The Gift

"These things, these things were here and but the beholder
  Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
  And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet."  

              - Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Hurrahing in Harvest" 

A chill that speaks of autumn gives way to the strengthening sun. From mid morning, as I walk, migrant workers move through roadside vineyards, hefting heavy, laden baskets shoulder high. Ahead, the approach to the village is splashed with crimson where fruit has fallen and been crushed by turning wheels. The air is suffused with the aroma of fermentation, the smell of La Rioja in harvest.

Beneath my feet the track puts on a mantle of asphalt to become the Calle de Esperanza. I pass through shaded streets, by stone houses bearing the coats of arms of long-dead inhabitants, to a white-walled cemetery where the asphalt gives way again to dust. Ahead the Way stretches westward to the horizon, through a patchwork quilt of red and brown where vines are arranged like neat, green braids, flecked with autumn red above soil of ochre and ash.

     “Peregrino”.

From behind the wall a sun-hardened man appears. Pilgrim, he calls me, recognising me as one of the fraying transients that for centuries have passed along this road.

He’s in his, eighties, I’m sure.  He wears an old suit jacket over his bare chest and his face is like dusty, figured mahogany, so perfect an echo of the landscape surrounding him that he seems other-worldly. He moves towards me, rocking from side to side on worn out hips, gesturing at me with an outstretched arm.

     Wait.

I’m surprised at the strength of his grip as he grabs my shoulder. Even as I tower over this man, I feel a wave of fright at this unbidden contact. His hand finds my own and I feel him press something into my palm as he closes my fingers into a fist and holds it in a rough grasp.

     “Un bolso”,  he says, nodding along the path. “Por el Camino”.

     A gift. For the Way.

He turns away and moves towards the village; a tarnished smile, then his arm raised in a rearward salute. I open my hand: three walnuts, hard and gnarled. Beneath the shell, sustenance. For the way.

I gaze for a while at the old man’s gift: the recognition and kindness of one who had nothing else to give.

Turning towards the afternoon sun, my vision blurs to a corona of gold.

Sub Rosa

The broom handle’s a bit short, so I bend over as I sweep the pigeon shit off my balcony. I’m surprised to find myself here; the distraction reflex is immediate. It tends to happen as soon as I realise I’m going to have to do some proper, work-related thinking. There’s a brief, barely perceptible instant of discontinuity, like a reel change during a movie, then I’m washing the dishes or pairing off some of the pile of odd socks that have accumulated since I moved in to the Thinking Flat.

I pause for a moment, then go back inside. In front of me a familiar ghost, kneeling on my counter top, cleaning out my cupboards with soapy water on the day I moved in. I turn away and everything shuffles back to its rightful place. It’s my home now, or as close to a home as I have.

Perched on the top of a ladder, I painted the ceiling rose, dabbing white paint into its Victorian intricacies. I could see patches of bright purple paint sill held in cracks and crevices. A bright purple ceiling rose in my little flat.

The white version looked down when I began to fill my space with the stuff I needed, and when that space began to fill itself with the ephemera that I can’t seem to throw out. An empty champagne snipe, a bottle of moisturiser that I know is in behind those books somewhere. A greeting card with a message so heart-felt that I don’t want to touch it. Space was at a premium, though, with all that stuff, so only one bedside locker. Only one dinner tray to put on my lap so I can eat while watching television from the couch.

There’s a mirror on my chimney breast that reflected us all; me, my visitors, the ones whom I invited in. If I’d looked in the right direction at the right time I could have had an outsider’s view, though reversed, of careful, fearful beginnings and a tearful denouement that seems to stand like a cold bookend on a shelf full of crumbling volumes.

I left for a while. The rooms warmed and cooled with the outside air. I came back and shaved off my beard of eight years in a tiny mirror balanced on two screws in the bathroom wall. A fatter face than I had remembered. Older, certainly. It felt like looking at an estranged brother; curiosity, then indifference and the recollection of the reasons why we hadn't spoken in years.

I had defended this place, this property with my foreign name on the freehold, as maybe the others had, those who had lived in these rooms over the last century and a half. I had defended the implied independence. I had defended my right to drill holes in the wall and to fill my drawers and cupboards with detritus that one day I’d be too sentimental to throw out.

