Killing Bono Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    â€œYes, 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