After the Rising

by Orna Ross

  They’ve both lost weight from the long trek and from lack of food and had to change outside because their clothes were hopping with fleas and stinking from repeated wettings. Worse than the fleas, he says, is a rash that makes him itch all over. They both have it, God love them. They’re downstairs now, in the usual place, putting in the night here. Probably not the safest but Barney will go nowhere until he sees Norah. He didn’t say so but he wasn’t fooling anybody, trying to pretend he wasn’t like a hen on a hot griddle at the thought of having to wait until the morning. He wrote her a note and I took it down and put it under our stone. Yes, in the pitch dark. I could see it was what he wanted, that he has it so bad, he’d nearly go up there after her. Once it was sent, he fell into a dead sleep. Hopefully, she’ll get to him somewhere, sometime in the morning.

  1975

  I arrive back to my new flat, lips swollen, thighs aching. Dee looks up from the table where she has been writing, takes one look at me and lets out a shriek. “Ah, no,” she says. “Not you. No, no, no.”

  I glance in the little mirror that hangs over the table. Is it so obvious what I have been doing? In the dappled glass, I see my face, split in two by a smile.

  “I don’t believe it,” Dee wails. “It’s not fair.”

  I have won a competition I didn’t even enter. All through our last year in the convent, Dee moaned loud and long about her virginity. Leaving home launched her campaign to rid herself of her seventeen-year-old hymen, her tag of shame. She has a bet with Monica: whoever gets rid first also gets paid a tenner from the other.

  “So come on, tell me all. I presume it was the mysterious Mr O’Donovan.”

  Dee knows a little about Rory now. She cannot understand that we allowed ourselves to be kept apart, living in the same village. Dee would knock aside barriers like boarding schools and vigilant families. She would slip him a note or arrange to “bump” into him or call to his house by night and throw stones up at his window. She is scornful of my weakness and even more of his. Is he a man or a mouse? Does he really like me at all?

  I don’t mind her thinking this way. It keeps her from realising how much I care. I’m not sure why – Dee is obsessional about her own crushes – but I’d rather she didn’t know that through all the months and years of not being with him, my feelings haven’t lessened at all but hardened and brightened inside me, like crystal.

  Over cups of instant coffee, I tell her what I am happy for her to know, about the lakeside incident and going back to his place.

  “You did it, didn’t you?” she says. “You went all the way?”

  I nod. I can’t switch off my smile.

  “Oh my God. Come on, tell me: what’s it like? Did the earth move? Was there blood?”

  “Dee!”

  “I hope you were careful.”

  That turns my insides over. All the way home in the bus, I have been quashing that thought.

  “Did he use a condom?” she asks.

  “Jesus, Dee, you’re unbelievable.”

  “Did he?”

  “He doesn’t like them,” I say. I have no idea whether this is true or not.

  “I wouldn’t say he’s too fond of squally babies either,” Dee says. “You’d want to get yourself down to one of those new clinics for the pill.”

  “Clinics?”

  “The family-planning clinics. That’s what they call them but they’re not just for marrieds. You don’t even have to be engaged. All you need is your money and your health and they’ll sign you up for a prescription there and then.”

  “How do you know so much about it?”

  “I’ve looked into it. I intend going down there myself to get kitted out. I’ll go with you.”

  “But, Dee, you don’t even have a boyfriend.”

  “That, my dear friend, is a very temporary state of affairs.” She laughs at my face. “I mean it,” she says. “I’ll bring you down. They’re supposed to be really nice.”

  “I don’t know, Dee…”

  “You’re not labouring under some thick notion that nice girls don’t, I hope. You’re going. That’s it.”

  In the afternoon, she skips her zoology practical so we can go together and she is right, it is easy: no judgements or disapproval, all so matter-of-fact that any embarrassment feels childish. It takes just twenty minutes to fill out some forms and see a doctor and then we’re back outside with six foil-packs of pills each. Six little packs of permission.

