The House that Jack Built

by Catherine Barry

  Joe eased me on to the dance floor and I buried my head in his chest. He pretended we were dancing real close, while all the time I sobbed uncontrollably.

  ‘Is this about Matt?’ he asked matter-of-factly.

  ‘Yes.’ I whispered. ‘Joe, is he here?’ I added.

  ‘He’s here all right,’ he sighed.

  I knew what that meant. I entered negotiations with God. Please, God, let him see me right now, right here. Please, God, make him walk past and see me with someone else, and then he’ll get jealous, and push Joe out of the way, and then he’ll tell me he loves me, and then everything will be back to normal, everything will be OK. Please, God, make him notice me, please?

  Joe held me close. I wallowed in his warmth and protection. I needed him. In truth I was using him, but it wasn’t making a damn bit of difference. As time passed, 1 realised that something was really wrong. Matt had not come looking for me. I would have to attend to the dirty work myself.

  I excused myself, and paid a visit to the ladies toilet. Looking at my reflection in the mirror, I was surprised to see how pretty I looked. I had borrowed Barbara Streisand’s hair perm from the film A Star Is Born. It suited me. My eyes were large and wide from the dope, but my mouth felt dry. I spent a long time at the mirror, mouthing the alphabet. All of a sudden, the letters seemed hilarious. Especially the letter ‘O’. I did that one over and over again, until I realised I was completely out of my face. I didn’t care. In fact, I was delighted. I wanted to be like him. I wanted to impress him. I wanted him to see how mature I was, by how stoned I was.

  Jill burst into the toilet, ran past me and spewed up all over the floor like something out of The Exorcist.

  ‘Fuck,’ she muttered, and threw up again, only this time it was a perfect hit, a bull’s-eye, straight into the toilet bowl. I tried the other toilet but it was locked.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I hissed through the hinges. ‘Some of us would like to have a piss.’

  The door opened and a threesome sheepishly crept past. The floor was littered with empty cans and bits of tobacco. I relieved myself amidst Jill’s gagging and groaning next door. She was leaning over the hand basin when I came out, the ends of her long hair dripping from the running water.

  ‘Jaysus, I’ll never smoke that Leb again, deadly shit.’ Then she rolled up again, lit it, and did just that.

  I left her to it, and made my way back through the dense crowd. The DJ was playing ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ by Pink Floyd. I wandered slowly around the back of the hall, trying to look like I was searching for a friend. Suddenly, I saw him. I ditched behind some longhaired louts. The music had begun to slow down, and cheers from the floor welcomed the familiar first few guitar riffs from ‘Still In Love With You’ by Thin Lizzy.

  My worst fears were realised. There he stood, his arms wrapped tightly around another girl. A beautiful girl, with long blonde hair. As if that wasn’t humiliation enough, she was wearing a magnificent hand-knitted mohair jumper. She had breasts too. The bitch.

  I wondered, had he already touched them? He hadn’t bothered to touch mine. Mine were so small that had I pushed the two of them together, they still wouldn’t have made even a half decent tit. I watched them dance slowly, his fingers entwined in her golden mane. My sense of defeat was complete. I had won the battle but lost the war. He never so much as glanced in my direction.

  Standing there, listening to that song, watching them, was the single most heartbreaking event in my life. Until a great big whale of a girl wearing stilettos dug her heel into my foot.

  ‘Ooops, sorry,’ she offered pathetically.

  ‘No problem, I’ll put an earring in it.’ You great big fat fuck, I thought, wincing, and returned to the gang.

  For the rest of the evening I sat nursing my bruised ego. Karen arose, like Lazarus from the dead, at around 12.50 am. Jill, who had mysteriously disappeared for most of the night, returned around the same time, and confided in me that she had wanked a fella in St Anne’s Park, next door. She said her hand was absolutely ‘fucked’. It took me years to figure it out.

  Chapter 3

  School friends are hard to lose. I tried losing Karen and Jill but we ended up being stuck together like glue. In the summer of 1980 we finished school. Down the back lane beside Karen’s house, we started a bonfire and hurled the dull grey uniforms on to it with glee. We did an Indian dance around the fire, war whoops and powwows included.

