One Focal!

I’m lean-pushing my bicycle along a narrow road in Blacksod listening to the three Dublin lads complain in English about things I don’t even understand: The BBC vs ITV vs UTV, bus transfers, girlfriends, a chipper called Burger King.  To the right lies a watery field sweeping down to the Atlantic Ocean – three thousand liquid miles before there’s land again: To the left the furze bushes’ olive-green needles and brilliant yellow flowers toss about in the wind, their wild freedom taunting us in our imprisonment in the Irish language Gulag!

A shite-brown coloured Renault 4 rattles around the corner behind us and revs up loudly.  As it starts to pass, the driver’s face spins towards us and the car pulls to a sudden diagonal stop, blocking the road.  The fast stop lurches the boney-faced driver’s torso forward.  He has to hold his angry face back with arms locked on the steering wheel.  His passenger, a gaunt woman, with a cigarette in her mouth, slams forward, wide-eyed, a hand grabbing the dash, her mane of grey hair whipping past her face.

The Renault window rolls with fussy-anger-speed.

“Cen teanga a bhí a labhairt agat (What language were you speaking)?” the boney face barks, his steely blue eyes glaring into mine.

“Béarla (English),” I answer, shock preventing me from lying, but immediately I force out a bad-fake laugh and add, “Oh, tá brón orm, Gaeilge, Gaeilge (Oh, I’m sorry, Irish, Irish).”

With an angry sigh, the shite brown door flies open, hitting the front wheel of my bike.  A wad of the Vaseline smeared all over the Renault brushes from the car door onto my bike’s tire.          

“Béarla!  Béarla, an é (English, English, was it)?” he snaps, spit flying, eyes glaring, the skin stretched double-tight across his bony face.

The Dublin lads are all sniggering, but they do it in Irish so he can’t turn on them.

“Níl (No),” I hold my nerve, though my stomach is gone.  “Gaeilge (Irish).”

From inside the car, the woman sighs out a cloud of cigarette smoke and then fires a machinegun blast of Irish words.

He presses his thin lips press together, the skin on his brow about to snap.  He darts back into the Renault and immediately leans his torso halfway out the window giving me one last slow finger wag, the underarm of his shirt mopping Vaseline.

“Bí cúramach a mhac, bí cúramach (be careful son, be careful),” he casts a hateful glance at the three Dubs who leer back insolently, eyes begging to be sent home.

The Renault lurches away, speeding up, slowing down, brake-lights flashing red. 

“Fooken bollix,” FP says, arching his tall frame forward.  “Can ya ‘magine dem pair naked within in bed? Huh?  Sure, he’d be like a shaved Doberman, and she’d be like a Muppet someone set on fire.”

He throws back his head, like he’s an ould fella, who’s seen it all.  That’s just how he is.  He says FP stands for the “firing pin” from a gun.  His family are mad Provo.  The way he goes on cheering every time there’s an IRA attack in Belfast, ya’d think he was a trigger man for the IRA.  But it’s all bullshite, Colaiste Riocard Bairéad (College of Richard Barrett) has his name down as Francis Patrick.

“Jaysys,” Brenny jumps in, like all looking-to-fit-in fellas he’s never one to be left out.  “Sure, de sight a dem nakid’d put a fella off roidin’ so it twould.”

“Sure, dowen here all deys be roidin’ anyhows is sheeps,” FP nods knowingly, “I mean me uncle wuz below in Curry an’ he seen a farmer with de sheep’s back legs stuck inside he’s wellingtons, an’ de farmer goin’ like he wuz on top a Blondie.”

His eyes dart to mine.

“Don’t you’se?” he angles his head toward me. “I mean seer…iously.”

“I do…n’t … know,” I drag out the words trying to think of a comeback.  

The three of them stare at me like whatever I say next will become lore back in Dublin: “It’s for real, sure dis cultie balow in Mayo tol’ me.”

“Does that make us baahaaad?” the gods of bad jokes finally dispatch the words.

Smiles dissolve their curious-suspicious stares.

 “Get up de fucken yard!” FP laughs, swinging his fist toward me.

 “Cum on ‘til I get me dinner,” Sharkey snaps, he’s a cranky-old-soul, always-hungry, sorta fella. “Or de din…year as de Bean an Tí (landlady) calls it.  More fucken spuds an’ gravy dan anathin’, but at least an’ it fills ya up!”

