The boys had gathered for Tristan’s return. Mulligan, a teacher, had driven from Galway through rain that seemed to resent his presence on the road. Rob had taken the train from Dublin. Shaney got a lift from a neighbour in Drumshanbo. And as for Tristan, he trumped them all: there was no beating a twenty-four-hour flight from Australia. (He’d failed to mention the stopover in Kuala Lumpur that broke the journey in two.)
There was no music in the bar. The owner’s son, who normally sang a disorientating selection of country tunes and pop hits, had taken a huff with his father. So the only bit of melody came from excited voices and clinking glasses.
Tristan had requested “nothing special” of his friends. And they duly obliged, sitting on stools around a glossy table near the darts board. They weren’t lads for surprise parties, and any emotions they suspected were feminine rarely made an appearance before a fourth pint.
Mulligan lit a cigarette. A Major. It was much stronger than anything Tristan would ever touch. And two years had passed since his lips had puckered to the approach of tobacco.
“You’ll be outside in the cold smoking that soon,” said Rob.
“Ah, that’s just daft talk,” said Mulligan. “How can they ban cigarettes from pubs? There’ll be no-one in them. And what’d this country be without pubs?”
“Like Africa,” said Shaney.
“Like Africa is right,” said Mulligan. “Our natural resources come in a keg.”
Tristan and Rob smiled at each other. “Mulligan logic” was a term they used often.
“It’s like this talk about computers going haywire on New Year’s,” said Mulligan. He scratched the stubble he allowed to grow only at weekends. “People love to say things other people remember. That’s all it is.”
They watched two couples square off in a game of darts. Rob provided some well-timed comments that had the lads laughing, most of which centred on the darts game. Mulligan was in full flow when his words trailed to a dead end. His eyes widened. The others turned to where he was looking. There was a breathless silence between them.
“What the fuck is he doing here?” said Mulligan. His voice was unnaturally deep.
“He’s been around the last year or so,” said Shaney, “since he retired.”
“He has some fucking nerve,” said Mulligan. There was a tremble in his voice.
There were no more words between them as they watched the man take off his coat and scarf. He had a large belly, and his curly hair was white as surf.
He hugged his friends and spoke in a booming voice, laughing so hard it drew attention. It was a different kind of voice to what the lads remembered, almost twenty years before, in a classroom. That voice boomed too, but in a different way, forcing information into their heads. It was when it grew quiet that muscles tensed. Students held onto their desks. Some had the urge to use the bathroom.
“The daughter moved back a few years ago,” said Shaney. His next words were designed to lighten the atmosphere: “She’s marrying a lad next year. Rich fucker from Wexford. He’s bought up half the country. I heard he has a dozen mortgages on the go.”
Mulligan’s eyes were fixed on the man.
“If he stays long enough,” he said, “I’ll go for him. Seriously. I’ll smack his fucking face against that bar till it’s a bloody mess.”
“Take it easy,” said Rob, his hand on Mulligan’s shoulder. “He’s not worth getting into bother.”
They turned away, and that seemed to settle things a little. But there was always talk of school days to be had – moments that had grown to legendary status, ready to be rehashed, adorned with new details. And that brought them all back to the beatings. They could see it in each other’s eyes.
Rob laughed when Shaney mentioned the school by name: they referred to Our Lady of Mercy simply as “the Mercy”.
“What?” asked Shaney.
“Just – the name,” said Rob. “It’s ironic, isn’t it?”
The mood darkened again. They took to looking down at their drinks or resuming interest in the darts game. It was so one-sided as to invite pity for the losing couple.
Tristan stared at Mr. Wymbs. The teacher had grown old, but not old enough to invite pity. The few words that passed between the four friends were nothing more than dumb sounds to Tristan. He could feel his face sting. He wondered if the burst of October air from the swinging door had something to do with it. Yet he knew it was his memory. It was still on his skin, and indeed, much deeper than that.
Mr. Wymbs walked towards them. Tristan’s eyes flickered. He looked away, but the others noticed how his muscles had tensed. They saw how he held his breath. Rob and Shaney turned their heads. Mulligan gritted his teeth.
Mr. Wymbs passed with a friendly “How are the lads?” He disappeared into the corridor that had been dimmer the last two weeks because of a spent bulb no-one had thought to replace.
