Free The Dead School by Patrick McCabe

Malachy Dudgeon as he was
walking past the grocery shop thinking about Cissie. It would have been wonderful if he had grown to like her again. If somehow it had become even remotely like the way it used to be between them,
walking along the shore and staring out at the yachts bobbing on the horizon and so on, but it hadn’t, for the old boatshed days were still with him and to tell the truth, if he had arrived
home to hear that she had had a stroke, it wouldn’t have bothered him very much. Of course, he was aware that it was wrong to think the like of that about someone who was supposed to be close
to you – but so what? She should have thought of that before she threw herself on the nets in front of the cowman, shouldn’t she? She ought to have given that some thought before she
started to make her little visits up to Dr Wilding. Sadly, however, she hadn’t and now it was too late. ‘Way too late, my friend,’ as Malachy now said to himself in his recently
remodelled American accent.
    As for Cissie herself, she was more or less at her wit’s end as to know what to do about the way things had gone between them. Once he looked up to see her standing in the doorway of the
bedroom with her voice shaking, pleading, ‘Please, Malachy – I don’t know why it happened. Forgive me, for God’s sake – please!’ He looked at her for a long time
but he didn’t say anything. There wasn’t a muscle moving in his face. And his eyes – well they were just about the coldest she had ever seen. It was sad of course. But then, as he
had discovered some years before, there were lots of things that were sad, weren’t there?
    In the end it did get so bad that Malachy began to feel a bit sorry for her. I mean she was so pathetic. Sitting there going through her tenth or eleventh box of Kleenex, practically throwing
herself at his feet. One day she broke down at the kitchen table and began to weep uncontrollably. She told him she had met Jemmy Brady up the town and sworn at him and told him that it was him had
caused all the trouble and she never wanted to see him again. ‘It will be all right from now on won’t it, Malachy,’ she wept. ‘Everything will be the way it used to be in
this house now that all that’s over.’ For a split second he felt so warm towards her that it was indeed like old times but it was only that – a split second and when it had passed
it might just as well never have happened at all.
    Which suited Malachy just fine. For if on a Sunday morning in the hotel long ago, he had been afraid to whisper the words ‘I love you’ to his father, in case they would wither and
die on his lips, he knew one thing for sure and that was that he wouldn’t be having that problem ever again, for from now on it was bye bye love as far as he was concerned, be it with his
remorse-eaten mother or anyone else. He had more sense than to let himself go down that road again didn’t he oh yes but of course he did.

He Said Nothing
    Not that it was all bad back in those days – indeed in many ways Malachy was happier now than he had ever been. For a start, Alec and his crew were no longer a problem,
having long since lost interest in him and now directing their attentions towards some other poor stuttering unfortunate whose mother with a bit of luck was making mysterious Sunday morning visits
to boat-houses. Jemmy Brady was still to be seen about the place but sad to say he was a shadow of his former self and if someone had told you that once upon a time he had been considered something
of a whizz kid in the prick department, all you would have been able to do was laugh your head off. Nowadays just about all Jemmy was able for was falling about the place with an old brown coat on
him and a bottle of whiskey in a paper bag, muttering and raving to himself: Not that Malachy gave two fucks what he did, for he was too busy enjoying himself. He spent long days in the café
listening to Donny Osmond and