Chapter 3
September; the gateway into autumn.
It’s when Mr Feeney stocked up his coffin room for the busy months to come.
It was also the time that I would go through a reverse metamorphosis.
All summer I was free, being my own boss in the yard at Feeney’s Funeral Home right up until the end of August when I’d start to feel myself cocooning.
The new school term was about to begin and that meant uniforms, orderly lines, rules, timetables, homework.
I was awkward in those first weeks back at school, as if my free-form self of the summer had to crust over with a layer of tougher skin.
I needed that tougher skin that year more than any other because it was our fifth and final one, which meant exams and the great unknown at the end of it all when we would leave school forever and be out there on our own.
But probably it wouldn’t feel so different than normal because even in school surrounded by hundreds of others I always felt alone.
I hadn’t told anyone about that loneliness except for my best friend Ronan.
I was always honest with him so he knew a lot of things about me that no one else did.
He was the only person in school who knew I worked at Feeney’s Funeral Home and he never told anyone.
Ronan and me had been in the same form class since first year.
Mrs O’Neill was our form teacher, her main subject was Religious Education.
I liked her more than any other teacher in our school.
I don’t mean how most boys liked Miss Hackett the Music teacher – boys said all kinds of things about her and her boobs – I mean, I liked Mrs O’Neill because she was a genuinely nice person, like one of those characters from a Roald Dahl book who you wished was your teacher in real life, and I felt lucky that Mrs O’Neill was that kind of teacher for me right from when I saw her on our first day of school.
It was the same with Ronan in a way. On that very first day in our new secondary school Ronan and me were seated beside each other at a double desk at the front of the class. We hadn’t even said ‘hello’ before our year head, Ms Toner, started giving us the ‘welcome to your new school’ speech.
‘Boys and girls,’ she projected (she was also head of the English department and seemed to enjoy the sound of her own voice even if none of us did), ‘welcome to your new school. You will have plenty of questions, I’m sure, but we will have specific question time allotted at the end, so please save any questions until then. Understood?’
‘Yes, Ms Toner,’ we singsonged.
It was at that moment that my nose started to bleed. This happened to me quite a lot for no apparent reason. I put my hand up.
‘What did I just say?’ said Ms Toner, not taking her eyes off the horizon, only seeing my hand in her periphery and not my bloody face, ‘no questions until the end. Hand down.’
I put my hand down and up to my nose. The blood began dripping through my fingers and onto my new white shirt.
I put my hand up again.
‘I said hands down until the end, please!’ she spat again without looking at me.
I put my hand down again.
My nose was really bleeding a lot. Ronan, a stranger to me then, turned to look at me for the first time. Without a second’s thought he interrupted Ms Toner mid-sentence:
‘Miss! His nose is bleeding!’
Then she looked. Then she saw.
‘My goodness, are you alright? What’s your name?’
‘Brendan.’
‘And you?
‘Ronan. Ronan McCoy.’
‘Alright, take him to the nurse, it’s next door to the reception where you came in this morning. Do you know where that is from here?’
‘Yes, Miss,’ said Ronan and we got up to leave, Ronan leading the way and opening the door for me to follow with my dripping face.
Outside in the hallway I told Ronan I didn’t need to go to the nurse, I got nosebleeds all the time, I just hadn’t had one in school before. I said we should just go to the toilets and get some toilet roll and wait for it to stop.
In the toilets, Ronan peed while I stood in front of the mirror with my head tilted back, holding a blood-soaked wad of toilet roll stuffed up my nostrils.
‘How often does it happen?’ Ronan asked, standing at the urinals and twisting his head over his shoulder to look at me. I was standing over the sinks looking back at him through the reflection in the mirror.
‘Quite a lot. Usually in my sleep, though, so I wake up with my face stuck to a bloody pillow.’
‘Ha! Messed up, so weird.’
‘Ha, I know,’ I said because I supposed it was weird.
Ronan zipped up and came to join me by the sinks.
‘I’m Ronan, by the way, officially and all that.
’ He was about to shake my hand but then he hit the tap and ran one hand under the cold water for two seconds, grabbed a green paper towel from the dispenser, scrunched it up one-handed, crumpled it into a damp ball, launched it into the air and kicked it with his foot towards the wire bin; it missed by a centimetre.
‘Oo! Close!’ I said.
Then he held his hand out to me again, but I held up my bloody hand. He didn’t care, he just shrugged and shook it anyway.
‘Do you play football?’ I asked him.
‘Yeah, love it, who do you support?’
‘Man U.’
But I didn’t support Manchester United, I don’t even like football.
I only said Man U because in primary school we went on a school trip to Manchester and we saw a football match at Old Trafford, I think it was Man U v Newcastle.
All the boys in my class had Manchester United scarves and I asked for one for Christmas that year.
I’d kept it and still wore it sometimes because it made me feel like other boys my age even though I didn’t feel like any of them at all.
‘Really? I support Liverpool,’ he said, looking at me as if he wasn’t sure he could really trust me based on the football team I had lied about supporting.
I checked my nose in the mirror. It had stopped bleeding and had dried all crusty around the outside and clotted on the inside with a few globules that I blew out.
‘Has it stopped?’ Ronan asked, crouching down low to gaze up my nostrils as if calling into a cave and expecting to hear an echo back.
‘It’s stopped,’ I said, looking down at him.
There was a moment standing there where I wanted to say:
‘But maybe we should stay here for a bit longer just to make sure,’ because there’s something about being out of class when everyone else is in class that has a special kind of excitement to it.
Maybe it’s because all the corridors that are usually packed are now vast stretches of free runway that only exist in that time when all classes are in progress.
The playground was the same; at a time like that Ronan and me could have gone and stood in the middle and felt like we were in some kind of time freeze.
There was a new feeling of bravery in me for the first time in my life at that moment and I wanted to do something with it and I wanted to do it with Ronan. But instead I said:
‘Let’s go back before Ms Toner notices we’ve been gone too long.’
‘Hardly likely when she didn’t notice all the blood pouring out of your face,’ he said, and we both fell into hysterics as we made our way back to the classroom.
It was hard to believe that was four years ago, as I stood at the front gates waiting eagerly for Ronan to arrive.
That’s how every morning began; me waiting at the gates to see Ronan’s beaming face bounding out of his parents’ car and running towards me.
And when it was the first day of a new school year and we hadn’t spoken in weeks I was even more excited to see him and hear all about his summer adventures.
Laughing together, my sides aching, I’d realise I hadn’t laughed like that in weeks. My day didn’t begin, not without Ronan.