“I’m going for the fucker,” said Mulligan. He stepped back off the stool.
“Don’t,” said Shaney, standing in front of him. Tristan remained where he was. As the others tried to convince Mulligan to sit down, Tristan wondered how many other students Mr. Wymbs had terrorised. He thought about Mikey, who’d been Tristan’s closest friend in school. He’d taken his own life six years before. Sat on the train tracks and waited for the Dublin train to come hurtling through a bend.
The others sat back on their stools.
“Do ye remember,” said Tristan, “the time Mikey thought he was high?”
“Down behind the bike sheds?” said Rob.
“Yeah. He took a drag off the final-year lads and went around with wide eyes for the rest of the day.”
“I remember that,” said Shaney. “They told us it was just a regular rollie.”
“That’s right,” said Rob, his smile showing off the teeth of a man who had money to spare.
Mr. Wymbs passed on his way back from the bathroom. Mulligan shuffled in his seat, as if he’d smelled him. Tristan was ready to get up and pull him back, but Mulligan stayed where he was. His shoulders rose, and he rested his arms on the table. It struck Tristan that he was protecting himself.
Mr. Wymbs left a half hour later. The boys said their goodbyes and told Tristan it was good to have him back. They’d see each other at Christmas, they agreed, and walked off to cold air that drained the colour from passing faces.
Tristan shunned the taxi rank. He’d walk home, he decided, needing to clear his head. Of what, he wasn’t quite sure – until the memories filtered into his mind. The punches Mr. Wymbs had dealt him. The pulling of his hair. So tight Tristan would rise to stifle the pain, only for the teacher to drive a fist into his stomach.
He remembered one occasion when he didn’t expect it. Rob was the one who’d made a silly comment about the Reformation. Mr. Wymbs walked slowly between the desks. Rob watched him closely, but it was Tristan who suffered: Mr. Wymbs grabbed him by the throat. He tightened his grip and put his face right up to Tristan’s:
“If you ever fucking smirk like that again,” he said, “I’ll knock the smile off your face.” His breath smelled of stale beer. His eyes were red. Tristan tried to nod but couldn’t; the grip was so tight. He felt blood fill his head. It was warm, and seemed to grow inside him. He wanted to raise his arm and grapple with the teacher, but that would only bring on more force. More resentment. Finally, Mr. Wymbs released his grip, and Tristan sank onto the desk.
He remembered most of all the slaps. Hard and loud. Sometimes, a red mark lingered like a brand on a student’s cheek. Mr. Wymbs cupped his hand slightly as he dealt them, to get a more satisfying sound. They were designed to humiliate, dealt most often to Tristan, Mikey and Mulligan.
Tristan never questioned why he was so often the target of Mr. Wymbs’s anger. It was simply because he was a Protestant. Tristan had always been aware of this. When he was younger, he simply accepted it. It seemed normal. Now, as he stepped onto the damp grass to avoid a passing van, he felt like lashing out. And he thought of how lucky Mr. Wymbs was to have left the pub when he did.
Tristan woke to the smell of sausages. It was one of the things he missed most in Australia – Irish sausages – and his old man knew it. When Tristan came down, his father had wrapped them in kitchen roll to pat off the grease.
They sat down in sunshine that was soon to be devoured by cloud, both intent on getting through the best part of their food before engaging in talk. The crunch of toast mixed with the happy business of their wet mouths. Neither said much until the tea was cold.
“Where’d ye go?” his father asked.
“We stayed in Mannion’s.”
“The whole night?”
Tristan nodded.
“Ye didn’t go to the club?”
“No.” Tristan dealt with the last corner of toast. “Did you know Mr. Wymbs is back in town?” he asked.
“Sure, I chat to him every now and then. He’s put on a sight of weight.”
Tristan pushed his tongue into the spaces between his back teeth.
“Why – did you see him?” asked his father.
“He was in the pub,” said Tristan.
His father looked him right in the eyes. It was unusual. Tristan wondered if it was because his voice had grown deeper. The bright chunk of light on the wood turned dark.
“He’s gotten friendlier,” said the old man.
Tristan rose, the heavy chair grunting over the floor. He wasn’t about to stay around and listen to tributes for Mr. Wymbs.
