The rat on the wall

1967. Manus is eleven.

Manus sat in silence on the bottom steps of the stairway. With his knees tucked under his chin, he fitted snugly inside a ray of sunlight, which penetrated the dark hallway, through the stained glass window above the heavy wooden door. In the four years since his father's death, a vindictive, somber air permanently lurked in the house. Harbor's of warmth and light were frail transient things.

The girls had already left for school and the house deserted, save for Manus and his mother. She was making the most of her rest before her hard day's work began. He was hoping desperately for a reprieve from school.

At one point a teacher had taken it upon himself to iron out the wrinkles in Manus's character. He had made a habit of punching and kicking the child with all the power of his adult muscles. Manus had had to attend the hospital and his mother, embarrassed that the doctors thought she was abusing her child, complained to the Christian Brothers who ran the school. She was told that the teacher in question was old and soon to be retired and that taking the complaint any further would be a big stab in the back for Catholic education. Something no good Catholic would ever want to do.

Manus had survived that teacher's class but he still hated school.
By way of a plea he let loose a faked, rasping cough to which his mother responded in her exasperated, exhausted voice: "If I have to get out of my bed to get you out to school I'll break your two legs."
Manus trailed his feet as he trudged up Blackwood Street, deliberately scuffing the toes of the shoe's she had worked so hard to buy him. His vain efforts to be excused from school had made him late again. He would be punished for being late again but it was not totally with out compensation. Free from the school kids and workers who had already traveled to their appointed places of toil, the road was not busy and apart from two women downstairs the bus was empty. Allowing Manus full reign of the upper deck.

He took, as his right, the front seat from where he had a stately view of all the little streets, shops and people. The bus rolled down the Ormeau Road, past where the stink of the gas works leered through the windows, then through the markets area to Cromack Square, where it slowed down to turn left into May Street.

It was just on the corner of May Street, where the bus traveled at its slowest pace, that Manus jumped from the open platform onto the road. He passed the courthouse and turned down the back of Town Hall Street as far as the police cells, before turning left again to face the high walled police barracks. Their huge gates were open this morning, allowing a view of the large, impressive cobbled stoned courtyard.

The entry, which served as a back entrance to his primary school, was lined on one side by the barracks wall and on the other by a fresh fruit warehouse and a flourmill. Inside the mill an unmanned machine for loading bags of flour onto lorries still turned. The mill workers had all disappeared for tea break and apart from the clicking of the unmanned machine; there was an eerie silence. Normally the entry was filled with screaming children who ran and played games of hurling, Gaelic football or handball but this morning the entry was empty.

Manus thought the end of the world had come and there was nobody left but him. The solitary slap of his shoes on the concrete alleyway echoed back at him with menace.

He might have run in blind, childish panic had he not seen it on the wall; the rat, like an eighth wonder from a Marvel Magazine, defied gravity and clung four feet from the ground on the corner of the barracks wall. Manus had never seen a rat so clearly before. It had brown fur and beady eyes and its body ran parallel with the length of the bricks.

The two observed each other briefly before scurrying in their separate directions. The rat made its way back to the mill while Manus ascended the broad, cast iron stairs, which led from the schoolyard to the upper floor of the old stone school. It was a peculiar building. Large coarse granite stones its upper floor jutting out to overhang part of the schoolyard. The yard walled off. Similar to the old tower houses built for protection. Built by the river in the eighteenth century, the Christian brothers school was now surrounded by more prosperous protestant buildings and was seen as an annoying papist eyesore.

Manus tried to sit unnoticed on the long wooden bench at the back of the classroom but the black smocked, chubby figure of the Brother beckoned to the boy. The Brother squatted down on his hunkers beside the hearth to bend his leather strap over the open coke fire, which burnt in the center of the partitioned room. Manus stood with little defiance but the disinterested acceptance of the unavoidable.
"I missed the bus," he tried, but the excuse seemed lame so he added; "And I stopped to watch a rat on the wall in the entry."

"There are no rats in the vicinity of this school." Stated the Brother categorically.

The boy and the Brother were an interesting diversion for the rest of the class and perhaps it was for the entertainment of his audience that Manus checked, "If there are no rats in the school then how come you put rat poison down in the cupboards?"

His audience was pleased with the show but the Brother was not impressed.

"There are no rats in the vicinity of this school." He repeated and had Manus hold out his hands so that he could be punished for being late. The Brother strapped unusually hard so that each stroke left a red swelling.

After three strokes on each hand Manus expected his punishment to be over. He folded his arms across his chest to fit his injuries snugly into his armpits and half turned to return to his seat, but the Brother hit the boy lightly across the face and smiling sadistically, had him extend his hands once more. This time he was to be punished for telling lies about seeing rats.

Brother Andia did not come from Belfast but from one of the twenty-six counties, which were no longer under British rule. His years of experience as headmaster of a school which existed under pressure within a sectarian state had taught him the necessity of blind loyalty and, as he strapped the boy, that was the true message which he wished to convey. Oxford Street Christian Brother's primary school was a good, clean school, which had no faults, no problems and no rats.

The Brother continued to strap. The boy stood there blubbering. His lack of intelligence or naive, stupid stubbornness forcing him to stick to his story.

There was a rat on the wall.

Biography

Stephen McRandall's stories are autobiographical with himself as Manus. He has written two dozen stories; sex, drugs and police harassment would make up the main components of "Manus' Misadventures". He is still alive, and will be 47 when this issue of Electric Acorn appears.