Killing Bono (3 page)

This was not the first such incident during my time at Sutton Park. I had previously received seven stitches after someone struck me over the head with a chair during a fight in the library. And the mayor of Dublin's son, a classmate of mine, had blown the skin off his face in a bomb-making experiment involving gunpowder extracted from fireworks while his friends looked on shouting words of encouragement. When a pupil was expelled for a sexual assault in a classroom, my parents, fearing that it was only a matter of time before one of their offspring ended up dead or in jail, decided it was time for us to change schools once again.

Thus, at the beginning of the 1975 autumn term, Stella, Ivan and I lined up for assembly at Mount Temple. A progressive establishment that had opened only three years before, it was the first state-subsidized, coeducational, nondenominational school in Dublin. A thin, rigid old man who identified himself as the headmaster, John Brooks, delivered a speech about enabling us all to fulfill our potential. Standing among a throng of unfamiliar faces, I felt nervous yet optimistic about the future. Perhaps, down these dusty corridors, my destiny would, at last, begin to unfold.

If some time traveler from the future had told me then that, one day, Mount Temple Comprehensive would become a legendary institution in the annals of Irish show business, I would not have been remotely surprised. And if they had informed me that among this generation of students were four individuals who would become the most famous Irish exports since Guinness, why, I would have shrugged bashfully before looking around at my schoolmates to try to work out who were the other three.

P
aul Hewson was in my sister's class, a year ahead of me, but we soon established something that was more than a nodding acquaintance if less than a friendship, falling into conversation at choir practice and morning assembly and during brief encounters as we made our way to separate classes. It was a passing relationship fueled by one characteristic we have always had in common: a capacity to talk about anything as if we were experts on the subject, no matter how limited our actual knowledge.

My rapport with Paul did not much impress my sister, who was proprietorial about such matters and did not think I should be fraternizing with any of her contemporaries. Indeed, in normal circumstances, there tended to be little socializing between pupils from different years. When you are young, even a year in age difference is usually perceived as an unbridgeable chasm. But, long before the days of his A-list celebrity, Paul was already something of a star in the school corridor, known to one and all.

Even now, I think of Bono as the Man Who Knows Everyone. His visage is inescapable in modern media. Open a newspaper or magazine and there he is, standing shoulder to shoulder with world leaders and political agitators, poets and pop stars, show business legends and flavors of the month. I've seen him pictured with his arms around presidents, glad-handing prime ministers, quaffing wine with Nobel Prize winners and swapping sunglasses with the Pope. Mention his name to movie and music stars and you are almost guaranteed to hear an amusing anecdote about their friend Bono, with a coda about what a nice guy he is.

He was always a gregarious charmer, loping about Mount Temple like a stray dog, sniffing out interesting conversations and activities, making sure he was part of whatever was going on. There was a lot of mischief in his smile and he had a stubborn, jaw-jutting, bull-headed streak that emerged whenever he felt put upon, but at his core there was a tangibly gentle, compassionate aspect that made him popular with girls (who always seemed to be fluttering about) and tolerant of younger pupils, such as myself. You felt honored when Paul spoke to you.

He could often be found hanging out in our common room because Paul was engaged in a vigorous, amorous pursuit of Alison Stewart, one of the most beautiful and universally admired girls in our year. Alison had thick, black hair, smooth, olive skin, dark, warm eyes and deliciously curled lips. Being a hormonally charged fifteen-year-old boy, I could not help but notice these things. She was also smart, kind, good-humored, strong-willed and, frankly, way out of my league. Actually, at that stage in my adolescent development, pretty much any member of the opposite sex seemed out of my league. But with some, at least, you felt you might have half a chance. Alison had a sort of aura of impermeability about her. I never really felt she belonged in the same world as an ungainly youth like me. On principle, I was against older boys going out with girls in our class, since their seniority and bullish air of experience seemed to grant them unfair advantage, but Alison and Paul seemed to fit. He wooed her over the course of a long year, until, when you saw them nestle intimately among the stark arrangement of chairs and lockers in the common room, it became apparent that they were an item.

