by Orna Ross
“No.”
“When, then?”
“Ask no questions,” she says, “and you’ll be told no lies.”
“Tell me,” Gran puts in, “you didn’t happen to see my scissors, did you? I’ve been looking for them all day.”
If they were not so busy covering up, they would see through my questions. Why should I suddenly expect Daddy to be at a party of mine? He never was before. My party is unlikely to attract him; always a slack affair, not really a party at all. Just Coke with my dinner instead of milk and an overdose of sweets from the shop afterwards. Then Mammy lighting the candles on the cake and Gran shouldering her and Auntie Norah through ‘Happy Birthday To You’ and ‘For She’s A Jolly Good Fellow’. Just the four of us, nobody else. Same as last year, and the year before.
I never bring anybody from my school to the house. Nobody wants to come, and anyway, to bring someone here and let them see how we live: it would be like handing bullets to your own firing squad. What if Mammy flared into one of her tempers? What if Auntie Norah took off her underwear like she did the other day? It stopped me in the hallway, her panty girdle and skin-coloured stockings bent right and left across the floor like a pair of fractured legs, her underpants open to the world, showing a stain. Yellow water oozed across the tiles and I knew what had happened just by looking at them. She had had one of her accidents and walked away, pretending it hadn’t happened.
I wanted to slink off too, but I was afraid for Auntie Norah in case it might not be Gran who found her leavings. So I got the rubber gloves and picked up the hateful underclothes and dumped them in the wash. I wiped the mess with a cloth that I put into the bin when I’d finished. I made it like it never was and didn’t tell anybody about it, not Maeve, not Gran.
I hate our life. I miss Daddy. No matter how hard I listen at doors I cannot find out where he is or why Mammy thinks he’s not coming back. I miss him but I don’t blame him for going. I know what drove him away.
I am walking out The Causeway towards Coolanagh. Ahead are three other girls my age, two from Mucknamore – Mary Cummins and Sally Rowe – and the other is Louise Farthington, home on holidays from England. The desirable one, the one we all want.
Our hands are full. Louise and Mary and Sally each carry a long stick but they have made me carry a heavy stone. A rock. This is my punishment, though I’m not exactly sure what I am being punished for. These girls are my new friends. My friends.
Though Louise’s mother is from Mucknamore and her father from Donegal, she was born and lives in London. Her skin seems softer and whiter than ours, her hair glossier, her accent shinier. She calls her mother Mummy and makes ordinary things sound fancy with her way of saying them: caah for car, ba-nah-nah for banana; hat and tomato with the ‘t’s clipped tight. Louise’s school has uniforms and bells, assemblies and school dinners, a PE hall and a headmistress, just like the schools in the Mandy and Bunty comics we all read. Everything about her is dazzling.
Mary won’t admit this. She and Sally jeer Louise’s way of talking. “Very lah-dee-dah,” Mary says, but still she has taken her away from me. Louise was mine first. Her grandmother is Mrs Redmond, my mother’s friend, and she was happy to play with me until Mary and Sally came along. Now the three of them have me under orders to stay back, ten paces or so behind, carrying this stone. Louise’s long dark plait swinging against her spine as she walks makes me ache.
The sands around Coolanagh is our destination. The sticks are for poking, the stone for sinking. This has been our craze for days: investigating the sinking sands. Our experiments are teaching us the character of the place: that the sands are erratic; that a heavy stone will sink in a certain spot one day but stay on the surface there the next. Each time we talk about going out further and testing more, but in fact we cling close to The Causeway. We are not as brave as we pretend.
I hold the stone as if it’s a baby, cradled in one arm supported by the other. My muscles ache from its weight so I have to keep changing arms. Up ahead, I can hear Mary explaining my inadequacies to Louise in words that are really aimed at me: “just not good enough”, “giving her too many chances…”
Foul glances are torpedoed back at me, over their shoulders. The day before yesterday the problem was the way I walked (“the state of her, like Quasi-bloody-modo”). Yesterday, it was something I said. (“No, we won’t tell you what it was. You can just think back and work it out for yourself.”)
