HEATHER AND THE RELIC
Sammy McIlwaine’s sister looked a lot like him – same fair hair, freckled face, slightly bulging blue eyes. The difference was that where Sammy’s teeth were crooked, Heather’s were neat. And where Sammy’s shoulders were square and knocked you against walls when you walked beside him, Heather’s were smooth and plump and pushed against the inside of her dress. If you looked carefully, you could see the little squares of thread in her frock being strained away from each other. Sometimes when she and Sammy climbed the barbed-wire fence to play with me, I’d picture how Heather’s shoulders would look without the dress. When that happened, my skull felt that tickle you get when you suck lemonade too fast through a straw. “Think of the thing you most enjoy and multiply it by a million million” Brother Bozo would tell us when he was explaining what heaven would be like. I used to close my eyes and think of tumbling around in a barn full of Heather’s shoulders.
The time I’m talking about, Heather and I were eleven; her brother Sammy, although in the same class as Heather, was twelve. All that year Brother Bozo made our class come in on Saturday mornings to do extra sums and writing for the Eleven Plus exam. If I got the exam, I’d be able to go to the Grammar school, where they wore blazers and had two handball alleys. If I failed, I’d go into sixth class and leave school at fourteen. When I complained about homework, my mother reminded me how awful a lifetime of carrying bricks in London would be, with a drip on my nose and the cold putting cracks in my knuckles.
At last, one Friday in February, with the sky bruised and threatening snow, the Head Brother came into our classroom. We stood and wished Brother Cahill a good afternoon in Irish. He was a tall bald man with eye-brows joined together in the middle. When he blew his nose, he folded his hankie over carefully and put it away in his pocket without even glancing at the contents. Now he stood at the front of the class, looking at us through his rimless glasses.
“Tráthnóna mhaith go leir. Afternoon, boys. Hands, now: Monday is…correct, well done. Eleven-plus day. Do or die, make-or-break day. Some of you will pass your examination; more of you will not. The way of the world and God’s will, mysteries that are beyond our comprehension. But will I tell you what God will not do? He’ll not fail a boy for trying. He will not. There’s only one thing the Almighty will be death on. He will be death on – I will be death on – any boy not prepared to do his best. The boy who sits staring out the window, the boy who draws wee men or daggers at the bottom of his exam page. That’s the boy our Heavenly Father will be death on”. The Head Brother took a deep breath through his long straight nose. “Hell for leather!” he shouted suddenly and loudly. “That’s how you must go for fifty minutes. And any boy who’s not prepared to, let him be a man and pull out now, for he’s not worth his salt and could not have God’s blessing”. He paused and stared round the class. “Very well. Now, stand, hands joined…Very good. Let us offer three Hail Marys for all those boys on Monday prepared to go at things with a heart and a half”.
Afterwards, Brother Cahill announced in a quieter voice that on Saturday The Song of Bernadette would be on in Miller’s Picture House. “Not Jane Russell, not Tarzan the Ape Man. Just the blessed Saint Bernadette, virgin and martyr, resisting evil as an example to us all. At half the normal price”.
Heather and Sammy didn’t hear Brother Cahill. They went to the Protestant school with the flag outside it on the other side of the town. Because he had trouble with sums and writing, Sammy had been kept back a year. He wasn’t doing the Eleven Plus. Heather was. It’d be nice, I thought, that she’d be sitting in her school on Monday, sucking a pencil the same time as me. I’d seen Heather sucking a stick of rock and she had nice lips.
“Our teacher’s head’s a marley” Sammy said. “He’s put George Watson in for the Eleven Plus, even though he couldn’t spell C-A-T to save his life. I’m miles better than Watson”.
George Watson was a tall sullen boy who helped carry a banner every Twelfth of July. Once he had stood on a step above me at the town library and asked if I would like him to bust my snotter.
“Poor George” Heather said. “He gets confused”.
“Your head’s a marley too” Sammy said, jostling her with his shoulder.
