Chapter 2: All The Things We Don't Discuss
(part 2) Introducing St. Catherine's Primary School for Girls
Welcome to (Re)wild Imagination, an exploration of how art can sustain hope amid climate crises, and how ordinary people can help the environment by supporting native wildlife in local areas. You are reading the paid version, which includes a serialised gothic novel.
Note: St. Catherine's Primary School for Girls is an actual building in Dublin that’s still standing on School Street in the Liberties area of Dublin city. When I lived in there it was half abandoned and as far as I know it still is. Explore the area here on Google Maps Street View. Pictures throughout this section are my pictures from that time in that building.
I found Ryan and my new home side-by-side in Krink's living room. Wooden boards, thick rugs, a lumpy old sofa, a lean Christmas tree in one corner. A staircase without a railing. The subtle, dank smell of must and mildew.
I watched while the old man stirred up the fire and the welcome heat flared against me. The hearthrug was speckled with spark burn. The small tiles on the fireplace were vaguely Moroccan, clashing with the convoluted wallpaper of all colours.
I watched while Krink jabbed at the fire, the poker fitting neatly into his hand as though they were made for each other. Something about this made my spine prickle, so I examined a luxuriant growth of black mould on a pile of books by my elbow instead, and then turned my attention to his desk. It was maybe the same age as me. The wood was highly polished.
Silence had been stretching out between us for some time.
“Is that so,” Krink said. It wasn't a question. I think he was growing tired of me, but how else was I to fill the frigid hush that had slunk in between us? Once out of his shop, our relationship had become more overwrought, more uncertain. I became afraid that he would leave me in the city, that I would be lost in a maze of alleyways for the night. I knew enough already of tangles. I had found my way to his shop by chance in the first place, following the faded thread of childhood memories back to his door, and I wasn't so sure that I would ever find it again.
"Oh yes," I said. I had been disappointed, however. I had been hoping for some scandal, some den above a whorehouse, some depth to the man. Krink was a lacquered thing of glass and little else. I agonised over what to say to such a creature. I picked in my mind through scraps of small-talk that I had filched from other people’s conversations, but none of them seemed to suit this occasion. When my rivulet of wordbile faltered, I found I had nothing else to say at all.
I thought, instead, of my reflection in his shop doorway. I thought of the sleepy smile. I thought his wallpaper was hideous. I said nothing.
The document pertaining to St. Catherine's Primary School for Girls was on the desk. It doesn’t make sense to me now that he suddenly produced this piece of paper that enabled him to be rid of me. Little makes sense.
I didn't know how Krink had gotten his hands on it, but I had my suspicions. I was growing more certain that I was enmeshed into some sort of ignoble intrigue. I was growing more certain that everybody I came into contact with all knew what they were doing.
The document was entirely in legal argot, and came with a thicket of keys. Krink waved them both at me, making the little bones in his wrist clack.
“I won’t say a word to anyone,” he simpered at me in what he obviously thought was a knowing way. At the time I thought by 'anyone' he meant my people at Auburn, but now I'm not so sure.
What struck me most about that evening was how he looked when he handed over the keys and the piece of paper. Hand extended, wrist bare, but leaning away, jaw clenched, as though afraid or repulsed, or both. I remember everything.
The keys felt unnatural. The metal wasn't cold and their design was all wrong somehow. The largest was easily the size of my palm, crouching there like a beetle. I sat back, clutching them, listening as Krink read from the old paper, his voice taking on a slightly different tone. A trickle of late-evening sunlight fought through the room, lighting up the struggles of a dying fly on the windowsill.
Krink finished reading and met my gaze. I was struck with the curious impression that he had been waiting for my appearance in order to relieve himself of these particular articles. I cannot remember what the paper said and I can't reproduce it here because of what happened next.
“Were you listening to me?” He asked.
“Of course,” I lied.
“Ownership of St Catherine's is in your family name.”
“Doncha hafta like tell the gards or something?” A voice asked from behind us. I craned my head at the staircase just in time to see a strange man hop his last step from them. He leaned on the edge of the sofa. I faltered a greeting. Krink’s nostrils flared.
“I don’t see why,” he said.
“Wouldn’t wan' yer man here being carted away.” I gazed at the newcomer politely. He had Krink's thin face but his eyes were warmer. He offered his hand, “Sorry man. Hey. I'm Ryan.”
“My son,” Krink said.
“I am pleased to make your acquaintance," I said, shaking his hand. “My name is Craven Wren.”
Ryan covered up what sounded like a snort of laughter with, “Hiya?” He had an easy way of smiling that softened any harshness in his words, and I smiled too, in spite of myself. His hair was a reddish brown and his earlobes were stretched to a pleasing circle.
