The Whipping Club (38 page)

             
He stood, lifting her in his arms, and placed her on the bed, his limp rag doll, tossed and tired now. He lay beside her. He took off her stockings and laid his head on her stomach. “I love you,” he said.

             
“No, Adrian. Just lie here next to me, wrap your arms around me if you need to and fall asleep with me. That’s all.”

             
He grabbed her wrists and pushed himself on top of her, but she shook her head no and he released his grip. She smiled up at him, and he smiled back at her, kissed her cheek and neck. She lightly rubbed his back and they lay there, their bodies close, the rise and fall of their breathing in sync.

             
The early morning light brought a thick, garbage smell from the docks and cast into view the grimy alleyways out the back of the seedy motel.

             
When Rosemary rose and began to dress, Adrian felt like ripping her clothes off her body.

             
“What about me?” he demanded suddenly, afraid she would run away, never to be seen again, never to be held by him again.

             
He grabbed her around the waist and she stopped, stared straight at him, and then laughed and played with his knobby head. He sensed her desperation. Lonely people can read each other’s thoughts.

             
“What are you doing to yourself here, Rosemary? This isn’t for you.”

             
“I’m moving back into a hostel run by the Sisters of Charity, a lot better place than this dump. They’ve found me a receptionist job. I’ve been studying during the day and on my nights off from that rat hole. I’m going to complete my Leaving Certificate next spring,” she said.

             
“That’s grand, Rosemary. Fair play to you.”

             
I love you!
He wanted to scream it at her. But then he looked at her and wondered if she or anyone could love him.

             
“Talk to me awhile.” He sounded pathetic clinging to her. “Where did you go when you left?”

             
“To a sanatorium.” She lit a cigarette.

             
“I’m sorry, Rosemary. I never should have–”

             
“For God’s sake, Adrian, it’s nothing to do with you. Sister Agnes was looking to put me away. I knew it, and it’s a miracle I’m not in there still.” She put an arm around herself and took a deep, comforting drag off her smoke. “My aunt, she would have come for me within the year, but she died. Tuberculosis. I was almost sixteen, about to get out, but that put an end to it all. I had no one to stop that Viking. I’d like to strangle her. She had no call to that.”

             
She took another drag. “I’ll have to go back there, but I’m saving up the nerve.”

             
“Why would you ever?”

             
She stamped the cigarette as if she were stamping on Sister Agnes. “Retribution. They nearly killed me in that half-wit place.”

             
Smoke swirled around the single overhead light bulb.

             
“Yeah well, I’ve just escaped out of Surtane and am on the run.” He sat up, started buttoning his dirty shirt.

             
She flipped the radio on loud.

             
“Turn that blasted thing off. I’ve spent years listening to military drills.”

             
“You used to love that brown radio, remember?”

             
He grinned at her. “You saved me in there, you know that.”

             
“Go on.”

             
“And you saved me in Surtane. I thought about you all the time.”

             
“I had no one in that loony bin. I would have gone mad without the people talking on the radio. Silence is unbearable.”

             
“Rosemary, it is amazing what you can hear in the silence. A bit of solitude, it’s the only way to survive.”

             
“What about love, you big fool?”

             
“It is love. For me, it is the only true love.”

             
He pulled up his pants, fiddled with the shillings in his shoe, looked at her willowy shape by the window.

             
“Go on, you haven’t changed. It’s still love you’re after,” she said.

             
“Yeah well, there’s some thing
s that don’t change,” he said,
hoping to get another kiss out of her before he left, but he did not.

             
“We’ll see you again,” he said, lingering by the door.

             
She smiled at him. “My virgin lover. My young Adrian.” And there was a feeling, somewhere floating between them in their counterfeit smiles, that this was more than likely goodbye.

Adrian rubbed traces of cyclamen lipstick off his collar and tried to clear his mind. A Saturday afternoon bus to Donnybrook to get more money, say goodbye to his family, hide out at Gran’s for awhile, and then he’d begin to look for work.

             
It was after five o’clock. He knew he’d have to find food soon.

The shops were closing and a gloomy fog rolled in as the bus stopped in front of Hansen’s Sweet Shop. Newspaper boys younger than him were on every corner, shouting at the top of their lungs, shillings pouring into their black aprons as men in brown tweed suits descended with him from the crowded bus.

             
Jamming his cap low over his eyes, he kicked a can down the gutter of a side street, trying to look tougher than the boys in finer clothes clustered together down a cobblestone alley. He pulled his collar up around his ears, feeling out of place amongst the rushing crowds. Over one year since his summer visit, he still remembered the way to 5 Mount Eden Road. He watched the people coming and going, imagining fires warming their city flats. Never had he seen so many lighting adverts high above the shops. Two pigs playing ball with a sausage. A cat fishing for pinkeen. The adverts alone made him feel his hunger.

             
He thought of Rosemary and wished he were back with her in her dingy room, all warm and smoky. Odd and grand he felt today, though. Worth it all to have spent a night with her.

             
His mind was jumpy as he rushed through the back roads, and he reminded himself that he needn’t worry so.
Someday I’ll fit in.

