Fortnightly Fiction | What it Says in the Papers

It had never even occurred to Nathan that people his age read the newspapers.

“You’re how old – fourteen, fifteen?” Mr Andrews asked that day in class, hands on his hips. CSPE was the ultimate doss class anyway; no one cared about the politics or social bit and Nathan was pretty sure no one had a clue what ‘civic’ meant. And then to have this student teacher, slightly on the short side – it was a death knell for the subject.

“Underage,” someone – was it Mullins? – said from the back of the class, and there was sniggering.

It could have meant anything – too young to vote, too young to buy drink – but Nathan had a flash of understanding.

Mr Andrews didn’t look gay but then again he’d put his hand on someone’s shoulder one day and you just didn’t do that sort of thing.

“We’ve better things to be doing than reading the papers, Tom,” Martin Conroy advised from the front of the class, where he’d been put the week before for messing.

Nathan felt the slight thrill in his stomach; they all knew Mr Andrews’s first name, but to use it with him –

“Like what, Martin?” Mr Andrews raised an eyebrow.

“Use your imagination.”

“Read the newspapers,” Mr Andrews said, after a pause that had Nathan itching to be out of there. “Know what’s going on in the world, actually make up your own minds instead of listening to what your parents say.”

Nathan realised the flicker of disagreement must have shown up on his face, because Mr Andrews said, like he was expecting a snide comment, “What is it, Nathan?”

Nathan hated talking in class; he knew his face was going to go red and he’d look like a sap. “Won’t we just be listening to what the newspapers say, then, instead?” It came out sulkier than he meant, which he thought would earn him a disapproving look.

Instead Mr Andrews shook his head. “That’s a really good point.”

Conroy caught his eye and smirked, which was a relief; this was being interpreted as him getting away with cheek.

“What you need to do is to be critical,” Mr Andrews continued. It was one of those moments anyone would have been able to tell he was a student teacher. Like he was really excited about what he was saying, like they might care. “What’s the bias?”

“What the fuck’s a bi . . . ass?” Mitchell asked from his seat next to the radiator. It was the warmest spot in the classroom, good for dozing off. He extended the last word deliberately.

“Language,” Mr Andrews said mildly. “Anyone want to give us a definition there?”

Nathan knew, and he was fairly sure Mitchell did too – although he could never be sure how much of Mitchell’s stupidity was for the benefit of aggravating teachers and how much was natural. The classroom remained silent until Conroy said wearily, “Being more on one side than another. Like if you were a ref, you’d favour one team, let them away with murder.”

Nathan didn’t know how to read this helpfulness, until Conroy opened his mouth again. “What team do you support?”

“Liverpool.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Conroy said half under his breath and half not, and Nathan caught Mr Andrews’s expression at that second, and then wished he hadn’t.

They had homework which it was obvious no one was going to do. Pick a news story, find what two different papers had said about it, write about their biases.

His skin was prickly and hot the whole way through doing it, his heart thudding when the due date rolled around.

“Can you pass your homework up here?” Mr Andrews said, five minutes before the end, just when Nathan thought he might have forgotten about it.

“Homework?” Mitchell said. And then there was a chorus:

“Did we have to do that for today?”

“I couldn’t find anything.”

“I couldn’t find any newspapers.”

“I left it at home.”

Nathan didn’t think he’d ever felt so bad for a teacher before. He could see that Mr Andrews was weighing it up – give them the benefit of the doubt, or give out to them. Finally he shrugged and said, “Those of you that have the work done, leave it on my desk on your way out. The rest of you – by Monday, please. If you think you’re liable to forget, write it down somewhere safe.” The bell rang, which was maybe what let him add, “No bullshit excuses, please.”

Nathan couldn’t believe he’d really heard it. Already the collective indignation was kicking off.

He’d torn the pages out of his copy so he could hand it up. The middle pages, so they weren’t all ragged at the edges. He left it face down on Mr Andrews’s desk as he shuffled out the door, feeling like he’d masterminded a bank robbery.

He got it back on the Monday, slid onto his desk along with a photocopy Mr Andrews was distributing to everyone. The slickness – the understanding of the need for it – impressed him.

*

Nathan’s dad bought three different newspapers on a Sunday and that was what he did with his day, just sat in the armchair, rustling. His mam read bits and pieces, usually about the economy.

The economy felt like too huge a topic to get his head around. So did the mass of papers that his dad shuffled his way through. Nathan went on the internet instead. Wikipedia first, even though he could hear Mr Andrews in his head going on about reliable sources. Loads of the papers you could get for free online, and right up to date. Nathan was baffled about anyone buying real papers anymore. He tried saying it to his parents but they seemed so pleased yet faintly patronising that he was taking an interest in current affairs, like he was a toddler taking his first steps, that he gave up.