  The smoke from the fire was horrific. Karen was furious that the uniforms were taking so long to disintegrate. We wanted to go out, all guns blazing. We wanted to see the uniforms crackle and shrink like a crisps bag. Instead, they filled the lane with smoke, which alarmed the neighbours, who called the fire brigade. Our moment of triumph was short-lived. We abandoned the blaze and legged it to a field nearby, leaving the half-burned clothes smouldering. We were supposed to be mature women by now, not the amateur pyromaniacs of the future generation. We were supposed to know exactly what we wanted from life and how to go about getting it. Towards the end of our final term, we all paid a visit to the school’s career guidance teacher.

  Jill and Karen had it all figured out. Karen was going to be a beautician. Jill was going to be an architect. I told her I thought that was a great idea. I didn’t tell her that I thought she wouldn’t have the stomach for it. That would have been ignorant and rude. It never occurred to me to find out what an architect was. I thought it had something to do with the research of bodily organs. That was how I left school. Completely ignorant.

  ‘Well, Jacqueline,’ the career guidance teacher started, ‘what plans have you for when you leave here? Have you decided on a career yet?’ She peered at me through her National Health glasses.

  ‘I’m going fruit picking in Donabate,’ I answered.

  ‘Very good,’ she said with a resigned sigh. Another one bites the dust, another teenage delinquent in the making. She never tried to guide me, as her title would suggest. Career guidance teacher, my arse! I was guided gently to the door and told in polite terms to please fuck off and don’t tell anybody that you went to this school.

  ‘Goodbye, Jacqueline,’ she smiled, as if I were headed for a long spell in Mountjoy Prison. Nothing else. No suggestions, no encouragement. No exploration of my talents, or even a small inventory to see if there were any.

  Jill and Karen were the bright ones. While we lay in the fields, smoking, they discussed their plans with enormous enthusiasm.

  ‘I’m going back to college,’ Karen said. ‘I need better marks in my Leaving Cert. I think I’ll do it again,’ she said with serious tones.

  ‘Probably do the same myself,’ Jill added.

  ‘Are you both fucking mad?’ I shouted at them. ‘You want to go back for more?’

  ‘Hey! I want to be something,’ Karen defended herself.

  ‘So do I,’ Jill added. They were rolling joints and counting their pennies to see if they had enough for a few cans. I smirked at the irony.

  ‘What are you going to do, Jack?’ they asked together.

  ‘How the fuck should I know?’ I answered irritably. Everybody seemed to know everything all of a sudden.

  I hadn’t the faintest idea what I wanted to do. I was free of school — that was all I could think about. That was all I wanted to think about. Not college, or repeating Leaving Cert. I wanted to have fun. I wanted some money. I wanted to party every night. The three of us sat and smoked and watched the shrieking neighbours as they helped the firemen douse our little fire.

  Finally, they put it out. It was symbolic. In many ways, our personal ‘fires’ were being doused too. We were young women entering the big bad world, poorly equipped with the necessary skills to become anything other than ordinary housewives. Our rebellious days were coming to an end. We were being challenged to open up and take chances. Barely eighteen, we were bordering on being fully grown human beings, but we had the minds of infants. The only things that mattered were sex — where to g
et, how to get it, how to not get pregnant — the best place to score hash, buy cheap booze and where was a safe place to drink it.

  The summer of 1980 was still ours. No matter what Karen and Jill thought about their future careers, our childlike minds kept calling us out to play, and we answered that call, enjoying those first months of freedom as adults. We spent long lazy days on the seafront, walking, talking, larking about. It was perfect. Joe and his friends would join us on the bull wall. We were paired off like mating gerbils at an alarming rate. We swapped boyfriends and girlfriends so many times, every day brought juicy new gossip. Jill was with Matt. Matt was with Karen. Karen was with Joe. Joe was with Mary. Mary was with Anne. With Anne?

  Up from the country, friends of friends. The group expanded; the circle widened. It was all just cavorting camaraderie. Nobody took anything seriously. Matt was always the centre of attention. He was the wild card, the one who made everybody laugh. He did handstands on the wall and cartwheels across the grass.