  At the top of the steps, Dee already has hers out of the bag. She selects a pack, pops open Tuesday’s bubble. “Bless us O Lord and these Thy gifts,” she says, stretching out her tongue and receiving the tiny tablet like it’s a Communion host. She gulps it down with a grin. “Amen.”

  I open my packet and copy her. The pill is small and hard and sweet on my tongue, covered with a smooth coating that makes it slide down easily.

  * * *

  I get myself a job as a lounge-girl, in the pub where Rory works. Three nights a week, I bring trays full of drinks to customers too lazy to go to the bar. The hourly rate is poor, a pittance really, but the tips are good, especially towards the end of the night as alcohol loosens the punters’ grip on their wallets. I dodge the men’s compliments and the occasional pinch; ignore them when they try to look down my white blouse or up my black skirt; find lines to spar away their slurred come-ons.

  From behind the counter, Rory sends me looks that I hold and post back to him: promises of later. We are a couple now: Jo and Rory, Rory and Jo. After the pub doors are bolted and the counters and tables wiped down, we sit with the rest of the staff and have a complimentary night-cap or two. Then we walk home, usually to his place; although it is further away, it is more private. Hand-in-hand we walk, heads blurry with alcohol, through empty Dublin streets where only the late-night chip shops and taxi ranks are awake. The wet tarmacadam is lined with little suns, reflections from the streetlights above, and the loud silence of the streets makes us feel like we are the last people on earth.

  I love these walks, weaving from side to side of the pavement, stopping every so often for long deep kisses, not drunk but a long way from sober. Cider is my drink, sweet and fizzy. A bottle or two of Stag cider unclicks something inside me, dizzies me with possibilities. I have always known why men wanted to buy drinks for women; now I understand why women let them.

  Back in Rory’s bedroom, we astonish each other all over again and afterwards fall asleep, our limbs knotted. Next morning, we wake in our bed salted with sex and begin again.

  He takes pictures of me: my fingers spread wide or rolled into a fist; the sole of my foot; one crooked toe and its painted toenail; my collarbone and the hollow above it; my elbows over my face; one breast, first in profile then face on; my pubic hair, zoomed so close that crinkles of hair fill the entire frame of the print and the pores of the skin beneath are visible. I am always surprised when the pictures come back: they are never what I expect.

  Whatever part he wants to photograph, I make available to him. He does full-body shots too, usually naked, often after sex. These are my favourites, though I can see that the fragmented ones are more interesting. Even when I’m taken in full, I don’t recognise myself as this girl with the wild hair and turbulent eyes who looks like somebody else, somebody I might like to know.

  Soon we’re spending every night together but still we haven’t had our fill: our days are spent on the soft chairs outside the Student Union shop, burrowed beneath his army coat, hands under each other’s clothes, fingertips on fire. We become known as the couple who are always at it. Everybody notices us, Dee says, her voice oscillating between censure and jealousy. Enfolded in our haze of love and lust, we barely notice them.

  My clothes begin to mutate. The coloured V-neck jumpers Mrs D. bought me stay in my wardrobe while I wear grey sweaters or black polo necks hunted down in the Dandelion weekend market. My jeans fray and blanch to fit my new colour scheme of black or white or shades of grey. My skirts turn black, shrink up to well abov
e my knees. Clompy boots weigh down my feet. I think about cutting my hair, short and sharp, but Rory asks me not to. He loves it long, he says, as he twists his fingers in its curls, buries his face in it, uses it to hold back my head when he wants to stare into my eyes.

  Mrs D. hates my new image. I go home to visit and, when I get off the train, she takes a step backwards from the black net tights that climb from my Doc Martin boots up all the way up under my short, tight skirt. I knew she would detest this outfit but I wore it anyway. A small mutiny, pathetically small, but I have to try hard not to be nervous.

  “Is that a skirt you have on you at all?” she asks, when we get into the car. “Or are you wearing a black handkerchief by mistake?”

