2004 - Dandelion Soup Read online

  Sister Veronica opened the front door with an enormous key that she kept on a chain hidden beneath the folds of her stiff grey habit. He’d read somewhere that you could make a wax impression of a key and make a copy, only he didn’t know quite how to do it. He’d have to puzzle his brains over that one.

  Padraig stepped outside the door and breathed deeply. He loved the smells of the early morning, the dew and the nettles, cuckoo spit and steaming cow shit, the breath of foxes on the run.

  He ran away down the gravel drive, kicking up his heels like a colt pumping his arms, and listening to the lively beat of his heart.

  High above him in the lightening sky a bird soared upwards and a squirrel chattered at him from a hole in a twisted old tree. Over in Kenny’s broken-down farm a scabby dog barked excitedly.

  Clancy Street was quiet The curtains were still drawn on the windows, of the cottages but fires had been lit and smoke coiled up lazily from the chimneys.

  As he passed Dr Hanlon’s house, the only big house on Clancy Street he heard someone tapping at an upstairs window. He looked up to see Siobhan Hartlon standing at the window in her nightclothes, waving at him. God, Siobhan gave him the irrits, she was always smiling at him in class and making mad cow eyes at him. No harm in her though. He gave her a lazy half smile. She blew him a kiss and he blushed, then suddenly a hand pulled Siobhan roughly away from the window. Dr Hanlon’s maid Nora filled the window frame, waggled her finger at Padraig and pulled the curtains fiercely shut.

  Miss Nancy Carmichael was on the orphanage committee and came to meetings at St Joseph’s. She was always in St Bridget’s church polishing the pews and tidying up the flowers. He posted the letter carefully through the letterbox and headed on down towards Miss Drew’s shop, which was on the other side of Clancy Street.

  The brown paper blinds were pulled down over the window hiding the display of sweets from his view. He bent down and pushed the letterbox open and peeped into the shop. It was dark inside but he could make out the outline of the huge jars of sweets on the shelves, the bran tub in the corner…

  He pushed the note quickly through the letterbox and ran off down the street.

  Ballygurry School was a hop skip and a jump from the beach. It was a grey stone building divided into two. On one side was the school with its one big classroom and cloakroom. On the roof there was a rusty bell that was rung for the start and end of school. In the other half of the building was the schoolmaster’s house.

  Padraig stood in front of Mr Leary’s door. He was nervous about knocking. What if Mr Leary came out in his nightshirt? What if he disturbed him when he was out the back on the lav?

  He rapped the door knocker timidly, shuffled his feet and waited. There was no answer. He knocked again, louder this time. He felt shy about seeing Mr Leary out of school hours.

  “Will you mind out of the way you blithering eejit!”

  Padraig jumped back in alarm as the door was flung open and Mr Leary stood before him, his eyes screwed up against the light. He was only half dressed in a cream vest and corduroy trousers and his braces dangling down to his knees.

  “S-sorry, sir, but Sister Veronica told me to…”

  Mr Leary smiled.

  “Oh, it’s you, Padraig, my eyes are not the best in the morning. And the eejit I was referring to was the dog and not yourself. Come in, do, and tell me what message the warm-hearted Sister Veronica has for me today?”

  Padraig hadn’t expected to be asked inside the schoolmaster’s house.

  “She wants to see you after school, sir.”

  “Well now, Padraig, the anticipation of such a meeting fills the heart of a poor man with hope.”

  Padraig gawped at Mr Leary.

  Mr Leary smiled again.

  “Come in, Padraig, I’m only teasing. It’s cold out there. Get inside and warm yourself up for a while. Mind the dog, the lazy beast wouldn’t move if his ar – his behind was on fire.”

  Padraig stepped inside the house and carefully skirted the Mack and white collie that lay sprawled across the hallway.

  “Nice dog, sir.”

  “It’s not mine, Padraig, he knows I’m a soft touch and comes down from one of the farms to warm his behind and cadge a bit of food.”

