Plainsong

My ears ate it up. I’d been brought up on a diet of strictly saccharine sweet vocals and harmonies, but this was just too much. This was the real thing. I couldn’t believe it Donny Osmond spooling it out note by note, spooning, and spelling it out to me, spelling it out to the world, the story of my love for Pauline Moriarty. I wouldn’t believe it. He’d teeth like a cartoon shark, but my words were in his mouth. I stared at the portable tinny radio we’d brought with us for entertainment and listening to the football results until my eyes were loose postage stamps and my brain dissolved like four brown sugars in a half cup of weak tea without milk. The silver aerial stuck out sideways for better reception over the small round caravan sink filled with six small cups and a red mug with the a white chip out of the rim. ‘That’s PUPPY LOVE by Donny Osmond,’ cackled Radio One DJ Tony Blackburn. My face was trapped with thinking, my hugger-mugger heart injected with angel cream and I just didn’t know what to do. I’d need to hear that song again.

Pauline Moriarty wasn’t in my class at St Stephen’s Primary. When it was our turn to get a ball and play outside in the playground I’d sneak a look at her playing netball with the other girls in the school gym, the top button of her blue shirt undone sweat trickling down her neck and on onto her flat chest as she wriggled away from the windmill arms of Josephine Hone, Pauline’s grey skirt drifting one way then the other, bouncing the ball off the wooden floor to the springy headed curls and the waiting hands of Anne Gallagher. A sneaky pass. Pauline wouldn’t give me a look, but she knew who I was because I was the best fighter in Primary Six.

Pauline was in the class room next door to mine in Primary Six. Her teacher was Mr Ward who helped run the school team with Mr Jordan. Mr Ward was heavy with a boil in the bag red face straight out of adolescent scare stories. I liked Mr Ward. He could be funny when he was with us boys. We got taught in the huts, long prefabricated buildings, with a slanted wooden roof covered with felt, three of them in a row, with a six-foot space between them. The screech and song of metal wheels on train tracks were background noises that punctuated dull mornings of mental arithmetic and sounding out times tables and afternoons of English and a gentle unwinding until the bell rang to relieve us of the school day. The subterranean tracks ran alongside the cast-iron perimeter fence that divided the tamed grass from the gorse tangled steep slope on the window’s side that let in our light and, on the other side, the muted light of the windows facing the windblown school playground. After the exodus of those that went to the new built school Our Lady of Loreto these blocks held most of Primary Six. Two classrooms provided space and symmetry, one each side of a hut, separated by a communal cloak room with a glossy black metal bar running along the middle with coat hangers curved one way for us and the other way for them, but nobody ever hung their coats up there. The proper place to hang them, let your anorak drip dry, was on the back of your
chair.

Where Pauline Moriarty was nimble, our teacher Miss Bridges was sack footed even in open-toed sandals as she patrolled the walkways between our double desks with the hole for the round inkwells for old-fashioned ink that seemed to collect pieces of gum and pencil shavings. Miss Bridges long red hair covered a plug neck. She had a tendency towards blondness leading up to the summer months when freckles began to bloom on her face and arms and in the close combat of the V-space between her stiff white blouses, where a gold crucifix glinted. Big breasted as an opera singer, she could belt out hymns like the best foot soldiers of the Lord. Teaching was nor her forte. She was good enough to be as indifferent to me as she was to most of the rest of us. Her heady perfumes strong armed us through the winter months and kept the muggy classroom stink of unwashed bodies and the stale smell of pee to a minimum. I used to see Pauline almost every day but I never noticed her until I did and I hoped none of the other boys had. She was a new constellation in my eyes.

My talent was for racing through words in a book faster than anyone in our class, apart from Ian Murray. I wasn’t good at neat pencil drawings. John McCrossan was the boy for that. He could make a bird look like something that pecked and not like a block of wood with a sometimes beak. My pencil and crayon drawings of Pauline Moriarty thus had a tendency to the sameness of a curtain of yellow hair, a middle parting that gently curved and showed a triangle of lucent white paper above her eyebrows. Care had to be taken here because brown crayons were not blond hairs and if her eyes were hazel, blue would have to do. Red lips were easy and she always smiled up at me, waiting to be kissed. Big noses like mine were like bird beaks easy to draw. Hers like a china cup were more difficult. Often I’d give Pauline a little crown. Nobody else knew about this apart from God and I trusted God not to say anything to anybody, but if God was God He’d know what to do. Of course I prayed and prayed, but God always lets you down.