You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here

by Frances Macken

  ‘Poor Aidan,’ I murmur to Maeve, who’s suddenly materialised in a pink high-necked creation. ‘No matter how much time goes by, people won’t let him get on with his life.’ We attend to the dance floor for ‘Rock the Boat’, and our dresses soak up beer and dirt.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Evelyn shouts in my ear.

  ‘Wha’?’

  ‘Aidan’s gone home.’ I’ve deluded myself. I’m not enough of a draw for Aidan to stick it out and stay on for the evening. I feel like a sham in the old bridesmaid dress, and the crystal pins have begun dropping out onto the floor. The hairstyle couldn’t even withstand ‘Rock the Boat’.

  The rest of the night is a washout, and I’m disturbed to see Peadar drinking shots with Daithí and Donnacha Cooney at half past midnight. You get the feeling that Peadar would say and do anything to keep the right people feeling friendly towards him. I feel badly for Maeve too, who’s pinned to the wall with Kenneth’s tongue down her throat, and him mauling her. The state of the pair of them. It’s a pity she doesn’t have much going for her, but what can be done about it.

  ‘Katie.’

  My stomach tightens. My heart gadunks.

  ‘I’m here to say sorry. About the other evening.’ Aidan’s called to the house to see me and he’s standing under the porch looking sheepish. ‘I’m sure you had a line of fellas waiting to ask you to go with them. And you went to so much trouble. I fucked it all up.’

  ‘It wasn’t much trouble.’ I’m smiling apologetically, as though I’m the one in the wrong.

  ‘You didn’t have to take me along but you did, and all I could think about was myself.’

  ‘I had a great night, sure.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind, but I know exactly what he’s like. He’s an arsehole with drink on him. He’s an arsehole without drink as well.’

  ‘It was natural to react as you did.’

  ‘I’m sorry anyway. I shouldn’t have stormed off,’ he says, grimacing and scratching his ear. ‘It won’t be long now until we’re all going our separate ways.’

  It hasn’t really struck me before now. We’re hurtling towards the end of it all. We’re about to embark on a new adventure, and take a new trajectory.

  ‘It’ll be strange alright,’ I say.

  ‘You’re going up to Dublin.’

  ‘I am. I got the letter this morning. What’s on the cards for yourself?’

  ‘Sports science. Sligo. Peadar said he’d batter me if I didn’t apply for something.’

  ‘What’s he hoping to do himself?’

  ‘You wouldn’t know by him. He’s changeable. He’s even thinking of joining up with the Cassidys, like Dad, and driving for them. He said the money is decent and he’d get to see a bit of the world. He might go on to college in a few years’ time.’ Is he only stringing Evelyn along with talk of going to Dublin? He mightn’t go at all yet. It’d suit me fine if he didn’t go.

  ‘Each to their own. I think he’d enjoy it.’

  ‘We must all make the effort to meet up from time to time,’ he says wistfully.

  ‘We must. Good luck, Aidan.’ He opens his mouth, and closes it, and then he turns his back and he’s gone. I suppose he only sees me as a friend.

  Mammy says I’ll never feel as intensely as I feel now, at the age that I am. She says the emotion gets worn out of a person. It sounds like a comfort to have the emotion worn out of you.

  I hadn’t heard from Evelyn in three days. It was most unlike her, as she was always phoning me up and wanting me to call in to see her. It turned out she got a letter telling her she hadn’t been successful in getting into the art college. Alma offered to go up to Dublin to try and sort it out. Mammy heard from Alma that Evelyn had threatened suicide. She’d been screaming and crying, wouldn’t eat or sleep, and was out of her mind. Alma said she had to call Doctor Fitz to go into the house and sedate her. Doctor Fitz is the doctor in Glenbruff, an old man who never formally retired, and the elderly people still go to him, but anyone with a bit of sense goes out of the town to the medical centre in Adragule.

  It’s a hot day, but Evelyn is lying in bed wearing a tracksuit and a dressing gown over it. She’s spun herself around in the sheets and she’s facing the wall, her long hair splayed across the pillow. She looks small and vulnerable and bundled up. Your heart would break for her. ‘Evelyn,’ I say, kneeling gingerly by the side of the bed.

