for him; Howard raises his eyebrows in bewilderment. Farley shrugs back at him. Well, perhaps he is right, Howard thinks, perhaps it is only himself who keeps clutching on to the past, who’s been obsessively watching the calendar. Tom is certainly in better form tonight than he has been lately – relaxed and jovial, if not what you could call sober. It’s Howard who remains stiff and diffident, unable to settle; he can’t help feeling thankful when Jim Slattery ambles up.
‘Found myself thinking of you the other day, doing ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ with the fourth-years. You remember it, I’m sure, Wilfred Owen…?’ He tilts his head back oracularly: ‘Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light / As under a green sea, I saw him drowning… Gives Graves a run for his money there, eh? Drowning on dry land. Such a striking image. Mustard gas,’ he explains to the others. ‘What did for Hitler in the First World War, though it didn’t kill the scut.’
‘Ah,’ says Farley.
‘Dedicated it to a teacher, as a matter of fact, Owen did. Woman called Jessie Pope wrote this jingoistic doggerel, prodding youngsters to go off and get themselves shot to pieces. “Who’s for the Game?”, other such rubbish.’ He sighs over his ginger ale. ‘No wonder boys learned to stop listening to their teachers.’
‘It’d never happen now,’ Howard agrees mordantly.
‘That reminds me. You were saying something the other day about one of your boys turning up an ancestor who’d fought in the war. It struck me that that could make a very interesting project for them – discovering their own forebears’ actions during the war, I mean.’
‘Yeah,’ Howard says non-committally.
‘Need a fair bit of spadework, of course, if they wanted to unearth anything significant, war record wasn’t popular in Ireland, as you know yourself. But this is probably the first generation that would even be able to research it – so you’d be breaking new ground in all kinds of ways.’
‘That would certainly be interesting,’ Howard says. And it probably would; but over the last few days, in his double-loneliness, he’s found it hard to muster enthusiasm about anything, even the classes he was enjoying so much.
‘Well, just a thought,’ the older man says. ‘I’m sure you have plenty to be going on with yourself.’ He checks his watch. ‘Hell’s bells – I’d better be getting home, or it’ll be the firing squad for me. Good luck, Howard.’ Tapping the handle of his satchel at the other two: ‘Till Monday, gentlemen.’