We’ve all been imprisoned here by our parents having paid Colaiste Riocard Bairéad (College of Richard Barrett) a hundred and fifty pound to isolate us up in North Mayo’s wild beauty and flail the Irish language into our thick skulls for four weeks so we can pass the big exams next year, get into college or qualify for a half-ways decent job.  

The one rule we all must live by, though the Dubs seem to be constantly on the verge of dying by it, is to never get caught saying a complete sentence in English.  If you want to remain imprisoned here (as opposed to getting executed behind the garage at home for having squandered the hundred and fifty quid) then you have to drop in one Irish word to every sentence.  Or at least include one Irish-ish sounding word: These we make by adding “ail” or “adh” to the end of an English word; then bounce the pronunciation off the roof of your mouth and claim you were speaking Irish: 

“Pass-ail me the butter-adh, please-ail.”  

We’ve literally been sentenced to speak Irish-ish for four weeks!  

The couple who run the school are hardcore Gaeilgeoirs or Gaelgoers as we call them: That is people who love the Irish language so much they make everyone else hate it … and them!   They spin around in that shite-brown Renault – plastered with Vaseline so the salty Atlantic air doesn’t rust the French metal to pieces – giving shite to everyone for not speaking Irish.  

 We’re in classes every morning from nine to one, just like regular school, only worser cause it’s all in Irish and everyone else is at home working summer jobs with tall-tale hangovers.  Then in the afternoons there’s usually some activity, either sports or a bike ride to some place the Gaelgoers call “go hiontach ar fad (brilliant altogether)!” a holy well or a rock or something that looks fierce like a regular well or rock but apparently someone went there and got their hairy warts cured.  Then we cycle home grimacing through the rain.  Soaked through, we dry off in front of the turf fire, Wranglers steaming so hot your thighs get scorched.

A sports afternoon was better, but that meant lads who had never before bounced a ball in their lonely lives were harangued out onto a watery-windswept field and forced to play Gaelic football – a game somewhere on the sports continuum between soccer and a bar fight.  Any attempt to play the hated “cluiche Sasnach” (English game – soccer that is: I won’t dwell on the fact that we have two words for the often negatively-adjectived English) brought a swift, red-faced shrill of the whistle by the boney-faced Ardmháistir (headmaster).  He then deliberately picks up the ball, holds it up for everyone to see, and places it into the entirely uncoordinated hands of the nearest young fella.  Restarting play with an energetically hopeful whistle blast, his eyes instantly betray his hopefulness as they dart around angrily to make sure everyone’s hands are held up ready to receive, and most likely drop, the ball.

Na cailíní (the girls) are issued a burst tennis ball and the handle of the broom from the room behind the stage for them to play the sport of rounders: which in this context was essentially baseball without the gazillion dollar salaries, or a functioning ball, a bat, or a field.  But there were lots of rules, harshly enforced by the chain smoking, grey-mane tossing, Ardmháistreás (you guessed it; headmistress – though definitively not in the French sense of “mistress”.)  They used their jackets as the bases, which, with people standing at base on the watery field for the couple of hours long game, ensured at least three girls cycled home literally dripping wet.

The activity is also, of course, all in Irish and woe betide the student who gets so excited they forget to jam into their sentences that one Irish-ish sounding word!

That’s what happened poor ould, always-hungry Sharkey.

Sharkey, like myself and nearly everyone else there, hadn’t hardly a clue how to actually play Gaelic football, but Sharkey had the added disability that he didn’t like bar fights either.  Inevitably he got clobbered in a tackle by Brenny that looked suspiciously like a punch-kick.  Brenny, in line with his wish to conform, showed up every Saturday morning for years with hundreds of other young fellas at Na Fianna Football Club in Glasnevin, and therefore knew how to play, or at least how to tackle … kinda-sorta.

“Ya fooken tick Glasnevin bollix!” Sharkey cries out, crumpling into a puddle.

The whistle shrills!

“SHARKEY ANESO (HERE)!” the Ardmháistir screams, pointing angrily at the ground. 

Then he contradicts his screamed-order and stomps over, aiming his index finger down at Sharkey’s always-hungry and now in deep-shit face.

With an anger-tinged ceremonial turning over of the all-powerful whistle to FP, who in his second year at the Colaiste (College) had gained at least survivor status, Sharkey is hauled off to the shite-brown Renault, the Ardmháistir firmly gripping him by the arm … never to be seen again.

After an hour of not-exactly-benign neglect refereeing by FP – three chipped teeth, two dislocated shoulders and multiple kicked-black-and-blue fingers – we’re on our bikes headed back to the house for a meal of a little meat, a lot of potatoes and peas.   