One of our principal topics of conversation at that time was God (the existence or non-existence thereof); and, indeed, this was to remain a subject of vigorous debate between us over the next twenty-five years. My personal problems with the deity had not subsided, but my confidence in challenging the religious order imposed by Irish society was growing daily. To be fair, religious education at Mount Temple was a very different proposition than under the Christian Brothers. A consequence of its being the only nondenominational state school in mainly Catholic Ireland was that most pupils were drawn from Dublin's Protestant minority. The school itself, however, toed no sectarian line, offering Religious Education (RE) classes characterized by a kind of woolly Christian liberalism, presided over by a well-meaning, but—as far as I was concerned—drippily ineffective young teacher named Sophie Shirley. There would be Bible readings and class discussions in which Jesus took on the character of a beatific hippie while God seemed to be personified as an avuncular old geezer who only wanted the best for His extended family—if that was the case, I wondered, why was I being kept awake at night wondering if the torments of Hell awaited me when I died? I would fire this and related questions at my long-suffering teacher but I never received satisfactory answers, just platitudes about Jesus loving me.

While the school's official policy on religious matters seemed nebulous at best, there was a curious, almost fundamentalist, born-again-style subculture among a section of pupils known as the Christian Movement. Loosely organized in an unofficial capacity by Miss Shirley, they held regular prayer meetings to which a sign on the door announced that everyone was invited. Everyone except me, that was. One day I stopped by to see what was going on and was informed by a literally holier-than-thou classmate (one of Miss Shirley's leading disciples) that my confrontational approach to matters of the spirit meant I would not be welcome at their mysterious jamboree.

“That's very Christian of you,” I commented as he barred my way at the door.

“Ah now, Neil, don't be like that,” said my flustered classmate. “You know you'd only sit at the back making trouble.” Which was, to be fair, my intention, but I still felt it hypocritical not to give me the benefit of the doubt.

Excluded from an organization I had no intention of joining, I made it my business to antagonize them at every opportunity. The thing that really perplexed me, and indeed intellectually infuriated me, was that the group's members included many of my closest friends, not to mention some of the most attractive girls and coolest guys in the school. Paul and Alison occasionally attended the meetings, where they apparently studied the Gospels, unencumbered by secular ritual, and found solace, harmony and truth there. Yet when I read these same books I found nothing but illogic and contradiction, fairy tales passed off as history. The apostle I identified most with was Doubting Thomas. While his skepticism about the appearance of the risen Christ was presented to us as a weakness of character, I always thought that insisting on poking his fingers through his ghostly leader's stigmata was the only sensible course of action under the exceedingly strange circumstances.

I was genuinely baffled as to how such a dynamic and evidently intelligent individual as Paul Hewson could be so committed to these ancient myths. He never became infuriated by my regular challenges to his convictions, however, but would always indulge my penchant for argument. “I like a good fight” was one of his mantras. “It's good to ask questions,” he told me once. He would listen to my barrage of misgivings and criticisms of Christianity in all its guises and try to persuade me that the leap of faith required to open yourself up to God was worth it. “When you look around,” he insisted, “you see the oceans, you see the sun, you see a storm, a beautiful girl; don't you think there must be something above man? Apart from women?!?!” He would keep coming back to the issue of faith, although he himself was not immune to doubt. He didn't like organized religion or empty ritual and seemed to be engaged in a struggle to quell his own demons. Paul had a temper which could suddenly flare up, his face going red with rage, although I never felt it directed toward me. In the aftermath of his mother's death the year before, there had, apparently, been little explosions in class, with tables being tipped over and chairs kicked across the room. He told me once that there was a period of two weeks about which he could remember nothing; he drew a total blank. He was undergoing some kind of existential crisis and almost buckled under the psychological pressure. “I faced ideas of suicide,” he admitted. “I was very unhappy; my mind was speeding.”

The school's response had been exemplary. Paul was told he could attend whatever classes he wanted, could come and go as it suited him until he found his feet again. One teacher in particular made himself available to talk and listen: Jack Heaslip, a counselor to the pupils and responsible for overseeing classes in career guidance and social issues. Heaslip was a gentle, thoughtful, soft-spoken, bearded man with strong spiritual leanings, who would eventually leave teaching to become a Protestant minister. Now Paul evidently had some strong childhood experience of “otherness,” a sense that there was something bigger than mankind. He once told me he had been full of questions about existence and had called out, as he put it, and a voice had answered from inside. But it had not been enough to change his life. “I just wandered on,” he said. “I refused to believe in God. Why should I? I'd go to church and there just seemed to be people there singing psalms of glory, but they didn't seem to feel anything—it seemed all wrong.”