Under the elderly ceiling rose, the intricacies and frustrations and confusion and tenderness of a suburban life.

Declan

The teacher is recalled to my mind as something of a stereotype: Farah slacks, shirt, tie, tank top or plain-coloured jumper, balding. I remember his cheeks, crazed by a filigree of fine, red capillaries. Above them sat a pair of wire-framed spectacles which, on rare occasions, he would remove and polish on a fold of his jumper as we stared at the vulnerable-looking man revealed.

He was a former member of the Christian Brothers, but at some stage had renounced his vows and become a teacher in the State system. When he became angry, which was a regular occurrence, you could see the tension spread through him. His eyes would open slightly wider behind his glasses and he would flick his chin to one side like a jackdaw. “You fellas…” he would repeat over and over, barely suppressing what was rising within.“You fellas…”

Sometimes, it seemed, he would just give in to his anger and let himself rage, screaming at the room full of children before him. I wonder now if he had initially nurtured that anger so it could be wielded like a weapon when required, but over the years had somehow lost mastery of it and, from time to time, was consumed by it.

There was a kid in my class called Declan who was from a tough part of town. He had close-cropped ginger hair, gelled forward like a working-class Caesar and would occasionally turn up to school dressed in a sateen track suit, apparently on a whim. He was cocky, agressive and noisy and frequently in trouble with the school authorities. At the same time, I remember him as essentially good humoured, with an easy smile and an endless desire to talk about Liverpool Football Club. He had a precocious swagger and a hard edge to his personality and I liked him for it.

Academically, Declan struggled. As part of our homework, we were regularly set passages to read before a public examination the next day. Under normal circumstances, he would speak with that rapid-fire variety of Dublin accent that starts at the back of the throat and seems to be articulated somewhere behind the nose. On those occasions when Declan was asked to read aloud, however, it was as if his personality simply fell away. All trace of bravado was forgotten, and he would falter and stumble as he followed the words on the page with his forefinger, his face creased with concentration.

From these primary school days, a single incident stands out above all other memories. I remember it with a clarity that allows me to replay it again and again as if on a cine projector. Declan, on this occasion, was sitting at the next desk over from me. Once again, his reading was under scrutiny and the text clearly had not been prepared. Declan simply didn’t have the ability to read aloud convincingly without preparation, and so it was obvious when the previous night’s homework had not been done. This was a frequent occurrence.

For several minutes he labored, pointing at the words on the page with his finger, willing the shapes to coalesce into a form that he recognised and could enunciate.

Even though we were expecting it, when it came, the shouted command was startling.

- Stand up.

Declan rose to his feet, his chair scraping on the floor tiles, holding his English reader at chest height with one hand as he attempted to continue, tracing each line with the index finger of his free hand. Each missed word, each stumble became its own mini failure and corrections were barked at him by the teacher whose jaw was already set at an angle against the boy who stood in front of him.

- Did you read this last night? Did you do your homework? 

- Yes, sir.

- Is there some bloody reason you can’t read it, then? 

His voice reverberated against the painted breeze block walls and, I imagine, through the empty corridors of the school.

- No, sir.
- Yes, sir! No, sir! Three bags full, sir! Get on with it, then, sir!

Against the peculiar silence of twenty frightened ten year olds, Declan began again. Some internal mechanism desperately tried to compensate for his misfiring reading process and searched for clues in the context or in the shapes on the page. He was guessing now, almost subconsciously, it seemed; random stabs, each one highlighted by a retort from the teacher. The punishment for Declan’s failure to prepare was to be forced to read in front of his classmates, and his difficulty would be held up to ridicule.

It was hopeless. I could see the skin on his face redden as his embarrassment grew. When reading, he would enunciate his words perfectly with a docile, almost alien voice, as if the reading process was entirely separate from his internal dialogue and his normal way of speaking. Now it began to be infused with a stammer, and it was worsening. The words began to catch, to trip on his building anxiety and shatter before they could be uttered.

- What’s wrong with you? We’ve already met that word.

He tried again, panic rising, forcing the words out, never raising his head to meet the gaze of his teacher. Eventually, it was all too much and I could see him shrink slightly as his resolve melted away.

- Did I tell you to stop? What’s the next word?

His head down, Declan stared silently at the book in front of him. His free hand faltered, dropped from the page, then returned to point at the place where he had left off.

