The Brothers' Lot - Kevin Holohan [81]
“Well, Lynch. It is not often we see your hand above your head except when you are throwing stones at passing buses. Pray enlighten us, sor.”
Lynch stood up, hands by his sides like some well-behaved Dickens urchin, and barked: “The bowels of the earth. On a clear day you can see Moscow from here, sor!” What Mr. Pollock could not see was the sheet of paper Lynch had stuck to his own arse that said Fuck Pollock in bright red letters.
“Very good, sor. You may sit down.”
“Thank you, sor!” replied Lynch, and sat down.
Brother Cox came to the door and tapped gently on the glass panel. The teacher nodded back conspiratorially.
Mr. Pollock then beckoned silence. “We will be going to the oratory now to pay our respects to Brother Kennedy, so I want no blackguardism. We will make our way up the stairs in silence and then you will wait for me at the oratory door.”
The boys stood outside the closed double doors of the oratory in a disorderly huddle. Mr. Pollock squeaked up the stairs so slowly that there was barely a trace of movement in his gown. When he got to the landing he held his arms up over his head to part the boys in front of him. They shuffled back and let him through. He opened the door a crack and peered inside.
“We shall be entering shortly,” he announced to the boys as if they were waiting expectantly for every tiny development in this outing. While they waited Mr. Pollock weaved his way through, ordering the tucking in of a shirt here, the tightening of a tie there, the straightening of unruly hair here, the removal of a smirk from the face there.
“As if the dead shite is going to be looking,” muttered Scully under his breath.
The door opened and Brother Cox’s red leather face peered round it. Mr. Pollock pushed the boys nearest the door back to allow for the egress of those inside the oratory. Brother Cox stood back from the door and watched his charges file out.
“Is it a good show?” whispered McDonagh to one of the boys leaving.
“Deadly. Laugh a minute,” whispered the other boy and rolled his eyes skyward.
Mr. Pollock stood by the door and ushered the boys in with a flourish of his right arm. They filed in and stood there in an uncertain maul.
“You will be seated in the pews,” called Mr. Pollock from the doorway.
The seating options were severely limited by the ragged scaffolding that Dermot McDermott had erected to repair the ceiling. Out of deference to Brother Kennedy’s lying in state, repairs to the oratory had been suspended and all of McDermott’s tools gathered safely away under lock and key in the basement. Of the pews that were left in place, the backmost ones filled first. Only the physically weak or the devout ended up in front.
Before the altar stood Brother Kennedy’s open coffin on a shiny liturgical-looking trolley. From a seated position you could just make out Kennedy’s red nose peeking above the edges of the coffin. It did not look as red as usual, more like a wax apple in a window than the nose of a bad-tempered reformed boozer.
Mr. Pollock stood beside the coffin and blessed himself ostentatiously. At the signal the boys knelt down in the pews, surprised by the unusual softness of the kneelers.
“We will say a decade of the rosary for the repose of the soul of dear departed Brother Kennedy,” announced Mr. Pollock.
He rattled on, followed by the ragged response of the boys. As if lulled by the sounds of Erse devotion to the Blessed Virgin, Finbar found himself staring at the end of the coffin and putting his eyes out of focus. When he was younger he had been able to drift deep into himself by fixing his stare like this. The room would grow larger and more distant while the detail of the fixed point would sharpen to an almost microscopic intensity. It sometimes used to feel like he was floating and sailing downward into an ever-expanding self and receding from the growing world. As he stared at Brother Kennedy’s coffin now, the only effect it had was that his eyes watered and he had to blink. There was no drifting away from the