It seems especially unjust that they are mean to me here, when it was my idea to go out to Coolanagh in the first place. I told them the stories about it, the stories Gran told me — about a bad man who met his deserved end out there, confessing to all his sins as he went down. About a woman who was too fearful to go to the aid of someone in trouble out there, and never had a lucky day after. About the special liugh that people are supposed to send up if they go astray out there, a particular shout for the purpose, high-pitched and staccato, that everybody recognizes, so that anyone passing on The Causeway knows the meaning of it and comes to help. About the ghosts of such screams that can be heard echoing through the night, when the wind blows a certain way.
Coolanagh belonged to me while I was telling them those stories. Now it is theirs, the backdrop to my torment. Halfway out the Causeway, the three of them stop, turn to face me.
“Can’t you keep up?” says Mary. “Why are you so slow?”
“It’s heavy,” I say.
“It’s heavy,” she mimics. “Of course it’s heavy. It’s a rock, isn’t it?”
“She doesn’t want to keep up with us,” says Sally. “She thinks she’s too good for the likes of us.”
“You’re right, Sal. She thinks she’s better than us but we know the truth, don’t we?”
I protest. “You were the ones who told me to stay behind y—”
“The Devereuxs think they’re something but everybody knows what they really are.”
“Except her.”
“She’s so stupid she doesn’t even know that.”
I look across at Louise, who is appalled and fascinated.
“But we all know, don’t we, Mary?” Sally looks across to Mary for approval.
“You don’t know the half of it, Sal,” Mary says.
Sally bites her lip. Mary always does this, has to be the best of the bunch.
“I do so,” Sally says.
“I bet you don’t.”
“What? What don’t I know?”
“I can’t say,” Mary replies, narrowing her eyes at me and shaking her head with pretend sorrow. “Sorry Sal, you’re too young.”
Louise’s eyes shine wide with curiosity. Something real lies under the jibes, it seems. “Tell me, then,” she says. “I’m older than Sally.”
“I might tell you sometime,” says Mary.
“Why not now?”
“You’d never talk to her again, that’s why. Isn’t that right, Jo? We shouldn’t even be talking to you, should we?”
A few days later, Mary suggests we should go further, to the other side of the island to examine the stream that runs there into the sand. Fairies are supposed to live in the water under the rocks. Tiny fairies, impossible to see unless you get down close enough and are really lucky.
We walk all the way out. I am wary of them now and I no longer believe in the picture we make, four friends walking out to Coolanagh together, but still I’m glad to be seen with them. On the island, Mary leads the way to the stream, and we lie beside it staring into the water. Mary lifts a rock and Sally shouts out, “They’re there. Look.”
“Oh my God, Sally,” cries Mary, excitement jumping from her. “You’re right. Can you see them, Jo?”
Is she serious? Fairies don’t seem like Mary’s kind of thing but her face is all puffed up with delight.
“Look, Louise, look. We’re after finding them.”
“That’s super,” says Louise, but she stays where she is, lying on her back, her eyes closed to the sun.
Mary whispers in my
ear. “Are you able to see them? Look closer. Look now or you might never get the chance again.”
Stones and silt and plants swaying in the water. She points, at what seems to me like tiny blobs of black. Dirt maybe? Or some tiny form of water slug?
“I can’t believe I’m actually seeing fairies,” she says. “Can you, Sal?”
“I can’t. I really can’t.”
“Janey Louise, would you get up off your bum and come and have a look?”
“It’s all right. I don’t need to see them.”
“But it’s beyond all, isn’t it, Jo? Louise should come and look, shouldn’t she?”
I decide to join in. “You really should, Louise. You won’t get a chance to see something like this again.”
Louise says, “Oh, Mary, give it a rest. You don’t really believe in fairies. You’re just trying to trick Jo.”
Mary looks at her through slitted eyes and I feel a sinking in my gut. Why did I pretend? Why, why, why?
“Or perhaps you do?” Louise says with a laugh. “Perhaps you think they’re leprechauns?”
Now it’s Mary’s turn to be stung. She takes a step back to stand between me and Sally and says: “We don’t want any English bitch coming over here to laugh about leprechauns, do we, girls?”