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘I heard the bad news.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘It’s not the end of the world, you know.’ I place my hand on her shoulder, and she turns and has a glassy look in her eyes. She’s been put on something awful strong. It’s like she’s been hit with a poison dart.

  ‘My life is over,’ she whimpers, dry-mouthed.

  ‘Don’t say that. You can still do everything you want to do. You can apply again in a year.’

  She takes a deep breath. ‘I’m not spending a year of my life fucking around trying to get onto a fucking course. I don’t even want to go there any more. The facilities were shit. The interview people were dicks and the pubs were shit. Fuck them all.’

  ‘Okay, well, what do you think you’d like to do instead?’

  ‘I don’t fucking know, do I. I can’t have a conventional life. I’ll die.’

  ‘What about the teaching?’ I quip.

  ‘Fucking teachers,’ she cries and laughs and hiccups all at once. ‘Totalitarian bitches.’

  ‘Do you know what, I’m not a bit worried about you, Evelyn Cassidy. I know you’re going to figure it out. You’re going to surprise us all. You’re going to make it one day.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘I know so. You’re pure magic, so you are.’ She’s pure magic. I’ve always felt it. I’ve always believed in Evelyn Cassidy.

  ‘Thanks, Katie. Will you go out and get Mam to make me a cup of tea and bring in the Rich Tea biscuits.’ I still believe that Evelyn will achieve greatness in one guise or another. Once the sedatives wear off, and she shakes off the pain of rejection, she’ll go on to do something unexpected. Something outlandish. Remarkable. She has that sort of an aura about her. You couldn’t help but believe in her.

  It happens some days later that Pearl Powers phones up Amperloc on Evelyn’s behalf, and they offer her a contract in the customer care department. ‘I’ll do it for a short while. Put a few bob together and move up to Dublin. I won’t be long after you.’ I think Evelyn has plenty of money for moving up to Dublin. All she has to do is ask Dan. Any time Dan was in Angelo’s he had big rolls of money stuffed in his trouser pockets, and he’d make a scene out of peeling off a fresh, crisp note.

  ‘Fantastic.’

  ‘Don’t be kissing anyone’s hole while you’re up there. And don’t get into any five-year lease or anything because we’ll be getting our own place.’

  ‘Alright, boss.’ If the dream means as much to Evelyn as it does to me, I’ve no need to worry.

  Evelyn has decided that she wants to go and see the Vaudeville. ‘We’ll only go for an hour. Come on,’ she pleads. ‘We’ll pull up, and we’ll walk around, and then we’ll head off again. Sure, what else are we doing. I’m bored stiff.’

  ‘How are we getting there?’

  ‘I’ll get Peadar or Aidan to take us,’ she says smugly, having triumphed over me.

  ‘Is Maeve coming?’

  ‘Ah no. She’d shit herself.’

  My parents had met at the Vaudeville, the only dance hall for miles around. Hundreds of young people used to come there from all over the county and beyond. Daddy would cycle to the Vaudeville all the way from Glenbruff, and Mammy would get a lift over from Adragule when she was down home from Dublin and visiting her family. ‘People got very dressed up,’ Mammy told me. ‘They had a photographer taking pictures of couples and gangs of friends. He used to develop them in a darkroom out the back and you could buy them at the end of the night. Myself and Hillary were in our element.’ Mammy hasn’t kept any of the photographs, and Daddy won’t talk
about the Vaudeville at all. On a Saturday night in December 1980, there was a tragic fire killing eighteen young people. Daddy was there, and a cousin of his, Bríd Devane, had died. Bríd was a wilful girl of fifteen who hadn’t permission to go out for the night, but she went along anyway when her parents were gone up to bed.

  ‘Where’s Peadar?’ Evelyn enquires, and Aidan shrugs. Dunno. Aidan’s not nearly as friendly as he used to be. He’s gone awfully sullen. Something of him has been lost. Only last week Father Christopher postponed all upcoming football matches between Glenbruff and Saint Malachy’s Parish. The rivalry between the two communities has taken a sinister turn: Donnacha and Daithí Cooney have been hoicking gobs of phlegm at Aidan on the pitch, and a fifteen-year-old forward has had his collarbone broken. The clubhouse has been broken into and the wiring torn out of it, and someone did their business on top of a bench.