The death of his mother was undoubtedly what tipped the balance. “It shocked me into the insignificance of human life,” he said. “One minute you can be alive, the next you're gone. I could not accept that people would just disappear. If life meant being on the earth for sixty or seventy years, I'd rather go now!” It is an argument that never impressed me. The notion that there has to be a God because there's no point otherwise is emotive rather than rational. But I hear myself saying this and I can see Bono gently smiling, chiding me about my preference for logic over faith. Somehow Paul had made a huge leap of faith and found himself standing on a rock of belief. He didn't have to question the past. He didn't have to let his own mind chase him around in circles of torment. He could pick himself up and move forward. God, in a sense, became the defining ground to his character.

Oddly enough, my RE teacher was unable to demonstrate quite the same sense of equable conviction. I would sit at the back of the class, flicking through a Bible, seeking out anomalies to bring to her attention. Miss Shirley would be in the middle of some happy-clappy sermon when my hand would shoot up. “Miss! Miss!” She would visibly stiffen while my fellow denizens of the back row stifled their giggles.

“Yes, Neil?”

She had a way of saying my name that conveyed both long-suffering irritation and nervous apprehension. I never got the impression that she much enjoyed the cut and thrust of scriptural debate. One day, faced with another unanswerable contradiction from the good book on which she had based her life's work, she simply burst into tears. We all sat staring at her in stunned silence, a few of my more devout classmates casting dirty looks in my direction. Miss Shirley eventually managed to control herself enough to say, “If you don't want to be here, Neil, you should feel free to spend these periods in the library.”

Well, cast thee out, Satan! I didn't know whether to feel triumphant or disappointed, because I did actually enjoy the hurly-burly of these classes, where I got to pit my skeptical wits against a member of the religious establishment, however lowly. On the other hand, a free library period every week was not to be sniffed at. I gathered up my books and made for the door. Whereupon the malcontents from the back row started sticking up their hands and asking if they could go too. “Anyone who wants to spend RE in the library should feel free to do so,” declared Miss Shirley sharply.

One by one we filed out of the class, leaving a rather forlorn-looking teacher preaching to the converted, all six of them.

I spent a lot of time in the library, and not just because I was a voracious reader who had been dismissed from RE classes. I was also excused from Gaelic, which was a relief: under the nationalistic ordinances of the era, if you failed your Irish exams you failed everything.

The library is where I became properly acquainted with Dave Evans, the boy who would become known to the world as iconic guitar hero, musical boffin and the coolest bald man in rock 'n' roll: the Edge. Having been born in London of Welsh parents, Dave had also managed to wangle his way out of Irish classes. Though his family had relocated to Malahide, north of Dublin, when Dave was aged one, so strictly speaking he should have been trying to get to grips with the ancient language of Eire along with the rest of the poor native suckers, Dave somehow convincingly masqueraded as a Welshman, born and bred.

I have to say, there was nothing particularly Edgy about Dave in those days. He had hair, a big, dark mop of it as I recall, but this would not have been considered worthy of note at the time. We all had hair, most of it pomped up in appalling, blow-dried seventies bouffants that made our heads look twice the size they actually were. Dave was quiet and somewhat studious, more inclined to use his library time to do his homework than to sit and argue with me about whatever was the latest controversial concept percolating in my hyperactive brain. I remember him being respectful to adults, poised and serious, but with a quirky and sometimes cutting sense of humor. We were civil rather than intimate. I was probably too rebellious and argumentative for his disposition, while, for my part, I felt intimidated by his perpetual air of intellectual superiority. I felt certain that he took a dim view of many of my antics, such as my prank of loosening the library bookshelves so that they would collapse whenever somebody returned a weighty volume. Dave's skepticism toward me was probably not much helped by the fact that he held strong religious beliefs and was close to the school's Christian Movement, with whom I, for some reason, had a bad reputation.

Dave and I were rivals for the affections of certain schoolmates of the female persuasion. He caused me considerable torment when he succeeded in snogging Denise McIntyre, the unwitting object of my adoration, whom I made a point of sitting next to in most classes. My distress when Denise blithely informed me of their brief encounter was only mildly mollified by her appraisal of my rival as a “sloppy kisser.”