by Neil Hegarty
They squeeze through the gap in the hedge, and the ground falls away a little, and then they are in the field, their own field. The sun is warmer, the wind is less, the air smells as green as grass. And the donkey, surely the donkey is pleased to see them. They have no Crunchies today, and the donkey doesn’t like bananas – but Maeve has saved up half an apple, and now the donkey takes the half-apple carefully into its mouth, and its long brown teeth crunch into the apple. The donkey blinks.
‘Maybe it’s donkey for thank you,’ Maeve speculates, ‘the blink.’
‘Should we blink back?’
‘We should.’
It might be rude, the girls think, not to blink. So they blink.
This is where it began, thought Roisin, sitting very still at the kitchen table and looking down at her sweetcorn, and remembering, remembering, quickly, quickly, before it all went away.
The great granite rock in the middle of the donkey’s field is warm in the sunshine: it wells with the sun’s heat, and it glints and gleams like tiny jewels, like – yes, diamonds. The girls sit against the rock, and the donkey browses the grass. He pulls up long, juicy stems of green grass by the roots, and crunches them down, while the girls listen. This is their own warm, silent, safe kingdom. Roisin, and Maeve, five and eight years old, together in a small, still, grass-smelling bowl of green.
This is perfection.
10
Something to remember, then: a glint in a rock, to catch her eye and her memory, and bring her back to a green field, and a full stomach, a warm sun, and the smell of the sea.
And here was another time, now arrived. She had put away her white dress, what Maeve called her wedding dress of First Holy Communion. All the parties, and the excitement: all that was over, which was sad – no more money – but now there was another chance for excitement, and for God to be magical, and for Roisin and all the girls to whirl in excitement, and Miss Glackin not able to stop them.
First of all, a statue of the Madonna, in some place two counties away, or three, or four, walking, and weeping. People claimed to have seen it, to have reported their sightings to the priest, to the authorities. The television cameras were sent from Dublin, first, and then from London and from all over the place. ‘Laughing at us,’ said her father, ‘and what have they to laugh about?’
Laughing, the news said, at the Irish and their ways. What, they said: it walked? And wept? – did the tears consist of blood, perhaps?
Well, they could jeer all they liked.
Roisin listened to the girls whisper in the classroom. She whispered herself, about this walking, talking, moving statue. Not in their own county, which was a pity: their own county would have been best. It was somewhere else, some other county. But still, it was good enough – now it emerged that their own Holy Mary, their very own statue standing, that had stood always, white and blue and gold, in the long corridor that led down towards the assembly hall: she too had moved? Had she whispered and wept? Did she clamber down from her pedestal and, weeping, did she walk the long white corridors of the school after dark, when the girls had gone home, and the place fallen silent?
She did, the girls whispered, in the classroom, at break, over their sandwiches at lunchtime.
She did, they told each other, and she had.
‘Enough, girls!’ said Miss Glackin, and fingered her ruler. ‘Enough whispering,’ said the teacher on playground duty, ‘get out there and run about!’ But there was nothing they could do; and there were no boys to break up the girls’ huddles with fists and footballs and clods of dirt; the news spread unchecked.
Someone had seen their own walking, weeping Holy Mary: nobody knew who had seen her, but someone had. A fact was a fact.
And now these facts could be related by Roisin, too. She had seized her moment, she was now a witness. She had studied Holy Mary at her leisure, and watched her eyes, and taken in the granite pedestal, and the mica in the granite winking in the clear light from the windows. The sparkle made anything possible. It made her think of happiness. And now.
‘It’s a fact,’ she reported. The shepherd’s pie cooled.
She was going to stand her ground. She didn’t know what was going to happen, but she could see Maeve already squaring her shoulders, getting ready to be sharp, to laugh, to tell her to catch herself on. But that was alright. Roisin knew better: she knew with her own eyes. And there was more. It was bluebell season now, and Holy Mary, on her glinting pedestal, was enjoying her May altar. Surrounded by glass jars of bluebells (though it seems a shame, she’d heard one of the nuns say to another of the nuns, a shame to pick them when they wilt so fast), jars of bluebells picked up in Carter’s Wood, blue to match Holy Mary’s too-long, sadly drooping blue cloak.