  Padraig looked around him in wonder. He’d only ever had a peep inside the house when the last schoolmaster was here. Then it was drab and dingy with withered palm crosses stuck to the yellowing walls and flypapers curling in the breeze. Now it was like no house he had been in before. The walls were whitewashed as most of the little houses were in Ballygurry, but hung upon Mr Leary’s walls were enormous paintings. They weren’t the usual sort of paintings of suffering saints and pale-faced sinners writhing in agony, but big colourful pictures in wonderful bright colours that made his eyes ache. Paintings that made your mouth water, paintings as tantalizing as sweets.

  Sometimes, as a treat, if they did well in class, Mr Leary let the kids use his own private paint box. Jeez, it was wonderful.

  Crimson, Cobalt, Carmine, Cadmium. Magenta, Burnt Sienna, Raw Sienna. Lovely names to wrap around your tongue. All the colours of nature in the one box.

  Mr Leary watched Padraig’s face with fascination as the boy gazed at the paintings and after a while he said, “Do you like paintings, Padraig?”

  “No, sir. Well, I like these ones. Did you paint them yourself, sir?”

  Mr Leary laughed loudly and said, “I wish I had, Padraig. If I had I would be sunning myself in the Mediterranean and eating grapes handed to me by sun-bronzed maidens. I have not the talent for creation, Padraig, merely the willingness to admire and encourage it.”

  Padraig stood before the most beautiful painting that he had ever seen. It was a picture of a lopsided house, and above the roof of the house was a fantastic night sky where the stars were like fireworks exploding and the moon like molten syrup. It was just bloody wonderful.

  “That one, Padraig, is my pension.”

  “How do you mean?” Padraig asked.

  “This was painted by a true master, Federico Rafael Luciano. I bought it before he became well known, when I was living in Spain.”

  “How will it be your pension?”

  —“Well, one of Luciano’s was sold in America for a fortune recently. The trouble is I don’t think I would be able to part with it!”

  “I know what you mean, it’s wonderful.”

  “Tell me, Padraig, what are the first thoughts that come into your head when you look at that painting?” Mr Leary asked.

  Padraig blushed; he wasn’t used to being asked to give an opinion on things. He studied the painting and said truthfully, “I’d like to be able to think the way the person who painted this thinks. I’d like to live somewhere like that, with a lot of colour.”

  “How do you mean about the thinking?”

  “I don’t know, sir; just looking at it makes me feel…”

  “Yes?”

  “Bold. Unafraid. Like it’s okay to enjoy things.”

  Padraig knew that the person who had painted this had a different sort of mind to the people he lived amongst. It was a happy painting, a mad, bad, glad to be alive painting and not meant to frighten the life out of you like all the wounded and mutilated figures in the St Joseph’s paintings.

  Mr Leary noticed that the boy struggled to take his eyes from them.

  “Come into the kitchen when you’ve had your fill of those.”

  He could have stood there for ages looking at the paintings but he dragged his eyes away and followed Mr Leary.

  The kitchen was a plainly furnished room. There was an old dresser with a scattering of odd cups and tin mugs, a pile of postcards and letters with foreign stamps. There was a large scrubbed wooden table and chairs and in the middle of the table there was a huge jar full of dandelions.

  Padraig stared curiously at the dandelions. He had never seen a bunch of weeds in a house before. Grown-ups didn’t usually like dandelions. They thought they were a pest and were always d
igging them up and yet Mr Leary had them on show as though they were prize roses.

  “I am an eccentric fellow, Padraig, and I have an enormous inexplicable love of dandelions.”

  Padraig beamed. That was funny. So did he.

  In one corner of the room an ancient stove belched out heat and a red kettle hummed contentedly upon it.

  “Take a seat, Padraig. I was just going to put on some bacon, cook up some eggs. Do you fancy a bite?”

  Padraig blushed and could barely answer for the spit rising in his mouth. His belly rumbled loudly.

  “I’ll take that as a yes then,” Mr Leary said, nodding at Padraig’s stomach.

  Padraig sat up at the table and watched curiously as Mr Leary prepared the breakfast; he had never seen a grown man cooking before.