He got ready to go to town for flowers. His mother would be dead five years soon, and his father hadn’t taken care of her grave while Tristan was away.
He saw Mr. Wymbs outside the supermarket, speaking with a woman Tristan half-recognised. She had short hair, and she nodded with the regularity of a wind-up toy. Tristan stayed in his van, which was cluttered with tools though he hadn’t worked for three years. Mr. Wymbs dropped his bag on the ground to free his arms, gesticulating at whatever it was that excited him.
Tristan felt safe behind the clouded glass of the windscreen. He waited until Mr. Wymbs disappeared around the side of the building. He opened the door of the van. A faint plume of white came from his mouth. It made him think of cigarettes again. Of how they’d given him comfort at various points in his life. During his school years. Again in his twenties, after he’d broken up with his only girlfriend. And once more around his thirtieth birthday, when he had no idea what it was that made him feel so restless.
He walked slowly through the supermarket aisles. He could feel Mr. Wymbs’s presence lingering. He reached the frozen food section, having passed the flowers without realising. When he paid for them, he went to the front door and looked out at the shower that battered hard against the metal roof above. It occurred to him that Mr. Wymbs might come running for shelter. Tristan watched the rain splinter into tiny, stunned drops. He looked left and right. Although there was no sign of the teacher, he ran into the deluge.
At the graveyard, he waited for the rain to stop. He didn’t kneel at his mother’s grave, as the stone frame looked so wet. Mikey’s grave was nearby, its vibrant flowers of red, white and lilac set in front of a black headstone. Tristan remembered how Mr. Wymbs had smacked a ruler down on Mikey’s head for writing with his left hand. Belittled him by calling his asthma attacks cries for attention. Passed remarks about his drunken father.
Not for the first time, Tristan struggled to get the image of Mikey from his head. Sitting on the train tracks. Hearing the approach. The horn blaring as the train smacked into him at some godawful speed. Tristan wasn’t the only one who thought Mr. Wymbs was to blame for Mikey’s suicide. Many lads said it in the bar after the funeral.
Tristan thought of how the teacher had robbed not only Mikey, but Tristan and others, of any sense of security. They were fearful of school every day for five years. It had done something to Tristan that could never be reversed. Left him anxious and unsure. It was this that had made him so shy with women, he thought.
He took one last look at Mikey’s headstone. For a moment, he imagined a different future, Mikey joining them in the pub for Christmas drinks. He shook his head and left.
He visited town most days. He’d walk along the gravelly path by the river, usually followed by tea and a pastry in the coffee shop overlooking the water. One day, he heard a voice downstairs:
“I’ll have a strong coffee and a ham salad sandwich.” The man pronounced it “sangwich”. Though Tristan tried to make room for doubt, he knew it was the teacher.
“I’ll drop it up,” said the lady with the warm voice.
There were heavy steps on the stairs. Tristan left a piece of apple turnover on the plate and went to the bathroom. He locked the door and wiped his mouth with toilet paper. He stood there looking at the door. All he wanted was a barrier between himself and Mr. Wymbs.
When he finally came out, he realised it wasn’t the teacher at all. The man who ate the sandwich by the window was younger, with fresher skin. Yet Tristan was so unnerved that he left.
He did see Mr. Wymbs on occasion – every second or third time he went to town. Tristan would cross the road if there was no other way to avoid him. One time, he saw the teacher standing on the jetty beside boats that rocked in the breeze. He was looking out to the water, his hand shielding his eyes. There was no-one else on the jetty. Tristan imagined he could approach from behind. Could he simply hit him hard on the head? Or did he need to make it look like an accident – stumbling into him, knocking him into the water?
He stepped onto the jetty. A man with a dog came near. The dog stopped to sniff something on the path. Tristan waited, but they didn’t move. He turned and headed for the van.
In his dreams, the teacher would appear – sometimes in his younger form. Sometimes older. In one dream, the pupils were in their thirties. Mikey was there, but he seemed younger.
“The highest mountain in Leinster,” the teacher said to him.
“Amm…Carrauntoohil?”
The smarter ones expected the crack that went through the air. The teacher’s open hand knocked Mikey’s head sideways. He almost fell off his chair, and was left holding his face, blinking fast from an eye that streamed with tears.
