Mothers and Sons Read Free Page B

afraid, almost useless. Eventually he pinned Markey down and got the knot around one wrist, jerking it so that it almost broke his arm and then turning him face down so he could tie his wrists together. He had worked out that there was no point in trying to beat Markey up. It would mean nothing to him. Which was why he had brought a blindfold, and a small pair of pliers he had also found in the workshop. Once the blindfold was on, he turned Markeyon his back and told Webster to start kicking him in the ribs, and as Webster was doing this with relish Markey had his mouth wide open roaring threats at him.
    He studied Markey’s mouth for a second as he continued to roar, and then he moved in quickly with the pliers gripping hard on one of Markey’s upper back teeth on the left-hand side. Even though Markey instantly clamped his mouth shut in shock, the pliers held fast.
    He began to loosen and pull at the tooth, worried now about the noise, the hysterical set of screams coming from Markey. He knew that the pliers had precisely a single tooth in their grip, but he could not understand the length of time it was taking to loosen and extract the tooth. In his own single visit to a dentist, when he had realized how simple and effective this would be, the tooth had come out very quickly.
    Suddenly, instead of putting pressure on the pliers and trying to loosen the tooth, he yanked the tooth back and forward and then he pulled the pliers hard. Markey let out a howl. It was finished. The tooth was out. Webster, when he came to examine it, seemed almost as pale as Markey.
    He took off Markey’s blindfold and showed him the tooth. He knew that it was important now not to let Markey go in a hurry, to keep him tied up, to let him bleed a bit as he talked to him quietly, letting him know that if anyone in the school ever touched him or Webster again, he would take out another tooth until Markey would only have gums left. But, he explained to Markey, if one of the brothers ever got word of what had happened, he would not take out teeth, he would go for Markey’s mickey. Did he understand? He moved the pliers down between Markey’slegs and tightened them around his penis. He spoke gently as Markey sobbed. Did he understand, he asked him. Markey nodded. I can’t hear you, he said. Yes, Markey said, yes, I understand. He released the pliers and untied Markey, forcing him to walk back to the school with them as though they were friends.
    From then on, the other boys in Lanfad were very afraid of him. Soon he felt unthreatened. He could, if he wanted, stop fights, or take the side of someone who was being bullied, or let a boy depend on him for a while. But it was always clear that this meant nothing to him, that he would always be ready to walk away, to drop someone, including Webster, whom he had to threaten in order to stop him from being his friend.
    The brothers allowed him to work out on the bog and he loved that, the silence, the slow work, the long stretch of flatness to the horizon. And walking home tired at the end of the day. Then in his last year they allowed him to work in the furnace, and it was when he was working there – it must have been in the winter of his last year – that he realized something he had not known before.
    There were no walls around Lanfad, but it was understood that anyone moving beyond a certain point would be punished. In the spring of each year, as the evenings became longer, boys would try to escape, making for the main road, but they would always be caught and brought back. All the cottages in the area seemed to have figures posted at the windows ready to report escaping boys to the brothers. Once, in his first year, two such boys were punished with the whole school watching, but that did not appear to deter others who wished to escape as well. If anything, it eggedthem on. He found it hard to understand how people would escape without a plan, a definite way of getting unnoticed to Dublin, and maybe