Bluebells, and whispered stories, and her own eyes: they’d stand her in good stead. They’d fire her up, Maeve squaring her shoulders or not. She could face up to her big sister, with her mouth tight and her eyes like slits sitting over her shepherd’s pie, and sweetcorn and greens.
Maeve will surely go to Hell if she isn’t careful. There’ll be no bluebells for her, not down there.
She watched Maeve glance at their daddy, she watched as Maeve opened her mouth.
‘Would you ever catch yourself on,’ Maeve said.
Boldly, too bold.
‘She’s probably right now banging her stone head against the stone wall at the thought of how stupid you all are,’ Maeve said.
What a sin.
Roisin said, ‘That’s a bad thing to say. A sinful thing to say.’ Because she knew about sin. Miss Glackin had made them draw a picture of their souls, last month, for Religion. And Roisin had drawn a big circle on her page, the shape and the size of one of their own plates, at home, and she’d taken a black crayon, and drawn smudges inside the circle, all across the circle, and she’d smudged the black crayon marks with her finger, and Miss Glackin had taken her page and held it up in front of the class – she was in a good mood that day – and given Roisin ten out of ten for her soul, and a gold star for her table, and had pinned the picture of Roisin’s soul, with its black-smudged sins, in the Art Corner.
So yes: Roisin knew about souls, she knew about sin.
If their parents were not right there, she knew what she would do, she would start a fight with Maeve – and smudge her soul some more, but it’d be worth it – but she couldn’t start a fight, because there Daddy was, which meant loud voices were off the table.
‘That’s right, Roisin,’ said Daddy.
Daddy must be on her side today. He wasn’t on her side every day – it was so hard to tell – but today he must be.
‘I suppose she has to pass Eternity somehow,’ said Maeve, later, as they all sat in their front room watching the news. ‘Holy Mary, I mean. She has to put in the time somehow.’
So, there was a knack. And now – look, Maeve had forgotten it herself. Roisin watched as their parents glanced across at Maeve, Daddy in one way and Mammy in another: and then Daddy crossed the carpet and turned up the volume on the television, and Roisin saw that Maeve saw this for what it was, a last and final warning, and remembered the knack, and kept her mouth shut.
*
Later though, when she and Roisin were in their narrow beds in their bedroom: later, Maeve tried again, more daringly. ‘Statues don’t move,’ she said into the darkness, to the beloved little sister whom she would move heaven and earth to protect. ‘They just don’t, Roisin.’ Maeve felt caught, tormented, by the moral rectitude that emanated like gamma rays from her true believer of a sister. Maeve had been there herself, once. There is enough of this already in this bloody country, thought Maeve, without having it blast its way in through the front door of their own house too.
Yet she could see that there was no talking to Roisin, not at this time, not for the moment. A walking, weeping stone Virgin, with added bluebells, was more than a match for Maeve’s disbelief, her unbelief. That much was crystal clear. She would just have to wait and be patient. Roisin woul
d wise up.
But she couldn’t just stay silent.
‘Would you have a bit of sense,’ she told Roisin. ‘A bit of bloody sense. Who believes,’ she said, ‘in this stuff? Who believes in it, anyway?’
But Roisin believed that she believed. Fervently, in the semi-darkness (for the May twilight lingered outside, and the bedroom curtains weren’t lined) she renewed once more her belief. Maeve could feel it.
‘I do,’ Roisin said, and she meant it.
‘Then you’re an eejit,’ Maeve told her, beginning to drowse, for it had been a long day, and a weight of truth and knowledge weighed her down, these days. Eleven years old, and more and more she was weighed down.
‘I wish you’d let me help you.’