  He could have fallen and broken his neck. He could have toppled over into the sea. He would have done anything to amuse us, and did. His eyes were constantly bloodshot and he disappeared regularly to a house on the front, always returning a bit crazier. No one took any of this seriously, except me. I was worried about Matt. I couldn’t understand the others not noticing just how out of control he was. It was impossible to get close to him. First, because there was a queue of girls wanting his attention. Secondly, he rarely seemed able to hold an intelligent conversation. It was funny, but looking back it was sad really. The cards were already being marked for Matt. Somewhere inside, I had a sneaking suspicion that things would go wrong eventually. This was an ironic sixth sense of mine, for I didn’t behave any better.

  I went through about ten boyfriends, none of whom I felt particular interest in. I still pined for Matt and my sense of inadequacy remained intact. My feeble fumblings with other boys behind the toilets and shelters did nothing to alleviate that sense of failure. I had wanted it to be Matt. It had been Matt, but I really wanted to try again and make perfect what had gone wrong. I was sure, given the right opportunity, we would have another chance. Sadly, Matt drifted, becoming more and more withdrawn, sullen and sensitive.

  Often we would pile into the back of Matt’s van and take off to the dunes.

  The dunes was where the serious stuff happened. If you went down there, you had better be prepared. Full sex was imminent. The dunes acted as marvellous camouflage and the weather made full intercourse more than a possibility. I declined any offer to get down to it on the dunes. A hand in my knickers was permissible. Sand in my knickers was not.

  On one of these evenings, Joe arrived with a six-pack.

  ‘It’s Jesus,’ Karen smiled.

  ‘With a perm,’ Jill added.

  We were knee-deep in the waves with our trousers rolled up. I saw the poodle-like head approach and almost fell over in the water. We could hear voices from Matt’s van. Hysterical laughter.

  ‘What the hell are they doing up there?’ I asked Joe.

  ‘Matt’s locked. The wheel has become embedded in the sand and they can’t get the van out. Come on, you lot, give us a helping hand.’

  We vaulted up the strand, six-pack under Joe’s arm, Karen and Jill squealing as their bare toes scraped against the rough pebbles.

  We reached the van and stared in confusion. Peter, a quieter member of the gang, was lying face down in the sand. He was covered from head to toe in brown masking tape. Matt and his cronies thought it was hilarious. It was. Peter mumbled through his gagged mouth. They had done a good job.

  ‘What the fuck have they done to you! You mad bastards!’ Jill was trying hard not to laugh. Matt was rolling around the sand, unable to stop laughing. Joe and I picked Peter up and put him in a sitting position. He slid back down, unable to hold himself. He was as drunk as the rest of them. Joe pulled the tape off his mouth.

  ‘Be Jaysus, it’s Jaysus,’ he slurred.

  We laughed until we were sick. Joe and I undid the tape piece by piece. It was getting dark and the van wasn’t budging. Jill and Karen pushed from behind. Joe and I dug a hole around the sunken tyre with our hands. The more we dug, the worse we made it. It was stuck fast. It wasn’t going anywhere. Matt kept his foot on the accelerator. The wheel sped round and round, moving deeper into the groove. There was nothing for it but to bed down for the night, and face some angry exchanges the following morning.

  Karen and Jill rolled up in the back of the van. Joe and I curled up in the passenger seat. I slept on his lap. We were all tired and drunk. I would have slept on a bed of nails.

  Joe cuddled me close and kissed me lightly on the neck. I let him. He was warm and soft. Without warning, he fell asleep and snored heavily in my ear. I drifted off to the sound of the lapping waves moving ever closer by the minute. The quarter moon shone through the window, casting a dim light on the bodies in the back. What a mad bunch of lunatics we were; we could have been swept out to sea!

  In the morning there was panic. Matt and Joe walked to a telephone kiosk and contacted the police. They gave them a cock and bull story about the van — claimed it had been stolen the previous night. A tow truck arrived and we all went home.