“Jaysys, he wuz fairly hard on poor ould Sharkey! Huh?” FP says, his head turning all around, eyes scanning.  “He’s fooken done for now, prolly already on de redneck express back ta Dooblin.”

“Nah,” I say, my eyes now starting to scan all around.  “Sure, he couldn’t help himself, he got a whack an’ the words came out automatically.  It wasn’t deliberate.”

“Doesn’t fooken mat…her.  When dat bollix of an Ardmháistir makes up his moind, yer gone,” he shakes his freckly face slowly.  “Ya don’t have a fooken chance.”
Sure enough, when we get back to the house, all of Sharkey’s stuff is gone: His rucksack, his bike, his books.  

The landlady is all upset, her bulk slamming around in the kitchen, tears welling in her eyes.  She liked Sharkey; he was friendlier than the rest of us and he walloped down everything on the plate she put in front of him.

I didn’t eat hardly any of the potatoes and peas at dinner.  I just chewed a lot on the pork chop that was as thin and hard as the sole of your shoe.

That evening before the “Céilí” (a session of music and singing from which the Gaelgoers had surgically extracted the joy) back at the school, the Ardmháistir stands with his fiddle and bow grasped white-knuckled in his left hand, while his right index finger stabs the air in front of all the older boys, warning us in spitting-angry Irish words that we too would be sent home if we spoke “as Bearla” (in English).  Jamming the fiddle and bow into his right armpit, so he could use both hands to emphasize his point, he was particularly careful in enunciating slowly in Irish and then translating it into the much-hated Bearla, that the courts had repeatedly proved the Colaistes (Colleges) correct in keeping all the fees when a student was kicked out for speaking in English, which was in fact “breaking the contract, signed by your parents when submitting your application.” 

“Agus anois, amhrán sona (and now for a happy song)!” he contorts his grimace into the fakest of fake smiles, whips the fiddle and bow from under his arm, and lifting and lowering his right leg, he tries to infuse levity into a being that can know no levity. 

That night back in the house, lying in the darkness on the top of one of the bunkbeds, I’m listening to FP and Brenny damn “to fooken cultie hell an’ beyond” the Ardmháistir, the Gaeltacht, the Irish language, the British Army, when suddenly FP goes:

“Éist (listen)!” 

They both fall silent.

We all listen.

The sound of gravel crunching underfoot comes in the open window.

“Oíche maith a fir uaisle (goodnight gentlemen),” FP enunciates the words slow, loud and clear.

I listen intently but it’s hard through the sound of my heart beating wildly.

A bunch of minutes later, FP slips off his lower bunk and pads to the window.

“Dat fooken bollix a bollixes was out dere, awright,” he says with a loud sigh.  “Jaysys, ya can still feel he’s weirdo-adhness!”

The next day it rains and winds so hard that we have classes inside the school for the afternoon.  During a break, FP, Brenny and I sprint through the wind-driven rain the fifty yards from the school door to the local shop-bar-restaurant (if a microwaved steak and kidney pie can be considered a meal).  In there they have a pool-table in the back.  Usually, we don’t go in, as the locals aren’t big fans of us strainséiri (blow-ins) taking over their spaces, but in the afternoon there’s only the usual two ould alkies sitting up at the bar glowering into their pints.

FP beats Brenny easily and I’m just putting my tenpenny pieces into the machine when in storms the Ardmháistir.

“Cén tseafóid atá ort anois (what sort of foolishness are you up to now)?” he says slowly, forcing a fake calm into his voice.

“Dhia duit a Paraiceen (how are you little Paraic),” he says, smiling his famously fake smile at the publican.  His eyes pass judgmentally over the alkies, who don’t even bother to look up from their yellowing pints of Guinness.  

His right-hand shoots out, index finger aimed at the door.

“Amach (out)!”

Outside, gripping his suit jacket with one hand, he run-walks to catch up to us.

“Nead Béarla an ait seo (that place is a nest of English)!” he sneers at us, giving FP a whack on the back of his head.

“Roinnt ceannaireachta a thaispeaint (show some leadership)!”

The windy-rainy days cycling all over the Mullet peninsula turn into rainy-windy weeks.  To spite the Gaelgoerswe actually attempt to communicate in Irish with the locals, but they’re so pissed off with them correcting their grammar that, out of spite, they only respond to us in English.  Still, we get friendly with some of the locals our age who can all speak Irish but won’t and only laugh at our pathetic attempts to pronounce the words correctly.  In any case, all they seem to want to talk about is what it’s like living in Dublin, which they then immediately compare to London and Birmingham to where all their brothers and sisters have emigrated.  

