The Brothers' Lot - Kevin Holohan [1]
He moved to the corner of the landing and reached down. His hands found the familiar boxy contours. This was his safe haven. This was where he came when the bad things closed in around him. This was his retreat.
Here he kept his tea chest. This was how he had arrived at the school: five months old, in the bottom of a tea chest with whatever clothes he owned thrown over him, left on the steps of the monastery by his unfortunate mother. There had been a note too, or so Brother Boland had been told, but that was long gone, as were the clothes. Yet he still had the tea chest, he still had his roots.
He sat on the edge of the chest and slowly rocked to and fro. He clutched each elbow and held himself close. As he felt his unease begin to subside, he reached out and ran his hands over the surface of the chest. He luxuriated in the familiarity of its shape and lovingly rubbed the rusted edging strips. His talonlike fingers felt love in the rough metal surface. He pressed at the tiny nail heads and sensed the love pulse into him. Brother Boland squeezed his eyes shut and ran his fingers faster over the metal edges of the box.
He emptied his mind. All he was aware of was the persistent tick-ticking of his middle finger on the side of the tea chest. He tried to listen behind that. There it was. There, just on the edge of the silence, was the sound of something different. Not new, but changed, differently evident. Boland shuddered. He felt a white light invade him but would not breathe for fear of putting the silence out of focus. He then felt a jolt as the silence slipped away from him. He tensed and twitched and with one final spasm he snapped into catatonic rigidity, unmoving as the walls around him.
When he woke the crows cawed harshly in the trees. The early trucks hauling toward the docks ground their gears like prophets’ teeth. Dogs barked their secret plans for the new day and softly the blinds and curtains of the early risers were drawn to admit the new dawn. In the early pubs, the dockers and the bona fides drank in uneasy alliance, all of them, either by choice or necessity, on a different timetable to the rest of the city. The tide shrugged out of the Liffey bringing in a cacophony of gulls to pick at the sludge in its shallows.
Brother Boland carefully placed his tea chest back in its corner and ran his hands lovingly over its surface. Whatever had haunted his night was gone. He glanced at his watch. He had two minutes to get to the bottom of the stairs and ring the bell for morning mass. He removed his slippers and tiptoed silently down the stairs.
1
Finbar! Declan! Wake up, boys! It’s time to get cracking!”
His mother’s voice drifted in from the fuzzy outskirts of Finbar’s dream. It registered in his head for a few moments and then faded back into the muffled waking world.
“Finbar! Get up, will you, for the love of God!”
It was closer now. From out of nowhere light leapt at his eyelids. He scrunched his eyes shut and felt the covers being pulled off. He clutched at them but they slid from his grip.
“Now, Finbar! I won’t tell you again! Lord knows I have enough to be doing! Come on, love, please …”
His mother’s voice trailed off and he finally opened his eyes. She was standing there at the end of his bed, biting the knuckle of her index finger and staring at the wall.
“All right, mam, all right. I’m up!” he said brightly, and swung himself into a sitting position on the side of the bed.
Mrs. Sullivan nodded and smiled weakly: “That’s a good boy. I’ll just get Declan up then.”
In the bathroom Finbar ran the water. Stone cold. He splashed it on his face. Outside he could hear them at it already.
“Declan! Get up!”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“Declan! I’m turning the light on now. Come on!”
“Yeah. Fine. Just leave me alone, will you?”
“Leave you alone, is it? Well, I’m sorry, Mr. High and Mighty, but you have to get up just like the rest