Gone by Martin Roper Read Free Book Online

my right hand as a shield. The rocks come faster now. I look up. There are two boys walking along the tracks. They are skimming the rocks down off the railway and onto the road as if there is an ocean there. They seem bored, as if they don’t care whether they hit me or not. I keep walking. The road is a mile long and whether I turn around and go back towards school or go on for home makes no difference—I’ve about the same distance to go either way. We’re doing Macbeth in school. So steeped in blood. I walk slower. Never let anyone see your fear, my father has always told me. The inner city in the seventies is a no-go area and showing courage is not so much a mark of foolish heroism as it is a way of survival. It’s normal. A rock hits me on the hip. I keep my pace. I can sense their excitement. They’re wondering how far to go, each rock flying out further into an infinity of malevolence. Something hits me on the side of the head and I fight the urge to lift my hand to the soreness. I keep walking as if I feel nothing. They are running now, running down the tracks away from the edge of hate.
    *   *   *
    I don’t know why they picked me. Perhaps because I walked home alone. Perhaps because I didn’t make friends. I liked poetry and I wasn’t going to run into school with a Dylan Thomas poem as if I had discovered a two-headed frog. Nonetheless, I wasn’t prepared to sacrifice my integrity to be in the club. My integrity. Nothing was as pure and absolute as the stubborn integrity of my childhood self. But later I would get over that. To join the club, not a named organisation but a constantly shifting but predictable world children invent. One had to go with the craze of the moment—go on the mitch, set cats on fire, break windows, force younger children to drink a jam jar full of piss. All of this interested me in theory. I liked to think about the boy drinking the urine, what was going on in his head. And what was going on in the head of the boy who forced it down the throat. But I despised them for their vindictiveness and never would be a part of it. Be your own man, my father always said. I wasn’t sure what being my own man entailed. I thought it meant I had to be alone. My father took good care of us and I never doubted his word. So I joined no clubs. I stayed out of the gangs and that made me different. Inside, I wanted to be what every child wants to be: the same.
    *   *   *
    My father didn’t believe in fighting. He told me a man’s job was to show that men could be men without behaving like wild animals. One day in school Mooney picked on O’Reilly. O’Reilly was always picked on because he couldn’t stop sucking his thumb. McNally, the science teacher, came in to the classroom and broke the scrap up. But we all knew what it meant. Four o’clock outside the back gates. About sixty of us stayed back to watch. Mooney started right into it. He shoved O’Reilly on the ground and kicked him in the head. He kept kicking him in the head and O’Reilly made no sound. We watched. Usually there was pushing and shoving and name calling and a bit of a punchup and everyone cheered until someone stopped it. This was different. Blood was coming out of O’Reilly’s mouth and out of his ear. I couldn’t bear it and jumped in. I woke up in Temple Street hospital. Mooney had pulled out an iron bar from his jacket and hit me with it once on the side of the head. I lost the hearing in my left ear. I never got in a fight after that.
    *   *   *
    Medbh calls to visit. I am out in the back chopping wood. It is a quiet day and I am loving the freshness of the air, the joy of being alone, the silence, the happiness of doing a bit of physical work. Each split of wood the skull of Darina, Alan, all of them.
    â€”That’s very macho for you, she says.
    â€”How’s it