On Sundays we go to mass and listen to the priest rattle off words we all know so well and try to map them to their English meanings.  Everyone gets the “Our Father” down pat: We’ll all be fine so long as Saint Peter speaks Irish!  

The priest nearly always shows up fifteen minutes late, eyes bloodshot, a fierce scowl on his saggy, red face.  He rattles through the mass quickly, if he even includes a sermon, we’ll never know.

Then on the Sunday after Sharkey was “disappeared”, the priest never shows up at all.  Eventually, at the time we’d usually be leaving mass, we all end up crowding around outside the church, rain spitting on us.  It’s unsettling for everyone.  The teenagers are upset, not cause there’s no mass, but because we sat there as long as mass and now the Gaelgoers will probably pull a new priest out of their arse.

Either way, we were not getting out of this for free.

The locals are genuinely upset.

“He mhust be verah bad this morn,” an ould fella, with hardly any teeth, shakes his capped head slowly.  “I seen him drive off inta town yisterdah, ‘bout three-ish.  I suppose there’s nathin’ like startin’ on time.”

He nods a lot, his sunken face twitching between a mischievous smile and a religious frown.

“Thure was a H Blocks protest within in Ballina,” snaps a heavyset woman, 

bulging out a tan raincoat, the belt tied in a rough knot, a sky-blue scarf cinched tightly against her ample chin.  

“My Eamonn seen him within on the back owa lorry,” she continues.  “Givin’ a serm… speech he wuz, an’ two plainclothes polismen grabbed a hoult a him after.  They prolly have ‘im locked up within in the Ballina barrack.” 

As punishment for listening to full English sentences, we’re frog-marched down to the school where we spend an hour learning the hymn “Ag Críost an Síol” (I never did learn what that meant).

A couple of days later a letter arrives for FP from Sharkey.  The address was very deliberately written all in English: The College of Richard Barrett.  

In the letter he said the Ardmháistir was furious all the way to the train station in Ballina.  He just kept telling him how much he had “wasted his parents’ hard-earned wages,” how terrible it was that “modern Irish children were so spoilt” and how this “sort of reprobate behavior” would lead him to “a life of ruin”.  Of course, he said all this in Irish first, then when Sharkey didn’t have any reaction because he didn’t understand it, he’d do it all over again in English.  Poor ould Sharkey, always hungry and now headed for a life ruin!

As he was getting on the train, Sharkey said “Go raibh maith agat (thank you).”  

The Ardmháistir got a bit teary-eyed and said at least he showed “character in adversity” – he didn’t even attempt saying that in Irish.  But Sharkey said what really meant was “thanks for fucking releasing me from the Irish Gulag!”   

One evening after the tea, the Bean an Tí (landlady) drops an old, red wine coloured, hardbacked book on the table.

“Féach isteach (look inside)” is all she says – she’s well sick of talking to us in Irish, which she had to do per her “contract,” only to have us stare back blank-facedly.

The book was a history of North Mayo with a big KENNY’S BOOKSHOP stamp of extreme West of Ireland authenticity inside the front cover.  At a bookmark halfway through it was the story of Riocard Bairéad (Richard Barrett), the man after whom our Irish Gulag College was named.  Turns out Riocard was a fierce sound fella altogether, loved by one and all in this area of the world.  He was born around 1740, first he married a Protestant woman, which could have been a bit a challenge back then, after she died, he married again and settled into a life farming the wilds of North Mayo and writing ballads and witty poems in Irish and English.  He fought in the 1798 rebellion – just a few weeks ago really, in the memory of Mayo people – when the French landed over the road in Killala.  For his pains did a short stint in the old gaol in Castlebar.  

The terrible thing was that his second wife burned all his papers after he died. Maybe she had that disease that seems to singularly inflict humans: Spite!

 Luckily his work was so revered by the locals that they had learned his ballads and poems, passing them along orally.  This is how two hundred years later we still have Riocard Bairéad’s songs and poems.   

It’s the last few days and with the wild abandon of the about-to-be-paroled inmates, we’re all dropping the “adhs” and “ails” off the end of our English words.  Surprisingly, we haven’t really needed them for a week or so, because, despite our spiteful resistance to the Gaelgoers some of the Irish language has soaked into our thick skulls.  Now we can converse somewhat understandably between each other in this heretofore local-yet-somehow-foreign language.

The Ardmháistir and Ardmháistreás relax just a smidge, an occasional smile showing their pride at having successfully taught us a little of the language they’re smothering with their overbearing love.