  At home, she uses this same line three times – to Gran, to Eileen, to Mrs Keating in the shop – as if it is the height of wit. Before I might have taken off the offensive clothes; now I pep-talk myself in the mirror, think of Dee and what she would do, of Rory and what he would tell me to say. Mrs D. does not realise that she and I have got by so far only because I have been switched to mute. Now I find myself drilling words in my mind, flexing and stretching them for combat.

  When I get up next morning, it is the tightness of my stretch jeans that brings her eyelids down in exaggerated dismay. “Where in the name of God did you get those yokes? Where are the nice skirts we got for you when you were going to Dublin?”

  I shrug.

  “You must have had to jump off the bed to get into them,” she snorts, and turns to Gran, who is drinking tea beside her. “Mammy, will you talk sense to her. She’s losing the run of herself entirely.”

  “They’re a bit tight, all right,” Gran says.

  “They’re made to be like that, Gran,” I say, bending into a squat to show her that they’re quite comfortable.

  “You have the figure for them anyway,” she says.

  “Oh, thanks very much, Mammy,” Mrs D. says. “Encourage her, why don’t you?” She turns back to me. “If you insist on wearing such things, you’ll have to keep them to the house.”

  “Everybody’s wearing them.”

  “Not around here, they’re not. You’re not thinking of going to Mass in them, or in what you had on you yesterday, I hope.”

  Ah yes, Mass. The clothes will be nothing to this. I take a deep breath and splurt it out: “I don’t go to Mass any more.”

  “What!” Mrs D.’s jaw makes a sideways swivel. Gran puts down her cup. Fashion she can go along with, but this is something different altogether.

  “Is this what I’m spending all that money on your education for?” squeaks Mrs D. “So you can come home with this kind of rubbish?”

  “I don’t believe.”

  “As long as you’re staying in this house, you’ll go to Mass. I don’t want to hear another word about it.” She thrusts herself out of her chair, out of the room, slamming the door.

  Gran and I sit in the whirl of silence left behind her. After a while, she says: “Is it the truth, Jo? Have your really lost your religion?”

  “That’s not how I think of it, Gran.”

  “You don’t believe any more, you said.”

  “No.”

  She looks stricken.

  “It’s not something to worry about, Gran. Some people do and others don’t.”

  She shakes her head. “You’ll come back to it,” she says. “Father Matt was talking about this before, how the young people sometimes leave for a while. But they come back.”

  I say, as kindly as I can, “Maybe, Gran, but I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t want you to say that, Jo.” Her voice sounds strange. “Some day not too far off, I’ll be meeting my Maker. It would make it hard for me to go…if I thought I’d never see you…hereafter…”

  If I go to the Hell set aside for non-believers, she means.

  “Oh, Gran…”

  “And for yourself…You’ll make life very hard on yourself, Jo, if you don’t have the Almighty God. When you make your mistakes, you’ll have nowhere to turn. It’s very few who don’t go some way astray in this life. If you haven’t got God in those times, you’ll think you have nothing.”

  I look into the coals of the fire. I’ll have myself, I think, my face hot. I’ll have Rory.

  “I was young myself once. I remember what it’s like not to know what end of yourself is up. It’s natural to question things when you’re young. But you’re a good girl, you’ll return all right.”

  Back in Dublin, I get a phone call from Maeve. What am I doing to poor Mammy, telling her the truth about all sorts of things? Can’t I do what everybody else does and tell a few lies? Do I think that she, Maeve, goes to Mass every Sunday? Is there any need to broadcast the matter? I endure her tirade without putting the phone down but I am not listening to her.

  I start to miss lectures, because I am too tired to get up, worn out by pub work and late-night drinking and sex. I skip seminars and tutorials because no class can compete with the thrill of time spent wrapped around my love. I skip meals and appointments and duties.

  I fall out with Mrs D. “Do you intend ever coming home for a weekend again?”

  I fall out with my tutors. “You can’t expect to pass your exams if you don’t come to tutorials.”

  I fall out with Dee. “For God’s sake, Jo. You’ll have no friends left!”