On Friday evening we climbed into our den in the hay shed. Lying there on our stomachs, with the straw pricking through our clothes, I told Sammy and Heather about The Song of Bernadette, and what Brother Bozo had told us about her. “It was only when she was nearly dead that people would believe a word out of her, and then they all came round and said they were sorry and cried. Brother Bozo was in her house two years ago in France – he says the place is full of crutches. Left there by cured people”.
“Buck stupid people, more like it” Sammy said. They could have took the crutches home and played high jump if they were all that cured.” The way Sammy talked sometimes wasn’t right, even for a Protestant. He had once said Our Lady couldn’t be a Blessed Virgin because she went to the lav.
Heather pushed a strip of fair hair behind her ear and smiled at me. “ I’d love a pair of crutches. You could have your name carved on them”. It was hard to tell if she meant my name or hers.
I suggested, very casually, that the three of us might go to The Song of Bernadette. The truth was, my mother never let me go to the pictures on my own. Besides, you never knew, Sammy and Heather might be converted after seeing the miracles. CONEYWARREN BOY CONVERTS PROTESTANT PAIR, The Ulster Herald would say. The Pope might even send me a medal.
Heather said she would definitely like to go. Sammy made a face and said it didn’t sound much. He preferred cowboy pictures or comedies. In the end Heather convinced him that there might be dancing as well as singing in the Bernadette picture. “Cripples all jumping on tables and that after they get better. Like Gene Kelly and them” she told him. Sammy really liked film stars who danced on tables. He even tried it once or twice at home, according to Heather. We agreed we’d meet outside Miller’s for the matinée at half-two.
Only then, on Saturday at one o’clock, Sammy and Heather’s uncle from Ballymena visited them. “Who’s getting to be a quire big wee girl!” he asked Heather, smiling and nipping her first on the cheek and then on the bum. He always did that. Then he took Sammy and her on the bus to see the latest Roy Rogers picture in Dromore, a town ten miles away. Which left me stuck with nobody to go to The Song of Bernadette with.
My mother was in the kitchen, rubbing a mop over the cream-coloured tiles. I drank a cup of water from the tap. Made myself a piece of bread and jam and chewed it moodily. Sighed and stared out the kitchen window, whistling. At last she stopped working and asked me if something was wrong. I told her about Heather and Sammy’s uncle. Her mouth was tight as she leaned on her mop. “Some people” she said “think more of an oul’ cowboy than a good saint. Though God help them, I suppose. They know no better”.
I bit my lip and wished in my heart God had me a Protestant too, if that’s what it took to get to the pictures.
Maybe she noticed. Because suddenly she put down the mop, pounded upstairs and came down carrying a glass dish the size of a half-crown. I’d seen it before in her dressing-table. It had cardboard backing and a tiny piece of material under the glass. “It’s a relic” she said, holding it out. “A wee snip of the dress Saint Bernadette was wearing the day she died.” It was hard even to recognise it as material, except for the tiny edges of thread. My mother removed one of the half-dozen safety-pins that were fasted to the front of her pinafore, and began attaching the relic to my jersey. “For to protect and guide you through every question in Monday’s exam. None of your cowboys could do that.”
Immediately I felt panic. Could I not keep it up my sleeve? I asked. Supposing I met somebody – supposing I ran into George Watson! He’d bust my snotter and my relic. When she saw the shine of tears in my eyes, she relented.
“Fix it inside to your vest then, Jimmy son. Carefully.” She pulled up my jersey. “You could have no better thing against your skin than a bit of St Bernadette.”
The following day after dinner I was playing handball by myself against the boiler-house wall and wishing Sunday was over when Sammy and Heather climbed the fence. Sammy landed heavily, heels thudding into the grass, Heather with a little bounce. The singing cowboy, they declared, had been brilliant. Roy Rogers had sung ‘Home On The Range’ and the baddy had screamed and fallen over a cliff at the end.