- What's the next word?

Standing on his own in the classroom, facing an adult who was shouting at him, Declan lost his fight against the tears. He turned his head to the side as we wiped his cheek with his cuff, eyes fixed firmly on the floor.

- The next word. You know it. “Brother”.

The awful, fearful silence continued unbroken.

- "Brother!" Say it!

We watched as Declan formed the word in his mouth, pressed his lips together, pointed at it with his finger, performed his habitual, physical ritual of reading which now had lost its effect. The sounds would not come, his breath trapped in his chest.

- Say it! Just say it!

The teacher was screaming now. Somehow, the prism of anger through which, at that moment, he was viewing the world, had distorted the scene before him, and Declan’s torturous silence became one more aggravating detail in an imaginary tableau of defiance. The sides of the child’s mouth fell as his breath began to come in heavy sobs that shook his shoulders

- I…. can’t.

- What do you mean you can’t? You’ve read it before. What’s wrong with you?
- I … can’t. I have a...
- You what? You have a what? 
- I have... a…. stutter.

To this day, I remember the effort with which he pronounced that final word, forcing it up from somwhere deep down in his chest, up and out from amongst the panic and the tears, and the sobs and the shame. I don’t remember much about my own feelings as I watched, no great sense of empathy or injustice. I have a recollection of a classmate voicing a protest - "Sir, he can't, he has a stutter!" -  but I can't be sure that haven't invented this to assuage my adult guilt at not speaking up on his behalf. My primary concern, I think, was to avoid becoming the focus of the teacher's anger; I remember little of his reaction after Declan’s tearful, plaintive plea, save a fleeting look of confusion. Of the resolution of the situation or the moments that followed, I remember not a thing.

Recently, I was reminded of the incident during a discussion with a friend who has taken up teaching as a second career. A fellow Irish expat, he is sometimes baffled, sometimes amused by the differences between the school environment we had gone through and the reality of state-run schooling in London. I told him the story of Declan and the teacher, and he was appalled. “That just wouldn’t happen now”, he said. Moreover, he told me, teachers were all too aware of how students, when faced with the insidious combination of a conflict-filled school environment, their own learning difficulties and an indifferent family background can quickly end up on the wrong side of the law. Teachers can see the slide beginning and gaining momentum, but were often powerless to prevent it. I immediately thought of Declan and decided to find out what had become of him.

It didn’t take me long. A cursory Google search of his name returned a slew of archived national newspaper articles, one of which was accompanied by a photo. It was a simple square-cropped head shot and slightly blurry, but the features – and the haircut – were the same. In December 2001, three months after 9/11 and while I was busy drinking my way around Australia on a working holiday visa, Declan received two consecutive sentences for membership of the Real IRA and possession of bomb making equipment. The reports indicated that he was thought to be a senior member of the organisation.

For those of you unfamiliar with the more difficult parts of recent Irish history, the Real IRA is a hard-line IRA splinter group which, in 1998, filled a Vauxhall Cavalier with 500lbs of explosives, drove it, on a busy Saturday afternoon, to the town of Omagh in Co. Tyrone and detonated it, killing 29 people, including seven under the age of 16, and injuring over 300.  That bombing represented a significant milestone in the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and one which marked the point when all sides found themselves saying “no more”.

I have no idea of the nature of the path that Declan took when our ways diverged in June 1989. It’s as impossible to quantify how he was affected by his time at school in Dublin, a time which I shared with him, as by the other significant periods and events in his life which I did not. Given the nature of the organisation of which he became a part, and that terrible act in Omagh which that organisation carried out, it's not unreasonable to wonder what made its members who they are, how they justified to themselves what they were about to do and what bloody reasons they had for what they ultimately did. I can't suggest answers to those questions, but I can tell you that they take on a certain poignancy when you realise that you once knew one of those men when he was a child, already struggling with what life was laying out before him.

Even before I read the articles, the recollection of the ten-year-old Declan would, from time to time, be called by some event to my mind, along with an attendant feeling of unease tinged with sadness and sympathy for that boy. An aspiring Dublin hard case he may have been, but he was a child who loved Liverpool FC, had challenges that I never had and, because of those challenges, was one day humiliated to the point of tears by a grown man.

I wonder does either of the two, more than twenty years later, remember that child also.