  I put all of me into him. All.

  1922

  “Slap your eyes on that one. What d’you think of that?”

  “Fuck-ing hell.”

  “What’s this? Dirty pictures is it?”

  Jem Fortune had a supply of them, God alone knew where from. He wasn’t telling. When not amusing himself with them, he liked to give himself a secondhand thrill from passing them around. And the freedom fighters of Mucknamore IRA, bored out of their brains sitting in an outhouse full of nothing but the smell of old straw, were even more than usually willing to give such matters their attention.

  Seven of the column were there, in a rickety shed that once sheltered animals, had been there for over a week now, ever since Parle and Delaney escaped from the gaol. Seven brave soldiers of the Irish Republic enduring a miserable, wet afternoon that was turning into a dark, drawn-out evening. Rain fell like a curtain in front of the open shed door. Every so often, a gust of wind whipped the downpour indoors, so a wet semicircular patch guarded the entrance to the building.

  Jem’s entertainment was helping the time to pass. “Oh, man,” said Lama, coming over to stick his head between him and Jamsie Crean, who was slow to pass them on. “Oh, man.”

  “Quite a baggage, I think you’ll agree, gentlemen?” said Jem Fortune, as if he owned the girl. Lama plucked it out of Jamsie’s hand, passed it on to Barney. “Take a look at this, Parle,” he said. “She’ll put hairs on your chest.”

  The girl was in a state of undress, lying back on a sofa with her vest up to her neck and bloomers pushed low down on her hips, showing some personal hair. Her dids were round and plump, with nipples big as saucers, and the way she had her arms folded underneath pushed them up and out at him. The bold-as-brass look on her face was as disturbing as her display of herself.

  He tried to stop looking. If he was alone, she would have all his attention, but he was made uncomfortable by the presence of the others. He passed her on and sat back down on the upturned bucket he’d been using as a seat.

  They had been brought to this place, eight miles from Mucknamore, by a suspected spy, a man called Browne. Tomorrow – it would have been today if the weather hadn’t put a stop to it – Barney and Lama intended to dress up in Free State Army uniforms they had confiscated and hidden in old sacking in the back of the barn and pay him a visit, make him an offer of money for information about their own whereabouts. If he fell for the inducement, they’d have the proof they needed. Their own information had it that this Mr Brown pointed the way for the last military round-up. Twenty-two men got picked up in that – including their own Leary brothers, all three, and Jack Kelly and
Gut Hayes – along with rifles, pistols and ammunition.

  They were lucky the army didn’t decide to do round-ups more often; it was their best tactic. Early as dawn they would come out from Wexford, assembling in bands of twenty or so, then moving systematically through the area, townland by townland, to search all suspect houses and hiding points. Regular round-ups could clear an area of Republicans in a matter of days, but lucky the Free State Army in Wexford were lazy, as half-hearted about this as they were about everything else.

  What the column would do to Browne when they found him guilty had yet to be resolved. Jem Fortune said he should be shot. “May the gates of hell never screech for want of grease while there’s marrow in the bones of a traitor,” he had said earlier, waving his revolver in the air. Others were less histrionic. It was Barney’s opinion that they should be merciful – punish the man, yes, but not shoot him. No agreement had been reached on the matter when Jem Fortune pulled out his pictures, the subject of which now seemed to exercise him a great deal more than vengeance on the informer.

  Another photograph was placed in Barney’s hand. “Perhaps,” said Jem, “you are more of an arse man, my friend?”

  The second picture was even more shocking. The same girl taken from the back, bent forward from the waist with her bloomers pulled down to the top of her legs, just below the large white globes of her rear end. Her legs were a little apart, showing the shadow between them. His breath stiffened in the back of his throat. He wanted to stop looking. He wanted to never stop looking. She gazed over her shoulder out of the picture at him, her long hair loose and hanging down.

  “What do you think of that, Barney me boy?” said Lama. “Fancy running into that on a dark night, would you?”