“We’ll go to the hay-shed” Sammy said. “Pee-ko! Pee-ko!” Firing and ducking, he ran ahead of us. Heather and I followed, smiling at each other.
We turned the wildcat on the hay-shed rafters for half an hour, with Heather’s hair and dress hanging upside down for a second, as she panted to complete the head-over-heels in the air. Then we went trapping spiders in a match-box. At the back of the byre, we cornered a hen and pulled three feathers from its wing for being Indians with. We would have fished for minnows but when we got down to the river there were none. On the way back Heather found a frog in a clump of long grass, and luckily Sammy had both a hanky and string in his pocket (“I always carry t hem”). So we were able to tie a hanky to the frog and take turns dropping it from a tree and take turns dropping it from a tree and pretending it was a parachutist. After the frog had been dropped from the second-highest branch, Sammy said he was going home to see what was for the tea. I was still up the tree, watching the top of Heather’s head below me, where she was trying to fold the dead frog’s arms across its chest. And as I watched the nice straight middle parting and the way her hair frothed up on either side of it, I felt the bubbles in my head. Suddenly it was clear, beyond any hint of doubt, what I must do, whatever the consequences. I scrambled down put a hand on her shoulder – her lovely shoulder – and spoke quietly. “Come behind the henhouse till I show you something.”
Without hesitation she tossed the frog’s corpse into a clump of nettles, wiped her hands on her dress and followed me. In the shadow of the hen-house we hunkered down, listening to the sound of cluckings and soft complaining noises from inside it. A hen appeared around the corner, stood on one. Leg, yellow eye watching us. I nudged Heather.
“Bet you never seen one of these”. Slowly I pulled up my jersey.
The effect was immediate. Her eyes bulged even wider, her lower lip hung open.
“When St Bernadette was in bed dying, she wore this. So when you’re sick you rub yourself with it and you get better. Or if you want something” I said.
Heather leaned closer. “Like Aladdin” she said. “What’s the glass bit for?”
“That’s to keep the relic safe”. I paused, willing myself to go on. “Swapsy for four kisses”. She looked away. I spoke carefully. “If you swear you’ll give me it back, you can this during the Eleven Plus.” I took a deep breath. “If you let me kiss yu four times.”
She turned to look at me, her eyes as blue as Our Lady’s dress. Then she took a twig and started drawing on the ground.
“Four?”
“Yes. Four kisses.”
“Here, do you mean? Beside the hens?”
“Nobody’s about”.
She was silent for a minute. Then: “On the face, do you mean?”
I swallowed. “No. The…the shoulder. You see, Heather.” – I spoke as fast as I could, in case I’d lose my nerve and stop, “you’ve got lovely shoulders. I’m a slave to your shoulders. They’re so pushy.”
She glanced towards me again, said “Mmmm”.
What was the hold-up? She was a Protestant, wasn’t she? They could do whatever they wanted.
At last she smiled. “Okey-dokey, I’ve decided.” A bead of sweat dribbled down my rib-cage. “No shoulders”. She stood, hands on hips, a little blue vein disappearing into the plumpness of her throat. “Shoulders are silly. Nobody in the pictures kisses shoulders, except maybe a cowboy with his horse”. She stared at me, little teeth showing, looking like Grace Kelly, only smaller and a good bit fatter. “But I don’t mind my b.t.m”.
The sweat on my ribs turned to ice. Had she really said that?
“Just looking, I mean. Nothing else. No kissing”. She stood and threw the twig as far as she could. “You’ve never seen a girl’s b.t.m., have you?” I shook my head, humble, inexperienced. “Right then. Turn round and close your eyes”.
I turned away, eyelids squeezed shut. How had things got to this point. I hadn’t really wanted this to happen. Her shoulders had been what haunted my thoughts, not her, her…There was a rustling, followed by the sound of something falling to the ground. A shoe? Then: “You can open now”.
