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A Mystery
by Colm Toibin
My father, who was a teacher himself, believed that every boy should be at the Christian Brothers by the age of seven, even if this meant skipping whole years with the nuns. Thus I found myself aged seven, raw and unprepared, standing in front of a small surly Kerryman called Tommy Brick, whose habits were known to all. He lived in digs and he played bridge and he walked through the town in long strides with his hands in his pockets. For recreation in the classroom, while his charges were doing a composition in Irish or in English, he would pick his nose and make a ball of what he found there and then flick it at random toward us seven-year-olds. You kept one eye on your composition and one eye on Tommy and you learned to duck his flying snots and this was, in many ways, more useful for later life than the Irish or the English composition.
Since my father had two degrees and had won scholarships and wrote articles, everyone presumed that I must be smart, too. But once, when a visiting teacher and friend of my father came to the class and noticed me, I watched the teacher telling him with great solemnity that I was, in the phrase of the time, no good. And it was true. I lived in a permanent state of soupy, dreamy distance from things. Even now, if someone explains directions to me, I find I have nodded and made clear that I am following and thanked them. But I have not been listening. I havent a clue what they have just said.
So it was with Tommy Brick and Brother Curtin and Mr. Dunne and Brother McInerney and Brother Carbery, each of whom I suffered under for a year. I never listened, and I never did anything but the bare minimum at home. Tommy Brick and Brother Carbery used a leather strap to see if it might wake me up. Brother Curtin tried a long stick, Brother McInerney a short one. Mr. Dunne used the back and the front of his hand. None of it worked. I couldnt listen. I would try to listen, and then something would occur to me; something quite banal and useless would detain me while every other boy sat quietly listening and afterward could do the sums or the grammar.
There were only two things I could do, and these merely made matters worse for me. I could do mental arithmetic faster than any other boy, except a chap called John McCann, who had a speech impediment that was even worse than mine. I stammered only over certain hard consonant sounds. He stammered over everything. Both of us could multiply fifteen by two hundred and two much quicker than anyone else. Both of us could add fifteen to forty-seven and then divide that by seventeen and include the decimal points. The teacher became bored asking us, so once we put our hands up we were left alone. In any case, it took us both an age to come out with the answer, and this didnt seem to please any of the above.
I could also give smart answers. I could say something that would make the whole class laugh. None of the other teachers seemed to mind this very much or notice it, but it drove poor Mr. Dunne out of his mind. Here you are now, he would say, with your smart answers, your funny remarks, and you havent a brain in your head. Youre a complete imbecile, he would add, and you think youre great. And then he would grow ominous. And Ill wipe the grin off your face, Ill get that smirk off your face.
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