Other dreams reminded Tristan of the pain he’d suffered himself. The humiliation of having his head slammed against the blackboard. Finding a patch of chalk stamped like lichen on his forehead when he looked in the mirror.
He woke often. Most nights, it was two or three times. He’d go to bed by midnight, but he wouldn’t wake until after ten, having mustered barely six hours of sleep.
In one dream, Mr. Wymbs called him “our Orangeman”, singling him out as the only Protestant in the class, perhaps even the whole school. Tristan dreamed of the sneer on the teacher’s face. A twisted thing that showed off the yellow staining of his teeth.
He woke one night at 4am. His breathing was quick. He wondered if this was how a heart attack began. The pillow was cold and wet. The back of his neck was coated in sweat. His breathing slowed, and he when he regained his composure, he asked himself: what would he most regret in his last moments? What was the one thing he’d wish he’d done?
He nudged the van into the grassy space before a gate. It was a narrow road rarely bothered by the hum of an engine. There were two horses in the field, though he could barely make them out. He turned off the lights and looked towards Mr. Wymbs’s house. As far as he knew, the teacher lived alone.
It wasn’t the first time Tristan had parked there. He’d occupied the same space twice before. He goaded himself with the thought that he’d never go through with it. Remembered how his mother used to say he was so indecisive he’d never choose a woman. Little did she know, he had few to choose from. He wondered if all mothers imagined their sons plagued with the affections of flirty women.
When he returned, two nights later, he thought of himself as an assassin. He thought of Lee Harvey Oswald and Mark David Chapman. They were misguided souls, he fancied, and he wondered if there was some skewed logic in his own thinking. After all, some people spoke well of Mr. Wymbs. And he had a daughter, to be married soon. Did she deserve to be told her father had been beaten to death?
One afternoon in early December, Tristan came home with two apple turnovers. He’d taken to bringing his food home instead of eating in the coffee shop. His father came in after his run and joined him at the table. The smell of sweat radiated from his hoodie.
“I met Barnes Mulligan,” he said, sniffling between quick breaths.
“Where?” said Tristan.
“In town. Over by the bridge. He was like a cat after a fight.”
“How do you mean?”
“Do you see Paul much?” his father asked.
“Mulligan? He was back when I came home from Australia,” said Tristan.
“Hmm.” His father looked into space.
“Why?” asked Tristan.
“Did you know he was suspended by the school?” said the old man.
“No. Why?”
“I haven’t a notion. Barnes told me. He was jumpy as fuck. He was a bit cagey, then he came out with it. It felt like he half-thought I knew already.”
Tristan chewed on his pastry and wondered what could’ve happened to get his friend suspended. He’d hardly struck a student, he thought.
He went to his room and played Tetris on his Game Boy. Five efforts, and still he couldn’t get within ten lines of his best score. When he came downstairs, his father was watching a nature programme. A mother gazelle munched on grass, her fawn jabbing its thin face into her teat.
“It’s fascinating stuff, this,” said his father. “They have to keep moving all the time to get good grass. Imagine.” He rambled on at length, as he often did when the topic was nature.
Tristan sat, thinking he’d stay no more than five minutes. He watched as a jackal approached the gazelle and her fawn. The mother charged at the jackal, and when she noticed another, she charged at that too, darting over and back until the hungry dogs trotted away.
Tristan looked at his father from the side of his eye. You never stood up for me, he thought. You knew what was going on. All the parents did. Only Rob’s parents said anything.
He thought of how he’d fantasised many times about his father turning up at the school with a baseball bat, calling Mr. Wymbs to come out and see how it felt to be terrorised by a bully. But Mr. Wymbs had never been taken to account. He walked freely around Carrick. If the world was a decent place, thought Tristan, he should be pacing a cell in Loughan House.
A week before Christmas, Tristan’s old man had tried to get the Christmas tree from the attic. He felt dizzy on the fourth step, so he got down and called Tristan. While he was in the attic, Tristan saw his old cricket bat in the corner. It was half-covered in shadow, as if it knew itself to be a dangerous thing. Tristan brought it to his room and rubbed his palm along its spine. The slopes that spread either side reminded him of the contours of a skull. “The posh man’s hurley,” Mr. Wymbs had called it when Tristan brought it to school. He had a way of making Tristan feel different to the others.