His mocks approached. CSPE should have been the least of his worries. There were standard answers you gave – you made a poster to put up in your school to spread awareness, you held a no-uniform day to raise money for charity, you wrote a letter to your local TDs if you wanted the government to do something.

Mr Andrews wished them all luck, the last class they had before the mocks started, and Conroy rolled his eyes. Nathan kept looking at the school crest on the battered cover of his homework journal as his teacher made his way around the room.

The sound of a chair being pushed back, clattering to the floor, broke the not-quite-silence. Suddenly Mullins was shouting, “Don’t touch me, fuckin’ faggot,” and shoving; Mr Andrews stumbled back against a chair and then lost his balance. It seemed to happen in slow motion then; Nathan wanted to hit a pause button and stop him from tumbling to the ground.

There was some debate, later, about whether Mullins had genuinely taken a good luck pat on the shoulder as a come-on, or whether it had just been a convenient excuse. “Shouldn’t be touching us anyway,” Conroy said, wisely. “Even if he’s not queer, like, he should know better.” Nathan nodded along, trying to erase the memory of Mr Andrews pushing himself back up, and looking around the room, his face flushed, and saying nothing.

If any of the other teachers knew what had happened, they didn’t let on. When classes started up again after their mocks and the mid-term break, there he was at the desk again, slightly wary but trying to pretend like it had never happened.

Nathan half wanted to say something, imagined sometimes what he’d tell Mr Andrews just to show that he didn’t think that there was any way he’d wanted to touch Mullins like that, and he was fairly sure most of them didn’t really and they were just being dicks and he was sorry about it, but he’d no idea where he’d even start.

*

Mr Andrews came back for their exam, a Monday afternoon in June. May had been all about studying for the exams; Nathan was pleased to see that they were discussed in the news, too. It was mostly the Leaving Cert, of course, but he read up on what people thought of the Junior Cert too. He imagined himself in the future, commenting on ‘curriculum reform’.

They met in the corridor after the exam. Most of the class had left early. Mr Andrews was wearing jeans and talking to one of the bright kids, the kind that Nathan didn’t want to be but also wondered what it’d be like, to be smart like that. To really understand things.

“Nathan,” Mr Andrews called over. “How’d it go?” He had a copy of the exam in his hand.

There was something pleasing about being invited into the conversation, even though he felt pathetic for caring. “Yeah, it was all right,” he said. He didn’t want to act like he thought he’d done brilliantly. You never knew. And anyway it was only CSPE, not like it really mattered.

He hovered, though, as the conversation went on, and then Mr Andrews said, “Which one did you go for in Section 3, Nathan?”

“The presidential election one,” he said. A classic – all about setting up committees and creating a booklet to get people voting.

“How’d you find it?”

“It was all right.” Nathan paused. “It’s a bit stupid, though. Why are they getting us to think about campaigns when we can’t even vote yet?”

“So we’ll know how it works when we can vote,” the other guy said. Nathan wished he’d just go away.

Mr Andrews nodded. “You’ll make informed decisions, when you get a chance. It’s not that long, I promise.”

It felt like an eternity. “Who’s your first preference going to be?” he asked.

“Norris, probably.”

Nathan wasn’t sure why that was a surprise and it wasn’t exactly. “He’s the guy that got the decriminalisation of –” The word ‘decriminalisation’ sounded weird enough in his mouth, too heavy, there was no way he was getting the other word out.

“That’s him, all right. Back in 1993.” Mr Andrews looked at them. “Olden days.”

Nathan had been born in 1995. Later, he tried to figure out how old Mr Andrews might have been in 1993. If he was twenty-two, say, he’d have been four then. You wouldn’t have a clue, at that age, what was going on.

When he’d first read about it, it had taken him an embarrassingly long time to figure out that it wasn’t a law that said you couldn’t be gay – he’d been imagining anyone a little bit camp being rounded up and locked away somewhere – just that it was illegal to have gay sex. Sodomy, was what some of the articles had called it.

He’d watched a little bit online, just to see what it was like, how you’d actually do it. Sodomy felt like a good word for the rougher times, when it was clear there was someone in charge, but there was this one clip he’d seen where it looked more like it was something that you did with someone else, not to someone else, and it was the wrong word altogether for that.

*

In the summer he had more time in the house on his own. His mam was happier if she thought he was running around playing football instead of slumped in front of the TV or computer, so he took to avoiding the house phone and the occasional white lie about games over in the park.

