CONOR O'SULLIVAN - THESE FOUNTAINS SHED INK

Conor O’Sullivan’s short fiction has appeared in the Lakeview Journal, the Bitchin’ Kitsch, Storgy, Dual Coast Magazine, A New Ulster, the Opiate, the Furious Gazelle and was published as a chapbook by TSS Publishing. He lives in London where he works as a sports journalist. 

THESE FOUNTAINS SHED INK  
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​Ursula Baxter parked her red Ford Focus between a station wagon and hatchback in the St Philip’s College staff car park. She cut the engine and applied make-up to her slim, wrinkled face while tuning the dial to RTÉ Radio One. Her white linen shirt complimented the pressed grey suit that she wore every Monday. She parted the fringe of her shoulder-length fair hair before stepping outside to the hazy, late May morning.
‘There are no games on the fields without a supervising teacher,’ she shouted at three boys playing football on the hockey pitch and dilated her green eyes at them. ‘I’ll be speaking to your form teachers if I catch any of you at it again.’
‘Yes, miss,’ the boys replied and gathered their belongings in the dugout. Sunlight glinted on the school’s two-storey, L-shaped grey building. The interior was mostly unchanged in Ursula’s thirty-five years teaching history with prefabs dotted around the school to accommodate an expanding student body.
She walked through reception to her office located in a side corridor off the first floor’s main hallway. It was a small, windowless room containing a swivel chair, filing cabinet and a wooden desk stacked with her books. She boiled the kettle plugged in on the nylon red carpet and put the handouts for each class into plastic sheets.
All of Ursula’s her original colleagues had retired to leafy suburbs and her former pupils now occupied the faculty, most of whom she had regarded as average pupils that were forced to return after failing at the professions.
She was born to English parents in Wicklow town and grew up near Cullen in a cottage perched over the dunes of a sheltered beach that served as the rectory. Her father, raised and schooled in Arklow, was sent to the south Wicklow parish five years after joining the clergy. He reserved any display of emotion for his sermons with his rangy frame leant over the pulpit. She sat in the front pew with her mother, bowing her head in obedience, and stared at her dangling leather shoes. They waited in the car afterwards while he attended to any pressing concerns among the congregation. Her mother was a tall, pale woman with straight fair hair down to her shoulders who met the Rector when they were both teenagers and spent her days assisting him with parish affairs.
They bought the cottage when she turned five years old, painted the chipped walls and reupholstered the furniture. She attended the local national school and walked home every day with the female O’Keefe siblings. They called for her after supper to play hide and seek in the dunes, their orange curls visible from her grassy vantage point. But the Rector had Ursula’s name down for the Benenden School in Kent since her birth and was not dissuaded by her pleas. She ran to the beach on the morning of her departure and had to be dragged back to the house, his large, cold hands wiping sand and tears from her cheeks. They all took the ferry from Dublin and washed down ham sandwiches with weak tea as a tailwind sped their crossing.  
‘You behave now and say your prayers,’ he said at Holyhead before her mother knelt for a short embrace. She walked backwards on the gravel to look up at his misted spectacles when her aunt Phyllis led her to the Euston train. Benenden was a converted country manor that catered for the education of Home Counties girls whose parents had flats in London and summer homes in Devon. Ursula’s classmates viewed her as a peasant, excluding her from common room games, and mocked her hybrid accent. She wrote long passages in her diary after lights out about escaping to Wicklow and running through the dunes into a calm Irish Sea.
The Rector died in a car crash outside Wicklow town that November while driving home from Dublin on a narrow stretch of road. He was found soaked in a ditch, lifeless and cut by shards of windscreen according to the newspaper report kept by her mother that described the conditions as torrential. She had finished writing her parents a letter with the blue Waterman pen given to her by the Rector for her 13th birthday during evening study when the housemaster took Ursula aside and up to her office.  Tears streaked down her cheeks when she was told to pack her suitcase and wait in reception for Aunt Phyllis. He was buried in a plot behind the church, her cardigan dampened by raindrops falling from the ashen sky.
