‘How are you getting on?’ Mammy enquires on the phone. ‘Have you made any nice friends?’
‘No. I haven’t. Not one.’
‘Ah, sure. You just haven’t met the right people yet.’
‘Mm.’
‘I suppose you’re missing the Cassidy girl.’
‘Mm. I am.’ I’m missing her badly.
‘Evelyn Cassidy is the sort of a person who likes to be a big fish in a small pond. The likes of her will never leave Glenbruff. She’d be too afraid of becoming a nobody.’
I hope Mammy’s wrong, but she’s often right.
‘When are you coming down to see us?’ Evelyn’s phoned between lectures. It’s bad timing. They’re after changing the lecture hall to another building, and they won’t allow us in if we’re late.
‘Christmas, I’d say.’
‘Christmas,’ she exclaims. ‘Jesus. That’s ages away.’
‘I’ll never settle in if I’m always running home.’
‘I suppose,’ she says, sighing. ‘I’ll come up to you, so. I’ll tell them I’m sick.’
‘Do that. I’d better go anyway. I’ve a lecture.’
Dry autumn leaves skate around our feet. Evelyn and myself meander through the campus amidst thousands of students milling about in their new college outfits. ‘Look at them all,’ she says disdainfully. ‘Look at them all dressed the same and thinking the same thoughts.’ The student bar is thronged with fresh-faced first years yammering in excited registers, and everywhere there are student union representatives in fluorescent T-shirts passing out flyers for societies and foam parties. Evelyn rams her index fingers in her ears. ‘Let’s just go into town and have a real night out,’ she says, shuffling from one foot to the other.
‘I told the twins I’d head out with them tonight. Why don’t you come with us?’
‘I’m not going out with that pair of fannies.’ She’s handed a flyer, which she promptly scrunches in a ball and drops onto the ground.
We take the bus into town and go to a few of the upmarket bars, the likes of which we’ve never been to before, all velvet damask wallpaper and electronic dance music. ‘This is more like it,’ she says loudly, flicking her hair over her shoulder and looking around the place. It is more like it, in fairness.
In the course of our conversation, I’m careful not to make too much of my new university experience. I don’t tell her that I’m learning about art history and film history, and I don’t talk to her about the mind-bending complexities of criticism, and how it seems to me that some film-makers and artists only come up with their rationale after having created their films and art in order to make themselves out to be intentionally adroit rather than accidental geniuses.
I don’t tell her that I’ve signed up for the Film Society, and that I attended a screening of a Tarkovsky film called Mirror, and I’ve never seen anything like it. The woman sitting on the wooden fence, gazing out at the pastel pastoral and smoking a cigarette. The sound of country silence that isn’t silence at all, only nature’s whisper and the breathing of the ground. The film has me thinking of Glenbruff. Panoramas of navy-green trees and irresistible meadows vibrating with life. Evelyn won’t have heard of Tarkovsky, and I hadn’t either until last week. If I told her there’s a difference between a movie and a film, she’d say I was raving.
It isn’t long before Evelyn relays something that’s happened Maeve. Maeve left a note under the statue of Saint Jude in the church in Glenbruff, asking him to help her to find her mother, and just last week Maeve’s birth mother sent her a letter saying she wanted to see her. This incident makes Maeve more intriguing to us. We think it would be good for her to meet her mother, and it might change Maeve for the better. It might bring her closure, and help to bring her along socially. ‘She hasn’t got a lot going for her. It could be the making of her,’ Evelyn says.
‘At least we have a bit of get-up-and-go to us,’ I say, feeling sorry for Evelyn still saddled with Maeve in Glenbruff. The bond cemented with Maeve might be altogether inescapable. ‘How are the lads getting on?’
‘Aidan’s gone up to Sligo. We haven’t heard from him. Peadar’s working for Dad for a few months to see if he likes it.’
‘Right. Good.’
‘I wish you’d just come back to Glenbruff with me,’ she says after a few drinks, jabbing a slice of lemon at the bottom of her glass with a straw.
‘I can’t go back,’ I say. ‘I’m in college now.’ She can’t think I’d give up the whole lot to return to Glenbruff. There’s nothing for young people down there.
