Holohan The Brothers' Lot

1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-1-84243-507-6
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

A hilarious and satirical debut novel exploring religious hypocrisy in an Irish grade school. Combining the spirit of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim with a bawdy evisceration of hypocrisy in old-school Catholic education, The Brothers' Lot is a comic satire that tells the story of the Brothers of Godly Coercion School for Young Boys of Meager Means, a dilapidated Dickensian institution run by an assemblage of eccentric, insane, and often nasty celibate Brothers. The school is in decline and the Brothers hunger for a miracle to move their founder, the Venerable Saorseach O'Rahilly, along the path to Sainthood. When a possible miracle presents itself, the Brothers fervently seize on it with the help of the ethically pliant Diocesan Investigator, himself hungry for a miracle to boost his career. The school simultaneously comes under threat from strange outside forces. The harder the Brothers try to defend the school, the worse things seem to get. It takes an outsider, Finbar Sullivan, a young student newly arrived at the school, to see that the source of the threat may in fact lie inside the school itself. As the miracle unravels, the Brothers' efforts to preserve it unleash a disastrous chain of events. Tackling a serious subject from the oblique viewpoint of satire, The Brothers' Lot explores the culture that allowed abuses within church-run institutions in Ireland to go unchecked for decades. The novel inhabits a space where Angela's Ashes meets the work of Flann O'Brien and Mervyn Peake, while providing a look at a regrettable era that still haunts many countries across the globe.

Kevin Holohan was born in Dublin. He is a graduate of University College Dublin and a veteran of a high school education at the hands of the Christian Brothers in Dublin. His short stories have been published in Cyphers, the Sunday Tribune (Dublin), and, most recently, in Whispers and Shouts. His poetry has been published in Studies, Casablanca, Envoi, and Poetry Ireland.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Holohan, Kevin

Leseproben

2

Jesus wept! Get away from the window, will you?” shouted Mr. Laverty, the French teacher, as he banged on the frosted staff room window where the two grey shadows were sitting. Reluctantly the two shapes moved away. “Desperate, isn’t it?” he lamented to the crowded but mostly silent staff room. He went to his bag, took out his thermos, and poured himself a quick cup of coffee, then lit a cigarette and stared dejectedly through the dirty glass at the sliver of cloudy sky visible above the monastery. He wrinkled his nose, and his droopy moustache and small rheumy eyes momentarily moved closer together. September already. Where did the summer go? It seemed only a few days ago that they had finished up, looking forward to the long, easy summer.

Now, gazing out through the grubby window, hemmed in by the growing noise of the boys outside and surrounded by the heavy tired sounds of all the other teachers in the staff room, it all seemed so desperately far away and long ago, like something that had happened in someone else’s life.

“Another year in this kip,” he moaned.

“Ah, feck off with ye now, Laverty. The last thing we need is your complaining to add to it,” chided Spud Murphy, the History teacher. Spud flashed a big, crooked, nicotine-stained grin and puffed on the pipe that he hoped would finally help him give up cigarettes this year. His mischievous eyes wrinkled mockingly at Laverty through the cloud of smoke.

“Piss off, Murphy,” snapped Laverty, and winced at the smell of the pipe.

Slowly all in the staff room became aware that it was getting loud, very loud, outside in the yard. The white noise of the boys’ voices seemed to be pressing against the windows like some incredibly heavy fog. It was a weighty, mirthless sound filled with the hollow laughing and horseplay of boys trying to distract themselves from the long-dreaded day that had hung over the latter part of the summer like a toxic mist. It had finally come: the first day back at school.

“What time is it at all? My watch has stopped,” called Laverty.

“Ten to nine,” announced a bronchitic voice from the silence.

“Jaysus, but they’re eager, the little bastards,” replied Laverty, taking a deep, despairing drag of his cigarette.

“Eager, my arse,” huffed Mr. Devlin, the Biology teacher, from the doorway. “They’re just early cos they don’t remember how to be late from last year.” Mr. Devlin popped two more mints into his mouth and breathed on his hand to see if the dead beer smell was still there. He had only intended to have a couple of pints and get to bed early but then the night had spun a little out of control.

“Good morning, gentlemen! Nice of you to turn up on time for once, Mr. Devlin. We hope this is a new leaf,” clipped Mr. Pollock’s angular vice principal’s voice. He was right on Devlin’s heels. “Here are the class lists. To the hall with you now!” He dropped the sheaf of typed pages on the table, whisked around on the ball of his right foot with a mousey squeak of his brothel-creepers, and was gone.

“Poxy creep!” muttered Spud Murphy under his breath.

Mr. Barry, the Chemistry teacher, picked up the lists and started dealing them round the staff room like a stacked tarot deck that contained nothing but death cards.