She was lying on the ground on her stomach, peering over her shoulder to check that I had opened my eyes. Her legs lay stretched behind her, straight and tight together, with the hem of her dress covering down to the back of her knees. She buried her face in her hands. Her voice was muffled. “When I say one, two, three, lift the dress and look. Once you’ve lifted I’ll count to five, then you must turn away and close your eyes again. Promise? Right. One. Two. Three. Lift!”
What amazed me most was, it looked familiar. I’d seen it before, in a dream maybe, or on a riverbank on a hot August day. Not this bum but one like it, smiling up at me, pink and terrifying. Before she got to the count of five I had turned away again, eyes screwed shut, light dancing behind my lids.
A minute later I passed her the relic. “You’ll see” I said, my mouth dry. “St Bernadette will help you with the questions”.
“Okey-dokey”. She jumped to her feet and ran twinkling towards the fence, her hair streaming behind her. In a small comet trail.
“I’ll get it back after the exam – at your school!” I shouted as she paused to hitch her dress before clambering over the wire.
She waved without looking back.
Next day, when our answers had been collected and we’d rubbed our cramped hands, Brother Cahill came in. Dabbed the end of his nose with his hanky, then shoved it up his sleeve. Now, he said. We were to put all thought of the exam business out of our heads. Take our lunch time now even though it was only quarter to twelve. But make no mistake about being back. For one o’clock. Now all stand for three Hail Marys to the Blessed Virgin for her gracious help.
I walked down the main street towards the Protestant school, my mind raw and stripped like a rabbit I’d seen once hanging in a butcher’s window. The exam had been not too bad, but I kept having periods of whirling, stripy confusion. When I close my eyes to work out twelve times seven, or what house number was sixteen down from number eleven and on the other side of the street, Heather’s bum kept appearing. Not as it had actually been but a shining version, like the apostles’ faces when they came down from the mountain after being transfigured. It glowed at me while an invisible choir sang very high notes for minutes on end, before I was able to force my eyes open again and push on with the exam. Ears burning, I whispered aspirations to St Bernadette and wrote down door numbers that could have been right or wrong. With ten minutes to go, I still had nine questions to answer. Breathing hard, I flew through them. There was no time left to check over anything.
At the school gates she was waiting. Eyes, excited blue, teeth begging to be sucked.
“It was easy-peasy, wasn’t it? Twangerdick warned us not to waste a minute, but it was so easy I was finished the second in my row”.
I nodded, kicked a stone, began to say something about door numbers.
She mustn’t have heard. “?Da-da, dah-da-dah-dah – DAHÍ!” she sang, holding her hands above her head and doing a little dance on the pavement.
I said in a dignified way that I’d like the relic back now.
She paused, knee in mid-air. Oh, right, the whatsit, the relic. The thing was, she’d given it to George Watson. No, not given. Lent it to him. That was all. “He looked so sad before the exam. Nerves, poor pet. So I slipped it from under my jumper and gave it to him. Lent it”. She laughed. “He said he could feel it still warm from being up my jumper!”
My heart, free-falling, shot past my stomach and crumpled against the soles of my feet. “George Watson has the relic?”
“No, no, no , no, no, no!” Her hands fluttered in the air as if rubbing out my words. “Not now. But yes, he did have it. There was a sort of mix-up after the exam, you see. George came up to me in the yard after it was over and really, such a state! Waving his fist, shouting, you know, bad words. Said the whatsit had muddle his brains. He’d been doing great, and then he began to think about it in his trouser picket and he started getting this, this pain in his, you know, and he couldn’t remember things the teacher had said, about how to do out numbers and colours and all that stuff, to stop getting mixed up. And the next thing, he took it out of his pocket, the whatsit, in the middle of. The playground, and said it was a bloody Fenian charm. And before I could stop him” – she touched my sleeve briefly, gently – “he had threw it over the wall of the boys’ lavs!” She paused. “But I did grand, even without it. And George will get it back for you bet you he will, if you just ask him. Poor dotes gets that worked up”. A hand-bell clanged behind her. “Oh my flipping goodness, the time’s up. Toodle-oo!” A final wriggle of her shoulders and she was gone.