On the Wednesday morning of the last week, everyone with banana sangwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and a can of Lilt (on sale in the local shop) from the Bean an Tí (landlady), we all board two minibuses for the much ballyhooed end of session “turas” (outing) around North Mayo.  As we wait for the inevitably late student, the Ardmháistir runs language security on our bus, his pale-boney face suddenly appearing in murmured conversations.  Staring out the window, I see the Ardmhaistreas’ grey-haired mane tossing as she coldly scans her bus for illegal English.

As the bus pulls out of the deep-potholed lot in front of the school and turns onto the Belmullet Road, I realize that in a few days I’ll be making this same journey for the last time with Da – who doesn’t speak a word of Irish: Hardly no one’s parents do!  

Oddly, I feel a sense of loss for something I didn’t even know I had to lose, and for all I think about it, I can’t put a focal (word) on this feeling.

The minibus trundles on, the suspension squeaking in complaint at the load.  Outside the boggy-wet fields, framed by child-drowning-deep drains, run down to the open water of the Atlantic; bony cattle nose around searching for grass between yellow-brown tufts of reeds; low red-oxide roofed houses, dirty-white walls, two windows, one door, sparsely dot the fields.  The Atlantic is seemingly everywhere; steely-grey beneath low clouds that smother the distant mountains.  A cut-stone pier, topped with a few feet of rust-stained concrete, wraps around fishing boats, like an arm protecting them from the wrath of three thousand miles of easy-to-anger ocean.

“Is é sin monarcha olann Angora (this an Angora wool factory),” an hour later the Ardmháistir announces pompously, though barely audibly above the minibus’ squeak-screaming complaints, as we pull off the road through a line of thickly knit-together pine trees.  

In the raw clearing behind the wall of trees, there’s a tan coloured, rectangular metal building, no windows but a gaping opening where a van sized overhead door has been raised.  As we squeak into the car park, with just three other, rusty-worn cars in it, the Ardmháistir purses his lips, turns and aims his index finger at FP, Brenny and me:

“Na bach leis do amadántacht (don’t start your tomfoolery now)!” 

He stabs his finger towards us, as we beam with adolescent pride.
There’s a rush for bus door as the Ardmháistir say-yells that we’ll see “coiníní gruagach (hairy rabbits),” but won’t “i gcás ar bith (under any circumstances)!” another harsh finger stab in our direction, be allowed to touch said hairy rabbits.

As we teenage-slouch towards the factory, a man in stained blue overalls and green wellingtons stalks out, holding by the ears, clumps of hairy, white, dead rabbits.

“Whare in de fuck d’ya tink youse’re goin’?” he asks in a Dublin accent, stopping and staring first at us then over our shoulders at the oncoming droves.

“We were-ail ag teacht (we were coming) …,” I start to stay but stop as my eye catches the contrast of the dead rabbits’ glassy-red eyes against their brilliant white fur. 

“Rinneadh me glao teileafóin inné (I phoned yesterday) …,” the Ardmháistir starts with his fake good-cheer, but stops at the sight of the dead rabbits hanging by their ears.

“Wat in de fuck did ‘e say?” your man asks, staring at me.  

“Eh, he phone-ailed you yesterday, d’ya know, about us come-ailing,” I answer.  “For a look-ail like, at the rabbits.”

“Rabbits!  Youse wanna see rabbits!” he half-yells, glaring at me first, then the Ardmháistir.

“Dere’s a heap a dem insoide, … dead as doornails!  Poy…sonned dey were, when deir fur wasn’t worth nuthin’ no more causa de Chian…neeze an’ deir cheap fur.  An’ is de guvermant gonna pay me for ta get ridda all dem dead rabbits, is it? Huh?”

“Oh, go dona ar fad (very bad indeed)!” the Ardmháistir says loudly, spinning around and waving back all the other children.

“AR AIS AR NA MBUSANNA (BACK ON THE BUSES)!” he yells, waving his arms wildly, bursting into a sprint, suit jacket clasped in hand, to stop two inquisitive, Ceathrú Thaidhger girls who are in a Gaelgoer-circumventing jog toward the open door. 

“Whare are youse lot from? Gerr…many?”

“Oh níl (no), no, no, no,” I answer, with a sorta-laugh.  “We’re with the Irish College down the road outside a Belmullet, d’you know, ag learn-ailing Irish.”

“Oirish!  Gimme a fooken break would youse?  Sure, dat language is as dead as dem rabbits!”