  There was murder to face. I was lectured on ‘responsibility’ again. I realised that I had better get my skates on. The summer was drawing to a close and I had no job. What amazed me was how the others ‘suddenly’ had jobs. Either through parents, or family connections, everybody seemed to know what they were doing. I bought a newspaper and saw a small ad for an assistant in a jewellery shop in Grafton Street. I went for an interview and to my surprise was offered the job immediately.

  Jill and Karen got average results in their Leaving Cert. Both did go back to school to repeat, in the hope of attaining higher grades. Karen never made it past the first year. She went to work for her father in the catering trade. Jill stuck with it. I was surprised.

  A new world was opening up to us. Slowly, but surely, in the following years, we gradually turned into adults.

  Joe never really took to office jobs, of which he had plenty. He worked for a transport firm as a courier, then he moved to a truck rental company. Then he made a living out of stocking up cigarette machines in pubs. He even wore a suit and tie one day. It just wasn’t him. I liked Joe, because he was like me. We didn’t know what we wanted, either of us. We were experimenting with different things. I was surprised to find I made a good sales assistant. In the quiet moments, I cleaned the silver and rearranged the display cabinets.

  Years passed quickly. We were hitting our twenties and were permitted to drink legally now. We frequented more stylish clubs like Saints and Tamangoes. We were perfecting our social skills as well as our careers.

  From 1982, things started to plummet in Ireland. Jobs became scarce. Some of us were lucky, some of us weren’t. Money was tight and the climate was explosive. Everybody felt the crunch, mostly at home. Our parents struggled to hold on to their jobs. Those in small companies fared the worst. One collapsed, then another and the domino effect took hold. In truth, the Depression had been building for some years, but as youngsters we didn’t take it seriously. Not until it made a personal impact.

  Karen was in luck. Her father’s trade boomed mysteriously. Some put it down to the fact that the economic Depression whetted people’s appetites. The same went for the entertainment business. It, too, was making a profit. People wanted escapism. People wanted to forget. To relax, leave their cares and worries behind.

  We met regularly in the evenings to discuss the state of the country. Suddenly we were taking an interest in the economy. We were forced to. Joe’s father had taken a redundancy package at the age of fifty-five and he never expected to work again. The redundancy payment was dangled before him, as it was many others, like a carrot. He took it to pay off his mounting debts. Soon it would run out. Joe was annoyed with his father.

  ‘What would you have done?’ h
e challenged Jill.

  ‘I would have taken it,’ she said assuredly.

  ‘He’ll never work again, he’s too old now. Who’s going to give him another job? It’s hard enough for us and we’re young. He hasn’t a chance.’ He spat on the carpet angrily.

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ I remarked, not getting the point at all. My father was lucky to work for the railways. There was no chance of his job being sliced.

  ‘There has to be food on the table,’ Karen said flatly. ‘We don’t know what it’s like to have all those bills. Hey, we just hand up a few bob every week. There’s a mortgage and ESB and gas and phone…’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Joe sneered.

  ‘I’d pay the fucking bills. He did the right thing, Joe,’ Jill repeated.

  ‘Since when did you become an economist?’ he shouted at her.

  ‘Hey. Calm down,’ I intervened.

  Silence descended on our group. The pub was packed to capacity. People talking about the state of the nation. People talking about having no money. People spending money on drink and cigarettes that they couldn’t afford. Might as well enjoy it. Spend the few pounds talking, instead of doing anything about the situation.

  We knew what was wrong with Joe. We knew the real reason for his resentment. It was self-blame. Joe hadn’t managed to stay put in an office job for long. If he’d made a better effort at securing a permanent job, he might have been able to give something back. He was feeling partly responsible for his family’s financial troubles. It was easy for us to pontificate. We were OK. Our parents looked after us, made sure we were fed, dressed and so on. There were other families bordering on the poverty line.

  Joe’s family had become another statistic. His father was joining the dole queues along with the other men. We didn’t understand the effect this had on the whole family. Joe wanted to do something about it, but he couldn’t.

  A group had formed in the back of the pub. I noticed Matt standing on the table with a bottle, miming to a very bad rendition of ‘Whiskey in the Jar’.