He got into arguments with people online, about all kinds of things. Sometimes it was stuff happening in the news; there were topics he wasn’t entirely up to speed on and he knew it but there were others where it was basically about your opinion. Like what the point of education was or whether businessmen could ever make good heads of state. There was one of them going for the presidency, and another candidate from Sinn Féin. Nathan was undecided about Sinn Féin and the North in general; he’d stumbled a bit on those questions on his History paper.

David Norris seemed like he was going to get the job, which Nathan thought was probably a good move; you wanted someone clever and who cared about human rights and had a track record.

Somewhere at the back of his mind he also thought that if you had a gay president guys like Mullins and Conroy wouldn’t be quite so quick with all that stuff they’d said.

He lost a good day and a half to a discussion thread about the legal voting age, wishing he had his eighteenth and not sixteenth birthday coming up at the end of the summer. What drastic change did they all think was going to take place in the next two years?

*

The last weekend in July, when other people in his class were probably out drinking and scoring girls, Nathan barely looked up from the computer.

It took him a while to sift through it. He was sure he was missing something really obvious. There was this guy David Norris had been with years ago, before Nathan was even born, and he – the guy, not Norris – had got into trouble over having a thing with a fifteen-year-old, serious trouble, and Norris had written this letter going ‘please go easy on him’, basically, and Nathan kept waiting for the big reveal. Like it was actually that the fifteen-year-old had special needs or something. Or that Norris had been there in the room watching it all happen, or paid for it or something really fucked-up.

He kept waiting for it to make sense why everyone was freaking out. Wasn’t it the decent thing to do, to stand up for your ex, to call out some crazy country on their stupid laws about gay sex?

Every time he read the word ‘lover’ instead of ‘partner’, which made it sound like if you were gay it was all about the sex, he kept thinking about Mr Andrews, and bias. It was like something had crawled under his skin and he didn’t know to stop it.

He wanted to shake the TDs that were ‘withdrawing their support’ ‘under the circumstances’ until the clichés rattled their way free.

*

“Ah, Nathan, you’ve been on that all day, get some rest for yourself,” his mam said on Sunday evening.

He was in the middle of an angry discussion thread in which some wagon (a word his mam used sometimes, and politer than ones he could think of) was going on about children. There were references to the Cloyne report, which was one of those things about the priests, and she was comparing David Norris – not even his ex, like, but the man himself – to those guys? ‘Children can’t consent to being sodomised,’ she’d typed, and he was shaking with rage and he hated people, he hated them, and why was the world so ugly, and –

“Did you hear me? Get some rest.”

“Yeah, in a few minutes,” he mumbled. Fifteen. The guy had been fifteen, and from the sounds of the letter it was a bit of a set-up, but fifteen, come on.

If it was him, and if there was someone who maybe wanted to do those things to him, or with him even, he’d be able to say yes, yes, I get it, I know what this is. Wouldn’t he?

He clicked on the ‘send’ button and then like he was in a trance he went to Facebook and he searched through a long list of people named Tom Andrews.

When he found the right one he clicked and even though he couldn’t see any of the important information – see, why were adults always going on about the evils of Facebook when it was actually so hard to find anything good? – there was a profile picture. Some holiday or other, he guessed, Tom Andrews in front of an old building, wearing a blue shirt and grinning. His skin suddenly felt just a little bit too tight.

“Did you hear about David Norris, the poor man?” His mam was shaking her head now. “He’ll have to step down, there’s no way he’ll get it now.”

“It’s awful,” Nathan said, and his mam looked surprised at the vehemence. “He hasn’t done anything wrong, and all the stuff they’re saying makes it sound like it’s him and not his ex, and we don’t even really know the story with the ex anyway . . .”

“Well, he shouldn’t have taken advantage of that boy, of course, but –”

“Taken advantage? He was fifteen!”

“It’s illegal, Nathan,” his mam said, like he didn’t know. Like it was that simple. “Even in this country, we’ve an age of consent –”

“Matters more if you’re gay,” he said sulkily.

She let it drop. Maybe she knew, then. Maybe she’d figured it out, just seconds after he had. He was too shaken to be grateful, as if he’d been beaten up.

He wanted to send Mr Andrews a message but he wasn’t sure what he’d say. Especially on the Tuesday, when Norris stepped down; Nathan watched it online. It was classy, he thought, classier than all the people tut-tutting about how he should have known better. He kept reading what the papers and the blogs said, and in his head Mr Andrews was saying, “What’s the bias here? And what are you bringing to the table, Nathan, what interest do you have in things being one way or another?”

In his head Mr Andrews was saying, “At least you know now, what people really think when push comes to shove”, and there was a CSPE question demanding an answer and he knew now that none of the standard replies – make a poster, write to your TDs, form a committee – worked beyond the confines of an answer booklet. In the real world, such as it was.

 

Featured illustration by Elizabeth Burgess.