  A fence has been erected around the Vaudeville, a rectangular block with scorched walls. The roof is burned away, or fallen in. I can’t tell from where I’m standing. The casing on an old neon sign is still attached to the front wall, though the lettering has faded off it. A notice says: PRIVATE PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING.

  ‘Come on. We’ll go in,’ Evelyn says, gazing at the blackened building beyond the fence. I can feel my heartbeat in my throat. A cold sweat rises across my shoulders and in the dip of my back.

  ‘We’ll be trespassing,’ I say weakly. I imagine Daddy as a young man running for the exit and colliding with flailing limbs, and flames leaping over the fabric ceiling. I imagine desperate people fighting to get into the building to find siblings and friends and neighbours and being restrained. I imagine bodies covered with coats laid out on the gravel.

  ‘It’s only an aul sign,’ she says. I walk behind her, hyper-aware of every step I’m taking. The gravel in the car park is wild with papery red poppies and assorted weeds. I’m fearful that I’ll see a flutter ahead of me, the flash of a spectre.

  ‘I’d prefer to stay out here. Ye go on ahead. Don’t be too long,’ Aidan mutters, jamming his hands in his pockets before stalking briskly to the car.

  Myself and Evelyn make our way inside the Vaudeville. We trudge about the space, the sunken floor like a green lagoon. Ferns have sprung up, dock leaves with burgundy stems, and ivy-like plants straggle along the ground, all emitting a green glow. Our footsteps snap broken glass. I lean down and take a picture of the melted sole of a shoe set in a scrap of old lino. Tsch.

  ‘You must show me the pictures when you get them developed. There might be orbs.’

  ‘What’s an orb?’

  ‘It’s how a spirit looks when you take a picture of it. Like a ball of light. This is the sort of a place that’d be a portal to another dimension. It’s a place of significance.’ She strolls about, nonchalantly kicking the ground. ‘I’d be watchful of him, you know,’ she says, like an afterthought.

  ‘Who? Aidan?’

  ‘I’d say he had something to do with it. With Pamela’s disappearance.’

  I look at her, puzzled. ‘Sure, we know Aidan wouldn’t have done anything like that.’

  ‘I think we should be careful under the circumstances,’ she says, darting her eyes and lowering her voice. ‘A cold-blooded killer doesn’t require a motive.’

  ‘He has an alibi, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Alibi, my hole. It’s only Peadar saying Aidan came in the door at ten past seven. Saying they sat down together and watched the Late Late Show from beginning to end. They’re brothers anyway, so it doesn’t count.’ A bird flaps out of a hollow in the wall. ‘You’ve a thing for Aidan. You don’t see what everyone else can see. You don’t know what he’s really like.’

  ‘I do not have a thing for him. I never said I had a thing for him.’ What is it that everyone else can see? What’s Aidan really like?

  ‘You don’t need to say it. You’re a pure spa when he’s anywhere near you.’

  ‘I am not. Go away out of that.’

  As we drive away from the Vaudeville, inching along the ruined road, I think of the people rushing over fields, leaping over ditches and raising the alarm at houses nearby. I think of the Ford Granada squad cars coming at speed, their sirens wailing.

  From the back seat, I can see the reflection in the rear-view mirror. I see Aidan’s face, intent and watchful, and Evelyn dipping her head to inspect her split ends.

  There’s an old story about the Vaudeville. That if you’re driving by at night and look into your rear-view mirror you might see a phantom passenger in the back seat. Someone looking to get home after the big fire. There’s people who’ve sworn to have had the phantom passengers and they’ve never been right after it.

  We’ve a banger of an olive-coloured car that takes a few goes to get started. Daddy has to wom-wom-wom with his shoe on the accelerator, and it’s a risky manoeuvre as the car has been known to shoot off unexpectedly. We can’t park in car parks in case the car bolts forward and hits another car, or even a person, and it goes without saying that it’s too much of a gamble to go all the way up to Dublin in it. I end up saying my goodbyes to Mammy and Daddy at the train station in Glenbruff.

  ‘You’re just as good as any of them,’ Daddy says. ‘Let nobody think they’re any better than you.’