“There ya are now,” he chided me, “I'd have a face like that on me as well if I'd-a been stuck wid him all day."
Abandoning the document, Krink returned to his ministrations of the fire.
“So,” Ryan plumped himself down on the sofa beside me, “what’s the story.”
“None of this affair is your business,” Krink retorted.
“Your father is kindly giving me somewhere to stay while I am in the city,” I told him, flushing.
“Nice one, dad,” Ryan raised his eyebrows in a manner I could not interpret.
“It is best to inform him of what is his own,” Krink answered, stiffening down into an armchair, his knees popping.
“I guess.” Ryan took the paper from his father and looked it over. “This isn’t too far away. Want a lift?”
I nodded, made the effort to focus my eyes, not being able to remember where I’d left my car anyway. Krink bared his teeth at me in a smile. I nodded. I held the keys.
Ryan was shrugging on a kind of outer garment I had never seen before, and before I knew it we were up and out and in a rattly old car that was parked outside. It was not a Ford, at any rate. Krink hobbled into the doorway. I put the keys and the document in the inside pocket of my coat once I was buckled up in the passenger seat.
“Make sure you hang on to that,” Ryan said, meaning the document, jerking his head over at me as he started up the car.
“I will,” I assured him. Maybe I could frame it.
“He’s great and everything, but you were lucky I was there or that fucker would have burned it,” he said, starting up the ignition and waving cheerily out the window.
“Why?”
“Jus' th' way he is.”
After this we sat in silence for a moment, at a loss for words. I compared my bitten nails with Ryan’s dirty ones. After some minutes he offered, “So yer up from t'country?”
“I suppose so.” I had never before thought of Auburn as being the country.
“Nice fer some. Fresh air n' all.”
“Capital.”
“Cows?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Cows? I mean, d'ya see lotta cows out there like?”
I gawked at his profile. We were driving a little too fast but he seemed confident.
“Yes,” I said, to please him.
“Deadly!” He seemed unaffectedly glad for me.
Quite, I thought, and said, “Have you always lived in the city,” haranguing myself for being such a poor conversationalist.
“Yeah. Used to live in Paris though like - y'know yerself.” This last was thrown off at the end, as though I was supposed to be impressed.
“My word!" I answered obediently, visualising the globe in the schoolroom.[1]
“I moved over here when da was getting older.” His words came faster now; he was nervous. I sympathised. “Didn’t want him being on his own, you know? He was really good to me when I was a kid. Gave me sweets and all that.”
“I like sweets.”
“Me too.” He smiled at me sideways without taking his eyes off the road. “But so, yeah. Came over here, joined the family business, and shacked up with the old man for a while. Till I find me own place like.”
I nodded. My own place. I looked down at my fingernails again. I thought of my twin sister’s limp-wristed farewell in the window of Auburn.
“What do you do?” I asked finally, reminding myself of my mother at garden parties.
“I’m jus' his assistant,” he said.
“Oh?”
He thought this was funny, "Ah c'mon the man's a c'ntrol freak like."
A small silence spun out until I thought to say,
“You must be very busy.”
“Nah.” Another sidelong chortle.
The streets were lined with tall rows of dark-bricked houses. Everything looked the same. I tried to picture what would have befallen me if I had been left to find my own way to this place, and found that it was a difficult thing to do. My imagination leapt to some foggy, gaslit world where opium dens figured largely.
We sat a moment in the car as it cooled down. The building stood out among all the others because it looked like it had been airdropped from some doom-laden Soviet planet. It was also far larger. It was boarded on either side by patches of weedy wasteland.
“Home sweet home,” Ryan said, unbuckling his seatbelt. We slammed the car doors in unison.
I fit the key into the lock on a slender metal door that looked relatively new, and it turned with difficulty as though it couldn’t remember how locks worked. Ryan shifted his feet about.
“Would you care to come in?” I said.
“Ah yeah sure migh' as well,” he said.
I flicked the light switch by the door and Ryan said, “Holy Jaysus,” but I couldn’t say anything at all.
We were greeted by a looming empty empty space, a kitchen like a mirage at the far end. The space turned out to be one vast room stretching almost the full length of the ground floor, leaving space for two stairwells on either end, and a small bathroom.
We went back outside and walked around the building in a puzzled circle. Dirty plastic windows, an overgrown patch of empty space. I walked out into the middle of the echoes around us and did a slow 360 turn. Ryan poked his head into a small security booth or former office that stood beside the front door, hemmed in and bisected by a chicken wire mesh.
“It’s warmer in there,” he said as he came out.
“Was this a…”
“Haven't a blue's clue man.”
When he left I stood at the door to wave him off. It struck me then that I was alone in an abandoned school for the night, and I trembled.
There had been no offers to visit on Christmas day.
[1] Paris, I thought. Paris with the apples?