‘He was such a careful driver,’ her mother repeated to Ursula in the kitchen that evening holding a glass of red wine. She spent all subsequent school holidays in Aunt Phyllis’s Wingham farmhouse where she helped churned milk into butter with her uncle.
Her mother died on a clear May morning a week before Ursula’s A-levels began. She endured a six-month battle with colon cancer that served as a pouring of salt over the wound of her life.
‘They’re together again,’ Aunt Phyllis said to Ursula and squeezed her gloved fist as the undertakers lowered her mother’s coffin beside the Rector’s. She swam past her depth that evening over moonlit waves then sat in the dunes rubbing sand and tears from her cheeks.
There was a knock on her door and the principal, Andrew Taylor, stood in the frame. His dark, slicked-back hair covered an advancing bald patch with his solid build compensating for an average stature.
 ‘Good morning, Ursula,’ he said.
‘Hello, Andrew. How can I help you?’
‘Well,’ he said and fixed his beady eyes on her. ‘I was wondering if you would be interested in handing out the diplomas at valedictory night as a parting gesture to the pupils.’
‘My retirement is irrelevant to the ceremony,’ she replied.
‘Of course, but do let me know if you reconsider,’ he said while retreating into the hall. ‘I know your pupils remain the priority.’
Ursula gathered her folders after he was gone and attended to the twenty-five waiting teenagers. She had kept her classroom intact from her early teaching days with the blue walls covered by posters of Irish writers, imperial maps and an embroidered school crest of a golden castle nailed above the blackboard.
‘This period will be on the exam so pay attention,’ she said and fast-forwarded through a DVD about the French Revolution while most of the class checked their phones after submitting illegible answers completed on their morning bus journey. At lunch, she ate a ham and tomato sandwich in her office then walked around the school. Pupils drove by in their cars holding McDonald’s cups, their laughter muted through the windows. Ursula wrote timelines on the blackboard waiting for the sixth years to arrive who had been an average group since their pre-pubescent, rosy faces had come under her tutelage.
They sat at their desks while Ursula searched through her DVDs for a documentary on the Bolshevik Revolution hearing the high-pitched voices of Stephanie Ward, Catriona Kennedy and Leanne Smyth behind her.
‘Miss Ward, I hope you’re discussing the establishment of Soviet Russia. You three girls have no margin for error after failing the mock exam,’ she said and turned to Ward’s slouched posture. She was a tall, slim blonde whose fake tan gleamed under the panelled ceiling’s fluorescent lights.
‘Sure,’ she replied, smirking at Ursula with pursed, glossed lips, and her two peroxide blonde friends sniggered at the curt remark.  
 ‘There will be a revision test on Wednesday,’ Ursula said at the end of class and handed out notes once the groans had quietened. ‘As usual, I’ll be running revision sessions all week after school.’
‘Miss, this is fifty pages,’ Simon Egan said.
‘Your point being, Mr Egan?’
‘We have the Leinster Cup final in two days.’
‘It is my job to prepare you all for the state exam,’ she said. ‘None of my pupils have failed in the thirty-five years I’ve been teaching here and I intend to retire with an impeccable record. Your cricket match or any other engagement is no concern of mine.’
A pale first-year boy with large freckles on his nose cleaned the blackboard during her final class as the pupils leafed through their textbooks. She finished marking homework assignments with her Waterman pen afterwards and opened the skylight as calls from cricket training filtered into the room. Katie Barry arrived at four o’clock clutching the straps of her suede leather rucksack and took her regular seat in the front row. She was a plain girl with a rotund figure and curly black hair that spiralled over her shoulders. The edges of her thin lips remained pressed together when she spoke to prevent exposing her crooked teeth.
‘There’s rumours going around the year that the examiners are planning to leave the Vietnam War off the paper,’ Katie said. 
‘Miss Barry, there will be no need for speculation if you cover the syllabus.’  
‘History is one of my bankers for Trinity College, miss.’
‘Just focus on your technique,’ she said. ‘You’ll have all summer to analyse your university prospects.’
The next day, Ursula typed up the sixth years’ test and played Beethoven off the computer. She set an essay question on the Tsar’s collapse that cast her mind back to a Russian literature class taken in her final undergraduate term at the University of Cambridge.