Tristan brought the bat on the next night he parked near Mr. Wymbs’s house. He wasn’t sure he’d do anything, but the possibility seemed more real. Could he beat him without killing him, he wondered? Could he trust himself? He came up with a strict rule: stick to the waist or below. The knees. The shins.
He tested the hood of his jacket, pulling the cord so tight that the opening closed around his face, showing only his eyes and nose. And yet, he didn’t want the teacher to believe this was some random attack or robbery. The only thing he wanted to rob Mr. Wymbs of was dignity. He wanted him to lie on the ground in pain, knowing it was a former student who’d done it. If such pain lasted the rest of his life, all the better. Only then could he regret what he’d done.
A car turned up the road. It stopped at the gate just after Mr. Wymbs’s back garden. It was hardly a farmer checking the sheep in the field behind, thought Tristan. But if it was someone who’d come to visit Mr. Wymbs, why not park in his driveway?
He watched closely. All he could see was a silhouette against the light that cast a glow from above the back door. There was no light inside the house. The dark figure climbed over the wall. It seemed to crouch a little as it walked over the garden. There was something long and thin in its hand.
Tristan held his breath. He opened the door of his van. As he walked down the road, he could feel soft patches of grass underfoot. He thought of how close it was to Christmas. December twenty-second. What was significant about that date? Mulligan’s birthday.
Before he reached the parked car, he knew who it was. He looked ahead. Mulligan had prised open a back window to enter the house.
When Tristan got to the window, he found a crowbar on the ground. He placed his head through the gap and heard someone coming down the stairs. He took a step back, then another. Mulligan came to the window. As he climbed out, Tristan stepped back further. Mulligan picked up the crowbar. Stopped. He had a cleaver in his hand. What struck Tristan was how shiny the blood seemed. Much shinier than the blade itself.
“Tristan,” he mumbled. It almost came out as one syllable. “I had to,” he said. “I just…I had to.” He had a vacant look on his face, with tired eyes that had seen too much.
“Is he dead?” said Tristan.
Mulligan nodded. The movement of his head trailed off to a series of shivers, as if he couldn’t stop himself from answering “yes” repeatedly – emphatically.
“Please…Please don’t say anything,” he said.
Tristan looked down. At the crowbar, then the knife. He had no sense that Mulligan would use either of them now, even if Tristan told him he had to tell someone. With these things in his hands, he looked pathetic, thought Tristan. Such a different person from the man who’d qualified as a teacher years before, full of hope and enthusiasm.
“If you promise you won’t go back teaching,” said Tristan.
“Done.” It was so quick it surprised Tristan. As if his friend had come to the decision long before.
Mulligan walked to the wall, climbed over with a sigh and put both objects in the boot of his car. He opened the door and said, “Thanks”. And drove off. Tristan stood for a moment, taking it all in. It was so unreal, he felt he had to see the body to believe it. Another thought prevailed, however: he needed to get away before anyone saw him.
The boys didn’t meet over Christmas. Mulligan claimed he was sick with the flu. Tristan didn’t even answer the message Rob had sent.
Various theories rebounded round the streets and bars of Carrick. They were bolstered by wordy articles in the local news. Most believed it was a burglary, though there were no reports of anything stolen. Some said it was “pure badness”, while others, mainly former students of Mr. Wymbs, suspected it was one of their own, dealing the retribution they’d all dreamed of. A few noted how it happened not long after Tristan returned to Carrick, but none said anything.
Mr. Wymbs’s daughter called off her wedding, and within six months, she and her fiancé had parted ways. As for Tristan, he settled on a move to Cork. He’d start with some electrician work, he decided, but only for a few months. By the time the following Christmas approached, he was still in Carrick.
He hadn’t seen any of the boys all year. When he received a message from Rob two days before Mulligan’s birthday, he thought of how strange it would be to see Mulligan again. Would they share a glance, he wondered? And would the others know?
Trevor Conway writes mainly poems, stories and songs. His first collection of poems, Evidence of Freewheeling, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2015; his second, Breeding Monsters, followed in 2018, then No Small Thing in 2023. His fiction and poetry have been published in the UK, US, Ireland, Austria, India, Australia, Germany, Singapore, Poland and further afield.
Website: trevorconway.weebly.com.
Idle Ink 