The God Squad Read Online Free Page B

did everything I could to stop him and he was cute enough to know that I wouldn’t want any of the nuns to hear him cry. One day while we were all out in the yard I left Eugene alone to play with a group of boys of my own age. I liked to play priests and altar boys and I treated the game as though it were an actual religious ceremony. I always regarded it as good training for the day I would become a priest. Halfway through the game Eugene’s voice rang in my ears. So did Mother Paul’s. I ran to where the child stood. A circle of children had gathered around him. I broke through and saw Eugene standing in a mound of his own excrement andurine. Tears ran in torrents from his pale blue eyes. He was dirty from the tops of his legs to the heels of his boots. Mother Paul screamed at me to clean him up, but before doing that I was to clean the yard. I stood looking at the child, my hand tightly pressed across my mouth to prevent myself from vomiting. My stomach heaving, I ran off to get a bucket of sawdust and a shovel. When I returned Eugene was still standing like a statue, yelling. I dug the shovel into the galvanized bucket of sawdust and scattered it at his feet. Then holding my breath, I told him to move, and when he was out of the way I scooped up the excrement and dumped it into the bucket. Then I took the child by the hand and brought him to the toilet. I had to take off his boots and socks, his jumper and shirt and finally his trousers. As he stood naked with much of his body covered in his own excrement, I vomited onto the cement floor. He became hysterical and to stop him being overheard I slapped my hand across his mouth and begged him not to scream. I cleaned him with some old papers that had been left in the toilet for that purpose. I held my nose with the fingers of one hand and rubbed off as much excrement as I could with the dry newspaper.
    ‘Why are you holding your nose?’ Eugene asked me.
    ‘Because I don’t like the smell,’ I answered, gripping my nose tightly with the thumb and forefinger of my right hand.
    ‘Why?’ he asked.
    ‘Because it stinks, that’s why.’
    He laughed at the emphasis on the word ‘stinks’.
    I went to the tap that hung from the wall to get some water to clean him. I turned its brass handle, and as I did it swayed on its length of lead piping.
    I soaked an old newspaper in the freezing water and rubbed the child’s body with it. His pale skin erupted ingoose-pimples and his teeth chattered uncontrollably. He cried from the cold but there was nothing I could do. When I was finished, I warned him not to tell anyone that I had been sick. He said he wouldn’t, but just to stress the point as best I could, I told him that if he opened his mouth I would kill him. Once he had committed himself not to tell anyone, I further warned him that if he told now, he would be lying and that lies would ensure instant death. Then when he was dead he would go to hell. He looked straight into my eyes and then asked me if the devil really had horns.
    ‘He has,’ I said positively, ‘and he might come and stick them in you if you tell anyone that I was sick.’ By the look on Eugene’s face as I spoke, I knew he would not say a word about what happened in the toilet. He watched me as I swirled his dirty clothes around in a bucket of cold water to rinse them. When they were clean I threw the dirty water down the drain, wrung out the clothes and shook them to remove the wrinkles. As soon as he was dressed in clean clothes he ran out of the toilet, content.
    The toilets in St Michael’s were stark and cold. The rough cement floor matched the even rougher cement walls. Ventilation was by means of an 18-inch diameter hole in the wall with thick circular iron bars across it. We urinated against a cement wall which was flushed down every now and then via a piece of pipe with holes at intervals of about an inch. Sometimes I was given the task of washing down these stinking toilets. I had to use