Louise sits up, shocked. A word like that would never be allowed to cross her lips. Mary decides to hurl another bad word at her. “Why don’t you fuck off back to England with yourself? We don’t need any English lah-dee-dahs here.”
I look at Louise, her eyes swelling wet with offence and hurt, and I am glad. She did nothing to help me: she only told about Mary and the fairies because she didn’t want to get up, not because she cared about me. Now it is her turn to suffer and I rejoice.
It doesn’t last. Next day, I’m in the wringer again. Louise cries too easily and is too likely to tell. Louise’s mother would not stand for anybody giving her girl a bad time. She would bring it into the open, tackle Mary and Sally’s parents, get them punished. I am safe. I take what they dole out and wrap it up inside.
Louise goes back to England and the other two stop calling for me. I feel myself dimming in their eyes. Even bullying me isn’t interesting enough to hold them. All that summer I feel something leaving me, draining out of me, like water down a plughole.
Back in school in September, Mary tells everybody that I believe in fairies. I have never been popular but now the others sense a new weakness and round in. Mary leads the pack, guides the moves. Water is poured into my schoolbag, ink onto my hair. My books are scribbled on with indelible marker. I am held down behind the bicycle shed and the boys are lined up to look at my knickers.
Each evening, I am first out of school, like a hare out of a trap as soon as Mr Walsh says we can go, but a hare who must appear to dawdle. The five-minute walk home is torture, with what feels like the whole school behind, firing jeers and occasional pebbles. Aching to run, I glue slow, indifferent steps to the ground. I bite the inside of my lower lip as I walk, a habit I have taken to. My teeth gnaw on the soft pink flesh until salty blood runs to the back of my throat. I swallow it down. Sometimes adults pass us on the road, see what’s happening. We all — me too! — smile at them, as if it is a game. They are unconvinced but nobody does anything to help me.
Mammy is glad Mary and Sally have stopped calling for me. The Cumminses were never “in the book”, she says, her phrase for respectable. “You were right to drop them,” she says. “Why would you want to be going around with the likes of Mary Cummins?”
I think about telling Granny Peg, but tell her what? I have no bruises to show, no war-wounds to flaunt, and anyway Gran’s days are full of trouble already, balancing Mammy and Auntie Norah. She knows I am not popular and she says it’s because I’m too brainy, that the other children are jealous.
She gives me a saying: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” It doesn’t sound right but I try it anyway, hurling it at them one day, when they are doing their worst. They laugh it right back to me.
So I don’t tell Gran, or anyone else, the things they do to me. A bunch of spiteful girls is all they are. I am shamed to silence by how much hurt I allow them.
Maeve comes home for half-term. “What’s wrong with Mammy?” she wants to know, making new again what I have got used to: the scrunched-up eyes and jagged face, the lying in bed with the sheet pulled over her head like she’s a corpse, the cigarettes half-smoked then crushed into little elbow-shapes, piling high in the ashtray.
“Daddy’s gone,” I say, “and she’s broken-hearted.”
It’s Gran’s word I use but it’s not the right one. Mammy’s sorrow is not pure like the princesses in fairy tales. It skulks around the house, claws curled in, waiting to pounce.
“Gone?” Maeve says. “What do you mean? Gone where?”
“Nobody is saying.”
It feels good to have someone to tell. I know that once Maeve is back a while, we will be squabbling again but today, the first day of her holidays, we are almost friends.
“I don’t think he’s coming back,” I say.
Maeve says I should know whether he is or he isn’t. So should she, we have a right to be told. So we go to Granny Peg.
She laughs us off. “Not at all, Whatever gave you a notion like that? Of course he’ll be back.”
“Are you sure, Gran?” Maeve asks.
“It’s been so long,” I add.
“You know your daddy. Doesn’t he always turn back up like —” She stops herself saying it. Like a bad penny.
“But when, Gran?”
“Soon, girls. I’m sure it will be soon.”
