Aloysius Tempo Read Free Page B

on the age of the people in the situation.
    And, truth is, now you’re thinking, Is that eleven-year-old okay in there?
    You’re thinking, I shouldn’t jump to any conclusions here, but …
    That’s how Ireland has changed. That’s where our minds go, because the whole country got punched in its sleep, the whole place woke up.
    Back then, when I was eleven, I had no idea about age, about numbers, about how they tell a story. That fifty-two-year-old, he knew. He knew all about the numbers. The number was all he needed to know about someone to know if he liked them or not. Sex, creed, background, attitude – all irrelevant. If he had your age, he had the only fact that mattered.
    I used to think that guy, Father Barry, must have been eighty or a hundred – as old as the hills. But I think of his gait and his skin now and I’m saying fifty-two, sticking with fifty-two. I can see him, very clearly, the way I saw him the last time I saw him. I see the crinkles, shades and sags, the lifts and drops of him going around the place and my brain goes, Over fifty, not yet fifty-three – that guy’s fifty-two .
    If I ever see a headstone with the words, ‘Here lies a priest, died hard aged fifty-two,’ on it, I’ll know who it is. If I see one and it says, ‘This one died hard aged fifty-five,’ I’ll not be so sure it’s him. I’m that confident at this age-calculating stuff. I don’t guess it, I say it.
    I stood in his study one day and he told me age describes everything. He said that age says when you can start to design a dream and when not to bother. He said that age can be hope, promise and power and all sorts of other stuff, and I hadn’t a baldy what he was on about.
    He said to me, ‘Age holds court over ugliness and beauty.’
    He went, ‘And, Aloysius, you should know that youth is beauty, they are equal.’
    And I said, ‘Okay.’
    That was his thing, having me come into his study and stand in front of him. I’d stand for ages, legs getting numb, as he wrote in his book or looked out his window and hummed some holy tune or talked away to himself in Latin.
    So, look, you wanted an example, a memory of an event in that shithole institution? I don’t talk about that place – I’ve never talked about that place – but I’m going to say this much, and it’s all I’ll say about it. In all that lies ahead, there’s no more talk from me about that place, okay?
    Well, I had to stand in that study a lot, standing there looking at bookshelves, bibles and ornaments and golden Jesus figures and thank-you cards. It was like a fucking shop.
    One day he said, ‘How many breasts have you seen?’ Honestly. That’s the sort of shite he said to the boys there. Random stuff about parts of the body, often about breasts.
    So on that day I had to think a bit because, being eleven, I hadn’t seen many breasts. Then I told him I’d seen seven.
    He sat back, put his big black shoes up on the chair at the side of his desk and said, ‘Breasts come in twos, you stupid prick.’
    I reckon he thought I wasn’t being serious, that I was trying to make a joke, maybe trying to insult him. So I said ‘Sorry’ and then ‘Six’, and that seemed to make him feel better.
    I’d seen the breasts of a woman on TV. I’d seen a nun’s breasts. I’d seen the breasts of a drunk woman thrown off a train for stripping.
    The single breast was when the sister of one of the boys came to take him away. Me and this girl, nineteen years old, sat on the waiting-room bench and chatted before he was brought to her. I saw the hatred in her movement as she talked about that place. She was wearing a black Motörhead T-shirt and as she left with her brother’s wee hand in hers, she pulled it up, flashed a tit, beamed it right at me.
    I always thought it was a lovely thing to do. It was like two fingers to that place, like some secret magic button, some sign to me saying, ‘Hey Aloysius, one day you will find a whole wide world out