A Cage of Roots Read Free Page A

before and …’
    Lann had returned to his desk of grey blocks, turning his back to the three drowned visitors.
    ‘We’ll talk about it again. We have a lot to be doing. Mr and Mrs Moran, feel free to head on in to the main house and take a look around, but take a hat from the office first and no going into the extension. We’ll be taking half of it down now.’
    There was a tone in his voice that said ‘This is not up for negotiation’, and the three headed to the prefab office to fetch another couple of hard hats. Lann muttered under his breath, crumpled the torn plans into a ball, and sighed, casting his iron eyes to the stony hillock in the northeast corner.

    Finny’s knees ached from kneeling on the hardwood floor. He was only about a tenth of the way through the ‘S’s’ in the old phone book, and already he had been there for at least an hour and a half. Writing out a letter of Fr Shanlon’s 1993 Telecom Éireann phone book was the lanky priest’s favourite penance, and Finny seemed to have to do it every second day. He wouldn’t mind, but it wasn’t even for doing anything bad. In his school, the slightest step outof line meant big punishment. But big punishment was fine by him, and the more they gave out to him, the harder he pushed back.
    It wasn’t so much that he loved to cause trouble – it was more that he hated being told what to do, especially by grown-ups. He had no faith in their authority, let alone any respect for it, and it made him angry whenever he thought about how they tried to control him, to push and pull and tug at him, constantly. He just wanted to be left alone, to hang out with his friends who never tried to direct or persuade him. Ayla, especially, just let him be.
    He did miss the hurling; that part stung. But it was the same out there on the pitch – they just wouldn’t let him express himself. Run here, mark him, you should be here, they would shout, and he would shut them up with a point from halfway. They hit him where it hurt now anyway – no hurling as long as he made trouble. Their loss, he thought defiantly.
    This particular purgatory was brought on by one of Finny’s favourite pastimes – a spot-on impression of The Streak himself, the Principal of St Augustin’s: Fr Donnacha Shanlon. Fr Shanlon was apparently an immortal – by all accounts, he had been in the school since before prehistory. You could find the yellowest, grungiest, antique relic of a photo in the most remote corner of the school and you could be sure the first person you’d notice in itwould be The Streak, arching over everyone else like an imposing old oak.
    He was called ‘The Streak’ on account of two things: first, his ominous height. Fr Shanlon, at nearly two-and-a-half metres, was definitely the tallest priest anyone in Kilnabracka, or, indeed, the whole of Limerick, had ever seen. At the crown of this commanding tree-trunk was his head – bald and large, it flowed towards the point of his hawk’s-beak nose. Either side of this prominent bill, and squatting beneath hedgehog eyebrows, sat two dark eyes, sunk deep. His dark eyes occasionally appeared a vivid green, so that on the rare occasion you witnessed the light hitting them they looked like two gemstones set in some ancient gargoyle.
    You only ever got to witness this when you were in real trouble – when he would take the bother to look down at you over the rim of his dense brown plastic glasses. This normally preceded an agonising pinch on the shoulder and an hour or two writing out sections of the phone book. Otherwise, he never really felt the need to come out from behind the cloudy lenses. His authority followed him like a shadow.
    The other reason he had this nickname was on account of his considerable speed. This fleetness was not an obvious feature to go with such a lanky frame, but Fr Shanlon was insanely quick. His exploits in track and field werelegendary, and there were countless stories about the races he had won