In the monastery common room, Brother Kennedy pursed his thin cracked lips and ran his hand over his balding skull, smoothing the wisps of white hair over the bright red parchment of his scalp. He looked up briefly as the door creaked open and Brother Boland jittered his frail frame into the room. Boland’s watery blue eyes cowered in their sunken sockets and darted about the room as if expecting some sudden attack. The man had jittered for as long as Brother Kennedy could remember. Brother Kennedy was in his seventies and Boland seemed to him to be at least a generation older. School lore had it that when Brother Boland was in his thirties, one of the sixth years had dropped a desk on him from a third-floor window while allegedly trying to knock dirt out of the inkwell. The boy had been dispatched to Saint Loman’s Reformatory and later escaped to London. Brother Boland was never quite the same after it.

Brother Kennedy rarely exchanged words with Boland. It was too slow and arduous an undertaking, particularly first thing in the morning when the man’s speech was still staggered and hesitant.

“Ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-good morni-ni-ni-ni-ni-ni …”

“Good morning, Brother Boland.” Brother Kennedy snapped his newspaper and went back to the Gaelic football results. His county, Mayo, were not doing too well but he still held out hope that they would make the Connaught finals. More hope than he could ever hold out for the pathetic school team. The scholarship boys, mostly from the local flats and tenements, had the audacity to show their ingratitude to the Brothers by being good at soccer only. It was typical of bloody Dubliners. The more malleable boys who came from the suburbs because their parents were under some illusion about the reputation of the school were just not rough enough for Gaelic football, try though they might.

New Roof for Mullingar Dog Track in Jeopardy, Bishop May Intervene, Brother Kennedy read with interest.

Brother Boland checked his watch against the wall clock and left the common room with a reptilian urgency.

Francis Scully turned into Greater Little Werburgh Street, North. There, on the corner with the West Circular Road, stood The Brothers of Godly Coercion School for Young Boys of Meagre Means, or “De Brudders,” as it was more commonly known.

The sun was shining somewhere, but not anywhere near where Scully was. A dark shroud of despair surrounded him. The long summer of drizzly days with scattered outbreaks of sunshine lay lost behind him; it was now time to go back to school.

He looked up from the ground and the appalling sight of the dead end of Greater Little Werburgh Street, North, and the heavy school gates greeted him like a bout of stomach cramps.

Forty shades of grey was the only way to describe the schoolyard. The school buildings and the monastery that surrounded it on three sides were grey. Even the windows seemed to be grey. The concrete surface of the yard was grey. The sky above it was grey. The boys’ shirts, sweaters, and trousers were grey. The only thing that broke the uniformity was the occasional black school blazer. The yard was a variegated fugue on the theme of grey. Had it been music, it would have been slow, mournful stuff played on a bassoon, a tuba, and the pedals of a church organ.

Scully turned heavily into the yard and looked around. It was exactly the same as last year, but even familiarity with the scene could not lessen its soul-sapping effect. The dull murmur of subdued teenage voices only added to the overall gloom.

“Scully, ye bollix! Are they lettin’ ye back in?”

Scully looked over to see Lynch and McDonagh sitting beside the bin in the small covered shed. He walked over and stood in front of them.

“So?” asked McDonagh.

“So, nothing,” muttered Scully.

“Yeah, right,” agreed McDonagh.

“Shite,” added Lynch meaningfully. He extended his cupped hand and Scully took the lit cigarette it contained. He took a long drag and exhaled slowly so as not to cause a cloud.

“Now, you boys!” It was Brother Loughlin, the Head Brother. He was on the steps of the monastery. “You will all go to the hall and get your class assignments there. First years will report to Mr. Laverty, second years to Mr. Devlin, third years to Mr. Skelly, fifth years to Mr. Murphy, and sixth years to Mr. Barry.” Such menial tasks as calling out names were beneath the Brothers and left to the junior lay teachers.

No one moved.

“To the hall!” shouted Brother Loughlin. He started down the steps in a wave of cruel blubber, smoothed his eyebrows—apart from his nasal hair the only visible hair on his whole person —and took his leather strap out of the special pocket of his cassock.

Slowly the grey, reluctant sludge of boys began to ooze out of the yard and across the big yard to the hall. Scully, Lynch, and McDonagh fell in with the flow when they saw Brother Loughlin swing his leather and start in on some third years who were leaning against the wall in a manner unbecoming of boys who should be on their way to the hall.

“Jaysus! Bollocks Pollock for form master. What is that for?”

“He’s a complete bastard.”

“It’s cos of the fire in the basement.”

“Can’t prove anything.”

“No. But …”

Scully, Lynch, and McDonagh thus examined their fate as they walked back from the hall. It had been good fun for a bit, pretending not to be able to hear their names called out, answering for other people, calling out that others weren’t coming back this year because they had been taken away by zombie spaceships, but there was no escaping it: they were going to have Pollock as their form master for the rest of the year, which at that moment felt pretty much like the rest of their lives.

“Yeah, and what is Smalley Mullen doing in our class?”

“Don’t know. Maybe we’re the new A class.”

The three of them burst out laughing.

“In ainm an Athair agus an Mhic agus an Spiorad Naomh, Amen.” Mr. Ignatius Pollock, the first lay vice principal in the history of the school, finished blessing himself in the tongue of the Gaels, and the prayer, probably a Hail Mary from what the boys could gather, was done. Mr....