Angus Crawford sat with the tutors scribbling notes in his black leather notebook the first time she noticed him across the shallow lecture hall. He was a rakish PhD candidate with doleful brown eyes who wore fitted shirts underneath one of his tweed jackets. Girls put on short skirts for his tutorials and his Edinburgh accent fell on Ursula’s ears like drizzle softening a field when he read from a rare Leo Tolstoy edition. 
She had stayed in the library during regattas and balls throughout her English and History degree to complete the assigned readings. Her peers stumbled through the campus under lamp posts while read in her dorm. Angus had complimented her work in class and agreed to be her thesis supervisor. He whispered John Keats in her ears while she edited paragraphs and they made love in his office after she completed the final draft.
‘Never hide that face of yours,’ he said and pushed back the strands of hair brushing her pointed nose. They began a passionate affair that summer and he had conquered her heart by the time she began her doctoral fellowship in postmodern Russian literature that autumn. Angus proposed within six months during a trip to Berry Head on the Devon coast when they remained in their hotel room all weekend. His desire for her appeared insatiable and his parents paid for a June wedding in Edinburgh.  
‘Heaven knows you deserve some happiness, child,’ Aunt Phyllis said with a glint in her green eyes.
‘I know mother and father would approve of him.’
They drove from Rome to Sicily for their honeymoon and her skin turned bronze swimming in the limpid Mediterranean. Angus wrapped his arm around Ursula’s cotton dress strolling through a village’s terraced streets and kissed her into a daze when they went to the shore after dinner.
‘Someday we’ll own a house that looks over the sea,’ he said after an embrace under the stars on a coved beach.
‘I already have one, my love.’
Ursula settled into her new role by hosting dinner parties and debating with academics as Angus uncorked another chianti bottle. He came to her office for luncheons, flexing his wedding band, and they held hands afterwards strolling to their respective appointments. Term moved at a slow pace and she commanded the respect of her students through her comprehensive subject knowledge and exalted status within the faculty. Angus remained faithful for a time and parted her fringe in bed when she was gripped in his arms.
 ‘I’m meeting a bachelor in Marylebone for dinner so it’s not appropriate for spouses,’ he said when departing for the station a few months into the Michaelmas term.
‘That’s the third weekend in a row, Angus,’ she said. ‘I’ve hardly seen you this month.’
‘Use the time to catch up on your work.’  
She tried to conceive a child for months, willing her body into submission, and cornered him in his office between lectures. But his rekindled lust yielded no conception and her anxieties grew when returning students flocked the cobbled streets in late September and Angus insisted on visiting a doctor.
‘Unfortunately, Mrs Crawford, you have premature ovarian failure and cannot conceive children,’ Dr Stevens told them, her hand was limp in Angus’s palm who nodded and tore the button on his tweed jacket. She saw the same luscious undergraduate leave his office twice in a week, her full blonde hair tied in a ponytail.
‘This was a mistake, Ursula,’ Angus said after announcing he wanted a divorce.
‘But we can come through this stronger, my love.’
‘Our marriage is redundant without the prospect of children,’ he replied. She wept and begged and smashed his vases. Angus cleaned up the scattered ceramic then went out for the evening. Ursula left Cambridge on New Year’s Eve 1970 and returned to Wicklow with frost on the dunes. She saw a resident teaching job at St Philip’s advertised in the newspaper four days later.
‘The pupils will be very lucky to have a teacher of your learning,’ a bearded governor told her at the interview.
‘I hope so, sir.’
Wednesday was a warm morning with the sun breaking through veiled clouds and Ursula played a DVD on the American civil rights movement in her first class.
‘Mr Murray, you may actually learn something about profound human suffering if you can focus for ten minutes,’ she said and glared at the dozing second year.
She sipped tea as the pupils ambled to their next class before the sixth years arrived carrying backpacks filled with notebooks and Tupperware. The cricket players sported dyed coifs and wore their school-issued white polo shirts.
‘You have forty-five minutes,’ she said at midday while handing out the tests. ‘Where are the three beacons of punctuality?’