  Mr Leary lifted an enormous black frying pan down from a hook on the wall and set it on the stove beside the kettle. He went off into the larder humming as he went and came back out holding four thick rashers of bacon. He placed them in the pan and slowly the kitchen filled with the gorgeous, salty, mouth-watering smell of bacon cooking.

  “Nothing like a fry-up in my estimation. In fact the one thing I missed when I was on my travels in Spain was bacon. Some days I could have died for the smell of bacon sizzling. The Spanish are a dab hand at producing wonderful ham but they have not a clue about bacon.”

  Padraig stared at Mr Leary’s back and wondered whereabouts exactly the bullet holes were in his legs.

  “Were you a long time in Spain, sir?”

  “Two years since I was there last. I’ve been there a few times.”

  “Did you have a job when you were there, sir?”

  He was hoping Mr Leary would tell him about the war and the bullet wounds.

  Mr Leary was silent for a moment as he cracked two speckled brown eggs into the pan along with the bacon.

  “I didn’t have a job exactly. I was there to travel, I got jobs here and there just to pay my way. In fact, Padraig, the truth is I was on a mission to find a lost Irish virgin, but that’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it some time.”

  “Thanks.” Were you in the Spanish civil war, sir?”

  Padraig jumped as Mr Leary laughed loudly.

  “Me? No. I was there just after the war had finished.”

  Padraig looked disappointed. Mr Leary grinned.

  “The legend has it in Ballygurry that I have bullet holes in my legs from fighting in the war, is that right?”

  Padraig could feel the hot flush that spread across his face. He nodded. Bugger. He wished he’d never listened to Jimmy Hoolistan.

  “Truth is I do have bullet holes in my legs, but they were caused by a drunken monk’let loose to shoot wild boar and he, I’m afraid, mistook me for a porcine marauder.”

  Padraig tried unsuccessfully to dose his mouth.

  “Was it nice, sir?”

  “Being shot jn the legs?”

  “No, sir, I meant living in Spain, sir.”

  “Padraig, to a man brought up in a small wet Irish village not dissimilar to Ballygurry, Spain was a glorious distraction, an education in enjoying both the body and spirit a Utopia for a narrow-minded lazy soul such as myself.”

  Padraig loved the way Mr Leary spoke. All the big words that rolled off his tongue no effort like.

  “Listen; while I finish cooking the breakfast, go into the dresser drawer over there, there’s a scrapbook of Spain in there. Take a look.”

  Padraig got up from the table, walked across to the dresser and opened the drawer. God, he was having the time of his life. A cooked breakfast! And a two-sided conversation where he got to ask questions!

  He carefully lifted out a leather-bound book and carried it back to the table.

  “Fried bread?”

  Padraig didn’t answer. Mr Leary smiled and put two slices of bread into the frying pan. The boy had his head bent over the scrapbook and was completely immersed in its contents.

  Padraig looked with interest at the photographs. One that took his eye was of an enormous higgledy-piggledy building that looked as though it had been dropped from the sky and had fallen to rest on the top of a mountain. Underneath in Mr Leary’s spidery writing were the words SANTA EULALIA.

  “Is this place a prison, sir?”

  Mr Leary leaned over Padraig’s shoulder. Padraig thought he smelled nice, of soap and old books and turpentine.

  “Oh, if only it was, Padraig, I would commit a felony and stay there for life. No, it was a monastery where I lived for a while, not the last time I was there but just after I’d left university. It was where, in fact I was wounded by the bullets.”

  “Were you a monk then, sir?”

  Padraig tried to imagine Mr Leary with a bald head, brown robes and sandals like the pictures of smiling red-cheeked monks he’d seen in books.

  “No, God forbid, I wasn’t a monk. Santa Eulalia had rooms for pilgrims to occupy. I did all sorts of odd jobs while I was there, helped out with the harvest and did a bit of cooking and polishing. It was a grand place to stay. The food was tip-top and the company second to none. There you go, Padraig, eat and enjoy.”

  Padraig closed the scrapbook unwillingly but the sight of the heaped plate before him claimed his full attention.

  Mr Leary was a great cook. Padraig hadn’t tasted eggs and bacon since, well, since a long time ago.