Silence.
‘An eejit,’ Maeve repeated, in low tones: now her eyes were closing, and sleep beckoned, and – or because – Roisin was safe enough, for now.
Roisin herself lay awake for several more minutes, and her mind studied sparkle, and the glint of tears on Holy Mary’s cheek. Maeve didn’t really understand – but Roisin did. This was the road to happiness. She saw this road stretch in front of her feet. Smooth and straight, without a hump, without a bump. The donkey in the field, the sun pouring down like melted butter, and now Holy Mary and her tears and her bluebells – they were all the same. Maeve would see this too, in the end.
*
It would pass. It would never do to have a sister growing up and behaving like that. Not many did, not any more. Though – well, no, this was hardly the case; there were plenty of them still, more than enough. Later that night, as Maeve woke and looked into the dimness, she knew that there was a good deal of this rubbish around. And maybe that was fair enough.
Just not for Roisin.
And besides, it was also the case that the world was speeding up, was moving on in the last few years, and this was a good thing, for Maeve. The world could not move rapidly enough. They were in Europe, now, the world was coming to get them. She never looked back, she was never tempted to do so. Onward, onward. What use is there in looking back? There is no use. She could not wait to move on and grow up, she could not wait for Roisin to move on – especially from this tiresome present phase – and grow up. She would whisk her away, to a wide world, to safety. They would go abroad, maybe, to London, or France, or America. Faye Dunaway looked down patiently from the wall. Maeve turned in her narrow bed, and closed her eyes, and slept again.
11
Maeve looked.
School was over for the day: and usually she was part of the crowd flowing out of the school gates, and away. But today, she stood in against the hedge and watched them stream ahead of her. They seemed loud, boisterous in a way that she hadn’t noticed before. Branches and twigs nudged her back.
A few weeks previously, the boys, across the road in their school, had been lectured about self-abuse. This was the news they told, as they left school, and mingled with the girls. They had even been asked by Mr Carney, the French teacher – but also the Religion teacher – whether they’d indulged in it, indulged in self-abuse.
‘What, just like that?’ Maeve had asked. They were walking towards the town centre, a gaggle of boys and a gaggle of girls, trailing towards town and home, as usual. The school buses had departed, whisking away the country ones; the crowds were thinning as pupils beat a retreat. ‘What did you say?’ What, she thought, what would you say?
Michael Clancy shrugged. He was her pal – her ‘chum’, as he said, and a fruit, which everyone knew, and nobody seemed to care about, Michael himself least of all. He shrugged. ‘I said, Yes, sir, of course, sir, would you like a demonstration, sir? You can join me if you like, sir. Would you like that, sir? I think you would, sir, from the way you’re licking your lips, sir.’
Mr Carney, with his daddy-long-legs limbs, and his sharp-ended nose. She laughed. ‘What did you say, really?’
‘Oh, you know, I let on I didn’t know what he was on about, so I made him explain it to me.’ Michael sniggered. ‘Right down to the last detail. I don’t really understand what you mean, sir. It was good craic, so it was, seeing him go red like that.’
‘What did the other fellas say?’
‘The same. Sure, you wouldn’t miss a chance like that. It’d be a disgrace, a waste.’
The two schools faced each other across the road, and it was almost as though the two were one. So Maeve liked to think. She knew every detail of life in the boys’ school, and Michael Clancy knew every detail of life in the girls’ school. They even shared sports pitches, though the boys and the girls never used them at the same time: what Maeve had heard her Maths teacher call a ‘complex algorithm’ had been formulated to prevent such a thing. They shared nothing else – and the schools, their principals, the nuns and priests on the staff, some of the parents: these conspired to keep boys and girls separate during school hours. It was better this way. Maeve knew that her father agreed with this; she wasn’t too sure what her mother thought.