Adrian arrived at the house, scrambled up the drainpipe, and tapped on Johanna’s window.

             
“Jesus, Mary and holy Saint Joseph!” she gasped. He put his forefinger to his mouth, and, like a tugboat, she pulled him through the window.

             
“Well if it isn’t the flying nun herself!” she whispered.

             
“Peter’s been murdered, Jo.”

             
Adrian sat next to Johanna on her cushiony bed. Her eyes questioning, she let out a wrenching skepticism.

             
“They’re calling it a suicide, but I know he was murdered. I have to get out of here. I don’t have much time. Just needed to let you know. Tell Ma, I’m a runaway now. I’ll be hiding out at Gran’s until I can get away.”

             
The beam of a torchlight shot through the window. Adrian ducked as Johanna crept over and glanced out.

             
“I don’t see anything,” she whispered. “Oh, wait. There’s Mrs. O’Rourke.”

             
“I have to go,” he said and rushed down the stairs. Johanna followed him into the kitchen. “Tell Ma I could use a union card, that I’m heading to the docks to try and get work. I’ll contact her somehow, but I’ve got to get out of Dublin or they’ll hunt me down. Tell her I’m sorry for the trouble.”

             
“Can I come?”

             
“Don’t be daft, Jo,” he said as they tiptoed around the kitchen. Scavenging a plate of cheese and some Walker’s biscuits, he reached for an open tin of Heinz baked beans and it clattered to the floor.

             
“Shit!”

             
“Go,” Johanna said. She looked into the living room and outside the bay window she could see two guards with batons. “Go! The police are here.”

             
There was loud banging on their front door, and Marian hurried downstairs to see what was wrong.

             
“What’s all this?” she said opening the front door, appalled to see the two officers.

             
“We’ve had an emergency call about an escapee from Surtane. You better tell the boy to come out,” one barked at her and they pushed themselves into the foyer. They ran through the living room into the kitchen.

             
Adrian grabbed a heavy metal pot soaking in the sink. With a grunt, he threw the pot toward them. Jeyes fluid soap splashed everywhere.

             
He scrambled out the back kitchen door, crashing through the hedgerows when the guards seized him. They pulled him to the ground.

             
Marian screamed.

             
Ben suddenly appeared as Marian, using all her strength, tried to pull the men off Adrian.

             
“Shove off! Let him alone!” Ben shouted, kicking open the back door.

             
In the commotion, Adrian clambered to his feet and ducked around the front of the house where the guards chased him down and wrestled him to the ground again. With a strong knee in his neck holding him still, he was cuffed. As he kicked wildly to free himself, one guard raised his stick and beat him on his back.

             
Ben grabbed hold of the abusive police officer and delivered a swift, hard punch to the man’s jaw.

             
Within seconds the other guard had Ben handcuffed. The one turned to his partner and the two jerked Adrian to his feet.

             
His eyes gritty with dirt, Adrian stood blinking at the guards.

             
“Leave him alone!” Ben shouted as the officers dragged Adrian toward a police car.

             
“They’ll kill me in there,” Adrian screamed. “I’d be better off dead than going back. I don’t care anymore. I’d just as soon be dead.”

             
Marian and Jo watched as a guard shoved Adrian into the police car. Ben was pushed out of the way.

             
Glassy-eyed, Adrian glared out the car window. Visions of Brother Ryder and Mountjoy prison filled his head. The terror of being locked away without ever being found again overwhelmed him. 

             
“Please don’t let me die, Ma. Please don’t lose sight of me. Please don’t…” he wailed, his cheek pressed up against the window. Marian knelt with her hand against the police car window as Jo stood by helpless.

             
“I just want to be small again so I can start over with you. I want to be born again, begin at the beginning,” he cried. Ignoring his anguish, a guard pulled a roll of tape out of the car and leaned inside to tape his mouth shut.

             
“Take him out of that car! Untape him,” Ben demanded as the neighbors began to gather on the sidewalk.

             
“You’re coming down to the station, Mr. Ellis.”

             
“Take him out of the car! Take that tape off his mouth, for God’s sake. Look at the way you’re treating him. He hasn’t done anything!”

             
“Your boy has broken the law on two counts, Mr. Ellis. We don’t make the laws, but we do have to enforce them.”

             
“What laws?” Ben bellowed.

             
“He’s a runaway, charged with breaking and entering. He left Surtane illegally.”

             
“We’ll no longer abide by laws that are unjust,” Ben shouted at the officer as he was escorted to another police vehicle.

             
Adrian stared at his ma and his da, at Jo and all the neighbors as the police car drove him away from his family.

Marian stayed behind, an inconsolable heap on the stoop. Johanna, too, hadn’t the energy to move and stayed by her side. “Ring Father Brennan,” Marian muttered. “Although God knows what good that will do.”

             
Johanna left for the kitchen and made the call. Then Marian could hear her mopping the mess of beans from the pot on the linoleum floor. Marian knew Jo felt determined to put the pieces together, but she imagined the news of Peter’s death must be overwhelming her. She could hear the heaves and the uncontainable tears coming from the kitchen. The mop streamed across the floor.