  ‘Have a fresh start, Katie,’ Mammy says. ‘Go off and enjoy yourself. And no matter what happens, don’t be rushing home. There’s nothing here for you.’ I peck Daddy on the cheek and I embrace Mammy and then I board the train. I spy Dylan Hartigan a few seats ahead of me and take a magazine and raise it up in front of my face. There’s nothing worse than being trapped in conversation with a dry person on a train.

  With the journey underway, I think about Evelyn staying behind and going to work in Amperloc, the same as Maeve is doing. It’s a pity she couldn’t come up to Dublin at the same time as myself, but it looks like she’ll be up before long. I think of Aidan going to college in Sligo, starting a new life for himself, and Peadar getting a licence to drive an arctic truck around France and Spain. And I think of Pamela Cooney, who’s either someplace and dancing, or no place and dead. I wonder if we’ll ever know one way or another. It’s a full eight months since she vanished, and the more time that goes by, the less she crosses my mind. Her name is as flimsy as ‘Princess Diana’; when I hear mention of Pamela Cooney, the words glide past me with little effect. The only hint of her now is a cellophane cone of crispy brown roses left down by the handball alley.

  I’m regularly lost on the university campus. I have to consult a map with minuscule triangles and tiny shoe prints, and I end up in the wrong place. I feel like a blood cell rushing in a vein, coasting past countless faces and bodies. A crescendo of noise bookends each lecture, and the halls are enormous caverns, with rows upon rows of broad-smiling strangers. I turn to three or four people and say that I didn’t catch the bit about the exam, or ask what was the name of the book mentioned, and I get to know the odd person that way, but I feel a bit daft for doing it. Most of the girls at university have come up in big numbers from the same Dublin schools and go around in ready-made middle-class gangs of friends, and it seems they’ve their friends already made and don’t need any more.

  I share an apartment with the Creighton twins, Nuala and Norma, in a high-rise in Stillorgan. Their father is a big dairy farmer and he bought the apartment for them. The place reeks of the chemical scent of hair removal cream and the vinegar tang of cheap synthetic clothing. They’d another girl in the room for a week before me, but she turned out to be a safety hazard. The girl left a boiling egg on the hob until it exploded and blew a hole in the plaster ceiling. ‘It went off like a grenade,’ Norma said as she was showing me around the place. ‘We couldn’t trust her after that. We had to show her the door.’

  Nuala and Norma are from New Ross, and they are thin, anodyne girls with curly hair and pointed noses who never have any luck meeting fellas. Norma has a high forehead and a Filofax and Nuala has neither. They’re humourless. Like a pair of wet logs in a fire
, the spark of devilment won’t catch. Nuala and Norma say that country girls have to stick together up in Dublin, and look out for one another, which is a nice sentiment but borderline forceful. Nonetheless, they’re good-natured girls and Nuala in particular is easy to talk to. ‘I don’t know if I belong up here at all. I feel like I don’t fit in,’ I find myself telling her.

  ‘Everyone has that feeling. Myself and Norma are in the same boat. You’re only up a wet week. You have to give it time.’ Nuala’s ironing a pair of jeans inside out. I’ve never known anyone to iron their jeans. I can’t see the point of it.

  ‘I don’t want to give it time.’

  ‘That sort of thinking is no use to you. You can’t live in…where did you say?’

  ‘Glenbruff.’

  Nuala screws up her features and sets the iron aside, a heft of steam rising from it. ‘Didn’t a girl turn up missing down there not so long ago?’ I don’t know how could a person turn up and be missing as well.

  ‘I don’t know too much about it.’

  ‘Well. As I was saying. You can’t live in Glenbruff for the rest of your life. You left for a reason. This is a new chapter. You have to make the most of it.’

  ‘I don’t know, Nuala. I’m finding it hard.’

  ‘That’s why us country girls have to stick together,’ she says resolutely, heaving the iron back and forth. ‘You can hang out with myself and Norma. We’re going to go out every week. We’ll be the ones in demand, wait and see.’ I can’t see how Nuala and Norma will ever be in demand.

  ‘It’s just weird being here without my friend. We’re supposed to be up here together.’

  ‘She hasn’t died, you know. You’ll make plenty of friends yet. Haven’t you made friends with myself and Norma?’ I nod out of courtesy. It’ll be great when Evelyn moves up to Dublin. We’ll find our own place, and get the show on the road for once and for all.