Her father and the others – the authorities, the clerics, the other parents – they all thought that it was a pity that the schools had been built facing each other in the first place. All that contamination, as Maeve heard her father call it. Oh, it had been a foolish move. Maeve knew that this was the general consensus. That it had happened at all had something to do with a piece of land that a farmer had donated to the Church in the olden days – in return for a swift progress through Purgatory when the time came. This piece of land had become the sports ground: it was cheap and convenient, it was the reason for the otherwise undesirable sharing.
Today, the authorities would change things if they only could, as Maeve well knew – but such changes being impossible, they went for the next best thing, for the ‘complex algorithm’. ‘Sure, in South Africa they’d call it apartheid,’ said Michael Clancy, ‘wouldn’t they?’ But the best that they could do was to make sure that Our Lady of Victories and St Joseph’s existed in separate universes during school hours, and that was that – and what a pity, they sighed in various quarters, that such segregation could not be maintained after school too. All this Maeve knew.
She herself could not agree. School was not her thing: the basketball she did not mind, but the best part of school was walking home after it, part of a crowd, listening to Michael, crisps and a bit of chocolate from the shop to keep them going until they got home. News swapped. Some male company – high-smelling and spotty company, that was true, but beggars could not be choosers. And whoever said that the boys weren’t gossips – well, they didn’t know what they were talking about. And it wasn’t only Michael Clancy, either: all the chunky boys swinging their hurleys, they were a crowd of old women once you got them going.
Which meant that now, a few years into Our Lady of Victories, she was well up on all the news, the politics, the scandal in St Joe’s. She knew its teachers as well as if they had taught her themselves, she knew the problems, she knew the politics. The Latin teacher liked the fists from time to time; the Maths teacher liked to pick his nose and roll the snot into little balls on the palm of his hand, as though it were Plasticine, before flicking it onto the floor; the Geog teacher was a skinflint, and the boys liked to glue pennies to his desk, or his chair, or the floor, and watch him pick with his finger, or flick with the toe of his scuffed shoe, and try to ease the penny off the chair, or desk, or floor, and into his pocket.
Michael had her in stitches, telling her all this. St Joe’s sounded like a bit of fun, a bit of craic.
It certainly sounded better fun, better craic, than Our Lady of Victories, where the only thing to catch the eye and raise a laugh was the turn in Sister John’s eye. Who was Sister John looking at when she asked a question? – God alone knew; it could be anyone. ‘Me, Sister?’ ‘Who – me, Sister?’ That was OK as far as it went: but it didn’t go very far, not really. And so many of the girls right bitches. At least you knew where you stood with a boy. He’d break his hurley over your head, and you’d have to get someon
e to pick the splinters of ash out of your scalp with a pair of tweezers, but you could be friends afterwards. The girls did it differently, and some of their splinters were embedded for good.
This was the usual way of it. It was a pity that just at the moment, she had other things to think about.
All this flowed through Maeve’s mind as she stood in from the crowd, as she let them pass, as she began walking slowly home. No Michael today: he had music practice.
She was on her own.
Which was for the best, when you had a problem to solve. It had come to her that Roisin might have some angle on her problem, that she might have some facts and figures gleaned from one of her library books that could help find a solution, had even mentioned to Roisin that she had some news for her; but – no, that would be a mistake. No way. It was her job to shield Roisin. It had always been her job.
‘Sure, nobody’ll know,’ the boy had said. The pebbledash of the youth club wall was cold and unpleasant against her back, the dusk was coming down and the damp too, it wasn’t what you would call romantic. ‘I wouldn’t tell anyone, would I? And you won’t either.’
Hardly.
‘I’ll be careful,’ he said, but Maeve had no idea what he meant. Maybe there was a way of being careful, and then she realised she was about to find out, for he took her silence for agreement, and off he went. He had set his hurley propped against the wall, and after a minute he must have kicked it with an excited foot, for it fell with a clatter; and after another minute it was all over. Zip up, and shirt tails tidied away; and she supposed the pain would pass in another minute. Nobody ever mentioned that it hurt. And how had he been careful?