Everyone kept their heads down in silence until she gave the signal and their biros began scratching A4 paper. Ursula remained on her feet waiting for the door to open and see the girls fresh from the dugouts or one of their cars with the smell of tobacco on their manicured fingers. At the bell, the class handed in their scripts and rushed off to their lockers. She walked to reception past teachers leaving for the day and waited for the secretary to end her call.
‘I need to see the principal.’
‘Let me check if his current appointment has ended,’ she said and dialled his extension with her stubby index finger. She entered the carpeted hallway to the spacious office that backed onto a curtained window and saw pupils load into buses carrying school flags.
‘Is there something urgent?’ Taylor asked, his briefcase open on the desk. ‘The final starts in less than an hour.’
‘Three of my pupils skipped a revision test.’ 
‘I see,’ he said and furrowed his brow. ‘You know how the senior pupils are when the end is in sight. Most of them find it more useful to study at home.’
‘Andrew, their behaviour has undermined the school.’ 
‘They graduate in two days.’
‘Those girls are a torment,’ she said, a drip of saliva lodged in her throat. ‘You must do something.’
‘Ursula,’ he said. ‘You’ve been a wonderful teacher but quite frankly some of your methods are outdated. Please let it go.’
She held his stare and turned back, her steps uneven across the carpet. Katie waited outside the classroom going over revision notes, her round face tightened scanning the highlighted text. Ursula unlocked the door and rummaged through her past papers booklet in search of a suitable essay.
‘I missed a few key points on the show trials in the test,’ Katie said.
‘You’ll have it back on Friday, Miss Barry.’
‘Will anything happen to the girls for skipping class?’
‘That’s at the principal’s discretion,’ she replied after a pause.
‘The school seems to have different rules for beautiful people,’ she said and gave Ursula a weak smile.
‘Make sure you cover the Anglo-Irish Treaty,’ she said. ‘It’s due to come up.’
She poured a measure of Bushmills into her mug and locked her office door after Katie had left. The sharp taste calmed her nerves as she sat there all afternoon marking every script with her Waterman pen before leaving at seven o’clock.
A group of boys and girls sat underneath the rugby posts, their bodies sprawled on blades of grass watching a ferry sail into Dublin Port. Ursula played the Ninth Symphony on a low volume, reclining her car seat, and drank whiskey from the bottle cap until she fell into a dreamless sleep. She woke a few hours later and vomited onto her skirt then drove back to Wicklow. The street lamps flashed in her windscreen and she kept her windows down to clear the fetid smell.
Her key almost broke in the cottage’s stiff lock and she stumbled inside before switching on the lamp beside a family photo taken at the beach. The Rector had stood behind them with his hand on her mother’s shoulder. Ursula held a plastic spade and remembered being distraught over her crumbled sandcastle when he carried her home at twilight.  
The sea was a black canvas through her bedroom window. She changed clothes, carried two malbec bottles to the car and returned to the school at dawn with dew soaking the hedges. Ursula played DVDs throughout her classes and drank wine in the office that evening reading over her university essays and unsent letters to Angus.
Dried purple stains covered her lips when she awoke and walked through the playground where leaves fluttered in the oak trees. The chapel was empty and she sat in the front pew with her eyes fixed on her shoes hearing echoes of the junior school’s Christmas concert. Every year, she stood at the back and watched the angels approach the altar in their papier-mâché halos singing hymns - their pure, sweet voices a crushing melody.
A door creaked behind the altar and she went to the canteen to order a breakfast of rashers and eggs with white toast. Ursula supervised an end of the year exam in the main hall as the pupils met a final academic responsibility before the summer. Some of the boys removed their red club ties with broad grins when she collected the scripts. Their restless minds prepared for the end of year parties in coastal mansions where they swilled cheap alcohol and waited to be kissed.
Ursula began cleaning out her classroom, leaving the DVDs, posters and maps in a supply closet when Katie arrived with a past papers booklet gripped in her arms.
‘There’s no session today, Miss Barry,’ she said and placed a cardboard box filled with DVDs into the closet.
‘But I have some questions about the space race.’
‘That will not be on the paper,’ she replied.