  They ate together for a while in silence and Mr Leary thought it was a pleasure to watch the hungry boy eat He was all skin and bone. A few good meals inside the little fellow and he’d double in size.

  Mr Leary poured two cups of tea, gave one to Padraig and pushed the sugar bowl towards him.

  Padraig put a spoonful of sugar into his tea and stirred it slowly.

  “Have as much sugar as you like.”

  He helped himself to three more spoonfuls and lifted the cup to his lips. He could smell the syrupy sugar as it melted. He sipped the tea and then licked his lips. God, it was lovely.

  “Tell you what, Padraig, why don’t I telephone Sister Veronica and say I have a few errands to send you on myself. Then you can have another cup of tea, take a good look at the book, save you running back all the way to St Joseph’s.”

  Padraig could barely keep the smile off his face, and when Mr Leary spoke to Sister Veronica on the telephone Padraig marvelled at how good he was at telling lies. Not even the Pope would have guessed.

  Padraig turned back to the scrapbook. Underneath the photograph of the monastery was a picture of an alleyway. It was a narrow place with houses squashed up tight on either side. You could have leaned across and held hands with someone living on the other side. The houses had wobbly looking balconies with pots of flowers all over them. There were beaded curtains strung across all the front doors. Underneath the photograph Mr Leary had written PIG LANE, CAMIGA.

  Padraig screwed up his eyes and peered intently at the photograph. He couldn’t see any pigs anywhere. There were no people in the photograph, except…Going into one of the houses was a shadowy figure, a strange-looking man wearing what looked like a swirling black cloak and a wide-brimmed hat.

  “Who’s the funny-looking man, sir?” Padraig asked.

  Mr Leary peered at the photograph through his thick-lensed spectacles.

  “What man, Padraig?”

  “There, sir, see, going into that house.”

  Mr Leary leaned closer to the photograph and looked again.

  “Look, sir, there.” He pointed the figure out with his finger.

  “Are you tricking me, Padraig?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Wait while I fetch my magnifying glass. I’m as blind as a bat most of the time.”

  Mr Leary lifted the lid off a pot on the dresser, pulled out a magnifying glass and held it over the photograph.

  “My God, Padraig! I don’t believe it. It just goes to show that one needs to see the world through the eyes of a child. I’ve looked at this photograph a hundred times and never noticed him before.”


  Mr Leary sat down heavily on a chair, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “When I was in Spain, Padraig, I was hoping against hope that I’d bump into this fellow, but he was as elusive as a rare moth. And now I discover that while taking this snapshot I was standing not fifteen feet away from him.”

  “Why did you want to see him, sir?”

  “He, Padraig, is an enigma. They call him Peregrino Viejo, which in Spanish means the Old Pilgrim. There were all sorts of tales about him. That he was an English axe murderer or a defrocked Italian cardinal. One thing is for sure, that he knew more about that part of Spain than any man alive. I wanted to pick his brains.”

  “Why, sir?”

  “I’ll tell you the story when there’s more time.”

  “Promise?”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  The next photograph was of two women who looked like sisters, an old woman with her eyes shut and Mr Leary, who looked different with a moustache and a beard. They were standing outside a café.

  “That,” said Mr Leary, “was taken in a little fishing port called Camiga. I worked in the fish cannery there, the worst job ever. Those three were friends of mine. See that’s the Café Cristobal where they sold the most delicious tortilla and fresh sardines that you’ve ever tasted.”

  “I’ve never tasted any, sir.”

  “You will one day.”

  “Is the monk one of the ones from the monastery where you got shot?”

  Mr Leary studied the photograph with the help of the magnifying glass and then stared at Padraig. Sure enough, sitting at a table outside the café was an old monk talking to a young woman who was big in the way with child; beside her chair was a package wrapped in paper and tied up with string.

  “Why yes, Padraig, that is old Brother Anselm. A very erudite but rather peculiar old man who spent many years studying in Paris before he became a monk. Well, I must have a lend of your eyes again one day soon. Now I wonder what on earth he was doing down in Camiga. Good Lord, look at the time and I’m not even properly dressed.”