I walked slowly back to my own school – past Miller’s Picture House, up the hill, past the Protestant church, past our own chapel. My mother had given me sixpence that morning, along with the relic, to steady my nerves. Fortunately I hadn’t used it. At the café down the street from our school, I went in and bought a big of chips. They were so hot I had to curl my lips away when biting on them. I was so busy I didn’t notice Sammy McIlwaine until he jumped down from the wall beside the bank.
“Give us a chip, greedygorb” he panted, shouldering me against the wall of Boyce’s newspaper shop. “Forgot my lunch and Twangerdick let me home for it, only then our Ma was gone out and now I’m half-starved.” His hand, plump and pink, grabbed two more chips. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for my relic”.
Sammy nodded – Heather must have told him about it. But not the bit about the b.t.m., or Sammy wouldn’t be so friendly. A solution began to take shape in my head. “Know who took it?” I said. “George Watson”.
“That blurt. He thinks Eskimos live in New Zealand”.
“He took it from your Heather and threw it over the lava at your school. For nothing”.
“He wanted my football boots one time. I told him he could have them up his arse. You eating all those?”
“Take two. Listen.” I had it worked out. “Would you like all of these?” A chip half-in and half-out of his mouth, he looked at me. “I need you to help us find the relic first. In your school lavs.”
“OK. Give us the chips”.
“Search first”.
Sammy said it’d be best to go in the back way, in case Twangerdick or some of the other teachers saw us. I gave him a leg up, the chips rolled up tight and stuck deep in my trouser pocket. Then he pulled me over the back wall of the lavs. Like cat burglars we jumped down inside. The labs had ten slate urinals and three cubicles without doors. The bowls were streaked with different shades of brown, and the smell was like at our school.
“Which one did he throw it into?”
“Don’t know”.
For fifteen minutes we prowled through the cubicles. We looked in and behind the lav bowls, we peered along the shallow stream of urine that ran the length of the slate stalls. We even peered into the cracks in the wall above the stalls, in case it had got lodged there. Nothing. It was only when we’d given up and were walking back towards the wall that we found it. It lay at the foot of a tree, as if placed there carefully by someone, the little scrap of material gazing up like a tiny eye.
“Is it still working?” Sammy asked as I picked it up.
“I think so”. I breathed on the glass bit and polished it with my sleeve.
“That Watson is some blurt. Give us the chips”.
When I got home I lied to my mother. The relic had been a great comfort, I told her. When I was working out twelve times seven or what house the Smith family lived in, all I had to do was stare at the relic and the answer came! She looked pleased when I said that. When I went to confession on Saturday, I told Father Brennan everything. My bargain with Heather, the lies to my mother, everything. You have to, if you want to get rid of your sins.
In the dark on the other side of the lattice grille he shifted and sighed. I could smell the tobacco smoke from his clothes. God, he said, would sort things out in the end, I could rest assured about that. But from now on, and for the rest of my life too, did I hear? I was to steer clear of bargains and agreements about girls’ underwear. If I didn’t I’d land up in serious bother, serious sin. Did I hear now? I said I did. He gave me three decades of the rosary. It was my personal worst penance.
Two months later the Eleven Plus results came out. Father Brennan had been right – God did sort everything. I passed, Heather failed, and George Watson, who by then hard moved to England with his mother, got the lowest fail mark that any boy had ever got in the history of the exam. Or that’s what Sammy McIlwaine claimed. He said it had been in the Tyrone Constitution.
Heather rolled her eyes. “Poor George” she said, slipping her finger under the neckline of her dress and scratching herself gently. “I feel sorry for him”.
“You would!” Sammy said, shouldering her against the boiler house wall. “What about that time he wanted to do the thing with your knickers, only you wouldn’t? He’s a right dirty blurt”.
Heather bent down to fix the buckle of her sandal, saying nothing. When she finally straightened up her face was red, and her neck too. “Poor George” she said again softly.
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