‘That’s what the examiners are expecting…’
‘It’s irrelevant whether you fail or pull off an A grade,’ Ursula said and waited for her to leave with tears welling in her brown eyes.
She walked along the coast to Blackrock village. Gorse patches on Howth Head shimmered across the bay and she found a pub to numb herself with gin and tonics. She felt serene at the bar with the drunks as the bright afternoon passed her by and the evening came in.
The main hall was cast in a dim light for the valedictory ceremony. Red plastic chairs were lined in equal rows and the lowered projector displayed a screensaver, “Congratulations, Class of 2006!” in white font. She took her seat with the teachers on stage, parting her fringe, and wiped a smudge of lipstick from the edge of her mouth. The pupils arrived with their parents, the boys dressed in pinstriped suits and girls wearing cocktail dresses. A collective murmur grew among the audience when the four-piece began playing a Bach interlude.
‘Tonight, we all take a step forward,’ Taylor said at the podium. His waxed black hair had a shoe polish tint under the spotlight and he began a twenty-minute speech about the emotion surrounding the evening while offering his sincere gratitude to the parents for raising such wonderful young adults. ‘Refreshments will be served in the canteen …,’ he said after handing out the diplomas and academic awards. ‘…and I hope you will all join us for a glass of champagne to toast your children’s wonderful achievement. Of course, the pupils are not alone this evening in bidding farewell to St Philip’s. Ursula Baxter will scold me for reminding everyone that she taught some of the parents in this room. She has been an outstanding staff member throughout her tenure at the school. Please join me in thanking Ursula as she begins the next exciting phase of her life.’
She raised her right hand to the applause standing beside Taylor who presented her with a plaque and bouquet of red roses. Her eyes fluttered as they played a video montage from her time in the school. She watched her younger self hold a stern expression ushering pupils to the starting line from a distant sports day. There was a hush once the video ended and Ursula stepped forward to adjust the microphone.
‘I shall keep this brief as I’m sure you’re all anxious for a drink and your children have an evening of study to catch up on,’ she said and paused for some gentle laughter. ‘It has been an honour to teach at this institution and I am thankful to all my colleagues but most of all to the pupils, past and present, who have provided me with far more joy than I ever gave them. I wish you all the best of luck in the exams and your endeavours moving forward. Thank you.’
Blush melted on her cheeks standing between parents in the canteen as she drifted between conversations. Champagne was opened and she spoke with colleagues feigning interest in her plans.  
‘You must be excited to be free of this old place,’ said Thomas Jones, a chemistry teacher who had blotched skin and white hairs coming out of his ears. His crimson neck bulged under his white shirt collar. They kissed twenty years previously at a staff party and went out for a few dinners to add a degree of formality to their awkward embraces in his apartment.
‘Yes, there’s a lot to catch up on.’
‘Time waits for no man…or woman.’
‘Invariably,’ she responded and watched him plod over to the sandwich tray afterwards. She made her way to the exit past parents shoving strawberries and cream into their mouths.  The still, warm air held a promise of summer. Ward and her friends stood outside the prefabs, the smoke from their cigarettes trailing above their straightened hair. She wore a white dress, tight against her supple flesh and devoted her gaze to a victorious batsman. The sound of their laughter carried through the vacant grounds.
‘Miss Baxter,’ Katie said who had emerged from the canteen. Her arms were pressed against the sleeves of a long maroon dress with her rosy cheeks lit under a street lamp.
‘Good evening, Miss Barry.’
‘I wanted to give you a present to say thanks for all the extra help you gave me,’ she said, her large eyes unblinking as she handed over a red velvet box. ‘It’s a fountain pen.’
‘That’s a very touching gesture,’ she said and placed the box in her handbag. ‘Katie, I must apologise for my outburst this afternoon. I was not myself.’
‘That’s okay,’ she said. ‘If I get into Trinity, I’ll know it was due to my great history teacher.’
‘I’ve played a very small role,’ she replied. ‘All your hard work will pay off.’
‘Thanks for everything,’ she said and wrapped her arms around Ursula’s neck.
‘You’re welcome,’ she responded and patted the back of her dress. She gripped the velvet box watching her go back inside, left to fade from all their lives with each step on the path.