‘You’re missing out. We’ve trips organised. We’re going ghost hunting at the famine workhouse. We’re going out camping on Doona Island.’ I’ve never even heard of Doona Island. It sounds made-up. I’d say there’s no trips organised at all. ‘I never ask you for anything. I’m always doing things for you. Taking you places. Giving you ideas. The camera.’ What can she mean, giving me ideas?
‘I thought you were to come up here.’
‘I’ll come up when I’m ready to come up.’ She crosses her arms and turns to face the lit-up display of vodka bottles behind the bar. ‘You’ve changed since you’ve been up here, you know. I used to get a buzz off you but I don’t any more.’ The words are like stones flying out of her mouth and belting my skin. How have I changed? I wonder. Is it bad to change? Is it wrong to follow the dream after all we’ve discussed? And whatever about the art college, couldn’t she still get the job in a cool bar at night and work an internship during the day? And how is it that she had a way of making you think you could do anything at all, but she hasn’t managed to do very much or go very far herself?
Might it be too soon for her to be up in Dublin, confronted with all the young people embarking on new lives, or might it be that the flame of friendship is beginning to sputter. I have a magnificent terror that she’s saying goodbye to me in her own way, and there might be no coming back from it.
The student grant doesn’t stretch too far. I take part-time work as a chambermaid in the Liffey Hotel in the city centre, a budget hotel catering to all and sundry. I have to turn around eighteen rooms on the fourth floor in three hours on a Saturday, and again on a Sunday. It’s back-breaking work, lugging heavy bath towels and vacuuming deep under beds, pulling fresh sheets taut across mattresses and scrubbing toothpaste spittle off bathroom sinks, mirrors and even walls. I have to wear a bright blue tunic with a name badge on it, and wide-legged pants, and wide-fitting shoes with metal toecaps. The weekend work prevents me from heading down home to Glenbruff, but Mammy and Daddy don’t appear to mind. ‘We’re all fine here. There’s no news, nothing happening. Keep the head down.’
Not long after I start the job, I’m pushing a cart loaded with cleaning products along the corridor when I see Dan Cassidy coming out of one of the rooms. I dip down and bend my head and pretend to rummage through the detergents, and he walks past me with an attractive young woman holding several shopping bags. The young woman isn’t much older than myself and Evelyn. I had an inkling that Dan Cassidy might be that kind of a person alright.
I’m on Grafton Street, drifting by the flower sellers and dodging a glut of Spanish students wearing matching backpacks. I double-take. Is it…? Yes. It’s Maeve. Just a few feet away, in a chic camel-coloured coat, and gazing in the window of a jewellery shop. A woman joins her. A tall woman. This is no Mary Lynch. This woman is coiffed, and younger, and more radiant than any of the mothers I know. Blonde in a long black coat with black spike-heeled boots. I can see a close resemblance between the pair of them. Even a brief sighting gives it away. Maeve is flushed and healthy-looking, as though she’s imbibed some kind of elixir. She seems altered to me, poised by the edge of the street. Her grey-blue eyes are flashing and rimmed with black pencil. Her hair is thick and long, a dark shining auburn shade. Maeve and her mother enter the jewellery shop together, and a flare of winter sun strikes the glass door.
I can’t get over it. Maeve, of all people, in a be
autiful coat, drifting into a jewellery shop on Grafton Street with her regal-looking mother. I’ve seen it all now.
It’s Christmas Eve. Glenbruff is judderingly cold. The sky is crossed with clouds like wildebeest, and the air tainted by the wide-scale burning of turf.
Robert lands down to collect me from the train station. A tangerine sliver of sun rests on the horizon as we course along roads lined with bare black trees, the fields and bogs waterlogged beyond them. ‘Anything strange or startling?’ I ask of him.
‘Fuck all,’ he says, twirling the volume on the car radio. ‘How’s Dublin treating you? How’s the course?’
‘It’s tough-going. We’ve to watch an awful lot of films, and write about them and talk about them.’
‘Jesus,’ he says, giving the side eye, and it’s there and then I resolve not to discuss the course at all while I’m down home if people are so inclined to be dismissive. ‘I was talking to Peadar Morley. He’s invited us up to the house on Stephen’s Night.’
‘I’m on for that. Will you go yourself?’