“Very good,” says the teacher as I write the correct answer on the blackboard. On the way back to my desk, I feel Mary Cummins’s attention calling me. I try not to look and immediately regret it when I do. I pull my eyes from hers but too late to avoid her index finger pointing at me and jerking upwards to indicate that I am shot, and her malevolent lips blowing on the gun-barrel finger like a satisfied assassin. This is not just annoyance that I am able to solve the sum. She has some new taunt; it swaggers in her face. Daddy? All morning she keeps pointing back over her shoulder at me, miming my shooting with a sadist’s smile. I sit on my own in my double desk, gnawing my inner lip, cutting through the healed-over scab with my teeth, reaching for the familiar.
I miss him badly now. Each morning I get up on my own, breakfast alone in the hush of the quiet kitchen, looking out to a distant grey sky pressing down on the distant grey sea. I wish he would come back for a little while. He could go away again, if that was what he wanted, but I wish he would just check in with us, bringing the glow of the outside world he always used to bring to the house. Mammy is too much for me, for us all, without him.
At break, Mary bears down on me with a gang of cronies behind her. Eyes swimming in their heads with excitement, they form a circle around me. I am backed up, hugging my ribs, against a wall.
“Her da’s after leaving home,” Mary tells the others, as if they didn’t know. “Gone off with a fancy woman from the town.”
I make my face blank to the sneers and staring wonder.
“Have you nothing to say for yourself? That’s a mortal sin he’s committed. He’ll go to hell.”
“You can hardly blame him, though, Mary,” says Sally. “Who’d want to see that ugly mug sitting across from them at the table every day?”
Everybody laughs.
Silence is my only defence. If I don’t speak, my voice can’t tremble. If I don’t shout, my face doesn’t turn red. If I don’t feel my feelings, my eyes don’t fill.
Mary starts to sing, a song with the words changed, just for me. So tell me Jo Jo, when did you see your daddy do? And the others join in with a laugh-along routine they must have planned, maybe even practised. Daddy, daddy, do, do.
Little Jack Breen comes home for his holidays from Birmingham and tells everyone that he met Daddy, that he sees him often in the Irish c
lub over there. He is with Mrs Larkin, except she calls herself Mrs Devereux now, and the two of them are living off the money she got from the sale of her pub. Living the life of Riley, if you want to ask Little Jack, going to race meetings and hotels and dinner-dances, out on the town every night of the week.
Each of the customers finds their own way of letting Mammy and Gran know that they know.
I am outside the front of the house collecting the milk when Bartie comes along with the post and gives it to me to bring in. Between the brown window-envelopes, there is a pale blue one that sticks out. The head of the English queen is on its stamp. I pull it up to the top, insides already churning, even before I recognise his writing.
Like a thief, I look around to see if anyone is watching me. I go round the back of the house where I can’t be seen. I think about hiding it, steaming it open later like I have read about in books. I consider this for a long time, but in the end I slip it back into the middle of the pile and set out to find Mammy.
She is upstairs, making beds. “Post,” I say, handing it over as if it were a normal bundle. I stay and watch as she files through them. She stops when she comes to it and flushes from neck to forehead, then looks at me, hard. I shrink from the slap that’s certain now she’s seen through me. The slightest thing these days brings on a slapping. Shoes abandoned in the living room: Slap. Clothes not laid out on Saturday for Sunday Mass: Slap, slap. Spat-out toothpaste not rinsed off the wash-hand basin: Slap, slap, slap.
I point at the unmade bed. “Will I give you a hand?” I ask, wiping my face clean of anything but the willingness to straighten sheets and blankets.
“Since when did you turn into Little Miss Helpful?”
I cower but the blow doesn’t come. She folds backwards so she’s sitting on the bed, shrivelled into herself. “For the love of God, what are you trying to do to me? Are you trying to send me over?” she says, eyes splintered, shaky fingers clutching the blue envelope. “Get out, child. Go on, go.”
Later, when she has gone into town to the cash-and-carry, a trip that always takes hours, I search for the letter. It’s not in the desk in the living room where important papers are kept. Not in the kitchen drawer with the bills and notes and parish newsletters. Not in the little side locker beside her bed. I have to go to more secret places. Her underwear drawer. No. Beneath the account books in the sideboard where I once found a book of mine she had taken and hidden as a punishment. No. Under the mattress. Yes.