He shrugs his shoulders. It’s doubtful he’ll go to the party. He’s never had much in the way of Christmas spirit.
In a low voice, he asks, ‘How’s that friend of yours?’
‘Who?’
‘Maeve Lynch. Is she seeing anyone?’
‘I don’t think so. I doubt it,’ I say, shifting uncomfortably in the passenger seat. ‘I thought you said she was a head-the-ball.’
‘I don’t remember saying that. She’s a nice-looking girl these days.’
‘Is she not a bit old for you?’
‘Sure, there’s only a year between us. I can’t see a problem.’ The thoughts of Robert meeting up with Maeve. Stepping out with her. Falling in love with her and marrying her. I have the feeling that someone’s stepped over my grave.
I’m not long in the door when Mammy informs me that Johnny Grealish had a stroke the day prior, and he’s lost the power of speech. He’s been put in a spotlessly clean room in the regional hospital, and after that he’s to be put up at Saint Fintan’s Psychiatric Hospital on a permanent basis. ‘They only agreed to take him in because he’s lost the speech. Can you believe that.’ Mammy is well acquainted with Johnny Grealish. She says that everyone’s a bit mad, it’s just some people are better at keeping a lid on it. Johnny Grealish has been in and out of Fintan’s several times over the years. He’s offended the nurses, the chaplain, the other patients and their visitors. On his most recent stay, he soiled himself deliberately and leapt about the ward laughing as the nurses chased after him. Mammy says he loved the attention. At night-time Johnny cried over his two brothers who burned to death at the Vaudeville, and his arm and his ear that he lost in the fire. The nurses took him to the therapy room, but it was a futile exercise; he could never make sense of his life and all that had happened to him. Johnny was only spouting the same tragic stories on repeat. The stroke will put an end to the stories.
Aidan’s at Midnight Mass, holding a candle embedded in a cardboard circle. The wax is falling on the fronts of his shoes but he doesn’t appear to notice. People are whispering that he looks shook. They’re saying he dropped out of his college course in Sligo, and went to a rave in a warehouse at Halloween and fried himself and didn’t sleep for a week after it. He’ll end up in Fintan’s too if he’s not careful.
On Stephen’s Night, I push the white, shrieking iron gate at the front of the Morleys’ bungalow and make my way towards the front door. I recognise the familiar cracked flower pots either side of the porch, the dried scrub poking out of them, and one pink flower vibrating in the biting air. I press the doorbell, hearing the low rumble of conversation within the house, and I rap on the window too, unable to hold myself back, wanting to get inside and have my entrance over with. I’m anxiously scuffing my shoes on the rattan mat when Peadar answers the door. He’s lanky and cross-looking, dark circles under his eyes, but still good-looking. He’s in black jeans and one of his father’s old Thin Lizzy T-shirts. ‘Peadar. Happy Christmas.’
‘Katie. You’re lookin’ well,’ he says, and then Kenneth Geraghty barges his way in in front of me, closely followed by a whooping Mickey Cassidy.
‘Where are the oars-derves,’ Mickey says, rubbing his hands. He has no coat, and his arms and hands are mottled purple with cold.
The house isn’t entirely slovenly, but has a sort of a careless look about it; there are clothes drying on radiators and pink-grey towels tossed over the backs of chairs. Crusted casts of dried mud fallen from football boots speckle the hallway. There’s hardly a decoration about the place, just a few skimpy Christmas cards slung on a string.
Inside in the sitting room, a gallery of familiar faces turns towards me. They’re neighbours, people from school, fellas Aidan used to play football with and their girlfriends. Not one of them rushes forward to greet me.
My face aches with the smiling. It’s hard work to look as though you’re enjoying a party. Maeve emerges from the kitchen. ‘Katie. You’re here.’ She’s like a different person. Her body has lengthened, unlikely as it is. She’s had her ears pinned back, and grown her hair long. Her eyebrows and nails are impeccably groomed, but nevertheless, I feel the swell of a familiar, unpleasant sensation: the recoil I’ve always experienced in her presence.
‘Hello, Maeve. It’s good to see you.’ We lean together and I kiss the air by her cheek, taking in the citrus perfume on her clavicle.
‘Can I get you a drink?’ she asks demurely.
‘Yes. Is there any white wine?’ I’ve become used to drinking white wine with Nuala and Norma on Thursday nights. They call it ‘wine o’clock’.
‘I don’t think so. There might be vodka or whiskey maybe.’ I follow Maeve into the kitchen and lean against the sideboard as she takes a glass from the cabinet and a bottle of vodka from the counter. I notice a chic little black-strapped watch with a white face and roman numerals on her ivory wrist. She hands me my drink; it’s warm, and the Coke is flat, but I drink it graciously, and another after that. Maeve tells me she’s enjoying the work at Amperloc, but she lives for the weekend. ‘You know how it is.’ She goes on to tell me that she’s been meeting with her birth mother, Amanda Dowling, over the past two months. Amanda had Maeve when she was a teenager. She owns a property company called Dexon Green, and she’s very involved in philanthropy. Her partner John is very involved in sailing yachts and Maeve’s gone out on a yacht with the two of them several times.
‘Isn’t that unreal. Good for you, Maeve. It’s done you the world of good meeting up with Amanda.’
‘I know it has. I feel like a different person. I’ve been spending an awful lot of time with her.’
‘I saw you on Grafton Street a few weeks ago. You were with a blonde woman in a long black coat.’
Maeve looks as though she could just die and go to heaven. ‘That’s Amanda. Isn’t she lovely? She got me the watch for my birthday.’ She holds up her wrist and the face of the watch catches the light.
‘Amanda has a glamorous look about her. You’re taking after her, if you don’t mind me saying.’
‘Thank you, Katie,’ she says, before placing her hand on my arm; my skin rises with prickles. ‘Will you call up to see me before you go back to Dublin? I want to talk to you about something.’
‘Okay. I could call up tomorrow.’ I hope to God she won’t be asking after Robert.
It’s late when Evelyn shows up. She’s wearing a denim jacket and a tight black dress, and a black velvet choker round her neck. Her hair whisks around her with every movement, and a cigarette hangs languidly from her lips. I rise from the couch and await her approach. She works her way about the room, hugging the local lads, smashing their cider cans against hers and hooting. Perhaps she hasn’t noticed me yet, I try to reason, but deep down I know that she has. Eventually, she turns about and comes to me. ‘Katie. I’m so fucking glad to see you.’ All at once, we’re back as we were, and over the hump. All the agonising for nothing. ‘Ho
w are the two spastic sisters?’ she says, smirking.
‘Nuala and Norma.’
‘Who else.’
‘They’re actually fairly sound when you get to know them.’
She lifts her gaze and her eyes rest on Peadar, who’s standing by the doorway with Kenneth. Kenneth is enquiring about the result of a match, and Peadar can’t remember, but he knows it was Connolly kicked the final point. Peadar says the barriers were broken and there was a bit of a scuffle but it resolved itself after that. ‘You can blame Saint Malachy’s Parish. They’re like caged animals over there.’ The matches have recommenced.
Peadar is coaxed to take out his guitar, and he plays and sings ‘Working Man’s Hero’ with an awkward sincerity, perched on the armrest of the couch. Everyone’s gathered round, smiling inanely, hoping he’ll do himself justice. I can’t think of a song any less jolly than ‘Working Man’s Hero’. Nonetheless, Peadar isn’t bad at the old crooning, and he certainly looks the part.
‘Myself and Peadar are really close. We hang out all the time. He says I’ve no need for college at all. He says some people are all they need to be.’
I clear my throat. ‘I don’t know. I mean, for a lot of people college is like a training ground for specific things.’ Evelyn doesn’t know what she doesn’t know.
‘That time I gave you the camera. How’d you learn how to use it?’
‘I got a book out of Adragule Library.’
‘That’s my point. It’s about a person’s initiative more than anything else. There’s a thousand scientific studies saying the same thing.’
Someone unexpected has entered the room during Peadar’s performance. It’s Stacey Nugent in a faux-fur cropped coat and jeans with a diamanté seam. Stacey’s had a weakness for Peadar ever since the glory days behind the clubhouse, and she gives an impassioned cheer at the end of Peadar’s playing. ‘That was powerful, Peadar,’ she gushes. I can sense the upset off Evelyn, her mood curdling.
You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here Page 9